7 Last Mile Delivery Best Practices That Can Help You Scale

Last-mile delivery can play a decisive role in customers buying from your brand the next time.

Because 56% of buyers won’t purchase from you if they don’t feel your delivery was up to the mark or satisfactory.

So how can you ensure to streamline your last-mile delivery operations?

Are there some standard practices you can follow?

Well, there are. And for your assistance, we have shortlisted the best last-mile delivery best practices to help you better understand efficient last-mile delivery operations.

But before we jump to the core segment, let’s clear out the basics.

The Importance of Last-Mile Delivery

The growth in the last-mile delivery segment is rising exponentially. The surge in the eCommerce industry because of the global pandemic has forced businesses to focus on their last-mile delivery operations and deliver fast and reliable results to their customers.

With the evolution in the customer demands and the growth in the delivery segment and global supply chain, businesses are looking to integrate end-to-end productive last-mile delivery services.

But it’s not easy.

Over 61% believe that last-mile delivery is the most inefficient part of the supply chain as it comprises more than 53% of the shipping cost.

Being highly expensive and time-consuming, last-mile delivery services can be streamlined using the right strategies, technology, and practices.

You can take multiple transformative steps while managing your last-mile delivery operations to diminish the errors and loopholes in your delivery process.

Out of multiple practices available on the internet, we have sprinkled our expertise in the industry and shortlisted the best practices you can use to transform your last-mile delivery operations.

Have a look.

7 Practices to Transform Last-Mile Delivery Operations

1. Robust planning

Planning the last-mile delivery operations can set a solid foundation for your successful execution. In recent years, the industry has evolved significantly; what used to be a USP feature five years ago has become an expected capability of the last-mile delivery segment.

The rise of timely and same-day delivery has become the new normal. People now want detailed real-time visibility of their package at every touchpoint in the transit process; they are tilted towards contactless deliveries and want a customized delivery experience with instant updates and notifications.

So, you can’t rely on the traditional methods for your strategy, technologies, and tactics. You need to rethink the last-mile delivery plan and adapt to the changing ecosystem to tailor and develop an audacious plan for the future.

You need to focus your delivery process on enhancing the customer experience and fulfilling their demands with no second thoughts. 

Answering a few questions can help you plan, like what are the new trends on last-mile delivery? What are the strengths and weaknesses of your competitors, and how can you deliver more value to the customers? What advanced technologies can you integrate, and how can you cut the operational cost and maximize your profits?

2. Smart outsourcing

Once done with the planning, you can step towards different segments of enhancing the last-mile delivery operations. One of the parts is managing the scalability of your delivery operations with finesse.

With the rise in the eCommerce business, you need to equip your last-mile delivery operations to handle the spikes in orders and deliver packages. Smart outsourcing and adapting to a hybrid model can benefit robust delivery management.

Being a result-oriented and determined business owner, you don’t want to disappoint your new customers in the peak season because of a shortage of delivery workforce, right?

So, associate with the third-party last-mile delivery partners to assist you in managing the scale in delivery orders. Your logistics and transportations team can coordinate with the delivery partners and deliver a quality customer experience to your buyers.

If you have outsourced your entire delivery operations to third-party delivery partners, you can focus on creating a compact delivery unit of your own. 

The new trends in the last-mile delivery segment show retailers shifting towards installing in-house delivery segments with the help of advanced technologies post pandemic times.

It can help you deal with your customers on your own and deliver a quality experience in no time without relying entirely on a third-party delivery provider.

Talking about technology, it has emerged as the game-changer in the last-mile delivery segment.

3. Technology

The leaders in the last-mile delivery segment heavily rely on the power of advanced route planning, mobile telematics, data analytics, and robust delivery execution technologies. 

Advanced technology solutions and last-mile delivery software enable you to reduce delivery costs, generate incremental revenue and enhance the customer’s experience. 

The amount of information you can collect and analyze significantly boosts the existing delivery ecosystem and helps you make well-informed decisions.

You can provide real-time locations and detailed information to the in-house team and customers to fuel the delivery process and modern-day requirements.

You can streamline and get a bird’s-eye view of the operations, from the buying process to the post-delivery service, within a few clicks. The new trends highlight the adaption of last-mile delivery businesses to the latest technologies, like robotics, self-driving trucks, contactless proof of delivery, drone delivery, and mobile warehousing.

Businesses are leveraging AI, big data, and machine learning to predict the customer’s requirements and integrating automation in the supply chain for enhanced and error-free results.

4. Use analytics

As discussed above, technology enables businesses to collect and analyze data to make well-informed decisions. 

When the valuable data sets are combined with advanced analytics, they deliver a more profound and broader perspective of the delivery business. You can explore multiple touchpoints and integrate new services and features that people are shifting towards.

As data becomes the new oil, you can leverage robust analytics to fuel your race to stand out from the rest in the industry, spot and predict trends and problems, and plan foolproof solutions.

It’s like going to an exam and predicting the question paper accurately and fairly. 

Interesting, right?

Analytics empowers you to get a broader horizon and focus on the details to tailor the opportunities to enhance the performance of your delivery operations.

5. Customer management

Modern-day retailers are highly focused on professionally managing their customers” for a better read.

Because of the rising competition, retailers want to improve their services to hook the audience to their brand. Even slight discrepancies in the delivery experience or lack in quality during the delivery can trigger the chance of losing the customer to the competitor.

Enable your customers to 24*7 customer support to help them resolve any delivery-related issues or troubles. Regular and real-time updates about the delivery process via notification, SMS, or email can add to the quality of experience.

Ensuing contactless deliveries and taking proof of delivery digitally can showcase your professionalism and advancements in the industry and hook the customers to choose your business over others.

6. Team building

One of the critical practices in last-mile delivery is to help you choose your team wisely. From fleet managers to delivery drivers, you need professionals that can deliver your desired results and stick to the plan.

An expert and experienced team can handle the complexities in the last-mile delivery business with finesse and help you streamline the business flow.

Your workforce can help you cut costs and save delivery time if they quickly adapt to the new technologies and optimize their work.

You can avail more benefits by automating your time-consuming and redundant processes in your last-mile delivery operations.

7. Standardize and automate

Automating and standardizing the last-mile delivery process can help you remove human errors and improve and enhance the productivity of your workforce.

You can save your time for route planning and focus on the core operation to improve the conversion rate for business scalability and success. 

Automation can help you bypass the drawbacks of manual route planning and delivery management. You can get a holistic overview of the delivery operations and update the automation standards quickly.

With automation, you can easily handle bulk order deliveries and cut the complexities to deliver an optimized solution that helps drive your business’s bottom line.

But you can achieve all the benefits of automation if you choose a dedicated route planning and optimization software for your last-mile delivery operations.

How Can Route Planning and Optimization Software Help You with Last-Mile Delivery?

Route planning is the science of analyzing different touchpoints and developing an optimized delivery solution that can drive maximum output in minimal time.

With the help of route planning and optimization software, you can analyze multiple delivery factors like traffic and weather conditions, delivery priority, vehicle and driver availability, among others, within a few clicks.

It delivers an optimized and shortest delivery path that can be dispatched to multiple drivers within seconds. You can add multiple delivery addresses to the software from your Excel sheet or files of different formats to ease the process of route planning.

With its powerful analytics, you get access to detailed reports for optimizing the existing delivery ecosystem. You can fix the latency in the process and enhance productivity and efficiency to deliver a quality customer experience.

A professional route planner provides you with centralized control over the operations and delivers real-time updates that can be shared with the customers to get in-depth information about the package in transit.

But not all route planning and optimization software can offer advanced and creative features to maximize the last-mile delivery potential.

While there are a few, we have selected the best for your business.

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