If you’re one of the logistics leaders at a building supplies distributor, you don’t have time for theory—you need practical ways to manage logistics more effectively. This means removing uncertainty, increasing visibility, and keeping customers happy and connected. All while minimizing delivery costs.
It’s a tall order, especially in a world where customer expectations in building supplies are increasingly shaped by the changing customer experience landscape in more traditionally consumer-facing retail contexts. Your average general contractor knows the difference between a great customer delivery experience and one that lacks visibility and accountability, and it’s your job to make sure your deliveries fall into the former category.
With all that in mind, here are 5 ways to meet increasingly elevated customer delivery experience expectations and the specific tools and technologies you can leverage to put those ideas into practice. The goal here isn’t just to give logistics leaders ideas, but to offer an actionable playbook for keeping customers happy in a scalable and cost-effective way right now.
1. Provide delivery predictability
Contractors are constantly juggling multiple priorities across job sites, and prepping for a delivery is just one more thing competing for their attention. You can make their lives much easier by ensuring that the deliveries they receive from you are predictable and consistent.
This means communicating clearly about when to expect the delivery, and then delivering exactly at the promised time.
From there, you can translate consistent, predictable delivery performance into repeat business and customer loyalty.
What tools to use:
What does it take to make this happen in practice? We’ll talk more about the communication (read: expectation setting) piece of this puzzle in the next section, but when it comes to delivering exactly when you promised, advanced route optimization is critical.
You might think that route optimization isn’t as important as scheduling in a business like building supplies distribution, but in point of fact it can be a crucial tool for powering predictable deliveries—provided it’s actually built for your use case. Routing that’s built on real logistics use cases can help you ensure that your schedules are actually feasible and that you’re getting as much out of your trucks as possible without risking late deliveries.
Look for a route optimization tool that leverages machine learning trained on logistics native data to predict delivery times more accurately. This can help you ensure the level of ETA accuracy and predictability that builds trust and increases confidence with customers.
2. Provide delivery transparency
Okay, we talked about using machine learning-powered routing to meet expectations, but how do you set and manage those expectations with customers to begin with? Phone calls are the traditional method, but they don’t scale (and, frankly, they annoy people).
Instead, you should be able to orchestrate the entire experience in the form of proactive alerts, notifications, and updates. If the customer is choosing their own delivery time slot, they should be able to do that from the comfort of their own device. Likewise, if they’re ever wondering where their order is, they should be able to open up a tracking portal and see a live ETA, order details, and the location of the truck.
This should be automated to the extent possible based on a defined cadence of messages before, during, and after delivery. Post-delivery, you might include a receipt with proof of delivery that documents exactly what was delivered, at what time, and in what condition.
What tools to use: Customer delivery experience management
Modern logistics management software solutions should offer you the ability to orchestrate the entire customer journey from one place. You should have a dashboard where you can create branded notifications for different delivery lifecycle stages, segment them by different delivery and service types, and set triggers for when to send them out.
AI can be increasingly helpful here. Simple AI deployments that can answer questions like “where’s my order?” can save your team huge amounts of time and effort—but the best AI for delivery experience does much more than that. It can help with scheduling, rescheduling, survey collection, and more. This frees up your team to focus on exception management.
Learn more about AI for customer delivery experience here.
3. Capture robust proof of delivery
The person doing the ordering isn’t necessarily the person who actually signs for the delivery on a busy jobsite. And neither one of them may be the person who authorizes the payment to you. That’s why clear delivery documentation is important to both you and the customer.
Thankfully, this is something that gets easier and easier to get right every year.
What tools to use: driver mobile application
At this point, nearly every driver mobile application for delivery management will enable you to capture electronic proof of delivery. But not all POD is created equal. Look for an app that enables your drivers to take multiple pictures, capture videos if needed, and provide notes and reason codes when deliveries are either failed or incomplete.
Bonus points if the app can detect blurry photos or photos that are missing items and require the driver to retake them.
4. Ensure execution excellence
The best customer experiences don’t happen by accident—they come from setting your drivers and delivery teams up for success from the distribution center to the job site. This means providing guidance before each stop to ensure that they know what the customer’s requirements are and what pitfalls they might need to avoid.
It also means putting them in a position to meet the customer’s exact needs once they’re on site. Some of the time, this will be straightforward: leaving a pallet of valves and fittings in the designated dropoff area on the job site.
But there will also be times where the requirements are more complex: installing an appliance or providing another on site service. When this happens, it’s all too common to see the delivery team flying blind. Either they don’t know the exact requirements, or they’re not able to document them. The result is slower time on site and a worse experience for the end customer.
Luckily, a few simple tools can make execution excellence the default.
What tools to use: configurable service compliance forms, AI for delivery drivers
To begin with, you can embed delivery intelligence for each stop on a route into the driver’s existing workflow in the mobile app. This can take the form of an AI-generated voice note that combines order and delivery details provided by the customer with location intelligence sourced from around the web. This helps ensure that the driver is prepared to tackle parking, access, and delivery details in advance.
Once the driver is on site, you can provide configurable service compliance forms within the mobile app to guide the driver through both the service being provided and the correct documentation. This can include checklists, step-by-step branching logic, and prompts for photos of specific steps (e.g. installing an individual fitting correctly within a larger task).
This can effectively uplevel more junior drivers and technicians on the spot so they can do their jobs more efficiently and effectively. The customer gets what they need faster (and with clear documentation), and your delivery teams free up time for more deliveries—it’s a win-win.
Conclusion: Turning Predictable Deliveries into Growth and Profitability
We’ve been discussing all of the customer experience strategies in terms of specific tools, but you’ve probably gleaned that none of these tools or processes exist in a vacuum. In reality, you should be able to get all of these tools from a single delivery orchestration platform that includes routing, customer engagement, driver management, and much more.
The right platform will be one that offers an integrated experience across all of these functions, so that you can make your deliveries more predictable and visibility across the board. Not only will that help you ensure happier customers, it will help you scale your delivery process and ultimately turn logistics from a cost center into a sustainable source of growth.
Interested in learning more about what that might look like? Reach out today—we’d love to walk you through it.