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Brands that take some time to analyse their decisions while choosing logistics partners, scale faster, said Ajith Pai, COO of Delhivery, during a fireside chat with Shradha Sharma, Founder and CEO of YourStory, at TechSparks 2023. 

Speaking on the factors that D2C brands must be mindful of when selecting a logistics partner, Pai emphasised on reliability.

Having been associated with one of the largest logistics players in the country for more than a decade, Pai believes that the less brands have to worry about logistics, the more successful they will be in terms of the choices they make.

“It (logistics) should be the silent engine working at the back and delivering what is promised,” said Pai, speaking at the ‘D2C Playbook Track’, powered by Delhivery and YourStory, on customer-centric logistics and the role of technology.

Brands, he said, should think ahead of time and select a logistics partner that can handle scale.

“The last five years have belonged to D2C brands … COVID has boosted the D2C market … What we saw as the general (trend and growth) in ecommerce earlier, D2C is getting into that phase,” Pai said. 

From the time a brand receives an order till it is delivered or returned, in exceptional cases, the logistics partner’s job is to make the entire journey seamless. 

“Our job at Delhivery is to make the purchase journey extremely seamless. We also want to help brands deliver their promises to consumers,” Pai said.

Finally, a logistics partner’s job is to help brands figure out the right promise to provide to the customer and then fulfil that promise. Pai explained how this is a complex problem, made up of many small decisions.

“It is basically integrating the order management system with the courier management system and the reverse flow of it,” he said.

Customer experience eventually boils down to reliability and communication.

“The first one is solved by the infrastructure. The second one is a bit tricky–too much or too little communication is a problem,” Pai said.

In order to fix the problem, Delhivery has moved to a completely locality-based business. If a customer enters a wrong pincode, the chances of a parcel not reaching them via Delhivery is far less than other service providers, and investing in the right intelligent systems has made it possible, Pai elaborated.

“It was a massive investment–more than money, we had to invest a lot of time in building the database, getting the consumer information, but these ultimately improve the customer experience in the last 2-3% of exceptions.”

Concluding the fireside chat, Pai said that, going ahead, customisation in logistics will eventually be possible when driven from systems and not done manually.

“With generative AI coming in, the extreme last mile of communication will be intelligently resolved by the system. AI will effectively ask a question, get the answer, and respond back to customers, and then direct systems to execute it in a certain way,” he said.