Case Study

Logistics Company Uses HSL's SMS Services

The global leader in international express, overland transport and air freight have been one of HSL's most loyal, long term customers. Currently, the company operates approximately 6,500 offices worldwide and handles more than 1.5 billion shipments per year.

The company's customer services department receives a high number of requests relating to the status of shipments, which have a costly demand on the department. Whilst such expense was required to be minimised, the company were also looking to extend their existing self-service package tracking capability to mobile users, being first to market with such a service ahead of its competitors.

Separately, the company were also looking to increase communication between its staff, most of whom have mobile telephones, and to provide a means for IT systems to initiate SMS messages to the mobile telephones of appropriate staff and customers. Such a requirement for IT systems was intended to enable integration into automated systems for notifying customers of events relating to operational systems.

HSL were therefore selected to provide services for shipment tracking by customers, communication to customers and internal communications between staff and with IT systems. The tracking service enables the company's customers to send an SMS text message containing the shipment number from their mobile telephone, the company's application then processes this request and initiates the shipment status back to the customer as an SMS text message.

The decision to select HSL was based on HSL's experience in providing services to world class organisations and their ability to fulfil customer requirements.

HSL's technically capable and highly reliable SMS delivery infrastructure comprises three geographically separate and independent customer facing sites, and links directly into the infrastructure of multiple mobile network operators. The configuration includes geographic redundancy and redundant links via different suppliers between all sites. This infrastructure enables HSL to offer clients over 99.9% availability Service Level Agreement.

The company has used the services provided by HSL to fulfil existing and new requirements which have arisen subsequent to the company's original requests being fulfilled. A large contributor to increased usage has come from business units within the company becoming aware of the availability of the SMS messaging service, the ease of use, and how this service can be applied to their own specific needs.

As such, multiple services are now provided by HSL to the company. For example, SIM hosting is used to provide inbound numbers to which the company's customers can send their tracking requests. SMTP email one-way utilising an alphanumeric source address is used to send outbound SMS messages to mobile telephones branded with the company's name so that customers can easily identify the company as the originator of the SMS. SMTP email two-way is also used to send SMS to mobile telephones using an inbound number as the originator address which enables replies to be sent from the recipient, which are then received by an email address within the company.

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HSL Logistics Case Study