Want to grow your small business? Start doing these!
A small business owner faces lots of challenges and to resolve them, you need proper advanced planning. When talking about making timely deliveries, wrong route selection increases both your workload and expenses.
Planning a route in anticipation helps a lot more than it seems. It ensures deliveries on the estimated time, reduces the need for more employees, consumes less time, lessens driving hours, and manual exhaustion, and decreases the overall cost of the process.
Besides, it can make you make more customers through your best on-time delivery services. Here are some of the most useful route-planning tips for small delivery businesses:
1. Accurate Delivery Location Information:
One of the most essential and unnoticeable steps is to collect the right addresses and double-check them. Even though you are familiar with that area, a little misreading might create confusion, which could probably set you a lot back.
Also, adding printed labels with accurate address information makes it a lot easier for the delivery person to reach out. This saves a lot of time later and you can ensure to reach the final location as fast as possible.
It will be an added benefit to set the delivery locations on a digital map, like Google Maps, that shows exact geographical locations. This will minimize your chances of error.
2. Effective And Exact Route Planning:
Knowing the shortcuts to your destination is always a bonus point unless it’s a dangerous one. Thus, it’s really important to get familiar with the routes you’re going to take.
It’s better to hire drivers who are local to that area. Keep track of all the basic information of needed locations, landmarks, popular routes to that place, and building or house names.
Furthermore, in case of repeated orders or regular customers, allot the delivery person who has already been there. Also, make the delivery persons aware of the location tracking and sharing apps. This makes you take fewer wrong stops as well.
3. Communication Is The Key:
Calling and communicating with the customer about any confusion or lack of information can never be a bad idea. Many times the exact apartment lies within small colonies which creates a lot of confusion, also it helps when the customer is a tenant, so there’s no need to be hesitant about it. This saves you a lot of time and you can move on to the next due delivery.
4. Install Tracking Systems:
Keep track of your drivers and the packaging by tracking the respective locations. This is one of the most underrated ways to look out for the reasons for delays in deliveries.
An efficient tracking system helps you to be more punctual and makes you more accurate and professional in route planning. It is always important to have a strong bond with the delivery executives and customers.
5. The Appropriate Mode of Transportation:
The mode of transportation is an important consideration when planning for shipping. It’s not always that you can be dependent on four-wheelers. Yes, it’s better than two-wheelers when it comes to storing parcels, but when it’s the peak hours of traffic, two-wheelers are always appropriate.
Moreover, the priority of the shipment, the expenses, the value of the goods that are being shipped as well as the dimensions of the goods need to be evaluated when deciding the mode & means of transportation. Thus, choosing the right transportation mode is equally important.
6. Availability of Drivers:
Always keep a check on the available drivers. Keeping up with that you can schedule all the deliveries for the day. Also, pre-scheduling the staff for the next day, helps a lot for you might know the to-be absentees for the next day.
Additionally, in case anyone is absent, backup plans with extra staff and drivers should always be there. So that the reputation will be maintained and no delays will be there.
Summing it up:
With the increasing demand for delivery, what’s also increasing are delayed deliveries, road accidents, and wrong deliveries, because of a lack of information on route or route planning. Especially for a small business, it’s necessary to stay on budget and execute everything safely.
And, it will get you myriads of customers, all they want is undelayed deliveries with polite delivery people. Also, since the pandemic hit people started to look out for small businesses for almost everything they need.
