Leveling up Customer Delivery Experience w/ DispatchTrack

Customer delivery expectations have never been higher—especially as economic headwinds make consumers and businesses alike more particular about where they spend their money. So it shouldn’t come as too much of a shock that many businesses are seeking to level up the delivery experience they offer to their customers, and technology is playing a big role in making that happen.

DispatchTrack’s customer communication and customer experience tools cover a wide variety of use cases for helping businesses achieve their customer delivery experience goals. This includes everything from scheduling reservation messages to post-delivery surveys, all of which can be configured to your customers’ expectations and the needs of your business.

In this post, we’ll go over some of those tools and show you how you can boost your customer delivery experience with DispatchTrack’s communication and engagement tools. 

Why Customer Experience Matters

Before we get into the nitty-gritty of what the platform offers, let’s spend a second talking about what we mean by customer experience—and why it matters. This will look different in different industries and for different use cases, but at heart, a great customer experience comes down to the same thing: providing the right information to your customers at the right time while ensuring open communications and connectivity. 

For a retailer, that might look like an experience with numerous touches—self-scheduling invitation, delivery reminder, day-of notifications, post-delivery surveys, and more—all with live tracking and two-way communication. A beer distributor might want to offer fewer touches, but still ensure real-time tracking and make sure that their customers’ teams know when to expect the truck to arrive. 

At the end of the day, your customers are never just buying a commodity—they're also paying for a service, and often investing in a relationship. When their dollars don’t go as far as they did in the past, these things begin to matter more and more.  

How to Level up Delivery Experience with DispatchTrack

Even on paper, providing a great delivery experience for your customers isn’t simple. It involves a lot of moving parts, all of which have to be coordinated effectively and add up to something cohesive. 

That’s where our configurable tools come in. With our tools, you can craft an experience that offers the right message, at the right cadence. Here’s how you attack each phase of the delivery process—before, during, and after—using our tools.  

Pre-delivery

Pre-delivery, you have the opportunity to open  communication channels with your customer in a way that promotes trust and creates improved brand visibility among your customers. With DispatchTrack, you can offer:

Self-scheduling invitations: Once the purchase is complete, you can let your customers know that their orders are ready to schedule. From there, if you’re offering this option, you can direct them to a self-scheduling portal where they can choose a time slot from options based on your capacity rules. 

Pre-routing messages: When the order is ready to be routed, you can send emails and texts to your customers letting them know that the order is about to be routed. This helps turn up potential conflicts before routes are optimized and lets customers know that you’re still on top of the delivery process.  

Delivery reminder messages: A day or two before the delivery, you can send another reminder with more information. This might include a shorter time window, facts about the driver, or important info about what the customer can expect during the delivery. Like the notification above, this gives customers the chance to reach out to you with problems, and it also helps you set expectations for the delivery day.

During the delivery

This is where the rubber meets the road—literally. The stakes here are highest in terms of communications, because the information you’re sending goes out of date much more quickly than it does at any other time. If a message that says “the driver will be at the delivery site in 5 minutes” arrives 10 minutes after it’s supposed to, it’s effectively useless.

That’s why our delivery experience tools here are closely integrated with our driver management tools. Drivers in DispatchTrack have an easy-to-use mobile app that keeps them connected with dispatchers, managers, and customers as needed. On the day of delivery, the app prompts drivers to send out an automated message to all customers on the route as soon as the route is started. 

This notification can be configured to include your branding and specific messaging, but it only takes the push of a button on the driver’s part to send it out. And they can do the same thing when they’re a stop away from a given customer. This ensures a consistent experience throughout.  

Importantly, each of these day-of delivery notifications can come with a link to a tracking portal that offers live delivery data to customers. This can include driver information, order details, the location of the truck, and the delivery ETA—all with your brand identity. This gives customers the ability to track orders at their leisure without having to call in.

Post-delivery

Just because the delivery is over, that doesn’t mean that the experience is finished. Following a delivery, DispatchTrack enables users to send out post-delivery surveys to track customer satisfaction and gather feedback. These are fully configurable, so you can tailor your questions to what’s most important for your brand. 

For deliveries that may not have gone according to plan—maybe the customer wasn’t at the delivery site to receive their order, or maybe when their order arrived it was damaged and hand to be returned—we make it easy to reach back out to customers to either reschedule deliveries or work on resolving the issue in another way. 

How We Handle Exceptions

Of course, how you deal with deliveries that aren’t going exactly according to plan is a big part of perfecting the delivery experience you offer. Even a system like ours that offers 98% accurate delivery ETAs leaves you with another 2% of deliveries that don’t run on time that may require some kind of damage control. And even orders that run on time sometimes run into damaged items, customer not-at-homes, or missing items. 

DispatchTrack enables you to improve the customer experience in cases where things are going precisely to plan by offering a slate of exception management tools. From our real-time visibility dashboard, you can gain instant insights into every delivery as it unfolds. Scroll down the dashboard to see the status of every truck and route. Drill down to details in deliveries that catch your eye to see if there are notes from the driver or images that provide context. 

From our exceptions tab, you can immediately see a list of all exceptions and respond to them in turn. This enables you to salvage deliveries in real time when they might not be going according to plan. For instance, if a truck breakdown means an entire route’s worth of orders needs to be rescheduled, we make it easy for you to find all of those exceptions and send notes to each customers with an apology and a new scheduling link.

Branding and Configuring Communications in DispatchTrack 

One of the most important elements of a great customer experience is strong branding. What you say to customers matters, and so does how you say it. That’s why we make it easy for our users to customize their communications with their own wordings, colors, branding, and logos.

All of this branding happens in an easy-to-use editor, and you can differentiate your messaging and branding for different audiences (e.g. for different product or service categories) by defining notification groups. This helps you boost brand strength in the mind of your customers throughout every touchpoint in the last mile delivery process, all while ensuring that the right message reaches the right customer at the right moment. 

In an era where customer experience is more important than ever before—and cost pressures are more intense than they’ve been in many years—it’s hard to overstate the importance of having the right customer experience tools. If you’d like to learn more about how DispatchTrack can provide those tools, get in touch with one of our last mile experts today.