If you are in e-commerce, you know that delivery is a crucial part of the customer experience. If you want your clients to be satisfied and to repurchase from your site, you’ll have to make sure the delivery runs flawless. Yet, flawless delivery (on time) is not enough anymore : it needs to be free-of-charge and the trend is towards quicker and same-day deliveries.
Customers’ expectations are more and more to get their order the same day. Yet, same-deliveries have a big inconvenient for those who have a job: it requires most of the time the order to be delivered to an external location: a point of collect, an automatic locker, … in that case you, as a customer, have to undertake an effort to collect your parcel.
DHL, Amazon and Audi are partnering to revolution all that and make this last step as effortless as the ordering process itself.
Read further to discover this open innovation initiative
From same-day delivery to same-hour initiative
A few years ago a 48-hour guaranteed delivery already looked like a revolution. In the meantime, the adoption of e-commerce has increased customers’ expectations. While a 2-day delivery was a standard of excellence a few years ago, a 1-day free delivery is nowadays more or less the standard and e-merchants are proposing more and more paying same-day deliveries. In some extreme cases, initiatives are even taken to test a 1-hour delivery. You may have heard for instance of deliveries by drones, or this 1-hour delivery promoted by Amazon in New-York.
Whatever the option chosen, it remains however that the location where your order is delivered may not always be the most convenient. The very last step of the delivery process needed to be improved, and the initiative by DHL, Amazon and Audi aims at doing just that.
Same-day delivery directly in your car
The last step of the delivery process is in most cases still inconvenient (except if you like waiting at home on your order). The idea tested by Amazon, is to use DHL as provider to deliver a parcel directly in the trunk of your own car. It works like this. Your Audi is GPS tracked for the purpose of the delivery, a code used by the delivery person to open the trunk (the code is valid for a given timeframe), the parcel is put into the car and the trunk closed.
When you go home at the end of the day, the parcel is already in your car and you haven’t to worry about anything.
Our take
Supply-chain improvements have focused in the last years on speed … speed only. As a consequence delivery times have decreased dramatically but convenience has been left aside. It’s now time to further enhance the customer experience and we’re glad to see such wonderful initiatives as the one by Amazon, DHL and Audi.
Photo: Shutterstock
Posted in Innovation, Marketing.
