Effective scheduled delivery is at the heart of big and bulky industries like furniture, appliance, and even food and building supplies distribution. Unlike parcel deliveries—where as long as you’ve dropped the package off before the date you told the customer, you’ve succeeded—scheduled deliveries require careful coordination with the customer.
In this post, we’ll go over the top challenges that retailers and delivery businesses face in streamlining their scheduled delivery operations, as well as offering up a few best practices for making sure your deliveries are reliable, cost-efficient, and delightful for your customers.
Scheduled delivery is, in a sense, a bit of a misnomer. Parcel deliveries have their own schedules, after all—it’s just that the schedule doesn’t have to be precisely coordinated with the customer in most instances. If you’re dropping off a small package, you’re probably leaving it on the customer’s porch or in the package room of an apartment building or office.
When the delivery is something like a couch or a dishwasher the game changes completely. Now, you need the customer to be home to accept the delivery and potentially tell you where to leave or install the item. Your delivery team may even need to haul away an old appliance, or process a job-site return if a commercial customer has over-ordered.
Estimates suggest that the last mile can take up about half of total supply chain costs for most delivery businesses, but for scheduled delivery the potential costs are even higher.
The differences we sketched out above between typical parcel deliveries and scheduled deliveries might not seem huge, but they add a level of complexity to the entire process. The customer needs to be at the delivery site to accept delivery, so your timings need to be a lot more precise. A day-long window is not going to cut it for most of your customers. This puts pressure on you to sequence your routes in such a way that you can be confident that drivers will arrive within a short (say two-hour or shorter) window—no mean feat when you’re dealing with a mix of products, service types, and customer preferences.
Those variables also make it challenging to generate cost-efficient routes to begin with. There’s a temptation to add buffer time between stops, but the tradeoff is that you can complete fewer stops per day and fewer stops per route, increasing your overall delivery costs.
And your customer communications need to match that increased level of precision, e.g. by offering frequent alerts and live delivery tracking via a separate widget. An email the day before saying the delivery is on its way isn’t going to be enough visibility for your customers—with the potential result being missed and failed deliveries when the customer isn’t at the delivery site when the truck arrives. This puts pressure on your team to communicate early and often, which can be a challenge without the right tools. Keeping customers informed by phone can require an entire call center full of staff for medium-sized operations.
Your proof of delivery needs to be more robust as well. Generally, you’ll want a signature as well as photographic documentation of the successful (read: no damage to the goods or the job site) delivery. This needs to be fully integrated into the last mile delivery process, so that you can see proof of delivery at a glance as you track the day’s deliveries and can send proof of delivery to the customer as a matter of course (e.g. in delivery receipts). This can help significantly reduce false liability and damage claims.
These challenges are real—but they are all surmountable. The trick is to leverage the right best practices across your last mile delivery process.
When the customer is able to select their own delivery time, they’re much more likely to be at the delivery site at the right time. Unfortunately, actually reaching the customer to schedule time with them can take multiple attempts if you’re trying to reach them by phone—and that’s before you even factor in the time it takes to call back and try again because they can’t decide on a time slot.
Best practice: Send customers a text that offers them a choice of delivery time slots. These should be automatically generated by your routing system based on your rules and existing capacity.
The phrase “scheduled delivery” evokes dread for anyone who assumes that “scheduled’ means "scheduled far in the future.” If you’re making to order, this may be a fact of life, but you can mitigate it by shortening your delivery lead times once the stock is available.
Best practice: Leverage route optimization that can generate rounds and perform route adjustments in a matter of minutes, so that you can easily handle next day or even same day scheduled deliveries once the items are available.
We’ve said it before, and we’ll say it again: successful scheduled deliveries depend on accurate ETAs. That means that in the routing and planning stage you need to account for drive time, traffic patterns, and service. This can be challenging, since service times may vary significantly across different types of deliveries (e.g. an installation versus an over-the-threshold delivery).
Best practice: Once you’ve done some initial configuration in your routing engine, let AI handle the rest. Use a solution powered by AI and machine learning to more accurately estimate ETAs. The top solutions can reach 98% ETA accuracy or greater.
Customer experience is crucial in last mile delivery—particularly when it comes to scheduled deliveries. If you expect someone to receive an order and sign for it at a particular time, they need frequent reminders with up-to-date information, otherwise you risk not-at-homes and failed deliveries, which can be costly in terms of person hours and risky in potential damage to items.
Best practice: Automate the sending of text and email messages to your customers at pre-defined cadences. This can include pre-routing confirmations, delivery reminders a day or two before the scheduled date, real-time alerts when the customer’s stop is upcoming, and post-delivery with a receipt and a customer survey.
Texts and alerts can be valuable for scheduled deliveries, but true connectivity comes when the customer knows that they can get the information they need, when they need it. Most customers are averse to picking up the phone and calling, so anything you can do to ensure that they don’t have to is a huge win.
Best practice: Offer your customers live delivery tracking from the comfort of their own devices, as well as an easy way to connect to you via text with any questions. Bonus points for implementing an AI-powered customer experience agent to provide instant answers to basic questions about ETA, order details, etc.
Many of these best practices will be easier if you have the right technology. Reach out to one of our experts if you’re curious how a SaaS-powered last mile delivery solution can help you perfect the art of the scheduled delivery.