This article was first published in the 2016 Winter edition of the Mail & Express Review.
Canada Post won the Delivery on Demand category of the World Post & Parcel Awards for its FlexDelivery service which allows busy consumers to direct online purchases to any post office throughout Canada. Paul Bernard, Director of Product Management, Canada Post explains how the innovative project was tested and why listening and responding to customers is so important and fundamental to their successful commercial launch in May 2015.
“We began working on the FlexDelivery project back in the fall of 2012. The premise for the service was that many busy Canadians aren’t home during the day to receive deliveries so we wanted to make life easier for them.
Our FlexDelivery service allows consumers to choose any one of 6,000 convenient and secure post office locations across the country for delivery. Shoppers can choose a post office near home, near their work or close to the gym – the location most convenient for them. This service is secure, free and simple to use.
Delivery to secure post offices offers protection for high value and temperature-sensitive items. It is a sure way to keep special surprise gift under wraps.
Our primary focus for so many years was on back office solutions and integrations with our commercial customer base. As postal administrators, we are used to working with enterprise solutions, back-end solutions, etc. This new service required us to reverse engineer the entire process to first respond to customers, their needs, their convenience, their experience.
The traditional waterfall method of gathering requirements, developing and moving code to production and then working with a couple of commercial customers to pilot the launch, had to change. The plan was to have the solution go live nationally with a very large PR and marketing campaign to support it. The execution had to be flawless.
Postal administrations are not, by nature, very flexible or astute to this type of approach and it was definitely a big learning curve internally as well as externally.
Consumers now have tremendous power through social media to share bad experiences that drown out any benefits. More than any other project undertaken at Canada Post we were completely committed to delivering the best consumer experience.
For FlexDelivery we did more testing on this concept than anything else prior. We became hyper-focused on making sure the customer experience was flawless. Here are the rounds of testing we did prior to launch:
- We tested the concept with both quantitative and qualitative research. FlexDelivery scored the highest of all the consumer preferences we tested.
- We did three rounds of 1×1 interviews with consumers to test the concept and the web pages looking for usability improvements. We had a UI expert in the room who made changes to work flow, text and messaging based on the feedback we were getting.
- We had a beta release to test the concept in a single city with the project team testing out the service.
- We had an employee launch which included all locations and all 65,000 employees.
- Just prior to go live we had a round of journaling research. We took 80 consumers through the advertising, asked them to sign up for the service and then use the service to have an item delivered to a post office of their choosing. Throughout the process the participants were encouraged to share any feedback, post pictures or videos about their experience. This round of research gave us the confidence to be sure that we had nailed the end to end process.
The project represented one of the first times we used our employee base as our testers. Unlike many of the solutions we put in market every one of our employees was a potential FlexDelivery user. The enthusiasm, support and feedback from our employees gave us the confidence that we were launching an easy to use delivery alternative that responded to what our customers are asking for – flexibility and convenience.
FlexDelivery is the first of a suite of consumer delivery preferences which we will develop, test and roll out over the next several years. I was very excited to win the World Post & Parcel Award and happy for the team back home who worked so hard to make this idea come to life.
Entries for the 2017 World Post & Parcel Awards are now open. If you think your organisation has created an exceptional on-demand delivery process, or if you’re interested in any of our other categories, enter today for free. Visit the Awards website to find out more or call the events team on +44 (0)1628 642910.
