90% of Customers Want to Track Their Delivery Orders: Here’s Why

According to Gartner, 80% of organizations now expect to compete primarily on customer experience. If you’ve been paying attention to trends across the business world the past few years, you probably aren’t surprised to learn that customer experience is at the top of everyone’s mind. In fact, you may be trying to boost customer satisfaction in your own organization by focusing on precisely that.

Unfortunately, when it comes to last mile deliveries, boosting customer satisfaction is easier said than done. Last mile delivery costs typically account for more than half of total logistics costs, and a lot of the reason for that is that it takes a huge amount of labor to get the right goods to the right customer at the right time, and even then there’s no guarantee of success. 

According to DispatchTrack’s Big and Bulky Delivery Report, modern customers have sky-high expectations for last mile deliveries. And, in fact, the report revealed growing frustration with deliveries—and it’s easy to see why. More than half of big and bulky deliveries wind up being rescheduled (a process that consumers usually find to be a hassle), and nearly half of consumers have been frustrated by a delivery that didn’t arrive at the right time (often, early is just as bad as late).

But it doesn’t have to be this way—retailers and other businesses can delight their customers and make themselves more competitive if they listen to consumers’ needs and work to create processes that meet them. The first order of business? Letting your customers track their delivery orders.  

What Does the Data Say About Consumer Delivery Preferences?

One of the most striking things about our research was how much it demonstrated the importance of communication and transparency in last mile deliveries. 90% of respondents said that they wanted to be able to track their orders. Not everyone felt like real-time tracking was a necessity, not everyone had a clear preference for communication methods, but there was no ambiguity about the basic fact: your customers want to know what’s happening with their deliveries. If you can offer that to them, you can earn their loyalty and repeat business. If you can’t, more than 60% will consider looking for another retailer.  

Here are a few other highlights from the data:

• Half of consumers blame negative delivery experiences on poor communication.
• Yet one in three consumers weren’t able to track their most recent delivery, and only 28% were able to see the delivery truck location in real time.
• The overwhelming majority of consumers (80%) want to receive delivery status updates.
• Text is generally the preferred medium for delivery information (with 70% of consumers responding favorably to receiving text messages), but many consumers also appreciate emails and phone calls. 

Predicting consumer demand for particular products or services will always be a crapshoot—especially in an era of high demand and supply chain volatility. But predicting what customers will demand in their deliveries is significantly easier: they want to be able to track their orders, they want frequent status updates, and they want clear communication. If you can offer that in spite of the volatility and uncertainty that’s swirling around virtually every other part of the supply chain, you can delight your customers and achieve true right-time deliveries. 

Why Are Order Tracking and Transparency So Important?

These expectations aren’t really new anymore—certainly when we’re talking about the scale of the past few years. But where did they come from in the first place? In other words, why do your customers care so much about this? 

This is the part where most people start talking about two things: the pandemic and the Amazon Effect. Though the impact of Amazon’s fulfillment approach has no doubt had a huge hand in shaping the way that consumers think about deliveries, they’re not necessarily the standard for big and bulky deliveries, or deliveries of things like building supplies or bulk food. But what Amazon and other businesses have done in recent years that’s so impactful is to prove that high levels of transparency are possible. 

And yes, the pandemic is when everyone found out exactly how good a delivery experience can be—and in the years since it’s cooled off customer expectations haven’t cooled off with it. 

Rewind twenty years, and the average customer waiting on a new piece of exercise equipment wants exactly the same delivery experience described above—they just know they’re not going to get it, because the technology doesn’t exist. But today, they know that it’s possible to receive real-time updates on their orders. They also know that it’s possible to get real-time, self-serve order tracking on their own devices—they’ve probably experienced it with food deliveries or even some retail deliveries—with ETAs being updated in real time. All of this makes it that much more frustrating when they buy from a business that doesn’t offer order status updates or live tracking. 

To be clear, none of this is simply a luxury or a nice-to-have. When your customers don’t know when to expect their orders, they’re significantly more likely to miss the delivery—creating huge headaches for both of you and significantly increasing your delivery costs. They’re also more likely to call customer service to ask for updates, which simply doesn’t scale when you’re making hundreds or thousands of deliveries each day. When your deliveries run late, this problem is only made worse—customers know that late deliveries happen (nearly half of survey respondents had experienced one for a big and bulky item), but when they’re left in the dark about delays they’re more likely to get annoyed. 

How to Keep Customers in the Loop Throughout the Last Mile

Like we said at the beginning of this post, rising consumer expectations don’t have to be a stumbling block. In fact, they can help businesses that focus on transparency and communication to delight their existing customers and attract new ones. Here are a few best practices for doing just that:

• Communicate before, during, and after delivery: Customers want to feel confident about the next steps throughout the process. Sending them schedule confirmations and reminders before the day of delivery, day-of alerts, and followup messages afterwards is the best way to do that. Of course, the key is to ensure these notifications are automated so your team doesn’t get stuck making calls and sending messages by hand. 
• Reach out about late deliveries and other delays: Keeping customers informed means letting them know when expectations change—to make that happen, you need enough internal supply chain visibility to immediately spot delivery exceptions. Not only that, you need to be able to send mass notifications for things like weather events and traffic disruptions that will impact large  numbers of customers. 
• Enable two-way communication: Even when things are going exactly according to plan, it can be helpful for customers to have the option of contacting your team directly—even if that’s just to let the driver know that the doorbell is out of order. On the back end, it’s useful to have this in a streamlined chat format so that dispatchers can easily see the conversation and react quickly. 
• Offer real-time tracking: Customers should be able to see the movement of the delivery truck in real-time from a branded tracking portal that shows order details, driver information, and a live ETA. Again, 90% of consumers want this ability. 
• Automate as much as possible: You can still give customers that personal touch while sending out messages that have been automatically triggered by your last mile delivery system. Things that can’t be automated, like next-stop notification, should be configured so drivers or dispatchers can send them with the press of a button.
  

Last mile deliveries are not an exact science—there will always be disruptions to contend with and late deliveries to remedy. But as we’ve learned from polling consumers, transparency can go a long way towards ensuring a great delivery experience.