5 Best Practices for Handling Peak Season Deliveries

Each year, peak season deliveries wind up jamming up the docks and frustrating both drivers and customers. And anyone wishing for a “normalization” of shipments in the future is going to end up disappointed: Online commerce—a key driver of seasonal shipments—is red-hot and its growth curve doesn’t appear to be flattening anytime soon. For the most recent year, online purchases were up over 8% and the forecast compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of online commerce from 2024-2029 is 9.49% globally. The U.S. clocks in at 9% while other countries are forecast even higher—with Turkey, Brazil, India and Mexico all over 11% CAGR for the next five years.

This means that delivery organizations will face increasingly tougher tests of their ability to delight customers with on-time performance without breaking the bank.

Given that, for many businesses, a huge amount of the year’s revenue can come from only a few weekends worth of buying, it’s hard to overstate the importance of rolling out deliveries that meet customer expectations. Building brand loyalty is tough in the best of times, but good delivery experiences—especially in peak season when competitors may be failing—can have an outsized impact on your repeat business. If you’re at your best when delivery season is at its busiest, you can stand out in a crowded marketplace—all while benefiting from efficiencies that help keep costs manageable.

But how do you make sure that you’re at your best when you’re at your busiest? The first step is to implement the right best practices.

1. Make Sure You’re Maximizing Capacity

The first challenge around Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and Christmas is the sheer volume of deliveries. You need to match your delivery capacity to your projected order volumes. To do that, you first have to know what your capacity actually is. Without the right tools, this can be very difficult if not impossible.

More often than not, when businesses feel like they can’t meet delivery demand no matter how many trucks they add, the issue actually comes down to route optimization. You might have a sense of how many deliveries you should be able to carry out per day, but instead your drivers continuously run late and can’t complete deliveries because it’s not clear how long each delivery will actually take. As a result, it’s difficult to figure out how much you theoretically should be able to deliver.

That’s why route optimization is so crucial to success. When you leverage AI to optimize your routes, you can be sure that you’re driving the fewest possible miles between stops and that your drivers are positioned to arrive on time. This helps you get the most out of your existing truck capacity—all while making it easier to figure out exactly what your capacity really is, such that you only add extra trucks (or contractors, or 3PL partners) when they are actually needed.

2. Optimize Your Distribution Network

Obviously, route optimization can help ensure you’re driving the fewest possible miles per stop—making it possible to deliver more orders, more quickly. But during peak demand times, you can amplify the effects of route optimization even further by making sure your distribution network is optimized for your expected demand. If, for instance, you know from past holiday seasons that your orders are likely to be spread out or clustered in particular areas, you can map out the optimal points to establish warehouse and distribution centers to minimize drive time and maximize capacity utilization across your entire fleet.

This might sound daunting but it only requires historical delivery data and the AI route optimization technology we talked about above. When your route optimizing software is lightning-fast and incredibly accurate, you can run potential what-if scenarios on hypothetical order data to determine the optimal network for meeting high demand. The result? More customers get their deliveries on time.

3. Confirm Delivery Appointments in Advance

The first two best practices take advantage of cutting-edge last mile delivery technology. At the same time, some of the most effective ways to ensure that things go off without a hitch are just common sense. For instance: confirming customer delivery appointments before they’re routed.

When you confirm with your customers before the day of delivery that the scheduled delivery window works for them, their order is accurate, and their address is correct, you can significantly cut the number of deliveries that fail because the customer isn’t at home. Since failed deliveries are costly and complicate future delivery plans—with redeliveries crowding out new ones—their impact is almost doubled: You make two deliveries while getting paid for one, and the second “free” delivery keeps you from making an additional paid one. Your FADR (First Attempt Delivery Rate) matters. A lot.

The challenge of course is to make all of those calls. Especially for larger organizations and especially in peak season, calling everyone on the schedule individually is an operational nightmare, and the amount of labor consumed could wipe out the savings from lower FADR.

Again, last mile technology can provide an answer. It can automate the phone calls, emails and texts needed to have customers set their own capacity aware delivery windows while also tracking schedule confirmations, even flagging unconfirmed deliveries so you can follow up with those customers if needed.

4. Adopt Technology That Actually Scales

Just as you need to scale up your customer communications in periods of high delivery volume, you also need to scale up other delivery processes: Routing more stops than usual, sending out more notifications, tracking more deliveries, and potentially managing more drivers, additional carriers or contractors.

To make this happen, you first need to have the right processes in place—you can’t effectively scale up something that doesn’t work. But you also need to have technology that’s built to handle as many orders as you can throw at it without slowing down. When your last mile tracking software is a true SaaS that was built for the cloud from the ground up, it can scale processing power required to call your customers, route your orders and track deliveries up or down as needed.

5. Visibility, Visibility, Visibility

There’s a lot you can do to prepare for peak season deliveries—some of it process-related, some of it through technology. But once the orders have been routed, dispatched, and loaded into trucks, the game changes completely. All of sudden, it’s not about how well you can plan, but about how effectively you can execute those plans in real time. You need to start with AI-optimized route planning that can give highly-accurate ETA predictions to help ensure things stay on track most of the time—but there’s no way to predict everything that’s going to happen on the day of delivery.

To successfully ramp up deliveries of higher order volumes, you need to build in a lot of flexibility and adaptability throughout your entire delivery process. The key to making this kind of flexibility possible? End-to-end last mile visibility.

When you can see at a single glance what’s going right and what isn’t, you can proactively intervene to keep plans on track and prevent late deliveries from piling up.

This isn’t just a matter of visibility into truck locations and driver statuses. It’s also about data visibility within your delivery management platform. And that includes visibility across teams and functions (sales, warehouse and delivery) and for the ultimate customer. Providing visibility to your customers helps reduce failed deliveries and ensure delightful deliveries no matter how busy the season gets. If you can make that happen, you can position yourself to win not just this holiday season, but all the peak seasons to come.

Want More Cost Optimization Tips? Read The Last Mile Cost Reduction Playbook: