The 7Cs of Home Delivery – Certainty for You and Your Customers

Think of all the appointments you make in a week.

With your colleagues to discuss strategy and growth. With your friends for drinks on a Thursday. With your kid’s coach for a Saturday soccer game. With your mechanic for that long-overdue oil change. With your dentist for that much-needed cleaning.

So much of the chaos of our lives is organized by scheduling and knowing that the person on the other end of that commitment is going to follow through. It’s about trusting the unspoken agreement that goes into an appointment: both people committing to what was discussed and arranged.

The same rules could be applied to home delivery.

Now, scheduling home delivery appointments is a complex process. On the backend, it’s not quite as simple as scheduling an appointment with a mechanic. There are a lot of moving parts. The parcel has to get from A to B to C to D before it's even loaded onto the fleet for delivery. And the fleet has to do equal amounts of preparation and work to make sure it’s set for the right route. The last thing anyone wants is the wrong delivery on the wrong truck.

On the front end, your customers have high standards. And, honestly, they should. When it comes to my deliveries, I do too.

Today’s consumers want and expect a similar kind of reliability that they get from their colleagues, their dentists and their car mechanics when it comes to their deliveries.  

They want that same level of certainty that the delivery promise will be kept. Because that certainty offers so much freedom for the consumer. They can now schedule their time—run to the grocery store, make that dentist appointment, rearrange work conflicts, whatever it may be—around an agreed-upon delivery window.

For fleet operators, providing that certainty is only possible with sophisticated home delivery software. There’s too much work involved, too many calculations, too much mapping for fleet operators to rely on manual processes and modes of operating.

At the core of all outstanding home delivery systems are sophisticated route optimization algorithms that quickly process all relevant data—like under a second quickly—and identify accurate, achievable delivery slots. They don’t wait for all of the orders to come in, batch them up, and then create a plan, leaving your customer waiting until the last minute to have visibility into their delivery slot. Instead, these powerful algorithms continuously optimize routes as each order is taken, looking at already-scheduled routes and a range of factors determining feasible time windows.

And what’s better, the degree of certainty narrows as the delivery date nears. You can start by providing your customer with an afternoon delivery slot and then update it to a specific two-hour window a day before and provide even more precise day-of-delivery tracking and communication. Without a robust home delivery routing engine, processing orders in real time, that kind of precision is impossible.

Home delivery operations are complex. So to add in providing assurance and certainty to customers that you’re going to deliver when you say you’re going to deliver makes the operation that much more challenging.

Particularly if you’re using manual processes.

Don’t worry. All is not lost. Our advanced home delivery software is designed to accommodate these needs exactly. To ensure accurate, on-time deliveries, our software analyzes the following factors:   

• Customer ETA requirements. The customer is always right. If they specify a morning delivery—you have to make sure you give them a morning delivery. With Aptean Home Delivery, you can automatically send out regular shipment updates via email and SMS, or grant customers access to a tracking portal via desktop, tablet or smartphone—reassuring them and reducing the number of times they need to contact your teams.

• Capacity and availability. Factor in your capacity restraints. It’s an absolute must. Reliable delivery depends on so much more than the availability of your drivers and vehicles—though that is important. Unless you accurately account for your output, warehouse picking, or trucking capacity, offering feasible delivery windows is far from certain. That’s why our software includes features to monitor and account for your overall capacity when optimizing routes.

• Drops on route. We all know there’s only so much time in a single day. So you must make the most of your delivery routes. Aptean Home Delivery software increases your number of drops per vehicle, maximizing the efficiency of each route and ensuring fewer miles are traveled while still giving the end customer a wide choice of delivery options. Everybody wins.

• Uploading time per drop.  Home delivery requires a bit more time than delivering newspapers. You can’t simply toss items out the window. Some require signatures, some have specific drop-off instructions. Don’t forget to factor this time in. Companies doing home deliveries have so much going on that it’s easy to forget to factor this time on-site in. And that’s so important because this delivery time is a massive part of your operation. Our software makes it easier for you to clock that time per drop.   

In considering all these factors, you’re looking at the delivery from all angles. There’s no stone unturned, no possibility unconsidered. Which means you’re able to follow through on the promise you made to your customers. And you’re providing that guaranteed certainty that they’re relying on. You’re operating more efficiently and creating satisfied customers along the way because you’re planning ahead. And you’re planning with the right tools.

Our home delivery software, Aptean Home Delivery, can improve your transportation operation. Are you ready to take complete control of the wheel? Find out how, now.

Be sure to tune in to next month’s post. We’re going to detail our third C in the series: control. This is all about how you can give your customers full control without sacrificing operational efficiency on the backend.  If you’d like to backtrack a bit, we wrote about the first C: choice last month.  And before that, we did a brief overview of all 7 Cs. And if you’d like to read a more comprehensive resource on the 7 Cs of home delivery, you can download our home delivery eBook.