What Are the Best Practices for White Glove Delivery in 2024?

According to a recent report from the Supply Chain Management Review, nearly two-thirds (64%) of top supply chain organizations said that improving customer service drove their new technology initiatives. That reason edged out cost control, digital transformation, and staying competitive in the market. In fact, it was the most-cited reason for diving into new technologies like Big Data, blockchain, and AI.

This study isn’t an outlier: when it comes to delivery and logistics, there’s never been a greater emphasis on customer experience. Businesses across the board are investing in ways to ensure customer satisfaction, and the spotlight is very much on last mile deliveries—in large part because that’s the end of the customer experience journey in many cases. 

All of this raises the question of how white glove deliveries are being impacted by this renewed focus on customer experience. After all, white glove delivery has been setting the standard for premium delivery experiences for many years. Do modern customers have such high expectations that white glove delivery is being rendered obsolete, or are these premium delivery options a crucial part of the last mile delivery toolkit for businesses that want to keep their customers happy? 

How Do White Glove Deliveries Work?

Before we dive into the ins and outs of how modern delivery experience is evolving, let’s lay out exactly what we mean by white glove delivery service. 

The name refers to the idea that the delivery personnel would literally wear white gloves during the delivery process—both to protect the client’s home and the furniture, appliances, or whatever else was being delivered and, on some level, to suggest a certain degree of luxury and care. While the gloves are always mandatory in modern deliveries, the high level of care and attention to detail are. 

Customers who opt for white glove services expect personalized service and extreme attention to detail throughout the entire delivery process. This means keeping them in the loop before the truck has even left the warehouse, and it means getting the order into the customer’s home carefully, efficiently, and to the customer’s exact specifications. 

These types of deliveries don’t necessarily require installations or other setup—though they certainly can. The point is mostly to roll out the best possible customer experience. This will often require spending more time on site. Your delivery team will be taking greater care with every step of the process, and the customers may have requests that take longer to accommodate. 

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For instance, they might ask your team to try out a few different ways of positioning their new dining table in the space, which would take longer than a simple across-the-threshold delivery. That’s part of the reason these deliveries often come with a price tag. But for customers that are willing to pay for that extra bit of service, the value to your brand strength—and the increased customer loyalty that comes with it—can be tremendous.   

White Glove Delivery Best Practices

How do you offer a delivery experience that will actually stand out in the current last mile delivery market? Here are a few best practices:

Communicate Early and Often

Honestly, this best practice could be applied to all modern deliveries. Customers across the board increasingly blame poor delivery experience on a lack of effective communication. Whether the customer is waiting for a delivery of a new dishwasher to their home or a case of wine to their restaurant, they want to have each delivery confirmed, they want to be notified when the driver is out on their route, and they want to be able to track the progress of the truck and consult live, accurate delivery ETAs. 

When it comes to offering a white glove experience, these communication touchpoints are table stakes. Customers receiving this kind of service need to know what to expect (i.e. what is and is not included in the white glove delivery service), but they also need to feel that they’re connected and taken care of. Here, it’s helpful to offer customers the ability to contact your team simply by responding to system-generated text and email messages.  

Deliver On Time

It’s hard to overstate how crucial it is to get the basics right. If your delivery time arrives four hours late to the delivery site, no amount of personalized service is going to turn the experience into a good one for the customer. 

Of course, delivering on time is easier said than done. To get it right consistently, you need to choose the right route optimization software—specifically, software that’s able to easily account for the differences in time spent on site for white glove deliveries versus other delivery types. This is an area where machine learning and AI-based capabilities can be particularly valuable. By analyzing huge numbers of data points from previous deliveries, solutions powered by machine learning can improve ETA accuracy over time and help ensure consistent on-time delivery. 

The other side of the coin is exception management. No business will ever reach a 100% on-time delivery rate, so the way you manage delivery exceptions is crucial. When it comes to white glove, you need to have the visibility to spot potential late deliveries far in advance. This means real-time tracking not just of vehicle locations but of delivery statuses—all from a single screen where you can easily spot potential late deliveries and work to mitigate them.  

Ensure Digital Documentation

Because the standards for white glove deliveries are higher than for normal delivery services, documentation is even more important. If there are questions after the fact about damage—other to the delivered items or other elements of the delivery site (say, floorboards)—you want to have irrefutable proof on hand that the delivery team did what was expected of them and didn’t cause any damage on-site. 

To make this happen, you need to empower your drivers and other delivery team members with the ability to capture digital proof of delivery for every stop. This should include photographs (or even videos), as well as signatures, timestamps, and geo-stamps. This way, you have a clear record of what happened where and when.

As an added bonus, having this level of documentation can help you resolve disputes and get paid a lot more quickly—whether you’re offering white glove services or not.  

Track Customer Satisfaction 

Ultimately, white glove deliveries are all about the customer, and the best practices that you work with need to reflect that. If you’re doing things for the sake of premium service that aren’t actually making customers happier—you need to figure that out ASAP. 

The best way to make that happen is just to ask. Send a survey via text after every delivery—or even have your delivery teams provide a physical survey to customers on site if they would prefer—and ask how your team did. Your uptake rate will be higher if you’re able to send out the request promptly and automatically, but by and large there will be many people who are more than happy to share their feedback. 

For positive feedback, you can even encourage users to leave reviews on Google or other sites. For feedback that’s less positive, you can look at your existing processes and try to spot room for improvement. If you’re offering white glove services, you can use this data to carve out a niche that will separate you from the competition.