People are hungry for food delivery.
Just a few years ago, when someone wanted a meal delivered to their home, they were basically limited to pizza and Chinese food. But now, there are services like Seamless and GrubHub that can take an order from pretty much any place in town directly to your door.
This trend has become so popular that major corporations like Amazon and Uber have taken notice and started food delivery services of their own.
Have you entered this industry as well? If so, then you should know that proper route management will allow you to reduce your expenses, improve productivity, overcome delivery problems, and make more money.
Make Deliveries While The Food’s Still Hot
For most delivery services, it isn’t a big deal if you miss an ETA by 30 minutes. But with food delivery, that’s not going to fly. Your field team members need to make each delivery before the food gets cold. Otherwise, your customers will get upset. Eventually, they’ll start using one of your competitor’s services.
Free online navigation tools are good enough for showing how one vehicle should travel to one destination. These free tools aren’t ideal for routes with multiple stops or multiple drivers, though. They won’t even optimize the order of your stops for you – they just plan your route in the same sequence that you entered the addresses in.
That’s why you need the best route optimization software. Route4Me’s route optimization engine processes millions of possible scenarios in order to find the most efficient route for you. It considers traffic, construction, weather, and many other factors. All you need to do is plug in the addresses you want to visit, set the constraints (number of drivers, availability window for each customer, etc.), and then your optimized route will be ready in less than 30 seconds.
In addition to helping you keep your customers happy, optimized routes will also shorten your travel times and save you a lot of money on gas.
Find The Right Size For Your Team
If you have too few drivers, you’ll have trouble arriving on time to each stop. If you have too many drivers, you’ll end up wasting money.
Route4Me can help you find the ideal size for your field team. Again, all you need to do is plug in the addresses of your customers. Then, Route4Me will show you exactly how many drivers you need to cover that workload (no time-consuming accounting work necessary). You could pocket the savings, or you could use them to lower your prices and attract new customers.
Want To See For Yourself How Route4Me Can Boost Your Profits?
Adapt To Change
Changing one stop on a route affects how you approach every other stop on the route.
Without Route4Me, it can take a long time to plan your routes. Then, what would you do if a customer canceled their order at the last minute? You wouldn’t have time to plan a new route that reflects that change, so your field team member would need to figure out what to do on their own. This would likely lead to delayed delivery. Your field team member might even get lost, which would lead to multiple delayed deliveries.
Route4Me is dynamic. You can make a change to a route and re-optimize it in seconds. Route4Me is cloud-based, too, so these changes would be automatically reflected on the mobile device used by your field team member. You’ll be able to easily accommodate last-minute cancellations and maintain a reputation for being reliable.
Track Your Team
Route4Me also has a GPS tracking feature, which shows you the real-time location and speed of your field team members. At any time, you can make sure everyone on your team is sticking to their routes and staying on schedule.
GPS tracking also allows Route4Me to collect data about your operations and help you understand your business better. For example, we have a reporting tool that breaks down your fuel expenses in detail. That way, you can experiment with different fuel efficiency techniques and determine what works best for you.
So, do you have any questions about this article? Feel free to let us know in the comments section below.
Finally, answering these three questions correctly will confirm that you understand how to plan routes efficiently for your local food delivery business.
- How can a trusted route planner help you control your fuel expenses?
- How can route planning software help you with routes that have dozens of stops?
- How can routing software help you manage last-minute order cancellations?
Want To See For Yourself How Route4Me Can Boost Your Profits?
