How Technology Is Improving The Courier Industry

Back in the 1990s, companies were writing out delivery instructions for the daily influx of parcels that passed through the depot. The phone would be ringing off the hook with customers wishing to place orders or requesting PODs, and life in the office was generally mayhem! Organised mayhem of course! Sometimes! A same day courier service was a distant pipe dream for many companies.

Communication is key!

As mobile phones were very expensive still, there were in-cab radios, difficult to hear due to interference, and less convenient for the drivers to use. Things have moved on a lot since then and a lot of the frustrating manual tasks are a thing of the past. What’s amazing is how much technology has helped our sector over the last couple of decades. Today we receive orders not only by telephone but by contact forms and emails too. Our same-day delivery drivers are all equipped with mobile phones, so we can communicate with them more safely and reliably.

Now we know where we’re going…

Our vehicles have sat-nav, so they know where they are going, how long the journey is taking and when a parcel will be delivered. It means we have less need to contact our drivers and our customers receive a much better service as we can keep them informed of progress when their goods are in our care. Sat nav has reduced same-day delivery times allowing any driver the advantage of finding their destination no matter where they are - you may have noticed that fewer people nowadays are asking for directions! And drivers can seek alternative routes easily when traffic incidents cause hold-ups. A sat-nav can even provide us with ETA’s on request, all great for managing expectations and meeting important deadlines.

We see everything.

Apart from having a vast selection of courier vehicles that need to be managed, as a delivery business, you also have to monitor all those vehicles. We can all agree that this is easier said than done. Fortunately, with the help of courier tracking, we can efficiently manage and maintain all vehicles to improve operations and result in an increase in productivity. There are companies that help to make monitoring easy. With new technology we can track, monitor, assist, record data and more to help you keep an eye on our vehicles and the status of the goods they are carrying, ultimately making our same day courier service ultra-efficient.

All the above = Shorter delivery times

These days, with our jam-packed schedules, finding some time to wait for a delivery, is extremely hard - especially if we find out it’ll be late, or worse, not arrive. Luckily, technology is evolving the delivery landscape and establishing faster deliveries. With the sheer volume of deliveries that need to take place on any given day and the added demand for meeting customer schedules, courier services need to up their game or risk losing out to competitors. This is why at Parcel Direct, we are confident that we can meet our customer’s needs for urgent and time-critical deliveries, all day long.

Drone delivery - The future?

As advancements in drone technology continue to improve, so do the possibilities for its use in delivery services. With industry giants such as Amazon and UPS starting to experiment, it won’t take long for smaller companies to embrace the trend and follow suit.

One example comes from Skycart, a California-based drone delivery service. They aim to provide fast and convenient deliveries (within 30 minutes) through an integrated cloud platform and self-operating delivery drones. This sounds fab but there a lot of kinks to iron out, the most obvious being the huge problem of theft in trials. Then there is the weather impact, getting technical here, when it is really hot the air density drops, reducing dramatically the lifting capacity of aircraft (including drones). When it is really cold, energy capacity for electric vehicles drops like a rock. The range is another factor and the issue of hitting birds.

To summarise…

Technology has even helped improve vehicle engine management making them more powerful and more efficient. Let’s not forget the more productive admin processes – orders and invoices are now processed via specialist courier software, and invoices emailed instead of being printed and mailed. These days, technology is having a profound effect on the business world, making professional life easier and more productive. IoT technology is revolutionising more and more industries, including courier dispatch. For any same day courier company, staying ahead of deliveries is the key to producing happy customers. With people’s hectic schedules, long waiting times are driving customers towards same-day courier services like us at Parcel Direct. So to accommodate these new demands same day couriers, like us, must take advantage of the new technologies that have helped us to the top of the pack.