Getting Ready For A Holiday Season: How Logistics Automation Could Help You Make All Ends Meet

Amazon has announced that the company is to hire 250,000 extra workers to meet the underway holiday season. It looks like they know something about the commenced high season. When even the biggest player gets ready on such a massive scale, it means the holiday season promises to be as hot as never.

This news means that your logistics company should be prepared too. It sounds way too obvious, but taming the holiday chaos is no easy feat. There are several best practices that can significantly help logistics companies get ready for the holiday marathon. And this article is all about these strategies that will help you prepare for demand peaks on all levels of your logistics business.

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Realistic Expectations is the Law 

Time is a premium asset for logistics services, which is why consumers are so sensitive to timely delivery. When it comes to holidays, this sense is particularly fragile: nobody wants to leave their family and friends without a Christmas present just because a logistics company failed to deliver it on time.

For that reason, you have to set realistic expectations of how many orders you will be able to process without delays. If you see that it’s somewhat risky to commit to one more order, it means you should not go for it. No doubt, it’s much better to process fewer orders with excellent timing and quality of service than try to cope with a workload three times exceeding your regular capacity and get half of these orders failed.

Instead, set an acceptable capacity threshold for your company and don’t go over it. Additionally, preserving 15%-20% of this capacity for mitigating any short-term risks will be a wise thing to do as well.

Critical Processes Checkup is Your Contingency Plan

Since you need to assess your capacity, it’s logical to check on the most critical processes in your company: those that you believe may go wrong or have already gone under a strain of a high demand. It can be anything from warehouse space to packaging and availability of couriers for last-mile delivery.

Nobody knows the weak spots of your company better than you do, so it’s critical to identify them and fix them right now. When the holiday season comes, fighting fire on a burning bridge between your company and delighted customers is obviously too late.

Just let’s get back to the news about Amazon’s announcement. It was barely the end of September, but the company already started hiring workers for the holiday season. Staff shortage is a common problem, so Amazon acted beforehand to have enough time to create sufficient workforce capacity and train newly hired employees. A perfect example to follow!

Customer Experience is Your Holy Cow

Consumers are especially distressed during the holiday period, so ordering and getting presents delivered should be a pleasant errand rather than another challenging task. You need to make sure that you have enough competent employees working in your customer support team.

The maximal availability of customer support goes without saying here. Various unpleasant situations will happen one way or another, so your support staff should be ready to handle them to help your worried customers.

On a side note, it’s vital to make delivery of orders as predictable as possible. Consumers will be certainly concerned with the exact time of their orders' arrival. You probably already have an order tracking system integrated with a customer-facing mobile app, but if you don’t, it’s time to implement one. However, building the entire mobile app from scratch may not be a realistic goal for this holiday season, but adopting a third-party software solution for tracking packages via your website is quite feasible.

Logistics Automation and Self-Service are Your Best Friends

Automating processes is one of the most reliable ways to unload your logistics company. While the basic processes are automated, your workers can focus on completing tasks that require a greater human involvement. Any logistics automation from warehouse robots and self-driving vehicles to parcel lockers and autonomous pick-up drop off (PUDO) points will significantly increase the capacity of your company. As a result, you won’t face any hiccups with the main operations, while the quality of your services will be up to consumers' expectations during the holiday season.

Speaking about self-service, it’s another way to speed up the delivery process and unload the demand during the holiday season. Again, self-service lockers, automated PUDOs, and out-of-home delivery solutions like parcel lockers will give consumers more flexibility and freedom in sending and getting their packages without interacting with your operators. On top of that, such self-service spots will decrease the number of people staying in line at post offices, thereby taking a part of the holiday season brunt from the shoulders of your staff. 

Returns are the Thing You Must not Forget About

Once you’ll see an ocean of packages, it’s natural that you’ll see a river of online order returns as well. It’s another pitfall where your logistics company can fall into and lose customers to the closest competitor.

That’s why it’s essential to pay separate attention to creating an easy and understandable return process. It should be as easy as sending or receiving a regular parcel.

Your internal operations are likely to change, as you need to contact your biggest e-commerce and retail partners to negotiate how you will handle returns: Who will pay for the return? Do partners know how they would like to sort the returned parcels? What if a returning parcel gets lost? These and other questions are better get settled right now because there is a little chance you’ll be able to nail them on the go when the hell of the holiday season breaks loose.

Fix the Roof Before it Starts to Rain

Whatever recommendation you’ll follow, you need to remember that you should do it right now to make it work. For instance, installing and testing automation equipment obviously takes time, so it’s better start looking for vendors at your earliest.

Again, Amazon starts hiring people for the holiday season peak now for a reason. This message is simple, but if you have doubts whether it’s a perfect timing to get ready for the demand peak, here is the sign for you: YES, IT IS.

So, with above-mentioned recommendations in mind, get your logistics company jet-set for holiday seasons without a further ado!

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