A customer’s ideal day is only one part of the equation. If everyone wants a different day, you’re left with a van driving through one end of San Jose with three crates and returning the next day to pick up two more. This challenge is also visible in your customers’ homes. Maybe it’s a water bottle rack outside the garage, a produce box sitting crooked against a flowerpot, or a pet food carton under a porch light with a peeling delivery label.
Routinely delivered items get easier to track once customers understand which days your service is available in their area. Your business benefits from fully loaded vehicles and predictable routes, while your customers don’t need to guess if your arrival time will be in the morning or evening.
Regional Delivery Days
Routines require a map, the latest list of repeat orders, and a clear picture of where the van goes in your area. San Jose is big, and if one household in downtown San Jose, another in East San Jose, another in Willow Glen, and another in the industrial zone near the airport all want different days, you’ll quickly run into a scheduling nightmare.
Instead, consolidate frequently visited locations into logical neighborhoods. If Tuesday is the water bottle exchange for your one post code, collect the empties at the side gate and replace them with full ones on the exact same door mat. If Thursday is your pet food delivery day, keep your route focused on that neighborhood. Don’t drive across town just because you added an extra order to the mix.
If you’re making this transition, let your customers know what days are available to them and within what time frame. A two hour window allows your customers to set out an empty refillable cleaning solution container before it sits baking in the sun next to a hot metal mailbox.
Customer Schedule Changes
Some long term customers love the day they’ve been accustomed to. They’ve built routines around it: bringing the weekly produce box to the fridge on the front porch, or hauling the pet food bag through a gate with a noisy latch before the morning school drop-off.
Not every customer needs to keep their current schedule. With Routed and Pre-Scheduled Delivery, you have the opportunity to provide customers with an alternative, nearby time slot, rather than treating them as a special case.
This communication should include:
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What the new service day is and what the delivery time will be
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When this change starts
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How to request an alternative time in their area if they have a conflict
Make sure you’re offering limited options. Sometimes, it makes more sense to move a Thursday pet food customer to a Monday stop when there are several other Monday stops in the same area rather than to maintain a Thursday exception for just that customer. The customer continues to receive a consistent delivery, and the driver doesn’t have to do a mostly empty route with only one bag rattling in the back of the vehicle.
Route-Friendly Skips
Pausings and skipping delivery is an expected part of any recurring delivery operation. Someone might be away on vacation, a restaurant might close on Thanksgiving, or a person might have two bags of dry food hidden under the stairs. Things start to get tricky when these kinds of changes are communicated informally via email, voicemails, and sticky notes posted on a monitor.
Establish a firm deadline for changing a delivery date before a route is generated. For instance, if a customer asks to pause delivery by 12 p.m. two days prior to delivery, then there is plenty of time to remove the customer from the order sheet, modify the delivery vehicle load, and avoid having to haul additional stock all day. It also ensures the driver doesn’t arrive at a gated community with no shaded parking area to place a delivery of ice-cold beverages.
When an order is skipped, it shouldn’t necessitate a make-up route. Instead, schedule delivery for the next planned delivery date for that area, reduce the amount of product being delivered, or pause delivery temporarily. These choices maintain the integrity of the route while giving customers some degree of flexibility regarding their orders.
Reliable delivery can often make the difference between a smooth transaction and an unnecessary delay, which is where providers such as Gold Rush Express Delivery come into the picture.
Gold Rush Express Delivery
910 Bern Ct #150, San Jose, CA 95112
(408) 292-7300
Driver Access Details
Local delivery vehicle logistics
Get a handle on how each address is accessed before creating the delivery route. In the densely populated areas of San Jose, it’s important to determine where a vehicle can park, what delivery instructions the customer left, the codes for gated communities, and whether deliveries can be left outside a side yard. Missing this kind of information could mean a brief delivery turns into a 10-minute delay, which throws off the delivery schedule for the remainder of the day.
Schedule Rollout
After deciding on new delivery days, batch-update the recurring delivery orders and monitor them during the first few weeks of the new schedule. Track any customers who consistently request different delivery days, why they request those changes, and which delivery routes are nearby.
Before preparing the delivery for the next route, review the list of stops against the actual delivery routes to identify which pausing requests are still on the packing sheet.
