Turn delivery frustration into customer delight

Let’s start with some questions…

1. Do you get incoming calls from customers chasing up deliveries?
2. How much time does that take each day?
3. What is your current on time, in full delivery success?
4. How much money do you spend each month on lost or repeat deliveries as the first attempt failed or an item went missing?

The question list could be longer but I’m sure you get the picture.  Poor delivery experience will cost your business, both in terms of customer churn and loss of revenue. 

The good news is that moving to an improved process, that keeps you and your customers happy is a lot easier, and cheaper than you might think.

However you manage your delivery routes it’s always a good place to start by ensuring that your schedule will meet the time window promised to your customer. Now you can plan these manually but it is difficult, unreliable and time consuming.  An automated route planning and optimisation tool will take over the bulk of the heavy lifting, allowing your planning teams to focus on route refinement. 

If you go down the automated route planning route at least you’ll know that you have routes that are planned to successfully hit promised time windows. Planning to succeed is always a far better option than hoping for the best.

So now you have your route plans, whether they be manually created or automatically planned, it’s imperative that you notify your customers when their items are due to arrive.  Here at Podfather our core product functionality offers all users, the ability to send both email and SMS notifications to customers. 

If you have created your routes with a system such as ours you can define a time window that could be 1-hour or all day, it’s up to you, but with customers expecting a two hour window as the ‘norm’ you can make the move to that model, confident that the routes you have planned are achievable.

In addition to sending out ETA notifications it’s best to provide your customers with a live tracking link.  For Podfather users we hear time and time again that once these live tracking links start going out the phones stop ringing and the number of incoming customer calls are significantly reduced.  This gives you back valuable time that can be spent on other, more productive activities.

ePOD is the final step in turning delivery frustration into customer delight. If you use ePOD you can give your customer and electronic version of their delivery note showing exactly what was delivered where, when, by whom, with supporting electronic signatures and confirmation photos.  This can be sent to the customer, and your own internal teams, instantly when a delivery is completed.  This level of visibility is a big benefit to both you and your end customer.

We all want to keep our customers happy as happy customers are more likely to stay loyal and generate word of mouth referrals.  If delivery frustration is keeping you up at night there is an easy way to make the problem go away.  We are here to help with so give us a call!

Podfather specialises in the development, delivery and support of route optimisation and electronic proof of delivery technology.  We are a UK-based team, located in Edinburgh, and we are passionate about what we do.  We work with companies of all shapes and sizes, from industry giants such as Tarmac and Breedon to well-known names such as Rexel and ODDBOX and everything else in between.  It doesn’t matter what you are delivering but if you have a multi drop distribution operation and are looking to make changes then we can help.  Our solution includes the following as standard:

• Route planning and optimisation
• Vehicle checks
• Customer ETA notifications
• Driver tracking
• electronic Proof of Delivery (ePOD)
• Reporting

Together we can help you improve cashflow, reduce empty running across your fleet, improve delivery performance and get costs under control.