New challenges for the modern office
With the rise of online shopping, more and more people are receiving deliveries on a regular basis. Couple that with the fact that deliveries require a secure drop-off location, and many employees prefer having packages delivered to their offices instead of their homes.
And it’s not just small boxes from Amazon, either. It’s not uncommon for office managers and receptionists to deal with everything from standard parcels and envelopes, to food and flowers, to huge deliveries like tires and furniture!
Developing ad hoc solutions
Whether you know it or not, someone at your workplace is likely handling delivery management already. What we call delivery management is really just making sure the deliveries that arrive in your office get into the proper recipient’s hands.
Coming up with storage solutions and devoting time to managing deliveries is a real problem for many offices, and it usually falls to the office manager or receptionist to find a solution. Often, they come up with a manual process that includes writing or typing a description of each delivery that arrives, then calling or emailing the recipient to let them know to pick it up.
Most workplaces we’ve surveyed get between ten and one hundred packages per day, so even if every delivery was picked up the day it arrived, these packages still take up a lot of space.
And here’s something else we’ve learned: Most recipients don’t pick their packages up right away. Whether they’re busy or simply forget, these lingering deliveries mean offices end up using even more costly storage space.
A better way to manage deliveries
Envoy is on the forefront of solving this problem with a modern solution. Deliveries automates the majority of delivery management work, so your operations and admin teams can handle more business-critical issues.
The idea is simple, but the technology is smart. Here’s how it works:
You use your phone to snap a photo of each delivery’s shipping label. Envoy uses optical character recognition to “read” the recipient’s name and match it with an employee in your directory.
Then, that person gets automatically notified to pick up their delivery. When they come to the designated delivery area, they’ll collect their package. They can mark it as picked up in one of two ways: either on an (optional) iPad kiosk or directly from their notification.
And if the delivery hasn’t been picked up yet, Envoy can automatically remind the recipient on a schedule you specify.