Jon Hall, operations director at TouchStar, puts forward a case that ‘Average Mondays’ need to be catered for too.
Yodel has made a bold statement this week stating that it will cap next day deliveries on Black Friday. By making the announcement now, it is giving its retail customers six month to consider how they will manage logistics in the autumn.
I can see why the decision has been made, if your ability to meet quality of service is put on the line then you will do what you can to protect it, as well as safeguard your brand and your contracts with retailers.
I expect some retailers will go into panic mode as they look at the revenue they make from next day and start to crunch the numbers. But my hope is that retailers take a more pragmatic view. Yodel has been clever to research how long customers are prepared to wait, and the findings suggest that the urgency is on getting the deal when it comes to Black Friday not the product.
Some of the headline findings illustrate the spike that the logistics industry will face this year. Of the 6,371 people surveyed, just 8% spent money on Black Friday last year, yet 30% said they would this year. It’s prompted Yodel to say that industry needs to work together to find a way to manage demand and expectation.
Yodel has gone a step further to try and get retailers to think differently and see that next day isn’t the be all and end all. 76% of people will wait longer for a parcel to be delivered if they are kept informed of progress. Only 13% said they wouldn’t wait. This helps give some context to the problem. And provides insight into where the solutions lie – choice and communications.
Two nuts that have to be cracked with technology. You simply can’t tell people where their order is if you haven’t got a backbone in your operation that is tracking everything real-time. From a work management system that is helping to schedule the volume and the priorities, through a means to scan everything in and everything out of the warehouse and to the depots, to tracking the trucks, and pushing progress updates to the customer.
It’s all about integration – thinking through how you can use technology to give a snap shot of your operations at any one time, which in turn can be translated into a customer update that helps them feel like they are in control.
Of course, that can’t be achieved if you’re not in control. Many logistics companies are now considering how they use the ‘Elastic Warehouse concept’ to expand and contract their operations in order to deal with a greater throughput without necessarily having to add more warehouse capacity or people hours. Much of this comes down to making technology selections that are flexible and grow with your operational demand.
It’s also about understanding how technology can help you offer a variety of ways to get a parcel to a customer. We all have lives that rule when we are at home and the window in which we can take a delivery are invariably shortening. Being able to fit in a collection to your schedule works better for some – picking up a parcel before you head down to the tube, collecting one when you do the weekly shop, and even making returns on your way to the cinema.
The power of the locker is strong and the days of missed attempts to deliver followed by a request to drive miles to a depot to collect are well and truly over.
But it’s also important to recognise how life events shape what’s urgent, and how that will influence the technology you implement. Monday might be an average day for one person, yet the day before a wife’s birthday for someone else. Giving customers a clear choice on when they can get a parcel as well as where, is what differentiates a brand, and can ultimately sway whether a purchase is made or not.
But you must meet the promise. So having technology options can help you spread the load for your logistics operation and the SLAs your retailers demand. By exploiting multiple drop offs to a train station locker hub, or, as is being trialed in Germany, to the car boot in office complexes are what will make the customer buy from you again. It is a small thing that can make a huge difference and will differentiate not just your brand but also your customers’ brand.
Now I know it’s not a small thing to deliver, but the retailers that invest in technology that gives people choice, and go on to execute its deployment brilliantly, will be the ones that win out on Black Friday, Christmas and on ‘Average Mondays’.
