How Yodel can empower their staff to help save the UK high street
The Living High Street is our plan to save the UK’s big retail brands with people-led change — transforming the role they play on the high street, and enabling their people to innovate and collaborate.
A sign of retail’s problems are delivery services that bring products to customers’ doors, eliminating the need to visit the high street and give it footfall, buzz and community. So we’ve taken prominent delivery service Yodel, and imagined how they might contribute to a thriving high street.
Yodel Depot
Yodel have worked hard to be able to deliver packages of all sizes, and they work in close collaboration with the businesses that use them to understand their needs. Meanwhile, Click and Collect and free returns have become standard for customers and retailers, but often require the customer to do the work, making multiple store visits.
The Yodel Depot offers a tailored shipping service, efficiently shipping products from out-of-town warehouses to stores as required and allowing customers to pick up and return items from a variety of stores all at once.
A small Yodel fleet visits the local car park. They drop off a Click and Collect order for one customer — clothes from Marks & Spencer, hired camera from 3 and books from WH Smith — and at the same time pick up several returns from another customer. They then move on to drop off some inventory to a few of the stores on the high street who requested items earlier that day — three Large-sized jumpers to M&S and some Eccles Cakes for the bakery.
The fleet is on a constant loop from high street to warehouse throughout the day, allowing the stores to adapt their inventory on the fly and convert more customers. And it saves customers time on shopper admin, giving them more valuable dwell time in the high street. And with a more efficient, tailored delivery service there’d be fewer vans and lower air pollution in the town.
The Living High Street isn’t real… yet. It’s our plan that could save big retail brands from a slow and painful decline. It’s grounded in driving the metrics that retailers care about — footfall, basket size and first party data. And it’s all do-able today with off the shelf SaaS (software as a service). But what it does require is a transformation of how retailers think about themselves, how they organise themselves, and how they manage their people.
Please share The Living High Street within your organisation and beyond in the hope that CEO Michael Cooper hears about it. Of course we’d love to be part of making this happen — but more than that, we want to see it happen.
Read more:
- What is The Living High Street?
- A day on Living High Street for a working parent, a local business owner, a high street store manager and a local council rep
- How M&S, WHSmith, Zizzi, TSB, Thomas Cook and 3 can empower their people to save the UK high street
- The principles behind Living High Street
- How to make Living High Street real?
Albion is a creative transformation partner. We’ll work alongside your teams, empowering them to work in new ways, design new services, and unlock new growth. If that’s interesting, please get in touch with our CEO: jenny@albion.co.
