The rate of residential delivery
services is increasing day by day. In the past few years the rate of
residential deliveries has almost doubled from 20% to 40%. You might face many
challenges being a residential shipper as the customers expect free delivery
and the carriers keep on increasing the rates.
The most important challenge to
residential deliveries is that these deliveries can increase your cost as they
are of higher cost than commercial deliveries. An additional cost is required
for the delivery of packages to residential costs than to a business address.
The costs of fuel and driver are higher outside of high density commercial
routes.
There is an expectation by
carriers to recover all the costs including residential charges, delivery area
surcharges and other charges that account more for total cost than delivery
charges. In addition to this, residential discounts that are granted in most of
the carrier agreements are not as aggressive as the commercial incentives. Many
other challenges involve:
- There is no need to acquire signature for residential deliveries for the parcel carriers.
- The disposition of final package is mostly left at your door that can lead to increasing costs by getting customer service calls, returns and reships and the damage claims by the customer. Customers can also accuse you of poor delivery services.
- There is restriction of package tracking.
Significantly, all these issues
in residential delivery services can
cause poor customer experience, decline in profits and negative publicity of
your company. It is also very challenging to maintain all the information
regarding present address for the residential customers.
Residential shipper have many
unique delivery options other than private parcel carriers involving the US
postal service, regional carriers and parcel consolidators. During the recent
years, residential services has worked a lot for the improvement of their
delivery speed, tracking systems, reliability, customer experiences and many other
areas .
There are many shippers that will
cite the proposition involving consistent service, cost savings and innovations
to make the delivery as much convenient as they can. There are many options
offered by residential delivery services
providers along with the provision of many benefits for its customers that
involves flexibility, decreased costs and most of all the better services for
customers. If all these challenges are taken into consideration by the
residential delivery service providers it can help them in providing enhanced
and best services to their customers in future.
