5 Keys to Successful Third Party Delivery Platform Integration

When people think of third party delivery platforms, they might be thinking mostly of food delivery services like ChowNow and UberEats. However, delivery businesses that deal with big and bulky items like building supplies or furniture know that there’s a whole other ecosystem out there for more complex last mile deliveries. This includes platforms RXO, Metro, Toolbox, OneRail, and even Uber itself that are designed to help businesses cover part or all of the last mile logistics journey.

Working with platforms like these can be a huge boon to organizations that want to extend their delivery capabilities—either by augmenting their first party fleets or leveraging nothing but third parties in the fulfillment process. At the same time, there’s always some amount of risk and uncertainty involved: you lose a little bit of control over your brand perception whenever a third party enters the equation, and keeping control over your deliveries can become difficult without a high degree of visibility. 

To get the most value out of these platforms, you need to understand the inherent pitfalls and find a way to overcome them in order to maintain visibility and connectivity across your entire logistics change. This is easier said than done, but the payoff is more than worth it. 

Using Third Party Delivery Platforms for Big and Bulky Deliveries

Delivery organizations that deal with big and bulky items—furniture, appliances, cases of beer, pallets of lumber; basically anything that’s not a small parcel—know how complex those delivery use cases can get. A small retailer on Etsy who’s FedExing packages to customers generally doesn’t have to worry about making sure the driver arrives while the customer is home to receive the order. They also don’t have to worry about setup and installation, capturing robust proof of delivery, providing real-time truck tracking to the customer, etc. 

When you don’t have a whole host of concerns like those to think about, you can outsource your deliveries to a third party without a care in the world. Even if that’s a slight exaggeration, you’re not likely to be kept up at night by the perils of last mile logistics. When the delivery is more complex, that can change quickly—suddenly, someone is effectively the face of your brand, but you don’t necessarily have any visibility into what they’re doing. 

That doesn’t mean that using third party delivery platforms isn’t a workably idea. In fact, it can be a great way to boost your fulfillment capabilities, but you have to make sure you’re leveraging them in a way that will boost customer satisfaction by offering visibility and consistent on-time deliveries.

5 Keys to Leveraging Third Party Delivery Platforms Effectively 

To get the most out of third party delivery platforms in a big and bulky context, there are a few best practices that it’s important to follow. 

1. Consolidate all of your deliveries into one view: Whether it’s owned deliveries or third parties, you should be able to see everything that’s happening across your network from a single delivery dashboard. This should include delivery statuses, ETAs, truck locations, delays and exceptions, and high-level KPIs about your deliveries. This way you can immediately spot potential issues and focus your time and effort on resolving them.
2. Stay connected with customers: When customers have delivery issues, they don’t draw a distinction between your company and the third party provider carrying out the last mile fulfillment—in fact, they may not even know that there’s a third party involved. In order to keep control of your brand, you should make sure that your own customer support team has visibility into deliveries and a direct line to customers if needed. Customers should be able to ask your team about order statuses and receive a quick answer from your team, and your team should be able to troubleshoot issues for the third party delivery teams if needed. Connectivity is absolutely key for this. 
3. Ensure digital proof of delivery and standardized documentation: One of the biggest challenges with a diverse delivery network is that you absolutely don’t want diverse documentation. At the end of each delivery run, you want the same kind of data packaged in the same way. This means ensuring that your third party delivery partners are equipped to capture photos, signatures, and notes for proof of delivery—and even to check off checklists for more complicated use cases to ensure that no steps were missed (e.g. in an installation setting). 
4. Track your performance metrics carefully: Your cost-per-delivery across channels will require visibility into contractor performance, but it will give you crucial insights into which partnerships are working out for you. By the same token, measuring customer satisfaction across different delivery channels can help you ensure that your brand standards are staying intact.
5. Don’t be afraid to leverage AI: When it comes to customer service interactions, both you and your contractors can potentially benefit from an AI-powered chat agent on the front lines. Implemented in the right way, this kind of technology can help you answer simple questions (like “when is my order scheduled for”) without taking time away from your team—while ensuring that inquiries and issues that require human intervention are routed to the right person at the right time. AI can also be leveraged to provide real-time stop intelligence to drivers and precise, accurate delivery ETAs, though those areas may be in the hands of your third party logistics providers more than yours. 

How DispatchTrack Empowers Third Party Delivery Platform Integration

DispatchTrack prides itself on helping businesses to optimize their last mile deliveries—no matter what their delivery networks look like. We can help ensure delivery excellence for owned fleets, mixed fleets, and delivery operations that run purely on third parties. 

To make that possible, we offer seamless integrations with third party delivery platforms to ensure connectivity and interoperability between our customers and their delivery partners. 

Here’s how we ensure successful deliveries and satisfied customers across your entire logistics network:

• Seamless technology integration: DispatchTrack’s offers third party delivery platform integration either natively or through APIs, meaning that you can easily connect to your entire delivery network without switching between multiple different solutions. 
• A single dashboard for your entire delivery picture: Because we’re able to aggregate delivery data from multiple different sources, we can display owned fleet deliveries and third party deliveries on the same comprehensive delivery dashboard. This means you’re never stuck with guesswork and uncertainty when you utilize third party delivery platforms.
• End-to-end customer experience capabilities: We give you the tools to offer a branded customer delivery experience even when it’s not your fleet that’s carrying out the deliveries—including omni-directional communication between your customer support team, your delivery partners, and your customers. We also offer an AI-powered chat agent that can provide instant responses to simple customer inquiries around the clock, while escalating to a human when needed.
• Standardized processes from end to end: We offer complete, end-to-end last mile logistics capabilities—from route optimization and dispatching to proof of delivery, driver management, and reporting—to ensure that you can digitize and standardize your processes across the board. 

The result is connected logistics across your entire delivery operations—no matter how complex. If you’re interested in learning more about how we can help you achieve third party delivery platform integration and smoother, more cost-effective logistics operations, get in touch with our team today.