For businesses like grocery stores in particular, there are few things more important in the modern era than the quality of the experience they’re able to offer to their customers.
Competition is growing fiercer on a daily basis, to say nothing of the implications that major brands like Amazon and other e-commerce businesses bring with them. There are a lot of people who probably do what you do… but nobody does it quite like you.
That special quality – those unique elements that separate you from so many other businesses – are what you need to be doubling down on, using them to create an experience for your customers that they won’t be able to find anywhere else. Glympse – the real-time location sharing solution designed for organizations like yours – is officially how you do it.
In fact, Glympse is a viable way to not only create a better experience for your customers, but it also helps overcome a wide range of last mile delivery challenges that are all certainly worth exploring.
Managing Cost by Improving Delivery Efficiency
By far, the most important ways in which a real-time location sharing solution like Glympse helps overcome last mile delivery challenges to do with how it can help dramatically improve delivery efficiency, all while helping you manage costs at the exact same time.
Glympse gives you access to an almost unprecedented level of visibility into the current status of your fleet – allowing you to proactively address issues now before they have a chance to become much more complex (and expensive) problems down the road.
- Even if something does come up unexpectedly, you and others within your organization are finally in a position to react to it immediately – thus mitigating long-term risk and helping you preserve the quality of the experience you’re able to offer to your own customers.
- If one of your vehicles is suddenly out of commission for whatever reason, not only do you know about it instantly – you can also see precisely which orders are affected so that you can get other drivers to pitch in and make sure the job still gets done properly, all without causing unnecessary stress for the customer in any way.
This idea also bleeds directly into the larger idea of route optimization. A real-time location sharing solution like Glympse allows you to use historical data that, when combined with the insight uncovered from past trends, improves route efficiencies across the board. You can see the exact routes that your drivers are taking to certain common destinations, thus allowing you to capitalize on opportunities to take a more efficient route that will cut down on gas and improve delivery times. Indeed, the sheer amount of savings that this level of detail can unlock is more than worth the initial investment for most savvy organizations.
Managing Costs by Meeting Customer Expectations
Along the same lines, it’s clear that one of the most common last mile delivery challenges is and will always be cost – particularly in the “Amazon Era” where innovation is a requirement but certain complexities can eat into already razor-thin profit margins as well.
Just as you always know the exact location and status of your drivers, the same is true of your customers. At any given moment, they’re never more than a few quick finger taps away from knowing exactly where their order is and approximately how long it will take to get to their destination.
This new level of transparency in the relationship between business and customer creates a number of core advantages, all at the same time:
- For starters, it makes things easier on the customer if they know with certainty that they still have two hours before their order arrives.
- They can run out and get their errands done, confident that they’ll still be able to return before the driver gets there.
- This will not only improve the overall quality of the process, but it will go a long way towards reducing frantic telephone calls as customers seek out information that should have been readily accessible to them in the first place.
Of course, all of this segues directly into what is perhaps the most important benefit of all: the types of real-time location sharing solutions that we’re talking about improve on not only customer loyalty, but retention as well.
Remember that it will always be more expensive to gain a new customer than it is to simply retain one of your existing satisfied ones. If your customers feel like they’re a part of the last mile delivery process, it makes them an organic part of a solution built with their needs in mind. Not only does this make them more likely to use the service again in the future (thus helping to improve the return on investment of your last mile delivery efforts), but it also instills trust in both the process and in your brand, too. For many customers, that alone could be the deciding factor when it comes to choosing a brand to shop with moving forward.
As stated, all of this also helps to reduce escalations – another major last mile delivery challenge that can often hurt the profitability and effectiveness of your service. With this type of transparent delivery, customers can see the status of an order themselves. They, too, have instant access to the most complete information possible, generating a level of confidence in the process on their behalf that most other organizations simply won’t be able to compete with.
In the modern era, don’t forget that carving a competitive advantage for yourself has less to do with what you do in a literal sense and is more about HOW you do it. The last mile experience is the foundation that your true competitive advantage will be built upon and with Glympse, you’ll have taken meaningful steps to make sure that foundation is as strong as it can possibly be.
If you’d like to find out more information about overcoming these and other last mile delivery challenges, or if you just have any additional questions you’d like to discuss with someone in a bit more detail, contact Glympse today.
