Nearly 28% of Australians – that’s 7 million people – live in rural and remote areas of the country. The service that connects those communities with the rest of the world is Australia Post. Trusted, reliable and affordable, the company operates more than 4,300 postal outlets, covers 10,000,000 addresses and serves more than 1,000,000 customers every business day.

Over the years, Australia Post has evolved from a letter and parcel delivery service to a fully diversified government enterprise that includes postal, retail, financial and travel services. And since 2011, Salesforce has supported many of those complex operations.

As business needs matured and the pace of change increased, Australia Post needed to ensure that its technology could keep up. “As an early adopter of Salesforce, Australia Post had significantly customized its implementation. But as the platform matured and the architecture changed, Australia Post wanted to continue to get the most value out of the product,” says Peter Vakkas, managing director at Slalom Melbourne. And the level of customization was no longer sustainable.

To maintain its high standards for customer experience and ambitious goals for growth, Australia Post needed a strategic roadmap to optimize its capabilities. Slalom was proud to be chosen as a partner.

Leaders at Australia Post knew exactly where they wanted to go – but had many ideas about how to get there. What the company needed was a roadmap to align its business vision with technology. “Our relationship with Salesforce has been really strong. We wanted to partner with Slalom to provide an independent view and help shape our strategy in this complex environment,” says the Australia Post team. 

We began work in 2021 with a discovery process focusing on two major areas: sales and customer service. Through a series of workshops, our consultants spoke with team members across the company to learn about their challenges and business needs, particularly within the context of an increasingly competitive landscape. We needed to know how Australia Post was utilizing its existing tool set, how to connect the right features to the right use cases and which products could work harder for the business.

Leaders knew that heavy customization of the platform was hampering their ability to leverage new products and provide the 360-degree customer perspective they value so highly. Standardizing and improving the systems had become difficult, which created inefficiencies and repetitive tasks for sales agents. The global pandemic, of course, threw these issues into sharper relief with urgent operational changes and demands.

In speaking with 12 different stakeholder groups across executive leadership, operational leads, technology, sales and customer service, we were able to articulate the value of Salesforce and accompanying technologies — and help verify the direction of the company. “Slalom came in and the business units trusted them. This allowed them to be transparent and provide all the information that was needed,” says Australia Post.

Rather than focusing on new Salesforce products, our consultants recommended ways to improve the existing toolset. To deliver greater value to the company and its customers, we demonstrated ways in which the company could streamline many aspects of the business, including platform governance, innovation and the operating model.

Thanks to Australia Post’s culture of openness, the process was a true collaboration. “Bringing those conversations together was challenging, especially given the nature of ideation workshops and the fact that we had to conduct them virtually. But we didn’t let it halt our work. We really thought about the best ways to operate as a team,” says Hayley James, a principal at Slalom Sydney. 

By combining deep experience in Salesforce, business advisory services and technology enablement, we delivered a three-year roadmap — including schedules, priorities and next steps — in just 10 weeks. “We aligned Australia Post’s capabilities and vision with Salesforce recommendations to create an actionable plan for the future,” says Christopher Nugent, a director at Slalom Melbourne.

Our partnership continues as the company looks toward implementation. “The roadmap we were presented was not a point in time – it was developed in a way we can continuously improve upon,” says the Australia Post team. “Rather than taking a hundred ideas and trying to make them all work, we needed a story to tell us where to go.” With a greater understanding of its capabilities, Australia Post has a strong foundation to continue building customer trust through a more seamless experience, broadening services – and behind the scenes, a network of well-aligned stakeholders.