August 9, 2024
Sarah Casalan Bittle, President, The UPS Store
Rebooting Our Shopping – Shipping – Return Addiction, Sarah Casalan Bittle – President The UPS Store
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Instant shipping is the new norm that continues to fuel America’s Amazon era shopping addictions. Approximately 350 billion packages shipped last year—projected to hit 500 billion worldwide by 2028. And in this brave new tech. enabled shopping revolution, consumers have moved beyond asking ‘what day’ will my package arrive to expecting real-time tracking with exact arrival times and proof of delivery.
With FedEx and UPS enabling these trends, we took a look under the hood to see how UPS is empowering consumers and businesses in the digital age. With 500,000 employees in 200 countries that delivered $91 billion in revenue last year, UPS thinks about all the aspects of shipping services from ordering and delivery, to deep logistics, analytics, and predicting potential returns.
The UPS Store® is the world’s largest franchisor of retail shipping and business service centers, with over 5,500 locations catering to the small-office/home-office market, gig-economy workers, corporate road warriors, and consumers. Like Walgreens, Starbucks and CVS, you can find a store within 10 miles of 85% of the U.S. population.
Driving their growth is UPS Store President Sarah Casalan Bittle, who is with us for this episode of the Reboot Chronicles to unpack what makes her people successful, the importance of collaborative partnerships, and how her near fatal heart-attack made her a moreremarkable leader.p
The Importance Of Returns
One way UPS has been able to maintain its relevancy is through its collaboration with Amazon in 2019 to make a better digital return experience. There is always a chance that the package you order is damaged or missing something, and with this collaboration, UPS has been making that process easier and quicker. Sarah even stated, “I don’t think Amazon or UPS store could have imagined that we would set the standard for what the digital return experience looked like.” Recently UPS has a new technology platform called “The Happy Returns” with its goal to do as the name suggests by pushing a “no box, no label consolidated returns”.
Maintaining A Competitive Edge
One of the difficulties that comes with any business is making sure you are not being left behind in the global marketplace. We heard what UPS has done previously to maintain its edge through its collaborations, but they have more goals moving forward. One is through expanding into “Non-Traditional Locations”, places like Six Flags or Disney, or other places where you may end up buying more goodies than can fit into your luggage. Even getting into airports for those business travelers who need to print last-minute work documents.
Loving What You Do
One of the defining moments in Sarah’s career came during a very low point in her life. She suffered a massive heart attack, “where my heart function, brain function, and lung function stopped.” After several weeks of being in a hospital and undergoing care and rehabilitation, she was discharged with an uncertain prognosis and a reaffirmed love for her job. Since that moment her recovery has been remarkable, and she has taken a new look at how she wants to lead. Even saying “Assessing a situation with a bunch of professionals that know what they’re doing has become a bigger focus for me. I’m no less urgent. I’m no less accountable. But I want to gain a deeper understanding of how maybe we got here.”
