Gilad David Maayan is a technology writer who has worked with over 150 technology companies including SAP, Oracle, Zend, CheckPoint and Ixia, producing technical and thought leadership content that elucidates technical solutions for developers and IT leadership. LinkedIn profile
While there is no certain way to create a successful last-mile delivery strategy, this article proposes creating a strategy that meets specific consumer needs. By following a blueprint designed to balance consumer needs with the resources of the company, you can create standard procedures that can withstand fickle trends and unplanned changes.
What Is Last-Mile Delivery
Last-mile delivery is the final step required to fulfill an order. The length of the road doesn’t matter—It can be a mile, three feet, or across states. As long as this path takes the order to its final destination—to the end consumer—the delivery is recognized as a last-mile delivery.
Why Does Last-Mile Delivery Matters
Last-mile delivery is responsible for creating a lasting customer experience. If end consumers receive their order in a timely, efficient, convenient, and cordial way—last-mile delivery can result in positive customer experience. If important consumer expectations aren’t met, last-mile delivery will result in negative customer experience.
In a time when one customer can instantly spread their dissatisfaction with a global network of people, one bad review can turn into a massive virus of bad PRthat infects prospective customers across the Internet and beyond. Once the damage is done, fixing the reputation of the company might be expensive and time-consuming. In the meanwhile, the company suffers from a decrease in sales and monetary loss.
How Last-Mile Delivery Influences Consumers
Nothing can ruin the customer experience quite like last-mile delivery. Nowadays, if a website is slow to load, a consumer can move on to another one. If they insist on staying because they’re emotionally attached to the product, they can tinker with a poorly-designed website until they finally press that desired buy button. But if something gets in the way between this product and the consumer? There would be hell to pay.
Consumers develop an emotional connectionto brands and products even before they make a purchase. Once a product is bought, it becomes a possession of the consumer. While possession has always granted people certain rights, the digital revolution has tipped the scales towards instant gratification.
Now, as soon as money is exchanged, consumers expect to receive their physical order almost as fast as a digital order. Any last-mile delivery delay or inconvenience might cause a visceral emotional reaction that can send the consumer on a borderless ranting spree. Thus, negative last-mile delivery usually translates into bad PR—online and offline—and damaged bottom lines.
Six Consumers Expectations in Last-Mile Delivery
The overall experience of last-mile delivery can be broken down into six factors. Each of the following factors represents a need the consumer expects to be met during last-mile delivery.
Convenience
Consumers expect to be offered a variety of delivery methods even before they order the product. The variety of the available delivery methods influences the decision to purchase a product, and consumers have shown a distinct preference towards the most convenient delivery method.
It is important to note that ultimate convenience relies more on customization rather than speed. One consumer may benefit from one-day delivery because they need the product urgently. Another consumer may want to time the delivery to two days hence in preparation for a planned house party.
The key goal here is to provide consumers with a variety of delivery options needed to help them incorporate the delivery into their time, rather than the other way around. You can do that by running last-mile delivery in-house, managing your own warehouse and drivers fleet. Or you can partner with a third-party provider.
Speed
Consumers expect fast and prompt deliveries. A prompt delivery means providing the consumer with their order on time without delays. Research indicates that failure to deliver on this promise can cause the consumer deep emotional distress. If you’re running your own fleet, you can use technological solutions such as route navigation optimization to ensure your drivers are always prompt.
While fast can be a subjective term and needs to be defined individually by each company, there are certain standards companies need to meet in order to compete in the market. Companies like Amazon have become world leaders in last-mile delivery and standardized fast delivery options such as two-days, one-day, and same-day delivery.
If you don’t have the resources to provide fast delivery in-house, you can take advantage of the available last-mile delivery services offered by third-party providers. Many third-party delivery providers offer end-to-end solutions that should cover all your last-mile needs. You can also incorporate a variety of third-party solutions into your delivery infrastructure. Be sure to make sure all the tech tools you choose can integrate seamlessly into your system.
Aesthetic
People are often prompted not to judge a book by its cover. However, most of the time people do exactly that. Consumers, like any human being, are subjective to universal signals. We see an envelope icon and we understand it represents emails. We see an old man dressed in red and we recognize him as Santa Claus. We see a woman figure over a door and understand it designates the room beyond as the ladies’ room.
People are naturally visual and see the world in symbols. The way a package is designedand packed often tells a consumer a lot about what they’re getting. At the branding level, appealing package design can spell luxury or high quality. A branded package design can hint or tell a consumer what type of product they can find inside.
Done right, the package design can create a connection between consumer and brand that may even lead to saving the package. However, a package doesn’t have to be branded to meet consumer expectations. It does need to be properly packed to show care for the product and care for the consumer expenses. Receiving a product in a squished package tells the consumer you don’t care enough to protect the product the consumer spent hard-earned money on.
Efficiency
Efficiency is the primary strategy of achieving any goal in the western world. Modern consumers often manage busy lives, juggling multiple tasks and priorities. To handle all of their responsibilities at home and at work, consumers need to be efficient. People continuously look for productivity tools to help improve every aspect of their life.
Today’s consumers are tech-savvy—and that includes almost every generation alive. From baby boomers and their overshadowed generation X siblings, the notorious millennials and their responsible generation Y counterparts, and the generation Y children who were born into a connected world and can’t even imagine life without technology as a source of instant gratification. There is hardly anyone who doesn’t use technology to become more efficient.
While receiving an order is often regarded as a fun activity, many consumers don’t have the time nor patience for an inefficient delivery experience. Consumers want to know their order is on its way and will arrive promptly. Integrating with tech solution such as last mile tracking can infuse transparency into the last leg of the delivery and inform consumers of the location of their order in real-time. Efficient delivery experience translates into a positive customer experience.
Conduct
In brick and mortar shops, sales representatives are the face of the brand. In e-commerce and delivery-oriented businesses, the delivery drivers serve as the face of the brand. In both cases, consumers expect, at minimum, a cordial treatment from the personnel that hand over the product. While the delivery drivers don’t have to be smiling rays of sunshine, they should present a standard of a professional manner as defined by the company.
Companies that manage an in-house last-mile delivery operation can dictate the standard manner all drivers must adopt and every aspect of the handoff—from the type of outfit, where to park the vehicle, how to greet the customer, and how to present the order. Tech-savvy companies can also give their customers the ability to rank the drivers and their satisfaction with the delivery.
However, companies that rely on third-party providers have less control over this aspect, if at all. As a service, last-mile delivery often comes at a fixed model with zero customization options. That means relying on the provider to manage their drivers properly. You will have no authority or power over the drivers and no way of implementing any changes for the better. If the driver, for example, throws your carefully packaged order over a fence, you will not be able to prevent this driver from continually ruining your reputation.
Communication
Since the invention of 24/7/7 live customer service via chats, consumers expect instant gratification on the communication level. Time has become the number one commodity, a priceless resource that should be used and prioritized to maximum capacity. Not because time is money but because time is living.
No one wants to waste their lives waiting for a customer service representative. No company wants to appear so slow in its service as to be compared to a sloth. Implementing smart technology solutions can help improve all levels of communications in last-mile delivery operations. Improved channels of communications can serve as an open channel for delivering efficient service that promotes a positive customer experience.
Incorporate Consumer Expectations into Your Last-Mile Delivery Strategy
It is possible to operate a business without a strategy or plan. You can wing it, and the success of the venture will rely on your intuition. However, creating a strategyand a plan can help ensure you take steps in the right direction. With a plan, nothing is vague or mysterious. You have pre-defined goals to follow and specific measurements with which to count your success.
When you create your strategy, you can incorporate as many of the delivery expectations as possible. For most companies, it is nearly impossible to achieve the highest level of quality in all delivery expectations. A strategy can help you evaluate the capabilities of your business and define the minimum and maximum level of delivery quality you can achieve.
Once you have a roadmap ready, you can opt to create your own in-house delivery operation, delegate the responsibility to a third-party provider, or implement the strengths of both delivery models into a hybrid strategy—a unique delivery infrastructure modeled to fit your business DNA.
It’s almost Halloween, and if your town is anything like mine, your neighbors’ yards are already littered with ghosts, witches and tombstones.
Clearly some of us enjoy giving other people a scare. Just as clearly, some of us enjoy getting a scare.
I’m not one of them. I hate haunted houses. I avoid scary movies like the plague. And I once jumped on top of several eight-year-old members of the Girl Scout troop that I was leading in order to escape a haunted hayride’s zombie.
However, that doesn’t mean I’m not capable of (wo)manning up and facing my fears, especially it’s for a good cause, which is why ALAN’s executive director, Kathy Fulton and I recently put our heads together to create this short list of some of the scariest perceptions that people have about disasters and disaster relief.
Scary Perception Number One: “A Disaster Will Never Happen To Me.”
When people live in certain areas (i.e. far away from a hurricane-prone coast or earthquake fault lines) it’s easy for them to assume that they’re protected from many types of catastrophes – and to become dangerously casual about making disaster preparations or heeding safety warnings.
Frankly, this attitude scares the heck out of us, because if the last few years have taught us anything, it’s that disasters can take a wide variety of forms and strike at almost any time. And the people who fail to plan – or to take shelter/evacuate as requested – are much more likely to find themselves in harm’s way.
Scary Perception Number Two: “It’s Okay. The Government’s Got It Covered.”
There are so many things wrong with this second perception that it’s not even funny. For one thing, not every disaster survivor qualifies for FEMA government assistance. For another, some survivors aren’t eligible for as much government assistance as others. Plus it can take some time for FEMA to process all of the requests for assistance that it receives and to conduct all of the necessary inspections that need to be made before it can provide funds. And even then, these funds are limited.
It’s a similar story for disaster survivors who are fortunate enough to have homeowners’ or renters’ insurance.
That’s why the humanitarian response organizations that provide food, hydration, shelter and other supplies immediately after a disaster hits (and the non-profit organizations that help survivors fill in the short-term and long-term gaps that government assistance and insurance reimbursement don’t cover) are so essential. It’s also why the people who support them are an answer to prayer.
Scary Perception Three: “We’re Too Far Away To Be Of Help.”
One of the laments that we often hear from potential transportation, warehousing and material handling equipment donors is, “We’d have loved to help you with relief efforts for X community’s disaster. But we didn’t have any locations in the area.”
The sad thing is, we probably could have used their help – and so could many of the humanitarian organizations that we support.
When push comes to shove, these organizations can’t afford to split hairs about where their donated relief supplies come from, especially if those supplies extend or enable their relief efforts. They might even NEED those donations to come from another part of the country because many of their closer potential product donors may have already been tapped out.
In light of this, never underestimate the value of a long-distance contributed logistics offer. Relief supplies are often located much farther away from a disaster site than you might imagine. And the help that you’re offering might be just the ticket.
Scary Perception Four: “It’s Been A Few Months (Or Years). So Survivors Of That Particular Disaster Don’t Need Our Help Anymore.”
If individuals and communities recovered from disasters as quickly as their particular disasters stopped making headlines, life would be much easier for everyone. However as any disaster survivor can tell you, that’s rarely the case.
Disaster recovery is a super-long process that’s usually measured in months or years rather than days or weeks. And many of its costliest and most work-intensive stages like clean-up and rebuilding don’t start until long after the news and camera crews have left.
So don’t ever think that there’s no way you can help a community just because the disaster that affected it happened quite a while ago. Chances are, that’s when your compassion and assistance will be needed the most.
Scary Perception Five: “Helping With Disaster Relief Won’t Pay The Bills. As A Result, There’s Nothing To Be Gained From Our Business Making A Financial Or In-Kind Donation.”
While it may not initially seem like you have anything financial to gain from helping a community in need, nothing could be further from the truth, especially if that community is home to some of your employees, customers, suppliers or business operations.
The people who live in these communities can (and do) remember who showed up for them when times were tough – and so do many other members of the purchasing public. In fact, according to recent article in the MIT/Sloane Management Review, multiple studies have shown that corporate donations ultimately attract customers. And according to another recent article in the Harvard Business Review, consumers tend to favor companies that donate a larger share of their profits.
Is this why so many of our country’s most successful organizations are also some of the most philanthropic? Possibly. However, if that’s the case, it’s okay by us, because when generous businesses do what they can to help a community get back on its feet more quickly, everybody wins.
Fear Not
There’s far more I could add to this story. But time and Halloween-candy buying obligations don’t allow me to discuss them all. Besides, I want to end this story on a caring rather than a scaring note.
So I’ll leave you with this: Even though disasters seem to happen with frightening regularity, I’ve actually become a far braver person since joining the ALAN family several years ago. It’s taught me that when horrible things like hurricanes, tornadoes and pandemics happen, a lot of wonderful people show up to help – and reminded me that when things are at their most harrowing, there are always extraordinary people like you ready to come to the rescue.
Just don’t ask me to go on a spooky hayride anytime soon.
"Spot solutions are needed to help a company get through a sudden shock, but the only way to ensure agility and resilience going forward is by addressing systemic issues in a way that is intentional and focused on the long term and brings together clear priorities, well-designed repeatable processes, robust governance, and a skilled team." - Harvard Business Review
An article published by McKinsey & Co. in August observed, “over the past year, many companies have made structural changes to their supply networks by implementing dual or multiple sourcing strategies for critical materials and moving from global to regional networks.”
This structural change pivots on the difference between low cost and best cost. The shift extends through Tier 1 Suppliers through lower tiers. The intent of a low-cost supply chain strategy is to present a low price to customers. A best-cost strategy adds factors beyond cost to the equation, like risk, lead time, and responsiveness.
The McKinsey article continues, “Ninety-seven percent of respondents [to the survey] say they have applied some combination of inventory increases, dual sourcing, and regionalization to boost resilience.”
We offshored, losing sight of the associated risk, for decades. Time to learn what near-shore, re-shore, regionalization, and localization mean.
As global supply chains become increasingly complicated, there are now more digital connections and business collaborations in the global shipping industry than ever before. Holding freight data in opaque, disconnected silos and relying on outdated methods of communication is not just inefficient - it’s unsustainable.
The global supply chain is no longer a linear process. Whereas before it was simply about moving freight from point A to B, now there is now a multitude of options for transporting that freight, each with its own unique set of capabilities and constraints.
So, what do shippers really want from their logistics service providers? Two things: accurate information at their fingertips and the ability to conduct business and transact - without having to pick up a phone or wait for email replies. Digital customer-facing freight execution platforms are the answer, collecting the most relevant and up-to-date data from carriers on one side, and providing shippers with a simplified and accelerated process on the other.
Digital freight execution platforms also provide shippers with a unified view of their shipping options, giving them the data they need at a glance to make an informed decision for any particular shipment.
Plus, as we continue to navigate uncertain waters, shippers are increasingly seeking solutions to increase resilience. After all, if there’s anything the last few years have taught us, it’s to expect the unexpected. The organizations that were able to pivot fastest came out on top. The availability of accurate data and solutions to action that data are key building blocks to resiliency in the face of new and unexpected challenges. Supply chain optimization, especially today, hinges on accessible, up-to-the-minute data, shared and acted on to keep freight moving as successfully as possible.
Digital Freight Execution Puts Power in Shippers’ Hands
Increasingly, freight forwarders and logistics providers are giving their shipper customers access to online freight execution platforms for just this purpose.
Largely unheard of just a few short years ago, online freight execution tools for shippers have quickly emerged to become a must-have for established forwarders to compete with startup digital forwarders. Logistics providers can no longer afford to go without offering this critical customer tool which enables shippers to access crucial freight data online, including timely visibility of their freight on the move. Their shipper customers have come to expect it, and it’s what’s needed to compete in today’s market.
Traditional methods of communication between shippers and freight forwarders can be slow and inefficient. Email and phone tag are not conducive to fast decision-making, and sales representatives may not always have the most accurate information about fleets, equipment, and routes. Digital freight execution platforms enable shippers and carriers to communicate in real-time, facilitating fast decision-making while eliminating the potential for miscommunication.
As digital conveniences proliferate our day-to-day lives (think of ordering food online, tracking your latest purchase, viewing your favorite shows on-demand, and so much more), it only makes sense that we should expect similar experiences in our work lives. That means that the traditional way of working in the freight industry, fraught with manual processes, phone calls, and emails, simply doesn’t cut it in today’s digital-first world.
What’s more, with timely freight data, shippers are better equipped to quickly address exceptions by changing transportation plans. Supply chain disconnections are costly. Responding to exceptions is critical to a smooth-running supply chain where shipments arrive at their final destination as planned.
“An organization's ability to learn, and translate that learning into action rapidly, is the ultimate competitive advantage,” Jack Welch
One of the outstanding things about a digital freight platform is the ability to integrate various functional modules to enable shipment data to be used and shared. These may include tracking and visibility, warehouse inventory, ocean shipments, freight rates, and even finance information, enabling a shipper to pay invoices online. Customer-facing online portals are an important and effective way to facilitate a shippers’ access to key shipment information, improving visibility and productivity on all fronts.
Partnering for Sustainable Success
Partner programs are another important aspect of connected digital freight platforms. This openness to integrate with a broad range of shipping industry businesses, such as technology or service providers, offers shippers the ability to access their partners through their forwarders’ customer-facing freight execution portal. This enables the shipper to have a comprehensive and complete flow of key freight data based on their unique needs and partners.
For example, if a shipper is using a real-time transportation visibility (RTTV) system provider, they can work with their forwarder to integrate the RTTV solution with the forwarder’s digital platform. This is only possible when the forwarder has a partner program enabling integrations.
All parties involved with a shipment can boost productivity and enhance value for the customer when they’re digitally integrated with freight transaction operational areas and partner providers. Technology companies who try to wall off access to the data they manage for their customers and their functionality have it backwards: they might create an appearance of their own business interests being protected in the short term, but long term, they’re either going to hurt their customers, or, more likely, their own product development roadmap.
Recent supply chain challenges have pushed BCO shippers and their logistics partners to take a much closer look at cargo flows. Accessible, convenient, and transparent freight data is now the expectation and necessary to control costs and keep cargo in view for optimal supply chain management.
Digital freight execution is the wave of the future, and it's already making a big impact in the shipping industry. Streamlining data flows by building out connectivity helps to bring greater logistics harmony that allows shippers to optimize their overall freight ecosystem.
America’s posture in world trade, and the underlying supply chains, are more than robust. According to the U.S. Census Bureau and the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, the United States balance of trade in goods and services deficit dropped to $70.6 billion in July. Exports hit the highest level in real dollars since tracking began over 70 years ago. During the recovery from Covid,, with reshoring and shifting market demands, are holding imports flat..
This success is happening despite the global disruption caused by Ukraine. Expect our labor shortages to continue. Expect wage pressure to continue. Expect inflationary pressures across the supply chain to continue.