With post and parcel technology making mainstream headlines this year, Mike Gratton of MBE Worldwide explains how a people first approach is key for success across the group’s brands.
Anyone who followed the recent news stories in the UK about the Horizon case will be well aware that the postal industry is feeling some friction between technology and the human beings it is supposed to help.
The global interest in artificial intelligence and the growing awareness of social media’s negative impacts highlight the need for a balanced approach to technology.
At MBE Worldwide, we believe that embracing technology, when used properly, brings out the best in people, helping them reach their full potential and delivering the best customer experience.
As a leadership team and a business, we integrate technology not to replace, but to enhance human capabilities, and not to stifle creativity, but to foster innovation. By leveraging the right combination of technology and human ingenuity, we aim to create solutions that benefit everyone involved.
So, while embracing the latest advances in tech, we believe that the human factor will also always be part of meeting the gold-standard in terms of customer experience and satisfaction.
As well as making good business sense, a people-focused approach is integral to the franchise opportunities we offer across our brands.
MBE Worldwide manages three franchised brands in the UK; Mail Boxes Etc., PACK & SEND and World Options, providing ecommerce, fulfilment, shipping, virtual office, marketing and print solutions to SMEs and consumers.
Delivering under these individual established brands and business concepts, the three companies together maintain and support over 260 franchisees, generating combined annual revenues of £80m.
With each brand focusing on a specific set of customer needs, each one has its own attractions, as a post and parcel industry franchise opportunity, for entrepreneurial individuals, based on the type of business they want to run.
Mail Boxes Etc., for instance, with its focus on high street locations across the UK is most attractive to people who are themselves people-people, who enjoy interacting with the general public on a day-to-day basis.
With the boom in ecommerce and working from home, a Mail Boxes Etc. franchise provides exceptional B2B sales opportunities, operating as a central hub and focal point for local businesses, especially those exporting and importing internationally.
PACK & SEND, on the other hand, has a particular specialist focus on secure and safe shipping of fragile, large, awkward and valuable items. As an approved service provider to LAPADA, the largest association of professional art and antiques dealers in the UK, it is a preferred supplier of art shipping services to galleries, collectors, dealers, artists and exhibitions around the world and our franchisees have handled packing and shipping of artworks by some of the world’s most famous artists, including Banksy, Damien Hirst, Andy Warhol, Tracey Emin and Jeff Koons, to name a few.
While Mail Boxes Etc. and PACK & SEND are built around a network of customer-facing service centres, World Options appeals to franchisees who are happy to work from home, or who are looking for an online addition to an existing business.
Managed through a network of over 100 franchised offices across the UK, the World Options portal provides a complete shipping solution, allowing customers to compare, book and track national and international shipments of parcels, pallets, freight transport, documents and imports, with customer service provided by a dedicated account manager.
While all these franchise opportunities offer different service structures for individual customers, and different working choices for franchisees, at the heart of it all, it all comes back to people.
That’s a reflection of the fact that, in the post and parcel industry, people are always part of the equation.
In essence, shipping should be a simple business: a case of getting an item from one specific location to another in the quickest time possible. But in reality, how that process plays out very much depends on the exact nature of the item in question and also the locations it needs to be moved between.
Different combinations of these seemingly simple factors can create very different scenarios in each case. For instance, shipping a small gift package between two addresses in the UK will provide a very different customer experience to shipping the same package to Europe, the Americas or South East Asia. The same again for an oversize parcel containing industrial goods, whether that’s nationally or internationally.
But, while even such simple elements can be more complicated than they might at first appear, there’s also the people factor that is a part of every scenario that has to be taken into account. At each end of the process, there is the person sending the shipment and also the person waiting to receive it.
A crucial element in achieving a successful experience is the understanding that both these are human beings. And, where there is a human factor in any process, there is a further factor: emotion.
Customer anxiety and frustration in the courier industry almost uniformly comes from unknowns, especially when it comes to parcels’ whereabouts in transit.
While there have been huge advances in tech to help mitigate these challenges over the past few years, the truth is that when things go awry, a complete reliance on tech will always run the risk of a “computer says no” experience for already frustrated customers.
No matter how smart the tech becomes, given the option, humans would always rather deal with an actual human when they have a problem – or even just a perceived problem.
A real human experience is something that cannot be fully delegated to the machines to achieve maximum customer satisfaction, and it’s hard to imagine a future where it will be.
So, as AI advances and as the Horizon scandal has shown us, even the greatest tech in the world cannot replace the reassurance factor that comes from knowing you are dealing with an actual human, who is on your side and dedicated to helping you achieve what you need.
The post and parcel industry is a vital component of the global economy. The world, quite literally, relies on us to keep things moving. It’s our duty and role to do that as efficiently as possible and to the highest standards, which means it’s more important than ever that we value the humans that work within the industry at every stage of the process, supporting them with increasingly advanced tech, but recognising that they are, and will always be, people first.
About Mike
Mike Gratton is managing director of World Options Holdings Ltd which, as part of MBE Worldwide, manages three franchise brands in the UK; Mail Boxes Etc., PACK & SEND and World Options. In 2023, MBE Worldwide served over one million business customers worldwide through its multi-brand operations (Mail Boxes Etc. [except in the US and Canada], PrestaShop, PostNet, PACK & SEND, Spedingo.com, AlphaGraphics, Multicopy, Print Speak, GEL Proximity and World Options), generating €1.4 billion.
