‘Listening’ GeoPost will build new hubs
GeoPost UK is to invest GBP40m (EUR60m) over the next three years in new hubs for its Parceline and Interlink Ireland operations.
The Parceline facility, likely to be built in the Birmingham area, will operate in tandem with the existing Smethwick site and will double current handling capacity of 24,000 parcels an hour. Interlink Ireland’s dated hub in Athlone “will have to be rebuilt by 2006 at the latest,” CEO Kay Phillips told IFW.
Phillips took over when Cohn Millbanks retired earlier this year, but is no newcomer to the parcels sector, beginning her Parceline career 26 years ago as manager of the company’s Leicester branch.
Parceline achieved double-digit growth in the first quarter. It has based future requirements on projected growth of 7% a year, driven by an increasing share of the domestic UK market and parent group La Poste’s planned restructuring of its DPD European road parcel network.
‘We sweated our assets in the 1990s and there was less investment,” said Phillips. ‘Since our acquisition by La Poste, it has been keen to support our growth; we have had no proposals turned down.”
Parceline opened four mainland depots plus a new facility on the Isle of Wight in 2003. This year, a new facility will open in south London and Gloucester, Bournemouth and Edinburgh are being redeveloped.
‘You’ve got to invest before you get the revenue. It’s in the September-December period that you have to have the capacity and drivers who know what they’re doing,” explained Phillips. ‘Anyone can do it at the start of the year, but then falling down is not what the customer wants.”
What the customer does want is gradually emerging under GeoPost’s Customer Pulse initiative, which has seen 11,000 telephone interviews, lasting up to an hour, carried out in the last 18 months.
Another 400 interviews took place face to face. Some were recorded and shown to staff focus groups, whose previous perceptions ‘can differ from the reality,” Phillips said.
‘Hundreds of ideas have come out, some so small you can do them overnight. We want to move customers from ‘satisfied’ to ‘delighted’, but it’s tough —you’re only as good as yesterday’s delivery.”
Customers had cited safe and secure handling as one priority. The challenge for GeoPost was to try to change the culture inside the company and encourage employees to take more ‘ownership’, she said.
