4 Ways to Power Up Your White Glove Delivery Success

There was a time – quite recently – when consumers were willing to accept the most basic delivery services. And for some categories of purchases having a bag or box tossed onto the front porch is still ok. But expectations have risen.

If you're selling expensive products, especially furniture and appliances, offering white glove service for delivery and set up is becoming mandatory. And while there are some customers who have always demanded a premium experience, their expectations have risen as well. Just pushing a new refrigerator into the nook in the kitchen and attaching the hose for the ice maker isn't enough. They expect their big-screen TV to be secured to an articulating wall mount, the cable box attached and all the remotes working before your crew leaves. 

Many brick and mortar stores built strong brands by offering white glove treatment from the time a customer first entered the showroom until their purchases were due to be replaced. But if most of the interactions customers have with your brand are online, your only real opportunity to give a premium 

experience comes during the delivery process. That’s why white glove deliveries have become such an important offering : They represent an opportunity to tend to your customers' needs in a more personal way. 

The potential for brand building is obvious, but orchestrating final mile deliveries is already challenging before layering on extra services. 

Here's how to implement white glove deliveries smoothly and profitably. 

1. Account for Service Time for White Glove Deliveries

One of the things that makes last mile deliveries hard is that estimating ETAs is difficult. Variations in service time, unpredictable traffic patterns, and complex routing requirements make predicting arrival times accurately a challenge. 

Especially when customers pay for premium services, part of what they’re paying for is confidence that you’ll stick to the delivery window you’ve promised. To make this possible, you need to correctly estimate and account for service time when you plan routes and set ETAs. 

White glove deliveries take longer, and when there's a complex set up, they're also variable. Typically, crews are not equally adept at different kinds of installation services. One crew might be wonderful with a home theater install but slow setting up an outdoor kitchen . 

The solution is to track how long each crew takes to perform different white glove services over time and use that to predict how long they'll spend on site in the future. Tracking that in a spreadsheet is possible but horribly tedious and slow. A sophisticated AI-powered logistics software system can collect service time data, crew by crew, and use it to predict future service times. . It'll also enable you to set on-site time expectations for customers more accurately, so they don’t find themselves looking at their watches wondering how much longer the delivery is going to take. 

2. Communicate Constantly 

White glove is all about expectations. Customers want something more than the typical delivery experience, and you can win customer loyalty by consistently promising great experiences and then actually delivering on them. But a delivery promise isn’t a one-and-done activity: It’s not enough to inform your customer at checkout that they should expect their order at a particular date and time. 

You need to increase the customer's confidence by staying in touch throughout the fulfillment process. This might include reminder messages leading up to the delivery, notifications during the day of delivery such as route start and one stop away, plus live tracking of the truck and proactive communications any time there’s an update to the delivery status or ETA. You can also let them know exactly what to expect when the crew arrives and the steps of the actual delivery. When a customer is paying for a premium experience they expect to know what is happening and when, so that they feel totally taken care of. 

3. Stay Flexible

So far, we’ve discussed white glove services as something that customers select at checkout from among other delivery options. But some customers won’t realize that they need premium service until the delivery is already underway. For instance, it might not occur to someone that they actually do need help unpacking and assembling a purchase until they see their new bed frame sitting on the stoop in a cardboard box . 

Being able to adjust the level of service on the fly is great for the customer and can add revenue, but it requires you to::

• Give drivers the ability to upsell a service within the driver mobile application and have that change be immediately reflected in your delivery data for the day 
• Enable drivers to quickly and easily reference checklists for white glove delivery services so they can be sure they’re providing the required level of care and attention to detail 
• Monitor deliveries in real time and communicate with customers further down the route who might be impacted by the change in service at the current stop

One customer’s great experience should not come at a cost to your other customers. You need granular last mile visibility into your daily execution to immediately see how changes to the plan will impact the rest of the route and ETAs down the line. That's not something you can do with Google maps, a spreadsheet and a cell phone. You need a routing solution with sophisticated AI capabilities that can adjust routes and communicate with everyone affected — dispatchers, drivers, customers — in minutes to reset expectations. Rapidly and automatically. 

4. Perfect Your Post-Delivery Touchpoints

If the customer feels like you’ve forgotten about them after the delivery or installation is finished, they may be less excited about buying again, or at least less likely to rate your business five stars on Google or Yelp.

When you follow up on a great white glove experience with a great post-delivery experience you solidify the impression of attentive service with your customers. That doesn't have to be difficult or costly. Simply giving customers the chance to fill out a delivery survey and sending a follow-up email after the delivery to make sure they’re still happy with the product and installation can be done automatically. The point is to stay connected and make the customer feel they're being taken care of. 

If your delivery software provides robust proof of delivery, you can leverage that, too. Especially with white glove , you want a clear record that you left the delivery site in great condition — no scratches on the floor, damage to the products, or excessive mess left behind. Capturing pictures of the delivery site following the completed services ensures you have exactly such a record — and you can share it with customers as part of the delivery receipt. 

All of these post-delivery touchpoints show customers that your dedication to their satisfaction doesn’t stop when the truck leaves their location and make it clear that the lines of communication are still open. When you combine that with exceptional white glove service that meets and exceeds expectations, you delight customers and raise the odds of repeat purchases.