

“If there was one thing I wish people knew about us, it’s this: we aren’t a declining mail business. We’re the largest delivery business in New Zealand. We’re expanding our services, staying competitive, and leveraging technology and data across the organisation to transform our offerings,” said Tammy Auranen, General Manager, Customer Solutions
NZ Post provides courier delivery solutions and products to help people communicate and do business. It divides its customers into three distinct groups:
The Customer Solutions team, (where Ms. Auranen works), is at the intersection of these three groups, working to support the larger business with innovative solutions. When a stakeholder comes to them and says “we need to transform this,” Auranen continued. “My team works with stakeholders across our business to develop solutions with the goal of providing a world-class customer experience. And in order to do that, we need to make investments in technology.”
As is probably no surprise with a name like Customer Solutions, Auranen and team strive to put the customer at the centre of everything they do. So, when a stakeholder says they need to rethink a program or service, they naturally start with that customer’s customer. “Recently, our leadership team met with some of our large retail customers and asked them ‘if you could wave a magic wand, what would be the one thing you'd like to see from NZ Post?' and they said 'robust, resilient, integrated services,'” said Auranen. Which was something the team was indeed providing. They could identify where a package or parcel was at any given time, when it was received, what channels or services were called upon by the merchant to get it there, and so on.
The only catch: package recipients aren't really NZ Post's customers. The people paying to ship something to those recipients are.
“We had to establish the concept of a customer in our systems. We had to identify when, say, Becky might be receiving a package as that end beneficiary and when she might be a paying customer, or working for one of our merchants. We need to connect those profiles on the backend so that we could toggle between Becky’s experience as a recipient and as a paying customer, because one could easily affect the other,” said Auranen.
In other words, the team had to build a complete view around Becky, not Becky’s parcel.
This is where the cloud came into play.
The team launched an integrated contact centre on the Salesforce Customer 360 for government. It gives NZ Post the tools to not only deliver robust, resilient, integrated services but also collect the data and insights they need in order to build a single source of truth around their consumer customers.
Here’s how it works:
“We are taking a customer-focused approach to the work that we do within the technology function, and delivering real value through a business partner, service brokerage approach,” Auranen continued.
NZ Post has used this strategy to scale service delivery without incurring additional costs:
But perhaps even more important than the numbers is the resulting impact they started to generate — internally. More employees wanted to work on the platform because they could see the potential and the opportunity that came from the team’s investments, and they wanted to be a part of that. After all, the employee experience usually correlates with the customer experience; i.e.: excited customers attract high-performing employees to the forefront of change, and high-performing employees deliver the kind of innovation that continues to move that forefront forward.
Developing a customer-first strategy is just one of the five best practices demonstrated by the team — best practices that make a great starting point or “to-do” list for your next digital transformation project.
“Now, we can see the customer come to life and create more personalised experiences. When someone calls in, we will see their history with us, suggest next steps based on their preferences, and take action accordingly,” said Auranen. “We recognise the power these platforms have to enable robust, resilient, integrated services and help make us a competitive, world-class organisation in the industry.”
We recognise the power these platforms have to enable robust, resilient, integrated services & make us a competitive, world-class organisation.
Tammy AuranenGeneral Manager Customer Solutions, NZ Post