DHL Exel: Customer focus using biware

Exel is one of the world’s largest providers of logistical services. The company doesn’t limit itself to the transportation of goods, but manages the total logistical chain for its clients. Customer satisfaction is one the bases upon which Exel builds long-term relationships with those clients. One of the tools used to measure customer satisfaction is by recording complaints and/or comments and acting upon them. For this purpose Exel has decided to make use of the complaints management application biware.

The core activity of Exel is taking over the supply chain management for large companies. Transport, storage, assembly and also other value added services are part of the package offered by this organisation, with more than 74.000 employees. Service Level Agreements and Key Performance Indicators have been common to Exel for years, just as are complaints and improvement management.

“Companies more and more tend to outsource their logistical processes”, as remarked by Dirk van Houtum, Manager Business Support Centre of Exel in Veghel, Brabant. “This is only achievable by continually delivering quality and being able to react timely on the developments important to your clients. Within our organisation we have Customer Focus Teams, who continually monitor our SLA’s and biware will support them in this process.”

Veghel is one of our 18 locations in the Netherlands and is currently the nerve centre for the implementation of biware. The overall selection procedure has taken approximately one year. After eight years, Exel’s old complaint system was found not to be function adequately.

It was slow, it wasn’t able to handle sufficient simultaneous sessions and due to varying use at different locations it became too costly to retrieve consistent data from the system. “Internally we have had a long standing discussion on how we could manage to get our large diversity of services into one system, without it loosing its user-friendliness.”, stated Van Houtum. “Finally we went looking for a package which could be controlled centrally, whereby clients would also be able to make entries.
Furthermore, for usability it should also make use of levelled fields of choice.” At the TQS-event in Ede, Van Houtum came in contact with Metaware. After a thorough orientation, the decision was made at the end of last year.

Even though biware is web-enabled and clients can have direct access to the system, Van Houtum doesn’t believe that many of them will choose to have this option: “Personal contact remains significantly important in our approach towards client relationships. Especially when a part of our service might not fully meet the client’s wishes.” Besides the options of input via the Internet and input at the Exel-locations there exists another method, which has been developed by Metaware. Clients are able use specially designed Excel sheets to provide information in batch-form, which can then be directly fed into biware. “Some of our clients deal with multiple notifications per day, varying from complaints to remarks and improvement proposals.”

The move to using biware also means a new impulse for the Customer Focus Teams. By working from one database it will become possible to generate reports at client, regional and national level. Customer satisfaction isn’t only of importance to Exel. Metaware presented its new client with three Senseo coffee makers with its purchase of the biware-application. Van Houtum: “We gave them to the three locations which were the first to go live with the application. Unfortunately I wasn’t one of the lucky winners, but it was a good promotion.”