Special delivery

Maintaining three websites that encompass the numerous services the Royal Mail group provides was costly and inefficient. Realising it had to maintain its competitive edge, the organisation decided to implement a portal to improve the online service it offers to its public and commercial customers. Dennis Greene, head of operations of e-business for Royal Mail, explains how the company accomplished the project in a little over nine months.

Royal Mail has a vital role in today’s society, having evolved from the original postal business that was founded nearly 400 years ago. We have a statutory duty to provide a letter and parcel delivery service to each and every one of the 27 million addresses in the UK at a uniform price, irrespective of distance travelled. Additionally, we make essential services available through our network of Post Office branches.

Despite the popularity of e-mail and other electronic messaging, we deliver 82 million items of mail each day. Our three best-known brands, Royal Mail, Post Office and Parcelforce Worldwide, provide hundreds of services ranging from express letter and parcel deliveries to banking services, electronic billing to warehousing.

Royal Mail is a highly complex business with a turnover in excess of £8bn involving millions of customers, 200,000 employees and a distribution network extending to every address in the UK. But the organisation now faces unprecedented demands and challenges from today’s rapidly changing marketplace. Increasing competition and our commitment to provide a high level of service to customers are the challenges facing the company. While Royal Mail is still effectively a monopoly in the UK there is increasing pressure from other players that are big in Europe, such as Deutsche Post and TPG. These competitors also offer high-quality web services, including transactional and information services similar to those now offered by Royal Mail.

In addition, customers’ lifestyles are changing and they expect to have the option to access services and information online more often. People are finding themselves under increasing time pressures, working longer hours but also spending more time on leisure activities. The internet has changed customers’ expectations of ‘good service’ – they automatically expect real-time capabilities and the convenience of instant access to information and services. The development of the Royal Mail portal was a reflection of these wider changes within society.

A passion for customer service

In response, we are reinventing our business to meet the changing needs of our customers and the demands of competition. This is only possible by focusing on what our customers want from us and delivering a top quality service to them. This means listening to their needs, developing innovative services and enhancing our services. Crucially, this entails developing an environment across our business where a passion for customer service becomes second nature. One example of this is the recent launch of the company’s Small Business Community, where small business users can access information and services relevant to their situation. This community also acts as a forum for users to debate the issues important to them and share advice and experiences. The launch of our SmartStamp product is another example of Royal Mail introducing a service that addresses specific customer needs. SmartStamp allows business users to purchase postage online, create their own distinctive “stamp” and print it off on their own printer. This provides a level of convenience that time-pressured businesses find vital, allowing everything to be carried out from their offices.

Our portal strategy

A major part of our customer-services strategy has been to maximise our use of the internet. Our three major brands once had their own individual websites, managed by the Royal Mail group as www.royalmail.com, www.parcelforce.com and www.postoffice.co.uk. Maintaining these separate sites, however, was a complex business, limiting the opportunities for cross-selling and our ability to provide a more comprehensive customer service.

The overhead involved in running three separate web sites, with multiple smaller sites buried within each, was huge. Many of the sites focused on ‘brochureware’, simply offering PDF versions of information documents. Our customers expected a level of interactivity that matched other websites they were visiting, providing an actual communication process rather than static documents. There was no single registration point, no uniform measurement system and no standard approach to data management or analysis. A single point of registration is crucial to ensure that customers have the easiest possible route around the sites. Rather than having to log in with a different user name and password for each part of the business, users should be able to log on once, making it easier and quicker for them to use. Uniform measurement of customer responses to the sites was also key to ensuring that we could learn more every day about our customers. Accurate information can be compared between sites to highlight best practice, and can be shared across the business to inform business strategy decisions. Data management and analysis is another fundamental building block of our business. If we don’t know our customers, how can we communicate with them or provide them with the products that meet their needs?

Maintaining the separate sites took a disproportionate amount of time and effort that could have been better spent elsewhere. It was clear that we required a transformation strategy that would move us away from the flat, page-based content of the previous websites to a single platform, transactional portal. This portal provides a truly interactive experience for our personal and corporate customers. It allows us to provide them with a whole new range of services, from parcel tracking to online billing, all tailored to the specific needs of each customer group.

As a single platform, it is easier to maintain, thereby providing management efficiencies. It also supplies the means to precisely target our marketing strategies, helping us to turn the business around, maintain consistently high levels of service and ensuring the long-term profitability of the company.

Prior to creation of the portal, maintenance (including agency staff, managers, development teams, hosting companies and other third-party suppliers) took well over 100 people. The current operation runs with a core team less than a quarter of that size, which is a significant improvement.

Additionally, we are well-placed to develop better services through watching and learning from our customers’ actions on the site. Royal Mail’s e-business team acts as a central point for data gathering and measurement and is therefore in an ideal position to make comparative and analytical evaluations of application and site performance, as well as dealing with issues such as usability. This allows us to make continual improvements to the site to increase user satisfaction and revenue.

A new self-service portal

We had long recognised the importance and potential of the online channel and so it was an easy decision to establish the new portal. We identified three criteria for the new portal: scalability; personalisation for our customers; and content management with a seamless integration between existing systems and websites.

The platform had to act as a self-service portal that would provide our customers with quick and easy-to-find information and access to our services. Specifics like tone of voice were carefully examined to ensure we met customers’ expectations and to ensure that the portal matched our brand values. It had to combine scalability with dynamic content based on detailed customer segmentation, profiling and targeting that would ensure our customers a more personal, satisfying and rewarding online experience. At the same time, we could not afford to lose the benefits of our existing systems in terms of basic functionality and fit to customers, and had to ensure the portal seamlessly integrated with our three websites.

We chose a solution provider with a good track record of delivering service in all these areas. The portal was built by teams from Royal Mail and ATG totalling around 150 people. We were constantly liaising with our colleagues in different parts of the business to test applications and to get feedback on their operation. We also worked with two interactive design agencies to make sure that the look and feel was just right. At every stage we were involved in multiple strands of work, auditing and culling content and applications to ensure the portal was as useful to our customers and as efficient as possible.

The existing commerce applications were ‘re-factored’ to fit with the new portal application, which means that the JSP pages were altered slightly and the java implementation was untouched.

Some applications were ‘re-engineered’ or developed from scratch, to provide new or enhanced functionality within the portal or commerce areas of the site.

For the portal application itself, extensions were made to the ATG Portal Framework to support the use of a virtual linking syntax between content/pages in the portal. This meant that the same content could be reused across the different brand sites (Royal Mail, Parcelforce Worldwide and Post Office), but the look and feel of the content was tailored according to the brand. The entire portal application and navigation scheme is data driven from the content, and the content is managed with ATG Content Administration.

There was limited migration from the existing systems as the different brand sites took the opportunity to refresh their content and update the sites.

This happened in parallel with the implementation and enabled us to turn the project around in about nine months – relatively quickly for a project of this size. The system remained on during the go-live as traffic was redirected to the new applications. Staff were fully trained in using the content-management system and shop tools to ensure that the project could be well-maintained after the initial roll-out.

The new portal was eventually built with two of ATG’s products: an online selling solution and a self-service and collaboration portal solution designed to help increase productivity among employees and partners. The portal uses XML interfaces to integrate with a number of legacy systems and is integrated with the solution provider’s content administrator product and an Autonomy search engine. The solution provider was chosen as part of a best-of-breed strategy, and was selected from a range of suppliers with experience in this area. We chose ATG because they best met the three specific requirements: scalability; personalisation for our customers; and integration between existing systems.

Timescales and challenges

Our timescales were aggressive, starting around mid 2003 and finishing at the start of 2004. The challenges we faced were enormous. First, the strategic direction had to be agreed with the businesses to take account of their various requirements. Determining the direction required a lot of face-to-face discussion and a willingness to see how the project would benefit the business as a whole. Once the direction was agreed, we had to work to ensure the development took place without hindering the business as it continued as normal.

We had to establish priorities and methods of working as well as get the go-ahead for the project funding. This was secured by focusing on the business benefits the new portal would bring. We took steps early on to ensure the benefits of the project were continually in focus by monitoring them against our business requirements and targets for sales, traffic and customer satisfaction. The development work was intense because this was a very large project involving some complex architectural concepts. There were also more than 100 people working on the project and one of the biggest difficulties they faced was integrating the numerous systems and applications involved. Building a single portal with many different faces on a shared architecture is a complex process as each application needed to fit with all the others. All the teams working on the project, however, were fully committed to its success and we worked hard to maintain motivation and the shared vision through frequent communication and good working practices.

When the new portal went live it was promoted both internally and externally to staff and customers to encourage them to make best use of it. Internally, the project was communicated to staff through newsletters and meetings. Externally, awareness of the new site was integrated into the promotion of new and existing products and functionalities through Royal Mail’s marketing activities.

A richer, more adaptive, interactive customer experience

Now up and running, the self-service portal is still accessed through the three URLs and contains a wide range of information for customers about our products and services. More than 40 applications are now running through the one portal, including full e-commerce capability across the three sites, a single registration system and shared common components. Applications available now include a postcode finder, address finder, and a full range of online products ranging from travel insurance and foreign currency (Post Office) to the online renewal of address redirections (Royal Mail).

There are also innovative new services for customers, such as Bills Online which lets customers view, pay and manage household bills over the internet. The Decide and Deliver service acts as an online address book, enabling internet shoppers to fill in delivery address details at the click of a button.

The volume of traffic across the portal reflects the popularity of these services. A NetValue.com survey placed the site among the top 100 accessed from home. From March to September 2004, users increased by 80 per cent, and customer satisfaction scores were positive. Over 80 per cent of respondents to a Taylor Nelson Sofres survey rated the site ‘good’ to ‘excellent‘. Feedback on the site also indicates that customer recommendations are playing a strong part in driving traffic.

A thriving, integrated, online business

The portal has streamlined the process of managing our online presence. The solution provider’s portal, commerce and content administrator products have automated many of the processes that were previously managed less efficiently over different websites. Typically, projects of this size can take months. However, in today’s e-commerce world, such lengthy timescales are unacceptable and the portal has enabled us to speed up our project development times.

This rapid development process means we can launch new services in a fraction of the time. In essence, the new portal gives us a platform for managing e-commerce services and for building and launching new online offerings quickly. As a result, we can drive down costs and speed up development cycles.

Customer services

Our services are based on one platform, which means we can offer the same core services to all users. However, depending on how users access the site, they are presented with different landing pages and specific content tailored to their wants and needs. For the first time, Royal Mail has a comprehensive picture of what its different customers do online from capturing customer transactions, site usage and registration details. This data can then be quickly translated and used in the development of new products and services. A personalisation product further helps this process and makes it easy to launch and manage online promotions, capture information and develop e-mail campaigns to build personalised applications.

Needless to say, we are delighted with the results so far. The real advantage of such a flexible approach is the potential for building new products and services based on the winning combination of customer feedback and our own innovations. We have been tracking the benefits of the project and building these cost savings into our budgets to ensure that the portal is delivering what it was designed to. We are constantly reviewing and updating the site as necessary, adding enhancements to applications to make sure we are getting the maximum business benefit. If we had to do it all over again we would follow largely the same model, but perhaps place more emphasis on integration from the start of the project. Good planning and being aware of potential hitches are the key to making a project like this run smoothly – arming yourself with as much information in advance and solid preparation are vital.

Tapping new online revenue streams

The new platform gives us the ability to re-package our applications so that all customers can benefit from Royal Mail services. It is an exciting business opportunity that we are looking to build upon.