Delivering Customer Happiness Through Operational Business Intelligence
ECourier, a Web-based London-based courier service, made customer service its driving force. Operational business intelligence gave the company the tools to keep tabs on that service, as well as its customer satisfaction.
CIO — Visitors to the eCourier website are greeted with the words "How happy are you? Take the eCourier happy test today!" Those words and the playful purple website represent the company's customer satisfaction focus. And a key for the company in achieving that happiness is through its focus on operational business intelligence.
Colin White, president of BI Research , says the adoption of operational business intelligence—technologies for keeping tabs on and managing the performance of an organization's daily operations—is one of the key trends in BI. "Operational BI represents the biggest growth opportunity (and thus business ROI and benefits) in BI development over the next few years. This is true for both large and medium-size companies," says White.
Business intelligence is moving out of the ivory tower of specialized analysts and is being brought to the front lines. In the case of eCourier, whose couriers carry 2,000 packages around London each day, operational business intelligence allows the company to keep real-time tabs on customer satisfaction. This is a crucial differentiator in London's competitive same-day courier market, where clients are far more likely to take their business elsewhere than they are to report a problem to their current courier, says the company's CTO and cofounder Jay Bregman. (Online directory London Online alone shows about 350 listings for courier services.)
Using IT to Modernize a Very Old Business Model
Before implementing operational business intelligence, eCourier sought to define IT as a crucial differentiator. Cofounders Tom Allason, eCourier's CEO, and Bregman ditched the idea of phone dispatchers and instead gave their couriers GPS-enabled handhelds, so couriers can be tracked and orders can be communicated electronically. They also focused on making online booking easy and rewarding; much was invested in user-friendly applications: Customers can track online exactly where their courier is, eliminating the package delivery guesswork. Today, 95 percent of deliveries are booked online, meaning that eCourier needs a much smaller staff for monitoring, tracking and placing orders, which in turn makes the company more scalable. Bregman says this is notable in a market where many courier companies use telephone dispatchers and guesswork about package whereabouts.
Booking and tracking automation—while innovative—did not complete the customer happiness puzzle. Without leading-edge business intelligence, account managers could miss the same issues that plagued other courier services—late deliveries, surly couriers or even an unnoticed ramp-up in deliveries.
