How Hermes raised agility to remain the UK leader

Delivering outstanding customer satisfaction

The rapid growth of online shopping means delivery expert Hermes is working in a fiercely competitive environment. With a huge choice of providers, clients can switch in the blink of an eye. To remain one of the UK’s market leaders in this quickly evolving environment, Hermes needed to increase agility and raise customer satisfaction. Offering a premium service, while keeping great value at the forefront of customers’ minds was a priority. With a slow legacy system and an appetite for innovation, Hermes needed one coherent ecosystem.

They asked Equal Experts to help restructure a robust digital platform to withstand future step changes in the business while providing clients and customers with better ways to engage. We helped Hermes embrace a digital-first culture, making delivery lean and flexible.

Outcomes

Business growth

through improved client engagement

Award winning

named “Digital Team of The Year” in the Digital Technology Leaders Awards 2018

About Hermes

As one of the UK’s leading parcel delivery specialists, Hermes clients range from over 80% of high street retailers, alongside catalogues and online stores. They all rely on the organisation to send over 400 million parcels a year. Hermes also works with individual customers who send and receive packages using its nationwide ParcelShops.

Industry

Logistics

Organisation size

Over 14,000 service providers

Location

Hamburg, Germany, with a UK base in Leeds

Challenge

Gaining in-depth insights for unrivalled clarity

Consultants from Equal Experts joined the team at Hermes, working closely with a number of suppliers as well as Hermes’ own people. This helped us gain a greater understanding of the business and all its intricacies. By working with stakeholders across the organisation from customer services, sales and marketing, to clients and those Hermes deliver to, we gained a comprehensive picture of the challenges they faced. We discovered that the organisation needed to:

Stay competitive by cutting costs (for instance, by reducing avoidable calls to the call centre).
Improve the user experience for their clients and the parcel recipient.

Hermes’ goals demanded a completely new approach to their technology. As the business became more complex, the historical platform was slowing down. The role of Equal Experts was to work with Hermes to design and build an entirely new one.

Solution

A single, robust platform delivers agility for an evolving future

The new system was based on an API-first platform. It allowed Hermes to consolidate multiple online experiences into a single, more user-friendly service.

Some front-end services, like the Hermes app, fell outside our direct remit, but still needed the APIs we set up to operate. The platform was the very keystone of the organisation’s ongoing mobile and web development strategy. It enabled clients and parcel recipients to engage better with Hermes, who found offering improved services was now easier than ever.

As a result, clients could be onboarded more quickly, and the flexibility provided more support as their needs grew and changed.

Results

Devising a roadmap for market leading goals and providing the support to achieve them

Equal Experts also led the Programme Analysis. Our team helped create a roadmap to guide Hermes’ technology suppliers, setting out its direction and identifying priorities.

This also helped us clarify the MVP delivery, which we brought forward, ensuring Hermes could benefit from its investment even sooner than expected. Our wide range of experience also helped ensure different suppliers worked together as a unified delivery team.

Working closely with them gave us the opportunity to embed new working practices. Now, teams start small and evolve, keeping the focus on continually adding value.

This ongoing transformation is already delivering benefits. New business is being won, existing clients have been retained, and Hermes is in a prime position to achieve its goals.

Even better, the Hermes team won Digital Team of The Year in the Digital Technology Leaders Awards 2018. We are proud to have been part of this ambitious transformation project and look forward to seeing where Hermes is going next.