Indian machine-learning logistics company FarEye has been working with retailers to deploy technology to help them with next week’s Black Friday surge.

This year’s Black Friday season is expected to be much larger than usual. Online consumer shopping is expected to get anywhere up to a ten-times surge during the season, however fewer than 30% of the retailers are prepared to handle this surge in demand.

FarEye has been working with retailers to roll out features and enhancements to its platform to handle the surge and enable retailers to meet the demand. The platform should help retailers offer more flexibility to customers with features such as self-service delivery slot booking, multiple payment options and deliveries at drop-off points.

“Consumers are rapidly moving towards an omnichannel experience as a way of life,” said Kushal Nahata, CEO of FarEye. “They want to engage with brands that understand their preferences and are able to establish a deeper connection with them – delivery expectations, payment preferences and lifestyle choices. In this scenario, brand experience is largely defined by its logistics journey. In an online-first world, logistics is the only actual touch point between the brand and its customer.”

The company has produced an accelerated model to onboard new carriers more quickly to meet the surge in demand. Some of this will be through app-based onboarding and training of freelance drivers to fulfil orders.

There is also the ability to improve contactless delivery capabilities, including temperature tracking of drivers, and integrations with national and international compliance applications.

Other features include instant track and trace, messaging drivers and single-click calling. There is end-to-end visibility of the logistics operations and real-time customer feedback to take corrective actions.

Improved personalisation and customer lifetime value involves showing more products based on customer behaviour and preferences.

“From the time we launched FarEye Serve back in March to help retailers deliver essential goods, we have not just successfully helped retailers handle scalability challenges, but have also made major breakthroughs in advanced contactless capabilities,” said Gaurav Srivastava, CTO of FarEye. “These include driver temperature tracking, compliance apps integrations and more. With FarEye, retailers can now focus on customer experience and not worry about scalability and orchestration challenges.”

Dharmin Ved, CEO of Dubai-based Sixth Street, an omnichannel ecommerce fashion brand from the Apparel Group, added: “With the upcoming festive season, we expect orders to triple until the beginning of the year. The most important part of online shopping is not only the shopping platform but also the logistics methods that are provided to consumers. FarEye has helped us go above and beyond to deliver safely and have also enabled us to offer next day deliveries.”

And Vaishali Thakkar, general manager at Indian online furniture company HomeTown, said: “As many families have started spending more time home, have transitioned to working from home, home improvement seems to have taken the customer’s attention. We anticipate a surge this festive season with new product lines, suppliers and logistics partners. FarEye has helped us scale up our product delivery and post-sale processes with new distribution models and logistics partners smoothly to ensure a consistent customer experience.”

FarEye is a logistics orchestration platform that makes deliveries customer-centric for industries across 3PL, courier, logistics, food and grocery, restaurants, retail, and CPG companies. It enables brands to orchestrate, track and optimise their logistics operations. The machine-learning-based platform is said to help enterprises shrink delivery time by up to 27%, increase courier productivity by up to 15%, and eliminate risks by up to 57%.