Evri leads the way in logistics with AI-driven automation using Power Platform

Evri is the UK’s largest parcel delivery company, handling over 900 million parcels a year. The company is on a mission to offer the most convenient way to send, receive, and return parcels without costing the earth. 

As part of that mission, Evri kicked off a project to automate business processes across the company. “We wanted to target operational improvements, drive transformational change, and improve customer experience with automation,” says Chris Gatrell, Head of Intelligent Automation at Evri. 

Power Platform was selected as a key driver of this automation work. The company already had an established relationship with Microsoft, making Power Platform a natural choice. “It made sense to use Power Platform as our foundation for automation, both from a cost and technology standpoint,” says Marcus Hunter, Chief Technology Officer at Evri.

A better customer experience 

One of the first automation projects developed using Power Platform was a solution to support its customer service response team. The solution was focused on enhancing the experience of Evri’s several hundred customer service staff dealing with inbound customer enquiries. Up until then, customer interactions were recorded on an aging CRM system which was slow, complex, and not intuitive to use. 

To streamline the process, the Evri team worked with its technology partner Robiquity, a leading specialist provider of Intelligent Automation (IA) and AI services. Power Apps was used to create a simplified and more intuitive interface while cloud flows were developed in Power Automate to automate processes and update the underlying CRM in the background.   The app was made available in Microsoft Teams. “Customer service agents simply open Teams and the app is ready to use. The ease of adoption and the seamless integration into our existing workflows have been a huge win for us,” says Gatrell.  

An automated system now sends consistent wrap-up emails to customers and provides customer service agents with a variety of pre-set templates, removing the need for customized responses. The approach has reduced advisor handling time from an average of 3.5 minutes to just 1 minute. 

“By improving efficiency, we have freed up staff to take more calls that require real-time attention and in-depth discussions,” explains James Crabtree, Head of Customer Service at Evri. The phone line’s successful answer rate has risen from 45% to 91%, driven by improved agent availability and time savings across other areas.  Better yet, the solution provides superior scale. “The solution can manage 30,000 inquiries per week, and we can easily scale to 100,000 as we approach our busy peak periods,” says Crabtree. 

That kind of efficiency has dramatically reduced the need for contract workers over peak holiday periods, resulting in over £1.65 million in savings. With Power Platform, Evri was able to realize those savings even faster. As James Procter, Robiquity COO and Exec Sponsor says, “By leveraging the Power Platform we managed to deliver a complete solution with Evri seeing a rapid return on investment. This was just phase one of the wider delivery program and with this solution we’ve already surpassed the initial ROI target.”

Given the success of the customer service project, similar automation projects quickly followed using Power Platform. In total, Evri automated 25 business processes with a £1 million investment in the first year of the automation initiative. These solutions generated £9 million in annualized cost savings. This year, Evri has doubled its automation investment to £2 million and is on track to deliver more than 30 automation solutions with an estimated £10 million in cost savings. 

A more centralized source of data 

As its automation efforts have expanded, the team is leveraging more and more of the Power Platform toolset with the support of Robiquity. A great example is a solution designed to better manage the company’s fleet of over 6,000 vehicles. Previously, these vehicles were tracked using a complex Excel spreadsheet which often led to manual errors and delays with updates – especially as the fleet has grown dramatically over the past few years. Today, the fleet is managed through an integrated Power Platform solution. 

At the core of the solution is Microsoft Dataverse, where all vehicle information is stored in a structured format, ensuring data integrity and scalability. “What we've built with Power Platform is a single source of the truth for the team,” explains Gatrell.

A custom app in Power Apps provides a simple, intuitive user interface, making it easier for users to access and manage vehicle data. Integration with the government’s Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency (DVLA) vehicle enquiry service is done using a custom connector and allows for automatic retrieval of selected registered vehicle details, improving accuracy and reducing manual input. Power Automate cloud flows send reminders for tax and licensing deadlines based on DVLA data and enable generation of downstream reporting. Power BI dashboards provide live interactive reporting, empowering data driven decision making. 

As Gatrell explains, “There are just so many operational benefits that come with surfacing centralized data in this app.” For example, if one region needs additional capacity, they might previously have budgeted for a new vehicle. Now, users can easily check to see if vehicles are available in a nearby region – or if a vehicle could be used to service both regions. With integration into the DVLA data, the app can also be used to align vehicles with low emission zones and help support net zero emission plans. 

In just the first few months of operation, the app had already received strong user feedback. All users have adapted to the new app quickly and enthusiastically, with no requests to fall back to the legacy system. Meanwhile the solution just keeps getting better based on user feedback and a low-code platform that enables rapid change management. 

Harnessing the power of AI and natural language understanding

The decision to centralize and structure data in Dataverse has also made it easier to add new capabilities to the solution – including a powerful AI-driven agent built with Microsoft Copilot Studio. Now, when fleet managers are on the move, they can ask questions, hands-free, using their voice on their mobile device. The feature uses the Natural Language Understanding capabilities in Copilot Studio, which enable the agent to understand, process, and respond to human language.

The team is also planning to use the multi-agent orchestration capabilities in Copilot Studio to expand from information retrieval to action. For example, the agent could be trained to delegate requests to another agent to transfer vehicles from one area to another. 

Just like other successful automation projects, news of the agent in the fleet management solution spread fast. “We’ve only just deployed this agent and I've already had finance, customer service, and HR all coming to us asking for similar agents,” says Gatrell. Currently, the team is working on a prototype for HR which will support management of employee questions sent over email. 

Expanding the potential for additional wins 

Evri drives its low-code work through its trusted partner Robiquity, with a small team of internal Evri developers taking on less complex projects. Many of these developers started on another low-code platform - but that is changing as the company moves more work to Power Platform. “Lower cost has been the main driver,” says Gatrell. “We also see the benefits of consolidating on to one platform.” 

To accelerate Power Platform development even further, Evri is also setting up a citizen development program, including strong training and governance processes. The goal is to have at least 100 employees active in the program by the end of year -a number that Gatrell feels increasingly confident the company will achieve. 

Meanwhile, Evri’s automation journey is set to continue with more improvements in the pipeline.  The company is focusing on digitalizing the entire client onboarding journey, which involves collaboration across 10 different business teams. This initiative is designed to streamline and accelerate the onboarding process, ensuring it’s as seamless as possible. 

“There’s still so much potential for process automation to deliver additional value,” says Gatrell. Other leaders at Evri are equally enthusiastic about what the company can accomplish with Power Platform. As CTO Hunter adds, “Over the next five years, the innovations we have planned are going to revolutionize the logistics industry.”