Retailers and carriers met for the annual Delivery Conference in February, discussing how to use tech and data to drive improvements in e-commerce
In the sessions at The Delivery Conference 2024 in London, there were echoes of the famous quote, commonly misattributed to Albert Einstein (first written evidence instead points to Narcotics Anonymous’ Basic text), that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
During a varied and insightful day of retailer and parcel carrier presentations on 6 February, one consistent theme was how the retail industry can better use data and technology to ensure it continually improves the delivery experience for consumers.
Instead of repeating poor home delivery experiences time and time again or continuing to see margins eroded due to rising levels of product returns by customers, for example, many retailers are looking at the capability of emerging technologies to take the delivery sector in a better direction.
Gary Page, general manager for customer delivery and collection operations at John Lewis Partnership, posed the question: “As we look to the future, how do we learn and learn from our mistakes?
“How do we use data to teach us when things have gone wrong, how do we react to that and learn and do something different to ensure the next day it doesn’t happen? Or maybe we get a good delivery response…how do we learn and apply those to the next experience?”
For many in the room, artificial intelligence (AI) is the great hope for supporting this learning process. In particular, at electric-powered delivery company Hived, there is work under way to use AI to help finetune several elements of its service.
Murvah Iqbal, founder and co-CEO of Hived, said: “Maybe you live in London in an apartment block, [finding] delivery addresses is quite difficult sometimes.
“So, one thing we’re doing is if we’re delivering to the same apartment block three times a week, but it’s not the same delivery driver […] we take the data from the quickest delivery driver and make sure the next delivery driver going to that apartment block has the right data to get there.”
Another key area for Hived, Iqbal added, is how AI can improve its routing intelligence: “That’s something we get so many data points from, minute by minute – how we can manipulate that data further to make better decision on the routing and then specifically drill down on that data on how we can give customers more proactive updates.”
As Page said, it is incumbent upon the wider industry to tackle this together, adding: “There’s a huge opportunity for us to learn from that information, and in being more collaborative in how we share it between retailers and the carriers to [get to] the level of 99.9% customer success.”
A report produced by consultancy and research house Retail Economics in associatio
