App for Delivery Drivers: 6 Features for Improved Last Mile Performance

Drivers are the face of your brand when you’re delivering to customers, so it’s crucial to empower them with the right tools. For the past several years now, that’s increasingly meant equipping them with the right delivery driver mobile app. The right app is more than just a way to dispatch orders and keep tabs on drivers in the field—it can be a huge boon for improving customer experience, reducing delivery costs, and even improving driver retention. But what does the right app actually look like?

In other words, what separates a delivery app for drivers that really saves time and money from one that merely gets the job done? That’s not an abstract question—there are a number of proven capabilities that can significantly move the needle on important KPIs. 

What to Look for in Your App for Delivery Drivers

Before we get into the individual features that make for a great driver mobile app, let’s take a step back and think about the last mile writ large. Drivers have to execute on route plans created by a route optimization engine that can output efficient schedules and then dispatch routes to the right people. Meanwhile, the team has to keep customers informed about when to expect their deliveries and deal with any exceptions that may crop up. 

Simply put, this requires folks from across a multitude of teams to work together to juggle a lot of competing priorities and keep a lot of balls in the air. Getting it right is no mean feat at the best of times, and when complications arise it can feel impossible to keep things on track. 

That’s why having the right technology bedrock to support you across the journey is so crucial. Best-in-class last mile delivery management software helps keep all of the above running smoothly—and, crucially, it can make sure processes that are intimately connected in real life (say, route planning and delivery execution) stay connected from end to end. 

The best part about this kind of solution? It will usually come with a driver mobile app. Sure, there are some standalone mobile apps that are worth their salt—but leveraging a driver app that’s part of a larger last mile delivery platform can help you ensure connectivity and reduce the potential for disconnect between teams. 

When you can plan, route, and execute within a single solution—one that encompasses both a routing engine and an app for drivers—you can boost visibility and ensure that the right data is always available to the right people at the right time. 

1. Photographic Proof of Delivery 

We recommend leveraging a mobile app that’s part of a larger last mile delivery solution—but the delivery driver app still has to provide the right functionality. And arguably the most impactful functionality a driver mobile app can provide is photographic proof of delivery. 

For companies that make the switch from paper-based proof of delivery to digital proof of delivery with photos, the amount of time and money they save can be eye opening. Electronic PoD doesn’t get lost, can be accessed more easily, and can be automatically slotted into workflows that involve billing, invoicing, and settling with drivers. 

Meanwhile, photos from the delivery site offer ironclad proof that you delivered what you promised and left the customer’s home or business in good condition. This makes it much easier to stave off disputes and avoid false liability claims. 

2. AI-Powered Location Intelligence

AI is certainly not ready to replace delivery drivers—at least not in the last mile. But the boom in AI technology is definitely having an impact on how drivers do their jobs. 

More specifically, AI can now empower you to offer your drivers contextual intelligence before each stop to help them grapple with common on-the-ground delivery challenges: where to find parking, delivery site access, customer requests, etc. 

How this works in practice is that AI analyzes a combination of the order and location data in your system as well as location information pertaining to the delivery site from around the web in order to generate a voice memo that lets drivers know what’s coming up at the next stop. If there’s a particular detail about accessing the site that the driver needs to know in order to get the job done quickly and easily, the AI will surface that fact and read it out as part of the briefing. 

All of this takes the form of a voice note that’s embedded in the driver’s normal workflow—no interruptions, no need to mess with their phones. The result is that drivers have the tools to do their jobs a little bit more effectively.

3. Works Without Cell Service

Sometimes, your drivers wind up in areas with limited or no cell service—even in 2024 it’s just a fact of life. When that happens, your driver app needs to keep functioning. You should equip your drivers with something that can cache delivery updates and other data when the phone is offline and resync as soon as the connection is reestablished. Otherwise, there’s a risk of losing key data throughout the delivery process. 

4. Streamlined Two-Way Communication

If there’s a theme developing here, it’s this: connectivity and visibility are two of the most important things that apps for delivery drivers can provide. Your drivers are the face of your company when they’re out in the field, and they’re also your most direct line to customers in many cases. That’s why keeping lines of communication open—and easy to use—is so valuable.

That’s why it’s crucial to look for a mobile application that enables quick, easy two-way communications between driver and dispatcher and drivers and customers. This helps avoid the need for phone calls, which can be time consuming, while ensuring that drivers are able to do their jobs more effectively. Rather than having to triangulate a message through a dispatcher in order to ask the customer what the gate code is, the driver can reach out directly and get the information they need in seconds. 

5. Ease of Use

To reap the benefits of the right driver mobile app, your drivers have to actually use it. It’s all well and good to mandate the use of a particular app or tool, but at the end of the day if drivers don’t like using something they’re going to find ways to avoid it. 

Luckily, many of the solutions that exist on the market make it easy to train drivers and offer interfaces that are easy to use. Some of the most intuitive solutions barely require driver training at all—meaning that you can roll out the solution that much more quickly. 

6. Configurable Compliance Forms for Flexible Data Collection

When you’re just delivering something over the threshold, grabbing a photo and signature, and moving on to the next stop, the delivery data you need to collect is pretty simple. But what about when use cases are more complex? Let’s say you have a technician working on site to install a new dishwasher in a customer’s home—how do they indicate that they did, in fact, set up an air gap? Or that they hauled the existing dishwasher away (meaning an additional charge needs to be applied to the customer)?

Not every app on the market will give drivers a way to indicate that they’ve completed tasks outside the usual delivery procedure. Sure, some will let drivers and technicians add notes, which can help cover a lot of these contingencies—but the data you get back from that will be much messier than if you had workflows designed for this type of service. 

At DispatchTrack, we offer custom forms to cover this use case. This means that for specified delivery or service types—or even for specified SKUs—drivers are given a customized checklist to fill out, which your dispatchers can then view instantaneously. In the process of filling out the form for a dishwasher installation, for instance, your drivers could also supplement the data they’re collecting with some additional pictures (of the airgap, say). 

Ultimately, this improves your visibility into each and every delivery. At the same time, it gives your drivers the tools they need in order to get the job done right. That’s what finding the right app for delivery drivers is all about.

The Power of Delivery Driver Apps

When you empower your drivers, you set yourself up to reduce delivery costs, improve customer experience, and get more out of your existing fleet. The right driver mobile app is the secret sauce behind great deliveries around the globe. 

At the end of the day, if you can find the features we listed out above as part of a larger last mile delivery solution, you can set yourself up to reduce delivery costs, make life easier for drivers, and even improve the overall customer delivery experience.