Deliver Orders Faster with the Best Last Mile Solution

Delivering at the speed customers expect is challenging, which is why companies of all shapes and sizes are turning their attention towards improving their technology stacks. The majority of customers don't view fast delivery turnarounds as a perk, but rather as a necessity, which gives businesses the chance to gain a competitive advantage by speeding up their deliveries with the right last mile solution. 

Some of this comes down to dreaded "Amazon Effect," i.e. Amazon guaranteeing one-day shipping for Prime members. Walmart actually offers free next-day delivery to for online shopping without requiring a membership. But this phenomenon goes well beyond the worlds of retail and e-commerce. 

As competition continues to heat up, businesses across the board try to gain an advantage by leveraging fast delivery methods to increase sales. Beyond that, faster and smoother deliveries can translate into lower delivery costs and improved fleet utilization. If you want to succeed in today's market, you need an effective strategy and powerful fleet management tools. 

Leveraging Last Mile Logistics Solutions for Faster Deliveries

Speeding up delivery service is possible, and your secret weapon to success is an AI-powered last mile logistics solution. Here’s how you can execute faster deliveries with the right software:

Automation

Automating your last mile delivery processes by leveraging the best last mile solution is crucial to streamlining your operations. With the best last mile ​​delivery software, you can effortlessly manage numerous dispatches every day, monitor drivers, vehicles, and order, collect delivery-related documentation (e.g. proof of delivery), and fulfill orders with ease—all without the mountain of manual effort that this has traditionally required.

By automating as much as possible, you can also connect your processes to ensure that everything leads up to the desired result. When data is automatically gathered and shared across systems and workflows, you can be sure that everyone can access the information they need to ensure successful deliveries—without wasting time hunting for it. This means that you can schedule orders as soon as they come in, rather than waiting for order data to be exported.

Route Optimization

To achieve faster delivery, you need to optimize your routes. Routing optimization involves choosing the most cost-effective and efficient route for each delivery drop-off. This, in turn, enables you to deliver more per day and shorten your delivery lead times. 

If you rely on basic delivery mapping software and manual calculations, you are unlikely to achieve truly optimized routes. For fleets with more than a couple of vehicles, optimal routes are nearly impossible to plan by hand. SaaS-powered, AI-enabled route planning software solves this problem.

Your route optimization platform should find the most efficient routes automatically and accurately predict ETAs, such that you can achieve higher on-time delivery rates. When you can calculate routes for thousands of orders and hundreds of drivers in minutes, you can efficiently deliver orders to customers without requiring long lead times.

This can be especially impactful when you’re trying to spin up same-day or next-day delivery options. The faster your routing process, the later your order cutoff time is going to be. This means you can capture more customers who might want rapid delivery turnarounds. 

Real-Time Visibility

Although strategic planning is important, it is equally important to be able to adjust that plan in response to unexpected challenges. Delivery runs are bound to have a few surprises along the way. The driver may get stuck in traffic, experience a flat tire, or be waylaid by an unexpected requirement during a delivery. To prevent small delays from becoming hours-long snafus, dispatchers and fleet managers need alerts as soon as something goes wrong.

With real-time tracking, dispatchers can track where a driver is on the road and determine their statuses in real time. When drivers become stuck in traffic or arrive late, dispatchers can make adjustments on the fly and even send updated routes to drivers' phones immediately if needed.

Real-time tracking also extends to customers. For instance, you can enable them to visualize their order’s progress via a live tracking portal. Many logistics companies notify their customers when an order is on its way, or when a driver is nearby, but the best last mile solution offers customers a live GPS tracking link and real-time ETA updates. 

By offering live tracking, you can minimize customer service calls without adding more work for your employees.

Resource Management

Managing final mile delivery is a complex, resource-intensive, and time-consuming operation. If you do not use the appropriate resources, last mile delivery operations and labor costs will be impossible to manage. That’s why your last mile software should help you plan the last leg of the supply chain in detail from a macro to a micro perspective.

When your software enables your dispatchers and fleet managers to assign the right delivery task to the right drivers and the right vehicle, you can be sure that you’re actually getting the most out of your delivery capacity and delivering to customers as quickly and efficiently as possible. 

Quick and Effective Customer Communication

Last mile delivery operations are complex, often depending on constantly changing variables. That’s why the most valuable last mile delivery management software offers the ability to communicate with everyone involved in the delivery process, including your customers, drivers, fleet managers, dispatchers, route planners, and customer service teams. By giving away the data they need to stay on top of things, you'll be able to take any necessary actions as quickly as you need, especially during critical times.

One of the most important ways that this smooths out and speeds up delivery operations overall is by reducing the number of failed deliveries. When you notify customers about upcoming orders, they’re much less likely to not be at home. The result is fewer re-delivery attempts, which frees up your capacity to handle newer orders sooner. This also significantly improves customer experience, which can help boost customer satisfaction.

How AI Is Impacting Last Mile Logistics

The pace of technological change in last mile delivery used to be glacially slow—too often it was moving at about the same speed as deliveries themselves. But as AI has become a ubiquitous presence in the world of technology, it’s begun to accelerate the rate of change in last mile technology as well. 

For instance, last mile operators can now leverage AI-powered chat agents to speed up the process of responding to customer inquiries. For simple questions like “When is my order scheduled for?” the AI can instantly provide a conversational answer, and for more complex questions it can escalate to a human in a predefined way. This helps free up your team’s time while improving customer experience. 

Likewise, AI can now provide drivers with location-based intelligence in the form of voice notes before each stop. This helps drivers to get the info they need on parking, access, etc. and thereby get deliveries done more quickly and easily. 

As this technology continues to evolve, its applications in the last mile will become wider and more impactful.

Conclusion: The Best Last Mile Solution for Your Business

The best last mile solution is the one that delights your customers, lowers your delivery costs, and speeds up delivery planning and execution across the board. To make that happen, your solution needs to offer intelligent, AI-powered capabilities that are both efficient and easy to use—and it needs to integrate seamlessly with the rest of your technology stack.

In the end, to effectively manage all your last mile delivery logistics and distribution needs—and do it fast—you need to use a last mile logistics solution that’s actually designed with speed, connectivity, and efficiency in mind. Otherwise, you risk losing out to your competitors who are finding their own ways of speeding up delivery timelines.