The purpose of offering delivery services is to give customers the convenience of receiving the items they ordered without leaving the comfort of their homes. It’s meant to promote convenience and hassle-free transactions between your business and the people. However, if the amount of effort and time spent on deliveries is increasing, it’s already an obvious sign that your business is providing inefficient service to your customers.
Delays on deliveries and other kinds of parcel issues can adversely impact the reputation of your business. To boost the customers’ buying confidence, you’ll need to improve the quality and efficiency of your delivery service. These are a few strategies that you should do.
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Upgrade your delivery vehicle
First things first, let’s talk about your delivery fleet. Before you determine what upgrades your vehicles need, you have to evaluate certain things, including capacity usage, service time, and cost per mile. Checking these aspects will give you an idea of the overall performance and productivity of your fleet.
Generally, if your cars have old batteries, engines, and tires, replacement is the key to improve efficiency. On the other hand, if the security of the deliveries, vehicles, and your drivers is your concern, safety and anti-theft devices are what you need. One of the best investments is installing dash cams to your vehicles to record car incidents and encourage safe driving. Other valuable upgrades include car alarm systems and GPS trackers
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Check in with your drivers
The input of your delivery drivers is crucial for assessing the efficiency of your service. After all, they’re the ones who drive to get your products to the customers. These insights will also be valuable for creating future route plans. Generally speaking, you’d want to determine the traffic bottlenecks, especially during peak hours. You’d also want to provide job flexibility to your drivers by identifying the usual start and end location requests and assign specific neighborhoods and areas they’re more familiar with.
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Leverage input from other staff
Apart from your drivers, you’d also want to get feedback from your other frontline staff. You can start seeking feedback from your people that actually receive and manage all orders. Ask about any concerns regarding delivery schedules or prioritization, or problems with equipment they’re using. If your team is struggling with route plans, you’d also want to seek suggestions from them. They can provide you with more accurate details when it comes to what’s happening in delivery management. Ask for candid feedback.
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Optimize the routes
Talking about route plans, optimizing the routes can help boost the efficiency of your delivery service. This is basically about managing vehicle space and the availability of drivers. For route optimization, take into account your vehicles’ top speed, load limit, capacity, and weight. Doing so will allow you to avoid misused or wasted space in your vehicles. You might also need to consider adding a stop to fill the capacity of vehicles with available space.
When it comes to the availability of your drivers, consider factors, such as their next availability and the time they need to go back to the office. This will help your manager to avoid problems in assigning tasks to your drivers. With optimized routes, you won’t likely need to add more drivers or vehicles.
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Improve prioritization
Enhancing efficiency also demands great prioritization. One important thing to understand is that not every order is crucial. There are items that should be scheduled on another day or week, depending on your resources. If you have limited resources, such as fewer delivery vehicles or drivers, you need to set strict priorities for orders based on urgency and on-site location.
At the same time, you can drastically boost production delivery if you also account for the delivery time, servicing requirements, and equipment available. In terms of re-prioritizing orders or re-routing your team, using a good work order management system can streamline the process and help you avoid errors and delays.
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Stick to your commitments
The last important ingredient to improve delivery efficiency is meeting your commitments. Clients always want transparency and are likely to acquire service from businesses that can at least stick to their promised time windows. In creating or revising your route plans, be sure to take note of time windows. Delivering within your time windows can lead to repeat orders, satisfied customers, and a good business reputation.
By offering your clients or customers a flawless service, your business won’t only have a strong reputation. You also get to increase customer satisfaction and retention, while maximizing your profit. Your business will have no massive returns pile and no heap of customer complaints. Start developing better delivery management now with our tips.
