Retailers need to better personalise the delivery experience whilst carriers need to work together more closely, says Quinten Francken-Bosman, group shipping and procurement director of Photobox.
Speaking at the recent Delivery Conference she said that localising the experience helped with customer experience and could be as simple as boasting about localised delivery options – such as same day – on the home page of a retailer, if appropriate to the customer’s location.
“The information on the homepage should be personalised to where they live,” she said. “For example, if you are living in London and there’s a same-day option it’s brilliant to be able to see that on the home page but if you are in Scotland and it’s not on offer then you don’t want to see that,” she said.
She urged delivery carriers to continue to innovate so that companies such as hers could take advantage. “I want to ask the carriers to keep up with innovation and rather than just testing it start implementing it industry-wide and start understanding the customer better,” she said.
She also urged carriers to think about consolidation. “We need to start consolidating for the last mile. Carriers are talking about it but we need to make a move on this. It stops the customer waiting in for eight different deliveries, reduces cost and congestion on the street and also helps solve the problem of capacity. Carriers need to start working together more and more,” she said.
She said executed correctly delivery offered the potential for huge advantage for retailers. “Delivery used to be a nuisance. Something that commercial people could be annoyed about but now it’s turning into something quite positive. Today it’s a sales lever,” she said.
Image credit: Photobox
