Make Promises You Can Keep

Modern customers increasingly see phone calls as an escalation—if they’re picking up the phone to call you about a delivery, something’s already not right. To make matters worse, fielding these calls is incredibly expensive and time-consuming, and for larger operations it might even require a dedicated call center.

When your customers have all their relevant delivery data at their fingertips—i.e. when they can check statuses, ETAs, and more from the comfort of their own devices—there’s no reason to call in to see if an order is on time or to ask about a delivery that’s five minutes late. The result is radically lower call volumes for your staff and a best-in-class delivery experience for your customers.

That’s why DispatchTrack offers a full suite of automated, configurable customer communications capabilities—from confirmation messages and schedule notifications to live ETA alerts to a dedicated tracking portal showing up-to-the-minute order, driver, and delivery data.

For many delivery organizations, tracking customers down via phone to get them to commit to delivery schedules can be painful. It takes 2.5 attempts on average to reach a customer, and even once you’ve reached them there’s a good chance they won’t be ready to pick a date and time to receive their delivery.

From an operational point of view, this slows down the scheduling process and wastes time. At the same time, it also makes it difficult to get the most out of your delivery capacity—after all, certain dates and times are always going to be less popular than others, you may wind up under-scheduled if no one you call will select an 8 AM Monday delivery appointment.

This is an area where the best thing you can do is automate the entire process, including the customer communications. Rather than calling customers manually, you can automatically send them self-scheduling messages once their orders are ready to be scheduled. They can then decide on a time slot at their leisure from the set of options presented. These options aren’t just pulled out of a hat—rather, they’re dynamic, capacity-aware timeslot options that are based on your existing schedules and capacity limitations. The result is that your customers are always choosing from options that fit in with your delivery plans.

One of the biggest factors that contributes to the likelihood of a big and bulky item getting damaged is the number of delivery attempts required to get it to the customer. If, for whatever reason, the customer misses the delivery truck the first time, their order is stuck traveling along the entire rest of the route, then back to the warehouse, where it's unloaded, then reloaded, then delivered again. At every stage, the odds of damage increase.

That’s why first attempt delivery success is so crucial for decreasing damaged items and the costs that come with them. To make that a priority, it’s important to do everything you can to make sure that customer is ready to receive the delivery when the truck arrives. This means making sure you’re delivering at a time that works for the customer and providing them real-time information about their delivery throughout the day—including notifications when the driver has started their route, when their stop is next, when the truck is half an hour away, and when it’s arrived.

It also means arriving on-time as often as possible. To make this happen, you’ll have to rely on your routing technology to generate routes that actually result on on-time deliveries.