A recent Insight Collective article summed up an important point about the B2B buying cycles: B2B buyers aren’t robots. In fact, they increasingly use the same methods to seek out suppliers as their B2C counterparts. The reason for this isn’t complicated: those B2B buyers are also getting the B2C buying experience when they’re off the clock, and they see no reason that the standards shouldn’t be just as high.
And yet, their experiences are fraught with frustrations, from technical difficulties at checkout to insecure payment options to a general lack of transparency. And that’s before we even start talking about the delivery and fulfillment process.
B2B businesses—anyone from roofing material suppliers to HVAC/R distributors to beverage wholesalers—need to find a way to uplevel the experience that they offer to customers across the entire lifecycle. That means making the purchasing process easy and transparent, and it also crucially means offering the kind of predictable, visible, low-stress deliveries that consumers are already accustomed to.
In this post, we’ll do a deep dive into the last mile logistics portion of this equation. We’ll cover the ins and outs of how customer experience expectations are changing in the world of B2B delivery, and we’ll show you how you can turn your last mile logistics process into an engine for protecting margins and delighting customers.
What Do B2B Buyers Expect from Delivery Experiences?
There’s been no shortage of digital ink spilled on the ratcheting of customer delivery expectations. The “Amazon Effect” has basically become a household term, but anyone who deals in scheduled deliveries or big and bulky knows that the Amazon experience doesn’t even provide the complete picture.
Customers don’t just want to track their deliveries, they want total visibility into them. Often, they want control over their schedule dates, and they want a direct line to the business if something changes or goes wrong.
To truly provide white glove-caliber experiences to their customers, the top retailers are offering a delivery experience that includes:
- Easy self-scheduling from the comfort of the customer’s own device
- A cadence of proactive alerts and notifications when the delivery is ready to schedule, ready to route, scheduled for the next day, out for delivery, and arriving
- Live delivery tracking including the location of the truck when the customer’s stop is next
- Proactive alerts if a delay or disruption occurs on the day of delivery—for anything from a truck breakdown to an ice storm that’s caused a whole route to be called off
- Easy two-way communication with customer support as needed
- Clear proof of delivery sent via email after the fact
They also expect that experience to be consistent with your brand voice and tone—regardless of what branch or location they’re ordering from and regardless of whether the delivery is being carried out by your own fleet or a third party.
Ideally, you’ve already made the actual ordering process easy and straightforward. And, at that point, the goal is to keep things easy and straightforward throughout the entire process. No one wants to sweat the possibility of their construction project falling behind schedule because a pallet of lumber doesn’t arrive when it’s supposed to. At least not more than they absolutely have to.
That means it’s not just a matter of ticking the boxes; it’s also a matter of building confidence between you and your clients.
4 Keys to Orchestrating White Glove Caliber B2B Deliveries
When you’re able to bridge the gap between B2C and B2B delivery expectations, you can keep your customers happy, improve your NPS, and inspire repeat business. It’s the start of a positive feedback loop that puts you in a strong position to protect your margins—something that’s more important than ever in an era of volatile fuel costs and tariffs.
Making that a reality requires B2B delivery organizations to:
- Take control of delivery routes across your network: This isn’t a simple math problem. It’s a matter of getting the most value out of your fleet—especially your specialized assets—and minimizing your delivery costs while ensuring on time deliveries. The ability to predict delivery and stop times here is crucial, as it enables you to right-size the loads that you’re putting onto trucks. Here a strategic tool that can help you optimize deliveries across branches can also be a huge help.
- Integrate 3rd parties into your technology ecosystem: Even when a 3PL is carrying out a delivery for you, you need to provide a consistent, high-quality experience to customers. That means leveraging a system that enables you to either send notifications from your own system based on live data from 3PL deliveries, or empower 3PLs to send out those notifications themselves. This helps create consistency across your network and boost customer confidence across the board.
- Look beyond the last mile: The entire logistics lifecycle is made of interconnected workflows, and if you can’t manage the handoffs between those workflows effectively, you can’t provide customers a B2C-caliber experience at every step of the process. Make sure your last mile capabilities are fully integrated with the first and middle mile, warehouse management, fleet and asset management, pickup logistics, and more.
- Manage by exception: The best laid plans often go awry—especially when it comes to delivery management. It’s what you do when things go off track that defines your CX capabilities. If you can manage by exception and salvage situations where drivers are delayed, elements of a customer’s order are missing, or a customer disputes what was delivered, you can prevent the small things from adding up to huge margin erosions. The difficult part of making this happen is gaining enough visibility to actually spot exceptions in real time. But investing in visibility across your network—and leveraging AI and other technologies to add an extra verification layer to documentation collected at the job site—you can take control of your deliveries even when they’re not going according to plan.
Finding the Right Logistics Technology Partner
One thing should be fairly clear from the best practices laid out above: if you want to bridge the gap between B2B and B2C delivery experiences, you’re going to need the right technology.
Sure, you could commit yourself to manually calling customers and sending messages, and devote a small army to perfecting your routes the old fashioned way. But in an era where the delivery orchestration software market is growing and delivery organizations are seeing huge CSAT score improvements by leveraging modern solutions, why would you try and scale up manual ways of doing business?
Change management is obviously a challenge for enterprises, but the right technology partner will offer a clear path to getting implemented and a quick route to positive ROI through reduced delivery costs.
Here are a few things to look for in a delivery orchestration solution provider:
- A track record of successful implementations with enterprise customers
- A strong history in the logistics industry, with large caches of existing delivery data to draw from for training AI tools
- An AI-forward mentality that’s rooted in increasing efficiency across every stage of the delivery process
- Flexible, intelligent customer engagement tools that automate the process from end to end
- Fast, efficient routing with highly accurate ETAs
- A mobile app that empowers drivers to do their best work and document it effectively
- Technology ecosystem integrations that ensure total visibility into the entire logistics journey
- A delivery orchestration-based approach that covers the entire process from end to end with no gaps
Obviously, this doesn’t get into all the features and functionality that you’ll need (e.g. delivery tracking, dispatching, and proof of delivery), but it should give you a sense of what to look for when it comes to this kind of technology.
Conclusion: Orchestrating Deliveries with DispatchTrack
If you want a more nuanced discussion about exactly what delivery orchestration software looks like and how it can empower delivery organizations to take their customer delivery experience to the next level, get in touch with DispatchTrack.
We’d love to walk you through the ways our customers have leveraged DT Agent and other facets of our platform to delight their customers across their entire networks. Book a demo here.
