09-05-2019
IPC's Global Customer Service System (GCSS) was launched in July 2013 as a new generation system to meet customers’ expectations towards postal and e-commerce market that are rapidly growing. The GCSS inquiry workflow enables postal Customer Service (CS) departments to be more competitive and provide a better e-Customer experience thanks to the six GCSS principles of quality:
• Flexible inquiry process
• Better data quality in requests & replies
• Enhanced pro-activity
• Faster resolution & decreased workload
• Enhanced system intelligence
• Improved Customer Service experience
What GCSS feature do you value most? And, why?
GCSS is a unique platform which allows customer service call centres worldwide to exchange customer queries about barcoded items in a standardised manner, with enhanced tracking and data capture at source. Through the BI Tool, CTT Customer Service (CS) management has access to powerful data analytics and visualisation tools that allows us to monitor the call centres’ performance, detect issues, investigate bottlenecks, drill down into workflow data and coach our agents to provide a more quality oriented customer and co-operators experience. The GCSS Content Management System has been a training platform for new agents but also a knowledge base for refreshment courses. Having a single platform for all international queries is essential to maintain efficiency, standardisation and unique training programs.
How important is it to your organisation to have only one cross border tracked item inquiry system for all products?
CTT Portugal Post has two local CRMs (one for Parcels and PRIME and a second for EPG, EMS and INTERCONNECT) and we are currently developing a new CRM to improve, standardise and expedite all customer service activities. GCSS allows us to manage the complexity of the seven products supported by CTT (EPG, EMS, Expres, Parcels, Interconnect Premium, Standard Letters and Standard Parcels) in a standardized manner, with similar procedures, types of requests/replies, KPIs and reports, a single training forum and point of contact for new developments and system helpdesk.
With our new CRM, we aim to apply the same standardisation methodology. Having more than one cross border tracked item inquiry system for all would be giving a tremendous step back.
Which GCSS feature is the one you most wish to have added? And, why?
For CTT it is crucial to add more features to the GCSS´s Interface in order to have our agents using our local CRM as the only front-end. Every click matters and to reduce the workload around CRM-GCSS inquiry process, we need to eliminate any manual tasks (e.g. copy/paste, send button in the Staging folder, download new messages, etc.) done directly in GCSS and have GCSS feed our local CRM directly with new messages on new and ongoing workflows.
The future of Customer Service is to automate repetitive tasks such as creating notification through tracking events and reason codes or broadcast messages. An enhanced GCSS interface will allow us to apply robotic process automation methodology both for IPC as the system provider but also for postal operators to reduce human resource costs, applying full time employee´s (FTE) in more quality driven tasks than repetitive and low added-value tasks, enhance productivity (robot works 168hours per week versus 40hours of a FTE) and improve data analytics by managing data centrally and keeping track of any processing transactions in real time.