Maersk aims for quicker turnaround

Maersk Line is set to implement its new customer service concept in southern Africa, having rolled it out successfully across the globe. The concept, built around improving the customer experience by ensuring a more responsive, more effective and quicker service, was piloted in 2011 with the roll-out starting last year. It has been getting the thumbs-up across the world according to Vicki Erskine, Maersk Line southern Africa national customer service manager. “The concept is relatively simple as it creates the capacity for customer agents to further build relationships with customers and develop a deeper understanding of their business – being more proactive in problem-solving and communication,” she told FTW. “Highly experienced staff based locally will concentrate on the proactive handling of customerspecific requests and exceptions that occur from time to time in the supply chain, while skilled team members based in shared service centres located offshore will complete tasks that are more repetitive in nature,” she explained. “We would like to free up our experienced local staff to focus on what impacts the customer the most.” The major change for customers, she said, is that in future they will be served by a primary point of contact in the country, and a support person based remotely, all aimed at improving service delivery. “Our research has shown that our customers want a reliable, proactive and responsive customer service from us in order to satisfy their business requirements. In response to this we have explored ways in which we can meet these needs on a consistent basis resulting in this new customer service model,” said Erskine. Ultimately the new model will allow customer service agents to react more quickly to circumstances or customer requests that deviate from the normal shipment cycle – a reality in the shipping industry. “We expect to pair up our customer service agents, who are all assigned to specific customers, with a support person in our shared service centre. The work will then be divided between the two agents. Our agents in the shared service centre will not handle any telephonebased activities,” said Erskine. “ So our customers will still use our single email address, but could receive responses from either one of the two people attached to their account. The customer service agent in South Africa will continue to be the owner of the account and will be fully aware of all actions being taken on the shipments. Based on our experience with this model in other countries, the customers have reported quicker turnaround time on queries.” INSERT ‘Skilled team members based in shared service centres located offshore will complete tasks that are more repetitive.’ CAPTION Vicki Erskine … ‘quicker reaction to customer requests that deviate from the normal shipment cycle.’