Toll Global Express Delivers Employee and Customer Success

Toll Global Express is a highly diversified transportation and logistics business, providing express parcel, freight delivery and domestic forwarding services in Australia as well as transport and contract logistics services in New Zealand.

The diversity, complexity, and critical nature of Global Express’s services keep its sales team on their toes and there’s a steep learning curve for new starters as well as an ongoing need for training. For this reason, Global Express has a team of two dedicated to the training and development of its 300 sales employees.

myTrailhead is the team’s platform for enablement. It has transformed the efficiency of onboarding and upskilling and is now helping the business create new pathways for employee success. At the same time, Salesforce is helping the wider business deliver a more seamless and consistent customer experience.

The sales training and development team was set up two and a half years ago and they hit the ground running, simultaneously creating content and travelling around locations around Australia to deliver an average of eight training sessions per week. Sessions included training on how to use Salesforce and manage the sales life cycle—a process which had to be repeated for every new starter.

As the team reached the end of the first year, they realised something had to change. The sales team and their needs were growing and face-to-face training was costly and hard to scale. There was no formal onboarding process, which often led to an inconsistent experience for new starters.

“We’re constantly looking to better support our teams to do what they do best and that means ensuring they have the right information and are able to follow the right processes,” said Michelle Goyen, Divisional Training and Development Manager, Toll Global Express. “We realised we needed a system to help us and wanted something a bit more exciting than a traditional learning management system.”

myTrailhead was the training and development team’s first and only choice. They first saw myTrailhead at a Salesforce event in 2019 and instantly knew it as the solution they required. It came with points and badges to motivate the sales team and provided a way to keep track of all their learning, including courses delivered by external providers. It also came with pre-built templates for rapid content publishing.

The team just needed to bring stakeholders onboard, which they accomplished through a convincing business case and a successful pilot. Following that, the team set to work developing 30 training courses over the course of four months.

“It was a significant effort for a two-person team, but Salesforce was right behind us, answering questions and offering advice. They also suggested ways to market it to the sales staff, and when we launched, we saw an 88 percent acceptance rate within three months,” Goyen explained.

In the first two months alone, Global Express’s sales team completed 2,300 badges. These badges represent thousands of hours of learning across a range of modules, from sales training to information on safety and compliance.

A lot of the modules in myTrailhead have replaced face-to-face training. This has reduced the time and costs involved in training geographically dispersed employees and enabled employees to learn in their own time which is less disruptive to day-to-day business. Employees can also revisit the training any time they need.

With less time spent on travelling and face-to-face instruction, the training and development team have more time for creating and updating content as well. They are releasing a new module every week and have created a streamlined and consistent experience for onboarding. 

The experience includes 40 modules to be completed in myTrailhead in addition to some face-to-face training. There are also processes to streamline the logistics of onboarding and ensure new starters quickly meet the key people they need to know.

At the end of the four-week experience, employees are fully equipped to be effective in their role. In the past, it took some employees up to six months to attain the same skills and knowledge. This was through no fault of their own, but due to challenges like finding the right time to attend training.

“myTrailhead has really helped us scale our training and ensure every new employee has the same experience and is on the same path,” said Ashleigh Wendt, Divisional Training and Development Coordinator, Toll Global Express. “It has also meant I no longer need to deliver the same training over and over to just one or two employees. For something like Salesforce, everyone can do the same modules online and I can hold shorter group sessions to answer questions. I can also point people back to a specific module if they need a refresher.”

This pivot to digital enablement has also helped Global Express continue onboarding and upskilling employees throughout the pandemic. For example, it combined the use of myTrailhead and live online training to roll out Salesforce to its New Zealand sales team.

It's now been five months since the launch of myTrailhead and Global Express is on track to achieve a $250,000 return on investment in its first year of use. The learning and development team is also leveraging myTrailhead as part of a new sales capability framework.

The framework will comprise eight different development pathways, each of which will include a combination of online learning, on-the-job experiences, and face-to-face training.

“We are first in our field to provide such a comprehensive employee development program. myTrailhead is at the cornerstone and will not only help us develop our people, but deliver outstanding results for our customers,” said Goyen.

Global Express has rolled out Service Cloud to its three contact centres. Previously, the contact centres worked on separate instances of another platform and had a siloed view of customers. This created frustration for customers, who would often unknowingly call the wrong contact centre and expect the agent to be able to help them, with or without a tracking number.

“We wanted our customers to receive a consistent and personalised experience, regardless of whether they phoned up the right contact centre,” said Brenton Watson, Senior Manager, CRM and Marketing, Toll Global Express. “We also wanted all of our agents using the same platform and the same processes, so that as they move across business units or depots, nothing changes except the door they go through.”

Service Cloud has provided a solution to both of these problems and helped Global Express gain a more connected view of its customers across both sales and service. It has also streamlined case management, with more efficient routing of calls and emails.

In addition, the replacement of legacy, on-premise systems with a cloud-based solution, has enabled teams to work from home during the pandemic while continuing to provide seamless customer support.

“There’s a lot more visibility of cases which helps us get on top of things quickly and has led to a definite reduction in response times,” said Watson. “The next opportunity is for us to take all that data and use it to continually improve the customer experience.”