DPD Ireland Case Study

BACKGROUND

DPD Ireland was founded in 1986 as Interlink Ireland Ltd with 10 depots. Following substantial growth, it is now the premier parcel delivery company in Ireland, with 38 depots handling in excess of 6 million parcels per year. In 2000, Interlink Ireland became part of GeoPost S.A., the parcels and express division of La Poste, the French Post Office. In February 2008, Interlink Ireland changed its name to DPD Ireland. Its parent company, La Poste, united its express parcel companies under one single brand - DPD - to provide customers with a single delivery partner throughout Europe. When the existing Cisco PABX was no longer supported and DPD was forced into an expensive updated version, it began investigating an alternative non-proprietary flexible, cost-effective replacement which could provide advanced functionality that would give customers responses to commonly asked queries via an interactive telephony system.

DECISION AND DESIGN

The reason DPD Ireland decided to go with an Asterisk-based solution was not only one of cost-effectiveness but because Asterisk could be customized to suit its organization’s business strategy. Furthermore, other proprietary solutions obliged DPD to replace all its existing handsets, while with Asterisk DPD could retain all its telephony hardware. As Asterisk is an open source platform it also offered the possibility of integration with other in-house and open source solutions already deployed in DPD. DPD then selected expert asterisk consultants; Asterisk Consulting, one of Digium’s main partners in Ireland, to design the solution because of the Company’s known ability to design and implement large-scale Asterisk deployments.

SOLUTION

Asterisk Consulting designed an Asterisk solution which included full resilience and redundancy and even allowed usage of the existing handsets.

The new Asterisk Telephone system is based on paired mirrored servers and two dual-port PBX bridges, all with auto-failover. The solution includes contact centre soultions functionality within DPD’s key Customer Service Departments, where Asterisk automatically manages customised Call Queuing and distribution to the appropriate agents.

RESULTS

DPD Ireland has achieved significant savings by switching to an IP PBX solution, both in implementation and in recurring costs. The system delivers detailed information to Management as a key tool for decision-making by providing calls analysis and statistical data and displaying real-time queues’ and agents’ status summarised information on various call centre wallboards placed across the organization.

"Asterisk Consulting simply could not have designed such an effective system using any technology other than Asterisk."