NZ Post diversifies its services using APIs

Challenge

Reinventing the business model to meet customer needs

NZ Post has provided postal services across New Zealand for over 180 years. Similar to postal services around the world, NZ Post faces continued decline in mail. In response, this government-owned enterprise aims to redefine mail delivery service to meet the changing needs of New Zealanders - both consumers and retailer customers.

In recent years, NZ Post has transformed itself from a trusted mail company into a reliable courier and online digital services organization. To remain competitive, the company strives to grow its digital solutions and ecommerce logistics services worldwide and offer personalized customer experiences. However, IT complexities and data silos made it difficult for the company to gain the necessary insights to create personalized customer experiences, launch innovative solutions, and expand its ecosystem.

NZ Post needed to access and gather data residing in disparate systems, such as parcel tracking data, contact center data, and financial data.

Objectives

Reimagining the customer experience

At the center of NZ Post’s digital transformation journey is the unwavering focus on becoming a customer-centric organization. The company even renamed its Enterprise Software team to Customer Solutions team, signaling that every piece of technology will be used to boost customers’ experiences. With that in mind, NZ Post aimed to:

• Launch an integrated contact center to foster connected and personalized customer experiences.
• Create seamless shipping experiences for retailer customers.
• Offer more delivery points by extending its network through partnerships.

Solution

Creating single view of the customer

The Customer Solutions team at NZ Post launched a customer contact center on Salesforce™ Customer 360 for government to provide a connected customer experience. The team replaced its legacy integration solution with MuleSoft® Anypoint Platform™ to connect key components of the customer contact center, standardizing their integration strategy which simplified the IT environment and reduced potential downtime. This enabled them to connect Experience Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud, and Sales Cloud with ease and without any downtime. They surfaced customer data from the community portal, service center, and the backend on-premises and legacy systems to gather the data in Sales Cloud to create a single source of truth for customer information.

This means that a customer will be able to log a service request ticket using their preferred method: portal, phone call, or email. The request will then be automatically pushed to NZ Post’s Service Cloud instance and quickly assigned to a customer service rep who will be able to help the customer with virtually any service issue, such as disputed deliveries or missing items, by accessing a 360-degree view of each customer. The reps will not only help resolve issues faster, but also offer specific services based on the customer’s profile in the near future.

Empowering retailer customers with APIs

NZ Post uses Anypoint Exchange, a marketplace for APIs and connectors, to offer APIs to retailer customers — a growing customer segment for the company. These pre-built APIs enable retailer customers to integrate their ecommerce platforms with NZ Post’s shipping systems and create seamless experiences for their businesses and customers.

2000 retailer customers have access to these APIs and connect to NZ Post’s systems and automate delivery workflows, including label printing and address verification. They can also enable shoppers to request a courier network pickup, track their parcel in near-real time, and receive automated notifications.

Extending the network to scale its business

At the heart of NZ Post’s operations is its extensive delivery network. Using Anypoint Platform, NZ Post was able to extend its shipping and delivery network through partnerships with postal and commercial logistics partners worldwide. NZ Post’s network is now New Zealand’s largest logistics and delivery ecosystem with services to virtually anywhere in New Zealand and over 220 countries worldwide.

Results

Spinning up new efficiencies

With Salesforce Customer 360, NZ Post gained the necessary insights to create personalized customer experiences, launch innovative solutions, and expand its ecosystem. The company standardized its integration strategy using Anypoint Platform to quickly spin up innovative services for its customers. The Customer Solutions team was able to bring new offerings to market three times faster than before by replacing legacy systems and reusing 30% of its 208 APIs. The team integrated dozens of systems, connecting previously siloed data to gain a 360-degree profile of its customers and adopt new technology across its on-premises and cloud-based systems.

According to Auranen, “We’re able to do more with less because of the efficiencies we gained by reusing APIs and ease of use of the platform. We have cost efficiencies in how we operate as well.” This frees up more time and energy for developers to focus on high-value, strategic projects. The company can do more without incurring additional costs, amounting to a 20% potential cost saving.