Logistics lags in race for digital leadership

The logistics industry comes sixth in a list of the UK’s digital leaders by sector produced by consultants BearingPoint.

The Digital Leaders Study 2019 analyses 593 companies across eight countries, including 72 UK companies across ten different industry sectors in the UK, to gauge the UK’s digital maturity and presence as well as areas for development.

The study found UPS (UK) to be the most digitally enabled in the sector, but it still didn’t make the list of companies in the UK’s top-ten digital leaders. The list was largely dominated by the UK operations of retailers such as Amazon, ASOS, AO.com, Argos and Tesco.

“The logistics industry should be a digital leader in terms of optimising opportunity, but it has performed poorly compared to the other industry sectors,” said BearingPoint partner John Lockton.

“Our study showed that the logistics sector scores low in digital marketing – particularly in their search engine optimisation (SEO) and pay per click (PPC) activity,” said Lockton. “It also showed the UK operations of logistics giants – UPS, FedEx, and DPD were predictably the most digitally developed of the firms scoring consistently across the dimensions aside from digital marketing. This shows that while there is room for improvement, there is a standard of digital maturity that spans the industry.

“Logistics should look to retail leaders as digital innovators, given the online and mobile reach of established retailers. However, even here, our study showed that in addition to digital marketing, customer service is also lacking – particularly in terms of live-chat support and responding with succinct and helpful e-mails from customer support,” said Lockton.

Digital leader rankings by industry sector:

Source: BearingPoint