How Retail Logistics Software Boosts Customer Experience

Retail logistics software might mean different things to different companies. The process of getting the right goods to the right place at the right time is complex, and each of the moving parts requires different capabilities to get right. But when it comes to last mile logistics, you need software that puts the focus squarely on customer experience.

This doesn’t mean focusing on customer communications, say, to the exclusion of all other supply chain and logistics processes. A lot has to go right to ensure happy customers in retail deliveries, and most of that might seem on the surface like it’s got practically nothing to do with the customer. It takes a comprehensive, connected, and flexible system to make retail logistics work. 

What does that look like in practice? Here are some of the connected capabilities that your retail logistics software can offer in order to improve customer service. By prioritizing these areas, you put yourself in a position to gain a competitive advantage by consistently delighting customers.  

AI-Powered Route Planning

Routing is one of those things that might not seem like it has a terribly direct bearing on the customer. And yet, one of the most important parts of a great customer experience is delivering on time, every time. To do that, you need to optimize your routes effectively. 

Your delivery management system software should leverage AI and machine learning to generate delivery routes that are highly efficient with accurate ETAs. These are two separate but closely connected concerns. In order to create routes that are efficient, you need to be able to account for a number of constraints and parameters:

• Customer time window requests
• Driver availability
• Truck and driver capacity limitations
• Site-specific needs
• Differences in load type
• Driver skill

This isn’t something that a human planner can really accomplish by hand. In fact, it’s not something that most legacy software can necessarily handle. Your solution should be able to account for these factors and more—and do it quickly. 

When it comes to ETAs, there’s a different set of factors at play:

• Driver speed
• Traffic
• Weather
• Differences in service time between different services
• Differences in service time between different product types

Again, this is something that not all delivery optimization software solutions can handle. Really, it requires AI and machine-learning powered technology to understand how all of these factors will affect delivery times. 

But the results are worth the investment. You can achieve 98% on-time delivery rates, which will boost customer loyalty and increase your brand strength. 

Real-Time Visibility

Visibility is often touted as a big part of the retail delivery experience. Retail customers want information about their deliveries right at their fingertips throughout the process. And the right software delivery tracking software can absolutely make that happen. 

With the right technology, you can offer customers live order tracking via a dedicated portal. From the comfort of their own devices, your customers can see where the delivery truck is, where it’s headed, and what their live ETA is. 

Crucially, the best way to turn visibility into a great customer experience is to make sure that what’s visible is something that’s going well. When deliveries are chaotic and frustrating, giving customers added insight into them doesn’t do much to boost their experience. That’s why the kind of route optimization we discussed above is so important. 

Customer Experience Orchestration 

Retail customers expect constant communication, total visibility, and easy connectivity when they make a purchase. Deliveries need to reflect all of these elements—all of which require specific software capabilities.

Simply put, your retail logistics software should make it easy for you to craft a high-touch customer experience and roll it out to all of your customers. This will look different for different logistics operators, but you should be able to:

• Send schedule confirmation messages
• Send messages to let customers dynamically schedule their deliveries
• Send reminder messages before and throughout the day of delivery
• Send real-time delivery alerts with live ETAs
• Customize different message templates for different product or delivery types
• Capture customer feedback with surveys 
• Instant message with customers on the day of delivery
• Promote Google reviews from satisfied customers

It’s not just about being able to send out messages. It’s about being able to stay in touch with customers at scale. When you can keep customers in the loop without a ton of back-office effort, you can reduce costs and bolster customer trust at the same time. 

Orchestrating your customer communications in this way has a number of benefits around delivery costs and efficiency. For instance, when your customers know when to expect a delivery, they’re much less likely to miss the truck. This saves you the costs that come from expensive redelivery attempts.

But the most critical benefits come from building trust with your customers. When you prioritize connectivity and transparency with customers, you make them feel confident that the delivery is going to go right. When you can back this up with stellar delivery execution, you can increase customer loyalty and encourage repeat business. 

DispatchTrack: One Comprehensive Retail Logistics Software Platform

At DispatchTrack, our goal is to turn last mile logistics into a competitive advantage for retailers. We offer cloud-based tools to plan and execute deliveries that will consistently delight customers. 

How do we make this happen? By offering an integrated platform that seamlessly blends last mile planning and execution. We help retailers to:

• Achieve 98% on-time delivery rates
• Cut failed deliveries and not-at-homes by more than 50%
• Decrease routing time by more than 50%
• Significantly reduce where’s-my-order calls
• Respond to incidents in the field much more quickly
• Decrease miles driven and fuel costs by more than 10%
• Significantly boost customer satisfaction

To learn more, book a demo and let one of our specialists show you how our retail logistics software can help elevate your customer delivery experience.