Where’s My Stuff?: Package Zen Makes Delivery Tracking Simple With Twilio MMS

February 09, 2015
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PackageZen

We’ve all been there. That super important thing was delivered to us – at work or at home – and disappeared into thin air.

There are stages of questioning in that moment where you’re standing at a reception desk or at the mailroom room door. Is it under that stack of packages in the back? Did someone else pick it up? Did it get delivered to a the wrong address down the street? Did it get stolen? And finally the most important question – where is my stuff?

For the receptionist or mailroom clerk who has to deal with all those packages and deliveries, every day is groundhog day. Fedex, UPS, USPS and hundreds of on demand delivery companies show up with every conceivable item. To fight against the rising tide of packages, they’ve got pen and paper, but they’re drowning in deliveries.

Package Zen is there for the folks who have to receive and manage all these deliveries. They’ve figured out a way to programmatically ensure that your stuff never gets lost again.

Pere Rigo, founder of Package Zen, knows how getting a package should feel: “Like Christmas, and immediate gratification all at once.” When a package is lost, the recipient is denied that awesome experience. Package Zen uses incredibly intelligent software and Twilio MMS to make sure each package that comes into your office, residence, college dorm, or apartment complex is accounted for.

Here’s how it works: When a package comes in, the office manager or front desk clerk snaps a picture of the address label through the Package Zen app (on iOS running on iPod Touches provided by Package Zen). They then click “Log Deliveries” within the app. Package Zen automatically identifies the recipient, extracts the correct contact info from the delivery label, and sends the recipient an email or SMS (or both).

Twilio MMS, embedded within Package Zen’s app, makes a menial task a breeze. Sorting packages and notifying their owners can take hours and hours. With Package Zen, that process takes minutes. Office managers and front desk clerks are happy to have their time back, but even happier to have a clear, well documented chain of custody for all of their packages.

Package Zen provides logs of when a package was scanned, so office managers can check against FedEx’s or UPS’s records when a package disappears into thin air. For example, if FedEx says a package was signed for at 2:15, but the rest of the office’s FedEx delivery came at 2:45, that office manager can prove the FedEx driver dropped a piece of mail off at the wrong address half an hour earlier – which is where 1 out of every 200 packages ends up. They can prove this by accessing the logs of when they scanned the rest of the mail into Package Zen’s database.

It’s The Message, And The Medium

SMS is a critical medium Packge Zen uses to notify recipients they should pick up their package. SMS’s open rates are incredibly high, and the sooner a customer sees they have a package, the sooner they’ll pick it up. This keeps mailrooms from overflowing, which can be a huge hassle for offices and residential properties built before the days of Amazon Prime.

Even Package Zen’s email open rates are incredibly high, hovering around 98%. Pere takes this a critical indicator of something working well, and contributing to the Christmas-level excitement of getting a package.

To learn more about Package Zen and how they create awesome experiences for their customers, visit their website here