How Can You Get the Most out of Your Last Mile Service Providers?

If you can’t fulfill all of your delivery orders with the fleet capacity that you currently have, then you must be doing something right. At the very least, you’re drumming up business, keeping your customers engaged, and working to handle the very real demand you’ve created for your product or service.

At the same time, it’s hard to avoid the big question: how are you going to handle last mile delivery for the orders that you can’t manage with your own fleet? Or—if you don’t have an owned fleet and do everything through 3rd parties already—how are you going to get the most out of your last mile service providers and ensure customer happiness?

There’s no magic wand that you can wave to make all of your deliveries go off without a hitch—but you can make sure that you’re selecting the right last mile delivery companies and setting them up to successfully bolster your brand and delight your customers. 

When Should You Work with Last Mile Service Providers?

First things first: how can you be sure that your existing delivery capacity isn’t enough to handle all the orders in your system? After all, last mile deliveries can be overwhelming at the best of times—it’s hard to know whether you’re getting the most out of the trucks you have. 

Before you turn to a third party logistics provider or delivery contractors to handle your delivery volumes, take a look at your route optimization process. Do you have a modern route optimization solution, or are you relying on spreadsheets or legacy solutions? 

If it’s the latter, there’s a good chance that you’re not getting as much out of your existing resources as you could be. By optimizing your routes with a smart, AI-powered solution, you can increase route efficiency and density to make sure you’re maximizing your fleet capacity utilization. 

One big upside to doing this is that you’ll have total visibility into your actual delivery capacity—so you can be confident when you choose to expand your capacity with a 3PL or contractor. 

Conversely, if you don’t do any of your deliveries in-house, last mile logistics companies are going to be key to the fulfillment side of your business. That’s why it’s so critical to choose the right providers and set them up for success. 

Getting the Most out of Last Mile Logistics Companies

When you work with last mile service providers, you trust your brand reputation to their capabilities. Your customers aren’t going to draw a distinction between the support you’ve provided throughout the purchasing process and the delivery service they receive. Those 3PL or Uber or other contract drivers are still the face of your brand in that moment, even if they’re not a part of your in-house team. 

This can be challenging from a number of perspectives: 

• Delivery visibility: It’s inherently difficult to gain visibility into what your last mile delivery service providers are up to—often, you send an order their way and the rest of the process is a black box.
• Customer experience: If an issue crops up, some customers may contact you directly, and if you don’t have real-time information about the delivery, you won’t be able to help them. This is especially frustrating for businesses that do direct-to-consumer sales without running their own trucks. 
• Documentation and audit trails: Once a delivery is completed, you want a clear audit trail so you can pay your contractors and close the loop with your customers. But without the right tools and processes in place, there’s no guarantee that you’ll get documentation in a timely way or that it will contain the information you need for your own systems.
• Cost management: When you’re not in control of your deliveries, a lot of the factors that can drive up last mile delivery costs—missed deliveries, unplanned returns, damage, reverse logistics—are out of your hands. 

Luckily, none of these challenges are insurmountable. In fact, by tackling them head on with the right technology, you can turn them into areas of strength. 

4 Key Ways Your Last Mile Software Service Provider Can Make Life Easier

To some extent, the way to think about all the moving parts that comprise your last mile delivery operations as a single ecosystem. Your fleet, your last mile service providers and other partners, and even (perhaps especially) your software providers should all come together to ensure smooth, cost-effective, customer-centric experiences.

Here, the onus is on your software provider to provide the connective tissue to create a cohesive whole that helps you overcome the challenges we sketched out above.

Here are some ways that your last mile software provider can do that:

1. Provide total connected visibility: You should be able to see every delivery, truck, and route in real time from a single dashboard, regardless of whether it’s your own fleet or a third party. This way, you can get a cohesive picture of your entire fulfillment operation at a glance. The right provider can make that happen by prioritizing visibility and data integration across the board. 
2. Ensure a comprehensive customer experience: When it’s your own customers out there wondering about their deliveries or running into issues, you want to make sure that your team is able to jump in and help. That means that while third party last mile delivery companies are going to customer sites, those customers still have a direct line to your customer service team—who, in turn, has total visibility into the delivery as it unfolds. Ideally, your team would even be able to jump in and provide guidance to delivery teams or service technicians as needed. 
3. Offer standardized, digitized proof of delivery: No matter who’s completing a delivery, you want your proof of delivery to contain the same information: time, location, signature, and a photo of the successful delivery. Your last mile software provider should make it easy for third parties to capture proof of delivery and automatically upload it to your system—preferably via an easy-to-use mobile app for drivers. 
4. Prioritize integration and ease-of-use: Your last mile service providers want to hit the ground running—and whether you’re requiring them to use a particular software solution or you simply want to connect their infrastructure to yours, you want your last mile solution to facilitate that. Whatever your combined technology stacks look like, you and your last mile logistics companies should be able to send and receive the right data without any complex and finicky integrations, and you should be able to leverage your software to its maximum potential without months of setup and training. 

Working with contractors and third parties to keep up with delivery volumes should never put you at odds with your customers. That’s why you need the right last mile delivery software to put you in the proverbial driver’s seat—even when someone else is in the literal driver’s seat.

Look out for a solution that offers streamline integrations with other software solutions, that’s easy for third parties to use if they need to, and is designed to be a one-stop shop for the entire customer delivery experience. If you can find that, you can consistently get the most out of your last mile service providers.