Delivery Service Software Lowers Costs—If You Deploy the Right Solution

When most people think about delivery, they’re usually picturing an Amazon driver dropping a package off on a porch or a USPS employee ferrying a cartload of small packages into a big apartment building. But logistics operators know that a huge proportion of deliveries aren’t nearly that simple—in fact, sometimes they’re not really deliveries at all. You might be making service calls to do follow up work on an installation you performed last week, or collecting a rental.

Even if it's still “just” a delivery, it may come with an installation component. Or it may simply be something that requires a scheduled delivery at the customer’s home or business. Either way, your needs get much more complicated than those that come with dropping off parcels. 

The good news is that modern delivery service software is sophisticated enough to help delivery and service organizations grapple with that complexity and delight their customers with great service across the board. But here’s the catch: not all delivery service software is created equal. To simplify, optimize, and ultimately scale your delivery service capabilities, you’re going to need the right solution. 

Luckily, we’re here to help. In this article we’ll give a quick rundown of the ways that best delivery service software can impact logistics costs, as well as the things to look for as you search for the right software for your delivery and service operations. 

Key takeaways:

• Delivery service software helps both delivery and service providers cut through the complexity of last mile logistics and ultimately reduce costs.
• The best delivery service software offers intelligent route optimization, AI-powered capabilities, customer experience tools, and first and middle mile integration.
• Look for a software vendor with a strong track record of successfully driving ROI for their clients. 

How Does Delivery Service Software Impact Logistics Costs?

Logistics costs tend to skyrocket when things get too complex—that’s the reason that the last mile of the supply chain tends to account for more than half of total supply chain costs. 

And there’s no shortage of sources for complexity. Planning routes can involve negotiating between different customer time window requests, driver skill and availability, differences in service time between different types of deliveries and services, vehicle and job site requirements… the list goes on. 

On top of that, you have to find a way not just to plan your delivery and service runs but to track them and document them—all while keeping customers engaged and in the loop. And all of this is before we start talking about the ways that delivery management intersects with your larger logistics and supply chain operations. 

Anything that can meaningfully simplify these complexities and shed light on your logistics operations has the power to reduce costs and make life easier for your teams. For instance:

• With intelligent route optimization that can quickly and efficiently handle all of your routing and scheduling parameters, you can drive fewer miles and spend less time on the road per stop, decreasing fuel and labor costs. 
• By automating customer communications across every touchpoint on the delivery and service journey, you can save your team a huge amount of time and labor spent on phone calls (this is magnified if you leverage AI for some of this workload).
• Improved logistics visibility results in better exception management, which can reduce your reverse logistics and unplanned return costs, in addition to boosting your on time delivery rate.
• Streamlined driver management can boost productivity while also enabling you to capture digital proof of delivery, which in turn reduces your accounting costs and helps decrease false liability claims. 

This isn’t the full panoply of ways that the right delivery service software impacts costs, but it should give a sense of the variety—and scale—of ways that you can optimize costs with the right technology.  

5 Things to Look for in Delivery Service Software

1. Intelligent delivery and service scheduling

We mentioned all of the reasons that efficient scheduling can be challenging—especially if you’re offering a mix of delivery and service calls—so we won’t belabor the point. We’ll only say that modern route optimization can cut through that complexity like a scythe.

The right delivery service software is the one that can demonstrably increase route efficiency by rapidly routing as many stops as you can throw at it—all while efficiently accounting for all of the parameters you’ve set up in your system. 

The key here is to find a system that can maintain efficiency even as you keep upping the complexity. Some routing solutions are great at generating a first pass at routes, but ultimately don’t give users the ability to adjust those routes without losing huge amounts of efficiency. Find a solution that generates efficient routes and schedules that can be adjusted without falling apart. 

2. AI-powered capabilities

If getting routing software that can accomplish the level of efficiency we’re talking about (and do it quickly and scalably) sounds like a challenge—it absolutely is. But it’s a challenge that delivery service software providers can overcome with the use of AI and machine learning in their route optimization process. 

This is technology that’s been around and making an impact for a while, but as AI has become a more commonplace part of the technology landscape, more and more parts of the delivery and service management process can be streamlined with the judicious use of AI. 

We’d recommend seeking out a solution that offers you AI-powered customer engagement tools, e.g. a chat agent that can handle customer questions via two-way messaging (and escalate to human support members in a clearly-defined way). 

You can also find delivery service software that offers AI-powered voice briefings for drivers to help them complete their stops more easily, as well as AI-powered tools to improve efficiency for dispatchers and to help decision makers query data more quickly and easily.  

3. Customer experience management

We mentioned customer experience briefly above. AI-powered chat agents can go a long way towards streamlining and standardizing the experience that you offer to delivery and service customers—but that’s not the be-all and end-all for providing great customer service. 

Your solution should also empower you to:

• Keep customers in the loop with automated notifications and alerts at defined touchpoints
• Offer real-time delivery and service visibility to your customers via a dedicated
• Communicate bi-directionally in real-time with customers as needed
• Consistently arrive at the delivery/service site on time

These kinds of capabilities are important for scheduled deliveries (where customer anxiety can potentially run high), but they’re even more crucial for services. Your customers may be coordinating around the services you’re offering, and the more visibility and consistency you can provide them, the better your NPS score will be.   

4. Total visibility beyond the last mile

Your delivery and service calls don’t happen in a vacuum. In fact, they’re part of an interconnected set of processes that make up a much larger logistics and supply chain function within your business. 

Too many solutions fail to treat them this way, and the result is that the last mile becomes disconnected from the rest of the fulfillment process. In other words, the left hand doesn’t know what the right is doing, and the result is that coordination is more difficult and costs tend to rise. 

Luckily, a little visibility here can go a long way. We recommend prioritizing solutions that are capable of both integrating with solutions that deal with, say, the first and middle miles and making it easy to find the data you need, when you need it. 

5. A proven track record of driving ROI

Sometimes, it can be difficult to tell the bells and whistles from the absolute must-haves in a solution. These will also differ somewhat from one organization to the next, meaning that when you set out to find a delivery service software vendor there will always be some question marks about what they’re offering and what the value is. 

It can be hard to predict in advance what the impact of certain features is likely to be, but it’s easy enough to take a step back and look at the track record of the vendor from a more holistic perspective. Are they able to consistently get their customers up and running on the software and help them achieve ROI quickly?

Finding a vendor where the answer to that question is an emphatic “yes” is every bit as important as finding precisely the right features in precisely the right configuration. A great technology partner will work with you to ensure success, not just for the initial deployment but for the length of your relationship. 

Conclusion 

Delivery service software can do more than ever before: it can help delivery and service organizations reduce costs, boost efficiency, and improve their logistics performance—as long as it has the right capabilities and the right team behind it. 

It can be tough to tell exactly what the “right” software looks like, but there are plenty of green flags to look out for. Want more help wading through the ambiguity? Reach out to our team today and we’ll walk you through some of the ways that delivery service software can reduce logistics costs.