Feeding the Nation - Dynamic Customer Contacting for E-Fulfillment in Times of Crisis

37 Pages Posted: 5 Nov 2021

See all articles by Jonas Schwamberger

Jonas Schwamberger

University of Mannheim - Business School

Moritz Fleischmann

University of Mannheim, Business School

Arne Strauss

WHU - Otto Beisheim School of Management

Date Written: October 1, 2021

Abstract

The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic led demand for online grocery orders for both Click & Collect (C&C) and Attended Home Delivery (AHD) to outstrip delivery capacity by a wide margin. In the UK, the booking systems of some e-retailers could not handle the flood of incoming requests, forcing the retailers to proactively reach out to certain priority customer segments with the aim of serving as many high-priority customers as possible. To determine when to contact each customer segment in this extraordinary demand environment, we investigate the new demand management concept of proactively contacting customers. We first develop a decision policy for the C&C fulfillment method to address the problem of when to contact customers and to gain managerial insights from applying this method to realistic data from the London area. We then extend our approach to the AHD setting. To cope with increased problem complexity, we propose a three-step procedure. First, we subdivide the delivery area into smaller subareas; second, we select the most promising subareas; and third, we determine which customers to contact within the chosen subareas. As in the C&C setting, we conduct a numerical study on realistic data from London to show the practical benefits of our approach. Our results show that proactive customer contacting allows for a tailored allocation of scarce capacity in e-groceries. We conclude with an outlook on how these contacting techniques can be valuable in post-crisis times.

Keywords: Demand Management, E-Groceries, Click & Collect, Attended Home Delivery, Contacting

Suggested Citation

Schwamberger, Jonas and Fleischmann, Moritz and Strauss, Arne, Feeding the Nation - Dynamic Customer Contacting for E-Fulfillment in Times of Crisis (October 1, 2021). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3933816 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3933816

Jonas Schwamberger (Contact Author)

University of Mannheim - Business School ( email )

L5, 5
Mannheim, 68131
Germany

Moritz Fleischmann

University of Mannheim, Business School ( email )

University of Mannheim
P.O. Box 10 34 62
Mannheim, 68131
Germany

Arne Strauss

WHU - Otto Beisheim School of Management ( email )

Burgplatz 2
Vallendar, 56179
Germany

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