Does Route Planning Really Influence Customer Experience?

Most delivery businesses are laser-focused on their customers. Whether you’re a retailer working to make sure that every delivery reaches the customer’s home at the right time, or a distributor or wholesaler working to ensure that your accounts all feel taken care of, you know that keeping the customer happy is the key to success.

route planningBut what actually goes into making delivery customers happy? In other words, when your goal is to prioritize the customer, what is it that you should actually be prioritizing? Too often, the idea of what the customer wants keeps businesses from drilling down on what actually goes into the total delivery experience.

For instance, if you’re evaluating your technology stack with an eye towards boosting customer satisfaction, you might not immediately look at something like routing technology. It might feel like an operational necessity that powers important back office processes without necessarily impacting the customer in more than an indirect way. And yet, depending on the technology, this isn’t necessarily the case.

Ultimately, every aspect of your supply chain has some impact on whether you’re able to get the right goods to the right customer at the right time in the right condition. Your sourcing decisions help to make sure that you don’t have aggravating stockouts. Your warehouse management technology can make or break your ability to process customer orders easily. And your last mile delivery management software determines your ability to show up on time and keep customers in the loop.

So how does route optimization fit into all of this? Does it have a direct impact on customer satisfaction, or is it all about maintaining stable processes?

How Route Optimization Shapes Your Delivery Operations

It shouldn’t be too controversial to say that your routes ultimately have a big impact on your deliveries. But as we dive deeper we can see that this happens at a number of different levels.

The way you plan your routes, for instance, can play a defining role in your entire delivery management chain. If you plan routes a few times a year, e.g. for more complex distribution operations, you set yourself up with a delivery process that’s stable but static. If you’re routing orders dynamically overnight, you’re positioning yourself for efficiency, but not putting a process in place that enables you to easily handle last minute orders.

The results of these processes define customer outcomes. If you’re running static routes to a mix of large grocery stores, minimarts, and on-premise sites, your routing process doesn’t just determine what times and days of the week you show with cases. It also determines whether you can handle off-day delivery requests. If you have the agility in your processes to easily slot in an extra stop for a particular customer in a given week, the customer has an experience that builds trust and puts you in a position of a reliable partner. If you can’t, the customer experience is inflexible—it may even put them in a bit of a bind as they try to deal with the lunch rush the next day.

For B2C businesses like retailers, furniture and appliance sellers, and others, the same idea applies. Sure, you’re not likely to be rolling out static route plans when every day’s deliveries are different. But your overall routing process—and the technology that backs it up—determines how flexible you can be in responding to orders.

If you can plan optimal routes more quickly, you can move your order cutoff time back. This offers customers a lot more leeway in when they order relative to when they need their items—which can go a long way towards increasing the quality of their experience overall.

The learn more, read the full post here: https://www.dispatchtrack.com/blog/route-planning-customer-experience