When you’re a large retailer, it can sometimes feel impossible to take control of the delivery experience that you’re offering to customers across your network. Not only is it hard to ensure that the same standard of service is being provided across branches and teams, it’s also challenging to present a unified brand experience from the point of purchase to the final delivery and beyond.
It may be challenging to get this right, but it’s a challenge that needs to be met head on. Why? Because the strength of your brand, your ability to retain customers, and your margins all depend on it.
Luckily, the tools at your disposal for orchestrating “white glove” delivery experiences are also more elevated than ever. With the advent of AI systems designed for logistics and a paradigm shift towards delivery orchestration, enterprise distributors have had better technology for delighting customers.
In this post, we’ll cover:
- The reasons that orchestrating white glove delivery experiences across your network is so urgent
- What those experiences look like in practice and what touchpoints and communication channels are required
- How a modern delivery orchestration solution like DispatchTrack makes it all possible with intelligent CX capabilities and a focus on operational visibility
Taking Control of Your CX in Delivery Is More Important Than Ever
It’s not news to large retailers and distributors that the game has changed when it comes to customer delivery experience. Your customers want predictable, elevated, and personalized experiences over the entire lifecycle of their order, and they’ll vote with their dollars when it comes time to make another purchase from you or your competitors.
Truly white glove delivery experiences start long before the truck arrives at the delivery site. They can include:
- scheduling notifications
- delivery reminders
- day-of notifications
- live delivery tracking
- next stop notifications
- opportunities to provide feedback…
… all segmented carefully so the right audience is getting the right message at the right time.
They also need to be built around open channels of communication between your team and your customers—so that someone waiting for an appliance installation doesn’t spend the whole day sweating about everything that can go wrong.
Getting this right the old fashioned way—with manual phone calls and support team members manually tracking exceptions—simply isn’t feasible for an enterprise.
Luckily, the old fashioned way isn’t your only option. In the era of SaaS, digitization, and AI, you can—and should—orchestrate white glove-level delivery experiences from end to end with the right technology.
Delivery Experience Orchestration from End to End with DispatchTrack
Frictionless Orchestration with DT Agent
DispatchTrack’s delivery orchestration capabilities are all centered around the customer and their experience. We give you the flexibility and control you need in order to create predictable, scalable, and delightful customer experiences across a large network.
At the heart of these capabilities is DT Agent, our AI system that directly engages with customers across the lifecycle of an order. When orders come into the system, DT Agent can proactively reach out to dynamically schedule deliveries with customers based on your capacity rules and requirements.
If customers have questions or notes (gate codes, delivery instructions, even reschedule requests), they can reach out via text or chat and DT Agent will act as the front line of defense to try and resolve their issues. It can even conduct surveys, verify customer addresses and site readiness, and communicate notes and instructions to delivery drivers.
This all happens with your branding and guardrails. DT Agent is more than a simple delivery chatbot—it’s a multi-agent system, which means that the specialized processes are handled by specialized agents to ensure accuracy and reduce hallucinations and errors.
This ensures that you can provide fast, predictable service to your customers, no matter the scale or complexity.
DispatchTrack Gives You the Control and Flexibility to Secure Your Brand
Every delivery that gets made across your network—whether it’s through your owned fleet or a third party or contradictory—is a reflection of your brand. You need to be able to take control of every aspect of that experience to make sure the strength of your brand stands out and customers trust you with their business in the future.
DispatchTrack is built to make that easy. We empower our customers to:
- Define the exact customer communication cadence that fits their use case, including messages and alerts before, during, and after the delivery—this can include everything from pre-routing messages to route start alerts to survey and feedback requests after the fact
- Easily insert your branding and tone of voice into messages being sent out by the system. This extends to DT Agent, which can be named and branded for that extra personalized touch. Plus, we’re able to ensure that this branding is consistent even when 3PLs and delivery contractors are carrying out the actual deliveries.
- Segment communications so that customers receiving an over-the-threshold delivery don’t get the same messages as customers receiving installations or services. This helps make sure that every delivery experience feels personalized and relevant.
Taken together, these capabilities make an elevated, white-glove delivery experience the default across your entire network.
Building Strong Relationship Means Keeping Your Delivery Promises
Of course, the most meticulously crafted delivery experience in the world will still annoy the customer if you fall down on the execution. Customers want a great delivery experience, which means you need to ensure:
- Consistent on-time deliveries
- Proactive alerts and notifications—especially if there are delays
- Open communication channels for customers to reach out
- Frictionless experiences and high quality service at the delivery site
- Real-time resolution of any issues that arise
Here’s how DispatchTrack supports each of those:
- Machine learning powered route optimization that ensures 98% accurate delivery ETAs. This means that you can avoid over-promising while offering shorter time windows to customers.
- Automated alerts are configured to go out with your branding based on specific triggers—including when the route has started and the customer’s stop is approaching. We also offer a dedicated tab for exception management so your team can respond to issues in real time.
- Two-way messaging via text and chat—powered by DT Agent, with intelligent escalation to a human when needed. This ensures that customers feel confident and taken care of across the delivery lifecycle.
- Drivers are empowered to do their jobs effectively and efficiently in multiple ways. First, Driver AI (the industry’s first AI-powered voice companion for delivery teams) reads out any notes from the customer as the driver approaches the job site—including access codes, delivery requests, and more. Once they’re on site, drivers are empowered with customizable forms that act as walkthrough guides for performing and documenting services in line with your guidelines and SLAs.
- Retailers can also use our Release Codes features to incorporate a mandatory verification step, giving customer support a chance to step in and save the sale.
By combining white glove experiences with best-in-class delivery execution, DispatchTrack helps large retailers evolve from simply routing deliveries to truly orchestrating delivery experiences. This is an important catalyst for turning delivery from a cost center into a sustainable lever for growth and customer satisfaction.
Translating Visibility and CX into Margin Protection
Providing white glove-caliber service across the delivery lifecycle is a good in and of itself. The most successful retailers are the ones that are the most obsessed with their customers.
At the same time, this kind of elevated CX is a key building block of improved visibility and margin protection.
When you have well-defined processes for communicating with customers, it’s much easier to 1) turn up potential exceptions before they happen (e.g. sending out a schedule confirmation that turns up a conflict), and 2) manage exceptions in a consistent way when they do arise.
This improves customer experience even further—they don’t feel like the delivery process is a black box where their issues may never be resolved—but it also decreases returns, redeliveries, and delivery failures. The result is that you save money and time across your entire network.
Conclusion: Reach Out Today to Visualize the Future of Delivery Experience
The need for orchestrating white glove-level experiences is more urgent than ever—which is why DispatchTrack is constantly innovating to improve our users’ ability to delight their customers.
Want to see what that looks like in practice? Book a demo now and we’ll walk you through what elevated customer delivery experience looks like with DispatchTrack.