Beleaguered by customer trust issues, SingPost turns to experience management tech

The pandemic did not do the postal service and logistics giant any favors, but its new digital experience focus can help.

Amid the pandemic lockdowns in Singapore last year, one firm experienced a 40% year-on-year surge in business. Reason: the increased reliance on international e-commerce, local door-to-door deliveries and related logistics services to circumvent safe distancing.

That firm, the country’s national postal service SingPost, continues to see declines in snail mail, of which demand was down 21% year on year due to replacement by digital communications.

In addition, the firm, which posted a 38% decline on year in operating profit, expects two patterns of consumer behavior—changing customer needs and an increasing demand for online shopping—to require special attention.

Focusing on experience management

The pandemic had hit the firm barely months after it had bounced back from a string of bad publicity and brickbats in the media about errant postal workers that had dumped mail at rubbish bins, left stacks of letters on top on letter boxes, leaving parcels on recipients’ doorsteps and falsifying proofs of delivery.

With the multiplier effect of workforce disruptions and drastic changes in market expectations, SingPost is now taking steps to improve customer digital experiences through further investments in experience management. This involves collecting customer feedback across the entire customer journey, capturing data insights, and continually developing operations to respond to the increasingly demanding customers across the countries it operates in.

The firm will be adopting experience management solutions from Qualtrics to create a ‘scalable listening platform’ to understand qualitative and quantitative feedback in real-time, segment data by different customer types and channels to drive rapid and targeted improvements.

Qualtric’s spokesperson, Mao Gen Foo, Head of the Southeast Asia operations, said that the ability to rapidly listen, understand, and act on customer feedback in fast-moving markets is key.