How Does Electronic Proof of Delivery Impact Costs?

Last mile delivery costs are driven by a wide range of different factors, from fuel and labor to phone calls, printed paperwork, truck maintenance, and more. It’s no wonder that the last mile accounts for nearly half of total logistics costs! So it’s no surprise that businesses across multiple verticals are always on the lookout for ways to manage those costs—which is why more and more delivery organizations are prioritizing digital proof of delivery.

Wait. Digital proof of delivery? Is that really going to offer you the ability to control your delivery costs? Sure, it’s nice to digitize something that you used to be printed out—but how much of an impact can it really make? 

As it turns out, the answer is that electronic proof of delivery (or electronic POD) can make a real dent in your delivery costs and help bolster last mile customer experience at the same time. In this post, we’ll get into the nitty-gritty details of how that works in practice. 

Table of contents:

• Electronic Proof of Delivery Is the Key to Keeping Delivery Costs Down
• Managing False Damage and Liability Claims
• Empowering Faster Time-to-Revenue
• Improving Visibility in Last Mile Delivery Management

Electronic Proof of Delivery Is Key to Keeping Delivery Costs Down

People tend to keep doing things the way they do them until there’s a real cost associated with it—and even then, it can be easy to become blind to the cost just from having done it so long. For some businesses, paper proof of delivery falls into this category. It’s just the way business is conducted. 

But as businesses have digitized their last mile delivery operations in the past 10 years or so, PoD has presented an easy opportunity for digital transformation. With the right electronic proof of delivery software, you can cut out all of the paperwork that drivers have historically had to carry around with them and improve your last mile delivery performance in the process. Here’s how:

Managing False Damage and Liability Claims

When it comes to managing your profit and loss sheet, it pretty much goes without saying that getting paid for what you deliver is crucial. That means avoiding—or fending off—damage and liability claims that might prevent your customers from paying their bills. 

Historically, this has been the bane of many a furniture retailer’s existence. Plenty of damage claims from customers are real, of course, but a huge percentage of them refer to damage that was caused after the delivery team was finished or is completely unrelated to the delivery. In spite of the spurious nature of many of the damage and liability claims that were sent to the typical retailer, there wasn’t much that could be done to refute them. Often, it wouldn’t be worth the person-hours required to chase down the proof that you needed to defend against these claims. 

With electronic proof of delivery, the calculus changes. Your drivers can document each delivery with photos and customer signatures, so there’s zero doubt about the condition of the items or the delivery site when the job is done. Most people when presented with hard evidence that there was no damage caused by the delivery team will drop their damage claims and pay their invoices. 

Conversely, in cases where damage did occur, your team has a clear record of what happened and can easily process claims. The effect is the same either way: you get to the right answer more quickly and expend fewer resources doing so. 

Empowering Faster Time-to-Revenue

We noted above that when it comes to liability and damage claims, electronic proof of delivery can be a big help in terms of clearing roadblocks and speeding up payments. But that’s not the only way that you can leverage smarter proof of delivery to improve your time-to-revenue. 

For instance, you can use the geotagging and timestamping on your POD to create a clear record of exactly when and where the delivery was made (or attempted). This can help clear up any ambiguity about whether the right goods made into the right place at the right time. 

By the same token, you can leverage electronic proof of delivery in your delivery receipts so the customer has a complete record of the delivery for their own purposes. For B2C businesses, this may not be a huge concern—but for B2B businesses or 3PLs that might have to get their clients’ accounts payable department to authorize payment, this can save a lot of time and effort. 

In fact, with the right technology, this process can even be automated. Based on the delivery details recorded by your delivery software you can instantly generate invoices for clients that include the relevant information with the proof of delivery attached. This helps you turn an otherwise laborious task into something that can be done in a few minutes. Once you’ve reviewed the system-generated invoices and sent them out, you can get the process started on the client’s end and ultimately get paid that much more quickly.  

Improving Visibility in Last Mile Delivery Management

When things are going right, electronic proof of delivery is a crucial tool for speeding up your time to revenue and improving your customer experience. When things are going wrong, it can also serve as a tool for smarter exception management. 

Picture this: you’re a dispatcher at a 3PL tracking the day’s deliveries from your dashboard. You see that one of the orders that was scheduled on a particular route has been marked by the driver as partially delivered. You want to know what caused the exception as quickly as possible so you can rectify the situation with the customer. So, instead of picking up the phone to call the driver—who’s probably back on the road by now—you drill down to details on the order and see that the driver has uploaded several photos.

Instead of trying to parse the driver’s description of the exception, you can visualize the delivery at a glance. You can see from the photos that one of the items out for delivery was damaged in transit, and the customer will need a replacement for it. You reach out to them to schedule another delivery and find a slot in an upcoming route to get the last of the items delivered. As far as partial deliveries go, this one doesn’t sting too badly for the customer, since it was resolved quickly and they know they’ll have the rest of their order soon. 

This is just one example of the ways in which you can leverage real-time information of this kind into better last mile exception management. Generally speaking, the more information you have at your fingertips, the more effectively you can manage the last mile as it unfolds—which means that empowering your drivers to capture robust, electronic proof of delivery is crucial. 

Of course, EPOD doesn’t exist in a vacuum. The value you get out of it is going to depend on the tools and technologies you surround it with. When you’ve got a highly connected, agile, and intelligent last mile delivery system helping you capture that proof of delivery and make the most of it, you can position yourself to reduce costs and delight customers.