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DPD chief executive Dwain McDonald reveals how artificial intelligence is helping the delivery company to keep up with consumer expectations.
With 2018 well under way here at DPD, we’re now focusing in earnest on peak 2018.
Our first operational planning meeting took place in the first week of January and we’re talking to all our big retailer customers to find out what they feel are the big upcoming trends in consumer buying behaviour.
Peak 2017 threw up its share of surprises but one trend we can predict with a high degree of confidence is that online shoppers will continue to expect more from the ecommerce experience when it comes to choice, availability and value for money.
“Already 33% of chat requests are fully handled by the DPD chatbot, which can interpret ‘text speak’ and also understands when a complex query needs human intervention”
The same goes for carriers, where the ‘3Cs’ – choice, control and convenience – have become the main customer considerations in the delivery experience.
A massive success for us in the festive season was our new artificial intelligence chatbot facility, recently launched to the 2.3 million users of our DPD app.
Chatbots are computer programmes that identify the user’s intent and answer questions in a conversational human style. The biggest benefit is faster resolution of issues and queries.
Investing in the future
We invested £300,000 to implement chatbot, which is now the fastest growing customer service channel at DPD.
The DPD chatbot won’t replace human advisers but it operates 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year, and during December handled tens of thousands of interactions.
Already 33% of chat requests are fully handled by the bot, which can interpret ‘text speak’ and also understands when a complex query needs human intervention, in which event it then passes the case to one of our agents.
The chatbot was born from closeness to our customers, that’s why we’re already picking their brains about last year’s golden quarter, so that our innovation and IT teams can develop new solutions to meet the rising expectations of shippers and shoppers alike.
- Dwain McDonald has been chief executive of DPD for 10 years and was voted Tech Pioneer of the Year 2017 at the Retail Week Tech Awards
