How Delivery Route Optimization Impacts Customer Experience

A product's journey from the warehouse to the customer's door (i.e. the last mile) is one of the most challenging parts of the fulfillment process. And to make matters even worse, the ultimate arbiter of success isn’t your on-time performance or your cost-per-mile—it’s how happy the customer is at the end of the journey.

But what differentiates a good last mile customer service from a bad one? Simply put, customers want a delivery experience that is convenient, reliable, fast, transparent, and with a personal touch. It's not enough to invest in the fanciest optimization tools—you also need to ensure that the most impactful areas of customer experience are being given the attention they deserve.

How Delivery Route Optimization Software Helps Companies Offer Great Customer Experiences

Gartner notes that more and more businesses are now competing based mainly on customer experience. This means that businesses have to make the right investments to help them provide a wonderful customer delivery experience.

Luckily, the right last-mile delivery optimization solution helps businesses improve their customer service in a few different different ways:

More flexible deliveries

Having the best last mile delivery software enables businesses to schedule deliveries quickly and adjust them on the fly. This allows the customer to request last-minute changes to times and locations or simply provide the delivery team more instructions on how to complete the order. Allowing the customer to make last-minute changes or give additional instructions makes them feel more empowered and valued.

You can also take this a step further and let customers self-schedule their deliveries based on your capacity rules and parameters. The trick is to make sure you're able to maintain delivery efficiency even when you're offering this level of flexibility. 

Better visibility

Modern delivery customers demand transparency in their transactions and they expect frequent updates on their orders.

Final mile software offers customers real-time notifications regarding the orders, including exact location and ETA. Informing customers about any possible delays in the delivery of their packages will also cut down the risk of missed or failed deliveries.

An advanced solution also allows customers to track their order in real-time without calling the seller, providing them with a view of the exact location of the driver and an accurate ETA. 

As technology advances even further, you can even incorporate AI-powered customer experience tools (such as chat agents embedded in two-way communications) to make it even easier for customers to get the information they need—no need to call in and ask your team, and no need to wait around for your team to respond to a message. 

All these features help in making customers feel appreciated and taken care of. It ultimately creates better customer experiences.

More accurate ETAs

Of course, visibility is only really valuable to the customer when it’s visibility into something that’s going according to plan. 

Inefficient route planning also means poor time management, and it often leads to delivery delays. Inefficiently planned routes limit your business's ability to offer customers time windows that are precise and accurate. 

Modern delivery route optimization, which factors in different variables such as driver availability, delivery windows, and location proximity enables businesses to make faster deliveries and meet their promised ETAs more frequently. In this way, route optimization allows companies to keep up with high volume deliveries and increasing consumer demands without sacrificing a strong delivery experience. 

Delivery Route Optimization and Last Mile Logistics Go Hand in Hand

One thing that should be fairly evident from ways that routing impacts customer experience is that routing doesn’t happen in a vacuum. You could create the most efficient delivery routes in the world, but if they don’t work for your customers—to say nothing of your drivers and other team members—then you won’t be able to reap the full benefits. 

Ultimately, routing is just one piece of the connected logistics puzzle—and your software provider needs to treat it that way by integrating it with customer experience, driver management, dispatching, and other workflows. 

Below are some of the features to look for in a last mile delivery solution that blends routing with other key elements of the fulfillment process into a cohesive whole.

AI-powered route optimization

Your software's route optimization feature should calculate routes using constraints that affect delivery times, such that you can provide customers with an accurate expected time of arrival (ETA). Optimizing routes for distance also enables your businesses to make more deliveries using the same resources.

The best way to make that happen is to leverage AI to improve routing performance and accuracy. This relies on having large caches of delivery data, which is why connectivity is so crucial here. 

Customer experience management

Route optimization has a direct impact on customer experience—but customer experience isn’t something that happens on its own. Rather, it’s something that you need to incorporate deliberately into your last mile efforts. 

Look for a solution that offers automated, configurable customer communications at flexible touchpoints throughout the process (schedule confirmations, delivery alerts on the day of delivery, etc.) that automatically account for your route optimization engine’s ETA predictions. 

Here, AI can play a crucial role in the form of chat agents that can act as a front line of defense for simple customer inquiries—with the ability to escalate to a human as needed. 

Auto dispatching

Just like with route planning, manual driver assignments and dispatching must be automated to find the most optimal driver, vehicle, and equipment assignments. This way, businesses can make the most of their existing assets without the need for an additional manual step. 

Real-time tracking and visibility

Real-time tracking allows fleet managers and dispatchers to track drivers' locations and statuses on the day of delivery. This gives you the ability to stay flexible and proactive—and it can give you a way to allow customers to track where their orders are at any given time. 

If you can gather data from drivers in the field and display it in a way that makes delivery exceptions obvious, you can call the customer before there’s a problem, earning their trust and loyalty along the way. 

Electronic proof of delivery

A solution that allows drivers to capture proof of delivery electronically, which then can be stored in a central system, gives you the ability to improve customer service after the day of delivery. Electronic proof of delivery in the form notes, photos, and signatures help in resolving claims of failed or missing deliveries.

Reporting and data analytics

Fleets need to track their performance objectively, and the right last mile software helps them do just that. With reports and data analytics to evaluate the fleet's performance, executives and other stakeholders can identify areas for improvement and make more data-driven decisions.

All these features help businesses provide their customers with a great customer delivery experience over time—in a way that’s fundamentally born out of connectivity and visibility across the board. 

The Power of Delivery Route Optimization

In the end, a last mile solution that automates processes and increases information sharing among stakeholders can help companies make customers happy. The result is that those businesses can boost their brand image and become more competitive in their fields.

Finding the right solution can seem daunting, but if you look out for a last mile delivery management platform that can handle your logistics operations from end to end, you’re on the right track to leveraging a solution that will quickly yield ROI.