Managing customer expectations and delivery operations

The wider picture

As we’re all aware, consumer expectations around stock availability, free delivery and timescales have accelerated in recent years. Basically, a few clicks and something can be at your doorstep the next day or even in a few hours.

However, as well as managing these expectations and protecting your customer relationships to ensure retention, you’ve also got to manage your operational costs effectively and realistically.

Meeting these delivery expectations is essential to secure sales and repeat business. However, transportation and delivery operations can become an extravagant expense and financial loss for businesses without the right tools and resources in place.

The price of delivery

There are so many factors to consider. There’s the cost of fuel and driver salaries, and on top of that, if you’re manually totaling costs for each order, this is going to be overly time-consuming and prone to error.

Ensuring your business has access to a fast and organised method of managing fulfilment and logistics through their own fleet of vehicles is critical. With the right tools, users can record and edit both vehicle and driver properties, assign tasks, schedule their weekly runs, plan routes, manage returns collections and split deliveries.

Once driver and vehicle costs have been assigned, your business can view the calculated costings against any planned runs. This should include an estimated cost per delivery, which can also be automatically sent back to any corresponding deliveries and sales orders.

Businesses using this method to manage their fleet of vehicles ensure the cost of each delivery run is then always calculated correctly. By automatically calculating delivery costs and applying these to each order, businesses can maintain control of their costs more efficiently.

Courier integration

Or, perhaps your business relies more heavily on third-party couriers to fulfill your orders? You can still gain full visibility on their activity to ascertain expenses and minimise costs.

If your business despatches and ships multiple deliveries via third-party service providers, then courier integration automates and streamlines data processing efficiencies around orders, deliveries, returns, transactions and consignment details. Courier integration optimises despatch details keeping you, your couriers and your customers constantly updated.

From a cost control perspective, courier integration is proven to be 96% faster than manual courier booking and saves businesses around £20,000 annually on salaries and over a workday’s worth of labour.

Through additional damage reports, your business can further look to cut unnecessary costs by optimising your data and automating reports to easily identify stock damages or delivery errors. So, if there is a pattern of this with a certain courier, you can avoid using them in the future and prevent stock waste and delivery faults.

Discover more with OrderWise

For more information on how your business can better control costs across your transportation and delivery operations, get in touch with an OrderWise specialist today. Our ERP software is proven streamline operations and provide optimal visibility across your processes to enable you to make the most profitable business decisions.