Insight / Blog

Q4 product release highlights – flexibility, C2C and more


Posted on 2nd November 2022

Summary: These are the new product features and changes we've added in the last quarter.



We’ve been busy…

Our product and technology teams are constantly working hard to improve our products, making them more effective and adding new features and functionality. We’ve created this ongoing series of product release notes for our team to talk about some of the latest additions and changes.

Here are some of the achievements we’ve been working on in the last few months, along with a preview of what’s coming up.

The Doddle PUDO Platform powers the creation, roll out and management of a PUDO network. Using the various tools within the platform, carriers can easily add new locations, improve the customer experience and increase parcel volume going through the network.

Improving our tools to support driving volume into PUDO

We’re dedicated to helping carriers & posts drive more volume into PUDO locations. Some of our recent improvements to help support this are:

  • Collections widget – An improved UX of our collections widget plug-in for ecommerce checkouts, making the pick-up experience clearer and highlighting benefits over home delivery to consumers.  

  • Flexibility – A more flexible plug-in, allowing  new carriers to customize & deploy this very easily in their own market. 

Helping carriers to run best in class PUDO networks

Everyone knows our heritage in PUDO, but we’re not resting on our laurels. We’re continually improving the configurability of our store app, to make it easier & faster to deploy and scale.

  • Store app optimisation – Our store app now handles returns from any returns portal provider. In cases where merchants have their own returns portal or other returns portals, we’re able to scan their barcodes in our drop-off locations for a seamless drop-off.

  • C2C enhancements – We’ve enhanced our store app to handle C2C sends – making the most of the boom of consumer marketplaces.

  • Footfall tracking – We’ve created simple tools to track the value of additional footfall coming into stores, allowing carriers to prove the benefits of becoming a host location to help expand networks.

Doddle’s self-service kiosk provides the best returns experience, providing customers with a queue skipping and time saving journey from end to end. Versatile and quick to troubleshot it unburdens staff helping them spend less time dealing with returns and more time helping and selling to customers.

Improving the consumer UX

We have now had more than two million parcels running through our kiosks, and we’re able to use consumer insight & data from those transactions to evolve the experience.

  • Refreshed consumer journey – We’ve updated the consumer journey to make it even more simple to use and speed up the drop-off process – reducing drop-off transaction time by 5%.

  • Reducing staff friction – We’ve also been making it even easier for staff members by introducing a new staff troubleshooting menu and functions.

DISCOVER

How we design for consumer change with our OOH checkouts

Evolving our kiosks to support new global use cases

With the growth of C2C and marketplaces like Vinted, Depop and eBay, the volume of consumers sending parcels is hugely increasing. We have been evolving our kiosk to support this demand by introducing a new C2C send flow. This allows consumers to drop off their sends in a completely self-serve way, taking our kiosks beyond returns.

Accessible & easy for everyone

We’ve implemented features to make the kiosks fully accessible, easier to use and fully compliant with Americans with Disabilities Act accessibility guidelines. This includes:

  • Always accessible – All inputs are accessible for wheelchair users, and the hatch doors can be opened with minimal pull force

    • Including dynamic navigation pads, audio cues and Spanish consumer flow

Returns are an essential factor in customer experience, loyalty and lifetime value. Whether the return comes through a store, a drop-off point or a self-service kiosk, Doddle’s returns products make returns simple for you and your customers. Doddle’s proven technology supports the full returns process, from post-purchase communications, to returns booking, to refund.

Speeding up launch processes  

We’re seeing increasing demand for our returns technology – with many logistics providers wanting to get started quickly & get ahead of their competition. To support this, we’re spending a lot of time optimizing our deployment speed & configurability.

  • Streamlining our consumer journey – behind the scenes we’ve done lots of engineering work to cut down launch speed.

  • White-label plug-ins – we’ve enhanced our Shopify, Magento & Salesforce plug-ins to make it much easier to white-label for a seamless returns experience.

  • New upgrade path – we’ve improved our upgrade path from our Standard to Plus services. This allows carriers to offer a basic returns portal to smaller merchants whilst having options for larger merchants as they evolve.

Improving returns for merchants

Our digital returns are all about helping merchants to reduce the cost of returns & improve the customer experience – which also help our logistics partners with retention. Some of our latest developments are:

  • More engaging consumer emails – we’ve recently re-designed all our consumer emails using bags of consumer insight & design best practice.

  • Merchant marketing assets – allowing merchants to add relevant promotions during the returns journey & turn service into sales.

  • Multiple returns addresses – for our Plus package, merchants can set different returns destinations dynamically, depending on where they want the item to go. Whether that means selecting the right DC, going back to store or straight to charity, we’ve got it covered.

Looking ahead… 

We’re really excited to keep bringing you engaging updates, so keep an eye out as we continue innovating and improving the Doddle platform. 

Want to know more? Get in touch with our team


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