Delivering a customer 360 view at Hermes

Courier firm's data infrastructure overhaul is helping push up standards and drive new opportunities, says head of data services Matt Peckham

From the viewpoint of a parcel, the world is a simple place. You start your journey, you are measured and weighed, your contents are reviewed, then you are taken by a series of trucks, vans and conveyor belts to depots and sorting offices where you are stamped before eventually arriving your final destination to be dropped off and opened. That's it.

This parcel-centric view was pretty much all that courier company Hermes had to go on, data-wise, until a couple of years ago when it started thinking more closely about the value of its data and what it could be used for, according to head of data services, Matt Peckham (pictured below).

"We struggled two years ago to actually answer the question of how many parcels someone had received. We would have to trawl through all our historic parcel data and work out which ones looked they are related to that person."

It's not as if Hermes is short of data - the company handles 380 million parcels annually with each undergoing an average of 20 data-generating scans - it's just that the way it was structured and processed placed limits on its value to the business.

As part of a wider digital transformation, the company has been restructuring and reorganising its data with the aim of opening a series of windows into its operations, including a customer view, an employee view, various operational views, a financial view, and so on.

As well as broadening the scope and range of the core data, there is now a focus on real-time information flows presented via dashboards, said Peckham. Hermes is moving away from batch-based ETL operations, but it's not straying from the relational model as it cuts and dices its data, relying on SAP HANA as the mainstay of its analytics operations.

"For the questions we want to answer relational has worked well for us, especially with the more modern in-memory technology like HANA, we've found the performance is still there," he said.

Data delivers

The data services team's main objective was to find out more about customers, Peckham said. It was basically a standing start. "Before we just had a customers' name and address, we didn't really know anything about them."

New information about who is using the service and how is already allowing Hermes to create products such as MySpaces, which allows registered users of the firm's app to take a photo of a safe place for leaving a parcel, such as a shed, along with instructions for the courier, and there are plans for other data-driven 'premium' services that can be delivered while keeping costs and prices low, Peckham explained.

Courier companies are frequently accused of delivering parcels to the wrong address or leaving them somewhere unsafe - or worse - as a cursory glance at Twitter will verify. Most Hermes delivery drivers are self-employed, which places legal limits on the degree of day-to-day control the company has over them, Peckham said, but the move towards real-time analytics and customer 360 views is helping to raise standards.

First, there's the concept of the "golden address", in which locations are rated for reliability. If there have been several drops outside an address without incident its score will go up. This is allowing Hermes to build a picture of where it's safe to leave a parcel outside a door and where couriers must ensure it's signed for.

Then there are new field management dashboards which enable tags to be kept on deliveries, with visualisations made possible by the restructuring of Hermes' data.

"At any point you're getting a current live view of what's happening in the operation. This has allowed field managers to really drive forward compliance within the field teams. For example, if the field manager looks at a courier and sees they've rescheduled half their ETAs, they can now get on the phone whereas before, they wouldn't have known until it was too late."

Similarly, dashboards have been rolled out to provide real-time reporting to depot managers. "It has completely changed how depot compliance works and it's been made possible through the better use of data," said Peckham.

Rather than just sitting there waiting for data to be sent to them, they're self-serving that information

Not that the benefits were immediately understood or appreciated. A large part of any technological transformation is encouraging uptake, and at first only about 20 of the 500 field managers were using the dashboard, with the vast majority continuing to rely on a spreadsheet emailed once or twice a day. A concerted push involving a dozen internal champions and the prodution of training videos was required, said Peckham, adding that the system is now used by all of the field managers.

"This shows the real change in the ways that the guys are using data. Rather than just sitting there waiting for data to be sent to them, they're self-serving that information."

Corona continuity

Those delivering packages are classed as key workers and Hermes continues to operate during the pandemic lockdown. However, the firm's call centres are not operational meaning customer support needs to be performed from home via 300 hastily provisioned laptops and softphones. The IT teams have also been working completely remotely since the lockdown.

"Our service department did a huge amount of work to ensure that everybody had the access they need. They saw a 20-fold increase in demand for things like the core VPN and remote desktop servers and they pulled off an amazing job just making sure that's available for everyone to use."

As with many organisations forced into remote working, the situation, while challenging, has not been as disruptive as might have been thought.

"We've been monitoring productivity throughout the period and performance seems to be relatively unaffected," Peckham said.