For your business to be successful, it must nail three key points; your business model should be sound, the business should have talented people backing it up, and most importantly, you should know how to take the maximum amount of work from your team. In today’s business world, slacking off will bring about your downfall.

These days, we can thank retail giant Amazon for the massive growth in e-commerce, and customer demands. To keep up, Amazon themselves started their same-day delivery option for those customers who are just unable to wait three days to get their hands on their purchase. And, let’s be honest, with today’s technological capabilities, why should they wait?

Amazon’s capabilities increased customer expectations and raised the bar for other companies competing in this market.

With more and more deliveries for companies to manage – and at a faster rate – companies need to look to helpful tools, to ensure they don’t fall behind. One tool that can seamlessly boost delivery operations and guarantees no kinks in the delivery chain, is a route planner. Here are only but a few ways a route planner can help.

Agility When It Comes to Creating Routes

The first thought that comes to anyone’s mind when thinking of a route planner, is on time deliveries. As at the end of the day, when the driver has a clear set planned route to follow, it’s fairly easy to reach all destinations on time in an efficient manner.

However, one element that often gets forgotten about is agility. When it comes to the nitty-gritty of planning a route, manually plotting out all your various destinations across town is not only time consuming, but also very frustrating. On the other hand, a route planner is able to create optimal routes in mere seconds – all you need to do is input the various addresses.

This can come in very handy for delivery companies, especially when they face the issue of needing to change a route on the fly. So, delivery managers can take a deep breath and enjoy the agility that a route planner offers them in regards to plotting and changing routes.

Meet Customer Demands

A typical mistake that many delivery planners make when planning is forgetting to take into consideration delivery windows. Just imagine, putting all the effort into planning a route, only for your driver to reach the address and find out that the customer isn’t home. This leads to unsatisfied customers, and a serious back up in your delivery schedule.

Route planners remove the stress of needing to calculate with these time-windows in mind, by doing the hard work for you. Courtesy of the route planner, your drivers will be able to accomplish faster deliveries and even complete more orders during the same day, at the same – and, with fewer expenses.

The emergence of route planner applications helps companies reduce delivery times, increase profits by delivering more, and satisfy customer demands.

Delivery Delays

One thing that is very hard to account for when planning, is traffic and weather conditions. At the end of the day, you never know when an accident or sudden road closures will hit. Of course, finding out conditions such as weather, and traffic ahead of time will keep you more prepared, but when it comes to being on the road – there are many external variables that affect overall driving time.

With a manual route, just one small delay can lead to a cascade of delays during the day that will affect ETA’s, customer satisfaction, and ultimately, your company bottom line.

However, having a planned route in place will help you avoid any major delays by keeping all players up to date at all times. If an unforeseen delay occurs, customers can be notified immediately and provided with a new ETA, drivers can receive a re-calculated alternative route, and you can rest assured that the one delay won’t affect the rest of the route.

Final Note

So, there you have it, advanced route optimization technology cuts route planning time from hours to mere minutes, provides you with alternative routes in case your drivers are stuck in an unavoidable situation, improves customer satisfaction, positively impacts operation profitability, and so much more.

With the increased number of deliveries your company faces, why not invest in a route planner, and systemize operations to provide your customers with the service they are expecting?