What Makes a Great Delivery Experience in 2025?

It can feel at times like last mile delivery is more of an art than a science. Customers' expectations are constantly shifting—as are market conditions and the technology landscape—and last mile delivery providers often have to get creative to figure out how to keep customers happy. It can be a daunting task.

At the same time, it’s not like delivery organizations have to fly blind. Implementing a new idea or trying to keep pace with an evolving market is always a challenge, but we do have some reliable information about what modern delivery customers want out of their delivery experiences. After all, they’re not mythical creatures—it’s possible to go out and ask them. 

What Makes a Great Delivery Experience? Here’s What the Data Shows:

What makes a great delivery experience? It’s a question that’s near and dear to the hearts of many last mile delivery organizations—and, luckily, it’s a question that data can provide a fairly compelling answer to. 

For instance, DispatchTrack’s Big and Bulky Last Mile Delivery Report—which polled more than 1,200 consumers about their experiences with last mile deliveries of big and bulky items—found that visibility, communication, and timely deliveries were some of the keys to success. 

Our report found that:

• “On-time” was the best aspect of positive delivery experiences—with two-thirds of respondents listing it as a crucial factor in a successful delivery
• 61% of customers are unlikely to purchase from a retailer again when a previous order missed the scheduled delivery window
• 90% of consumers want the ability to track their order, and 80% want to receive delivery status updates
• 58% of those who experienced a negative delivery experience found the rescheduling process to be frustrating

How does that translate into a great delivery experience? Here are a few key elements of a great customer delivery experience in an era of shifting consumer needs and preferences:

On-Time Delivery

One of the clearest preferences that customers across the board express is for consistent on-time delivery performance—and it’s easy enough to imagine why. Whether you’re a consumer or a business buyer, your entire day can wind up revolving around a scheduled delivery. And when that delivery fails to show up, you’re left frustrated and confused. 

Crucially, showing up too early can also be an issue for many consumers. Simply put, showing up at the right time is a crucial building block of a great delivery experience. 

Pro tip: The most effective way to make this happen consistently is to invest in AI-powered route optimization capabilities that can generate accurate delivery ETAs. This—combined with a program of empowering your drivers with the tools they need to get jobs done on time—puts you in a position to make sure that on-time delivery is the default. 

Quick Delivery Turnarounds 

Another potential benefit to leveraging a smart route optimization solution is that it speeds up your routing time significantly (by more than 50% in most cases), which means you can provide later order cutoffs and generally get orders routed more quickly. 

If it’s something your customers are clambering for, this puts you in a position to more easily offer same-day and next-day delivery. But even if you’re not trying to offer that particular level of service, your customers will still appreciate the shorter delivery lead times. 

Pro tip: Let customers self schedule deliveries from their own devices. Send a dynamically generated list of available slots based on your capacity rules and let them choose what works for them. This added feeling of control over the delivery process can boost confidence and increase customer satisfaction. 

Clear, Frequent Communications

Of course, there’s an interesting question to be asked here around what makes a particular delivery time the “right” time. If you show exactly when your route plan said you would, but you never informed the customer about when to expect the delivery, then it’s the “right” time in a pretty narrow sense. 

Obviously, that’s a slightly extreme example—but customers increasingly want visibility throughout the entire delivery process. That means leveraging frequent messages and alerts. 

Here’s a communication cadence that’s worked for our customers in past:

• Schedule confirmation message after the order has been scheduled
• Pre-routing message right before the order is routed
• Delivery schedule notification with an official ETA once the order is routed
• Reminder message a day or two before the actual delivery
• “Route start” notification when the driver leaves the warehouse in the morning
• “En route” notification when the customer’s stop is coming up in the next half hour or so
• Post-delivery followups with NPS surveys

Pro tip: Find a way to automate as much of this as you possibly can. Calling customers manually is obviously a prohibitive amount of work (and most customers won’t answer the phone anyway), but even sending texts manually can eat up a fair amount of time. 

Real-Time Delivery Tracking 

People like to talk about the “Amazon Effect” in customer delivery experience, but big and bulky delivery expectations have frankly exceeded what Amazon typically offers. Case in point: customers want real-time delivery tracking on the day of delivery—ideally from the comfort of their own devices. 

Offering up this increased level of visibility can really amplify the impact of your other customer communications. If you can offer customers the ability to track the location of the delivery truck and view a live ETA at any moment, you can give them a measure of peace of mind—which means they’re much less likely to call in to ask “where’s my order?” 

At the same time, it also means they’re much more likely to be at the delivery site when the driver shows up. 

Pro tip: In addition to offering live truck location data in the customer’s delivery tracking portal, add a headshot of the driver as well—this helps humanize your brand and let the customer know who they’re expecting. 

Two-Way Communications

We’ve mentioned a few times that phone calls are anathema to smooth customer experiences: for one thing, they don’t scale—and most people don’t want to answer the phone anyway. 

But what’s the alternative when your customers actually need to get in touch with you? Sure, some of them will actually call in—which can be time consuming to deal with for your customer support team—but most customers will happily instant message with your team if the option is available to them. 

Here, the best practice is to set up your communication flow such that customers can respond to automated messages to initiate a chat. From there, your team can resolve the customer’s issues or questions without a lot of additional fuss. 

Pro tip: Make sure that chat threads are available in one convenient place within your last mile delivery software, and that teams can access all of the context they need about customer ad order details without spending time hunting for it. 

How Is AI Impacting Delivery Experience?

It’s hard to talk about delivery experience now without talking about AI. Many of the best practices we’ve shared have been evolving in the age of AI and machine learning, and logistic organizations are finally in a position to leverage this technology in a serious way. 

• AI can power smarter route optimization, resulting in improved ETA accuracy and thus better on-time delivery performance.
• AI is now being used to help drivers along their routes—for instance with AI-generated voice notes providing contextual intelligence for upcoming stops—which can help you improve delivery execution and reduce delays. 
• In customer communications, it’s now possible to use an AI-powered agent to handle simple inquiries from customers. These can be baked into your two-communications to answer questions about delivery status, details, and ETA—the agent can then escalate to a human for questions outside its remit. By acting as a front line for customer inquiries, it can save your team significant time and meaningfully speed up issue resolution. 

These are just the first wave of AI enhancements in the supply chain. As time goes on, there will be even more sophisticated uses for AI to impact precisely what makes a great delivery experience. Early adopters of this technology will be in a position to capitalize on these new evolutions as they come down the pike. 

That’s why there’s never been a better time to implement cutting edge last mile delivery management software.