Five ways that tech makes PUDO perform

In reality,  the delivery journey is the result of a whole orchestra of tech that gets goods into customers’ hands (and out of them again) in the simplest way possible. So, how do these digital processes work in harmony to make a PUDO workflow the Vienna Philharmonic of delivery and returns?

When a retailer offers PUDO, they are putting control in the customer’s hands and that begins even before they’ve completed the checkout. Embedded checkout tools  which offer a choice of local pick-up points represent the opportunity for a customer to receive goods at their leisure and remove the risk of problems occurring at the point of delivery. Enabling carriers to deliver many items to one location also means that the goods are in their hands faster.

In a seamless PUDO workflow, push notifications can also play an important role in convenience and speed. This might take the form of prompts to let the customer know when their parcel has arrived at its destination, with the opening hours of their selected pick-up location. Also useful are geolocation services which automatically open the collection QR code from the customer’s Apple Wallet or Google Pay when they arrive to collect.

The same push notifications and well-timed email comms can help keep the connection between retailer and customer for longer.  Confirming collection and checking in on the purchase can lead into further engagement: encouraging customers to share on social, or give a review; or if the product isn’t right, sorting out a quick return and resolution.

Delivering many parcels to one single location is immediately better for the environment, but the digital workflow of PUDO has added sustainability benefits you may not have even considered. A customer generating their return digitally means there’s no need to print and pack returns forms in the warehouse. This cuts down on consumption in both paper and power – and adds even more speed to the delivery process. As ASOS point out, in their case it meant saving 50 T-Rex’s worth of paper. The first time ASOS offered paperless returns was with Doddle, intriguingly…

A PUDO network can comprise thousands of third parties who have no ties with the retailer acting as a convenient middleman and benefiting from the extra footfall that a PUDO service brings. By providing simple-to-use software to scan codes and print labels (whether that’s on their own smartphone or using a rugged enterprise grade mobile device) a PUDO presence is an easy way to add great economic benefit to small businesses.

Customers love contact. PUDO technology should enable branded, automated communications at every stage of a delivery. These are simple and reassuring micro brand experiences that require little to no effort on the part of the customer. Whether through emails, texts, instant messages or app push notifications, these comms are standard in the Doddle solution and an essential part of the reputation toolkit for retailers and parcel carriers alike.

Adding new digital processes might sound like additional complexity, but in reality these new ways of working should make life simpler for everyone. Low-touch integrations for key elements like retailer checkout plugins, out-of-the-box automated communications and an intuitive in-store app make deployment straightforward and scalable across all the different use cases for PUDO.

Technology never pauses, so it stands to reason that for every thorny business challenge, there is a company working on solving it. Exactly the same can be said of PUDO. Emerging tech in this space is seeing rapid push in development as it responds to new consumer needs triggered by Covid-19, with everything we’ve detailed above accelerated for the convenience, comfort and safety of consumers.