From their roots as a mail order company nearly 50 years ago, Evri has grown considerably over the decades. Evri launched in March 2022 following a successful rebrand from Hermes UK. Now, with a team of 18,000+ couriers, 8,500+ local one-stop ParcelShops and Lockers, and a growing network of state-of-the-art hubs and depots, Evri provides delivery solutions for anyone who wants to send a parcel in the UK and to more than 220 international destinations.
Evri experiences a significant spike in demand every year in the last quarter, which is driven by Black Friday/Cyber Monday and Christmas. To meet demand, Evri recruits and retains around 7k new couriers annually. Evri was keen to understand why some couriers leave sooner than expected, and make changes to increase courier retention.
This year, Evri looked to meet the peak in demand by scaling their courier network without needing to scale their courier support teams by the same ratio. A chatbot called Elmo was envisioned to help address the routine questions from new couriers and speed up the response rate for couriers leading to a better onboarding experience.
We were brought in to work in a blended team with the Evri Innovation Team to turn their proof of concept (PoC) into a working prototype at a speed that would allow Elmo to be tested in the real world ahead of peak season, and validate if Elmo will realise the intended business value.
We created a three-phase approach to taking the existing PoC and creating a working prototype to test the core hypothesis. The three phases were: ‘productionise’, ‘increase quality’, and ‘feature enhancements’.
The ‘productionise’ phase focused on making the application fit for trial by embedding best coding practices, carrying out performance testing, defining and implementing success metrics, improving stability, ensuring consistent and correct answers to frequently asked questions, introducing standard disclaimers, improving the user interface and blocking sensitive data. Additionally, the team ensured that answers returned by Elmo were only from content within the provided documents and not other sources.
The ‘increase quality’ phase focused on improving the quality of Elmo's responses by introducing context-aware splitting, refining the prompt passed into the solution for further context, and introducing a feedback loop to allow users to provide feedback on the quality of the answer provided by Elmo.
The ‘feature enhancements’ phase focused on introducing features that add a "wow" factor, such as allowing couriers to use their voice to ask questions of Elmo and have the answer read out to them. This functionality reduces the need for couriers to interact via the screen of their device and speeds up the interaction time.
A robust chatbot capability was achieved quickly, enabling Evri to test their value hypothesis and validate if scaling their courier support capability without scaling the size of support teams was achievable.
Elmo has three core capabilities: Ingestion, Chat, and Analytics & Reporting:
Through working in a blended team with AND, the Evri Innovation team was upskilled in both the technology used and agile delivery practices.
The introduction of clear metrics and measurements allows for the success of the trial to be clearly quantified and articulated, and ensures that Evri can make a data-driven business decision whether to further invest in the solution.
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