DHL awarded industry accolade for best customer support
DHL has been awarded the Japan Institute of Information Technology’s (JIIT) highest award — ‘Best Customer Support of The Year 2007’ — in recognition of its contact center initiatives that enable the customer service unit to achieve productivity and quality targets, while cementing its role as a profit center.
JIIT established its ‘Best Customer Support of The Year’ award in May 1998 to promote improved productivity and more effective management systems within customer support units in public and private enterprises. Award applications are submitted every April for screening by JIIT staff members, who follow up with visits to applicants’ contact centers. Award winners are announced in August. This year, JIIT honored contact centers at DHL Japan and three other firms for outstanding contributions to their companies’ operations.
DHL Japan has in place strict Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for each of its contact centers. These KPIs include answering at least 90 pct of all calls within 10 seconds, and maintaining a hang up rate — the percentage of all incoming calls abandoned by the caller before communication with an agent is established — of no greater than 0.1% of all incoming calls that ring for more than 15 seconds.
Assessment of contact center performance is based on inspections conducted by a team of internal quality control staff and a mystery caller program undertaken by an outside organization.
DHL Japan also emphasizes the quality of its agent responses, and believes that the 2007 JIIT award validates recent efforts to reinforce training of in-house staff and incentive program improvements that allow contact center agents to proactively propose services to customers — changes that have facilitated KPI achievement and raised profitability.
The results speak for themselves: sales of Time Definite Delivery (TDD) value-added services deriving from requests for pickup have risen significantly, with profit doubling in fiscal 2005 and nearly quadrupling in fiscal 2006, both relative to fiscal 2004, when contact center initiatives had yet to be implemented. DHL Japan has successfully positioned its contact centers as highly-profitable units within the company.
