Creating a positive customer experience enables a
company to differentiate itself from the competi-
tion. This is particularly true in the highly frag-
mented road freight business, where the offering
has become highly commoditized and price driven.
DHL Freight, a leading provider of international
road transportation solutions, set out to enhance
the customer experience by bringing the voice of
the customer into the organization, improving cus-
tomer interactions, and developing an organization-
wide customer-driven vision, common purpose, and
value proposition. The need to engage the whole
organization, across multiple locations and coun-
tries, in delivering an excellent customer experience
was critical to the success of the initiative. Within
12 months of implementation, DHL Freight is see-
ing a major change in the culture and operations of
the company. Encouraged by this success, each coun-
try in which DHL Freight operates is taking steps
to appoint a dedicated customer experience leader
in their respective senior management teams. The
company’s experiences point the way for implement-
ing an effective customer management approach in
other operations-driven businesses.

⃝

2014 Wiley

Periodicals, Inc.

The importance of customer experience manage-
ment (CEM) as a source of competitive advantage
has been well documented in many service indus-
tries, including retailing, public transportation, hos-
pitality, and vehicle repair (Clatworthy, 2012; John-
ston & Kong, 2011; Rawson, Duncan, & Jones,
2013; Verhoef et al., 2009; Wilson, Zeithaml, Bit-
ner, & Gremler, 2012). In the road freight market,

however, there are a multitude of companies com-
peting with limited differentiation, resulting in an
extreme focus on price. Success and failure are of-
ten determined by the ability of the road freight
operator to manage costs. These companies, there-
fore, tend to be very operationally driven, with the
customer relationship frequently reduced to that of
a simple discussion on price versus service delivery
standards.

Logistics is a highly complex undertaking. The pro-
cess of comparing offers, making bookings, prepar-
ing shipments, and getting goods to their recipients
at the right time is a daunting task, even for the
most sophisticated and experienced shippers. Us-
ing a customer-focused approach to make this end-
to-end journey simple and effective should signif-
icantly improve customers’ positive perceptions of
their road freight operators and engender loyalty
to those that can consistently deliver not only their
freight but also a positive business experience.

Customer Experience Management Defined

Walter, Edvardsson, and Ostrom (2010) defined cus-
tomer experience as the customer’s direct and indi-
rect exposure to the service process, including the
organization, its facilities, and interactions with the
service firm’s representatives and other customers.
This focus on experience and interaction is also em-
phasized by Biedenbach and Marell (2010), who
define customer experience as being the result of
the customer’s interpretation of his or her total in-
teraction with the supplier and the perceived value

⃝

2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Published online in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com)
Global Business and Organizational Excellence

●

DOI: 10.1002/joe.21569

●

September/October 2014

Exhibit 1. Key Attributes Sought by Shippers

companies in the industry, DHL Freight uses func-
tional scorecards to measure how well its various
functions perform in terms of such aspects as de-
liveries made, invoice claims, invoice correctness,
and number of complaints. But its ratings on these
measures did not correlate with customer survey re-
sults relating to satisfaction, loyalty, or likelihood of
recommending the road freight provider to others.
Clearly, there was a need to further explore what
shippers really wanted.

As part of the customer survey, shippers were asked
to rate the importance of various attributes on a
10-point scale. As expected, quality and price were
rated highly, but they were not the only characteris-
tics that customers identified, or even the most im-
portant. As

Exhibit 2

shows, customers identified

ease of contact, quick action, and having a knowl-
edgeable staff as equal to or more important than
quality and price. The survey results demonstrated
that the relationship between a company and its cus-
tomers in road freight is more complex than widely
assumed.

DHL Freight was keen to address its level of cus-
tomer relations along these dimensions so that ship-
pers would be:

●

Less likely to leave, reducing churn rates;

●

More likely to award their preferred supplier
more business, increasing up-trading;

●

Prone to spread positive word-of-mouth, attract-
ing new business; and

●

Easier to serve, reducing relationship maintenance
costs (for example, as a result of fewer claims and
complaints).

Implementing Customer Experience Management

The survey results indicated that to manage the cus-
tomer experience, DHL Freight needed to change its
traditional focus on operational management. Un-
der the leadership of the Transformation Depart-
ment, the management board jointly took the fol-
lowing five steps to drive the necessary changes:

1. Define a clear, compelling vision, common pur-

pose, and value proposition for DHL Freight.

September/October 2014

Global Business and Organizational Excellence

DOI: 10.1002/joe

Exhibit 2. Detailed Attributes and Their Importance to a Shipper

2. Define the DHL Freight customer journeys and

determine what matters most to customers.

3. Continuously improve the customer journeys.
4. Engage the entire organization in providing high-

quality customer service.

5. Create a performance management system with

defined metrics.

Defining Vision, Purpose, and Value

Before entering into dialogue with customers, it was
important to define how DHL Freight wanted to be
seen as a company. The overall vision, common pur-
pose, and value proposition needed to be clear to
everyone in the organization, from top management
to blue-collar employees, so they could focus their
daily work on what needed to be done to achieve
corporate objectives.

Companies go about defining their vision in vari-
ous ways. All of them require intensive discussions
and alignment at the top management level. As

Ex-

hibit 3

on page 10 shows, the DHL Freight manage-

ment board used the business transformation man-
agement methodology of Uhl and Gollenia (2013)
to define the challenges it was facing, as well as its
aspirations in six key capabilities:

1. Innovation management,
2. Transformation management,
3. Effective knowledge worker development,
4. Customer-centricity,
5. Operational excellence, and
6. IT excellence.

The outcome was a clear consensus on where the
company wanted to be in the future, as well as what
steps it needed to take to get there.

When it came to establishing a common purpose,
DHL Freight found that getting the board to achieve
consensus on one sentence that describes what the
company does, for whom, and how is not easy.

Global Business and Organizational Excellence

September/October 2014

DOI: 10.1002/joe