5 Actionable Ways to Achieve 1 More Delivery Per Day

Achieving one more delivery per day may not sound like much—but if your drivers are making a dozen stops per day on average, then adding even a single successful delivery to the tally represents an increase of nearly 10%. That represents improved fleet utilization, faster time to delivery, happier customers, and, yes, lower costs.

It’s also much easier said than done. There’s a lot that can go wrong in modern logistics management: Your plans might not jive with reality, such that your drivers can’t actually meet their SLAs. Or your customers might not be at home or at the delivery site to receive their orders when the driver arrives. Or traffic and weather patterns might conspire to throw your delivery schedules into disarray. 

You could even wind up in a position where none of these things are happening at all—but you completely lack visibility into your deliveries and can’t tell whether your capacity would stretch to more orders per day. 

If you can gain visibility into your delivery and logistics operations—and you can take steps to make sure that your teams don’t fall into any of these logistics pitfalls—you can achieve that crucial added delivery each day on each delivery run. The question is: what practical steps can you take to get there?

1. Adopt a Connected Logistics Approach 

Okay, the first step here is in some ways the least practical—or, at least, it’s the most conceptual. At the same time, it’s crucial for making more practical actions possible. 

So, what do we mean by a connected logistics approach? At a high level, we mean leveraging logistics technology that connects every stage of the last mile delivery and pickup journey and ensures visibility into the process across the board. That means ensuring that the software covering each functional area—from warehouse loading and scheduling to routing, execution, customer experience, and documentation—is fully integrated with the software covering every other related functional area. 

In practice, this means taking a long, hard look at your logistics technology stack and evaluating gaps, data silos, functional silos, shadow IT, and other areas of potential disconnect. Anything that requires manual data entry or unreliable integrations needs to be rethought.

2. Empower Your Drivers with AI

With the right logistics technology set up across your organization, you’re ready to empower your drivers to be more productive on their shifts and complete more stops on their routes. This starts with simple planning and execution improvements:

• Leveraging AI-powered route optimization to improve delivery ETAs so that drivers aren’t running late.
• Offer turn-by-turn directions and configurable workflows and forms to guide drivers and technicians through more technical jobs.
• Enable drivers to send alerts to customers so that they’re prepared when the driver arrives and the delivery can be completed smoothly. 

These can all go a long way towards improving your first-attempt delivery rate, which in turn helps boost delivery productivity and optimize cost-per-delivery. 

At the same time, there are new frontiers when it comes to driver empowerment. With the advent of modern AI technology, you can empower drivers with real-time, AI-generated guidance built specifically for teams in the field. 

This kind of driver AI provides contextual audio guidance embedded into their existing workflows so that they can complete delivery stops more easily. 

3. Give Customers Instant Answers to Queries

Another key area where AI is helping delivery organizations to complete more stops per day is in the realm of customer experience. Customers expect seamless, flexible, and proactive service—and with an AI-powered chat agent, businesses can meet these expectations while transforming customer service from a cost center into a competitive advantage. 

This kind of technology sits within your two-way customer communication workflow to independently answer customer inquiries while escalating to a human support team member as needed. The impact is reduced support workload, fewer inbound service calls, and faster responses to customer queries. 

Another impact is that customers get answers more quickly and easily, which means they’re much more likely to be informed. Even if they’ve missed the first two text messages telling them when to expect the driver to show up, they can ask the delivery chat agent and find out precisely when they need to be at the delivery site. 

And it all happens without human intervention (except for queries that the agent needs to escalate, which will of course go to a human team member). That means that you can get more done with your existing team—resulting in fewer failed deliveries and more successful deliveries per route. 

For a step-by-step guide to implementing this kind of technology within the last mile, check out our recent guide.

4. Optimize Your Routes

Effective route optimization depends on connectivity and high quality data. But once you’ve checked those two boxes, optimizing your routes can help you drive 10% fewer miles per stop at least, enabling you to get that much more out of your delivery capacity. 

The actionable guidance here isn’t so much “use route optimization tools” as “configure your route optimization so that it works for you.” That means leveraging a few best practices:

• Match your delivery vehicles to the right jobs based on vehicle and job site requirements
• Match your drivers and technicians to the right jobs based on skill and availability
• Incorporate reloads, store stops, and multi-day routes as needed
• Leverage calendar-based routing and scheduling for fitting deliveries and services in with your clients’ existing job schedules
• Incorporate variances in service time into delivery ETAs and schedules

Making this happen starts with ensuring that your routing technology—whether it’s a standalone solution or a component of your larger logistics management solution—can handle each of these items in a way that’s intuitive and easy for your team to use. 

This way, you can speed up the time it takes to route and schedule your deliveries (meaning your order cutoff time can be later and your team can recoup time for more valuable tasks) while ensuring high route efficiency. In this way, you can theoretically complete 10%+ additional stops on each route.

One of the key things to note here is that usability is crucial. You don’t want your team to be stuck digging up configuration settings out of a binder or hunting through documentation all day. If your solution requires your team to spend hours planning routes, it’s time to find a solution that can cut that down to minutes. 

5. Manage Exceptions in Real Time 

We talked a little bit about the importance of visibility above. When you have true data visibility across your logistics network, you can get more out of your capacity and improve your delivery performance and tracking across the board. 

But what does that look like when deliveries are actually underway? After all, this is where the proverbial rubber meets the road—your drivers are either going to be able to get the deliveries done as scheduled, or they’re going to run into issues that result in delays and redelivery attempts. 

The trick here is to have a real-time delivery dashboard that enables you to spot potential delivery exceptions at a quick glance and immediately take steps to get things back on track. 

Achieve More Deliveries Per Day with the Right Technology

One extra delivery each day may seem like a modest goal from the outside, but clearing the way for improved delivery performance can be a real challenge without the right tools. 

Luckily, modern last mile logistics software that can help you empower drivers, optimize routes, connect with customers, and manage exceptions is out there. You just have to find a solution that’s easy to use and integrates seamlessly with your technology stack.