Three more postal operators, Austrian Post, Latvia Post and Malta Post, will join IPC’s integrated‘priority parcel’ delivery network, the E-Parcel Group, this summer giving it coverage of 29
countries in Europe and North America.Austrian Post will be joining the EPG in August, while Latvia Post and Malta Post will followin September, IPC announced. The existing EPG members comprise IPC members in Europe (excludingCyprus), non-IPC members Czech Post, Eesti Post (Estonia), Lithuania Post, Poczta Polska (Poland),Posta Slovenije (Slovenia) and Slovak Post, as well as the US Postal Service. IPC’s othernon-European members are not part of the group.
EPG participating operators are committed to delivering their priority parcel productsthrough EPG’s integrated delivery network. This network uses a track-and-trace system and anautomated customer service system linking each postal operator’s call centres to ensure stable andreliable quality of service for their customers.
IPC provides project management for the group, monitoring services to measure adherence toformally agreed standards, and support to set up and implement improvement action plans whenneeded.
Created as the Enhanced-Parcel Group in 1996, EPG began with nine European postal operatorsthat required a two-day parcel service for their business-to-business customers. The service, whichused a European road network, was competitively priced, provided tracking based on barcodes, anddefined targets for responsiveness to customer service enquiries.
In 2000 the group became the ‘E-Parcel Group’ and expanded geographically and to increase itstraffic volume. Although the project began as a business-to-business service, the proportion of thevolume consisting of parcels to consumers has been continuously increasing.
The IPC Customer Service System (CSS), launched in 1999 to link customer service call centresof nine EPG operators, is now used for all barcoded items (parcels, EMS and PRIME letters) on adaily basis by over 1,000 customer service agents around the world working in 262 call centresbelonging to the 175 operators that are connected through the system. CSS is designed around afixed set of formalised workflow procedures with agreed response targets per supported product ormodule, allowing agents to quickly handle customers’ inquiries on all types of internationalcross-border items.
