Online Christmas shopping – how to stop your serviced office staff being swamped by deliveries for your tenant clients
If you’re a serviced office provider, your staff are likely used to taking deliveries as part of the service you offer for your tenant clients. But do they get snowed under with festive deliveries at this time of the year? Find out more about the impact that constant parcel deliveries may have on your serviced office business and some solutions to this common modern problem.
As we learn to live with Covid-19, your workspace is probably filling up once again. But with pandemic online shopping habits only set to continue, people are re-routing their online deliveries from home to their workplace.
In addition to the normal volume of commercial deliveries coming into your workspace alongside sporadic personal packages, the Christmas season brings the arrival of generous hampers as well as an ever-increasing number of personal deliveries as people shop for gifts, party clothes and decorations online. As the Christmas shopping season ramps up, there may well be days when your front desk is piled sky-high with parcels, packages and personal deliveries.
So how do you control the relentless flow of online parcel deliveries for your tenants into your workplace? And what is the most efficient way to handle this, to ensure you are still offering a high level of service?
Above and beyond for your serviced office tenants
As a workspace provider, you are expected to provide everything that modern employees could want in a place of work. That stretches to parcel delivery services, but in today’s e-commerce heavy world that can be a big ask and a big drain on your staff resources.
However, employees working long hours loathe spending their precious Saturday morning standing in a Post Office queue. By including this service to your tenants in your contract, you demonstrate that you understand modern life and the demands it has on working people. It gives your tenants’ employees the ability to shop online on their lunch break and receive a parcel the next day, with no concern for the ease and efficiency of its delivery and whether they are going to be in a meeting or on the phone and therefore unable to take receipt themselves.
Greener e-commerce
Missed deliveries mean a wasted journey for the driver, and an additional journey to be made by the consumer to a depot to retrieve their parcel or a return journey by the courier. In fact, researchers at Kühne Logistics University and the University of Southampton have calculated that a 10% first-delivery failure rate leads to a 15% increase in CO2 emissions.
By offering a parcel service across your workspaces, you could provide a genuine impact on carbon emissions by reducing the environmental impact of online shopping. As a business and a workplace for lots of people, you could be combining numerous deliveries into one address, avoiding individual trips being made by delivery drivers and minimising the overall impact on the environment.
For both tenant satisfaction and as a proactive measure in our battle against climate catastrophe, a parcel policy could be a great move for your workspace, potentially even helping to underpin the CSR policies of your tenant businesses.
Potential problems of receiving packages on behalf of your serviced office tenants
While parcel collection on behalf of your tenants no doubt makes them happy and is good for the planet, it can create its own set of issues, including:
- Security concerns: who is responsible for these packages until your tenants take receipt of them? If they’re piled up behind your reception desk or in your lobby and someone light-fingered fancies the look of them, can you be held responsible for the value?
- Storage: and talking of piled up… with the avalanche of deliveries, especially at this time of year, have you got the space to hang onto lots of packages for your tenants until they are ready to collect them at lunchtime or the end of the day? And what impression might a prospective new client get if their first glance of your service office building is that it looks more like a warehouse than a contemporary workspace?
- Cost to your business: taking receipt of deliveries, calling tenants to tell them you have their package, interacting with couriers all take time – time that is effectively impacting on your bottom line.
The solution for green deliveries that doesn’t impact your bottom line
A parcel delivery box will enable you to offer a value-adding, environmentally friendly parcel reception service, without taking up valuable staff time – with the added advantage of providing a secure storage solution until your tenants are ready to take receipt of their package.
Features to look for:
- Size matters: as a serviced office provider with many tenant companies, you can expect to receive dozens of deliveries a day. Therefore it’s important to choose a parcel box that has a storage compartment big enough to accommodate several packages at once.
- Security: To reduce the risk of potentially being liable for replacing missing or stolen packages, you need confidence that your chosen parcel box is secure.
- Weather proof: With more and more e-commerce companies opting for environmentally friendly cardboard packaging, it’s essential that your parcel delivery drop box is weather proof.
The Penn Parcel Box can be securely installed outside your workspace, limiting disruption to your staff, and giving you the ability to resolve your tenant’s parcel problems. Installing a Penn Parcel Box comes with only a small initial investment and no ongoing impact on your bottom line – except the ability to charge tenants a little more for the privilege!
The Penn Parcel Box is a secure parcel drop box, which comes in a range of sizes – perfect to keep packages safe and dry. A small initial outlay could solve your tenants’ parcel problems, limit the disruption to your staff and support your tenants in reducing the carbon footprints of their businesses – it’s a win, win, win!
We hope the above information helps you to manage your tenants’ parcel deliveries better. If you feel your business would benefit from a secure, outdoor Penn Parcel Box to limit time spent receiving deliveries on behalf of your clients, then please contact our friendly team on 01424 429 641.