How Do You Leverage Last Mile Technology to Improve Customer Service?

In a recent survey, respondents were divided: 43% said that the biggest benefit of providing a great customer experience is increased revenue, white 41% said that it was higher customer satisfaction and retention. The good news here is that improving customer experience isn’t an either-or proposition. If you prioritize it, you’re likely to get both of the top benefits in something like equal measure.

Figuring out the importance of last mile delivery experience is easy (97% in that same survey agreed that it was critically important), but sussing out exactly how to improve it can be somewhat more challenging. That said, the tools, techniques, and technologies are out there to help delivery businesses improve the service they offer to customers—and reap the very real rewards in the process. 

In this post, we’ll provide an actionable guide to leveraging last mile technology towards the aim of boosting customer experience and raising customer satisfaction and retention scores. 

What Does Great Customer Delivery Experience Look Like in 2025?

Before we can dig into the specific steps that delivery businesses can take, let’s discuss what we mean when we talk about great customer delivery experiences. The precise ins and outs of this have changed over time, and no doubt they’ll continue to evolve as the delivery (and technology) landscape changes. 

But broadly speaking, there a handful of keys to nailing customer experience in last mile delivery:

• Provide a delivery confirmation with a scheduled date as soon as the transaction is completed. 
• Open a two-way line of communication via text and/or email so customers can reach out if they have questions or issues
• Notify customers when their orders are routed and let them know their ETAs
• Remind customers of their delivery schedules a day or two before the scheduled date
• Notify customers throughout the day of delivery, including when the driver starts their route and when the customer’s stop is next.
• Provide real-time delivery tracking—with a live, up-to-the-minute ETA—from the customer’s device.
• Reach out immediately with an alert in the case of a delay or a delivery exception. 
• Provide delivery follow-up, including customer satisfaction surveys and delivery receipts (including photographic proof of delivery).
• Ensure a consistent experience in terms of brand and tone.
• Offer flexibility if the customer needs to reschedule or has an issue.
• Empower your drivers to complete any services or installations smoothly and effectively.
• Deliver on time!

We’ll talk about how to make all of these best practices a reality, but we’ll also go into how you can do that at scale without doubling the size of your customer support staff. In both cases, the answer is going to be to automate as much as possible with smart, integrated last mile delivery technology.    

4 Steps to Leverage Technology to Boost Customer Satisfaction

1. Implement last mile technology that can optimize your routes effectively

It’s easy to lose sight of the importance of delivery routes when it comes to customer experience—it feels like a problem of operational efficiency more than something that directly impacts the customer. But in point of fact your ability to deliver on time comes down to the quality of your routes. 

Specifically, your routes need to be both efficient and built to execute. To make that happen, you need software that leverages AI and machine learning to turn huge caches of delivery data into more accurate delivery ETAs.

At the same time, it’s not just a matter of finding the shiniest software solution and pressing the “optimize” button. Whatever solution you adopt should be easy to use, but it should also be powerful enough to efficiently handle your use case. Look for something that has industry-specific capabilities (e.g. hybrid static and dynamic routing if you’re in food distribution or calendar-based scheduling if you’re in building supplies) and lets you configure things like vehicle matching, service time variables, and driver skills to your specific business case. 

2. Brand and automate last mile delivery notifications

You want the delivery experience to fundamentally act as an extension of brand experience. That means you should incorporate your corporate identity and tone of voice into thet messages and notifications you send out. Simply put, you should make sure they reflect the delightful brand that made the customer choose to purchase from you in the first place. 

Once you’ve got that in place, you want to arrange customer communications so there’s as little need for direct human intervention as possible. That means trying to remove phone calls from the picture as much as possible—i.e. unless something is really time sensitive and requires a direct chat with the customer. 

Here, the best practice is to decide on your preferred customer experience cadence, make sure you’ve created branded messages for each touch point, and then set up the right triggers so that they go out to the right customers at the right times. This will mean simultaneously notifying everyone on a route when the driver leaves for the day and sending alerts to individual customers automatically when your system registers that the driver is, say, 30 minutes away. 

For things that can’t be automated—for instance, mass text notifications due to inclement weather causing cancellations—you want to set up your notifications so that they can be sent out to a large group in a couple of clicks. You don’t want your dispatchers sitting in the office in a snow storm trying to write an email to customers from scratch. 

3. Implement an AI-powered chat agent for simple customer inquiries

Your customers want answers to their questions as quickly as possible—and most of the time those questions are simple and repetitive: “Where’s my order?” “What time is my delivery scheduled for?” etc.

These questions are easy to answer, but the sheer volume of them can make them a challenge for your team. That’s where AI comes in. You can check out an in-depth guide to implementing this kind of technology here, but the upshot is: customers get instant answers to simple questions, and your team only has to field the questions that the AI has escalated to them. 

The result is happier customers and significant time savings for your team.

4. Empower drivers to do their jobs more smoothly

For most of the last mile delivery process, you can orchestrate your customer experience from a central solution and roll it out (mostly) automatically. This works great for texts and emails, but when it comes time for the driver to actually deliver—and potentially install—the order, they become the face of your brand. At that point, customer service comes down to the driver and how well they’re able to do their job.

That’s why one of the keys to effectively leveraging technology to improve customer service is to empower your drivers to do a great job at each delivery site. This means they need a mobile application with effective directions (for routes that they can actually execute on), the ability to notify customers with the push of a button, and clear documentation on what should be delivered and how. 

This may not seem not seem like a tall order—but as you get into areas with more complicated SLAs and customer expectations to match, it can be helpful to have service compliance forms that ensure that the driver is ticking off all the right boxes at the delivery site. 

It can also be helpful to have AI-powered voice briefings for each stop so that drivers can more easily find parking and access and get their jobs done more quickly. This isn’t the most common AI-powered feature in most driver mobile apps, so it’s something you’ll probably have to hunt for in terms of providers—but the impact is that drivers are in and out more quickly and your customers get a better, smoother, more seamless experience than ever before. 

Conclusion: How AI Is Impacting CX

You probably noticed that two of the four steps for leveraging technology to improve customer service involved potential AI use cases. Given all the headlines that AI has been garnering for the past few years, that shouldn’t be too surprising—this technology really is making an impact on the last mile, and businesses that adopt it in a smart, considered way stand to gain real benefits in terms of customer service levels. 

The challenge is to separate the wheat from the chaff. There’s a mix of real, workable, practical AI technology and smoke and mirrors out there, and figuring out which is which isn’t always straightforward. 

This can be daunting, but it’s the type of challenge a trusted technology partner can help you navigate. In that way, you can grow your capabilities with AI without increasing risk. The result? Better customer service and lower delivery costs.