The e-commerce industry has grown rapidly over the last few decades in parallel with the growth of the internet. This has significantly increased the pressure on the courier and parcel business. It is now no longer enough to accurately deliver the parcels to the destination, but it is important to do so in a cost-effective manner. The faster speeds of delivery and customer services are also important as more customers demand it from the businesses that run such courier delivery services. The delivery businesses not only have to face such harsh market demands, but also unpredictable work environments, which are common in the industry.

The business is now required to handle many complex tasks at once. The complexity comes from the fact that each delivery job is unique and the corporation must effectively navigate between many obstacles to offer the consumer a good experience. To keep making profits, courier businesses must also incorporate tactics that help them beat their competition. This includes methods that help increase in productivity of the business and also branding others that increase the market value of the brand. All this can be done by hiring an on-demand parcel app development company to develop a custom tool to work with your business. Such software is both essential and beneficial to modern courier businesses to function efficiently.

Major Challenges Associated with Courier Delivery and Their Solutions

High Competition

The first and the greatest challenge for a courier delivery business is that the competition for being the customer’s favourite is very high in the industry. There are few companies who get the share of attention that can sustain their profits naturally. Depending on the country, the businesses that are preferred are different. Very few companies distribute couriers worldwide, and those that do have a highly productive system of making deliveries.

Solution: Focus on a niche

The solution to such problems includes increasing the productivity of the business using software that is built for effective courier delivery solutions. It is also helpful if the business tries to fit their courier delivery services into a niche because that helps in both brandings and specialisation in that particular niche. A particular example can be that people associate Domino's delivery agents with pizza, and Royal mail with postal delivery, although both are delivery companies. Offering features that are suited to the niche will also be productive both to the business and the customer. Even if the customer base becomes narrow, more productivity will increase the number of customers.

Market demands

The market demand itself has become a huge challenge in the courier delivery service industry. For a business to succeed in any kind of supply chain model, these days it is necessary to provide sustained, fast service to customers and be highly efficient. This is true for courier businesses that focus on any sector, as all companies have started to use advanced software to make their business more beneficial

Solution: Understand your customers

When every company has tools of the same capacity and work towards similar goals, their policies can make the difference between success and failure. The most important policy that helps to meet the market demand is to understand the customers. The business can understand its customers by making use of analytics that the delivery management software provides. Extensive market research and asking customers for suggestions by voluntary survey questions are other ways to understand customers. By always keeping up with the customer needs, the business can make more revenue.

Increased staffing needs

Regardless of the standards in the delivery business, some parts of it are handled by manual labour. Not handling the staff efficiently during different times can lead to times where they cannot do the work in time. This is another problem that can rise rapidly in the courier delivery business. This usually happens when unexpected peaks in courier requests come up. If the staff aren’t prepared to handle such requests, the business can lose its income and sometimes it can also cost the reputation of the company. There can also be times where the staff may be forced to be idle because not many customers use the courier service.

Solution: Prediction and automation

The solution to this problem lies in the accurate prediction of customer activity and assigning the staff correctly. This can be done by getting an app designed by a high-end courier delivery app development company that has expertise in designing systems. Such companies also design automation features into their applications that help in automatically assigning the staff for different tasks. This not only helps the customers get their deliveries fast with the minimum amount of workforce but also decreases the cost in the hiring process.

Keeping customers informed

The customers of a courier delivery service must always be able to know the status of their delivery. There must be real-time updates about the delivery process even without the customer asking about it on regular occasions for every delivery job. The customers must feel at ease to ask and change anything regarding their delivery job during the process. This is important because, without such a facility, the customers will just not see the particular courier service as friendly or flexible enough. This may cause customers to choose different courier services that have such features.

Solution: Maintaining seamless communication

The solution to the above problem is to always maintain seamless communication between the customer, the delivery agent and the administrators of the business. Although that seems like a difficult task, technologies exist that make such things possible. Many software that have been developed for such last-mile processes come integrated with features like automated notifications, instant chats and sometimes even chatbots. The more suited the software is to the business, the more beneficial it becomes. 

Conclusion

As with any business, there are certain challenges that are associated with the courier business that deals with transporting many packages to their destination. A combination of last mile delivery software and human supervision is used to gracefully overcome such challenges. Oddappz is an on-demand delivery app development service that specializes in developing applications that fit many specific products. Over the years, it has developed many applications catering to grocery delivery, remote spa booking, and local parcel deliveries. Due to its expertise, it has clients around the world.