Silk Contract Logistics Zoho Desk Case Study

Introduction

Silk Contract Logistics (SCL), is a leading name in Logistics space within Australia. It is ASX listed public limited company. SCL is proudly 100% Australian-owned, providing integrated, port-to-door, landside logistics services to some of the world’s biggest names. SCL contacted FI Digital to work on solving their customer service problem, which we did using Zoho Desk, a powerful smart omni channel customer service software by Zoho.

Overview

SCL had a unique challenge within it’s different business lines and facilities. The problem originated from delays and lack of clarity for their customers.

FI Digital realized that this could be solved using Zoho Desk, Zoho’s omni channel customer service platform, which could handle multiple sites, departments and teams.

Fostering engagement within the teams and ultimately leading to better customer service outcomes.

This case highlights Zoho Desk’s ability to handle large customer service teams, who work from different sites across a vast country like Australia, handling different sizes of customers and fleets that service them. The level of complexity that Zoho Desk and FI Digital delivered was simply amazing, with layers like multiple departments, access levels, collaboration between managers, floor staff, drivers, management dashboards and customers.

Executive Summary

Silk Logistics is head quartered in Melbourne, Australia having their logistics facility sites across all the major cities in Australia. SCL is one of the largest third-party logistics suppliers across Port Logistics, and Contract Logistics, servicing Australia.

SCL History

SCL has been built on the strong foundation and reputation of two dynamic Australian logistics companies that now work together as one team. In 2012, Kagan Logistics and Hoffmann Transport aligned to form Silk Contract Logistics. With individual company histories dating back more than 50 years, SCL is one of the most experienced warehousing and transport operations in the country. In February 2014, the management team acquired SCL from Gresham Private Equity

SCL guiding philosophy

“FIRST AND FOREMOST, WE FOCUS ON OUR CUSTOMERS”

“Each of our people embrace our key values: Safety, innovation, respect, integrity, customer centricity, and passion. These all-encompassing values are embedded in everything that we do and support each of our strategies.

Our vision is to be the market leader of innovative supply chain solutions through our people and connected networks.”

Problem statement and key challenges

SCL came to FI Digital with a key ask, which stems from their guiding philosophy stated above. They wanted to innovate their customer service space, to provide accurate updates to their customers who were spread across the country. They had different sites which were huge facilities in themselves with multiple floor work teams, drivers and managers.

SCL wanted a single customer interface where their customers could get all the information, ask for help or register their grievances. According to an assessment by FI Digital, SCL was losing 34% of their employee time in collaborating and double handling of crucial customer data points. This time could be used in processing more customer requests, addressing their complaints and giving a better customer outcome. Hence for SCL and FI Digital, the problem statement was clearly defined.

“How do we increase SCL employee productivity, collaboration and customer satisfaction? And how do we cut down customer service turnaround timeline?”

Evaluation of the problem

We at FI Digital did multiple rounds of workshops to understand how SCL’s current processes operate, what is the current source of truth and what each of their different stakeholders want to achieve at team level.

For instance, the floor workers were used to Outlook to manage all their email queries and wanted a system which is not too complex or else user adoption would be an issue.

Mid level managers wanted to track productivity and see an uptick in the same, hence measurement was a key requirement for them.

Higher level management wanted to see how the customers are able to get quicker query resolution and single window interface with SCL. Ultimately breaking the silos between the departments and acting as one entity for the customer.

Management’s ultimate goal was to see a customer 360 and customer service was one of the building block for the same.

Proposed Solution

While going through the requirement gathering workshops itself, we understood that Zoho Desk, Zoho CRM, Zoho Survey and Zoho Analytics are going to be critical software stack for SCL.

Zoho Desk being the key software in this case because of complexity of the ask. Multiple teams, multiple sites, different roles and access levels and huge customer base with multiple transactions / deliveries to track. This was only possible through a robust software within the Zoho Stack, Zoho Desk.

Features like Departments, Teams, Field level access, Keyword based automation, ticket level collaboration, Knowledge base, Assignment rules helped us deliver the customer support engine SCL wanted.

We topped it with Zoho CRM and Zoho Survey integration with Zoho Desk, to help track customer sentiment from time to time.

All the critical dashboards and metrics were pushed into Zoho Analytics to present key reports and dashboards.

Implementation

We at FI Digital started off an exercise with requirement gathering across the boards and adopted an agile method while delivering the solution. We worked with SCL to roll it out one facility at a time and gathered feedback, fine tuned the product and tested it again to make it perfect to be rolled out in next facility.

The entire process of delivery and fine-tuning took about 6 months and now all the users and sites are live using Zoho Desk.

During the entire project crucial elements were not only customization and development services our team provided, but also Project management, Communication, Go-live Support, Training and documentation. This helped build confidence amongst the software users, ultimately leading to higher adoption and success towards solving the problem statement we started this journey with.

Result

During the time of publishing this case study, SCL had completed 2 full months with the roll out and there were significant gains on the productivity improvements as well as query resolution times.

Productivity per employee grew by 27% and resolution times were down by 1/4th from their original moving average. Customer satisfaction survey also reflected on this sentiment, which was sent via Zoho Survey to track NPS twice a month.