As the winter holiday season approaches, you’re facing the chance to make more sales, win over more customers, and maximize your profits.
But what if you succeed? That is, what if your tailored marketing strategy and irresistible promotions strike a chord, and you’re suddenly swimming in orders? Can your store – and in particular, your last-mile delivery operations – handle the pressure?
Boosting sales is only a true benefit for your business if you follow through with excellent experiences that keep customers coming back. And in the era of Amazon, customers have little patience for late or complicated deliveries.
In this article, we’ll focus on three ways you can get your local delivery operations ready for the pressures of the holidays.
By including these tips in your holiday ecommerce strategy, you’ll delight your customers, turning what might have been one-off sales into a foundation for long-term loyalty.
1. Automate manual tasks
Managing your own deliveries involves a lot of small planning and communications tasks. When orders start to ramp up for the holidays, you may find that some of these tasks start to feel time-consuming and prone to error.
Now’s the time to automate as much as you can. AI-powered delivery management software like CanFleet is designed to reduce friction by taking care of these tedious jobs for you, freeing up your team to focus on more important things.
Here are just a few examples of delivery management pains that can be helped – or even eliminated – by dedicated software.
Customer updates
Problem: Customers often want to know the real-time status of their deliveries. This can become a burden for your customer services team, who themselves may not always have up-to-date information.
Solution: Let customers access real-time tracking through delivery management software. This feature allows customers to track the location and estimated arrival time of their packages.
To really go the extra mile, set up automatic SMS notifications at key moments. – for example, when the package is picked up by the driver, or when the driver is nearing the customer’s home.
Proof of delivery
Problem: Customers often want to know the real-time status of their deliveries. This can become a burden for your customer service team, who themselves may not always have up-to-date information.
Solution: Let customers access real-time tracking through delivery management software. This feature allows customers to track the location and estimated arrival time of their packages.
To really go the extra mile, set up automatic SMS notifications at key moments. – for example, when the package is picked up by the driver, or when the driver is nearing the customer’s home.
Proof of delivery
Problem: Manually collecting and logging proof of delivery can be time-consuming and imperfect.
Solution: Enable drivers to capture electronic proof of delivery through the software. This can include digital signatures or photos, reducing paperwork and ensuring accuracy.
Unexpected issues
Problem: Sudden changes in delivery demand or unforeseen issues (such as traffic incidents) can disrupt planned schedules.
Solution: Enable dispatchers to reassign tasks and adjust routes on the fly. These changes are automatically communicated to drivers.
2. Use a dedicated route planning tool
We all love Google Maps – but if you’re using it to optimize your delivery routes, you may come up against few limitations.
First and foremost, Google Maps only allows you to plan a route with up to 10 stops. That might be all your business needs during the regular shopping season, but think carefully about how holiday demand may change things.
If you have 11 or 12 deliveries on your list for the day, you’ll already need to build two routes. This makes life more complicated for your dispatchers, who will have to manually organize all tasks into two separate routes, and for your drivers, who will have to pull up a new route at some point during the journey.
Secondly, Google Maps plans your route based on external factors such as distance and traffic. But because it isn’t optimized as a delivery management tool, it won’t factor in special considerations like customer delivery windows.
Personalized service is now a basic customer expectation. But if any of your customers have indicated specific time slots for delivery, or left notes such as, “I’m leaving for vacation at 3pm”, you’ll have to manually adjust your Google route, trying to balance each request as efficiently as possible.
During a high-intensity period like the holidays, these kinds of gaps can lead to errors, miscommunication, and delays. These not only frustrate customers; they also waste your team’s time and cost fuel.
For a more streamlined flow, choose a local delivery solution that includes a robust route planning tool.
If you use CanFleet, you can allow customers to schedule delivery windows at checkout. Then, CanFleet’s AI-powered route optimizer will generate an efficient route for your driver that ensures each delivery window is accounted for.
Whether you have 10 or 50 drop offs to complete in a single trip, you can honour customer preferences while expertly negotiating distances and traffic conditions.
Each driver receives their route clearly mapped out in the CanFleet Driver App. Your dispatchers are free to simply monitor and adjust when needed.
3. Learn and improve
The holiday shopping season is the ultimate test of your operations. If things didn’t go perfectly, turn your headaches into an opportunity to learn and prepare for future busy periods.
Your last-mile delivery management solution should include analytics on different aspects of your operations. These will help you take stock of what went well, and what may need extra attention in the future.
For example, if you see that a high percentage of delivery tasks were late, you can start looking into the reasons why. Here are some examples of metrics that could help you identify the problem:
Driver utilization rate – If all your drivers are actively engaged in delivery tasks almost all the time, yet deliveries are still arriving late, poor route planning may be to blame. Or, you may simply need more drivers next year.
Average time to task assignment – If your tasks are sitting for long periods of time before they are assigned to a driver, you may want to consider enabling auto-assignment to speed things up.
The number of tasks needing reassignment – If tasks are constantly being reassigned from one driver to another, you’ll see a slowdown. Have a talk with your dispatchers about the underlying reasons for the reassignments.
Make sure your customers have a way to rate your deliveries. Together with findings from your customer service team, this is a great way to identify what’s working well and which areas – such as your communications or your drivers’ customer service skills – may need attention.
Make your last mile count
These days, last mile delivery counts for a lot – and that’s especially true during the upcoming holiday season. Holiday shoppers’ calendars are filled with gift-giving events. Or, they’re about to board a plane to spend the winter break with their family. That cashmere scarf for Dad just has to arrive on time.
Take a good look at how you’re currently handling your deliveries. If you’re doing things manually, there are most likely weak points that could buckle under the strain of increased holiday sales, causing major hassle for your team and customers.
By implementing a software solution that can automate, streamline, and simplify your operations, you can make your customers excited to shop with you again, turning your holiday ecommerce strategy into a springboard for genuine growth.
