Parcel Tracking Challenges and How to Overcome Them

In the past, contacting a customer service team was often the only way to find out the status of your parcel. In today’s highly modern and digitalised era, though, tracking shipments has become quick and easy thanks to advanced innovations and technological advancements. 

New technologies allow customers to stay updated about shipment progress, from monitoring the parcel’s real-time geographical location to determining the estimated delivery date and time. According to a report, 88% of consumers consider the real-time tracking of their orders important.

Subsequently, where shipment tracking significantly boosts customer satisfaction, maintaining your tracking system is crucial for seamless and stress-free shipment management. 

Let’s examine the most common parcel tracking challenges and how to overcome them. 

What Does “Parcel Tracking” Mean Exactly? 

Parcel tracking, often called Shipment Tracking, monitors package delivery status within the supply chain process. 

This system allows customers to get information about their package at every step, from the moment of order confirmation and receiving the tracking ID to the receiver successfully receiving the package. 

Parcel tracking is undoubtedly a revolutionary advancement in the logistics industry. It is available through online portals, websites, and applications, allowing customers to keep a keen and comprehensive eye on their parcels. As a result, clients’ queries decrease, helping the shipping business keep its customers well-informed, happy, and ultimately satisfied. 

Whether you are an e-commerce startup that needs to deliver packages within 24 hours to its customers or want to send a birthday gift to a loved one through international shipping services, parcel tracking features can make your process easy, quick, and stress-free. 

Here’s a quick rundown of the benefits of using parcel tracking technology for monitoring your shipments:

• Enables clear, complete, and comprehensive shipment details. 
• Prominently reduces the risks of parcel theft, loss, and misplacement. 
• Reduce customers’ queries and questions regarding deliveries. 
• Enhances customer satisfaction with reliability and transparency.
• Allows automated notifications for progress, troubles, and other alerts. 
• Makes the shipping process simple, quick, and stress-free. 

Common Parcel Tracking Challenges and Their Solutions

Here’s a breakdown of the most common parcel tracking challenges and possible solutions to overcome them. 

Lack of Real-Time Location Details

If customers cannot track the real-time location of their parcels, they can experience frustration, stress, and confusion regarding their order’s delivery, which may reduce their overall satisfaction. 

With the help of shipment tracking tools like trackmypackage.net, your customers can continuously monitor the location of their parcels. The shipments are often equipped with GPS, so your logistics company and customers can track and be informed about their real-time location. This decreases the risk of parcel misplacements. 

Outdated Status in Supply Chain

Another common challenge of tracking shipments is getting outdated/ incomplete information, especially about the status of packages in the supply chain. Customers can get anxious and assume your company is incompetent in delivering orders.

By utilising effective and comprehensive tracking technologies, you can ensure that your customers can track the real-time status of their parcels in the supply chain. Whether the package is out for delivery or stuck for customs clearance, they can get quick information about its current status with only a few clicks. 

Limited and Ineffective Accessibility

Accessibility is one of the biggest challenges in digital parcel tracking systems. If your website is unresponsive, difficult to navigate, takes a lot of time to load, or does not have downloadable applications, your customers will have difficulty accessing information about their packages. It is important to ensure easy and quick accessibility for your customers. By having an effective website and smartphone applications with accurate and comprehensive tracking features, you can boost your customers’ satisfaction and easily win their trust.

No Delivery Date and Time

Estimated delivery dates and times are essential to lessen customers’ anxiety about the shipping status. With the expected delivery schedule, customers can stay informed about receiving their parcels and avoid any inconvenience. 

The package tracking tool also shows the estimated delivery date and time for parcels. Thus, you can ensure that the receivers are available at the delivery addresses within the given time range for receiving and other formalities. This reduces the chances of failed delivery attempts and ensures successful deliveries.

Receiving No Alerts

Your customers’ parcel could experience any trouble or uncertainty, like the worst weather conditions, customs clearance documentation problems, or heavy traffic on the planned delivery route. In such situations, their parcel delivery can either be cancelled or delayed, and they must contact your logistics company’s customer support for further processing and issue resolution. 

It is important to send quick alerts or notifications to your customers to inform them about problems with their deliveries. You must ensure the system is responsive enough to automatically generate alerts and send them on time. 

Restricted Integration with Logistics Companies

Customers can experience delays in updating the parcels’ status details because of ineffective or limited integration with the logistics company’s data. This can create frustration and make the shipping experience uncertain, resulting in customer dissatisfaction and loss of trust.  

A parcel tracking tool must seamlessly integrate technologies like cloud management, Internet of Things, and other digital advancements with a logistics company and provide accurate and timely details to customers. It ensures a smooth and disruption-free tracking experience and makes the process transparent and reliable. 

Transit History

In case of theft, loss, damage, or misplacement, accessing the transit history of the shipment is important to understand the problem and effectively solve it. However, if your parcel tracking tool doesn’t provide these details accurately or completely, it will be complex for customers and the logistics company to address the issue. 

In this case, tracking tools should provide a complete transit history of the packages to overcome such potential troubles. From order confirmation by the logistics company to its current status on the supply chain process, transit data should be accessible so the customers and the company can troubleshoot the problem and solve it for a quick, easy, and effective delivery. 

Final Words

Whether you send your customers e-commerce parcels or deliver important documents to another state, tracking your shipment is essential. It makes the shipment process transparent and well-informed and helps you build a trustworthy and reliable relationship with your leads. 

Like its powerful positive impacts, the tracking system’s glitches, troubles, and ineffectiveness can damage customer satisfaction. To get an accurate and comprehensive tracking experience, it is important to use a reliable tracking tool for shipment monitoring processes.  

With such importance placed on successful logistics operations within the supply chain, at The Institute of Supply Chain Management (IoSCM) we offer a range of professional qualifications in logistics and transport, each carefully designed to match modern businesses’ needs and upskill professionals at all stages of their logistics careers.

The IoSCM Logistics and Transport training programmes are available as part of our wide selection of Supply Chain Management courses, covering every aspect of the industry. Start earning an internationally recognised qualification today.