Delivery speeds have never been more imperative for companies. While it has always been an important component in getting approval and repeat business, the digital age has seen customers become a whole lot more impatient – and expect their orders to reach them without delay.
Although there are certain factors beyond your control, the good news is there are methods to refine and improve your delivery process. Doing so ensures customers are happy and don’t have to deal with any annoying (and unnecessary) delays.
For assistance, here are four steps toward enhancing delivery speeds for customer orders:
Step #1: Don’t delay
It should go without saying, but you should attempt to react as fast as possible once an order arrives from a customer. The quicker you are able to pick, pack, and ship an order, the greater the possibility it will arrive on time. Of course, this might not be that straightforward if you’re consistently dealing with multiple orders at the same time.
As a result, it is recommended you prioritize orders in the right manner. One way of doing this is by offering different shipment options to customers. If someone opts for next-day delivery rather than standard delivery, for example, that’s a signal to bump them up the priority list.
Step #2: improve warehouse efficiency
Warehouse efficiency is something that can be easily overlooked when it comes to delivery speeds. If your warehouse is inefficient, where it takes overly long to find and pick orders, it will seriously impact how quickly it will take to send out items to customers. This is why it’s vital you improve warehouse efficiency in all possible areas.
To optimize your warehouse the right way, it is recommended to use specialist consulting services. A consultant will be able to analyze your current warehouse operations thoroughly. Through their audit checklist, they are able to identify issues that currently exist – and put together a plan to overcome these issues.
Step #3: Optimize delivery routes
Another aspect to optimize is your company’s delivery routes. Going with the fastest, most cost-effective routes will naturally improve delivery speeds. However, manual calculations are not going to cut it. You will have to use specialist routing software that can use real-time data to find the most optimum routes for your deliveries. The latter is particularly important for ensuring a driver doesn’t get stuck in traffic or held up by other issues.
Along with being able to optimize delivery routes, routing software also supplies you with visibility information to provide accurate updates to customers about the location of their orders.
Step #4: Plan ahead
This is an obvious point, but you should attempt to improve your delivery schedules by planning ahead of time. In theory, the better this plan is, the better the execution – and the shorter your delivery times. There are different ways you are able to plan ahead of time. For example, if you’re expecting more deliveries during the holidays, you can sort your logistics operations to better handle the demand.
