The Australia Post has been around for 207 long years, audiences at this morning’s Salesforce Future of Marketing conference learned, but that legacy didn’t necessarily translate into a seamless and modern customer experience.

“Historically we’ve had a relationship with our customers where they connect with us, but it’s been in a really physical form – so the person in the store, the postie, the person delivering things to their door,” Australia Post chief customer officer Christine Corbett said.

“Now because people are mobile, we needed to transform and translate that to be bigger than a parcel business and a letter business.

“It’s now really about online shopping and making that easier for a small businesses. A lot of small businesses are struggling with going online but also with exporting,” she added.

“We’re a company that’s been something to everyone so rather than be this ubiquitous brand that everyone’s had some sort of interaction with, we wanted to being much more personal.”

Corbett said they thought they were “really cool” when they began email marketing a few years ago, but that was clearly not good enough.

“We’re a customer service organisation, but it still comes at the end, it doesn’t come at the beginning. So we need to start with the customer,” Corbett said.

“Now we’ve taken one million known customers and started asking, ‘Are you living in an apartment? Are you an online shopper? Are you a lapsed online shopper? Have you been carded and have to pick something up from the post office?’ And now we’re actually personalising that experience.

“We’ve combined emails with Facebook and Google Search to ask people how we can improve that first time delivery experience.

“And two weeks in, we’ve had our third highest week ever in terms of using our parcel loggers. And when you think about parcel volume, to have a “Christmas level month” in August – typically a low month – is amazing.”

And as a side note, this author ordered a parcel, which was delivered by Australia Post today. Minutes after it arrived on my desk, I had an email flashed out to me, signed off by chief customer officer Christine Corbett asking for my feedback on the Australia Post experience.

Bryan Wade, the SVP & CPO of Marketing Cloud at Salesforce joined Corbett on the stage, and suggested the entire process of working with Salesforce was designed to “take the burden of having to manage your company’s infrastructure on your own plain and put it on ours so you can focus on being a marketer”.

“We’re all about customer touch points, and Salesforce Journey Builder works across all platforms, from social media, emails and apps.”

What Wade said he discovered is when marketers talk to their direct customers, they’re not seeing them as just a ‘customer’.

“When we talked to doctors about their customer in health care, they don’t call their customers ‘customers’, they call them patients; academics call them students; flight attendants call them passengers.

“So the core value of Salesforce is building trust, because every customer is on their own unique journey.”