Package tracking system saves major office retailer millions while increasing customer satisfaction

The problem? While the company’s vast carrier network kept delivery costs low, it was a logistical nightmare, and the over 20-year-old package tracking system only made matters worse.

The company’s call center was burdened with hundreds of calls each day from customers wondering about the status of their shipments. Employees were spending valuable time navigating the outdated tracking system. They were also struggling to decipher redundant and inconsistent delivery data from the many package delivery partners, each of which used its own unique terminology, exception codes, and data retrieval procedures.

As a result, the company was steadily sinking money into a bloated customer service department but saw little improvement in customer satisfaction.

The Challenge 

There were two main challenges with this project:

1. Consolidating tracking data from 100+ different delivery partners into an enterprise system to provide clear and consistent tracking information to the website, users, call center, and order management system

2. Migrating from the company’s over 20-year-old legacy tracking system, which was written in code that no one at the company understood and was afraid to touch

The solution: A single source of truth  

The idea was simple: create a single resource (source of truth) that provides clear, accurate, and consistently written tracking updates. The reality was a little more complicated.

Migrating the old system  

Before migrating the legacy tracking system, we had to understand it. Everyone at the company assured us that it couldn’t be done. The code was notoriously complicated and dangerously outdated.

“You’ll never figure it out.”

We heard this numerous times. Other teams had tried and failed, but we were determined. “Just give us a chance,” we told them.

Within three months, we had a firm grasp of the legacy code. How did we do it? Hard work. We rolled up our sleeves and read the legacy data structures and code until we knew it as well, if not better, than anyone at the company.

Later, KIS put four people in a room, and six months and many boxes of pizza later, we were able to update the old system to a modern infrastructure while expanding upon the user functionality.

Handling the Volume  

On average, the company was moving about 300,000 boxes a day and receiving about 10 updates per box, averaging around 3 million package tracking updates per day. To handle all that data, we designed a system that could accommodate up to 300 transactions per second. By the time you finish this article, the system will have processed about 100,000 transactions!

Data consistency challenge

The legacy package tracking system didn’t standardize the tracking data supplied by the carriers. As a result, customer service representatives struggled to locate and decipher tracking information. Some carriers provided duplicate data, cluttering the system with redundant text. The previous tracking system also had the following issues:

• Each carrier had its own unique exception codes for a given issue, making it difficult for employees to determine why a package hadn’t been delivered.
• Each carrier formatted its data differently.
• Some carriers used different data retrieval methods, causing inconsistencies in how the data was displayed in the system.

The new tracking system would need to standardize the data and display it in a consistent and easy-to-read format. We spent months learning each carrier’s data formatting and unique coding schemes. There were no shortcuts here — this again was just plain hard work. In the end, we were able to normalize the data by creating a layer in the system that

• Filtered out duplicate data

• Translated and standardized exception codes into easy-to-understand language

• Reformatted data for consistency regardless of the carrier

• Reformatted data retrieval methods, further creating consistency and readability for users

Change management

We also needed to align internal and external stakeholders. Change management, or the process and approach to implementing change, is a common buzzword, but in any large software project, it is a brutal reality.

It was difficult getting people at the carrier companies to talk to us about their processes. They were dismissive of our inquiries and would often dodge our calls. It was equally challenging to get internal groups to align. A project this large involves many areas: call centers, internal IT teams, the website, customer experience, and many more. Getting all these internal stakeholders on board was no small feat.

We found out quickly that this was real-world software development. Anyone with enough determination and know-how could write a program, but what makes or breaks a project is knowing how to talk to people. We had to convince the people at these carrier companies that we weren’t a bunch of software nerds in a room but that we knew what we were doing and we were here to make everyone’s job easier.

Organizational alignment wasn’t easy. But with enough persistence and professionalism and by demonstrating the value of our product, we eventually broke through to these delivery companies and got them on board. What started out as contentious relationships turned into partnerships, and we got the information we needed to build the system.

In the end, this was one of the hardest parts of the entire project, but it reinforced a valuable lesson: it takes more than technical knowledge to develop software. You also need people skills, and that’s where we excel.

What we built: An electronic package tracking service

• A core database for delivery data (single source of truth)
• Real-time data ingestion framework that streams package tracking updates  
• An intelligent polling solution that calls delivery partner APIs  
• A publishing framework for making downstream systems aware of important tracking updates, such as an OMS and notification platforms
• APIs for data consumption from enterprise systems
• Call center
• Website

Stats

• Receives scans from over 32 different carriers  
• Receives about 100,000 tracking requests each day from customers and call center reps
• Processes an average of 2 million to 3 million valid scan events each day after de-duping and other business rules

The result  

In the end, our single source of truth for package tracking made significant sustainable improvements to the office supply company’s daily operations, customer satisfaction, and overall profitability.

By providing a consistent and reliable source of tracking updates, customers could check the status of their package through the website, cutting down on the number of calls the call center received each day. Customers who did call were assisted quickly by employees navigating the new and improved system. Customers also enjoyed near real-time email and SMS messaging delivery updates. As a result, customer satisfaction skyrocketed, and the reduced workload of the call center saved the company roughly $20 million!

The new tracking system also enabled the company to better hold their vendors accountable. The department responsible for making sure the carriers in the delivery network performed their job in accordance with their contract terms saw the value of the data supplied by the new tracking system, and they migrated over to it immediately. The system helped them improve the efficiency of both their department and the carriers by making sure packages reached their destination on time.

A few metrics and results:

• Helped the client save $20 million
• Improved call center efficiency  
• Improved user experience on ecommerce platforms
• Enabled near real-time email and SMS messaging for delivery updates
• Improved customer satisfaction  
• Helped hold vendors accountable to their terms

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