4 Minute Read
Challenging customer demands, shrinking delivery times, and more intense price wars are making delivery management an ever more arduous task. It’s hard to find the right balance between the factors affecting delivery services. That's why it’s more important than ever to make sure that your last mile delivery operations are efficient.
One way of ensuring optimal processes across last-mile operations is to use delivery management software. This can help reduce costs, ensure right-time deliveries, and delight customers.
Delivery Management Software: Essential Features
Route Optimization
A delivery management tool with robust route optimization functionality can help fleet operators and managers plan daily operations more efficiently.
Route optimization enables you to plot routes for multiple delivery drivers automatically in just a few minutes. Optimized route planning paves the way for more efficient delivery operations. It saves time for planners and ensures that the routes you’re assigning to drivers are actually efficient.
How? By using AI and large caches of data to generate optimized delivery routes. This might mean factoring in weather, historic traffic conditions, service time expectations, driver skills levels, and more.
Customer Communication and Live Order Tracking
Ultimately, successful deliveries are all about customer satisfaction. Sure, you need to keep delivery costs in check. But if you discourage repeat business by putting cost-savings over delighted customers, growth will be hard.
That’s why your software needs to help streamline and automate customer engagement. It should empower you to send delivery notifications to customers throughout the entire process.
In addition, your software should also enable live order tracking through a dedicated customer portal. After all, today's customers are more demanding than ever. They want to receive their orders as quickly as possible and be able to track them in real-time.
Automated Scheduling of Deliveries
Assigning and deploying drivers can be one of the most burdensome tasks for a dispatch or delivery manager. It can be hard to decide manually which orders to assign to which vehicles. And it's even harder when delivery volumes are high.
Thankfully, the right delivery management solution helps provide complete visibility into resource usage. A worthy delivery management platform should help organizations allocate assets and drivers according to factors like weight time requests.
Flexibility and Agility
This is important for tailoring the solution to your needs. But it’s also critical when a delivery business wants to add features or scale up operations. Delivery solutions should have the capability to accommodate new functionalities without much hassle to support new business needs.
This is partially a question of software architecture. But it’s also a question of the solution provider itself. Are they in a position to innovate quickly and roll out changes as needed? The right solution provider will have a track record of adapting to changing customer needs.
Smooth Mobile Interface
No delivery service will ever drive success without empowering delivery personnel. Thus, delivery software should offer a smooth mobile interface. It should enables drivers to access all pertinent information regarding each order or delivery with the driver app.
Information can include customer data, specific instructions, payment information, and route information.
Ideally, your software would also give drivers the ability to capture electronic proof of delivery via signatures and photos. This helps drivers document their good work and ensure timely, accurate compensation. This can have a big impact on driver retention.
Easy Integration
Rolling out a new last mile delivery logistics solution doesn’t have to be complicated. The trick is to ensure a solution that allows for easy integration with current enterprise systems.
Look for software solutions that are flexible and easy to integrate with other systems. This way, you can avoid an expensive phase-out of any systems currently in use.
Here, seeking out cloud-native SaaS software is usually the way to go. When the solution provider is handling maintenance and updates, you’re less likely to run into issues down the road.
Data-Driven Insights
Technology advancements have paved the way for data-driven action. Having data means gaining valuable insights across the last mile. Delivery management software should provide analytics on route performance, driver behavior, cost per stop, cost per route, and much more.
In this way, data helps managers and businesses determine pain points and improve processes. That’s why it’s so important for your fleet delivery software to provide robust analytics. Customized reporting functionality and real-time tracking dashboards can make for more rapid decision making.
The right dispatch delivery management system allows businesses to manage operations better through route optimization, customer communications, and real-time visibility. Simply put, this can help businesses drive down operational costs while achieving operational excellence and high customer satisfaction.
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