Customer Care Award Winning mentality

DPD, the UK’s leading domestic B2C parcels carrier, continued its dominance in the Customer Care category with its eighth win in the past nine years

DPD UK’s three wins at the MT Awards on September 7 puts the company – including its predecessor Parceline – on a total of 39 wins racked up since Parceline took the first of its eight trophies with Best Marketing Campaign in 1991.

DPD has dominated the Customer Care category, taking the title in eight of the past nine years, a track record that can largely be attributed to the introduction of its ground-breaking Predict service in 2009.

DPD has not rested on its laurels and is now the UK’s leading domestic B2C parcels carrier, doubling turnover since 2016 by establishing itself as the go-to carrier for retailers who value a personalised home delivery experience. Its 22,000-strong team delivers 410 million parcels each year for 7,500 customers, including leading brands such as L’Oreal, IKEA, Selfridges, M&S, Gousto, EE and Next. 2021 saw turnover break through the £2bn barrier, up £148m from £1,926m to £2,074m.

The company says that “putting optimum levels of customer service at the heart of everything we do translates into growth and a strong competitive edge, enabling us to continue outperforming the other main UK parcel carriers in the last five years”.

DPD carries out regular research among its retail customers to find out what is most important to them. The January 2021 survey of its top 100 customers revealed: n 94% were ‘very satisfied’ or ‘satisfied’; n 92% were likely to remain a customer; n 76% would recommend DPD to others.

What The Judges Said

Our judges were once again blown away by DPD’s winning entry.

“The board and executives are obviously committed to both customer service and to position themselves as the best home delivery operator,” said one judge. “They have demonstrated the ability to adapt to rising volumes and this has not impacted customer service levels as they remain consistently high on customer reviews and have over 99.81% on-time delivery performance.”

“They know their stats, they benchmark them, they get external verification, they get their clients’ feedback, they monitor it – it’s client service at aspirational levels,” said another.

“Customer care standards have put DPD at the top of this difficult sector, enabling year-on-year growth,” concluded our panel of experts. “This is an exceptional business and it is difficult to challenge its performance or the results it gets from providing industry-leading service. The entry relates well to the criteria and has clear, well-written proofs to back up the claims made.”

Perhaps the strongest indicator of customer loyalty towards DPD is that nearly 70% of these top 100 customers have now been with the carrier for five years or more.

DPD won £173m of new business in 2021, its best-ever result, and up from £142m in 2020. New accounts included Vision Express, North Face and B&Q. It also secured numerous three- to five-year contract renewals including John Lewis, Asos and Currys and says “this level of loyalty is crucial and means we can continue to invest in refining the doorstep experience”.

Despite being a significant carrier in its own right, Amazon remains a DPD customer. “First and foremost we see Amazon as a customer,” says Tim Jones, DPD director of marketing, communications and sustainability. “While Amazon has its own operation and uses other carriers, it is a very valued customer and we give it the same service and value as our other customers.”

As well as formal surveys, DPD stays close to its major retail customers through the executive sponsorship programme in which all 10 directors are aligned with 10 different top 100 customers, visiting each one at least twice a year.

Customer ratings

DPD’s app provides parcel recipients with a ‘Rate my Driver’ function that enables them to give a positive or negative rating for their delivery. Immediately after receiving a delivery, consumers can rate their experience with a thumbs-up or thumbs-down, give a star rating, and provide further detailed positive feedback.

“It allows the consumer to rate their doorstep experience,” says Jones. “That allows us to reward and recognise consistently good, above-and-beyond performance which is what we are always looking for. More importantly, where there is a thumbs-down we can investigate what wasn’t so good. That might be a matter of training around following standard procedure.”

DPD took this “golden opportunity” to understand what is most important to its customers’ customers and in January 2021 it began offering unhappy consumers the chance to request a call-back to prevent complaints from escalating.

This resulted in DPD making 136,000 calls to dissatisfied consumers. Following these calls, 54% of people rated their experience ‘really good’ or ‘awesome’.

DPD gives statements summarising the feedback to its retail customers so they can see for themselves exactly what their customers think of the DPD service.

Jones says that these continuous improvements in the recipient’s delivery experience show DPD is not relaxing its efforts. “That is never the attitude here,” he says. “The attitude always is ‘let’s look at all the little things we can improve’, because the minute we start resting on our laurels is the minute we start getting disconnected from our customers.”

In yet more evidence of how well DPD performs for consumers, just after the Christmas 2021 peak, Martyn Lewis’s MoneySavingExpert poll asked 9,200 home shoppers to rate all the major UK delivery companies based on their experiences.

For the ninth successive year, DPD was the winner with 61% of voters rating its service as ‘great’. Its nearest competitors in the domestic home delivery sector were Royal Mail (55%), Parcelforce (42%), DHL (40%), APC (32%), Hermes (28%) and Yodel (26%).

DPD’s closeness to its customers revealed that, especially in the months preceding the COP26 climate change conference in Glasgow, they were becoming more focused on reducing CO2 emissions in their supply chains.

Delivery options

Not content with having the biggest fleet of EVs in the sector with 1,700 battery electric vans, DPD decided to re-engineer one of its key processes – what the driver does when a first-time delivery attempt fails on day one. Until March 2021, this process was to make a second delivery attempt the next day, thus racking up extra mileage and CO2 emissions.

The new process is to send the parcel direct to a local DPD Pickup shop on day one, unless the consumer has used the app to nominate either the ‘safe place’ or ‘deliver to neighbour’ options. This has resulted in 4 million parcels being delivered directly into one of

6,000 Pickup shops, reducing carbon emissions by over 1.1m kg.

This initiative relied on expanding the network of Pickup shops and DPD negotiated new partnerships with a range of high-quality retailers, including Co-op and Morrisons. This nearly doubled the size of the network – from 3,500 to 6,000 stores, so that 97% of the UK population are now within five miles of a DPD Pickup store.

In August 2021 DPD signed a ground-breaking partnership with the Post Office, which opened its network for the first time in its 360-year history to a rival to the Royal Mail. Consumers can now collect their parcels from 1,500 Post Office branches across the UK.

“We were delighted with that,” says Jones. “We are constantly looking for more high-quality pickup points and I don’t think there is higher quality than a Post Office. Royal Mail is primarily a letters business, but we know it has ambitions to be a parcels company.

“Post Office is a great friend to DPD and I hope we will be extending that agreement.”

While the push from customers to cut carbon emissions is one factor in the drive to go carbon neutral by 2040, DPD also wants to pull the rest of the industry down the road to net zero.

“The overwhelming reason is that we want to be the UK leader in sustainability,” says Jones. “A key step is the electrification of our collection and delivery fleet. Sustainability is the only way forward and our parent company La Poste has declared our net-zero target date of 2040 – but that is the latest date we will achieve net zero in the UK and we are well advanced to bring that date significantly forward.

“Our customers want it and their customers want it too.” n