Better customer service through Hapag-Lloyd’s Quality Service Center

Fast, efficient and constantly improving – that’s the idea behind Hapag-Lloyd’s Quality Service Centers (QSCs). Their overarching goal is to offer customers the best service possible. And, to do so, all Customer Service, Operations and Business Administration tasks for a larger region are concentrated under a single roof.

In China, for example, the corresponding tasks were previously divided among the regional offices in Ningbo, Shanghai, Qingdao, Hong Kong, Shenzhen, Guangzhou, Fuzhou, Dalian, Xiamen and Tianjin. Although these branches still exist, they now only handle those tasks that require direct customer contact or contact with the ports. Since the middle of last year, all other tasks have been bundled at the QSC in the eastern Chinese city of Suzhou, about 1.5 hours west of Shanghai by car. The center currently has a staff of 429 people.

“The subdivision of South and North China in terms of business transactions worked well in principle, but now it’s working even better due to the synergies,” says Juliana See, Managing Director of the QSC. “And that’s what the QSC is essentially all about: efficiently exploiting synergies by having all departments work closely together to enhance the consistency and reliability of our internal processes, thereby making it easier to continuously improve the customer experience.” Bringing together all these resources has had another advantage: speed. “Our decision-making processes are swifter,” See adds.

There is also a QSC in Region North America; it was the first of its kind and was already opened in Atlanta in 2017. The center currently employs 200 people, and its workforce is steadily growing. In fact, it is supposed to reach 550 soon because, unlike in Suzhou, the departments have only been bundled successively rather than all at the same time. “In the beginning, only Documentation and Imports were located here,” says Bradley Swihart, Customer Service Documentation Manager at the QSC outside Atlanta. Things did not get off to an easy start. “There were some growing pains that initially hampered our customer service,” Swihart explains. “But we have learned from these mistakes, and now the operation is running almost without a hitch.”

Other QSCs in other regions of the world are currently being planned. And they will be needed – as they help to turn Hapag-Lloyd’s key customer promise into reality: to become the number one for quality.