Customer satisfaction is just as important in B2B deliveries and distribution as it is in B2C—if not more so—but the end result of that satisfaction doesn’t always look the same on the outside. When you deliver a new couch to someone’s home, a successful delivery might elicit smiles of delight. When you get a case of beer to the right place at the right time, the customer is more likely to act like this represents business as usual—because it should.
B2B operations know better than most that early deliveries are, in many cases, just as bad as late deliveries. If a restaurant is expecting a truck with a pallet of cabbages to show up at two, and the truck is an hour and half early, there’s going to be a huge disruption in the middle of their lunch rush. Likewise, if you’re delivering to a job site and you show up with supplies that the foreperson can’t use until the right hardware arrives three hours later, your delivery is going to take up space in a crowded construction site and potentially get in the way of other work.
For many businesses, B2B and B2C alike, “on-time” has a tendency to mean “not late.” But as we can see from the examples above, just avoiding late deliveries isn’t good enough: you need to deliver at precisely the right time for the customer in order to declare success for a particular delivery.
Thinking about deliveries in these terms helps businesses to increase their focus on the importance of the customer in the delivery process. Since “right-time” fundamentally means “the right time for the customer,” it’s not just a matter of making a schedule and sticking to it. Instead, it’s a matter of actively engaging with the customer so they know when to expect the delivery, and offering them transparency at every stage of the process up to (and beyond) the moment when the truck arrives as expected. This requires delivery organizations to be connected, agile, and intelligent across the board.
Making this happen can feel like a tall order, especially in contexts that involve mostly recurring deliveries (e.g. beer distribution, food wholesaling, etc.). Like we saw above, most of these delivery sites are places where an early delivery is potentially even worse than a late one. In industries where on-time delivery is simply non-negotiable when it comes to customer retention, many businesses wind up delivering fewer stops per day than their capacity allows, just to add buffer time before stops. This obviously results in a lot of wasted driver time and much less profitable routes. But if the alternative is to risk losing business, it’s the only viable option.
But how did we get here? Why, exactly, is it so difficult to optimize B2B delivery processes without risking a dropoff in customer satisfaction and potential churn? There’s a handful of common culprits:
A lot of this ultimately comes down to routing. Most distributors rely on recurring static route plans to get the right product to their customers at the right time—and static routes are inflexible by definition. At the same time, they’re often a necessity if you want to maintain stability for your most important customers.
So, how do B2B last mile delivery operations get around the seeming contradiction of maintaining stability in their customer service while also looking for more efficient ways to conduct their deliveries? The answer may be a hybrid approach that combines static and dynamic routing. Essentially, static routing for your top customers and dynamic routing for newer or smaller customers. In this way, you get the stability that comes with static routes—plus the ability to pivot, make adjustments, and stay flexible that modern dynamic routing solutions offer you.
Here, again, the goal is to be connected, agile, and intelligent:
When you can make the things we described above a reality, it’s possible to implement an AI-powered hybrid routing approach that combines static and dynamic routing. In this way, you can seamlessly blend planning and execution, resulting in more stops per day without a heightened risk of late deliveries to your important accounts. At the same time, you can handle last-minute or off-day requests from those clients without your plans going haywire.
In short by taking an agile, connected, intelligent approach to hybrid routing, you can make right-time delivery management a reality in the context of B2B deliveries. Instead of adding in buffer time between stops to ensure on-time performance, you can dynamically route around your most important delivery windows, relying confidently on your AI-powered ETAs . Instead of flying blind with regard to which stops are profitable and which aren’t, you can leverage connectivity and visibility into smarter reporting and clearer delivery costing. Ultimately, you can consistently deliver at the right time for more customers using fewer resources.