The waiting game

I am pretty sure that I am not the only person in the world to be left foaming at the mouth, confined to my house until 3.30pm waiting for a package that was supposed to be delivered “some time during the morning”. With work commitments, school-runs, and a plethora of other socially stimulating tasks to carry out during the average day, clearing the diary in order to wait for a delivery can be a tedious process. I read an article at the end of last year that focused on the release of a hotly-anticipated video game. The game in question, Modern Warfare 2, smashed records across the world for pre-orders, sales and online playing time, but many people were left game-less on the day of release. One particular person was so distraught that he didn’t receive his pre-ordered copy before 10am that he went to his local computer shop to buy another copy, and was sitting at home shooting militia gangs for several hours before his original, but now redundant copy, arrived at his front door.

I am not trying to analyse the lack of patience shown by the modern day MTV generation, but the willingness of people to wait for a delivery when they can be guaranteed the product by strolling down to the shops. E-commerce has increased steadily since the Internet burst into life several years ago, but in order to preserve this level of growth customers need to have faith in the B2C delivery industry.

GeoPost UK CEO Dwain McDonald said: “Most online shoppers are busy people who love the ease of buying on the Internet at any time of day or night but resent the inconvenience of waiting in all day for a delivery.

Upon launching its new one hour window delivery service, GeoPost UK subsidiaries, DPD and Interlink Express, asked Opinion Times to conduct some research into UK delivery trends. After the company kindly provided this information to Post&Parcel we thought we would share the key highlights with you.

Expectedly, 86.8% of people quizzed during the research said that they had waited at home for a delivery not knowing what time it was due to arrive. Of these people, 72.4% of 16-24-year-olds said they had; in comparison 88% of 55-year-olds-plus said yes. Now, this suggests that younger people spend less time at home, whether they are in school, college or work; and those customers 55+ would happily wait for a delivery, as that demographic encompasses the retired.

When the answers are broken down geographically they produce some interesting conclusions. 81% of people who live in London said they have waited at home all day, along with 85% from the south east of England. In comparison, 90.7% of Welsh residents answered yes, while a huge 94.9% of people agreed from Scotland. I draw the conclusion that delivery companies are far more efficient in London and the surrounding area, with customers receiving their packages sooner rather than later. I presume that the greater efficiency levels in this area are down to hub location, and that larger-scaled operations have been implemented to deal with demand in the heavily-populated region.

Furthermore, this is backed-up when we look at the answers from a second question. When asked “what percentage of deliveries over the last 12 months had no specified time of arrival”, 24.7% of people said that 76-100% of deliveries had no specific time; 38.2% said that only 1-25% had no ETA, while only 6.1% said that no deliveries came with no specified time of arrival (or that all the expected deliveries received over the course of the year had a time of arrival; double negatives, if you will.)

Again, the geographical breakdown provides the most intriguing results. As mentioned above, 6.1% of people said they had received a specified time of arrival on every delivery over the past 12 months. In London, the figure stood at 10.2%, whilst Scotland lagged behind again in terms of efficiency of delivery on 1.9% – well below the average.

So what is more annoying than wiping out a day’s activities to wait at home for a parcel? Probably getting home to find that dreaded notice card on the doormat explaining you have missed the delivery and that you have to make the long, dreary drive to the post office or collection centre to get your hands on your package – 20 miles away in my case.

80.4% of people have travelled to one of the above to pick-up their goods at least once time during the past 12 months, whilst one in three people have gone more than three times. When we examine regions, London and the surrounding area comes up trumps again. 22.7% said they haven’t been once, whilst the north east of England came out bottom with 11.1% avoiding the inconvenience.

In response to the poll, David Smith, director of operations at IMRG, said: “Our own research shows that 62% of online shoppers have experienced a failed delivery due to nobody being at home and a further 38% are put off purchasing because delivery times are too vague.”

This has also prompted Consumer Focus to call for courier companies to: “keep up with the world around them and develop more suitable ways of delivering parcels.”

And so they should. The consumer is King, and everything should be done to create a greater level of trust in delivery companies, so that more and more people are ready and willing to fuel our industry. And if that doesn’t work? Well, you could move to London.