How to Avoid Missing a Delivery and Improve your Delivery Operations?

One of the biggest challenges an eCommerce business industry faces is matching the customers’ delivery requirements. 

With the decreased patience and evolving customer expectations, people want their orders delivered as quickly as possible. Multiple businesses are trying to achieve this fate, but only 50% can offer same-day delivery demand.

eCommerce businesses are falling short of fulfilling the delivery demand of the customers, which delivers a poor user experience—but being an eCommerce venture, how to avoid missing a delivery? 

There are multiple ways to avoid delays, but let’s first get to the root cause of the issue.

What Causes Delivery Delays?

Sometimes the cause of the delivery delays can be because of the customer’s mistake. Still, it’s the nitty-gritty mistakes that last mile carriers and delivery businesses make on most occasions.

Whatever it may be, it’s resulting in delivery delays, and that’s not good for your business. Look at the common mistakes that a delivery business tends to make.

1. Documentation mistakes

Human errors in the documentation process like misspelled addresses, insufficient information added, incorrect order forms, and many others can cause roadblocks for your delivery drivers. These mistakes can be from the customer’s end or your in-house team during the transit process, but it needs to be checked thoroughly by the delivery carrier.

If your logistics workforce is jam-packed with orders and work, these mistakes can happen. 

Also, if your buying process is not robust and you receive orders without complete customer information, you won’t be able to deliver the order and end up in a bad light in the eyes of the customers.

2. System failure

Your order processing is dependent on the platform you have for your brand. If you frequently experience system failures, your customers won’t get real-time information about their orders.

Also, you might not respond to the orders in time, which can automatically lead to delivery deals and an awful customer experience. 

You need to ensure that your hosting and online platform are working efficiently and that it doesn’t encounter any hiccups that can tumble your delivery experience.

3. Logistical issues

You don’t want to experience logistical issues being a delivery business; it can cause a ripple effect and disturb your entire supply chain. But because of rising demand and increased orders, your business delivery chain can experience logistical problems. 

Your team might encounter situations like lost or stolen packages, damaged packages, or missing packages that can hinder the expected delivery date. 

In such circumstances, the business should outsource its operations to prevent the worsening of the situation. Using the right tactics and proper tools in the first place can help you bypass the top reasons for delivery delays for a business.

4. Bad weather

There’s nothing you can do if Mother Nature is not by your side. Bad weather conditions can hinder the agile delivery process, and conditions like foggy weather, heavy snow, or hailstorms make it difficult for the delivery drivers to sit behind the wheels.

But if you have a dedicated route planner in place, you can avoid the harsh weather conditions and optimize the delivery path of the drives to achieve better results. We’ll discuss the route planning software in the latter half of the article.

Now that we understand the basics of the common issues that can cause delivery delays for your business, let’s dive into the solutions and understand ways to avoid delivery delays.

6 Tips on How to Avoid Missing a Delivery

While there are multiple tactics and ways to avoid a delivery delay, we have shortlisted here the most effective and easy methods for your convenience. Have a look.

1. Update your inventory

Every business has its best-selling products listed at the top of the online platform to encourage more sales. But what if once you receive bulk orders and figure out that the product is unavailable in your inventory?

Delivery delay, right?

So, you need to maintain your inventory up-to-date because you don’t want delivery delays because of the unavailability of the product. 

As soon as one product is out for delivery, your team needs to ensure that the product space is filled again to avoid future hiccups.

2. Warehouse maintenance

You need to ensure the dispatching process is streamlined from your warehouse. If you don’t have organized warehouse management, it can cause delivery delays that can hinder the customer experience.

With the increase in demand, your workforce won’t have the time to manage the organization of the products, and it can create havoc while dispatching orders.

Arrange your best-sellers first, and then jump onto the least in-demand products to streamline the warehouse maintenance and reach maximum productivity during order dispatching.

3. Set up a minimum and maximum delivery time

Sometimes businesses want to push their limits and offer unrealistic delivery promises to the customers that are very difficult to fulfill. You should avoid falling into the trap to skip minimizing the chances of delivering a quality customer experience for your customers.

You don’t want to put yourself and your entire workforce under pressure to achieve rigid delivery timings for your business. Think and calculate the minimum and maximum delivery time to provide your customer with a realistic promise that you can keep.

It can help you stay in line with the ETA and provide a quality delivery experience to your customers.

4. Prepare for peak season in advance

Irrespective of the industry and the niche you are in, there is a time or event in a year when your business sales hit the peak. You need to spot those time frames and prepare for the rise in demand beforehand to avoid delivery inconvenience to your customers.

Holidays, festivals, and events can trigger the rise and your need to strengthen your delivery armor to handle the rising storm of customer orders with finesse.

You need to introduce different order fulfillment strategies that can help match the surge in the increased sales to avoid any hiccups in the supply chain.

Streamlining your delivery flow beforehand can help you avoid missing a delivery and ensure that the customers can become your raving fans even after the peak season has ended.

5. Hire a fulfillment service

Multiple online businesses don’t want to manage the order delivery element of their business to focus on the core aspect of their business. That’s where hiring a third-party fulfillment service (delivery service) comes into the picture that can help you to stay in sync with your on-time order deliveries.

A third-party logistics and transportation business can handle the packaging, warehousing, and delivery of orders on your behalf to help you escape the hassles of the delivery process.

It’s a great strategy to ease your mind and focus on driving customers to your online portal and increasing the sales numbers. Still, you lose control over the delivery element of your business, and it can go downhill in some cases.

Without having control, you won’t be able to deliver a personalized and enhanced delivery experience to your customers. And if a dispute arises with the third-party courier company, it will throw bad limelight on your brand.

6. Technology got you covered

You can avoid third-party outsourcing and shift towards technological advancement to escape the modern-day trouble of the delivery world.

You can integrate automation into your delivery system to remove human errors, redundancies, and other manual faults that can cause delivery delays.

Automation software can help you improve the productivity of your delivery teams and increase the ROI and profits of your business.

It can help you timely deliver the orders and manage your business delivery operations even in the peak season.

One of the examples of this automation software is a professional route planner that can streamline your entire delivery process.

Want to find out how?

How Route Planning and Optimization Software Can Help You Avoid Missing a Delivery?

Route planning and optimization tools have the set algorithms and machine learning technology that delivers an optimized and shortest delivery path for the drivers to deliver multi-stop delivery orders.

It analyzes and monitors traffic, weather, vehicle, and conditions to finalize the path as per delivery address to help you achieve maximum delivery orders within minimal time.

A route planner cuts the delays in the process by providing features like effective in-house communication, agile route planning and optimization, detailed analytics reporting, and real-time tracking of orders.

You can escape the manual pen and paper planning and enhance your delivery productivity with the help of robust software. Strengthen your in-house logistics and transportation ecosystem and deliver premium delivery services to your customers with the help of a professional route planner.

But out of hundreds of route planning and optimization tools available in the industry, which one is suitable for your delivery purposes?

---