North Shore Business Focus
Hi-tech delivery system
A courier company based on the North Shore has found a way to stand out from the crowd - no mean feat when they do the same thing as the competition: deliver goods.
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| Receiving their BDO Spicers Excellence in Service Delivery Award from Andrew Hill of BDO Spicers (far right) are Cheree Wigg (far left), Daniel Wallis (second left) and Nick Kershaw (second right) from Inter City Urgent. |
Inter City Urgent of Albany has carved a niche for itself by focusing on innovative technology to simplify and improve its service and also by transporting anything up to 5-tonnes in weight. Most couriers have a 1-tonne limit.
The approach paid off for the company when it won the BDO Spicers Excellence in Service Delivery Award in the 2007 Westpac Enterprise North Shore Business Excellence Awards announced at the end of August.
Inter City Urgent was established in 1996 by Nick Kershaw and Cheree Wigg as an alternative to the monopoly held by a small number of large transport companies, focusing initially on the greater Auckland region. All the office staff have been urgent couriers themselves and therefore understand the challenges facing the on-road team of 30 contract drivers and this insight has been invaluable in helping the company to deliver a high level of customer satisfaction.
In order to stand out, the pair introduced a number of industry new initiatives including the development of their unique booking and dispatch system in 2002. The system was the first two-way mobile data solution in this part of the world and attracted interest from technology companies as far away as Europe and South Africa.
The Inter City Urgent website came online shortly afterwards, allowing customers to interact with the office staff and get fast updates on deliveries. Importantly,
By 2005 Inter City Urgent had recognised a need to have larger trucks to make fast delivery of heavier goods and introduced Auckland’s first fleet of urgent trucks.
Other factors in the success of Inter City Urgent are its flexibility and speed of service. The company prides itself on offering as little as quarter-hour local delivery for small items and four hours for large freight, and will transport anything from a small envelope to five tonnes of goods: documents to poker tables, medical supplies to sound equipment, gourmet baskets to hazardous chemicals via a fleet of motorcycles, cars, vans and trucks.
And they are on call 24 hours, seven days a week.
Impressed by the operation, the judges noted Inter City Urgent had identified a niche market for heavy freight to be organised in the style of a light courier service.
“It is successfully preventing competitors entering this space through offering and delivering on superior service. Service delivery is therefore a fundamental component of Inter City Urgent’s makeup and drives (literally) everything it does.”
