Why do consumers agree a time for you to deliver to them – and then seemingly do everything in their power to avoid the delivery person?

What can be done to help the consignment and its destination customer to coincide? Sometimes it seems easier just to send out a whole new consignment than to work with your delivery agent to redeliver the original.

There are opportunities to improve at every stage;

• Sending a consignment that won’t be accepted
• Customer not present at time of delivery
• Getting the consignment to the customer second time round
• Learning from experience

The current scenario seems to constantly return suspicion to the delivery person in the eyes of the customers; did he even try to deliver it? Where is the “safe place” he [alledegedly?] left it in?

Thankfully technology is allowing changes to this scenario, allowing the future to be implemented today:

•  In scanning a consignment “out for delivery” an error message alerts the operator that there is only 3 boxes in a consignment of 4, so checks can be made before the vehicle leaves the depot with a delivery, that would otherwise be refused. 
• With advanced route scheduling, the order of deliveries is recognised and a pre-alert, text or email can be sent to the recipient at a predetermined interval prior to delivery to confirm their availability.
• If, on arrival the recipient is not in, similarly a text or email alert can replace the traditional “delivery card” allowing options to be presented to the absent recipient in real time; “AA Fast Couriers are trying to deliver consignment number 123465 from ABC Corporation, but you are not in. What would you like us to do?
• a)    Deliver to your nominated safe place
• b)    Divert to your PO Box
• c)     Return to depot for you to collect
• d)    Try to deliver same time tomorrow - Text your preference to 123 or respond to this email within 2 minutes, otherwise we will try again tomorrow.”

In the worst case, the recipient doesn’t respond and the delivery agent is left with the traditional options – no worse than today - however on receiving a response, the need for a redelivery could well be averted. However, better tools are at hand to support the actions of the delivery agent in either situation;

• The consignment could be left in a safe place - but now the delivery handheld device can be used to photograph the consignment in that location, plus a text description can be added, then both the photo and text can be attached to the scanned consignment reference and all of that information can be stored by the carrier’s database, be sent to the recipient and even to the supplier if required.
• If it is more appropriate to return the consignment to the depot, the handheld device can record this and similarly update all parties, including the delivery database. Following this notification the recipient may have now responded to the failed delivery alert and expressed a preference between requesting redelivery or nominating to collect from the depot.

On arrival at the depot the recipient can show the text or email on their mobile phone screen – allowing easy identification of the consignment, which has been sorted and stored by reference number, rather that the previous haphazard “all failed deliveries” cage or sorted by route, or most recently returned. More detailed and flexible communication is not just good for customer service – it is a key enabler for improved data and consignment management.

Managing Failures

Realistically the best way of managing a failed delivery is to avoid the cause of the failure. Every delivery has a significant data associated with it – analysing and interpreting this information will allow future deliveries to be dispatched with greater success. One possible outcome of this experience is finding multiple “failed delivery’ exceptions being entered by one driver within a period of a few seconds. This could show that the driver has already learnt from experience what you are trying to learn from the data – that consignments of a certain type to be delivered to a type of location or at a given time of day are destined to fail – the driver becomes frustrated and begins to give up even trying to deliver those jobs.

Smart delivery software can report exceptions (or failures) by region, by driver, by exception type, by time. It can also show successful deliveries in the same format for comparison. Any patterns which emerge from this analysis are opportunities to minimise “planning to fail”. This can prompt  the carrier to change delivery or route scheduling to allow a better match of consignment to a more appropriate time for delivery. Alternatively, it may result in feedback to suppliers, which allows them to agree delivery instructions with their customer which conform to the “successful delivery” profile for that product or recipient type.

In summary, use your tools to plan to succeed; capture all data about each delivery to deliver excellent customer service alongside each consignment and review your performance data to discover opportunities for continuous improvements.