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A big part of the growth in the Indian e-commerce industry has come from Tier III/IV cities and beyond. It is therefore important for fulfilment companies to ensure smooth deliveries for customers in these cities. We spoke to Amit Choudhary, Chief Product & Technology Officer, Ecom Express on how they are leveraging digital technologies to ensure seamless customer delivery experiences
In the last half-decade, with demand growing more than ever, the Indian e-commerce industry has been gaining from the demand generated out of Tier III/IV cities and beyond. The growing number of shoppers and the rise of social commerce have driven e-commerce growth. Therefore, last-mile delivery has evolved in tandem with this growth. At Ecom Express, we realised that to cater to this growth we need to increase our footprint in the hinterlands. However, in e-commerce fulfilment, customer experience is appended to smooth doorstep order delivery which mandates correct addresses. The address system in India is relatively unstructured, especially when we talk about Tier-2/3/4 cities. Written addresses often contain anomalies such as incorrect spellings, incomplete locality information, poor explanation of landmarks, etc., which impacts deliveries.
We endeavour to constantly expand our digital capabilities for the enhanced customer, and it is precisely for this reason that we collaborated with what3words, who, with their new-age technology, enhances our effort with an additional level of precision to offer a better customer delivery experience and even more ways to save time and attempts.
The last mile is the most complex stage in the entire e-commerce fulfilment journey and often amounts to the highest costs of an order journey to the customer. With the year 2020 creating disruptions not just in our everyday lives and the sudden spurt in e-commerce made the last mile challenges more acute than ever. With faster delivery expectations and growing competition, businesses will need to maximise resources to fulfil consumer expectations. Therefore, to help improve last-mile delivery and order delivery accuracy, Ecom Express uses a sophisticated AI-driven location intelligence platform that identifies and tags each address with a score that captures the likelihood of successful delivery. By pairing our proprietary solutions with what3words, it will further enhance and augment our capabilities. This collaboration will make the whole process of order fulfilment a lot more seamless for our online merchants or the end consumer too.
For logistics and e-commerce companies, inaccurate delivery addresses are a severe issue since they result in non-deliveries, redelivery attempts, costly address validation intervention, and intensive customer service. Every unsuccessful delivery mandates the delivery associate to reattempt later, which adds to the cost. This not only hurts customer experience but equates to a significant customer service expense for delivery services, both when considering the cost of failed deliveries and in the price of resolving address inaccuracies. Our internal data shows that 15 per cent of failed deliveries are due to incomplete or inaccurate addressing, out of which we can identify and correct 60 per cent of the addresses with our proprietary technology solution.
With the increased use of big-data analytics, like any new-age logistics company, we are also looking inward to make sense of the data available to us and use them to fulfil a ‘WOW’ customer experience.
One such effort is to understand from the past experiences of delivering orders to a locality/ address/ unique end-consumer. For example, if an end-consumer has used an MPOS (mobile point of sale) card swipe machine to make a digital payment for their order, we will ensure that the delivery associate carries an MPOS device when they revisit the end-consumer. Another example is to categorise addresses into home/ office through text mining and thereby identify the availability hours of the end-consumer. This information is pushed into the last mile mobile application to ensure attempts are made at time windows where the probability of delivery conversion is maximised (say 09:30 – 18:00 hours would be an ideal time to attempt for an office address).
We also use sophisticated route optimisation technology. A static optimiser creates a one-time optimal route for a delivery associate based on the orders to be delivered for the day. By capturing the location of the delivery associate, this static optimiser can become dynamic by factoring in the real-time traffic scenario of the area, that is, re-adjusting the route based on minimising travel time/ travel distance (as the algorithm may be designed). Other technological prowess is incorporated into various planning scenarios, including customer preference and dynamic scheduling (real-time assigning orders based on location). All these scenarios are built to maximise delivery conversion with enhanced resource utilisation and intelligence.
India’s current state of logistics is still emerging and has a long way to go to match up with its global counterparts. The sector is fragmented with a need to improve infrastructure, information technology penetration, and skilled human resource to help tackle operational inefficiencies.
One of the biggest challenges today is poor infrastructure. While the quality of road infrastructure is undoubtedly likely to improve, the pace of development is critical to logistics and transportation. There are bottlenecks in hinterland connectivity resulting in higher lead times in cargo movement and lower turnaround time in the supply chain. The weak transportation network in the rural parts also poses challenges to roadways infrastructure, directly impacting the transportation of goods.
In India, automation of processes is still in the embryonic stage and non-standardization in the industry due to its fragmentation further slows down the progress. Acceptance and adoption of technological advancements like automation, robotics, tracking, warehouse management system, etc., can resolve the issues between domain requirements and IT.
Despite the success of India’s technology industry, there is a dearth of skilled resources such as data scientists, robotics specialists, operations research experts, etc. To keep the rate of efficiency going, we must stress not only to develop the capabilities of the sector but also and most importantly, skill development.
While the intricacies of logistics are subject to external and internal challenges but by careful management, planning and realistic goal setting, they can be overcome to be able to thrive, succeed and compete in the Indian economy with their international counterparts.
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