Australia Post taps ServiceNow's emergency response apps

Australia Post is using emergency response apps developed by ServiceNow to understand the day-to-day status of employees during the Covid pandemic.

Australia Post's Adam Dimech (Image credit: ServiceNow)

ServiceNow platform manager Adam Dimech told ServiceNow’s Now at Work A/NZ summit that the apps had proven “really helpful” and “highly beneficial” to the postal service.

The vendor was quick to introduce the apps in mid-March and made them free until the end of September.

“One, [the apps provided] the ability to understand what the status of our employees was day-to-day, and two, [they provided us] the ability to reach out to [employees] and to seek a response from them,” Dimech said.

“What we actually did was we took both of those products and merged them together into a seamless dashboard so that we can, from a manager level, request a response daily, if required, from our team and get feedback from them along the lines of what their current work status was, are they working in the office, are they working from home, are they sick at home, are they on leave that is completely unrelated to anything Covid, or are they home for something related to Covid.

“We're able to get a view of our workforce within moments now that tells us where our people are and what their status is.”

Australia Post is a long-time user of ServiceNow, having had the platform in production for around eight years.

Dimech said the company regularly runs ServiceNow’s in-built HealthScan tool to benchmark Post’s environment against best practice and to identify improvements and optimisation opportunities.

He noted that ServiceNow’s role at Australia Post had only increased in importance during the Covid period, and not just due to the use of the emergency response apps.

Dimech said ServiceNow is now being used to manage product backlogs and to aggregate the needs of different business areas “in a really streamlined and consistent fashion”.

In addition, ServiceNow plays a critical role in identifying, logging and addressing faults with online lodgement services that merchants use to send parcels via Australia Post.

“If there's ever an issue with that, it's critical to our business, to our customers, to our ongoing operations, that we get those things resolved as fast as possible,” Dimech said.

“The way those issues get logged with us is directly through ServiceNow's customer service [platform]. 

“Our customer service team can then take that issue, investigate it, contact the technical teams that they need to contact to resolve it, get it resolved and get back to the customer in the fastest way possible. 

“At the same time we use [ServiceNow] to really measure and track every one of those requests so that we're ensuring we're delivering the best possible experience to our customers and the fastest turnaround.”

Dimech said ServiceNow typically logged “over 170,000 incidents in a year”.

“Most of those hit the frontline - the first level support - on their initial run,” he said.

“So for us, shifting left, digitising as much about that upfront interaction as possible, will be key for us moving forward. 

“We'll be looking to utilise virtual agents and analytics to determine the best possible way to automate outcomes for our customers and streamline their path to solution or resolution, depending on what they've asked for.”

More broadly, Dimech noted that Australia Post’s business is steadily transforming away from letters to parcels and powering product delivery for e-commerce.

Australia Post’s ongoing transformation efforts, he said, were really about “improving time-to-market for our products and our services.” 

“We want to enable our customers to readily access our services and take advantage of our offerings competitively, physically and digitally,” he added.