AI-powered delivery with PostNL

When it came to customer care, the PostNL team knew it needed to explore how generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) could contribute to a fast, accurate service, 24 hours a day and seven days a week.

Bram Tilmanns, Program Director for Generative AI at PostNL, says: "We felt strongly that GenAI could help us realise our ambitions in growth and innovation. We knew that this technology could help us optimise processes, empower our teams to be more efficient and improve our services for customers. We needed a partner advisor who could help us structure and organise the knowledge and insights we needed."

Deloitte Netherlands supported PostNL to bring its ambition to life. "Our strategy for PostNL was simple: show, prepare, and integrate," says Morris Boermann, Senior Manager at Deloitte. "We showed AI's value by developing key proofs of concepts. We helped the client to prepare for the necessary organisational changes. Finally, we guided their technology choices, such as leveraging their existing AWS cloud infrastructure for a smooth transition."

PostNL already had an ethical framework for working with AI. However, introducing new GenAI solutions required a renewed perspective.

Naser Bakhshi, Deloitte Technology & Transformation Partner, says: "This new technology needed guardrails to make sure PostNL employees could use it in a reliable, trustworthy and transparent manner. We drew up new risk checklists and enriched existing lists.

“For instance, consumers need to be aware when they interact with an AI system. In itself this is a simple check, but it needs to be embedded in the risk frameworks to ensure that PostNL complies with regulations." 

Aiming to spark ideas and set our client up for success, we hosted a series of GenAI Labs for the PostNL leadership team. Facilitated by a multidisciplinary team of Deloitte industry and GenAI experts, these sessions included collaborative hackathons and design sprints. The goal was to create working prototypes to bring ideas to life.

During the lab sessions Deloitte used simulation games and fast prototyping to identify possible pilot solutions to drive efficiency. The chosen pilots included smart search and automated customer service email generation.

These proofs of concepts were created within six weeks - with the Deloitte team working alongside PostNL’s developers - and then scaled up and delivered by PostNL following the lab sessions.

The email solution reduced the time to respond to emails from international customers from 15 minutes to less than two. With 75,000 responses of this kind needed every year, the time saving is clear. And that’s just one email trail. This technology can be scaled and leveraged to all types of communication, which is where the big opportunity is.
 

PostNL now has clear executive sponsorship for GenAI and a taskforce working to create continuous innovation and new ways of working. The lab offers a new perspective to future-proof PostNL.