We had a pleasure to chat with Dana von der Heide, Founder & CCO Parcel Perform, about her professional experience, parcel industry, cooperation with Nespresso, and much more!
If you’d have to tell us in one short sentence – what is Parcel Perform? We’ve read that you’ve founded the company. What brought you to this?
We’re the leading carrier-independent parcel tracking software for enterprise clients, with over 600 logistics carriers worldwide integrated on our platform.
Prior to founding Parcel Perform, I worked in various global strategy and regional business development roles in international logistics companies. That’s also how I met my Co-Founder Arne. Given our combined logistics and e-commerce background, we saw a huge gap in the market to improve the customer experience after checkout and provide more transparency in logistics.
Most of the merchants leave the delivery experience in the hand of the carriers and have little control of the checkout experience and the carriers performance. However, consumers view the delivery experience as part of the merchant’s responsibility and it can make or break their trust. Therefore in 2016, we started Parcel Perform to improve the post-purchase experience for the merchants and their consumers worldwide.
How does your workday look like? What are your responsibilities?
We have offices in Berlin, Ho Chi Minh and Singapore and I spend my time across these offices, so my day to day varies quite a bit. One thing that’s constant – it’s always challenging and keeps me on my toes! Every morning across all offices, we have our daily standup where everyone shares their focus and tasks for the day. This ensures the team is aligned and we work collaboratively.
On Mondays, I spend most of my time catching up on updates with the sales, marketing and product team. My Co-Founder and I also take time out of our schedules once a week for a ‘blue skies’ session. This is a creative space for us to brainstorm new ideas, reflect on the business and plan for the future.
If I’m not with the team, I’m meeting our customers – who come from the e-commerce, logistics and B2B space. Next to spending my time with the team, I love to get their perspective on things and discuss how we support them to further professionalise their business and ultimately help them grow.
On Fridays, we end the week off with a ‘Retrospective’ session with the entire team, again across all offices, along with a couple of beers. We reflect back on our week and share what we were happy or unhappy about.
Back in June, you said about Parcel Perform: “I think we face more opportunities than challenges”. What are the opportunities?
We as a business sit on a massive amount of logistics data and that’s where the huge opportunity lies. A huge focus for us recently has been on how we can leverage machine learning to predict delivery trends and transit times for our customers.
We believe that with the right data insights, companies are able to make smarter, more informed decisions for their e-commerce business and improve customer experience. We will continue to expand our product portfolio to also help our clients with benchmarking – stay tuned for product updates in the coming weeks and months.
However, let’s come back to challenges. What do you think is the biggest challenge in providing flawless customer experience?
E-commerce is on the rise and there’s a huge amount of transactions and parcel delivery movements. In fact, parcel volumes are growing faster than the overall e-commerce industry. However, with multiple carriers and merchants, all these data are segregated and on different platforms, in different languages, time zones etc. As such, it is not possible to make sense of the data to draw any insights. But that’s the first important point in order to manage the after-checkout process seamlessly and within your own branding.
With Parcel Perform as a neutral party, aggregating parcel data from multiple carriers, we enable merchants to easily retrieve parcel information and show them in their branding for flawless customer experience.
What are the most common mistakes when it comes to logistics? Why does the e-commerce sector keep making them, in your opinion?
The most common mistake in e-commerce logistics is operating without the consumer and technology in mind. Carriers and merchants need to become more customer-centric and pass the power of choice to the consumer: the consumer should be able to choose their delivery speed, when they want their item delivered, and where they want their parcel delivered to. In a connected world, regular updates and transparency on the delivery is a must.
I think that the e-commerce sector is still embracing up to this change, but we look forward to more carriers and merchants transform their operations and leverage logistics as a powerful lever for their growth.
We’ve seen many interesting insights and testimonials, one of them was from Nespresso. Could you tell us a bit more – how did you help them?
I usually believe it’s actually best to let customers speak for us 🙂 We are working with many global brands such as Nespresso, Wayfair, Decathlon, just to name a few. As their tracking partner, Parcel Perform aggregates and standardizes logistics data across multiple markets and presents the streamlined data in multiple languages for various use cases.
We help our customers to update their end-consumer on the delivery status while exposing their own brand to create a powerful touchpoint for sales. Our delivery notifications can be fully customized and help to remind customers to be at home and also gather NPS feedback.
We also support the customer service and logistics teams with full transparency on the delivery status, any issues in the delivery and full visibility across the carriers performance. In Nespresso’s case, we are currently also rolling out a new SLA compliance feature which helps them to ensure a global SLA for all their last-mile deliveries.
Where do you see the post and parcel industry in 2025? How can e-commerce get prepared on it?
I believe in 2025, we will see the introduction of more innovative solutions by traditional players, as they move from the current testing phase towards execution.
At the same time, with the continued rise of e-commerce, 2025 will see a more open post and parcel industry – more new startups will be attracted to enter the market while the 100+ startups already established will further stabilize their foothold or exit.
I truly believe in the power of collaboration between the established logistics companies, the upcoming startups as well as other governmental bodies who strive to improve the logistics experience together. We are doing the same in Singapore where we partner with Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA).
What is your plan to rule the e-commerce world?
Data will be the centre of everything – driving insights, intelligence and customer experience. With the right data and insights, the entire e-commerce industry will be pushed to further improve itself benefitting both the consumer and merchant.
Thank you for your thoughts, Dana!
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