5 Minute Read
Visibility is more than just the location of the delivery truck on a map. As the global logistics industry grows by more than 5% annually, the ability to operate efficiently gets more and more important all the time—and that means achieving real visibility.
When you have the right logistics tracking software, visibility is exactly what you get. But what does visibility really mean when it comes to last mile deliveries? How does it impact your customers, how can you leverage it to improve your bottom line, and what’s the right tracking software to leverage in order to gain the benefits of smarter tracking?
Index:
- The Modern Logistics Software Landscape
- Benefits of Optimizing Your Logistics Tracking
- What to Look for in Logistics Tracking Software
The Modern Transportation and Logistics Software Landscape
Businesses that have to grapple with last mile deliveries have complex needs. Operationally, you need to know when your customers’ orders are ready to ship, optimize routes for each delivery day, dispatch and manage drivers, and track each and every delivery as it’s unfolding.
At the same time, you need to be able to turn around and offer customers nearly the same level of visibility you have internally. You can provide transparency by sending texts and emails to customers with their delivery information, but that’s not the same as true real-time tracking.
When the customer wants to track their order on the day of delivery, they actually want a lot of information. The location of the truck on a map is one thing, but you need to contextualize it with other information:
- What stop number is the customer?
- What stop is the truck on now?
- What’s the scheduled time for the delivery?
- What’s the latest delivery ETA?
- Is the truck running on-time?
Taken together with the truck location, this gives the customer a complete picture of what’s happening with their delivery. This boosts confidence and helps ensure that there’s actually someone at the delivery site to receive the order—but it’s not necessarily that simple to provide. You need GPS tracking, but also status updates from drivers and technicians in the field. You also need a routing engine that can turn real-time information into updated ETAs.
Simply put, to achieve real logistics tracking, you need a solution that covers the entire last mile delivery journey from end to end. This will need to slot comfortably into your larger tech stack in order to promote visibility across the board—but when you can achieve that, you can delight your customers with an elevated delivery experience.
Benefits of Optimizing Your Logistics Tracking
Like we saw above, customers want the ability to track their deliveries from the comfort of their own devices, and with the right capabilities you provide them with that. This isn’t just a nice-to-have. Studies increasingly show that the ability to track deliveries in real time is a crucial part of modern delivery expectations.
While data is scarce, it’s a safe bet that expectations in a B2B context are similar. A consumer waiting for a new couch might check their phone two or three times (or more) over the course of the delivery day—while a contractor at a job site waiting for a pallet of lumber is less likely to be glued to their phone, they’ll still feel better with tracking information at their fingertips.
That said, boosting customer satisfaction is just one benefit of logistics tracking software. Some others include:
- Faster exception management: When your ETAs are constantly updating, you can immediately spot deliveries that are likely to be late and take action to smooth the situation over.
- Decreased phone time: Phone calls can get time consuming and expensive quickly—especially when delays start to pile up. But when your customers have logistics tracking capabilities on their devices, there’s less reason to call in. Likewise, there’s less reason for your team to call drivers to get status updates.
- Improved driver safety and productivity: Drivers don’t want to be interrupted by phone calls either, so giving them an easy way to ensure that status updates are flowing back to dispatch without distraction can be a huge boon. (Electronic proof of delivery is an added bonus here.)
- Improved coordination between planning and execution: When you can track deliveries in real time, you can see the gaps between last mile delivery planning and execution and work to shrink them. The more tightly you can coordinate between planning and execution, the more effectively you can rein in delivery costs across the board.
What to Look for in Logistics Tracking Software
The right logistics tracking software will help you achieve the benefits we’re talking about, and it can go a long way towards making your last mile delivery operations smarter and more cost effective.
But what should you actually look for when you’re selecting delivery software? Here are a few things to look for:
Total coverage of the last mile delivery journey
Tracking in a vacuum isn’t nearly as valuable as tracking that’s contextualized within your larger delivery operations. It’s always a balancing act to try and figure out the ideal scope of each segment of your technology stack, but when it comes to deliveries it can be incredibly valuable to have routing, dispatching, tracking, customer engagement, and driver management within the same solution.
Focus on the customer
Tracking is valuable both internally and for customer-facing visibility, but it’s not the end all be all of customer experience. When it’s integrated into a complete, end-to-end customer experience that promotes engagement throughout the full delivery lifecycle, you can boost customer loyalty and encourage repeat business. Here, you might ask how easy it is to communicate directly with the customer during the delivery, how much flexibility you have in your communications and notifications, and how the entire last mile journey is supported from the customer’s perspective.
Ease of use/implementation
Some software solutions look good in theory—they might even look good in a demo. But once you start trying to integrate them within your technology stack, the issues start to pile up. Conversely, there are some solutions that are difficult to get value out of even once they’re successfully implemented simply because of the difficulty of using the platform. This is something that can be hard to figure out from a demo or a sales conversation, which means looking to a provider’s track record may be your best bet. If they’ve helped other clients roll out quickly and with minimal disruption—and they’ve got the receipts to prove it—that’s a good sign.
Pathways to growth
Your business is constantly evolving. Your software provider should do the same by constantly refining their platform to provide more and better capabilities. Here, a history of meaningful partnership with their clients is a must. Your provider’s product roadmap should be driven by what challenges their customers are grappling with on a day to day basis.
At DispatchTrack, we provide SaaS-based logistics tracking software that we built by working hand in hand with our customers. The result is a system that’s built to make life easier for logistics operators across the entire last mile.
Book a demo today to learn how we can save you money in your last mile logistics.
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