5 Keys to Connecting Logistics Costs, Performance, and Customer Outcomes

If you’re a logistics leader, you know that delivery costs, logistics performance, and customer satisfaction are all inextricably linked. But what you might be wondering is exactly how to connect those three areas in order to boost each of them in turn. Good news: that’s exactly what we’re going to dive into in this article.

Of course, we acknowledge that many of the best practices below will be easier said than done, especially if you don’t have the right technology tools and capabilities. 

In this post, we’ll go over the specifics of how you can more effectively get logistics costs, delivery performance, and customer outcomes moving in the same upward trajectory. We’ll also cover the way that you can leverage specific technology capabilities to get there. 

1. Gaining Visibility Across Your Logistics Ops

This sounds nebulous, but it’s really quite concrete when you put it into practice. You can measure visibility in the time it takes the average member of your team to find the information they need about a given delivery, order, route, customer, plan, etc. Bonus points if you have alert-driven visibility that means your team is alerted instantaneously to delivery disruptions that require their attention. 

The same logic applies when you take a bird’s eye view of your delivery and logistics operations. How quickly can you answer a question like, “What’s my average cost-per-route?” or “How many of my customers are confirming their delivery appointments ahead of time, and does that impact first attempt delivery success rate?”

To get to the point where you can answer these questions, you need to both connect different sources of data into a cohesive source of truth and leverage an interface that’s easy and intuitive to use. If your leadership team has to ask someone to ask someone to run a SQL query to get key operational data, that doesn’t count as visibility. 

But once you’ve achieved real visibility across your logistics ops, you can take control of both customer experience and costs across the board. You can visualize costs at the planning stage and optimize as needed, and you can plug up any gaps in your customer journey to ensure a great experience every time. 

2. Bringing Together Delivery Planning and Execution

When it comes to keeping delivery costs down, bridging the gap between planned and actual performance is the holy grail. If your plans are efficient, and they’re carried out to a T, then you’re set to keep costs down and ensure that customer expectations are met. 

How do you make this happen in practice? It starts with the visibility that we sketched out above, plus close coordination across scheduling, routing, driver management, and customer experience. 

Simply put, your routing needs to be sufficiently in tune with your customer needs, fleet requirements, delivery site requirements, asset and driver availability, and driving conditions (think historical traffic and weather patterns) that you’re able to create delivery routes that are both efficient and realistic. 

This takes a powerful and intuitive route optimization engine—i.e. one that your routing teams can easily leverage to create routes that meet all of their parameters in a short period of time without eroding route efficiency. 

It also takes strong driver management/empowerment tools. If your drivers don’t have the tools they need to get the job done (turn-by-turn directions, direct access to dispatchers, configurable forms, intelligent stop-level guidance, etc.), then they can’t deliver on the route as generated and you wind up with late and failed deliveries. 

It’s a tough needle to thread, but the rewards are significant. You can maximize the use of your assets while improving on-time delivery performance. It’s a win-win for your customers and your bottom line.

3. Empowering Drivers to Represent Your Brand

We mentioned driver management above, but it really bears its own separate callout. When it comes to turning your optimized delivery plans into positive customer outcomes, drivers are the absolute linchpins of the process. They’re the face of your brand from the moment they reach the delivery site. 

Some businesses worry about this facet of delivery management, but the reality is that you can empower your drivers to represent your brand in the best possible light in a few straightforward ways:

• Give them realistic routes so they’re not constantly running late 
• Match drivers and technicians to jobs that suit their skillsets
• Provide automated voice briefings for each stop so drivers know about both customer requirements and things like access and parking issues
• Provide configurable service checklists that help them ensure a consistently high level of service is being provided across the board
• Offer pallet scanning to make it easy to load and unload in a way that ensures clear documentation

Too often, drivers are on their own when they leave the distribution center, and the lack of support shows up in CSAT scores. By empowering drivers, you can turn that on its head. 

4. Addressing Customer-Centric Challenges with Customer-Centric Solutions

Here are a few examples of operational issues that fundamentally stem from the way you engage with your customers:

• Customer not-at-homes: Customers want to receive their deliveries at a time that works for them, so if they’re not at the delivery site when your driver arrives it’s generally either because they didn’t know the driver was coming or the scheduled time didn’t work for them in the first place. 
• Low first attempt delivery success rates: In the same way that we can see it in the bullet point above, confusion on the customer’s part can make it impossible for a driver to get the job done on the first attempt. The result is that your customers get annoyed, your performance metrics droop, and your costs go up.  
• Unplanned returns: Some returns happen for reasons beyond your control, but some happen because the customer didn’t have the chance to review the order before the delivery was scheduled or because the order wasn’t what they expected.
• Overworked associates and customer support staff: When customers don’t have the information they need, and they don’t have an easy way to get it (like clicking a link or sending a text), they’ll call in (already annoyed) to ask the question. At scale, this can quickly become unworkable. You can wind up leveraging entire call centers to provide subpar customer experience at a huge cost to your business. 

You can address all of these head on by leveling up your customer communication game. We go into more depth on this topic here, but at a high level you’ll need a few things:

• Automated notifications via SMS and email for delivery schedules and updates. You can define the right cadence for your business, but you should probably send a reminder the night before the delivery and notifications for a few set triggers on the day of. These should all get sent out in bulk with the push of a button (or automatically).
• Two-way customer chat. Customers should be able to initiate a real-time conversation with your team just by responding to a system-generated message. From there, you can handle exceptions and customer questions without constantly hopping on the phone. 
• Offer live delivery tracking: When customers can see where the delivery driver is just by clicking a link on their device, they’re much less likely to call your customer support team—and they’re much less likely to miss the delivery driver when they arrive. 

This is a fairly rough-and-ready sketch of a process that’s got some nuance to it, but it should give a useful guide to translating customer challenges into improved experience and lower delivery costs at the same time.

5. Leveraging Every Tool at Your Disposal—Including AI

The elephant in the room when you talk about something like two-way customer chat is the use of AI. Is it actually an effective way to deal with customer inquiries, or is it destined to annoy precisely the people you’re trying to delight?

This is something where the jury is no longer out. It’s absolutely possible to deploy AI in customer experience in an impactful way that actually speeds up responses to customer questions while decreasing the volume your support staff has to deal with manually. 

How do we know? We’ve seen it with our own eyes. You can check out the success that some of our customers have had in this roundup. But the value of AI in logistics isn’t limited to chat agents—it can also be leveraged to improve route performance and ETA accuracy, and it can even be leveraged to help drivers out with location and order information in the cab. 

The key is to scope your AI agents and deployments properly, bring humans into the loop in the right places, and leverage real-life supply chain and logistics knowledge. Our CEO gave a rundown of how to make that happen in Forbes recently if you want a more thorough investigation into this topic. 

But the upshot is: when it comes to improving customer satisfaction while improving cost efficiency, leveraging AI as a tool is becoming increasingly critical.

Bringing Together Customer Satisfaction, Cost, and Performance

Doing all of what we described above by hand isn’t just impossible—it defeats the purpose, at least where cost and performance are concerned. To make these keys a reality, you need a technology solution that combines visibility, route planning, route execution, customer experience, and digital chain of custody under one roof. 

That’s exactly what we provide at DispatchTrack—reach out to our team today to learn more.