Customers today are more demanding than they’ve ever been before. A decade or two ago, if a package arrived around the day you said it would, everyone was happy. Now, customers want to know exactly where their order is at all times. You’ll need to incorporate real-time technology into your final mile delivery optimization solution if you want to keep your customers happy.
And yet, despite how much real-time technology can improve customer satisfaction, many fleet owners still don’t understand much about it.
In this article, we’ll do our best to educate such fleet owners and explain the applications of real-time technology and how it affects both the shipper and carrier.
Real-Time Tracking
Every fleet owner needs to ensure their drivers are following planned routes. You don’t want them goofing around and making personal stops on company time. Real-time tracking technology, such as a GPS tracking solution, can help you here.
How does GPS tracking work?
GPS tracking helps you visualize your drivers’ activities on a map in real time so that you can immediately know if a field rep or driver makes an unauthorized stop or takes longer than planned at a specific destination.
A GPS tracking solution gives you complete visibility of your assets. It also gives you frequent updates on the locations of shipments, information about how fast your vehicles are driving, alerts when a package is stuck, and much more. It’s like CCTV for your delivery operations.
This results in better vehicle management, inventory management, and customer service.
Another benefit is that, by providing you with more detailed and accurate information than you would have if you didn’t use GPS tracking, it improves efficiency by reducing delivery errors.
Real-Time Re-Optimization Of Routes
The routes you plan at the start of the day might need some tweaking later on, as customers can and often do make some sort of last-minute change to their orders.
That kind of change could throw your whole route off. If you planed for your driver to be in one area at a given time and based the rest of your route on that information, what will you do if the customer in that area is suddenly unavailable? You’ll probably have to start planning over again from scratch with your route planning… do you even have time for that?
Thankfully, there are programs like Route4Me that will automatically adjust a route to accommodate last-minute changes. If a delivery is suddenly cancelled, you just need to delete the details of that delivery, and our route planner will do the rest and make new routes that are 100% optimized and reflect those changes.
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Alternatively, if you need to add a pick-up at the last minute, you can do so in the system and our program will also automatically produce routes that reflect those changes.
Real-Time Order Transfer And Route Planning
No matter which eCommerce platform you use, whether Shopify or WooCommerce or anything else, it does not come with route planning capabilities.
This means that if you use a delivery route planner, you’re forced to manually move the orders stored on your eCommerce platform to your route optimizer one by one. If you have a lot of orders to move, this is an extremely time-consuming process.
Route4Me can automate this process, saving you a lot of time.
Route4Me’s final mile delivery optimization software also offers an eCommerce plugin that helps prevent delay-causing, customer-upsetting errors. If you make a spelling error and key in an incorrect address, our software will let you know and suggest that you enter the correct address instead. That’ll stop your drivers from driving all the way out to the boonies for no good reason.
All this is done in real time! Did you ever dare to imagine that planning route for your eCommerce orders would ever be this easy?
Read the following article to learn more about our eCommerce plugin:
Why You Should Use Route4Me’s New Ecommerce Plugin for Route Planning
Have you used real-time technology before? If so, how did it improve your business? Let us know in the comments below.
Want To See For Yourself How Route4Me Can Boost Your Profits?
