As a delivery business owner, you encounter a new challenge every single day. Let’s say you provide your driver with a seemingly faster route. But the driver gets stuck in the sudden traffic, causing a delayed delivery. Or a customer requests a last-minute change in the delivery time, disrupting your pre-planned schedule with no prompt availability of drivers.
Dealing with these types of instances manually is not only time-consuming, error-prone and tiring but also affects your overall efficiency and productivity. Add to that the bad customer experience, and what you get is damaged business reputation & goodwill.
The result? Your business hits a phase of stagnation, finding it tough to scale up.
That’s when switching to a robust delivery route planning app can help enhance processes and widen your business operations. Before we find out how, let’s understand what a delivery route planning tool is.
What Exactly is a Route Planner App?
A route planner software takes care of planning the most efficient and optimized routes for you, making your everyday deliveries smoother. It is much more than the standard tool that maps the perfect route from Point A to B. The app provides you with cost-effective and shortest routes with unlimited stops, leveraging its modern, automated technology and algorithms.
At the same time, you can also manage your orders, employee shifts and schedules more strategically with route planners. That eliminates the scope of human errors, saving you considerable time, resources and money.
Whether you are an established delivery business or an individual operator, here’s how a route planning app can broaden your delivery operations:
12 Ways a Delivery Route Planning App Can Scale Your Delivery Operations
1. Multi-stop Deliveries
With delivery route planning software, you can plan and add as many stops for your daily order deliveries as you need in merely a few clicks. It can be 10, 20, or even more than 100. What’s more? You can plan such unlimited stops for all of your delivery drivers at one go without any errors. The icing on the cake? All these routes are optimized to fulfill orders faster.
2. Faster, Simpler Route Creation
While the manual planning of routes takes an eternity to complete minus the accuracy, a route planner generates routes within a span of a few minutes. And since the tool considers past records and live geo-location details for route creation, there is unmatched precision and efficiency, letting you complete more deliveries.
3. Saving & Duplication of Routes
Do you use specific routes frequently? Then you can save your regular routes or make a duplicate of them and share those with your delivery drivers. That eliminates the need to add the same routes every day, saving you a lot of time while accelerating the entire delivery process.
4. Smart Input of Addresses
All the leading route planners have an in-built smart input system to auto-detect the correct locations as you are typing the addresses. Thus, even when there is a spelling mistake or selection of a wrong stop, the system can identify your intentions depending upon your past address history and current location. That not only ensures accuracy but also speeds up the process significantly.
5. Powerful Route Optimization & Navigation
Using a route planner relieves you from the trouble of finding the best and shortest routes possible for each order manually. The system is capable of doing that automatically through its smart optimization algorithms. Moreover, it also offers efficient navigation to achieve on-time order fulfillment.
6. Hassle-free Excel Imports
Have your route plans organized in the excel sheets? With route planning software, you can upload those entire sheets or selected columns with a few simple clicks. Once done, you get to schedule all your deliveries, thoroughly optimized, weeks in advance as per their expected delivery dates.
7. Streamlined Driver Management
The better you manage your drivers, the more orders you can deliver every day. That’s why most route planners come in with centralized functionality for driver management. That way, you can add and remove drivers without hassles, set a default location for each of them, as well as update their schedules in real-time. So even when a driver fails to report at the last minute, the orders reach customers on time.
8. Driver Dispatch in One Click
Route planner apps provide you with a dispatch dashboard through which you can send the optimized planned routes to your drivers with a single click. The drivers receive the information either via texts or emails based on their preference. The entire process hardly takes a few seconds, enabling the drivers to complete more orders.
9. Prioritization
With route planning software, defining priorities for every order and delivery stops en-route becomes easier than ever. Since the tool allows you to consider time windows, constraints, and client-specific requests while prioritizing, you’re spared from missing or delaying critical orders. That increases customer satisfaction, bringing in more business.
10. Proof of Delivery
From digital signatures of clients to attaching photos and delivery notes, there are multiple ways for your delivery drivers to record proof of delivery on-the-go using a route planner. That accelerates the confirmation process, eliminating the cumbersome paperwork.
11. Integrations
Have the habit of using popular GPS navigation tools, such as Google and Apple Maps, for planning routes? Don’t worry. You don’t need to abandon the habit since most route planning software offers seamless integrations with top GPS for faster output and continuous tracking. That helps maximize your operations.
12. Reporting & Analytics Tool
Using a route planner for your everyday deliveries can help you collect a significant amount of data about all your processes. And leveraging the software’s analytics and reporting tool, this data can be converted into actionable insights. That, in turn, can help enhance your operations at the right time, which leads to business expansion.
Which Route Planning App Should You Get For Your Business?
Given the boom in technology, the market offers you plenty of choices when it comes to delivery route planning solutions. However, only a few tools provide better features and unparalleled performance.
One such tool is Upper Route Planner. It comes in with intuitive, easy to use design, automated route planning with multiple stops, optimization, smart navigation, reports and insights, and more. Besides, there is a dedicated driver mobile app, saving you added costs, fuel, and time. All while improving your productivity.
Another great option is MapQuest. It is a popular free delivery routing software that helps you plan and optimize routes for your daily order deliveries.
Ending Note
With consistent advancements in technology, the route planner apps see continuous evolutions and turn more robust. From optimized routes to centralized management of drivers, scheduling, data and processes, the tool streamlines all of your daily delivery operations. That boosts your overall efficiency and productivity, leading to faster order fulfillment and happier customers.
All of that, when put together, brings in repeat business and opens up more avenues for customer acquisition, helping your business scale new heights.
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