In focus: Aramex International

Q: In terms of customer service, what are some of the features that make Aramex stand out from the rest of the competitors?

Olga: At Aramex, we take pride in our customer centric approach to customer service and experience. We believe the key is communication and we develop different solutions to ensure our customers are continuously updated and engaged actively in creating a seamless customer journey.

We have created diverse channels for customer communication and shipment management to ensure different customer personas can access different tools effortlessly.

Q: How does Aramex earn customer loyalty?

Olga: Customer feedback and expectations are at the core of our solution development mechanism in order to ensure customer loyalty. Our solutions are always unique, innovative and customer centric.

Q: How do you measure customer feedback and what processes are in place to identify client needs?

Olga: Our voice of customer program is optimized across different channels and customer personas. Catering for QR code surveys at retail outlets, SMS, In-app, email etc. for consumers, as well as phone, email and in-depth customer interviews for our corporate segments.

We strive to integrate qualitative and quantitative techniques to capture customer feedback and identify customer needs across different products, services and solutions.

Q: How do you deal with customer complaints and ensure satisfaction?

Olga: We have very specific processes to handle customer complaints, analyze root causes, with clear role definition between our front and backline support agents. Our robust communication system ensures that customer complaints are captured and adhered to within the right standards and expectations of our customers. Ongoing quality assurance procedures ensure that we understand any gaps in the customer experience, fix any issues at the earliest, and ensure satisfaction with our services and products. Our customer service agents undergo extensive training and coaching programs reinforcing the importance of customer centricity and their role in delivering outstanding experiences across the globe.

Q: Do customer expectations towards your brand vary from region to region?

Olga: As with every brand, customer expectations are continuously growing, impacted by regional differences, market maturity and competitiveness, and various trends across industries.

We exert extensive efforts to understand customer expectations and perceptions across markets, work with our local teams to analyze and impact improvements across the different areas of the customer journey.

Q: What kind of online customer service and support are you currently offering to your website visitors?

Olga: Our landscape of digital and non-digital customer touch points (bots, apps, websites) ensures we are able to provide multiple avenues for self-service and customer service tools to ensure the optimum customer experience, covering tracking, shipment management, profile management, payment and end to end visibility.

Q: Do you offer any customer service training programs to your staff and what key skills do you focus on?

Olga: We focus on 12 key soft skills for our CS staff including customer centricity, proactiveness and problem solving. This is part of a wider program that our teams undergo when they first join Aramex, which is augmented exponentially as they grow in their careers into seniors and leaders, where we focus on additional skills that enable them to support others in our customer success organization and empower our front and backlines to solve issues for our customers in a timely fashion.

Q: How are you incorporating the latest technology in your company to improve customer experience?

Olga: Our CX strategy drives our technology implementation, as we identify areas where we can improve customer experiences, then our experience design and journey teams align with different stakeholders within Aramex to come up with the ideal customer flows. This is an iterative process that integrates new technologies like bots, conversational AI, machine learning as well new operating procedures that improve the customer journey inside-out and outside-in.

Q: What are some of the challenges that you are facing because of the COVID-19 Pandemic?

Olga: COVID-19 accelerated our change management and product development cycles to ensure we are able to cater for different customer groups and personas, it has highlighted various working models, and enabled us to test remote working scenarios very effectively.

Q: How do you plan to make customer experience better in the future?

Olga: We will continue to invest in understanding the voice of the customer, and customer journeys, analyze areas of broken experiences, and augmenting our landscape of digital and non-digital touch points.

About Olga Budieri

Olga Budieri is the Senior Global Head of Customer Experience Strategy at Dubai-based international courier, transportation and logistics services company Aramex International. Olga has over 12 years’ experience in logistics, which has equipped her with a laser-focus on customer expectations, needs and experience landscape.

Olga is highly experienced in enterprise level experience transformation programs, change management, experience design, voice of customer, journey management & orchestration, and strategic planning to uplift B2B and B2C experience programs.