These days, technology is having a profound effect on the business world, making professional life easier and more productive. IoT technology specifically is revolutionizing several industries, including courier dispatch.
For any courier company, staying ahead of deliveries is the key to producing happy customers. But with the current situation of vague five-to-eight-hour delivery slots, it’s hard to do so. That’s not to mention the boom in e-Commerce that is adding a lot more deliveries that need to take place.
With people’s jam-packed schedules, these long waiting times are only driving customers towards other courier services. So to accommodate these new demands couriers must take advantage of new technologies, to guarantee that they accomplish all their tasks and stay at the top of their game.
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We’ve gathered some of the ways that technology is improving the courier industry.
Improved Delivery Tracking
Apart from having multitudes of courier vehicles that need to be managed, as a delivery business you also have to monitor all those vehicles. We can all agree that this is easier said than done.
Fortunately, with the help of GPS courier tracking, now you can efficiently manage and maintain all vehicles to improve operations and result in an increase in productivity.
Companies such as Trackimo, a real-time GPS tracker, makes monitoring easy — even if you’re out of the country. With its web-based technology, you can track, monitor, assist, record data and more to help you keep an eye on your vehicles and the status of the goods they are carrying, ultimately making your business efficient.
Also, on the other side of things, customers can use GPS tracking to receive more accurate information on their package location. In the past, customers would have to insert a tracking code and receive news only once the package had been scanned. Today, customers can track their delivery in real time within a meter throughout every step of the journey on their smartphones.
Shorter Delivery Times
These days, with our jam-packed schedules, finding some time to wait for a delivery, is extremely hard — especially if we find out it’ll be late, or worse, not arrive.
Luckily, technology is evolving the delivery landscape and establishing faster deliveries. With the sheer volume of deliveries that need to take place on any given day and the added demand for meeting customer schedules, courier services need to up their game or risk losing out to competitors.
Investing in handy tools, such as a route planner to create the most time-efficient route, is the way to go. When dealing with multiple destinations, simply finding the shortest path between two stops isn’t enough. Sure, it may be fast for that one particular stop, but you will find yourself backtracking because you haven’t taken into account all the destinations, making your travels longer.
But with a route planner tool, couriers can eliminate wasteful practices by receiving an optimized route based on the number of destinations and their locations.
For example, take a look at route optimization tool MyRouteOnline. The tool helps customers plan daily routes in three simple steps, removing the need for people to manually enter each destination. With the tool, customers not only receive the best route with driving directions, but also they can reach destinations faster.
Couriers that utilize this tool can speedily reach all their destinations and avoid keeping their customers waiting all day long.
Drone Delivery
As advancements in drone technology continue to escalate, so do the possibilities for its use in delivery services. With industry giants such as Amazon and UPS starting to experiment, it won’t take long for smaller companies to embrace the trend and follow suit.
One example comes from Skycart, a California-based drone delivery service. They aim to provide fast and convenient deliveries (within 30 minutes) through an integrated cloud platform and self-operating delivery drones.
These drones are an effective and inexpensive means of shipping, but they also remove the need for heavy trucks and drivers, helping you reduce your company’s carbon emissions and delivery costs.
Final Note
As technology is becoming intertwined with people’s daily lives, it’s easy to take the benefits for granted. The courier business has benefited immensely from the introduction of new technologies such as IoT, which have brought about shorter delivery times, delivery tracking, alternative delivery vehicles and more.
These exciting developments are improving the range of services offered, and the methods of execution, resulting in a changing landscape and exponential growth for the courier industry. And we can only be sure that it’ll continue to grow and change.
Shachar Shamir is COO of Ranky, a marketing company based in Tel Aviv. As Ranky’s COO, Shamir helps startups around the world with their marketing and online growth needs. So far, he has helped more than 200 startups with hands-on solutions. On the side, Shamir is also a tech and business blogger who enjoys writing about marketing, business management and professional growth.
