Hermes Germany has rapidly introduced an extra ‘non-contact’ delivery option enabling staff to take a picture of a customer signature to record a successful delivery.
The company already switched last week to non-contact deliveries that do not require signing on the hand-scanner in order to protect the health of the deliverers and customers by avoiding contact.
Marco Schlüter, Chief Operations Officer (COO) at Hermes Germany, explained: “This new form of contactless parcel acceptance enables personal delivery at the front door while maintaining the currently urgently required distance. The most important thing is that we do everything we can to ensure that deliverers and customers are not able to infect each other.”
In contrast to other parcel services, Hermes is not dispensing with the recipient's signature but rather establishing a new digitally supported signature process. The signature also ensures complete handover documentation in the event of a complaint.
In future, customers can confirm receipt of their shipment directly on the label of their parcel. Deliverers then use their scanner to photograph the signature and information on the package label so that the delivery is clearly documented.
This is feasible because all of the approximately 18,000 scanners used in delivery and at the logistics locations are equipped with a camera.
Around 11,000 deliverers nationwide who are on the road for Hermes every day have been informed about this innovation and trained accordingly, and the new delivery process was launched nationwide yesterday.
Meanwhile, Hermes said it is currently not experiencing any operational restrictions or delivery delays in Germany. However, delays on intra-European transport routes are occurring due to border controls, even though the movement of goods is exempt from cross-border travel bans.
The B2C specialist also pointed out that it is currently not seeing any signs of additional volumes due to the corona crisis and believes it is too early to predict the consequences of the pandemic for online retailing. At present, the priority lies in supplying everyday goods to the population, it underlined.
Hermes already stated that it expects about 70-80% of its 16,000 parcel shops in Germany will remain open as they are integrated into retail outlets such as foodstores, pharmacies, petrol stations and dry-cleaning stores which the government has allowed to stay open.
