Around the world, with your parcel

Vishwanath Kulkarni

Technology has brought in changes -- and increased customer expectation. To provide better and cost-effective services, companies are being forced to design, develop and implement innovative solutions to provide value-added services.

This is especially true in a time-sensitive industry such as logistics. TNT India, a joint venture between TPG and Redington Ltd, leveraging on the technological strength of its parent company TPG, has extended a host of Web-based services to customers.

Gone are the days when customers had to depend on acknowledgement receipts to check whether their consignment had reached its destination. With the evolving of supply chain management solutions, customers can not only book their consignments from home or office, but can also track the status of the shipment, check and negotiate the price online at the click of a button or by using mobile phones.

TNT India has introduced a range of services on the Internet, including Web Tracker, Price Tracker and M-Tracking, an SMS-based tracking system. The 24-hour, real-time, online track and trace system, which helps customers to track their consignment, is linked worldwide and is continuously updated, second-to-second, says Jinendra Sancheti, Managing Director, TNT India.

So how does the system work? All that the customer has to do is to log into the company's Web site, go to the tracking section and key in the consignment reference number. He can easily track the status of the shipment. This service is relevant to India as 89 per cent of Net users use the Net for e-mails. WAP tracking and XML tracking are other ways to track TNT consignments, says Sancheti.

The tracking services are possible as all TNT centres around the world are linked to its global IT hub at Atherstone, the UK.

Also, a customer can obtain the price of shipping a consignment between any two places, anywhere in the world, online. These services and facilities, developed centrally at Atherstone, are aimed at making the process of sending consignments through express distribution flexible and convenient for the customer. In fact, TNT has been rated among the top ten private IT networks worldwide, claims Sancheti.

Through the recently launched M-Tracking Facility, customers will be able to track the status of their TNT consignments using the SMS facility on their mobile phones. This facility is economical for the customer as it costs only Rs 1.50 to track the consignment nationally and internationally and saves him the cost of an international call.

The TNT customer must type `C' followed by the consignment number and send it to a specially coded number 447740767767 in all countries except the UK, and 07740767767 in the UK. Once this is done, he will receive a real-time response from TNT. The response will include the current status of the consignment and, if the consignment has been delivered, then the date and time of delivery and the name of the signatory who has received the consignment.

``M-TRACKING is a further iteration of our understanding of today's consumer. In today's technology-driven environment, tracking by SMS is targeted at our growing base of customers on the move,'' says Sancheti.

TNT India, which specialises and operates only in international express distribution, provides services for collection, sorting and distribution of international mail, parcels and valuables. The company, within a short span, has grown tremendously from a mere six per cent market share in 1996 to over 20 per cent as of now, according to Sancheti.

The other big players in this sector are Elbee, AirFreight and Blue dart, all of which, except for TNT and very recently FedEx, franchise operations.

The strengths of the parent company, TNT Worldwide, have come in handy for the Indian operations to introduce varied services, says Sancheti.

The Bangalore-headquartered TNT has branches in Mumbai, Delhi, Calcutta and Chennai and depots in Pune, Ahmedabad, Ludhiana, Moradabad, Kochi, Agra, Coimbatore, Tirupur, Jaipur and Hyderabad. The company's depots are located in key export/import areas in line with its niche marketing strategy of setting up offices close to its customer, he says.

In India, TNT caters mainly to key market segments such as garments, leather, tea, pharmaceuticals, tobacco, granite, handicrafts, food products, logistics, jute, chemicals, sportswear, software and engineering goods.

The introduction of the new Web-based services has helped the company register increased growth, says Sancheti.

An interesting trend noticed by the company is that upcountry customers prefer to use Web services more often than their counterparts in the metro, who still prefer telephonic enquiries, he says.