Challenge

The increased online shopping and demand for fulfillment during the pandemic meant that Aramex’s support team was quickly inundated with a sustained higher volume of customer calls. Most of these incoming calls were from customers who wanted to track, schedule or change their deliveries. These were simple requests that were taking a lot of time and resources away from agents.

Low deliverability rates of SMS and email tracking updates made the issue worse. Customers could not reply to SMS updates, and email responses were slow, causing even more calls as customers turned to voice channels for support.

In response, Aramex set the goal to reduce calls by up to 80%. They needed a partner that could help them manage the increased volume of customer inquiries efficiently.

Solution

Aramex chose MessageBird’s Flow Builder and Inbox because it enables them to communicate with customers on their preferred channels, while also building self-service automation to effectively deflect calls for their support team.

Recurring customer inquiries are automated through a chatbot

Flow Builder helps Aramex resolve recurring customer inquiries through automation and chatbots. Customers can track, schedule, or reschedule their deliveries immediately through chat, reducing the need to call support for help.

Delivery notifications and updates are sent through WhatsApp

Aramex increased the deliverability of customer updates by switching from SMS and email to WhatsApp. This ensures customers are always up-to-date with the status of their packages and can easily solve issues on their own with one of the self-service automation or chatbots. Today, Aramex handles 500,000+ conversations on WhatsApp every month.

Omnichannel support to engage with customers faster‍

Inbox allows agents to communicate with customers across multiple channels. Aramex can respond to all incoming messages from WhatsApp, Messenger, SMS, or Google Business Messaging through one Inbox. There's no time lost from switching between different tabs or applications to access different messaging platforms.

Results

With MessageBird, Aramex’s support team is able to respond to all incoming messages more effectively. Customers are first directed to solve issues on their own before talking with an agent.

The customer support team can simultaneously handle multiple chats, resolving issues more quickly. “Both our customers and our team love it because it's faster and easier to respond to WhatsApp messages than it is to take calls or write email responses,” said Ruby. For every call they could handle before, they can manage 2.7 chats at the same time — almost 3x their productivity.

“Call center agents now have really fast response times, which has also helped us retain our customers during this difficult period,” according to Ruby.

Aramex began its implementation of MessageBird’s solutions in Australia and New Zealand. With the ambition to move even closer to their ultimate goal of reducing call volume by 80%, Aramex is in the process of expanding MessageBird into three more countries and sees MessageBird as a solution that can scale with them.

"Both our customers and our team love it because it's faster and easier to respond to WhatsApp messages than it is to take calls or write email responses."

Ruby Wolff, ANZ COO