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Parcel Perform’s Founders Dana von der Heide and Arne Jeroschewski have always been passionate about technology and e-commerce.
Having spent years working with retailers around the world, they noticed two gaps that needed to be filled.
First, merchants were sending their end-consumers to third-party tracking apps to keep track of their orders. This causes merchants to miss an important touchpoint with their customers for marketing, branding, and upselling. Secondly, retailers lacked refined data that allowed retailers to track the delivered goods.
These became the impetus for the eventual founding of Parcel Perform, a carrier-independent delivery experience SaaS platform. It currently has offices in Singapore, Vietnam, and Germany and has worked with over 600 logistics carriers worldwide. In 2018, they managed to raise US$1.1 million in an oversubscribed Seed funding round.
Just two years after its founding, Parcel Perform cemented its place as a crucial player in Singapore’s logistics ecosystem. They scored a collaboration with Singapore’s Infocomm Media Development Authority’s (IMDA) to develop the Locker Alliance pilot; an initiative to provide Singaporeans with access to a high-density network of parcel lockers. Recently, they were accredited by the IMDA under the Accreditation@SG Digital program.
In this exclusive interview, our CEO and Co-Founder JJ Huang had a chat with Dana to learn more about Parcel Perform’s growth and her view on the future of the logistics industry.
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Growth Tip 1: Demonstrate your domain expertise
Dana emphasized the importance of demonstrating your expertise in your domain. Simply put, show people you know what you are talking about.
Parcel Perform’s sister site, Parcel Monitor, was set up for this very purpose. It is the global knowledge-sharing community dedicated to e-commerce Logistics for retailers, logistics carriers, and end-consumers.
Parcel Monitor focuses on thought leadership by showcasing insights derived from logistics data in the form of infographics and visual content. Sharing these insights regularly helped them to start conversations with people in the industry and foster close partnerships. These include other players in the industry like Rakuten Insight, zenloop, and iPrice Group.
This focus on thought leadership also helped them to engage their existing customers with useful insights and cement their position as leaders in this space.
Dana added that it is also important to be consistent with the messaging and deliver quality insights. This ensures that your brand comes to mind whenever people need a solution like yours.
Growth Tip 2: Prioritize customer engagement
It is essential that businesses place a strong emphasis on customer engagement and account management, said Dana.
To the Parcel Perform team, it’s crucial that they take the time to understand their customers.
In order to create a direct connection with the customer, Parcel Perform assigns a Key Account Manager to each customer.
The Key Account Manager serves as a direct point of contact between their customers and Parcel Perform. Customers can direct whatever questions they have to the Key Account Manager. This satisfies the customer by easing the ability to approach Parcel Perform for any queries.
This helps streamline and facilitate the communication between Parcel Perform and its customers.
Furthermore, when each customer has one Parcel Perform representative attached to them, they’ll feel like their unique needs are being heard and taken care of. This makes customer service even more personalized.
“It’s important that both new and existing customers feel like we are by their side and understand their business needs”, Dana added.
Happy customers become one of your strongest sales channels. Through word-of-mouth (WOM), they may end up recommending your company to other businesses and prominent figures within the industry. This inadvertently drove Parcel Perform’s growth.
Growth Tip 3: Use the right social media channel for the right purpose
Since the pandemic started, many businesses have placed a stronger emphasis on their digital channels. Whether it was done to improve communication with their customers or to use them to promote deals, we’ve all seen an increase in their usage.
For Parcel Perform, they doubled down on using social media to distribute content. In particular, LinkedIn was a strong engagement channel for both sales and marketing efforts.
In times of uncertainty, people look to experts in the field for information. And this is exactly what Parcel Perform has been providing to its users since the pandemic broke out.
They focused on sharing relevant insights into their networks. This has helped them to engage their customers and social media followers with helpful content. This helped to keep the Parcel Perform brand top-of-mind in any conversations related to e-commerce logistics and the post-purchase experience.
While Dana emphasized the importance of using social media to distribute helpful information and engage with their customers and followers, businesses need to be mindful of the content that they share. Certain content formats are more suited for certain social media platforms. And the social media teams of every business should know these nuances.
Adapting to a COVID-19 world
COVID-19 massively accelerated the shift towards e-commerce.
It brought with it a surge in the demand for e-commerce services and new limitations for operating warehouses. Initially, Parcel Perform saw a dip in customer activity as both retailers and logistics operators struggled to cope with the new reality.
“According to our internal parcel volume data, early volume indications in February and March were below last year’s”, Dana said.
However, by the end of March, Dana noticed encouraging signs in the internal parcel data across customers.
Due to government regulations, countries around the world had to be placed on lockdown, and people weren’t allowed to leave their homes unless necessary. Places like gyms and entertainment providers were shut. This caused a surge in the demand for things like home workout equipment and game consoles. While many businesses were devastated by the pandemic, the e-commerce sector was booming.
There is also a surge in demand for the digitalization of business processes like logistics management. This in turn would lead to more demand for expertise and partners like Parcel Perform in the logistics space as more businesses speed up digital transformation efforts.
And Parcel Perform is coping up with the new reality well! They are continuing to invest in new initiatives to strengthen the infrastructure to bring even more customers while refining the customer engagement process.
The future ahead for Parcel Perform and the Logistics Industry
According to a Parcel Perform survey, Southeast Asia is the fastest-growing e-commerce zone with a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 62% over the past three years. And yet, delivery remains one of the greatest obstacles faced by regional customers.
Dana is excited about the rise in popularity of lockers and delivery points or collection points for e-commerce logistics in Southeast Asia.
Parcel Perform’s collaboration with Singapore’s IMDA isn’t a one-off thing.
Building upon the project, the Singapore government has recently announced the development of 1,000 parcel locker stations nationwide will be scheduled for completion by end-2021, with Parcel Perform powering its interoperability platform. The expansion of this initiative would further enhance the delivery experience for end-consumers and further contribute to Parcel Perform’s growth.
“We have seen across the world that consumers appreciate these flexible delivery options as not everyone is at home or wants to deal with every delivery individually”, Dana added.
In the last quarter of 2020, Parcel Perform’s focus is to prepare its customers for the fast-approaching e-commerce peak season. With all the biggest e-commerce sales coming up before the holiday season, one can be sure that they’ll be very busy in the coming months.
Fatima Bajwa
Fatima is a content marketer at Novocall.
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