Interview: London Local, Rory O’Connor

This week, The Fetch London’s Community Ambassador, Alexandra Leslie, spoke with Rory O’Connor, CEO and Founder of Scurri.

So let’s get to know each other! Can you tell our readers a little bit about yourself?

In my early career I worked in Waterford Wedgwood, spending time in various sales, marketing and strategic project roles. This included being part of the team that delivered a €10m SAP implementation, where I got my initial taste for big technology projects. I subsequently worked as a consultant and was lucky to work with clients such as Heineken, Intel, Euronics and Siemens and spent a period as a project manager with AOL Broadband. I travel a lot with work and I am based in London during the week but home is with my wife and four children in Wexford in the south east of Ireland.

How did you get involved with Scurri?

I was working as a consultant, when I got the initial idea and saw an opportunity to create a website which would connect up transport companies to create a virtual network of carriers that would make the delivery process easier for consumers. I was still running my own consultancy business, but I put in some of my own funding at the end of 2010 and hired a developer to design a prototype website. I had this vision of using technology to make delivery simpler and more efficient.

What is Scurri, and why should people use it over other delivery methods?

Scurri provides a cloud based solution for multi channel retailers and e-Commerce merchants who ship physical goods and need to integrate multiple carriers. The delivery management platform provides the merchants with the tools to tackle and reduce delivery related shopping cart abandonment and unlike our competition, the platform is cloud based making it an economical service that is fast and agile to deploy!

How is Scurri innovative in eCommerce?

Do you think other delivery systems will catch on to Scurri’s simple methods?

I think some will find it hard to change as they have taken a long term bet on older technologies and they will struggle to change from their legacy systems even if they really want to. I am sure other smaller and newer companies will copy what we do, thats really inevitable in this day and age. However we are working hard on maintaining and growing an amazing culture within the company. We really believe that its so important to be always listening to our customers needs and we need to continue to embed lean and agile methodologies into the way we work. Its our culture and way of doing things that will ensure that we will continue to be innovative and customer focused and culture is very hard to be copied.

What’s the worst story you’ve ever heard of someone losing something in the mail?

We have seen many different items getting lost including one time a lady opening her parcel to find the designer clothes she had purchased had been mixed up with a parcel of packing tape due to the wrong goods being packed into the wrong box . Our customer used our tools to work out where the clothes had gone and everything was sorted out relatively quickly once the mistake was identified. I do remember reading however that last year post that was lost in the Royal Mail system turned up after 23 years. Once it was found Royal Mail reunited the missing letters with their rightful owners and I bet it was a surprise to see that post coming through the door after so many years.

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Written by Alexandra Leslie, The Fetch London Community Ambassador. Video blogger for Newspepper.com and TechFluff.TV. American student in London, finding her way around the city one iPhone app at a time. Follow her on Twitter at @AlexandraLeslie.