Supercharge Customer Experience with a Delivery Logistics Platform

Delivery customers want that personal touch—but they also want everything to go off without a hitch. Any time they have to pick up the phone and call your team, that’s a loss with the potential to impact your NPS score and tamp down repeat business. For years, surveys have consistently shown the importance of reliable and connected customer delivery experience, and it’s only going to become more important going forward.

There are pros and cons to this state of play: On the one hand, providing a great customer delivery experience can require a lot of time, effort, and tools that delivery businesses often don’t feel like they have to spare. The stakes for getting this right are high, but upgrading your customer experience capabilities isn’t as easy as flicking a switch. 

On the other hand, modern logistics operators are in a greater position than ever to turn customer experience into a competitive advantage. Yes, it requires investment, but it’s also not rocket science, and the reward for outclassing your competitors in this area is huge. 

The right delivery logistics platform can be the key to unlocking that competitive advantage, and it can go a long way towards helping delivery organizations to build strong brands and even reduce logistics costs. In this post, we’ll go over some of the most crucial ways that delivery management software makes that happen.

The Critical Importance of Customer Delivery Experience

There’s no getting away from the importance of customer delivery experience. But what does that actually mean to customers? What’s going to cause someone to leave a 5 star review for your company on Google, and how can you make sure you’re providing that day in and day out across your delivery operations? 

We don’t need to resort to guesswork here. We know from surveys and studies that customers want clear, timely communications. They want the ability to track their orders, and they want to be able to reach out and get an answer to any questions they might have. 

Most importantly, they want the right order delivered to the right place at the right time. This puts pressure not just on your communications and alerts, but your delivery and logistics execution more broadly. Again, it can be a challenging bar to clear consistently, but by investing in customer experience you can reap serious rewards in the form of increased customer loyalty, a stronger brand, and more efficient operations across the board.  

5 Ways Delivery Logistics Platforms Power Great Customer Experiences

1. Total visibility and clarity into scheduled deliveries

90% of customers want the ability to track their orders. Why? Because when you’re waiting for a scheduled delivery—whether that’s a new dishwasher to your home or a pallet of lumber to your job site—you have to organize your day around when you think the truck is going to show up. The more visibility you have into when that’s actually going to happen, the more confident you feel and the less stressed you are about the possibility of a no-show. 

The right delivery logistics platform makes it easy to offer that level of transparency to your customers. As a baseline, your software should empower you to send out alerts and notifications to customers letting them know when their orders are scheduled for and what the status of their order/delivery is.

Once the delivery is underway, your customers should be able to follow a link from any of those delivery communications and directly access a live tracking portal. This will show them their delivery details, an up-to-the-minute ETA, the location of the truck, and even details about the driver. They can check this information as often as they need from the comfort of their own device—boosting confidence and helping avoid missed deliveries. 

2. Instant answers to delivery questions

Even with real-time visibility into deliveries that are underway, customers will sometimes need a little bit of extra information (or even a confirmation of the information they already have). When this happens, the best delivery logistics platforms will make it easy for them to reach out to you via chat, so they don’t have to pick up the phone and call. 

Increasingly, you can also leverage AI tools to automatically answer a portion of customer messages. This gets customers the information they need that much quicker (since the AI agent is always on), and it can help save time for your team that they would otherwise spend answering repetitive questions like “where’s my order?”

This can be a win-win from that perspective—provided you scope your AI agent properly within your delivery logistics platform and ensure a smooth handoff from agent to human for questions that the AI can’t answer. 

3. Self-scheduling freedom

We mentioned above that one of the keys to a great customer delivery experience is reliable delivery service. After all, there’s no number of texts and emails that are going to delight a customer if they’re all wrong about the delivery ETA or informing the customer of a delay. 

That’s why your routing and scheduling capabilities are just as critical as your customer engagement tools. And one of the best indicators of a solution that can seriously help with routing is that it enables customer self-scheduling. 

Obviously, there will be times where this doesn’t make sense and there will be certain products, service types, or customer tiers where you don’t want to offer it—but if you can juggle the challenges that come with maximizing capacity while still offering scheduling freedom, you can delight your customers while remaining efficient. 

4. Consistent on-time performance

Even if you’re not offering self-scheduling to customers, your routing capabilities are of the utmost importance. Robust, AI-powered route optimization is the only surefire way to make sure you’re delivering on-time consistently—which means it’s an absolute must for providing a high level of service to customers. 

To get to the point where you can hit your delivery ETAs within a short window 98% of the time or better, you need a delivery logistics platform whose routing is up to the task of simplifying complexity. Time window requests, vehicle requirements, driver skill requirements, job site requirements, capacity constraints, multi-day routes, backhauls, store stops, differences in service time or drive time—your routing engine needs take all of these into account without getting bogged down. 

Here, there’s a huge difference between best-in-class and middle-of-the-pack. With the former, you can make promises to your customers and actually keep them. 

5. Standardized service quality

We’ve talked about what happens before the delivery, and when the truck is arriving at the job site. What about what actually happens on the job? What’s the best way to empower drivers and technicians to offer a constantly high standard of service to customers?

It starts with providing them with the right tools and clear expectations. The best delivery logistics platforms will offer a driver mobile app with configurable service and compliance forms, meaning that drivers and technicians at job sites can actively document the fact that they’re doing the job correctly.  

Conclusion: How DispatchTrack Can Help 

Finding the right delivery logistics platform is crucial to supercharging customer experience in the ways we’ve been talking about. But how can you be sure that you’ve got a solution that will actually yield results?

At DispatchTrack, we’d love to help make that process easier. Reach out to us today and we’ll be happy to schedule a briefing on the ins and outs of our delivery logistics platform and all the ways it can help you delight your customers.