Why Early Isn’t the Same as On-Time for Last Mile Deliveries

Conventional wisdom is wrong about as often as it’s right. For example, in delivery management “timing is everything” is wrong: Timing is the only thing.For a restaurant counting on a crate of fresh tomatoes first thing to complete the morning prep routine to a builder expecting framing lumber mid-day to a patient who ran out of antibiotics yesterday, when your delivery shows up is important. And here’s the most unconventional part—“on time” is not the same as “not late.” On time actually means just that: At the time the customer asked for the delivery.

While an early delivery may be fine in some circumstances, there are plenty of cases where it isn’t. For big and bulky goods, for instance, being early can be a real inconvenience as well as a drag on your reputation and your bottom line.

The data we collected as part of our Big and Bulky Delivery Report bears this out. We found that a large percentage of consumers (31%) said they considered early deliveries inconvenient—and 60% said that they’d be unlikely to purchase from the same business again after a delivery failed to arrive within the promised window.

This is pretty clear: if you’re delivering early — especially big and bulky items — you’re risking repeat business from a large swath of customers. The question is, why is early delivery an issue, and how can you ensure that you’re actually meeting customer needs?

Why Do a Third of Customers Say Being Early Is Just as Bad as Being Late?

So what’s wrong with showing up early? For one thing, if you’re delivering to a consumer’s home, there’s no guarantee that they’ll be there. Many customers have to make special arrangements to be home during the promised delivery window, and anything outside that window is inconvenient. If you’re very early, it may result in a failed delivery, even though that’s the last thing either party wants.

If it’s a B2B delivery, the issues are just as difficult. You might deliver to a construction site before there’s anywhere for the delivery to go. Or you might wind up in a restaurant’s parking lot during their lunch rush, when no one has time to accept the order and the manager’s annoyed that you’re taking up space needed for customers.

Inconvenience is definitely a problem, but it’s not the largest problem with showing up early. Arriving before the schedule window can cause the same reaction as showing up late: lack of trust. Your customers want to trust you to keep your promises, and showing up at the right time—not before and definitely not after—is the biggest single factor in earning, and keeping, that trust.

Challenges to Delivering at the Right Time

Just as you should be measuring on-time (not early, not late) deliveries as a primary KPI, the logistics industry as a whole measures that as well. In the most recent quarter, on-time delivery percentages for three major last-mile carriers—UPS, FedEx and USPS—showed a second consecutive year-over-year decline by 2%, 2% and 6% respectively to an average of 93%. Even those results may be exaggerated since some of the carriers implemented new “on time” policies that include counting a package promised for noon as on time if delivered by end of day (which can stretch to 9pm in some cases).

Delivering within the promised ETA window isn’t easy for even the largest carriers, and for other organizations, disappointing almost 10% of your customers is a real problem, whether that’s showing up late or showing up early. A lot of things have to be going right for you to be early, even if it's just that earlier deliveries took less time than anticipated. But that probably also means that your ETAs were off, which can signal larger planning issues.

Here are a few of the reasons that it’s so difficult to deliver at the right time:

• Estimating ETAs is challenging without the right technology: Accurate ETAs throughout a delivery run require you to effectively estimate not just travel times between stops but service times at the delivery sites, all of which might vary from product to product and driver to driver. Getting it right by hand with any real degree of precision is virtually impossible—instead, it requires an AI-powered solution that can use the accumulated data from past deliveries to generate incredibly granular predictions.
• Visibility is hard without accurate tracking and realtime reporting: Simply put, if your last mile deliveries are a black box from the time the trucks leave the depot to the time they complete their last stop, it’s impossible to keep even the best plans on track. Even when you have data coming in from out in the field, it’s hard to make sure you’re getting the right data at the right time. The result is that it’s not clear what’s happening over the course of the delivery run, which leaves you with little control over the outcomes.
• Maximizing your delivery capacity often involves guesswork: There’s real-time visibility that offers clarity on the day of delivery, but there’s also visibility into how much delivery capacity you actually have on any given day. It’s not uncommon for businesses to feel that they should be getting more deliveries out of their trucks and drivers than they are. Often, this is a result of ineffective route optimization. To keep your operation at optimum efficiency, you need to ensure that you’re delivering as much as you can per day, but loading up drivers with more cargo and route plans that can’t be executed is a recipe for late deliveries. 
• Customers need visibility too: Delivering at the right time isn’t just about hitting a time window that you calculated. It’s about doing what works for the customer—which means that you need to provide complete visibility into the delivery process from end to end. While our data found that large percentages of consumers don’t like early deliveries, it found near universal support (90%) for customer order tracking.

Three Best Practices for Right-Time Deliveries

Here are a few strategies:

1. Leverage AI: The trick to ensuring that your drivers arrive when your customers expect them is to use AI-powered delivery routing technology to generate highly accurate predictive ETAs as you’re creating delivery routes. This process really can’t be separated from the process of planning routes since it directly reflects your delivery capacity, but leveraging this kind of technology to optimize delivery routes yields better capacity utilization, improved ETAs, and more efficient delivery operations overall.
2. Prioritize true visibility: Real visibility is about having the right data—and complete data—in the right place at the right time. When your deliveries are already underway, that means live, up-to-minute order status updates that jump out at you from a single dashboard. If you have to hunt for the information, it may be out of date by the time you find it, and your hopes of managing by exception—and delivering at the right time even when things aren’t going precisely to plan—will be thwarted. How do you make real visibility happen? By focusing on both data integration by connecting the right systems and user experience by making critical information easy to spot.
3. Connect with your customers: Again, 90% of customers want to track their orders. And when you keep your customers informed throughout the delivery process, you have the chance to build trust by making—and keeping—delivery promises that work for your customers. You should be able to send your customers texts, emails, and calls with delivery updates and offer them a live tracking portal so they can see the exact status of the delivery once it’s underway. It’s hard to overstate how important this is for giving customers a feeling of control over their delivery experience and making them feel more confident that you’re actually going to deliver when you say you are.

If it seems like there’s a lot of talk of visibility in these best practices, that’s because it’s a crucial part of keeping your plans on track. When you combine real-time visibility with AI-powered routing that learns from each route executed each day, you can plan optimized routes that can be executed. That empowers drivers to make right time deliveries and delight your customers by keeping your delivery promises.