An Integrated Courier Services Application: A New User Experience
There are numerous courier services available locally or worldwide. However, the most services only applicable at their respective company’s whereby the pricing information is often hidden and customers usually need to call the company or visit their respective website or application to get quote, then make a price comparison with other company’s courier services quotes for them to get their preferable quotation. This could be very time consuming mainly due to the inflexibility services whilst with certain terms and conditions apply only customers able to enjoy the door-to-door delivery service. Hence, the main objective of this project is to integrate a few of the courier services price and information in one stop whilst providing a low-cost peer-to-peer service to assist customer in delivering their parcel. The application will be able to generate the quotes of all the selected courier services in one application to ease the customer and enable a price comparison for each of the selected courier services company. The usability study was conducted and analysis of respondents’ feedbacks shows positive interest of having this application and would opt to use the low-cost peer-to-peer services. With Parcel2Go Mobile Application, the problem of inconveniency of the customer and the inflexibility of services that have in the current courier services will be solved as this application will ease the people who wants to deliver their parcels.
The population of Malaysia in the year between 2014 to 2016 has approximately 31.7 million and the annual growth rate between 2015-2016 is 1.5% [1]. Among its evolving population, constant movement of people and goods from one location to another is expected to occur due to certain cause or situation. If an individual who does not possess their own transportation (vehicles) to travel from one place to an-other, it can be a quite stressful process for them [2]. This barrier eventually happens when an individual is initiating to perform the action of delivering parcels and goods. Thus, door to door delivery service can be invaluable help for the individual [3]. Courier services can be defined as a contracted company whose responsibility as an outsourcing medium in assisting the role of transporting the goods of a customer from one geolocation to another [4]. Generally, the goods are related to the delivery of documents, packages, printed materials, parcels and letters [5]. Typically, the postage transportation process consists of mail collection, input sorting, organize the movement of mail (global area transportation), output sorting and mail distribution. Thus, it is better for ICT to assist the complexity of the process to make sure that the correct mail can be received by the right customer on time. Nevertheless, an average person or online seller would not easily access to the courier services due to their inflexibility in services. This is because it requires a company registration, office address and a monthly committed volume for them to enjoy the privilege of courier services. This has directly placed numerous online sellers in a dilemma situation as the high shipping cost of courier services would turn customers away, whereas normal mail services would take a very long time to deliver the pack-ages to the buyers. Besides, customers need to run around to quote rate such as to make a call to the courier service company or visit their respective website to get quotation. With that, a price comparison could be done with other company’s courier services rate to get their preferable rate. This is because different company courier services will have a different rate thus it is time consuming for the customer to check one by one. In addition, customers tend to feel troublesome to travel to the post or courier office in purpose to post their documents if the distances are far apart yet not owning any transportation. The door-to-door delivery service that provided by courier services could only be enjoyed with certain terms and conditions apply or additional charges will be charged to the customer. Therefore, this paper presents a study that integrate the selected courier service providers in one stop to save user’s time in terms of price comparison while develop a low-cost peer-to-peer courier service for the users. The scope of the study does not only limit itself to the concept of integrating the quotation of the courier services but also matching up people who wants to deliver their parcels and people willing to help them and earn while travelling.
Courier services applications are widely used in the era of rapid technology advancement. The developed applications, Parcel2Go has become important for people who frequently want their items to be delivered, especially for people who are conducting online businesses. The application be able to generate the quotes of selected courier services in one application and enable a price comparison services. The conducted usability study analyse of respondents’ feedbacks shows positive interest. The integrated courier service application implements the concept of service innovation to solve inconvenience of courier service users of getting quotation and the need to travel to post office to drop their items. With the Parcel2Go Mobile Application, the system generate the quotation from different courier services whilst matching up people who needs parcels to deliver from their doorstep to another and people willing to help them and earn while travelling.