Drivers are the key to effective delivery and logistics management, which means you want to empower them to do their jobs as effectively as possible. That means providing them with the right technology. They need to be able to access route manifests, get driving directions, send status updates, capture proof of delivery, and do a whole lot more day in and day out—and they can’t do that without the right software on their devices.
But there is a catch: you certainly don’t want to bog down your drivers with unnecessary devices or a panoply of different apps for different parts of their jobs. That way lies confusion, inefficiency, and silos.
The ideal is to find an all-in-one delivery app for drivers that can handle all of their (and your) last mile logistics needs without requiring anyone to hop from one app to another. But how do you figure out exactly what your app should offer? In other words, what boxes does a driver mobile app have to tick in order to really be considered “all in one?”
That’s exactly the question we’re here to answer in this blog post.
Before we dig into the exact ins and outs of driver mobile apps, let’s talk a little bit about the role of the driver in the last mile. More specifically, what are the challenges that drivers face that can be addressed with the right technology?
The first challenge that needs to be addressed is arming drivers with the right information. When drivers have printed out route manifests and physical maps—or even if they have a schedule and use a separate app to plot a point-to-point route for each stop—then they simply don’t have enough visibility to do their jobs easily. They can’t see at a glance what’s coming up on their routes, how feasible their ETAs are, which means they can be easily blindsided. When that happens, the result is inevitably late deliveries and unhappy customers.
The next challenge is connectivity. By default, there’s no line of communication between dispatchers and drivers or dispatchers and customers outside picking up the phone and calling—which is obviously a last resort.
But when lines of communication aren’t well established and easy to use, drivers wind up in situations where disruptions and exceptions arise and there’s no one to support them in solving the issue. To make matters worse, they have no easy way to let customers know that they’re on their way, which means the customer is much more likely not to be at the delivery site or prepared to receive the delivery.
Finally, you need to think about the logistics of the driver actually getting the job done at the delivery site. Do they have the skills they need to perform anything above and beyond a simple over-the-threshold delivery? Do they know where to park and how to access the delivery site? Are they able to document the fact that they completed the job effectively without causing any damage or leaving off any items?
These are real challenges, but modern technology makes it straightforward to solve many of them. But, again, the ideal is to have all of the solutions to these challenges within a single, all-in-one delivery app for drivers.
So what should that app actually include? Here are a handful of must-haves:
Most of the features we’re going to call out will follow pretty directly from the challenges we’ve sketched out above. Think digital proof of delivery, route manifests, etc. While this one might be a little bit less intuitive, it’s increasingly crucial to delivery success today.
It can be tough to tell reality from hype when it comes to AI in the supply chain, but technology has absolutely progressed to the point where AI can be incredibly helpful in generating briefings for drivers to help them navigate each stop on their routes.
In practice, this might take the form of AI-generated voice notes embedded into their existing workflows. AI can gather a combination of data from your systems and around the web to create a comprehensive briefing that lets the driver know ahead of time about where they might find parking, what building access is like, and any specific customer requests or requirements.
With this kind of functionality, you can amplify the power of the app and help your drivers get more deliveries done per day with fewer disruptions.
More specifically, time-stamped and geostamped photographic proof of delivery to ensure a complete audit trail for every stop on a given route.
They say a picture’s worth a thousand words, but when it comes to logistics that’s probably an understatement. Having photos not just of the item(s) being delivered but of the surrounding areas of the delivery site can help prove that you delivered what was ordered, in the right condition, without causing any damage.
The best practice here is to make sure those are automatically uploaded to your centralized last mile delivery system in real time, so that dispatchers and managers can instantly see the outcome of every delivery.
Any given driver mobile app is going to provide you with turn by turn directions, and most are going to be able to offer some kind of proof of delivery capture—but it’s a lot harder to find one that offers you the ability to roll out configurable forms to ensure service compliance.
This can effectively act as a checklist for drivers to make sure they’re hitting SLAs. Rather than just allowing drivers to take a picture and mark the job as done, drivers go step by step checking off each stage of, say, an installation and even documenting some of the crucial steps with additional pictures.
This helps put you in a position where compliance and documentation are the default—which goes a long way towards helping you standardize your data and processes.
This needs to cut two different ways:
The first part of this requires an app that has a seamless, intuitive UX that makes it easy for drivers to get quick answers. The second part requires your teams to support your drivers with automated communication flows that ensure that the driver has to do as little as possible to keep customers posted.
Ideally, you would have your customer communications flow set up in such a way that alerts and messages were automatically sent out whenever a driver selects a new status in the app. When the driver starts heading to a job, they click the button and the next customer up is automatically notified.
One of the things you might have noticed in the last section is that an all-in-one driver delivery app for drivers doesn’t work in a vacuum.
On the one hand, you want it to be comprehensive enough that your drivers only need one app to do their jobs to the best of their abilities. On the other hand, some capabilities—like customer communications—will happen within workflows that are defined outside the mobile app. That’s why it’s so crucial to make sure your all-in-one delivery app for drivers is part of an all-in-one delivery management solution that covers the entire last mile journey from end to end.