The First 5 Steps To Create a Great Customer Experience in Last-Mile Delivery

by GetSwift | Jun 7, 2019 | Uncategorized

It’s easy with GetSwift’s delivery logistics software.

In the last mile of delivery, customer experience is fundamental to your business. And that’s not just lip service or a pitch from your marketing team. A good customer experience keeps your customers informed and updated so they can plan their day, encourages them to buy again, and gives your business essential data to grow.

Although customer experience means something a bit different in every industry, there are some easy steps business in almost all industries can take. These five steps are all simple to implement with the right delivery logistics software, and here they are:

1. Create SMS Alerts

One text message can change your customer’s day. All it takes is a friendly SMS telling them when the delivery is expected to arrive and a customer can make plans, save time, and know exactly when they need to either leave their laptop to head downstairs (or across town).

You can also easily customize the text of these SMS messages to add a little bit of your brand’s magic, stay consistent with your brand’s voice, and even delight your customers by choosing the name of the sender that pops up on their screen. You can also enable automatic replies so that, if a customer texts back, that message is immediately emailed to your team to address, and the customer receives a phone number and email address to contact if they still need help.

These alerts are easy to set up, and once you have, you may find that the 5-star reviews will start coming in—in the form of both online reviews and direct feedback (more on that later).

2. Provide Real-Time Tracking & Live ETAs

According to an analysis we did of GetSwift’s clients, when a company gives customers live tracking, customer retention increased by 31 percent and order size jumped by 12 percent. If you spend some time reading online reviews on Google, Yelp, Weedmaps, you’ll also quickly see how much customers love having live tracking.

The live tracking map is rich with information. You can include your logo, the driver’s name, and the ETA around the map, along with a way customers can contact the driver with just one click.

3. Set Up Your Customer Booking Form

You might deliver for the same, regular customers each week and you just need a simple way for them to book new delivery requests with your business. With a white-labeled customer booking form, those customers can book with you in seconds, rather than have to spend time emailing, calling or texting your staff.

With just a few clicks in your GetSwift dashboard, you can easily create a booking form for each of your customers and invite them to set up an account. Once they do, they can use the same booking form—white-labeled with your logo—over and over again to book new jobs, which will instantly show up in your GetSwift map to dispatch and manage.

4. Add Proof of Delivery

Proof of Delivery may or may not be necessary for your business, but it’s easy to add to your optimized delivery journey, and even customize it so that a driver can add any notes and take photos. While the customer may not receive an immediate benefit when they give a handler their signature, any notes and photos will help down the line if your customer service or sales team needs to address a problem. So it’s a step worth considering, and, of course, setting it up is simple.

5. The Last Step: Get Customer Feedback

With delivery management, great customer experience doesn’t mean being perfect. Mistakes will happen—sometimes due to circumstances beyond your control like traffic and weather. However, great customer service experience does mean turning a negative into a positive.

After a customer receives their delivery—whether that’s flowers, cannabis, or pizza—they should automatically be sent another SMSlinking to a customer feedback form (you can easily set this up). That way, your team immediately knows if something went wrong or they’re less than happy, and you have options to contact the customer to apologize and try to make it right. Trying to fix a problem immediately shows that you care, and means you have the option to address their concerns before they post a negative comment online, which will hurt your business even more.

Customer feedback also turns into customer data, which you can use to improve your operation to provide even better customer experience as you grow.

In closing, keep in mind that not every business is going to deploy all five of these steps. You may choose to not send a live tracking link or use proof of delivery. In the end, you’ll choose what’s to optimize delivery for your business. But whether you implement one of these steps or all five, you’ll be on a path to providing a much more delightful experience for customers, and a more useful experience for your business.

Are you looking to get started with delivery logistics software? We’re here to help. Get in touch.

5 Reasons Your Delivery Business Should Use Your Own Drivers

by GetSwift | Jun 3, 2019 | Uncategorized

The long-term benefits of having your own fleet are major.

As a growing delivery business, it’s a good bet you’ve debated whether to partner with third-party food delivery apps such as UberEats, Grubhub, and Doordash. While there are some benefits to relying on these apps (namely: they send you business!), there are often much greater benefits—in the short- and long-term—to delivering from your own fleet of handlers.

As a provider of delivery logistics software, we’ve witnessed the major benefits directly from our customers across dozens of industries. Here are five big reasons you should consider managing your own fleet:

1. Own customer experience from end to end

When delivering food (or furniture, groceries, even laundry), mistakes can happen. Food may spill over into the bag or it might arrive cold or later than expected. The problem is, your restaurant will very likely get the blame for it whether it was your fault or not. Even if a third-party made the delivery, the calls and the bad reviews are coming your way.

But when you operate your own fleet, you can not only prevent lots of mistakes, but you can also own them. You know exactly why food arrived cold, late, or spilled, because you can either see what caused the bottleneck on your dashboard (provided by GetSwift) or you can chat with the handler. You can address the issue with the customer, develop solutions (like better packaging), and ensure it’s less likely to happen again.

2.  Address complaints instantly

When you do get that call from a customer who wants to know where their delivery is, both you and your customer will have varying levels of visibility into a third-party handler’s location. And so it may take a while to find an answer.

However, if you run your own fleet—and use the GetSwift map pinpointing your handlers’ locations—you can give all your customers a live tracking link, making them less likely to call you in the first place. And if they do call, you can answer your customers’ questions in an instant.

Armed with that information, you can make decisions to better serve that customer. You might just let them know that the driver is finishing up another job first. Or you might see that another driver is nearby and reassign the order. You can also make a quick call to your team and figure it out. The point is: you have the control.

3. Represent your brand

Every one of your drivers can be an ambassador for your brand, and has the ability to delight your customers and turn them into more loyal followers. If it’s part of your brand to be super nice and helpful, and you instill that attitude in your drivers, customers will notice and write reviews.

It goes further than attitude. You might also want your drivers to dress to a certain standard to match your brand, something you can’t control with third-party services. And when you have your own drivers, you can give customers and drivers their your own white-labeled app, which puts your brand stamp on more touchpoints and gives you control over the customer experience.

4. Motivate your team

With your own drivers and delivery logistics software, you get detailed data on every hander’s performance and your fleet’s KPIs. That means you can track average delivery times, analyze, and then motivate your whole team or individual members to improve. You can get data on outliers and figure out why any delivery took too long, and deal with underperformers. Finally, you can help your team grow their careers. When one of your drivers keeps getting 5-star reviews, it might be time to put that person on track for a promotion.

5. You own the data to make data-driven business decisions

Number 5 really serves as the exclamation point. When you rely on online food delivery apps like GrubHub or Doordash, you don’t see much of that data. Even though it’s your food being made and delivered, it’s now Uber’s delivery data.

However, when you manage your own fleet, you also own your own delivery data, giving you the tools to evaluate how to get more customers and grow revenue. For example, you can know which customers ordered which items—and when—allowing you to market more of the products they probably want directly to them, and grow revenue. You can track specific KPIs like time-to-dispatch or driver in-store-wait-time to know exactly what’s slowing down delivery, or measure your monthly progress on big KPIs like average delivery time to motivate your team.

All in all, as a delivery business, it just makes good business sense to have your own drivers. You and your team can take ownership of the customer experience from end to end—making it true to your brand—and you can use data from your operation keep your team accountable, track overall performance, and leverage your data to reach more customers.

To learn about how our last-mile delivery platform will work for your business, send us a note or start a free 30-day trial.

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