Paul TessySenior Vice President, Purolator International
This spring, I’ve shared articles that take aim at the core elements of what makes an ideal Canadian delivery partner. After touring through innovation, sustainability, broad coverage models, deep portfolios and plug-and-play qualities, I now place focus on the most important consideration: customers themselves.
It’s no secret a strong client experience propels companies forward, and building and maintaining that reputation requires partners that understand their distinct needs and go the extra mile – figuratively and literally – to ensure they are met.
Companies looking to thrive in the Canadian market must find delivery partners that can leverage broad expertise in order to implement effective, sustainable solutions designed with customer experience at their core.
In focus: A solutions management team
For a personalized service, your ideal partner will deploy an advanced solutions management (SM) team – one that unites cross-disciplinary experts with experience overcoming obstacles and has the ability to customize cross-border and domestic networks. At Purolator, our SM team notably includes diverse engineers who help companies plan waste-free, efficient transportation options.
Initial interactions with SM engineers should feel like a consultation. Once your needs are captured, industrial engineers work with multidisciplinary experts to determine the most effective way of getting deliveries into the hands of customers. The SM team ideally has experts split up by both industry and function for cross-border shipping, as they will be best suited to customize a solution tailored to your company’s needs, and will have intimate knowledge of key factors such as government regulations and shipping routes.
The larger your volume of packages, the more important an effective SM team becomes. When interacting with these teams, consider these best practices that help demonstrate long-term support:
- They listen to your needs and offer a customized solution that works for you.
- They demonstrate a high level of customer care.
- They put in place an SM team contact without relying on a call center.
- They demonstrate a commitment to making an efficient end-to-end process.
Delivering quality customer care
When evaluating a potential partnership, it’s worth investigating the depth of how a delivery partner tailors customer service. To help determine whether the partnership is a good fit, you can start with asking questions such as:
- Does it have customer care teams specialized by region, industry, and even product category?
- Does it have a playbook on how it will maintain service in the face of unexpected events?
- How does it integrate a solutions management team? They should have a vision of what the highest quality of customer care looks like.
Every good courier should promise speed, reliability and responsiveness. But true customer service means having the right teams in place to document and analyze your needs, and having the right specialized support in place to customize solutions. At Purolator, our specialists are based on geography and product line (rather than being centralized) and collaborate with sales and onboarding teams to meet expectations.
When Legrand, a leading manufacturer of electrical devices, needed help with a distribution centre that couldn’t effectively support their operations, we worked with them to consolidate pick-ups. Although courier and freight typically run on two different networks, we knew Legrand needed a consolidated solution that comprised individual parcels and palletized loads. In a new service arrangement, it takes just two trailers for all twice-daily shipments instead of what would be many more, across multiple delivery providers.
It’s important to also note that advanced customer service enables better support during evolving crisis situations, such as weather events and social disruptions. In 2021, for instance, floods in British Columbia pushed the province into a state of emergency with residents evacuating homes and many highways and rail lines closed. Purolator, in the short term, arranged charter flights with Air Canada to keep packages moving while our hub in Richmond, B.C. designed an “air bridge” to replace what would typically be ground routes. Overall, these solutions carried the equivalent of 160 trailers of packages to Vancouver during that unforeseen situation.
Ultimately, going the extra mile on customer experience means deep expertise and flexibility. With a customer-focused solutions management team at your disposal, you’ll find that both continuity and efficiency of service will far exceed what more conventional strategies can offer.