Productization

Convey has spent the last 2+ years investing in its technology and platform, and working closely with early customers to flesh out capabilities and solutions to run on that platform.

I’m happy to announce that we’ve taken all of that hard work and packaged it into two branded products, Convey Engage and Convey Initiate. We’ve also formalized our common technology layer across both products, which we call Convey Platform. Let me describe each one, and give you some details on our roadmap.

Convey Engage

Convey Engage is focused on in-transit visibility – from the time when the shipment is registered with the carrier until it is successfully delivered to the customer.

Convey Engage consists of two components that work in tandem to improve the customer delivery experience. The first is Delivery Communications, which serves as the hub for the customer to get information, give feedback and sign up for alerts and push notifications. The second is Command Center, which provides a real-time view of all shipments in transit. Working in concert, Delivery Communications and Command Center bring customer and carrier data together to provide the retailer with powerful insights and opportunities to improve the customer experience.

Within the last week, we've launched two major new features for Engage.

The first new feature is reason codes for delivery feedback. When a user gives negative feedback, Delivery Communications now prompts the user to choose a reason. Reasons range from "shipment delay" to "damaged" to "wrong item" etc. We have rolled this feature out to all customers and we are already seeing incredible insights into delivery issues that are not being identified by carriers.

The second feature is a new dashboard to measure customer engagement with Delivery Communications. This dashboard lets the retailer see user behavior and better understand the nature of user feedback. The dashboard uses the new reason code functionality to give retailers insight into what issues occur most frequently and with which carriers.

Coming up, we'll be launching Convey Engage Command Center, which puts all shipments in a unified view, categorizes and highlights distressed shipments and allows the retailer to take action with either the customer or the carrier. Command Center is a key piece of realizing the full value proposition of Engage, and we are very excited to get it in your hands ASAP.

Convey Initiate

Convey Initiate is our product that is focused on the execution of shipments, whether that’s the retailer or the retailer’s vendor. Shipments can be executed in variety of ways: from our web-based portal, customer configuration of shipping options pre-purchase, or back-end systems that call Convey APIs.

As with Engage, we are hard at work on improving Initiate, and we have two features in development to launch within the next 60 days.

The first is a unified API that spans both parcel and freight execution. This allows the IT team to code to a single API, dramatically reducing time to market and code complexity. We have done the hard work of normalizing service levels across carriers, which gives our software to optimize which carrier to select based on rules.

The second is shopper-initiated scheduling of a return pickup. Customer service reps will have the ability to trigger the pick up request process and customers will have the ability to choose an appointment time and get additional instructions and documents, including a bill of lading. We will be deploying this out with select freight carriers at first, and scaling it to a broader set of carriers over time.

We expect both of these to ship in early 2017.

Convey Platform

We also continue to improve Convey Platform. We consider the platform to be our carrier integrations, our data ingestion, mapping and translation engine, our rules engine and our analytics services. These technologies form the underpinnings of all of our products.

Over the last few months, we have made major strides in integrating to more carriers. Our total number of integrated carriers now stands at 70 with recent improvements to our UPS, USPS and XPO API integrations, as well as the ingestion of shipment reports from UPS and FedEx. We also continued to invest in the reliability, availability and scalability of our platform.

Coming up, we will be working to improve our rules engine and retailer-facing configuration of rules. This will be leveraged first by Engage to proactively escalate shipments and notify customers of in-transit issues, and it will also be used by Initiate later in 2017.