Most of the parcels DIREKTexpress Service AG is handling change five times from warehouses to vehicles and vice versa before they are delievered to the final adress. If the receiver does not accept the parcel, this number doubles until the sender has the parcel back in his hands.

In addition, multiple trials to deliver the parcel have to be taken into account for ex. because the adress of the receiver was wrong or because the receiver ist not at home.

In order to ensure that nothing goes wrong each single parcel is scanned with a GPRS scanner every time the parcel is moved from a vehicle into a warehouse or from a warehouse into a vehicle. This data is then nearly in real time transmitted via GPRS to the central server located in the heaquarters in Ulm, Germany.
With this information, an authorised person can find out at any time where the parcel currently is and which status it has (e.g. reception rejected, delivered, on the way between warehouse A and warehouse B etc.).

Since quite some time the customers of DIREKTexpress Service GmbH can lookup the status of their parcels in the internet as well as the predicted time of delivery. But not all customers have an internet access available or they are not sitting in front of their computers when they need tofind out the status of a parcel.

This caused a lot of calls for the service team of DIREKTexpress Service GmbH.

Since the fully automated interactive voice response system has been implemented for DIREKTexpress Service GmbH, its customers can call 24 hours 7 days a week to find out the current status of a parcel. When a customer calls the sevice number, the system asks the caller for the unique tracking number of the parcel. He can then talk a number like FFF-seventeen-eight-ninety into the phone.
Now the interactive voice response system reads the status of the parcel from the database and presents the result to the caller as follows:

The parcel has been delivered to the receiver at $Date $Time o clock successfully
    or
The parcel has left the warehouse in Munich and is on its way to the warehouse in Kassel

While presenting the status to the caller, $Date and $Time is replaced by the system with the data that was retrieved from the database.
If anything is wrong with the parcel, the caller can force the system to forward his call to the manager of the warehouse where the parcel currently is to discuss changes regarding the delivery process with him.