Tips to scale your last-mile delivery operations
Are you looking for last-mile delivery options you can use to scale your business? Then, this article is for you. Last-mile delivery is a critical process in the supply chain. Reducing the cost of operation and wastage, generating more revenue, and growing your business by scaling the last-mile are the best ideas that will help you achieve several things. If you want to stay ahead of your competitors, this article will give you tips on how to do just that. Read along to find out!
Importance of improving last-mile delivery
Last-mile delivery is the future of B2C as the delivery status during the COVID-19 pandemic has manifested. This has brought about many opportunities. Therefore, the main reason why lastmile delivery is prime in scaling your business is meeting customer expectations.
Changing customers’ product delivery expectations
Thanks to the availability of smartphones and the internet, most customers shop from home from various e-commerce stores. Delivering the product to the doorstep is critical. This is the part where you can stay ahead of your competitors.
Customers want a memorable delivery experience and companies that achieve this build a bigger customer base. Therefore, businesses need to put more effort into last-mile delivery. Changes need to be made in the business as fast as possible or making an impact in the market won’t be possible.
What do customers want last-mile delivery?
Customers want to have a say on how you deliver their items. This includes deciding where you have to drop it, waiting time, and overall delivery cost. This means that customers want a fast delivery, they no longer want to wait for their delivery to arrive. Most customers want same-day delivery. Next-day delivery is the current norm and customers want a faster delivery during check-out.
Customers want more options on the delivery location. During the pandemic, inventions were created, such as in-store delivery, click and collect and curb side delivery. Customers want to know whether you deliver to a locker, on the doorstep, or in the trunk of their car.
1. Control your delivery process
Use software for planning and streamlining the delivery process. The software manages operational capacity at scale. The software automates almost every operation, including route and schedule planning, monitoring team performance, managing orders, tracking inventories and supplies, data storage, optimizing crucial last-mile processes, and data analytics for boosting performance. A delivery management software, for instance, enables you to manage every last-mile delivery aspect from a single platform. This software has route planning or dispatching capabilities and can connect to other apps through APIs.
2. Optimize your delivery routes
Driving from one location to another during delivery is the most expensive activity and causes a lot of waste. The solution to this is route optimization. This helps in scaling down wastage and scaling up the output of your fleet. Therefore, you have to find the best route from one point to another. This is not necessarily the shortest route, but the most effective one. You can waste lots of fuel when the route is not efficient. Route optimization considers several factors like traffic patterns, speed limits, driver rest times, and driving time limitations.
For example, Norma LIVE is a delivery route planning software that create a route plan within seconds before delivering the ordered items. This helps you deliver the products effectively rather than creating a route plan manually which needs a lot of time. Norma LIVE helps ecommerce businesses to create the most effective route using artificial intelligence. Using automated route planning helps you save on resources regardless of the shape and size of the fleet. In a nutshell, you do not have to depend on fixed zones, but you can modify the routes as required and reducing operating costs as a result.
3. Provide same-day delivery service
Customers want you to deliver their products as soon as they order them. Speedy delivery scales your operations quickly and generates profit. Same-day delivery offers you more customers. However, same-day delivery will be difficult to achieve without software. A delivery management software enables you to deliver faster at a lower cost. It also helps you to eliminate unnecessary processes, reduce delivery cycles, and increase delivery speed. Ensure that you invest in delivery operations software before embarking on same-day delivery.
4. Update the consumers with the status of their delivery
Many consumers do not want to use a delivery service if they are paying for it. The only way you can make them use it is by offering them what they want and making them never regret that decision. Update consumers on the status of their delivery and also enable them to track it. You can create tracking links using visibility and delivery management software like Altair DC to help customers track their orders in real-time. About 75% of customers said that notifications were very important when making online purchases and tracking the delivery. Moreover, you can enable consumers to book delivery appointments as per their availability for convenience and the route optimization software like Norma LIVE will be responsible for making sure deliveries are made successfully within the time slots.
Conclusion
Last-mile delivery is a very vital phase in 3PL. To compete, you need to have a last-mile delivery strategy in place. However, it is not crucial to offer free shipping or same-day delivery. At the moment, customer expectations on how you deliver their goods are very high. The only method to meet these expectations is adopting the latest delivery strategy to scale your operations.