Our cars no longer require keys. We can order food from a wide selection of restaurants straight from our smart phone to our door. Taxis are no longer hailed or ordered, we simply tap a screen and a car shows up. We no longer have to visit banks or supermarkets in person.
Armed with social networks, greater choices and rapid reviews of companies and services, these savvy consumers, already driving e-commerce demand, now are forcing increased competition for the ‘last mile’.
The ease at which things are made accessible to the consumer in 2016 has raised the level of expectation of what levels of service should be like in all areas of life. Looking at a map or printing out pictures have all become things of the past. Computers do it for us now. Waiting for an online delivery for a week is no longer considered the norm, or acceptable in a world where we can ‘FaceTime’ anyone on the planet from just about anywhere on the planet. The bottom line here is that the consumer holds the power in these situations. If companies do not provide the ease of use at a price point that is acceptable the consumer will simply move to someone else that will.
Consumers are seeking seamless services and experiences, and expecting brands to collaborate to provide these
Ella Majava wrote in a piece named ‘The rise of on-demand and changing consumer expectations’ that “Consumers are expecting businesses to be ‘always available’ and adapt to changes – so they don’t have to”. The modern consumer looks for the product or service that they are using to take away all of their pain points, so they don’t have to solve the problem themselves. One way in which brands are combatting this issue is to collaborate in spaces in which it makes sense to. Where multiple problems can be solved throughout one service offering. An example of this offered by Majava is of Uber collaborating with Hotel chains and restaurants to provide complimentary services to those already offered.
Nowhere is consumer demand felt more than in the logistics industry, where margins are already low and where volumes are ever increasing. A finite number of drivers and vehicles in which to deal with these volumes means that speed and efficiency are paramount to success. Not only this but reverse logistics and dealing with items being returned by consumers put added pressure on logistics companies who are the face of e-commerce.
With much of the burden of increased e-commerce falling on delivery companies, efforts have been made to increase efficiency across networks with the ultimate goal of cutting costs. But how big a dent can be made without implementing some of the same technology that has created these customer demands in the first place? Many of the adjustments to delivery that have been made involve physical changes such as the creation of drop off points. The question could then be asked that is a consumer who has ordered something online with the purpose of not having to leave the house then going to leave to pick it up?
The introduction of Parcelive into global supply chains will see the implementation of twenty first century technology into logistics in a real way. Creating smart logistics means that delivery companies will have the ability to alter and affect their supply chains based upon real live data on things occurring in the world. Much in the way road signals change based upon traffic volume in order to ease congestion in cities our parcels will now be able to send back data on the most efficient routes, places where items are likely to get broken and the most likely time of day that people will be in. Our online orders could soon be ready to adapt and change to us in the same way that Facebook already knows which articles will likely be interesting for us to read.
Parcelive is bringing the Internet of Things into logistics. If you are interested in offering real time parcel tracking as a service to your customers
Hanhaa enables an Internet of Things framework that solves a real world pain while remaining accessible to anyone and everyone. Our role is to remove the technology from the conversation and just deliver the answers our customers are looking for.
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