Fulfilment Our Fulfilment performance reflected the rebalancing of the sector following the pandemic boom and the inflationary impact on consumer spending towards the end of the year. Despite this background and fluctuating customer volume affecting forecasting, partly driven by supply chain disruptions, we performed well during a busy peak with a good quality of service meeting express and next-day delivery requirements. For example, we successfully managed the trend for air fryers, an energy saving appliance as well as a healthy way to cook food, driving both B2C and B2B fulfilment activity for one of our high-profile customers. In common with other businesses in the sector, the division was impacted by an increase in cost base and availability of quality experienced staffing during the year, which has adversely impacted overall profitability. The various fulfilment acquisitions are now fully integrated into the business and, during the year, we delivered new customer solutions and system enhancements to our WMS to increase operational efficiency. Despite this background and fluctuating customer volume affecting forecasting, partly driven by supply chain disruptions, we performed well during a busy peak with a good quality of service meeting express and next day delivery requirements.
Contact centres In April we launched a new integrated telecoms system across the business, and contact centre sites can now share traffic loads more efficiently. This further enhanced the quality of service we can provide customers as well as allowing us to scale capacity by utilising additional work from home resources, if required. We joined the Call Centre Management Association (CCMA) to take advantage of their extensive resources helping us to discover new ways to improve the customer experience we deliver. The team had great success with a Gold award win for Outsourcing Partnership of the Year at the Contact Centre Awards for its work with TOCA Social. Our relationship with POPSA has further strengthened with them utilising a flexible resource of 60 call handlers, 24/7, including use of our multi-language service.
The system helps customers: • Maximise their sales opportunities • Reduce inventory holding costs • Maximise order margin • Improve real time visibility of order / stock status and returns Plans for further semi-automation are ongoing and we are reviewing options to further utilise our current and future infrastructure to enable our next phase of fulfilment growth. We have worked with many long-standing customers who have grown and evolved their product offer to ensure that we meet their current needs as well as winning new customers such as IT Luggage and Hugo & Hudson. We have consolidated warehousing locations where optimal and invested in a new property in Gateshead and new bagging machines in Rushden to facilitate increased productivity. A Commercial Board has been appointed to enhance the opportunities to cross sell fulfilment contact centres across the business whether to DSA, International or DDM customers and we have upskilled the sales team to widen their product knowledge and relevant market understanding. For context, in 2022 UK online sales fell 10.5% compared with the previous year according to business group IMRG. It is the first time that online sales have fallen on an annual basis since 2000.
GOLDEN GOAL! OUR CONTACT CENTRE
TEAM WON OUTSOURCING PARTNERSHIP OF THE YEAR TOGETHER WITH INTERACTIVE FOOTBALL CLIENT TOCA SOCIAL
Whistl Annual Report 2022
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