How to Make Efficient Deliveries? 5 Tips for Business Owners

While handling a delivery business, it is crucial to maintain quality service and good customer response. In order to carry out efficient deliveries, it is important to plan and execute things. 

As per the data by Statista, the total revenue of the U.S. trucking industry in the year 2020 was 732.3 billion U.S. dollars!  

Increasing efficient deliveries is not an easy task, yet it is not that tough if you follow some strategies. One of them is to take up optimized routes with a route management software.

If you are a delivery business owner willing to make more efficient deliveries and boost your revenue, this blog is for you!

5 Ways to Make Efficient Deliveries

1. Sort Packages

When dealing with many packages, it becomes tough to manage all of them as per cities and addresses. So, the first step is to sort all the packages based on different categories.

Leading logistics companies like FedEx that provide overnight deliveries also follow this method. On the previous night, before they dispatch couriers for the delivery, they sort packages according to countries, states, cities, and pin codes.

Sorting packages can help you plan delivery routes and save time. Also, you can pile up packages in the delivery vehicle as per the order of delivery stops. It’ll help the delivery person spend less time finding the package on reaching the delivery destination.

Sorting packages makes the task of route planning easy. You can assign several packages to one driver and delivery truck in a particular area. This can save a lot of delivery time wasted in circling the city to deliver packages.      

2. Plan Deliveries and Optimize Routes

After sorting and loading packages in the delivery vehicles, the important part comes. Also, it is the step often skipped and underestimated by many delivery business owners. 

Planning and optimizing routes make the delivery process fast and easy. Drivers spend less time on the road looking for the address and more time delivering packages.      

Basically, routes can be planned in 2 ways: Manually and using route optimization software

Manual route planning requires a pen, paper, map and plenty of time. You need to list out all the drivers, packages, and addresses. Then using your mapping skills, you have to plan and plot all the delivery destinations starting from the address nearest to the warehouse.

This traditional method is messy and time-consuming, and the possibility of error generation is also more. There are no more chances that you will save on fuel costs.  

On the contrary, planning and optimizing routes using route optimization software can be very helpful. You only need to add a list of drivers and delivery destinations to the software.

Also, you can manually add each stop by selecting from the map or by entering each address. You can even import an excel sheet directly from your device.

Soon you will get an optimized route according to the data you added. By following optimized routes, you can save on fuel costs and reduce delivery time. 

Using route optimization software can be helpful in many ways. You can add up to hundreds of stops, unlike Google Maps, which helps you optimize up to 10 stops only. 

Also, it saves hours spent in route planning and also decreases time per delivery. Eventually, helping you and your team make more deliveries and increase your revenue.

3. Give Updates to Your Customers

In many cases, customers complain that they are not getting updates about their packages. This makes them impatient about the whereabouts of their delivery. Either they are not provided with proper tracking details, or the tracking feature isn’t working properly.

So, make sure that your customers are getting updated on time. You can even send text messages in different time intervals like when the package reaches the warehouse, it is getting ready for the delivery, when it is out for delivery and when it gets delivered.

Customers do not need to contact delivery personnel asking about updates by providing such information. This will help drivers save time spent in solving customers’ issues and can utilize the same in making on-time deliveries.   

Dissatisfaction among the customers can impart a negative impact on your company. So, make sure not to be one! 

4. Time Management

Handling a delivery business means you are competing with the time. Whether it’s about delivery planning or actual delivery, you need to keep up with the time. So, ensure minimum time wastage and maximum time utilization in the process and ensure on-time delivery.

Managing time is a very crucial thing in any business venture. For example, managing time properly can give you an extra edge over your competition, who may otherwise be doing the same quality work as you are.

Using robotics is a great boost to time management for material transport. Look to automate key processes and to augment heavy lifting tasks with machines that save effort for your team.

Proper time management can help you reduce costs and save money in the delivery business. There are so many tasks that need to be done at a certain period, and if they get messed up, it will cost you a lot of money and time.

This will allow you to efficiently plan for the next day or week and leave room for last-minute changes that can impact your delivery schedule. Learn how time management can help you in the long run!

5. Customer Support

Your role of providing efficient deliveries doesn’t end here. Providing satisfactory customer support before and after delivery is as important as on-time delivery. 

In order to retain customers, it is necessary to provide support at any hour of the day. Support can be provided in various ways, e.g., online help, telephone support, and email support.

A delivery business needs to have a system that offers efficient and effective customer support. This allows you to communicate with customers, answer their questions, and help them through the process of getting their queries solved.

Make sure to study customers’ problems and improvise your methods based on that. This will help you reduce future problems and gain customers’ trust.  

Summing Things Up

In a nutshell, it is not easy to transform your delivery business and make it more efficient overnight, but it is easy to adopt steps that slowly help you reach more customers efficiently. We hope that the 5 tips mentioned above will help your business reach high levels of growth.