Mailroom madness: how to handle the Black Friday load!
It’s that time of year again! Black Friday and Cyber Monday are upon us, but can your mailroom handle the load? Your mailrooms are sure to be working overtime to keep up with the volume of parcels and packages that will be flying into your buildings.
We have partnered up with Parcel Tracker, the number 1 rated parcel management software[i], to share four effective ways you can prepare your mailrooms to handle the load with ease.
#1 Don’t lose the parcel
We're kicking things off with an obvious one, but it's super important! We all know the feeling when your package gets lost or even damaged. It ruins the experience and leaves a long-lasting negative impression that can be hard to restore. 32% of people in the UK have reported having a package lost or stolen in their lifetime, and with the sheer volume of packages being delivered during busy periods of the year, it's likely to happen[ii]!
Mailrooms will be under pressure as Black Friday and Cyber Monday can put a strain on any parcel management process - making it easy for packages to go missing. The solution? A powerful parcel tracking system that can ease this strain, leading us to our next point...
#2 AI is your friend
Logging parcels can often be a long and time-consuming process, especially if you aren’t using some form of parcel management software. Parcels Trackers intuitive app helps to speed the process up, giving you time to focus on what matters most!
The app takes 3 seconds to log a parcel and notify the student that their parcel has arrived; that is very fast, right? But picture this, if a courier delivers 100 parcels, these can be logged in 5 minutes thanks to Parcel Tracker – but if you use a paper-based system, it can take up to 1.5 hours!
#3 Make the most of your space
With Black Friday & Cyber Monday likely to put a strain on your storage, teams, and systems, it’s important that you’re making the most of what space you have. We’ve found some useful ways of saving extra storage space, such as sending high-priority notifications to residents. Leaving a paper slip in their mailbox often has the slowest pick-up times. In contrast, an email notification has, on average, a 9-hour turnaround time, and an SMS notification has on average a 4-hour pick-up time. The sooner a parcel is collected by a resident the more space it free’s up! Another great tip we have gotten for our clients is that smaller parcels can have a box dedicated to them. When a smaller parcel arrives, you arrange it into the box based on either room number, numbered label or alphabetically.
#4 Ditch the paper-based approach
We’ve hinted at this throughout, but it’s time to provide more insight. Most mailrooms are built-up and set up with software from the get-go. This is in stark contrast to buildings that manage parcels through the reception. Often parcel management is overlooked by the Systems and Operations Managers to the detriment of the Front of House Staff, which means that all systems are implemented post facto, and there often isn’t the budget to buy parcel management software. Here's what the numbers say: If you receive 100 parcels a day, that’s over 800 hours a year to log parcels and packages. This costs an average of 12,000 GBP in wages (15 GBP/Hr). For some larger buildings, the costs are drastically higher; there might be 1 or more dedicated staff members just for handling deliveries and logging parcels, which comes to a full salary for just managing packages.
To find out just how effective our parcel management solution can be to your organisation, visit: https://kineticsoftware.com/parcels or get in touch directly today.
[i] Parcel Tracker is the number 1 rated Parcel Management Software by G2, Sourceforge and Capterra. https://www.parceltracker.com/solution/university
[ii] https://www.independent.co.uk/independentpremium/uk-news/global-parcel-theft-report-2022-b2204341.html