There exists a version of a courier operation that looks great from an outsider’s perspective. Trucks drive, parcels are dropped off, deliveries are moving, and phones are ringing. But on the inside, it’s another story entirely. Dispatch is operating on one level of information. The drivers are operating on another.
The customer service team is answering queries they’re unable to fulfill because no one is communicating on the road. It’s that in-between, the lack of knowledge everyone has between each segmented business piece, that creates the majority of courier issues.
When Information Exists in Various Places
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It’s an easy enough notion to speak aloud. Everyone should know what’s going on. But in reality, courier operations evolve in layers. There’s a spreadsheet for this. A WhatsApp group for that. A separate invoicing system. Another for tracking. Each piece makes sense when it was installed into the operation. The issue lies when they don’t seamlessly communicate, and the second something goes wrong, a delayed driver, a missed stop, an ambiguous address, the system starts to break down.
For businesses seeking solutions, purpose-built courier software provides a means through which all these disparate pieces come back together through one-view live information that dispatchers and drivers, and management, have access to in real time with one another. It’s this newfound visibility that changes how decisions are made and how quickly they’re made.
The Dispatcher Problem No One Talks About
It’s behind the scenes and dispatcher effectiveness that connect to the information gap that’s most painful. A stellar dispatcher can manage a lot, but they can only manage as much as they have access to. If they need to get manual reports of where drivers are, or updates on their route come via texts that can be missed, or job updates aren’t changing in real-time only complicates the situation, the dispatcher is working in a vacuum.
The kicker: this leads to decisions that seem reasonable in the moment but complicate later efforts. Someone reassesses a job and hands it off to someone who is 15 minutes away but no one realizes they’re further away because no one has shared their current positions. One stop gets pushed off because it seemed like it was low-urgency when the reality is it’s not. These are small inefficiencies, but when thousands of deliveries occur a day, time is of the essence.
When dispatchers have real-time access to where drivers are physically, what’s happening on the road, traffic conditions, where they’ve just been flagged, and up-to-date jobs in the queue, their decisions become sharper and less guess-driven; in addition to time lost from minor inefficiencies, many secondary delays could be avoided.
What Drivers Experience When Everything Works
From a driver’s perspective, having one point of truthful information changes their day at work drastically. They’re handed their run sheet on paper in the morning but hope nothing changes by the end of it. If a stop cancels but it hasn’t made its way to them, they drive all the way there only to find out it’s no longer on their task list. If a stop comes in at their next location but they haven’t been notified yet, they find themselves caught backtracking after being told mid-delivery to swing by and pick something else up.
The underestimated amount of time lost due to uncertainty, as drivers call dispatch to verify an address, wait for dispatch to tell them what’s next or backtrack because nobody updated them, is shocking, but that time is almost instantly regained when reliable access to information keeps them updated and on track.
They can focus on driving (which sounds obvious but it’s not). They won’t need to go over ten stops instead of fifteen anymore because they’ve gotten sidetracked due to unknowns; anyone who has been on the road before knows how quickly time can slip away, without access to accurate information beforehand, that time continues to slip further away.
Customer Service Team Can Really Help
This doesn’t get talked about enough, but customer service teams for couriers are often set up for failure. A customer wants to know when and where their package will arrive, and a customer service rep has no idea unless someone has communicated their need within the system effectively, but what they’re giving is guesses based upon basic understanding which isn’t satisfying for the customer.
They get vague reassurances like “let me check and call you back”. They foster unnecessary frustration because no one knows what’s going on, and often, they don’t.
When there’s a unifying system under which everyone operates, customer service teams can pull up what dispatchers are seeing; they can see who’s working what job at what time and know exactly where they’ll be with an ETD (estimated time of delivery). It may not sound revolutionary, but it’s the difference between empowered customers who feel respected versus ones logged onto Yelp writing bad reviews before they hang up the phone.
The Bigger Picture Implication for Improved Performance Across Business
Beyond specific areas suffering most from lack of visibility/information and standardized decision making throughout a courier operation over time improves overall performance pictures across management’s expectations.
They can see what’s taking too long, who is fastest, where things tend to go wrong and whether businesses even meet what they’ve promised (to themselves or to clients). Without receiving more information from clients, when everything is standardised behind one digital interface, it allows for research assessments that all hold weight.
Meaning managers/operators can compare performance intentionally instead of after-the-fact shortcomings instead of having difficult conversations with clients about capability/availability/timelines/lack-of-service expectations, because they exist.
Those courier operations that get this right wind up finding their service gets better over time; complaints get fewer and employees aren’t so frantic trying to put out fire after fire but instead enjoy consistently predictable operations, making everything else easier, scheduling planned or unplanned needs becomes easier as does growth patterns or simply making it through a busy work day without incident.
It all comes down to this one theme: when everyone operates from the same field of play, with access to information, everything runs better.