Boosting Delivery NPS with DispatchTrack's Customer Experience Tools

Whether you use NPS or not, you can’t deny the importance of customer experience for modern delivery businesses. We all know that customers place a huge premium on the service they receive, and their expectations are stringent—but what can companies actually do to ensure a great experience for each and every delivery?

The answer, unsurprisingly, comes down to having the right tools, processes, and technology. In this post, we’ll go step-by-step through the tactics that DispatchTrack users have leveraged to boost their delivery NPS and delight their customers. 

Over more than a decade of last mile delivery optimization, DispatchTrack has helped numerous businesses boost their delivery NPS and improve customer experience across the board. If you want to learn about specific customers who have benefited from the technology we offer, check out our Customers page. 

What Makes a Great Customer Delivery Experience?

Before we do a deep dive of what DispatchTrack’s offering empowers delivery organizations to do with regard to customer experience, let’s talk a little bit about the idea that’s driving all of these capabilities: great customer delivery experiences. 

What does it mean to offer a great customer delivery experience in the era of rapid order fulfillment and a customer-first mindset across verticals and segments of the delivery industry? 

Modern customers want a seamless, transparent experience. They want to know what to expect, and when to expect it, and they want to feel confident that they can contact you if they have a question or something changes. Crucially, they want to be able to do all this without picking up the phone to make a call. 

At the same time, it’s not just about making delivery promises—it’s about keeping them. Transparency has its limits, and being transparent about deliveries that are late or disorganized can only help so much. 

Naturally, different industries and customer types will have different needs and expectations around the right customer communication cadence, about the right level of personalization, and about how your business manages customer requests. But, broadly speaking, the businesses that succeed in this area are the ones who give the customers what they want, when they want it—both when it comes to communications and when it comes to deliveries. 

There’s plenty of trial and error that can go into figuring exactly what that means, which is why the ability to collect timely feedback on the delivery experience is also crucial. A lot has to go right in order to get a highly-connected, adaptable, scalable last mile delivery process, but when you have the right tools you can make it happen without breaking the bank. 

How DispatchTrack Leverages Connected Technology to Boost Delivery NPS

At DispatchTrack, customer experience is our business. Our technology is built with a powerful route optimization engine at its core, but our key functionality is intended to make it easy to roll out a world-class experience to your customers no matter what you’re delivering. 

Here’s how empower our customers to boost delivery NPS:

Customer communications

Our customer communications capabilities run the entire gamut from pre-delivery notifications and customer self-scheduling to alerts on the day of delivery and follow-up afterwards. 

We offer schedule confirmation emails, route start notifications, next stop and arrival notifications with live ETAs, and automated surveys after the fact so you can measure your delivery performance and capture feedback. Best of call, you can configure these alerts to your specific messaging and branding, segment them to the right audience, and leverage them as-needed throughout the entire delivery lifecycle. 

Customers like Morris Furniture have leveraged these capabilities to boost NPS by ensuring that customers are in the loop before, during, and after the delivery. With DispatchTrack, they rolled out: 

• Automated route start notifications
• Schedule confirmation messages via text
• Customer feedback survey requests via text
• Live two-way messaging with customers

These were customized based on the delivery or service type, and they gave customers multiple opportunities before the day of delivery to correct incorrect order/customer information or to reschedule a delivery slot. 

The result was a 29 point increase in NPS, in addition to a 37% reduction in unplanned return rate and a 93% productive delivery rate. Read the rest of Morris Furniture’s story to learn more. 

Route optimization

By leveraging DispatchTrack’s routing capabilities you can set the foundation for a best-in-class delivery experience for your customers by delivering on time, every time. With our fast, cloud-based solution you can generate delivery routes quickly enough to push back your order cutoff time. This positions you to offer flexibility to your customers as to when they get their orders in—it also puts you in a position to easily adjust routes to accommodate changes as needed. Bear in mind, the right routing solution will make it easy to match the right drivers and vehicles to the right orders, so you won’t be sacrificing route efficiency. 

Crucially, our AI-powered routing can also ensure that you have precise and accurate delivery ETAs. This puts you in a position to show up at exactly the time that you promised your customer—which forms the foundation of any successful delivery run. 

When you’re communicating with your customers, you’re providing them transparency into deliveries that are actually going according to plan. This is critical to improving your customer satisfaction scores. 

Order tracking

Customers don’t want to have to call your customer support team to ask when the truck is going to arrive. Phone calls are seen as a last resort by most these days, and even if they weren’t they still wouldn’t scale from a back-office perspective. Conversely, when you can give customers the ability to instantaneously see their delivery ETAs, they can get the info they need and plan accordingly. 

Making this happen requires a connected system that feeds status updates from drivers back into your centralized system in order to adjust ETAs in real time. This means leveraging smart, connected systems that cover the delivery process from end to end. You need seamless movement of data between drivers, dispatchers, and customers and the kind of visibility that comes from not having to hunt for information.

We help provide that in the form of a dedicated customer tracking widget that can be accessed via link from the customer’s device. Here, they can see order details, order status, and up-to-the-minute ETAs, as well as driver information and your corporate branding if desired. 

Exception management

Not only do we ensure total visibility for customers, we also make sure that your teams have total visibility into the last mile delivery process from end to end. How? By providing a live delivery dashboard that shows you how the entire day’s worth of deliveries is unfolding in a single glance and lets you drill down to details as needed. 

When you don’t have to hunt for the information you need—when the status of every truck, route, and driver is at your fingertips—you can see whether a driver is going to miss their ETA for any given stop. Once you’ve seen the potential for a late delivery, you can proactively reach out to the customer to work the situation out, or even send new instructions to the driver. 

By the same token, when you can see the proof of delivery for each stop as soon as it’s uploaded, you can spot deliveries that didn’t go according to plan—e.g. those where the wrong items were delivered or items may have shown up damaged. This puts you in a position to mitigate the situation directly with the customer, and do it quickly. 

These situations may not be ideal, but the faster you’re able to reach out to the customer the faster they’ll feel confident that you’re going to put things right. Most of the strategies we’ve discussed so far have been aimed at getting higher highs when it comes to customer satisfaction, but cutting out the lowest of the lows can also be a big help. 

As customer expectations evolve, keeping an eye on your delivery NPS is only going to get more important. At DispatchTrack, we give you the tools to improve your NPS over time by consistently delighting your customers. If you want to learn more about how we do that, don’t hesitate to get in touch.