DPD UK plans 5-minute delivery alerts and ‘green delivery’ notifications

DPD is adding more consumer services in the UK with plans to notify customers five minutes before a driver is due to arrive, and to inform them if their delivery is environmentally-friendly, according to a top executive.

The parcel carrier is also differentiating retailer prices between deliveries to homes or to parcel shops, Dave Moores, DPDgroup’s head of sales UK, told delegates at last week’s Leaders in Logistics Last Mile Delivery conference in London.  

The ‘5-minute alert’ is designed as an extra service in addition to the existing one-hour time window notification and will be introduced in August, he said. It will directly respond to customer feedback about DPD services in the company’s DesignSpace ‘user community’ platform, including criticism that drivers do not wait long enough at the doorstep, he pointed out.

Another innovation will be the introduction of a ‘Green Delivery’ notification showing recipients that the delivery was made by an electric vehicle or other environmentally-friendly method, Moores said.

Overall, 4.3 million customers have downloaded the DPD App 2.0 version to manage their deliveries, inform DPD about their delivery preferences, rate drivers and their customer experience, and also benefit from shopping deals from 75 different retailers, he said. The app has so far generated a 3% improvement in successful first-time deliveries while there is an average 4.92 star rating (out of 5) for drivers.

In response to CEP-Research questions, Moores confirmed that DPD offers retailers cheaper rates for deliveries to its 2,500 parcel shops than to homes. According to experts, bundled deliveries of multiple parcels to alternative delivery points such as lockers and parcel shops are much more efficient for carriers than home deliveries of individual parcels.

Meanwhile, DPD Precise, which offers consumers a choice of delivery times at the retailer’s online checkout, is now being used by 10 retail customers in the UK but DPD does not plan to offer it more widely at present. “If it was offered more widely, then everyone would want their own delivery time. That would be difficult to provide,” he explained.

In terms of operations, DPD UK’s Quantum route planning software, enabling driver-specific daily planning, is now live at all depots and has enabled the company to improve efficiency, Moores told the conference.

The company’s network covers 65 depots, including 16 large facilities able to sort more than 40,000 parcels a day. The £150 million, 26,000 sqm Hub 5 in Hinckley, Leicestershire, is due to become operational by October 2020, with capacity to handle 71,000 parcels an hour.

DPD will continue to roll out more electric vehicles under its strategy of making 10% of the fleet electric by 2021 and open up more urban depots closer to the customers, Moores said. There will be eight micro-sites in London to deliver within the capital’s Ultra Low Emission Zone using a fleet of Nissan eNV200 vans and Paxster local delivery vehicles.

DPD UK increased revenues by nearly 9% to £1,311 million in 2018 with volumes up by 8% to just under 250 million parcels. About 55% of these are B2C and 45% are B2B parcels, according to company information.