Yodel Direct: Launching our new services.
Last month we launched our Store to Store and Store to Door Send services, Yodel Direct.
Leading the project were our Technical Delivery Manager, Jenny Harden, and Customer Experience Manager, Emma Drever who below discuss the challenges & rewards of implementing the new services, the level of detail involved and the importance of stakeholder communication & collaboration in order to make it all happen.
“When we began the process of relaunching Yodel Direct, our shared goal was to be the go-to carrier in the C2C market and to provide our customers with an option to send parcels directly through the Yodel network," Jenny states. "To launch Yodel Direct, we worked closely with the team at Parcel2Go, utilising their expertise in delivering growth in a C2C environment. We worked together with their teams to create a white label website that is so far proving effective and provides a fantastic UX.
Through collaborative working with P2G, we identified key areas where their expertise could enhance our C2C offering including customer service queries and My Account, which allows customers to manage their parcel deliveries all in one place, whilst Webchat functionality on the Yodel Direct website allows the customer service teams to handle queries responsively and effectively.”
Emma adds that, “One of the main challenges of relaunching the Yodel Direct Send service was ensuring that all stakeholders’ visions were aligned with the overall strategy – The Yodel team were extremely excited about the relaunch of Yodel Direct. Communicating the objectives of each output and solution ensured that all relevant stakeholders were informed and involved in the planning execution of the relaunch at every step.
When working with Parcel2Go, it was important for us to define the Yodel vision to their development teams so that they had a strong understanding of our expectations, brand and our values when implementing this on the website and throughout the communications to customers and clients."
A Yodel colleague for nearly 14 years, Emma continues, "Collaboration was one of the most important factors when working on the project, particularly as we were working closely with external stakeholders on a day-to-day basis. It was important to stay close to the team so that when each stakeholder involved had feedback or input, we could use that to our advantage."
Jenny, who oversaw the day-to-day planning of the launch, stated: “The project, as previously mentioned, was a cross functional collaboration between the team at Parcel2Go who we spoke to daily. Internally we had our software development teams, solution design team, database teams, finance and billing and our IT infrastructure teams heavily involved. In addition, the commercial team and customer experience team played a key role in the overall success of the relaunch.
It was vital to make sure that our key stakeholders were kept up to date. From the way our customer service solution is handled to making sure that the process for this was fully documented and communicated. It was also important to ensure that our commercial team were kept in the loop with any changes or challenges that we overcame - the impacted stakeholders within the businesses were continuously engaged throughout."
Emma explains, "There were initial delays in commencing the project due to the pandemic. Careful planning, daily checkpoints calls, and open lines of communication were central to keeping things on track
Ultimately, the introduction of Yodel Direct allows us to increase our marketplace integrations, offering sellers a wider audience when sending parcels. We now have a bigger platform for our customers who wish to use our Send solution via Yodel Direct. From customers who may ship a single parcel every month, to our partnered sellers who ship hundreds of parcels a week, we have made it easier from them to do just this."
Visit yodeldirect.co.uk today.