How to improve your delivery service in LESS THAN 7 days

Take control of your day with a smarter, more dependable route plan. Learn how you can leverage route optimization software to enable more efficient deliveries for your field service business.

Your route plans hold a lot of weight for your field service business – not only do they impact your employees, but they are critical to providing a positive customer experience. 

It can be challenging to build the perfect route that meets all of your requirements while allowing you to run a profitable business. But, with the right technology and processes in place, it can be done!

If you’re looking to save time, use fewer resources, and have real-time updates – combining route planning and GPS tracking can help you accomplish your goals. 

WorkWave Route Manager provides you with the ability to plan, route, track, communicate and analyze all from one easy-to-use solution. 

• Just upload your orders, dispatch the approved plan to your drivers through their mobile app, follow progress with live GPS tracking, and when your drivers are done you can analyze the results. 
• It’s an all-in-one solution that gives you flexibility, visibility, and control.
• When you’re ready to reevaluate the way you planned your delivery routes, you’ll quickly see the benefits of on-time arrivals, productive employees, and satisfied customers. 

How you can instantly increase your delivery efficiency with dynamic route planning technology and optimisation

1. Set Priorities

An easy way to organize your day is to set order priority. By doing this, you can identify certain customers or stops that must be served based on an order’s importance or the specified calendar date.

By defining the order’s priority, you are letting the algorithm know what must be included in the route optimization. Or, on the flip side let orders get pushed to another date if you run into resource constraints.

WorkWave Route Manager can easily work around your rules, so if you have some flexible stops, by placing a “low” priority or a later “serve by” date – orders can be added to future dates – allowing you to schedule what’s a priority today.

2. Stick To Your Commitments

Today’s customers demand transparency and are more concerned with companies delivering during promised time windows than they are with speed. If these customer demands can not be met, businesses run the risk of damaging their reputation.  

WorkWave Route Manager’s routing algorithm will always assign the right order, to the right resource, at the right time. As a result, you’ll increase your accuracy, precision, and reliability.

By accounting for “time windows” within your route plans you can keep customers happy by meeting your commitments. WorkWave Route Manager’s routing algorithm will always assign the right order, to the right resource, at the right time. As a result, you’ll increase your accuracy, precision, and reliability. 

3. Leverage Your Drivers’ Input

You might be attacking each day using your knowledge. But, it’s a good idea to check in with your drivers and use their insight as well. Here are just some ways you can improve your future route plans by getting feedback from your team:

• Identify traffic bottlenecks that are always a problem and peak times.
• Become aware of customers who tend to throw off delivery schedules and need more time added per stop.
• Inquire if there are start/end location requests so that you can build in locations to the plan and offer job flexibility
• Assign areas to specific drivers if they are more familiar with certain neighbourhoods and can get around easily.

4. Minimize Wasted Space and Time

If you need to make adjustments to routes, you want a solution that gives you control and flexibility. Move delivery orders around with the drag-and-drop feature, swap routes between vehicles, or re-optimize delivery schedules easily. Not only can you make changes on the fly, but you can review the impact before you “approve and dispatch” changes to your drivers. The route summary allows you to quickly visualize any violations and calculate the new cost for your routes.

5. Minimize your chance of error

Delivering the last mile is challenging and at times you may feel like the “jack of all trades.” You juggle driver performance, put out warehouse fires, solve spikes in customer service calls, and more. With so much going on, you can rely on route optimization technology to help you avoid mistakes from happening and focus on higher priorities. Here’s how route planning software can help you get ahead – without worrying about issues:

• Give your field service team read-only access to check-in on driver location, completed stops, and proof of delivery
• Set exceptions (like vehicle maintenance days or holidays) and never plan for unavailable days or resources
• Define rules in Route Manager and the algorithm will never violate them unless you override them

6. Reduce paperwork and guesswork

Whether you want to keep your drivers or office staff organized, the WorkWave Route Manager delivery management software can help you stay connected. With visibility into updates from the road, you don’t have to play phone tag or rely on instincts. Maintain visibility on updates like order completion, current or previous GPS location, or live ETAs. 

7. Other food delivery business ideas.

Offering scheduled delivery and the possibility to pre-order your meal when you make a reservation. Comfort and convenience are two of the main reasons why online food delivery is popular.

8. Having the option to schedule a meal delivery, so you don’t have to stop what you’re doing in the middle of the day takes that one step further.

• Introduce various payment and fulfilment options

Especially now, with COVID, customers want to pay and get their food delivered with as little contact as possible. So, here’s how to improve food delivery service by catering to their needs: introduce brand new features that will keep them safe. Allow customers to pay online, via card, PayPal, and more so they don’t have to exchange unsanitary paper bills.

As for order fulfillment, give foodies options like no contact delivery where the driver leaves the order in front of the door, rings the doorbell, and leaves or minimum exposure pickup such as meeting outside the restaurant or at curbside. This will make customers feel safe ordering from you.

9. Streamline the order acceptance process

Food delivery logistics can be a headache for restaurant owners. Still, the truth is the entire process, from accepting the order to delivering it, should be optimized for happy customers and a steady order flow.

First of all, you need an order-taking app that is easy to use and allows you to accept an order in just a few taps. Also, from the app, you should be able to share an estimated delivery time with your customers and print the orders for the kitchen.

• Dedicated Team. At this point, if possible, you should have a dedicated team that is in charge of preparing and packaging delivery orders, separate from the dine-in team. If that’s not possible, you should at least have a dedicated order packing area that won’t get in the way of day-to-day restaurant operations.

• Finally, the delivery person should be on stand-by and retrieve the order bag ASAP without imposing on dine-in customers or waiting for a long time in front of the restaurant. This will make it seem as if you can’t handle both dine-in and delivery traffic.

• Come up with new marketing materials and promotions. Wondering how to increase delivery orders? One surefire way to do that is to promote your delivery service everywhere. From your website to print materials like flyers and stickers, customers should know that they can now order food from you online (and where to go to do it).

Any good marketing strategy for an online food delivery service includes promotions that are exclusive to that platform.

• Always have at least one promo-active to reward customers that choose to order food from your restaurant. The promos should be easy to spot on your website, and at the top of your menu, so no one misses them.

• Add a flyer in every takeaway bag that contains vital information like the website customers can place orders on, your contact information, your logo, a delicious-looking photo of one of your most popular dishes, as well as your social media profiles.

• Pay special attention to food presentation and packaging

It’s true; your online food marketing strategy should revolve mainly around how your food tastes because that’s the main attraction. However, that doesn’t mean the way it looks and the packaging is not important. Small details can make a difference.

• Make sure your menu is optimized for delivery

Last but not least, you have to think of food delivery optimization. Not all menu items travel well, and it’s better not to deliver them at all rather than them arriving at your customers looking like a jumbled mess. Consider removing those items that don’t travel well from your delivery menu and replacing them with something more appropriate.

Learning how to improve food delivery service as a restaurant owner in a full-blown pandemic can be challenging. 

Luckily, it should all be part of a larger digital marketing strategy for restaurants that is no longer optional in this day and age but necessary. Food delivery trends are gaining more and more ground in the industry.