TNT Express Italy has renewed a distribution contract with leading direct sales company Amway basedaround its growing B2C network and invested €1.4 million to improve its customer service offer with
an automated system for pick-ups and new help teams.US-owned Amway, which markets mostly cosmetics, healthcare and home products to consumers viaindependent retailers, will use the nationwide network of 1,200 TNT Points to distribute productsto its salesforce.
Goods will be transported by road from the Amway hub in the Netherlands to TNT’s branch atRho, near Milan, and then distributed throughout Italy through the TNT Point network. Amwaysalespersons can pick up their parcels at a convenient TNT Point instead of having to await courierdelivery.
The B2C retail network, using a “shop-in-shop” concept in cooperation with retailers such asnewsagents, tobacconists and office supply shops, is due to grow from 1,200 outlets to 1,500 bySeptember.
Alessandro Sabato, managing director of Amway Italia, said 22,000 persons were selling Amwayproducts each day in Italy, and they would now have rapid and comfortable access to their salesproducts.
Paolo Cominone, TNT Express Italy sales director, added: “The TNT Points represent astrategic integration of our nationwide presence, and ideally complement the 134 TNT branchesacross Italy.”
Meanwhile, TNT Express Italy said it had completed a €1.4 million investment to upgrade itscustomer service offering under a contract with BT Italia. Following a successful test phase, TNTExpress Italy has fully implemented the self-service speech application known as “Victoria” tohandle standard calls from customers requesting pick-ups.
The Interactive Voice Responder (IVR) system requires just 3 – 6 standard questions to book apick-up. Such calls were previously a “significant” proportion of the 36,000 daily calls handled by500 call centre staff, TNT pointed out. “Victoria” is indistinguishable from a real person, and ifproblems arise, the customer is immediately transferred to a human operator, the company added.
“Victoria” is now handling calls from 18,000 customers involving about 4,000 daily pick-ups,and is expected to deal with a total of 900,000 pick-ups from 50,000 customers in 2008.
As a result, TNT Express has transferred 100 call centre staff into four new regionalcustomer assistance teams. They now provide added-value customer service such as parcel trackingand complaint handling for customers in their respective region.
“In this way, we have freed a significant number of resources from this task and transferredthem to the true objective of the re-engineering project: the creation of dedicated help teams,”explained Enrico Ardemagni, customer service director. Within three weeks, the proportion ofcustomers calls with an immediate solution to the problem has soared to 90%, he stressed.
