City Link are the latest courier to drag deliveries into the 22nd Century and start offering time slot prediction of when your parcel will arrive.
Spotted today by Tamebay reader Andrew from Shopforthehouse.com, they’re giving a two hour delivery window for a parcel out for delivery today, saving the need to wait in for the entire day.
There’s nothing more frustrating than waiting in all day for a courier, especially if they then fail to arrive on the day you expected them. There’s also nothing worse than after waiting for hours eventually nipping to the shop for five minutes to discover that the courier chose that exact time to show up and has now carded you.
DPD and Interlink are superb at keeping their customers informed of when parcels are due to arrive. Now City Link have also upped their game it’s time for other couriers to follow suit.
Now that a couple of couriers offer a predicted delivery slot service, consumers will want and demand it from all carriers. Whilst it may be a significant investment to figure out when a parcel is due to be delivered to within 15 minutes, it shouldn’t be beyond the wit of man and technology to at least inform the customer that their parcel will arrive in the “Morning”, “Afternoon” or “Evening”.
8 Responses
That is a really interesting change by City Link, from what I have seen over the last few years they have gone from being a real player to a poor courier. This type of service would really put them back in the market as a leader, that is of course as long as it works and is accurate. What they certainly don’t want to do is promise this 2 hour time slot and then turn up at a different time.
Using Fed Ex we absolutely love the service we get from them, but a time slot to our customer would certainly start to sway us to change.
Not sure if this is an April Fool (in October?).
I’ve had nothing but extremely POOR service from these guys. Getting them to turn up on the right day is an impossible task in itself and now asking their overstretched drivers to deliver within a certain time – I just cannot see that happening. Just another set of standards they’ll fail to adhere to.
“City Link are the latest courier to drag deliveries into the 22nd Century ”
22nd Century? Sounds like normal delivery time for Yodel or Hermes
Impressed. Delivery turned up at 13.33!
Maybe I’m just lucky, but CityLink tend to be very reliable in Kent, and deliver to my customers fast.
However, if you want to see really ace shipping have a look at DPD
You can follow their van on its route and even know your driver’s name. Out of interest I did this on one delivery. It isn’t quit real time, with a lapse of around 15 minutes for updates, but you can see exactly where your driver is on a local map, how many calls he has to do, and a constantly updating planned delivery time. Fantastic.
MyHermes are the only company who have let me down, but then only once. The real aggravation was calling a premium rate line to speak to anybody. That bit was really poor. I still use them when required and find if you drop off at a parcel shop they are good.