Is your post ready to delight with digital?
If not, it’s time for an immediate digital transformation strategy and implementation plan.
Why? Because posts that avoid digital transformation will struggle to compete in the 21st-century delivery market, particularly when it comes to winning young customers. Millennials and Generation Z account for over 60 percent of all online shoppers. Ideally, young people should be engaging with the postal service frequently, but some posts have failed to make themselves relevant to this age group.
This presents an opportunity for posts to bridge the gap between their current capabilities and their future performance. They can do this by aligning their innovation efforts to market trends, so they can delight with digital.
Companies that lead in customer experience outperform companies that do not by 80 percent. It’s no surprise since customers have more options than ever and companies have fewer chances to get things right. Thirty-six percent of consumers report shopping elsewhere after only one bad experience.
First step? Eliminating the cause of long queues at post offices. The cause of which is generally bottlenecks created by staff waiting to use dedicated computers.
Posts can solve this problem with the right digital tools. For instance, a mobile point of sale (POS) system frees retail workers from waiting to use one dedicated computer, allowing them to help customers directly in the line. Plus, customers get in and out quickly, so retail branches enjoy a higher volume of daily transactions.
Millennials and Generation Z consumers have grown up with self-serve options and one-click delivery. The idea of going to the post office, waiting in a long line, and asking a customer service rep to process a transaction they could have processed on their own is foreign to their experience.
Understandably, there’s an unavoidable physical component to letters and parcels. But that doesn’t mean posts can’t reduce the friction associated with their customer experience, namely time and place.
For instance, self-service PUDO lockers and relationships with third-party retailers help expand customers’ access to services both in terms of where and when they can access postal services.
With the right IT system (either an open architecture on-premise solution or a cloud-based solution) posts can equip retail partners, like convenience stores, with the technology to process retail transactions.
Not only does this give customers access to their services outside of business hours and within their neighborhood, it also helps posts offset the cost of meeting the universal service obligation (USO) by moving from the fixed cost of numerous physical branches to the variable cost of retail partnerships. This is no small matter considering 82 percent of posts expect an increase in parcel volumes over the next five years.
Finally, this technology enables posts to set up self-serve kiosks in high-traffic areas like train stations and university student centers.
Young people aren’t just doing a lot of online shopping. They’re doing a lot of cross-border online shopping. Posts can position themselves as the go-to carrier for global e-retail, a trillion-dollar industry. E-retail revenues will soar to US$6.54 trillion by 2022 and 22 percent of those physical products will be shipped across borders by 2022.
Posts have the subject matter expertise to help customers, particularly younger customers, with an enormous pain point in online shopping: taxes, duties, and compliance. Posts understand the documentation requirements, how to navigate customs requirements, and how to avoid running afoul of prohibited items or denied parties lists. They must convert this subject matter expertise into digital tools that support their customers.
For instance, with the Riposte Taxes, Duties, & Compliance solution, Escher customers receive support with product classification, taxes and duties estimation, product restriction screening, and denied party screening.
Finally, posts have to commit to continuous improvement if they want to stay competitive. Posts can use AI tools to identify their most successful branches, in terms of operational efficiency or sales performance, and replicate that success across their entire network. In addition, a strong customer engagement platform with survey capabilities allows posts to capture insights from their customers, feed those insights into an AI tool, and produce valuable recommendations for future projects.
Interested in learning more about the Riposte Customer Engagement platform? Schedule a meeting with the experts at Escher today.