Managing a lot of different customers and orders on a daily basis, alongside having to process these orders correctly, plan routes, and manage all the admin in the background, can leave your teams with little time to find ways to improve customer service, drive sales, and widen margins.
A lot of businesses rely on paper processes. Either that, or they have a few different systems in place to help them manage each process. This can mean planning takes a long time, communicating between teams and customers can be slow, or drivers have to rely on their own customer knowledge to figure out which products to pick and load.
These processes can lead to:
So, how can you drive sales for your delivery business, by improving how you work and what information your drivers have?
Whether it’s by telephone, e-commerce, your driver taking a forward order, or outbound calls, each customer will have a different preference for how they want to place their order.
The tricky part is collecting these orders and feeding them into your ordering system in a quick and error-free way. Paper-based systems can lead to a lot of disorganisation, while some digital ordering systems can make it difficult to input orders from a variety of sales methods. This lack of organisation may lead to unfulfilled orders and missed deliveries.
RouteMagic lets teams either enter new orders into the system directly, import them in bulk, or receive orders directly from our customer portal. This portal cuts out the buffer and gives customers a quicker, easier way to place, manage, and oversee the progress of their orders.
A lot of businesses still use a lot of manual planning and guesswork in their route plans. Sometimes these plans can be very effective, but at the end of the day, it is at best a guessing game.
Specifics ETAs and a scaling delivery operation means manual planning processes can become very complicated, very quickly, leading to increased redeliveries, delays, disruptions, or missed deliveries altogether, all of which are costly to your business’s profits and reputation.
By automatically optimising your routes, you can remove the guesswork and make sure ETAs are met, your fuel costs are reduced, and every scheduled customer gets their delivery each day. Meeting every delivery deadline and minimising redeliveries means your profits will improve alongside customer satisfaction.
Every customer wants to feel like they are the priority. This can be stressful for a distributor with hundreds of deliveries to make each day, but there are tools that can help.
Delivery apps can help drivers personalise the customer experience easily and sell more, by prompting drivers with suggestions for each customer, based on previous sales records, purchasing habits, and trends. Your drivers can then offer specific products to customers, driving sales, while helping to improve satisfaction. With all the customer data they need for every single stop, you can make sure every customer is a priority, and your drivers can make the most out of every sales visit.
This personalisation drives customer loyalty and helps them to see you as a customer-focused delivery business that goes above and beyond the competition.
The most convenient way for your customers to place an order for the next day, week, or fortnight, is while your drivers are at the point of delivery. It’s quick and easy for the customer, but a lot of the time it can be tricky for drivers to accurately pass this information along to your office teams. This is especially true if your drivers are making order notes on paper.
With a delivery app, drivers can carry out a variety of tasks quickly and securely with no room for error. They could take a forward order, set up a standing order, or even add a new customer while on their route. Our delivery app even sends this information straight back to the office so these orders can be prepared.
You may have different price lists, deals, discounts, or promotions for each customer at different times throughout the year.
Each of these pricing structures relies on a lot of maintenance to ensure profits can be controlled. Often it’s far too difficult to control how much you’re selling different items to different customers for, and it's almost impossible to control the exact prices your drivers offer to customers.
Finding a way to set minimum and maximum prices for each product or product class, which has to be adhered to by sales reps, keeps you in control. If you could remind drivers at the point of delivery to mention a particular promotion, you could boost sales opportunities at every stop, and if you could see exactly which products are slow-moving, you could set up discounts to drive sales of specific products to keep stock levels organised.
With this level of accuracy, drivers can know exactly how much of a discount they can offer to each customer, and delivery apps can prompt drivers with promotional items for each customer, based on their habits, helping them to sell more.
RouteMagic is a route planning, optimisation, and electronic proof of delivery solution. Simply put, RouteMagic gets your deliveries where they need to be, when they need to be there every time, widening margins, improving efficiency, and driving customer satisfaction in the process.
The planning and delivery management system improves control and accuracy, while helping teams communicate effectively, so everyone has access to the same, real-time information.
It is completely digital, offering office and mobile functionality to help teams work smarter, not harder, helping delivery businesses to stay competitive for the future.
