DispatchTrack Doubles Down on Customer Experience with New Enhancements

There’s never been higher expectations for customer delivery experience in last mile logistics—and, at the same time, it’s hard to think of many instances where economic pressures on delivery businesses have been much greater. That’s why DispatchTrack has redoubled its commitment to offering best-in-class customer communication tools. 

Today, DispatchTrack announces the launch of advanced customer notification options, including support for: 

• Custom full-lifecycle communications
• Real-time customer interaction via streamlined two-way messaging 
• Branding opportunities with embedded images into two-way text communication 

All to ensure that last mile distributors are able to stay connected with their customers throughout the entire last mile delivery journey and manage delivery exceptions more effectively.  

Why We’re Doubling Down on Customer Experience

We don’t need to tell those involved in distributing furniture and appliances, food, building materials, or other big and bulky items that delivery is not just about moving goods from point A to point B. What the customer experiences end to end–from purchase to final delivery to their home is an extension of your company’s reputation and brand, making it a critical component of overall customer experience. Even if customers are satisfied with the merchandise, a poorly executed delivery can leave a negative impression that customers remember.

This can be a challenge under the best of circumstances, but with big and bulky it’s especially acute. When you need the customer at the delivery site to receive an order, there’s no substitute for the kind of timely, accurate communications that keep everyone in the loop and on the same page.

At DispatchTrack, we’ve always been committed to empowering our users to provide a best-in-class experience to their customers. Today, we’re reupping that commitment to extend to a new scope and new use cases as we continue to work hard and innovate within the space. 

DispatchTrack’s New Customer Communication Enhancements

Our latest round of customer notification enhancements include three components: custom full-lifecycle, real-time customer interaction, and branding opportunities with embedded images. Here’s a quick rundown of each:

Custom full-lifecycle communications

Custom notifications enable users to send text messages to customers outside the usual communications cadence. These can be personalized and configured to specific delivery situations and sent out as needed, e.g., weather-related delays, unexpected interruptions, or post-delivery follow up.

For instance, let’s say you’re distributing appliances from a distribution center in Portland, Oregon, and you have a group of deliveries scheduled that day in Bend. The weather is fine in Portland itself, but a winter storm further south means that the mountain pass that connects Portland to Bend will be unusable that day. 

Most of your customers won’t be impacted, but the few within the impacted geography will need to reschedule their deliveries. DispatchTrack now enables you to craft messages in advance for use cases like these, and send them out to impacted customers as needed. This can include a message explaining the delay and apologizing for the inconvenience—and it can also include a link to reschedule the delivery for a later date. 

The use of this feature isn’t limited to just weather and traffic related delays. Users have total flexibility in how they configure the notifications and how they define the audiences, meaning the feature can also be used for post-delivery follow-up, promotions, mass scheduling requests, and much more. Ultimately, this gives DispatchTrack users the ability to be more flexible and agile in the way that they communicate at scale.  

Real-time customer interaction

We’ve also enhanced our two-way messaging capabilities to streamline real-time interactions between dispatchers and customers. To make it easier to stay connected to customers and enable support staff to ramp up on the situation quickly and address their specific needs, we now have a dedicated message center that shows all of your messages and responses to and from the customer in the same place, alongside relevant customer and order information. 

In the appliance delivery example above, this enhanced two-way messaging would give you the ability to quickly and easily manage other exceptions cropping up due to the weather. Let’s say a customer is stuck on the wrong side of the pass and won’t be back home in Portland to receive their delivery. 

They reach out to you directly, and you go back and forth to get the order rescheduled and removed from the driver’s route for the day. You can visualize the entire conversation in one place as it unfolds, and you can see key order details as you’re chatting so you can make any necessary adjustments based on what’s headed their way.  

The result is a smoother experience for both customer and dispatcher—ultimately leading to faster, easier exception management across the board. 

Branding opportunities with embedded images

Now, in addition to text messages, DispatchTrack will support sending images as SMS messages. This means that information that might be better displayed visually can be more easily incorporated into communication cadences. 

With this enhancement, customers can use embedded images to verify the authenticity of the notification, showcase their brand, introduce your driver, and confirm accurate deliveries. This can go a long way towards enhancing the power of your brand and building trust with your customers. 

This isn’t just a matter of branding. Pictures have been shown to increase engagement in a host of different circumstances, and including images in your communications with customers can help them stand out. If you’re able to share a photo of the delivery driver that customers along a certain route can expect—possibly formatted with some of your corporate branding—you help them gain a better sense of exactly what to expect from the delivery process. Ultimately, this can help deliveries go more smoothly, all while helping extend the power of your brand into the delivery experience and beyond. 

You can learn more about the enhancements here: https://www.dispatchtrack.com/customer-notification-enhancements 

The Power of Full-Lifecycle Customer Engagement

Like we said above, providing customers with a world-class customer experience throughout the entire delivery lifecycle has never been more crucial—which is why it’s so important to have the right tools for the job. 

These new updates add on to DispatchTrack’s already comprehensive suite of configurable customer engagement tools that includes self scheduling, order received communication, schedule confirmations, day of delivery and next stop notifications, delivery feedback, and customer surveys—all of which can be configured and branded to provide exceptional customer service before, during, and after the delivery.  

As DispatchTrack CEO and founder Satish Natarajan puts it: “At DispatchTrack, we’re always innovating to ensure that our platform is updated with new enhancements that our customers need. Currently, the delivery experience has never been more critical to brand loyalty and that doesn’t just include delivering on time. A critical component to customer satisfaction is transparency and real-time two-way communication that reflects the brand throughout the last mile, especially in the event of an interruption.”

With these new enhancements, we’re doing more than boosting customer experience and helping bolster our customers’ brands. We’re also making life easier for dispatchers, managers, drivers, custom service reps, and others across the entire last mile fulfillment process. At the same time, we’re continuing to work hard to provide our users with cutting-edge tools that are tailor-made for the unique challenges and opportunities that come with big and bulky delivery use cases like food distribution, furniture and appliance retail, building supplies distribution, and other areas.

As these industries continue to evolve, we plan to keep innovating. We’ve spent more than a decade solving hard problems in last mile logistics, and we have that same mindset today as we launch new and exciting enhancements to our customer communication capabilities. It takes a high level of service to retain customers and preserve brand loyalty, and we’re excited to keep helping companies achieve that.