From Damage to Delight: How Pidge Helped Royce’s Chocolates Achieve Smooth Delivery

The Story of Royce’ Chocolates

Established in 1983 in Sapporo, the capital of Hokkaido, Japan’s northernmost island, Royce’ is famous as a luxury brand for artisanal chocolates that are mindfully created and impeccably packaged, with a keen focus on every detail. Their chocolate-making philosophy is rooted in authenticity, simplicity, and elegance, and aims to create an element of surprise in every creation, from taste to texture.

So what was ruining Royce’ Chocolate’s growth in India?

Despite being a super-premium chocolate brand, Royce’ Chocolate quickly built a cult fan-following among the well-heeled and those who appreciate high-quality chocolates. It became the go-to brand for personal and corporate gifting, which meant there were thousands of chocolates getting delivered every day. But the operations team realised that delivering a delicate item like chocolates was extremely challenging:

#1 Inefficient deliveries leading to damaged orders

Chocolates are temperature sensitive, and therefore require immediate refrigeration. In cities like Delhi and Chennai, high temperatures necessitated quick deliveries. Unfortunately, orders took almost 10-12 hours to get delivered, which ruined the texture, firmness and flavour of the chocolates.

#2 Inability to live-track deliveries

The Royce’ Chocolate team was struggling to ensure on-time order deliveries as they had no real-time notifications on order collected from the hub or the expected time of delivery.

#3 Unavailability of reliable 3PL partners

The team was unable to grow their business at the desired pace because they could not find a reliable delivery partner who specialised in fragile and premium shipments and could guarantee deliveries within 4-5 hours.

#4 Customer Complaints

As the number of damaged orders increased, customer complaints surged sharply. To address this issue, the team replaced the damaged items, but this put additional strain on their bottom line.

#5 Limited operational capacity during festive season

During regular months, a compact operations team could manage the deliveries easily, but during the festive months, they were unable to cope with the massive surge in demand.

How Pidge Integrated Solution is helping Royce’ enjoy a smooth, decadent growth in India ?

Stage#1: Automating logistics With A Layer Of Accessible Technology

The operations team at Royce’ Chocolate wanted a one-stop partner who could help them do hyper local deliveries within 3-4 hours.

With Pidge’s assistance, they successfully collaborated with various local and bigger third-party logistics (3PL) partners enabling seamless distribution across multiple cities.

However, over time the team realised that they had to use multiple dashboards to track deliveries across various partners, which was a tedious process.

With an insider’s perspective, the Pidge team proposed a game-changing solution—a unified approach where Pidge would be at the helm- from the technology, to the last-mile operations to managing the various 3PL partners across the country.

• Starting with Delhi NCR and then eventually all 6 cities, Pidge developed a closed-network of delivery partners who were specifically equipped to handle delicate deliveries like theirs.
• As Royce was impressed with the performance of Riding Rangers (RR), who was their dedicated delivery partner in Delhi, Pidge helped RR expand their service across other cities to handle Royce’s business there as well.
• With a staggering 4X surge in orders during the Diwali season, the Royce’ Chocolate team was able to smoothly navigate all delivery challenges with the help of Pidge’s integrated solution.

Stage#3: Elevating Customers’ Delivery Experience with Pidge’s Personalised Support

#1 Tailored SOPs with Exclusive Partners

Pidge provided comprehensive training to all riders engaged in Royce’ deliveries, ensuring they were adept at handling and delivering these delicate orders. The idea was to mirror the quality of the products with an equivalent level of service. Additionally, Pidge offered a high degree of customization, for e.g. increasing the original delivery slots per day from 2 to 4.

#2 Constant Customer Support

The Pidge team delivered exceptional support, remaining available even during late nights and weekends to ensure all orders were successfully delivered. For instance, a week prior to Diwali, Royce’ Chocolate urgently required 12 air-conditioned cabs to fulfil bulk orders in Mumbai.

The Pidge team promptly contacted multiple vendors in the city and successfully arranged the fleet overnight. Each taxi was accompanied by a Riding Ranger rider to guarantee the orders remained undamaged, providing customers with a positive delivery experience.

#3 Live Order Visibility for Stronger Customer Experience

For the first time, the Royce’ team was able to track each order on a live map, receive POD (Proof of Delivery) on WhatsApp and get visibility on the entire delivery process. Riders would upload the POD (Proof of Delivery) of every order on WhatsApp and provide regular PODs notifications to customers, which greatly brought down customer complaints.

#4 Pan India Vendor Visibility On A Single Dashboard

The Royce’ team were able to see all orders and all vendors on the same platform, which has now become their single source of truth for their last mile operations.

#5 Timely, Accurate deliveries

For the first time in the history of Royce’ Chocolate’s presence in India, delivery time came down from 12 hours to 2 hours! Despite the chaotic traffic conditions in the festive weeks, Pidge was able to maintain the TAT for all deliveries and still managed more than 98% order fulfilment.

The Pidge Impact, Royce’ numbers do the talking… 

Pidge is delighted to be part of this rewarding journey with Royce’ Chocolate. It is a reaffirmation of the Pidge proposition and the trust they placed in us in handling thousands of deliveries for the biggest occasion of the year.

We look forward to continuing this journey together on a path as rich and decadent as their chocolates and as pleasantly surprising as their chocolate potato chips.