Delivery exceptions in the modern last mile are so common—and so bewildering to consumers—that FedEx actually has an entire page explaining what the status “delivery exception" means on order tracking pages. Of course, by the time your customer is Googling around to find out the definition of delivery exception, something has already gone wrong.
In FedEx’s case, customers will mostly be expressing their anxiety about parcel deliveries. The exceptions are likely going to mean that a package isn’t going to reach the customer’s front porch until the next day, or at worst they may have to go to the distribution center themselves. But with big and bulky items like furniture and appliances, or business-to-business deliveries like cases of food, kegs of beer, or pallets of lumber, there’s a much more delicate balancing act that needs to happen.
Usually, these deliveries are scheduled for a particular time, which means even a small delay can cause an exception. Similarly, items that require installation or service (or even items that simply have to fit in the space that the old dishwasher occupied) are much more likely to result in unplanned returns.
The upshot is that managing delivery exceptions is paramount when you’re delivering big and bulky items—not just for ensuring solid customer experience, but for maintaining efficiency as well.
Here’s a 5-step guide to making that happen.
Delivery exceptions are a fact of life—there’s simply no universe in which they never occur. But the fewer delivery exceptions you have to deal with in a given day, the more effectively you can manage them. Your teams will be stretched less thinly and they’ll have more time, energy, and attention to devote to the issues that do crop when they can be confident that everything else is going right.
There are two primary ways that you can work to reduce delivery exceptions before they happen:
Both of these are easier said than done, but they can stop a huge percentage of potential delivery exceptions from ever becoming reality.
Another thing that gets in the way of dealing with delivery exceptions efficiently is the sheer volume of customer service messages and inquiries that come across your customer support team’s desk in a given day. When there’s a high volume, it can be difficult to pick out the most pressing issues.
One quick and easy way to give time back to your team and make sure it’s only meaningful customer queries that reach their desk is to leverage AI-powered chat agents in your customer communication workflows.
These agents sit on top of your two-way communications and act as a front line of defense for fielding simple questions like “where’s my order?” or “when is my delivery scheduled for?” For more complicated questions, the agent escalates to a human who can reach back out to the customer to resolve the situation.
In deployments of DT Agent—DispatchTrack’s customer support AI—our customers have seen a 70-80% drop in customer service call volumes and a huge decrease in the average time it takes for a customer to get an answer to a question.
This has the effect of making exception management significantly easier, since your team isn’t bogged down with answering routine questions.
At this point, we’ve gotten your last mile to a place where exceptions are actually the exception—not the rule. And we’ve also streamlined the workflows of your customer service staff to the point where they’re not inundated with questions that could be answered by a computer.
Now we get into the nitty-gritty of how to deal with the exceptions that do come up in a more efficient way.
Step one: track deliveries in real time so you can spot exceptions before an issue reaches the customer.
This enables you to be proactive, rather than reactive, when it comes to exception management. If a particular order looks like it’s going to slip out of its scheduled time slot, you can reach directly out to the customer and let them know. If they need to reschedule, you can get that done straightaway. They won’t necessarily be happy—but they’ll be a lot less annoyed than if they had gotten radio silence.
This approach works across the whole gamut of potential exceptions. The trick is just to make sure you have real, strategic visibility into your delivery in real time. That means not just GPS coordinates for your trucks, but order and driver statuses and automated ETA updates—all available from a centralized dashboard so the information doesn’t go out of date while you hunt for it.
A real-time delivery dashboard is a great first step when it comes to getting enough visibility to manage delivery exceptions. But it does fundamentally rely on your teams actively monitoring and spotting exceptions as they crop up—meaning there is some potential for things to fall through the cracks.
That’s why the best practice is to augment that real-time delivery tracking with automated alerts for specific conditions. For instance, your fleet tracking system might automatically send a notification to your team whenever a particular delivery is flagged as being behind schedule, or whenever a driver marks a delivery as “failed to complete.”
The result here is that your team is immediately alerted to anything that requires their attention and they can start working to resolve the situation right away. This takes a lot of the guesswork out of tracking deliveries and spotting exceptions—you just need to specify the parameters for what counts as an exception that requires your attention and configure your last mile delivery software to send you messages when those criteria are met.
So far, we’ve mostly talked about individual delivery exceptions. But what happens when something like a snowstorm or a catastrophic highway closure means that no one on a particular route is getting their order delivered that day?
This kind of delivery exception is less common, but you absolutely don’t want to be blindsided when a situation like that comes around. The absolute last thing you want when there’s an ice storm barreling your way is to be furiously drafting an email to your customers letting them know that their orders are delayed until conditions improve, and then sending it out one at a time to each impacted customer.
Here, you want to have generated and configured these messages ahead of time, so that you can send them out to all impacted customers with the push of a button.
It’s no secret that most of the best practices we’ve been discussing depend on your having last mile logistics software that can handle your needs. Simply put, your team needs to be equipped with a solution that can provide true visibility, ensure effective delivery execution, and help you connect with customers across the entire delivery logistics journey.
To learn more about what that looks like in practice, feel free to reach out to one of our experts today. We’d be delighted to walk you through it.