Studies have shown that most customers with big and bulky delivery orders find rescheduling to be a hassle. And if it’s an annoyance for the customer, it’s often a much greater hassle for the dispatcher or customer service rep who has to manage the process on the delivery provider’s side. Carefully constructed routes get upended, inventory slows down, and the entire lifecycle of an order is disrupted.
The more you can speed up the process of rescheduling, the more you can keep your delivery operations on track and manage costs more effectively. Unfortunately, scheduling and rescheduling are slow, finicky processes by default. In an operation that’s not digitized, it can involve hunting out information about which orders are actually ready to schedule, and then calling up customers to confirm schedule dates—then doing the whole process all over again from scratch if the original schedule date doesn’t work for your team or your customers.
This is a recipe for high costs, slow inventory velocity, and disappointed customers who feel like they’re constantly playing phone tag and waiting on deliveries that should have shown up by now.
Luckily, this isn’t an intractable problem. In this article, we’ll show you how scheduling and rescheduling are evolving in the era of intelligent delivery orchestration. We’ll cover the ways that AI can be used to improve and streamline this process, and we’ll do a deep dive into DispatchTrack’s solution for this thorny logistics problem.
Why It’s Time for Rescheduling to Evolve
The problems we’re describing aren’t new. Talk to any retailer or distributor going back many years and you’ll get the same complaints and frustration—but there are two trends that are moving the needle on this and acting as a catalyst for change:
- Customer expectations for visibility, flexibility, and speed have increased significantly in the last several years. They’ve seen what’s possible with digital technology and they want the same streamlined experiences across the delivery lifecycle.
- Technology has evolved to make a number of logistics processes easier to automate and optimize. With the advent of supply chain AI, this factor is only becoming more powerful.
Simply put, we’ve entered the era where logistics operators have the tools at their disposal to cut through uncertainty and poor visibility to streamline the scheduling process in an efficient way. More than that, they have tools and platforms available to them to make scheduling one of the cornerstones of an effective delivery orchestration strategy.
What do those tools look like exactly? It starts with deploying the right AI.
How DT Agent Can Speed up Rescheduling for Logistics Operators
There are a few keys to speeding up scheduling and rescheduling that distributors, retailers, and carriers need to focus on to remove the scheduling bottleneck:
- Improving visibility into item availability
- Speeding up customer back-and-forth
- Gaining visibility into routing parameters and optimizing routes accordingly
Each of these different factors are interrelated. When you have visibility into products moving through the first and middle miles, you can schedule more accurately. When you have a close connection with your customers, you can actually execute on your schedules. And when your routes are efficient and accurate, you can keep your scheduling promises to customers while maintaining visibility and cost efficiency.
Sounds nice in theory. In practice, it requires careful orchestration of the entire lifecycle of an order. It also requires tools and technologies that can automate the mountain of processes that create uncertainty when they’re not managed effectively.
At DispatchTrack, we leverage DT Agent—our multi-agent AI system—to simplify these challenges. Where other logistics solutions offer simple AI-powered chatbots, we have a team of AI agents that can handle complex processes like scheduling and rescheduling orders with customers.
When a customer needs to reschedule a delivery (let’s say they’re no longer going to be available to accept the delivery on the original date), they can reach out to your team via text or a chat widget on your website. DT Agent acts as the front line of defense, and if the customer is asking for something within its purview, it handles the task with requiring human intervention.
In the case of rescheduling, your team gives DT Agent the relevant parameters, rules, and requirements for rescheduling orders, connects it to your ERP if that’s what you use to manage scheduling time slots, and sits back to watch the magic happen.
When customers message the team to reschedule orders, DT Agent handles it autonomously, updating the schedule on the back end and sending alerts and schedule confirmations to the relevant parties. If the customer’s request is thorny or challenging for some reason, DT Agent escalates to a human.
If the order’s schedule needs to change because of something on your end—let’s say there was a delay in the first or middle mile—DT Agent reaches out to the customer proactively. From there, the process is essentially the same.
The result? The entire rescheduling process happens significantly faster, with less friction for the customer and less work for your team. Orders are fulfilled faster—even when their delays upstream—and customer not-at-homes and other delivery failures are reduced
The savings for an enterprise could add up to thousands per week easily.
Rescheduling in Context: Taking a Delivery Orchestration Approach
We’ve been taking a fairly narrow view of the rescheduling process up to this point to drill down into the key details. But it’s important to take a step back and think about how this slots into the larger context of your delivery operations.
Scheduling and rescheduling sit at the intersection between route optimization and customer experience—and, historically, that’s been an awkward meeting point. Businesses can’t make delivery promises with high confidence, and it impacts customer relationships negatively.
But the kind of streamlined scheduling process we’ve been describing turns that paradigm on its head. It helps you ensure efficiency in the processes that support delivery planning, decrease wasted time and effort, and keep customers engaged and happy. The result is that you stop simply routing and start truly orchestrating your deliveries.
What’s the difference? Delivery routing is fundamentally reactive. You’re ticking boxes in the hope of making all of the scheduled time windows work for your delivery teams and your customers.
Orchestration is fundamentally proactive. You take control of your entire logistics operation—the last mile and beyond—and turn it from a reactive cost center to a driver of profit and value. Your delivery orchestration platform sits in the center of your logistics IT ecosystem and empowers you to turn daily routing and scheduling needs into new efficiencies.
Conclusion: Reach out to DispatchTrack Today
At DispatchTrack, delivery orchestration is what we specialize in. We’ve got 16 years of proprietary logistics data that we’re able to leverage to create effective AI systems that power efficiency and visibility across the first, middle, and last miles.
Choosing the right vendor for the future of your logistics operations has never been more important. Reach out to our team today to learn how DT Agent-powered scheduling and rescheduling can slot into a larger delivery orchestration process to help reduce costs and improve customer experience.
Interested in learning more about our AI-powered customer experience? Read the white paper.
