• SITA Omnichannel Services to improve collaboration and communication with customers  

Hamburg. 22 March 2021. Global ocean carrier Hapag-Lloyd has placed SITA’s Contact Center platform at the heart of its ambitious plan to be ranked number one for customer service in the freight and shipping sector within the next five years.

Hapag-Lloyd has implemented a strategic program to strengthen its sales, customer service, and service management to elevate the overall customer experience. SITA’s Contact Center Advanced Services, which are fully integrated with Hapag-Lloyd’s Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Freight Information System, is key to achieving this goal. Local customer calls will be collected worldwide by SITA via its online managed conditional routing. Calls will be qualified before being routed to their final destination. By integrating the contact center with their CRM Salesforce, each of the 2,000-plus agents taking calls will have better visibility on the calling customer.

Hapag-Lloyd also wants to increase the collaboration between employees during and after the COVID-19 crisis. By implementing video endpoints, integrated with Microsoft Teams, in more than 100 Hapag-Lloyd sites globally, employees can now better collaborate and communicate through the use of video. With many employees working from home due to COVID-19, colleagues can easily communicate whether at home, on the move, or in the office. This will support more collaborative decision-making, and in turn, a more responsive customer experience. 

With the SITA Omnichannel Services platform, employees can also work from home during the COVID pandemic without any risk related to safety or performance by providing regional VPN gateways in the USA, Germany and Singapore.

Martin Gnass, Managing-Director IT at Hapag-Lloyd AG said: “With the right tools, our customer service teams are better able to understand the customer’s requirements when they call and can now respond with the right support from within the organization. SITA’s network platform has enabled that experience and is already paying off with improved customer satisfaction.” 

The new communication platform also supports Hapag-Lloyd’s push for greener, digital solutions that reduce the need for additional hardware and reduces travel.

Martin Gnass added: “As a company we continue to seek to enhance the transparency of our customer services and live up to our customer quality promises. Technology and digital innovations such as SITA’s contact center will help deliver this.”

Sergio Colella, SITA President for Europe, said: “We have taken a solution already successfully implemented in the air transport industry and used it to deliver real value to one of the world’s largest ocean carriers. At SITA we see business needs converging across the travel and transportation industry. We are proud to have delivered an effective customer platform, in a timely and cost-efficient way, to a leading player in the maritime sector, improving customer experience while ensuring longer-term sustainability. We are pleased that we can prove real value to Hapag-Lloyd in so many ways.”