Earning the right

Customers’ personal shopping habits are changing – not just with online ordering; they want next day delivery and to order as late as possible in the day.

For every parcel delivered in the UK - we deliver more than all our competitors combined. In the next few years we are going to be delivering more and more parcels with fewer and fewer letters.

It is not only parcel volumes that will increase it is also the size of those parcels. As a business, we are going to have to adapt our equipment and mail centres to handle those changes. It's an exciting future for all of us, but we have to earn the right to be in that market.

Service delivery director - Central, Geoff Braden, said: ‘I think the challenge that we have is because we deliver so many parcels, the complexity for us is that we have to replicate everything on an absolutely massive scale. One of the key areas we have been working on in recent times is the mail order returns part of the business, which is a very profitable part of the business and something that 10 or 15 years ago just wasn't so significant.

‘People back then bought things online, but if they didn't like their purchase, they pretty much kept hold of it because they didn't really want the hassle of sending it back. That’s obviously all changed now.

‘I've got daughters in their early 20s and they won't think anything of buying some shoes or buying some clothes online and if they don't fit, sending them all back to the place where they bought them. One of the things we have been doing is working with mail order returns and putting the printers into our delivery office call offices so that customers can come and scan their mail order return prints off the return barcode and send those through to us.

‘In terms of how we, as a business, prepare ourselves to deal with the massive growth in parcels, I think one of the big challenges for us is how we sort parcels efficiently and deliver them to an optimum.’