Design the parcel service for the customer who will never open the app

There is a woman of eighty-three in a hill village in Okayama Prefecture who has received parcels from the same Kazemachi driver for eleven years. Her son sends rice and medicine from Osaka; her granddaughter orders her winter clothes online. She does not own a smartphone and does not intend to. When I rode that route last year, the driver told me that she keeps the absence slips in a biscuit tin, in date order, because she likes to know when he came. I have thought about that tin more than about most of our dashboards.

Every Japanese parcel carrier now reports digital progress: app registrations, the share of delivery choices made online, the decline in calls to contact centres. We report them too, and they matter. Our app has 9.4 million registered users, and most delivery changes now happen without a human being involved. But a measure of digital adoption is also, read the other way, a measure of who is being left with a worse service. In our rural depots that is a large and growing share of the people we serve.

The average hides the mountain depot

Kazemachi classifies 212 of its 1,180 depots as rural. They handle 11 per cent of our parcels and use 19 per cent of our driver hours, because the distances are long and the drops are few. In those depots 41 per cent of recipients are over seventy. Only 9 per cent of recipients over seventy-five have registered for our app, against more than half of recipients under fifty across the company.

When we launched our evening-before notices in 2021, the company's second-attempt rate fell fast. The rural rate barely moved. It had started lower, at 9.8 per cent, because more people in villages are at home during the day, but it fell only to 8.9 per cent while the company as a whole fell from 13.6 to 7.9. Our national figure looked excellent. It looked excellent partly because the people the programme did not reach were a small share of the total.

That is the general lesson I would offer any consumer business in Japan. An average improves fastest when the easiest customers improve, and the easiest customers are rarely the ones whose lives depend on the service. Since 2023 I have reported rural depots separately to our board, with their own second-attempt rate, their own complaint rate and their own measure of how many deliveries needed a driver's judgement rather than a system's. The separate line has changed several decisions, including one that would have closed six small depots on cost grounds.

Keep the slip and the telephone

The second lesson is that analogue routes are not legacy costs to be retired. They are channels in their own right, and they deserve design work. Our paper absence slip was redesigned in 2023 for people with weaker eyesight: larger type, a single telephone number in bold and the driver's name printed rather than scrawled. In January 2024 we launched an automated telephone line that lets a customer choose a delivery window by pressing two digits. It now handles 1.2 million requests a year. Most callers are over sixty-five, and the average call lasts under a minute.

None of this is sophisticated, and that is the point. A service that works for a customer with poor eyesight and no smartphone also works for a busy parent with a broken phone screen, a visitor without a Japanese number and anyone whose battery has died. When we tested the larger slip in urban depots, response rates rose there too. Designing for the hardest customer rarely makes the service worse for the easiest.

The temptation in a cost-conscious company is to push every customer towards the cheapest channel and to treat those who resist as a problem to be managed down. I understand the arithmetic. A call handled by a person costs us many times what an app request costs. But in a rural village the driver and the slip are often the only part of Kazemachi a customer ever meets, and if those are degraded the brand is degraded with them.

Make the rural route a contract, not a hidden subsidy

The hardest question is money. Rural routes cost more per parcel than urban ones, and the gap widens as villages lose people. Most carriers handle this by averaging: urban customers and shippers pay a little more than their deliveries cost, and the difference quietly supports the mountains and islands. In 2025 our finance division proposed a surcharge for contract shippers on parcels addressed to rural depots. I recommended against it, and the board deferred it, because the surcharge would have fallen on recipients through their shops' delivery prices and would not have reduced the cost of a single route.

I think the better answer is to make the rural route visible and contract for it openly. Since 2024 we have signed agreements with 23 mountain and island municipalities. In each, we share loads with another carrier so that one van serves the valley instead of two, deliver groceries from the local co-operative alongside parcels, and, with residents' consent, tell the town office when a driver notices signs that an older resident may need help. The towns pay between ¥4 million and ¥9 million a year, and the combined service costs each of them less than running its own. The arrangement is written down, priced and reviewed annually, rather than buried in our national tariff.

There are risks. A municipal contract can be cancelled when a town's budget tightens, and sharing loads with a competitor requires careful agreement on data and liability. Some colleagues worry that we are turning a parcel business into a welfare service. I would put it differently. We already provide part of the village's infrastructure. The question is whether we account for it honestly and ask those who benefit to share the cost, or whether we let it erode until a depot closes and nobody can say exactly why.

The woman with the biscuit tin will never open our app. If our service is designed so that she does not need to, it will work for nearly everyone else as well.