Ideal Shopping Direct deploys Route Genie to drive growth and boost customer experience

This article is brought to you by Retail Technology Review: Ideal Shopping Direct deploys Route Genie to drive growth and boost customer experience.

Ideal Shopping Direct, the leading multi-channel home shopping retailer, has signed a five-year contract to deploy Route Genie, the advanced carrier management software, to help facilitate the next stage of its growth across the UK and overseas. The retailer will also use the solution to enhance its overall customer experience by offering increased delivery options and improved communications for consumers buying items via the company's TV channels or website.

By implementing the innovative software, Ideal Shopping Direct will now be able to integrate additional carriers on to its internal systems, providing increased choice and convenience to their growing customer base. The retailer will also benefit from offering consumers greater access to a range of Click & Collect solutions, which are also managed via the Route Genie platform.

Route Genie is integrated with all leading domestic and international parcel carriers allowing cost-efficient routing of retailer parcels and packets. Its management dashboard provides real-time data so customer service agents can update consumers on the progress of their deliveries.

Sam Holden, Chief Operating Officer at Ideal Shopping Direct, said: "We currently ship more than four million parcels a year, a volume we expect to double by 2020. We are a forward-thinking organisation that has ambitious targets in place to further grow our customer base, both in the UK and internationally. To enable this growth we require access to a greater number of home delivery operators, an improved process for carrier selection and management, and enhanced client communication tools. Therefore Route Genie was the perfect fit for Ideal Shopping Direct."

Richard Tucker, Head of Sales, iForce Group and Route Genie, said: "This is significant business win for Route Genie. Ideal Shopping Direct will now have increased and visibility control over deliveries, as well benefitting from a range of additional functionality, such as enhanced tracking and customer communications. It was these important factors that led the retailer to choose the Route Genie platform over our competitors."

Route Genie has played a fundamental part of the iForce proposition for numerous years and continues to underpin iForce Pathfinder, the company's carrier management solution. Due to its success, Route Genie was also launched as a SaaS (Software as a Service) application in 2015.

Tucker added: "Up until now the industry has been dominated by 'pay per label' pricing. iForce is the only carrier management software vendor that offers its products to retailers of all sizes on a licence basis."