COVID-19 changed everything, online shopping and deliveries being one of the strongest affected. From March 2019 to March 2020, online shopping increased by 74%. These sales pushed delivery services over the limit, causing severe delays. DHL had a daily parcel delivery increase from 5.3m to 9m per day, an issue the service only experienced during the Christmas shipping season. Shipping delays cause a domino effect; property managers have never had to deal with a year-round influx of high volumes of packages for their tenants.
Mailrooms and reception areas are becoming more and more the nervous systems of the building environment. Tenants look to building managers to deliver/process their packages on time once they have been delivered on site. However, the influx of mail, as shown in the above graphic, is putting a major strain on property managers and building resources.
Before blaming the property managers, you need to consider these locations were never designed for these volumes of delivery. Consumers buy everything, from groceries to medications online and have them shipped via FedEx, UPS, USPS, and DHL to their homes. This has created an unprecedented logistical burden on the built environment.
Parcel areas for residential buildings are often cramped and lack the storage space to store all the packages that are now deliveries in on a daily basis. Mailroom staff members have been forced to do more with less, often using pen and paper logbooks that take up valuable time. Overwhelmed with deliveries, front-of-house staff often lack time to give tenants the proper attention and attend to their requests and duties. This dropping in quality-of-service manifests itself in the form of unhappy tenants and lower occupancy rates.
Moving on From Spreadsheets and Paper Logs
To create a positive experience for tenants regarding deliveries, property managers should invest in Mailroom Management Software. It can allow staff to focus on providing a great tenant experience rather than using all their time sorting packages.
COVID-19 isn’t over. The Western world is about to go into the colder months, where numbers will serge again. Any slowdown in parcel deliveries property managers have seen over the past few months are coming to an end. Similar to 2020, the increase in deliveries will coincide with the holidays, as shown in Figure 1, compounding the problem.
The benefits of implementing a parcel management solution speak for themselves, as you can see from figure 2 on parcel management time with vs without mailroom software. The property managers and employees at locations with mailroom management software ccan subsequently spend more time improved the living/working experience and less locating, storing, and delivering mail.
How PropTech can Improve Resident Satisfaction
Mailroom software solutions are designed to make your property management business more efficient. Also known as PropTech, it’s a category of comprehensive software that helps solve issues faced by the property and real estate industry.
Many organizations use mailroom management software to boost productivity, improve tenant experience and put into place repeatable processes. COVID-19 changed everything for mail and parcels, and these changes are here to stay. Tenants are embracing online deliveries to save them time and money. Property managers and concierges should be embracing technology to help them turn this challenge into an opportunity!
