Deutsche Post AG (DHL) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

And before you know it, it's Friday afternoon again. Thank you for joining us to the fourth and somewhat, unfortunately, final edition of our Digi Fridays series. I'm Martin Ziegenbalg, Head of Investor Relations here. And I welcome you to the session on how digitalization is going to help the group to get to the next level in terms of customer experience. Just as a reminder, for those joining late into that series over the past 3 weeks -- 4 weeks, we were looking at how digitalization supports our ESG road map, how it's coming into the automation and how it's helping the e-commerce business to continue to grow. And so today, as I said, it's on customer experience. And who better to give us an introduction in a minute than Katja Busch, Head of our CSI key account management team and Chief -- what is it? Commercial Officer. See, I didn't want to get that right -- wrong. And yes, so she's going to lead over then also to a couple of interesting cases introduced by 3 colleagues from Express, from Forwarding, from Post and Parcel Germany. So you get an idea how deep rooted our efforts are throughout the group. And for the Q&A afterwards, we will have some time. I ask Robert from the team to take us through the Q&A. For that Q&A, to place your questions, as before, please make use of that little text box that you see in the webcast, and we will deal with that question. And without any further ado, Katja, over to you.

Thank you, Martin. Digital is literally everywhere. It's embedded in the glasses of our picking force and warehouses. It helps with exhausting and repetitive tasks in the warehouses. It improves our last mile routing. But this is just one side of the [ menu ]. This is where digital is in all our operations. But by the same time, we do a lot of digital efforts to improve and enhance our relationships and collaboration with our customers, and I'm super happy to talk you through that today. But before we dive into the topic, I will briefly explain you what we are doing in CSI, which stands for Customer Solutions and Innovations. So our bread and butter business is basically to care about the 100 biggest companies worldwide, at least the 100 biggest customers in DHL. And as we think that you ideally know the business of your customer better than himself, we are working in so-called industry sectors. And a good example is right before we got the first request to transport electric batteries on a bigger scale. We already had a project team in place that worked on these topics. With these customers, we are accountable for 20% of the group's revenue approx. So customer-centric, industry-leading innovation. We have in 4 innovation centers across the globe in Singapore, in Chicago, in Dubai and here close to the headquarter in Bonn. Because we firmly believe that to increase collaboration and commercial success with your customer, you have to be very, very close to everything that's going on in the industry. So we try to be in the middle of all the startups and new technologies in logistics and our customers. And yes, I'm very proud that the dhl.com website is in our responsibility as well, and I'll come to that a bit later. So this all in an integrated approach, just a little idea what we are doing. So -- but let's now talk about digitalization in commercial. So you probably think so, oh, wow, what pandemic, that's already long ago. But if you want to get a glimpse of what the value of CSI really is, it was the transportation of the vaccines around the globe. So in total, we shipped over 2 billion doses, together with our customer, Pfizer, in 175 countries. And what the teams did day and night is they put the dots together. We had all capabilities in the group. We had the ultra-low-freezers in some warehouses. We have all the licenses to transport Medical Express. We know how to handle dry ice, and we obviously have an outstanding last mile network across the globe. So our job was, and this is why my team just not customer solutions and innovations, we put the dots together. So that gives you probably an idea about our daily business. So if you have a look at our customer base, 98% of our customers are using 2-plus divisions. And long ago, over 15 years ago, the group decided that we would not drop the complexity of our different divisions on the lap of the customers, but that we would have this special force to help them. If you look at Tier 2 on the right-hand side, these are a few thousand customers. So the next level after our 100. And there, you still have 73% of customers using more than one division with more than 46% of DPDHL Group's revenue. That gives you a rough idea about the numbers and the scale we are talking about. And so, we obviously want to continue to enhance this with 3 main levers. One is obviously online, sustainability and data and AI. So let's start with data and AI. When I started in this industry over 30 years ago, I literally had a Rolodex on my desk. That was my customer base that was my heart I worked with. So these days are likely long over. Today, we are working with a central commercialized hub here in Bonn. We're using advanced analytics, pattern recognition to tell our sales force, what is the next best move. We use sales automation to take all administrative tasks away from the sales force to give them time to spend with the customers. We have a very strong performance management to identify where we have to coach where we have to improve our sales force further. That goes together with capability building. You always need to be at the forefront of all logistics developments. Best example is definitely sustainability, a topic that gets even more complex, the deeper unique. And we have strategy and programs where we, together with the sector heads, with the global sector heads out there, identify new growth opportunities, develop strategies and programs here out of our central team. Two good examples. One is our focus facility dashboard. What we have is we have a global overview of all facilities of all our customers, be it a tiny little chat where just probably a few express shipments are shipped out, albeit a big central warehouse. We know exactly where the location is who owns the building, who is running the operations, who keeps the contract, when will the contract expire. These are all data we get from our customers, and we combine it and enrich it with our internal DHL data. That gives us a fantastic overview about what's going on in the world in our customer base. Just fancy that there is a warehouse that is very close to a facility of us. That would mean later pickup times and cheaper costs for the customer. So something where we have definitely a competitive advantage. Another example is indeed the sales automation platform, all repetitive tasks are done there by robots, by chatbots. And we are working very, very heavily on the response of RFPs, which is always a huge, huge administrative task to automate that any further. We really try to touch things just once and then refresh them in all our systems in all our databases. And that you probably have an idea how much that reduces time for our sales force and give some time to focus on our customers. Dhl.com, I mentioned a bit briefly right in the beginning, our website, where we already year-to-date have 95 million of visitors. We are live in 150 countries with over 42 languages. So what makes this website very special. We really think the process from the beginning from a customer who looks for us on Google until the point where he has a label in his hand, and he can use our service, and we try to not let him go in this process. Sustainability, the last task I would shortly talk about what you see here on the screen is our express -- our express shipping system, where we make it very, very easy for a customer with one click to buy SAF, buy Sustainable Aviation Fuel and to inset around here in this example, 30% of its CO2 emissions. We are firm believers that the differentiator between the competitors and us is to make it very, very easy for customers. This is what has been historically grown always been a success. So that was a very, very short fly-through to our digital efforts. And with that, I happily hand over to Jonathan.

Thank you very much, Katja. My name is Jonathan Zaiss, I'm Head of CRM Solutions and Customer Service of Post & Parcel Germany. As Katja explained very well, making it easy for our customer and making a great customer experience is a great -- is a main factor for our group. Therefore, our digital touch points are of the other most importance to us. Later, Christine will talk about myDHLi at Global Forwarding. I will now start with a very important touch point, our customer service and the platform MeinService at Post and Parcel Germany. But first, let's look at what makes Parcel Germany and our customer service, so interesting and so important for us. When we look at our customers, we first have our business customers. For them, it is very important that we have affordable fees. On the other hand, we have our consumer customers, the recipients of our parcels. And for them, the very parcel might be of unlimited emotional value because it contains something for the wedding, a gift for the children, something of high emotional value. And this is why quality is so important for us at Post and Parcel and Deutsche Post DHL. But if something goes wrong, we need to have the top of industry customer service. And as I said, affordable fees, high emotional value, we need to do more with less. And this is what digitalization can do for us. This is what a digital customer service can do for us. By being highly efficient and having the means to provide a great quality customer service to our customer. So how did we pull it off? Before we had a lot of tools, a lot of channels, and in order to have a great customer experience, we had to bring everything together. So we introduced MeinService. MeinService is a CRM platform based on sales force, and it is end-to-end digitally integrated. What do I mean when I say end-to-end integrated. Let's look at it. Well, first, we have our customer touch points. And first, it is very important to have all the touch points, phone, chat, mail, everything connected to our platform so that we can provide a true omnichannel experience for our customers. Second case handling, before our service staff, they had to put in numbers and information into many different systems. Now they have one platform where we provide easy and automated processes. Issue solving. We don't want -- just want to take the issue of the customer. We want to make sure that we solve the issue permanently. And therefore, we need to have a good integration with all of the departments that we need in order to solve the issue. And in the end, all this allows us to give a very individual and fast feedback to our customer and to provide a great customer experience by putting it all together. But let's look a little bit deeper into that platform. Let's start with the customer touch points. As I explained, we connected all the channels to our platform. This allows us to have that true omnichannel experience. On the other hand, what we want to do at our touch points is to solve as many problems as we can write at the instance where the customer connects with us. One way we do that is by using AI and our chatbot, which is one of the most powerful service chatbots in Europe. You see that right now on the screen. Yes, and that really helps us to get a quick solution for the customer while also saving efforts on our side. So now we have the customer touch points. Let's look at the case handling. So with all the touch points connected, what we can do is we gain structured data, and we can combine this data with all the business data that we have in our platform, most importantly, our tracking data. And this allows us to automate a vast percentage of our processes within customer service and really facilitate the case handling for our service centers. And as a result, we can create as many green tick boxes that you can see in our workflow here in that picture. We have the touch point. We have the case handling. Now we need to really solve the problem of the customer because we are the voice of the customer with over 30 million contacts every year, we need to make sure to really carry the message of the customer into our operations. And we are very proud that our platform provides us with a seamless digital feedback loop right into our operations, our sales. So for example, if a customer complains about that the parcel was not put into the right location, we can make sure digitally that the delivery person does know about this the next day and make sure that this doesn't happen again. Or we can dynamically adjust the delivery instructions, if you, for example, see that at a certain address we have several parcels go missing, we can make sure that this parcel is always -- parcels are always delivered personally at this address. And of course, data mining to improve our operation processes. So we create a lot of data, combine that with operations data, make sure we get better altogether. So we solved the issue of the customer. Now let's get feedback to the customer. All these technology that I just presented to you, it helps us to really make sure that our service staff can focus on customer experience. Also, we can use technology to give a more individualized feedback to our customer. For example, by detecting if there is a recurring issue for the customer, if he had several other complaints before, we can put more attention to that customer. So all that helps with the great customer experience. Let's wrap it up. What we have done so far is that we set the basis by migrating all parcel services and customer touch points to our MeinService platform. We connected all these apps and interfaces to really connect with our operations and other relevant parties. By doing so, we were able to really increase value for everyone. We leveraged our digital processes and increased customer satisfaction with our customer service to an all-time high. As a result, we were named the best of industry customer service by the magazine Handelsblatt while also unlocking substantial savings and quality improvements across our division. But of course, we are not done yet. We want to expand MeinService to our post services in order to have that synergies for the future on a joint platform. We want to continue the use of data analytics to really fight complaint reasons because the best customer experience is if there's no need to contact the customer service. So if we can eliminate complaint reasons, that's really the best that we can do. And we are very excited about the technology opportunities that lay ahead like generative AI, which will help us in the mass market, which is our consumer side, really to make information that the customer needs much more easily accessible and make digital interaction much more natural. So far about MeinService, and I'm very happy to hand over now to Christine.

Thank you, Jonathan. Also, a very warm welcome from my side. I'm Christine Behling, the Senior Product Manager Digital Customer Interaction at DHL Global Forwarding, responsible for our customer portal, myDHLi. In the next minutes, I will explain to you how we are using data analytics to improve our customer experience. First, let me explain to you. myDHLi is our DHL Global Forwarding digital customer portal. It's a one-stop solution that caters to all of our customers' needs. It contains of different parts, the quoting, the booking, the tracking, the documents, the analytics and the reports. And in this presentation, we will actually take a look of how we are using ETA forecasting to improve our tracking and reports functionality. At DGF, we know that for our customer, it is critical to know when the goods arrive and to have an early estimate of something is going wrong. As we can see on the graph, global schedule reliability has significantly decreased starting 2020, mid of the year and it has only slightly increased again end of last year. The problem is if we have an uncertainty in ETA, we cannot do proactive exception management and an early customer communication. From customer service, we know that this is information is very critical to them. There are 3 different problems we face with ETAs provided by our carriers. There's, of course, some limited accuracy, and we do see some inconsistencies between different carriers and shipment, which can actually lead to the problem that shipments traveling on the same vessel would have a different ETA. Also, we can only limit -- have a limited possibility to control the updates we receive from our carriers. To solve this problem, we have launched our Ocean Freight Smart ETA. What are we doing? We are calculating and harmonizing ETA with a machine learning algorithm. There's 2 different components to it. We have a lot of historical data and we actually correct ETAs by looking for repeated delayed patterns in our historical data as well as always looking at the current vessel position and doing real-time corrections of the ETAs. This allows us to significantly improve our following share functionality in our customer port and myDHLi. I will now explain to you how does that actually work? How is the algorithm working. We will look at one example a shipment going from Hamburg to Singapore. Shortly after the shipment to part, we, of course, get some carrier ETAs, and we will look at the historical data for that route according to different parameters and calculate the smart ETA that is our prediction when that shipment is most likely to arrive. During the journey, we continuously update this information. And when we see a delay, we can react and inform our customer proactively, as we see here, we already know in advance if there's, for example, an incident in the Suez Canal that will affect the ETA of the shipment. Then at the end, we have the actual ETA to compare against this. Before we launch the solution to our customers, of course, we compared how accurate is our algorithm. And with confidence, we can say that 10 days before arrival, we know we are 48% more reliable than the carrier information we have. And of course, we want to share this information with our customers so that they can drive value. Now I will actually show you on our portal how we are making this information accessible. I now look into our customer portal, myDHLi. I'm here on the lending bathe dashboard. You can see prominently the world map. Here, I can see all of the shipments that are currently in transit for the customer. We will take a closer look at one shipment. The shipment is in the moment on the vessel Atlantic sky. On the right side, you can actually see the historic root the shipment has taken to now as well where it's headed. On the other side, we have all of the relevant shipment information. The shipment is going from Germany to the U.S. I have seen the routing information were all relevant times in that of the code can be seen as well as the estimated times of future milestones. If we now go to Halifax, which is the port of Deutsche for this shipment, we can see the arrival. The shipment was supposed to arrive 25th of June, early in the morning, but we already know from our calculation that it is not going to most likely arrive before the evening. The small shield icon shows that this was actually calculated by our smart ETA. There's 2 different functionalities I want to point out here. First of all, we have the share functionality. With one click, we can share the shipments so a customer can share with the colleagues, with the shipper or any interested party, all of the important milestones for the shipment, and there's another feature or follow. The little star icon, if I click it, I will now follow this shipment. This means if I set my notifications in the portal, I will be always informed any updates for the shipment that I'm interested in. I will show you how this can be configured by going into the notifications. In the notifications menu, there's 2 different options to set up. There's the customer notifications I've already created one here for a specific trade lane that is active. And there's the general notification. The customer gives really all kinds of opportunities. It's an advanced mode, but we will now activate the general notification. The general notification gets 2 options. It can be set for them to follow shipments like I have just followed on shipment before or you can set the notifications for all of the shipments in your portal. We have updated here that we want to stay informed about status changes, operational regularities. and of course, the destination port arrival that is calculated with the Smart ETA as well as the customer delivery. Now I activate this and will be staying informed. There's 2 different other parts of the portal where we're using the Smart ETA, first of all, in the shipment list, where the customer can sell for any shipment they want. The estimated arrival is also calculated by the Smart ETA. Another section I want to point out is our report section. In the report section with a few easy clicks. The customer can use a template that is preconfigured to actually set up a report and will always be stayed informed. This can be scheduled, so if they want to receive it on a daily or weekly basis, they will always have up-to-date information. Now actually going to where are we from the project in the moment. The Smart ETA solution was launched last year in May and is fully rolled out. So it's calculated for all our Ocean Freight shipments globally. It actually provides 3 main advantages here. We can actually react and update the ETA in case of unforeseen vessel delays. Also, we have the big advantage of having a harmonized ETAs. So all shipments traveling on the same vessel and route have the same help at the top of the notch data quality. And we can reduce the frequency of irrelevant ET updates as we're just providing ETA updates that are important for the customer. I also want to give a short lookout, what we are willing to work on next before I wrap up the presentation. Of course, we are not done with the journey. The algorithm has a constant self-learning. We are having more and more data, so we were going to improve even further in the future. And there's one area we are looking into as well, which is improving connection intelligence. That means that we are going to be earlier already informed in case the shipment would miss the transshipment port and not make the next connection. And now I have the pleasure to hand over to my colleague, Christoph.

Thank you very much, Christine, and warm, good morning, good afternoon or good evening, wherever you are. I'm Christoph Sprenger, and I'm looking at our staff department and the range of cross-functional programs and strategic projects like digitalization or our insanely customer-centric culture or ICCC. And today, I'm sharing with you how we are getting to the next level of customer focus, which we call ICCC+. At expresses, we deliver more than 1 million TDI shipments every day. And every day, we generate millions of customer interactions and customer experiences. And the experience shape the satisfaction and loyalty and loyalty loyal customer is one of our core pillars of our focused strategy, and we are actively managing that. We haven't started this late is a decade old, and we are calling it insanely customer-centric culture, ICCC and it literally is easy as 1,2,3. What we've established over the years is listening to our customers through our Net Promoter approach. Through that, we obtain ratings and customer feedback. We identify mainly detractors and then follow up with them, which has been a very successful program, but very phone-driven. Then we understand and prioritize this is where ICCC really got its name from the established ICCC committees in our countries years ago. This is where the country managers and all the functions meet together, understand issues for our customers and fix them. And then last but not least, of course, it's all about execution. Our first choice practice, our Lean Six Sigma program to get better and continuously improve. So while it has served us very well, what is the next evolution? And how do we get to this next level of customer focus. And the answer is digitalization. And while we have those strong processes and routines and mindsets established, there are still some gaps because a lot of things are manually or semi digital, I would call it, spread over hundreds of Excel sheets in various e-mail inboxes and not really capitalizing on it. So what we are doing is we have picked Medallia as a Software-as-a-Service provider. We are going for their customer experience suite to move our customer experience management or our ICCC+ program to the next level. So the main benefits, how we said, is faster, more and better feedback. And what you see here is the logic we are following. We have identified our customer journeys. And then within the journeys, we have what we call moment of truth. And previously, with NPA, our main focus for us was making outbound calls to customers after they had an interaction. And through this new way of working here with our new tool, we have now many more channels to be added. And the cool thing is across the globe. While some countries have done e-mails and SMS and other means, now we have it all fully integrated, and it allows us much more. And initially, we see we increased the number of feedbacks we get by a factor of 5 to 10. We get better feedback because in a phone call, you can only do very limited questions, normally close questions there, while if you get an e-mail or an SMS or a pop-up on a website, you have more -- you can give us more feedback. And I'm sure you all know this, every or many other industries, banks, insurances, aviation, hotels, all uses mechanism. And this broader range gives us also much faster feedback while our old routine was -- we sampled overnight, we call the customers. Now you can almost get instant feedback and it puts us in a whole new situation because if you track a shipment, do you have an issue, you give us feedback. That's minutes, while it was before probably a day or 2 days delay. And by the time we got the feedback, it was already done. And if we were lucky, the customer complaints and we were able to do something, but now we can act very actively here. And then the cool thing is about what's on top of that. What you see here is what those new capabilities are. The smiley line on the left-hand side, this is feedback or customer feedback as it comes in real time. The smiley color indicates the Net Promoter Score, whether it's a promoter, a detractor or neutral here. And the difference to before is now we have kind of people watching this live and do something as and when the feedback comes in. While in the old days, we found detractors and we put them into a call queue. We asked our managers to call them back, which normally happened a few hours later or a day or 2 days later. Now we are in a total different position to act on it. And with all those digital channels, customers are temp -- or we get more live feedback from the customers in the form of text. And what you see here as an example, the AI helps us to also analyze the text. There are sentiment analysis, you see here positive, negative, neutral, and we understand the underlying topics, which helps us much better to route the follow-up to the right person within our company and to aggregate that information even more afterwards to identify underlying issues there. So pretty cool things we see there. On the right-hand side, then you see when we go above and beyond, this is then taking text analytics to the next level. Here, you see the system just scrolls through the data and understand it here, you see the example of Courier. How Courier is labeled with other works together. So you see it's very positive. It's a people-driven touch point where we are very good at, and we know that our Couriers are doing a great job. If you look at the ones where as a bit more red, it’s normally technology plays a part of it as well, and the Courier can only be as good as the technology we equip them this. But this gives us very cool insights. It gives us, for the first time, insights across all countries, while before it was, as I said, spread over hundreds of Excel files and e-mail inboxes. And it allows us also to do follow-ups within the tool. And where are we and where we are going to as Software as a Service, we piloted it in Denmark. Last year, we went live around Easter, built a system, defined the global blueprint, worked it out for a year, learned it. And then we went to 2 more countries, Singapore and Chile, to cover Americas in Asia so that we have our 3 major regions covered. We invest a little bit more time defining the deployment approach, defining the training, the change management approach to it, also fine-tuning it a little bit. Remember, we are coming from making phone calls to now sending e-mail surveys, while we know very well how to deal with the detractor on the phone. How do you do that when they give you online feedback there. So that is what we need -- what we are learning at the moment. But now we are solidly there and deployment is starting. We just kicked off 15 more countries mainly in the Americas. The next 20 are in the pipeline for in 2 weeks and then we go zoom more than 100 countries live before our peak season and then wrap it up the remaining countries early next year. And then from there, we are going and become a better company and drive our customer experience to the next level. And with that, I'd like to invite Robert, Christine, Katja and Jonathan back on stage for the Q&A session.

Yes. Thank you, Christoph. Thanks to all the presenters. As foreseen, we are back for some minutes of Q&A. We have a bit of time left. So please make extensive views of the right-hand side of your screen and send us a few more of these questions. We have a few already in. I'll perhaps start with the middle one, at least here on my screen, which is the famous question on how to measure effectiveness perhaps, Katja, for you to start with, how do you measure and track the effectiveness of your digital initiatives in terms of customer satisfaction, what quantitative measures can you share regarding the improved customer experience, is it about retention, reduced complaints? Famous question, I guess.

Yes. I think in the end, everything goes down to revenue, right? So a happy customer will give us more shipment on a regular base. We ask our customers how I have been there with us. We obviously track retention business, new business and all these usual levers you use in a key account organization. We do that definitely as well. And we have a close look on how customers adopt all our digital tools as well.

And perhaps I can add how do you allocate budget or how do you do the ex-ante decision on such tools, which is also a bit difficult, right, to kind of gauge what is worth doing next? And then...

Yes, it can be somehow tricky, I agree. I think what Christoph said makes a lot of sense to pilot things first, to start on a smaller scale and tend to seek and then to scale up with it.

Yes, exactly with Express. And I think the same question was, therefore, for Express is right, Christoph, specifically for you, how can you measure benefit of such a tooling Express that came specifically as well?

What Katja said, all those commercial measures. If we are looking specific at this CCC+ topic the system in and of itself holds the Net Promoter Score. And the Net Promoter Score as a good loyalty measurement helps also understand that. I know sometimes we look at general scores, which don't tell a lot. But the moment you put the segmentation to it, you look at the respective customer journey at the moment of truth, you see very well improvements you make, and this is what we've seen over the last 10 years with our NPA approach. But now we will see it across country borders.

All right. So it's good to hear as we all agree. So perhaps the question then is, number two, you have different customer portals for each division, would it not be efficient then to have only one?

So first of all, dhl.com is one portal and the entire complexity with the different portals are in the background. So the customer doesn't even recognize that he is guided by example from dhl.com to the Express website. A regular Express customer who's in news working with us, he would go directly to Express anyway. That doesn't change if you have a single system. Probably a good vision for the long run. So far, we are very, very happy with the progress we made with the different portals.

I guess it's very specific as well in terms of mass market versus premium versus business customers in terms of expectations.

You should first look at the effectiveness of the portal and then look into the efficiencies. And I think that's the evolution you see and as Katja said in the background that makes sense, we absolutely work together, but it might look different for the different customers.

And we have seen one example on the ESG part where we talked about the CO2 reporting tool that we now have fully integrated, which is obviously one where all the different portals are coming together, right? One more on the forwarding side, how does DHLi plus compared to the different offering of digital forwarders out there? Have you caught up?

I think with myDHLi, we really don't need to hide what we have. We have a state-of-the-art portal. And as well, what we have as a unique value, we don't even -- can only compete when it comes to functionalities, but we also have still the full expertise of all our logistics professionals as well.

Yes. So let's not forget is all the beauty of the digital still real life out there, right, and the containers have to move. The second one, on my list here, how do you adapt your digital strategy when competitors introduce new technologies or customer service innovation? What is your process for staying competitive? Are we looking at our peers to go up front right away?

I think, of course, everyone takes inspiration from their competitor. And of course, we're looking at what they are doing. But for us, more important is to look at our customers to really listen to them with an NPA approach with, for example, looking at our chat, transcripts, what topics are we missing here? Can we help our customers faster and better. So inspiration, yes. But to stay competitive, more important is to really stay close to your customer.

I agree to that and not only look at your competitors because the logistics industry as such, I don't think it's the most innovative industry. So we are also looking at other industries that are more known for driving customer experience to the next level.

Absolutely.

All right. Then a question which might come rather from Germany about data security. How are you ensuring the security and privacy of customer data with the increased digitalization?

So I can probably answer that for the dhl.com. We have a team that is full time on this topic. It's indeed very, very complex, but very, very important as well. You can easily make a mistake there, and that will be definitely financial downside for our corporation. So we are on this.

Yes, I can only agree especially when looking at Germany on Post and Parcel business. Yes, we need to make sure and we're really honored to fulfill all guidelines. And yes, that's a very important topic.

Yes. And there's definitely a policy in the group as well that we honor. Trade on regularly and -- are implemented in our procedures.

I think anyone of us can sing that song about how difficult it is to get through all those instances of the CISO data protection and so on. So we take it very serious.

So all we have seen has been checked thoroughly.

Not only ones.

No digi session without GenAI. You mentioned GenAI. I think it was on your presentation at the end. How can you concretely make use of the processes described? How quickly can you leverage this?

Yes. As I said, we are very excited about this opportunity because it helps us in the mass market, especially in the consumer side to really make it more easy for our customers to interact with us. So yes, how fast can we leverage it? We are honored as a corporate initiative. Yes, clarifying all the big questions. We have data security as a question. We are very convinced that there are great opportunities in that technology. And yes, we soon we'll see first results.

It's an evolution of our data analytics basically with just more tools available now. Next one, I think we answered it already a bit, let's take it. Have the implemented digital solutions introduced new revenue streams for your company? Or is it primarily served to increase efficiency and customer satisfaction you talked about it already a bit.

Yes, definitely new revenue streams, see all the online booking, the online contracting, probably the customer would have called us, but you never know. So this is definitely money in the bank and all the other processes, and I'm coming back to our competence center is with active pattern recognition to foresee what the customer wants next is a big, big lever.

Yes, and maybe adding to that, I think customer satisfaction, cost cutting and new revenue streams, it sometimes goes hand in hand because when looking at customer service, they didn't want complex processes in the background. They want a quick solution and a quick solution can be very cost efficient and helping customer satisfaction.

Best of both worlds. Perfect. How has the digital transformation impacted your workforce? And what steps have you taken to ensure that they are trained and equipped to deal with these changes? I think we're doing a lot across all divisions, who wants to have a go with that. How has the workforce reactor and you just rolled out a product...

Can talk about this CCC+, just as absolutely resource neutral. But what we find is that while we had NPA analysts all over the place, copying stuff together and looking at it, now they are becoming drivers as et cetera. They look now at the live dashboard of customer fee comes in and react versus do stuff in terms of training that's relatively easy because those tools are simple to use when we design those and I think that's true for many of our initiatives. I mean it's an hour-to-hour of training, you get along with it. So this is resource neutral, but gives us better, faster and more feedback.

And more fun to work with.

Focusing on the value-adding stuff, right, fixing customer issues not administering them.

Christine, do you have any perspective on the forwarding world, where there are bigger changes on the IT that have happened in the last few years with CargoWise as well? Do you have any perception on how it has changed there from the workforce side?

I think it definitely makes the work easier for our operators. We have also a lot of young people that actually want to have all of these nice cool tools. And it's a demand. I mean...

Okay. So definitely no pushback here, but rather happy to engage. And there's a lot of training. I mean we all but perhaps for the audience, useful to repeat that we're certified in all the installed training mechanics. We definitely make sure that all people get trained in using the new tools.

That's right. We have strong engagement programs. And after all, I mean, our industry will still move physical shipments. And if you know that an express 70% of the workforce cannot work from home because they need to be on site. It gives you an idea of what I think there's other industries that are harder hit with that. But jobs are changing. And I think this is what we take very careful with training and equip our people and hire for the right profile.

All right. Excellent. Questions keep queuing. How are demands and expectations of corporate customers evolving? Can you identify emerging trends or specific areas of concern that's for you?

Yes, I can. I mean one trend is definitely sustainability. It's on the plate of everyone currently, and we have intense workshops with our customers to work to help them to reduce Scope 3 emissions. So that holds true for all the industries. Other than that, you have different trends like electric vehicles. It's not trivial to transport a battery in the air by example. As the semicon shortage, the industry faced during the past year. So this is a big project or as a good example in life science, health care, the clinical trial business, which is really emerging and comes with completely different demands in terms of logistics. Just to name a few.

And all leading our digital capabilities toward the end for these needs.

And what we see from the CCC+ program is, I mean, corporate customers are also private consumers, right, and they are living in a world where their banks and their insurances and mobile phone companies change and become more digital. So they are not going back to the office and do a business like they did 10 years ago. So this is the increasing demand for especially digital touch points with us.

Yes. We called it the Amazon effect. So everybody wants in the office, the same experience and a private person ordering on Amazon.

Okay. One, again, back on the workforce, which is a bit similar. I guess, Christoph, it's more specifically for you, as you mentioned the countries of rollouts. How is your work for -- how has your workforce reacted to the new tech and solutions, specifically which country or office has surprised you both positively and negatively in the rollout? I guess rollout was on your country map. Perhaps you can tell a bit about the rollout as well..

So the 3 pilot countries love it. The new 15 countries are only for 2 weeks or 3 weeks, but they love it as well. So we didn't have any negative pushback and I could have rolled out all countries last year already. So they were bringing me when they get it.

Anything you heard negatively has been ironed out already for the new countries?

It's a constant learning. But because the step change was so big in terms of adding capabilities and probably going back to this workforce question, we didn't impact the workforce here. And this is why there are a lot of positive things come together. Everyone wants to do or give a good customer experience. Now we equip everyone to do more. The tool, the difference before, before it was only 2 or 3 people per country had access to the tool and everything else went via PowerPoint, reports, Excels, e-mails. Now a significant portion of our people have direct access to it, they see it live. So it's a whole different experience for them as well. So it's cool to come to work. And it's a step beyond e-mail, lots of people say we should get rid of e-mail, but we do it then, right? And this is a difference with new tool.

It's good to feel you're excited as well about it. Yes, brings it across. Christine, for you, do you see any scope to expand the Smart ETA solution to air freight, road freight as well? Or is it just applicable to Ocean freight and from the logic of it?

I mean, of course, ocean freight was a very good starting point because we have very long vessel journeys. There is the biggest customer value if we improve that, but we don't see the journey ending there. You always have to look at what time then does it make sense? Where can we have an AI and drive value and improve the data quality, of course, other products are in scope for this as well.

Okay. Perfect. How does the digitalization need of customers vary by segment air, ocean, road versus Express? That's a very broad one.

I don't think that it differs that much, as she pointed out. So ocean, the journey is very long. The more security, you can give a customer when the vessel will arrive the better. In Express, the journey is very short but very expensive. So the customer has probably huge demands in terms of let me exactly know where my shipment is. But overall, transparency is key in all services in all divisions. Correct?

So it reflects the base logic of the divisional offerings in digitalization, yes.

Maybe I can add about the different customer segments that we have in our customer service, mass markets, consumers, business customers from Adidas to little shops. And I think a lot is the same. They want a quick solution to their problem. They want transparency. They want it easy to access our digital touch points. But then, of course, business customers, they value more standardized processes, while the consumer customers, they like flexibility. Do I want to call, do I want to chat, do I want to write an e-mail. And we have to do the work of really transforming that into our efficient processes and making it flexible for them.

Standardized the flexibility. That’s the key. All right. I see that we are through the list of questions as well as nearly through our hours. So I would say thanks to all the colleagues who join us today. So thanks to all listening. If you joined us on the last one only, please note that the replays of all 4 sessions are, of course, available on our website. We have one more week to go before going into a quiet period. So if you want to have a quick chat, please reach out to a team. And with that, I would say, we are closing the last IR event of Deutsche Post DHL Group. And I'm happy to welcome you as of next week as DHL Group and with our Q2 results on August 1. With that, have a good weekend, all out there. Thank you. Bye.

Okay. Bye-bye.