Live Delivery Tracking Is Non-Negotiable—Here’s How to Get More from It

Live delivery tracking is so important to consumers that Google’s latest Android update goes out of its way to ensure that users don’t have to refresh their phones to see delivery progress and ETAs for Uber Eats orders. In point of fact, they’re playing catch up with Apple’s iOS on that front—but the point stands that the ability to get live delivery updates at a glance is more than just a “nice to have.”

When it comes to big and bulky deliveries—whether that’s a pallet of roofing shingles or a dishwasher—this desire is only amplified. Whether it’s a business or an end consumer who’s getting the delivery, they most likely need to be at the delivery site right when the truck arrives, which means that real visibility is paramount. That’s why the standards have been shifting towards more and more granular delivery tracking in the world of scheduled delivery. 

Simply put, modern delivery organizations need live delivery tracking capabilities—not just for keeping their customers happy, but for improving their own internal capabilities. 

In this post, we’ll dive into exactly why that is, how you can improve your delivery tracking capabilities, and the best practices for getting the most out of increased real-time visibility into the last mile.   

Why Do You Need Live Delivery Tracking?

It’s not just that your customers want to be able to track their deliveries in real time (though study after study suggests that they really do), it’s that your internal operations depend on that same level of tracking. 

By way of example, let’s say that you’re delivering flooring tiles to a handful of new construction sites around your region. Towards the middle of the day, out of the blue, one of your clients calls your office in a huff. Their order was supposed to arrive an hour ago, and their crew has been sitting around doing nothing.

If you don’t have direct visibility into your delivery runs, you’ll be scrambling to offer the customer any answer at all, let alone a remotely satisfying one. You may have to hang up on the customer and call the driver, which will be irritating for both of them, and at the end of the process you may still not be able to answer a simple question: “where’s my order?”

This paradigm is flipped on its head when you have effective delivery tracking. The customer can check on the status and location of their order from the comfort of their own device. And if they do feel the need to reach out to you directly, you can see what’s happening with your delivery runs at a glance. There’s no need to desperately hunt for information that’s already going out of date. 

The result is that you can resolve exceptions much more quickly and easily and improve the overall customer experience that you offer. Crucially, this is true even in cases where things aren’t going quite according to plan. When you can manage exceptions more quickly and efficiently, you can raise both the ceiling and the floor for customer satisfaction. 

How to Get More Value out of Your Delivery Tracking

Once you’ve got delivery tracking capabilities baked into your last mile delivery and logistics management, you want to do whatever you can to maximize the value of those capabilities. There are a few keys to making that happen:

• Provide a live delivery tracking portal to customers via text: You want the process to be as seamless as possible from the customer’s perspective, so sending a link as a matter of course in your delivery communication cadence is critical. And the portal should offer more than just a truck on a map—it should provide an up-to-the-minute ETA, order and delivery details, and even a picture of the driver to let the customer know who to expect.
• Give customers easy ways to follow up with your team: Most of the time, if things are going well, the ability to track their own delivery orders will put customers in a position where they don’t have to reach out to you with questions. But for the small percentage of the time where that’s not the case, customers should be able to instantly send messages your way. Here, you can also incorporate an AI-powered chat agent into your customer communications workflow so that customers can get instant answers to simple questions and your team can focus on dealing with more pressing issues. 
• Incorporate live delivery data into a single cohesive dashboard: When you turn that visibility around and provide it to your own team, the most important thing is to make sure that no one needs to hunt for data in order to get a sense of how delivery runs are unfolding. That’s why incorporating live delivering tracking into a single intuitive dashboard is so critical. Here, the best practice is to make it easy to visualize the status of every truck, route, and delivery from a single screen. 
• Incorporate first mile and middle mile tracking: This advice won’t necessarily apply to everyone, but anyone who’s taking a bird’s eye view of their larger logistics operations stands to benefit from incorporating first mile and middle mile delivery tracking into the process. By leveraging the same technology and workflows but extending them beyond last mile deliveries, you can gain visibility across your logistics network and thus improve coordination across the board. The result is that you turn up delays much more quickly—and you can shorten lead teams in the same way. 

5 Ways that Delivery Visibility Improves Business Outcomes

When you implement the best practices above, you can set yourself up for smoother, more efficient, more streamlined logistics. The added visibility that you and your customers can get with better delivery tracking then translates into a host of very tangible benefits:

• Improved customer satisfaction, leading to better NPS scores and increased customer loyalty—both of which can boost revenue over time
• Faster, more efficient exception management—meaning that your worst delivery outcomes are mitigated significantly in terms of both cost and CSAT scores 
• Fewer inbound calls from customers, resulting in less time and money spent on customer support team labor
• Improved coordination across teams and functions (particularly if you’ve included first and middle mile delivery tracking in the equation)
• Streamlined driver management workflows—and improved driver morale and productivity—as a result of 

This is just a top level of rundown of what you might see from leveraging delivery tracking. Since customers increasingly expect it anyway, the ability to set up tracking in such a way as to gain all these added benefits can be a huge win. 

Conclusion: Combining Visibility and Optimization 

They say you can’t optimize what you can’t measure. Nowhere is that more true than in the world of logistics. Visibility is a huge part of this—it puts you in a position to actually track deliveries and measure outcomes in a consistent standardized way. 

But that’s only the beginning. When you have true visibility in place in your logistics operations, you can begin to standardize operations and optimize them for cost, performance, and efficiency. In this way, you can start to drive towards serious ROI for your logistics technology spend.