Enhance the delivery experience with the people-centric approach

24th September 2020

Understanding the human being that use your products is crucial to whether your products or services are better than your competitors. With just 5 steps you can improve your delivery experience by using the people-centric approach.

Big data, new technology, automation, but what about the human being? We are so data-driven and technology focused in most industries today that we might end up forgetting the human being we serve. This can potentially mean that our company is not as competitive as it could be.

According to Design Anthropologist, Anna Kirah, companies will only be truly successful when they centralize the human being rather than economy and technology:

“Companies should create products with their customers rather than for their customers. Looking at people who use your products and understand how they use your products in a context is the essence of using the people-centric approach to improve your business. When you build on meaning and relevance, you get solutions that are coveted and fruitful as well as an efficient organization. Meaning and relevance are crucial to whether your product or service is better than your competitors’, also when it comes to delivery.”

We have to understand the people we serve through the service or the product that we sell. This also applies to deliveries, both B2C and B2B. It might be that robot technology suit some situations, and in other situations it is better to use human contact. The most important of all is that companies need to apply this understanding. That is what the people-centric approach is about, according to Anna Kirah.

If you want to use the people-centric approach to improve delivery in your company, it is quite easy, as the people-centric approach in all its simplicity is about being open. 

How to use the people-centric approach

Whether you are a shipper, distributor or carrier of goods or parcels, Anna Kirah’s recipe for using the people-centric approach is as follows:

1. Practice active listening on both employees and customers
   Active listening means that you do not have your own agenda, but instead try to see things from a new perspective.
2. Ask people more than you do today
   We often draw conclusions from our own assumptions. Be curious of others, and creativity will appear.
3. Be willing to take on a challenge
   Challenges moves us professionally and personally.
4. Involve people
   Create withyour customers and employees and not for them.
5. Be humble to people, not numbers
   Numbers are not the absolute truth. We must dare to look at the people behind the numbers, both internally and externally.

Want to learn more about the people-centric approach. Watch Anna Kirah present it in this video.