For years, the popularity of online shopping has surged, thanks to the improvement of last-yard logistics and the convenience this provides to customers, who can order items online and expect to receive them within a day or two of purchase.
Already, the stream of deliveries from e-commerce stores was placing a strain on building mailrooms and receptions as they struggled to keep up with the influx of orders. However, over the last two years, as a result of global lockdowns and the closing of brick-and-mortar stores across the country for periods of the year, consumers are shopping online more than ever.
This is still true despite the fact non-essential stores have reopened; consumers’ shopping habits have changed for good and online shopping will remain at a permanently higher level than before the pandemic.
Graph showing the number of average deliveries made per person per month in pre-COVID compared to post-COVID times. Data from across 34,000 deliveries from Parcel tracker Mailroom Software)
This is bad news for apartment and office buildings, which were already struggling to keep track of parcel inventory and deliver parcels to their recipients on time.
To cope with the enormous popularity of online shopping, mailrooms and receptions are having to adapt and find ways to keep better track of tenants’ orders and ensuring their safe delivery.
Why is this important?
In the modern world, people expect efficiency and convenience as the globe has become more digitally-enabled and speed and ease has become king.
As a result, after being ensured next day delivery, tenants expect their parcels to be made available to them as soon as they’re able to pick them up – a feat which many mailrooms struggle with. In some cases, overburdened mailrooms even lose or mislay parcels.
Such delays and cases of lost packages decrease tenant satisfaction, leading to more complaints and damaging word-of-mouth being spread about your building, which can affect occupancy in the future if the issues aren’t sorted.
What can mailrooms do to overcome this?
While countless advances have been made by e-commerce businesses to ensure quick, seamless parcel delivery to their customers, a number of other technological advances have been made to help mailrooms keep up.
At best, mailrooms’ method of tracking deliveries typically involved typing a record of the deliveries onto an Excel spreadsheet or even writing the deliveries down on scraps of paper.
However, PropTech is helping mailroom managers and property owners all over the world adapt to the technological age and make their parcel management system more seamless.
Mailroom Software by Parcel Tracker, 1) Log delivery 2) Notify recipient 3) Collect proof of pickup
A game-changer for both mailroom staff and tenants has been the implementation of mailroom management software, which allows parcels and packages to be accounted for in seconds, and allows them to be easily found when tenants want to pick them up.
Moreover, the development of smart lockers has helped to automate the delivery process in countless buildings, providing a contactless hub that tenants can pick up their deliveries from at any time of the day, whether that’s 12pm or 3am.
The last crucial part of arming your mailroom to cope with vast amounts of deliveries is to ensure your staff are equipped with excellent receptionist skills, so they’re able to use the PropTech to its fullest potential and make the mailroom as efficient as it can be.
If apartment and office building managers want to ensure tenant satisfaction by enabling instant, easy pick up of their packages and parcels – and relieve some of the burden currently endured by staff – PropTech can help to revolutionize mailrooms so they’ll never struggle again.
Article by Parcel Tracker, The AI powered Parcel Management and Mailroom Software
