DELIVER Europe – Colissimo gets “faster and better”

Colissimo is improving customer satisfaction, speeding up deliveries and investing in sustainability and extra capacity despite lower volumes due to reduced consumer spending, top managers said at last week’s DELIVER Europe event in Amsterdam.

The French B2C delivery specialist, part of La Poste’s mail and parcels division, has a 1% increase in revenues so far this year, driven by higher prices, but volumes are down by 5%, Benoît Huc, Colissimo’s sales and marketing director, told a workshop.

Last year, as the pandemic-driven peaks of 2020 and 2021 faded away and consumers reduced spending in the face of surging inflation and rising costs, the business unit’s volumes dropped by 9.8% to 409 million items while revenues were 5.7% lower at €2.1 billion.

About 22% of its revenues were generated by cross-border shipments (export and import), which are handed through Geopost’s international network.

Out-of-home boom

Outlining current market trends in France, Huc highlighted the rapid increase in ‘out-of-home’ deliveries to parcel shops, lockers or other collection points, which now accounted for 26% of deliveries compared to 74% for home deliveries.

“Out of home is a booming market and this makes France very special,” he told an audience of retailers and other event participants. The overall French B2C market totalled 904 million parcels last year, according to Huc.

Colissimo itself has a 98% first-attempt delivery success rate, not least due to the large French home mailboxes that are big enough to take about 80-90% of parcels, he pointed out.

Higher NPS

Sanae Murschel, director of international sales, presented the results of Colissimo’s latest customer satisfaction survey, based on 800,000 responses. This showed that the Net Promoter Score (HPS) had risen in the last three years to reach 58 points last year, and by a further four percentage points to 62 points in the first quarter of 2023.

“Need for speed”

One important customer demand is for faster deliveries, she made clear. While most customers expect deliveries in 2-3 days after making an order and Colissimo has a 48-hour delivery commitment, about 62% of French retailers now offer next-day delivery as well.

In response, Colissimo now offers next-day deliveries and delivered 101 million such parcels last year, representing about a quarter of its total volumes. “We are meeting the need for speed,” she declared.

Sustainability investments

In terms of sustainability activities, Huc said Colissimo is investing about €200 million to “green the fleet” with electric vehicles and cargo bikes. B2C deliveries in Paris will be carbon-free by the end of this year, with a target of zero-emission deliveries in the 25 largest French cities in the next few years. The whole business aims to be carbon-free by 2040.

Murschel noted that Colissimo’s overall network has expanded to 19 hubs across the country thanks to recent investments, including six larger ‘next-generation’ sites of 20,000sqm or more and capable of processing up 37,000 parcels per hour.

In late 2021, La Poste announced plans to invest €450 million in the Colissimo network in order to increase capacity significantly over the next four years, ready for an expected 1 billion parcels a year by 2030. With the new platforms, Colissimo would be able to offer next-day delivery across 90% of French territory.