What Are the Top Best Practices in Last Mile Delivery for Flooring?

The US flooring market has  been on an upswing that is projected to continue—with an expected CAGR of 5.4% between now and 2030. That means that distributors who specialize in flooring are going to have a lot of deliveries on their hands in the near future, if they don’t already.

One option is to outsource these deliveries to a trusted third party logistics provider, but for businesses that are managing their deliveries in-house, getting the last mile of the logistics process right is going to become increasingly important. After all, the last mile can frequently account for nearly half of all logistics costs, which means that the ability to control those costs through smarter, more flexible, and more efficient last mile operations can have a huge impact.

At the same time, how well you manage your last mile deliveries also has a huge impact on your customers. Businesses and consumers alike want more and more transparency into their deliveries, and they’ll seek out suppliers who can offer them the level of transparency—and the level of service in general—that they’re looking for. And, of course, you also need to show up on time with the right order. 

Luckily, the last mile technology market has been growing as well, and there are solutions on the market that can provide capabilities that simply much harder to come by even a few years ago. That means there’s never been a better time to invest in improving your last mile deliveries in flooring. 

How to Tackle the Last Mile Delivery for Flooring

When it comes to last mile deliveries, you’re grappling with a balancing act between giving customers what they want and ensuring that your own costs are manageable. In the days of pen and paper delivery planning, these two goals could often be at odds—but with smarter, more efficient processes they actually dovetail. 

Here are a few critical best practices for perfecting your last mile deliveries:

Optimize Your Routes for Greater Efficiency

Let’s get the biggest ticket item out of the way first: the first step to getting your last mile deliveries into a state where they’re efficient from both operational and cost perspective is to improve your route optimization. 

Efficient route optimization can help businesses reduce their last mile fuel consumption by more than 10%, which can be a huge boon right off the bat. At the same time, it can help you get more out of your capacity by reducing the amount of time required to complete a given set of stops. 

Crucially, the best route optimization solutions for flooring distributors will also enable you to increase ETA accuracy to as much as 98%. The result is that you avoid the hassle and inefficiencies that inevitably come from late deliveries—i.e. managing unplanned returns, managing redelivery attempts, and potentially dealing with irate customers. This not only saves you more money, it also improves customer satisfaction. 

Set Expectations via Customer Communications

Speaking of customers: Depending on who your customer is, they may or may not know what to expect when it comes to having their flooring delivered—which means that setting expectations is huge. If you need the customer to do any sort of prep before your arrival, or if there’s any information they need to know that’s specific to the type of flooring they’re receiving, that’s something that needs to be worked into your delivery-related communications as much as possible. 

Of course, communicating about the delivery across the entire lifecycle of the order is a big part of customer delivery experience. You’ll want to offer your customers guidance about what to expect and what you might need from them, as well as when to expect the delivery team to arrive. 

For consumers, the best practice is to give them multiple opportunities to confirm the delivery date, time, location, and order details before the day of delivery. For business customers, this might be overkill—but the same level of transparency and connectivity is critical. 

Ensure Real-Time Delivery Tracking

Another best practice for ensuring a great customer delivery experience is to enable real-time delivery tracking throughout the day of delivery. Many of your customers will be depending upon your deliveries for keeping their projects on track, and the ability to see exactly where the delivery is at any given time can help boost confidence in the delivery process. 

To make this possible, you need a technology ecosystem that ensures visibility and connectivity between drivers, dispatchers, and customers. Real-time delivery data should be gathered via driver mobile app as drivers out in the field perform their tasks for the day, and that data should be processed by your routing engine to update ETAs in real time. 

The best part about providing this level of visibility to your customers is that it also ensures that you have last mile delivery visibility within your own four walls. That means that dispatchers, managers, customer support staff, and even sales personnel can quickly visualize what’s happening across routes and deliveries. From there, they can spot potential exceptions and flag them for follow up. This gives you the ability to get in front of potential late deliveries or other issues that might impact customer experience. 

Speed up the Process with Flexible Pallet Scanning

The faster you can scan items off the truck, the more quickly you can get in and out of the delivery site. Not only does this have a big impact on customer satisfaction, it also helps position you as a top tier organization worthy of priority. 

The trick to making this happen is making sure your drivers have the ability to scan entire pallets throughout the entire process—not just when loading and unloading trucks at the warehouse or distribution, but when unloading at the customer site. To make this happen, you need a smart driver mobile app that can handle this sort of functionality as well as a system that will integrate effectively with your ERP so that the same pallets can be tracked via audit trail during the first, middle, and last miles.

<< Read the case study: Learn how BMD leveraged flexible pallet scanning with DispatchTrack to improve efficiency in their deliveries. >> 

Don’t Forget About Pickups and Reverse Logistics

Unplanned returns are just a part of life when it comes to flooring delivery. Your customers know that it’s better to order too much than too little, and the odds are you’ll have a certain amount of product coming back to the warehouse at the end of the day even if your delivery performance is flawless. 

The ability to ensure a complete audit trail for these deliveries is critical to success. Luckily, it’s something that you can do easily with the right technology—you just need to empower drivers to document which items are coming back on the truck and why. 

By the same token, if you’re offering pickup logistics at your store or warehouse to customers, you need to be able to manage that process the same way you’d manage last mile deliveries. Orders need to be created and scheduled, customers need notifications when it’s time to pick their orders up, and you need total visibility into pickups as they’re completed. 

Each of the best practices we’ve mentioned above can be impactful on their own, but when you combine them you can truly revolutionize your last mile logistics. With the right technology to support you, you can take your last mile to the next level—reducing costs and improving customer satisfaction in the process.