J&T Express stands out as a prominent global logistics service provider. Its express delivery business is taking the lead in the world’s largest and fastest-growing markets like China and Southeast Asia. Founded in 2015, J&T Express has established a courier network covering 13 countries, and owns 237 large transit centers and 19600 express sites. It collaborates with 8500 network partners, and owns over 400 thousand employees to offer express delivery services to global customers. It is committed to providing efficient and sustainable logistics solutions to customers around the world through intelligent and digital business and technological innovation.
As J&T has entered the stage of E-commerce delivery express, it has witnessed the simultaneous expansion of both business volume and business scope. In recent years, J&T has successively entered multiple markets in Southeast Asia and the Middle East, committed to providing efficient and accurate express delivery services to more customers. Adhering to the principle of “customer-oriented, efficiency-based”, J&T has always attached great importance to customer experience.
As Mr. Charles Hou, Vice President of J&T Express once said: “Since our founding in 2015, J&T has rapidly expanded and continuously enhanced our services. We always remain true to our original aspiration and committed to seamlessly connecting the world through our customer-centric approaches and dedication to efficiency.”
Under such circumstance, the accuracy and timeliness of delivery has been increasingly significant.
It just takes several days from order to delivery, but the process of delivery is not so simple. It often gets a lot of people involved, including customers, customer service agents, businesses, couriers and so on. So during the whole process, frequent but efficient communication is highly needed, especially the communications with customers, who play a crucial role in the final step of delivery. That means, customer contact can be regarded as the key to express delivery.
Customer Contact Challenges Encountered by J&T Express
During the express delivery process, J&T encountered several challenges related to customer contact in its Southeast Asia and Middle East markets:
Delayed information updates:
Many customers often temporarily change their delivery time and address. Once the information is modified, the e-commerce platform needs to communicate with customers first for confirmation, and then inform couriers of the modification, reminding them of contacting with customers during delivery. Such a complex communication process can sometimes cause information updates to lag behind, making couriers unknown about the latest delivery address, thus slowing down the speed of delivery.
Difficult Cash-on-Delivery Collection:
Customers in Southeast Aisa and Middle East are accustomed to Cash-on-Delivery (COD), which means that couriers must meet with the recipients face-to-face to help merchants charge fees for the products. Generally, couriers would contact customers first to confirm their available time for receiving parcels, and then deliver the parcels as agreed. However, this one-on-one communication method is not efficient at all. Sometimes if the communication is not so smooth, the delivery efficiency would be affected seriously, bringing difficulties to the charge of products.
Inaccurate Address:
For customers who buy products on e-commerce platforms, they need to fill in some personal information for smooth delivery, like address, phone number, name and so on. However, the information like address and postal code of some orders is not so accurate, so couriers could only communicate with customers repeatedly to confirm the delivery address. This may lead to low delivery efficiency, or even wrong delivery, posing great challenges to both couriers themselves and J&T’s brand effect.
J&T Express’s Collaboration with Sobot
Faced with challenges above, J&T urgently needed to upgrade its customer contact functions on its platform. And it does hope communication between couriers and customers could be more efficient, and the efficiency and accuracy of express delivery can be improved obviously.
Therefore, J&T Express chose to collaborate with Sobot, who shares the same value “Customer First” with it, to find out customer service solutions.
In order to provide customized customer service solutions for J&T Express, Sobot’s team conducted an on-site visit to the Middle East and Southeast Asia market after learning about the challenges faced by J&T Express. They followed couriers to deliver packages for a whole day, and found that parcel delivery was seriously affected by inefficient customer contact— once a parcel was delivered as much as 5 times before it was successfully received by the customer!
Due to this special and impressive experience, Sobot’s team gained a deeper understanding of the difficulties faced by J&T Express and its couriers, thus managing to provide highly targeted suggestions for it to improve communication efficiency between the delivery team and customers:
Provide high-quality communication channel: WhatsApp Business Account
J&T Express found that many customers immediately exit the e-commerce App after placing an order and rarely continue to follow the platform’s message notifications, resulting in a low notification reach rate. If couriers deliver the parcels without confirmation, it may increase the cost of subsequent communication and lower the one-time delivery rate, thereby affecting customer satisfaction.
Based on this situation, Sobot advised J&T to send delivery notifications through WhatsApp. As an authorized WhatsApp Business Solution Provider (BSP) officially certified by Meta, Sobot facilitated J&T Express in obtaining a WhatsApp Business Account with a verified green tick. That means, J&T could send bulk messages without the risk of being banned or blacklisted by Meta, establishing full trustworthiness and credibility among all recipients.
In this way, the confirmation rate of information before delivery, the one-time delivery rate and customer satisfaction all could be greatly guaranteed.
Realize automatic messaging with rule engine
Based on the “Rule Engine” capability of Sobot, J&T Express could set automatic message delivery rules for customers. After the customer places an order, the system would automatically retrieve the order information based on the message template and send it to the customer for confirmation through WhatsApp, reducing human staff’s workload and improving messaging efficiency. If the customer’s phone number is not registered on WhatsApp, the rule engine can also realize automatic SMS resending to ensure message reach.
After the customer receives the goods and clicks the “confirm receipt” button, it will be transmitted back to J&T’s system in real time. Then the customer tag, status and other relevant information would be updated, providing more accurate data for further operation and management.
Integrate Sobot’s communication platform with WhatsApp
Sobot provided a platform for couriers to communicate with customers, which was integrated with WhatsApp Business Account. If customers have any delivery address or time changes, couriers can check the changed information and contact customers on the platform through WhatsApp Business Account.
From the customers’ perspective, they are chatting with the same WhatsApp Business Account, but actually it is different couriers that send messages to their respective customers through Sobot’s integration with WhatsApp. It not only enhances the brand effect of J&T Express, but also facilitates administrators’ monitoring and management of conversations between couriers and customers.
Confirm delivery address
Through WhatsApp, couriers of J&T Express can ensure delivery address with Google Maps. If customers want to change their delivery address, there is no need to further communicate– customers can select the delivery address on the map, and couriers can also apply to check the address at anytime with just one click, so that the delivery routine can be optimized according to the accurate address. Besides, couriers can even share pictures, videos, and location through WhatsApp, making the process of address confirmation much easier.
With Sobot’s solution, J&T has witnessed 50% reduction in cost, 35% increase in delivery rate, and 40% increase in COD collection rate.
If you also have a need to improve your customer contact efficiency, please contact us. As an authorized WhatsApp BSP officially certified by Meta, Sobot can not only help you with WhatsApp Business Account, but also provide overall customer contact solutions with various products like chatbot, live chat, ticketing system and so on. Do not hesitate to contact us!
