CASE STUDY - BPO

 Delivering courier solutions to enable real estate BPO client to achieve efficiency

The client engaged DBSA to handle its domestic shipments, leveraging its mailroom management service to oversee incoming and outgoing documents and tapping its market-leading technology solution.

Corporate profile

The client is a business process outsourcing company providing sales administration support to the residential businesses of a large Philippine real estate conglomerate. It pioneered the delivery of a full range of real estate services and operates four locations in Metro Manila and one provincial hub.

Executive summary

As a strategic business partner of the real estate conglomerate, the client focuses on providing administration support for reservations and bookings, customer services, monitoring of billing and collection, buyer’s financing assistance, credit investigation, documentation, and transfer and release of titles.

Catering to an upscale real estate portfolio, the client sends out more than 10,000 documents, packages and freight to domestic destinations on a monthly basis. With this huge volume, there is a need to ensure documents reached clients in an efficient and timely manner.

For eight years, the client had been managing its own mailroom setup, facilitating the dispatch and tracking of its shipments with its courier providers. To make its team more efficient and enable them to focus on high-value work, the client thought of outsourcing its entire courier service process, from booking to billing.

The takeover

In September 2016, the client engaged DBSA to handle its domestic shipments, leveraging its mailroom management service to oversee incoming and outgoing documents and tapping its market-leading technology solution.

DBSA implemented its standard business model process, which involved having the team directly picking up the document or package from the client, with delivery handled by a third-party courier. This meant:

•   Admin tasks such as preparing documents for pickup were handled by the client’s mailroom team
•   DBSA courier coordinates pickup with the third-party courier

In addition, DBSA put in place a back-end support team, which included:

•   a dedicated customer service team to answer concerns and queries
•   a billing team that provides a weekly summary of dispatched items and consolidates validated transactions
•   a progressive report, which provided the client with real-time booking status of shipments

The challenge

The initial months of streamlining the client’s mailroom system took a bit of adjustment, with some issues coming to focus

One challenge involved delayed delivery and tagging concerns with mail that needed to be returned to sender. In fact, during the first year, DBSA dealt with an accumulated 4,000 returned documents (RTS or return to sender) with no clear status in their transmittal slips.

Another challenge was brought about by the client’s business growth, which resulted in an increase in documents and shipments. Within a year of servicing the client’s mailroom, DBSA found its operations had to be ground to a halt: the client’s account had been suspended by the third-party courier, having gone beyond its credit limit.

The solution

Moving quickly, DBSA acquired the services of a second third-party courier and created a task force that was focused solely on clearing out the client’s undelivered documents. Occurrences of RTS issues were consolidated and analyzed to enable DBSA to understand and permanently resolve the root cause. RTS packages and mail were being monitored at real time, so that the client could quickly provide information to help with redelivery.

With a workaround process in place, DBSA resolved the client’s backlog within a month’s time and restored normal operations.

To ensure that DBSA had oversight of operations on the ground and could address issues that came up on real time, DBSA deployed a team in the client’s four sites. Regular roadshows across the client’s major sites also helped ensure that the client’s side understood what solutions were being rolled out while enabling DBSA team representatives to collaborate with the client to quickly re-calibrate requirements as needed.

Results

Over the years of managing the client’s mailroom, DBSA continued to introduce efficiency measures, which included:

• Rhermal sticker generation for international shipments
• Invoice validation process
• Assignment of DBSA specialists at client’s headquarters to help with real-time provision of transmittal slips, increase deployment efficiency, provide POD within defined turnaround time and minimize RTS with a thorough validation of contact details

Many of these measures have produced excellent results. These included improved turnaround time for shipments within the metro, which were handled by DBSA messengers; a 100% turnaround time for local and international inbound transactions; real-time-response to inquiries; and the execution of an effective business continuity plan, in which operations continued even in the absence of DBSA specialists on-site, especially during the COVID-19 lockdown.