The transportation and logistics industry is one that touches nearly everyone you meet, whether it’s on a professional or personal level. This is extremely evident if you work in last mile delivery. From meal kits and birthday gifts to medication and vaccines, ensuring prompt delivery is key to not only keeping your customers satisfied but to keeping life running smoothly for people all around the globe.

For many businesses, the best option for ensuring that customers receive their deliveries on time is to entrust the delivery process to a third party courier. Whether it’s due to a business’s personnel limitations, the lack of their own fleet, or a desire to eliminate the need for initial investments when first entering into the delivery space, many businesses rely on third party couriers to complete their deliveries.

If your business is looking to enter into the third party courier industry or attract more businesses to use your services, there are a number of ways that you can make your delivery business stand out.

Provide Superior Value

As with any business decision, companies approach their transport and logistics decisions through the lens of profitability. By hiring a third party courier to take on their deliveries, their goal is ensure that the cost of your services is outweighed by the revenue those deliveries generate.

Your own profitability is at the core of how much you choose to charge your customers, which in turn determines their profitability. For that reason, optimizing your own company’s efficiency is key to attracting shippers to your business and convincing them to hire you.

The efficiency of any shipping operation hinges on route optimization. By ensuring your routes are laid out in the most efficient way possible, you save on nearly every expense associated with making deliveries. More efficient routes allow you to save on fuel costs, spend less on vehicle maintenance, and even complete more deliveries without hiring additional drivers. This not only saves you money directly but allows you to price your services competitively to demonstrate value to your customers without cutting into your profit margin.

Offer Transparency Into Your Operations

While operating efficiently is in the best interest of both your company and the businesses  you serve, you can’t expect every customer to assume you’re doing all you can to handle their deliveries as quickly and efficiently as possible. Whether it’s genuine curiosity into how your operation works or a desire to verify that your company is their best option, you’re likely to encounter clients who want more insight into your process and how you can ensure their deliveries are being dispatched and delivered in the best way possible.

In these situations, a bit of transparency can go a long way toward alleviating any concerns and keeping your customers content with your services. While you don’t want to give them access to every detail of your operation—maintaining some secrecy for your secret sauce, as it were—offering visibility into your processes can ease any concerns and even reaffirm the value your company provides.

If possible, consider providing select clients with limited access to your route optimization tools so they can see firsthand just how much thought and technology goes into planning, optimizing, and dispatching your routes. WorkWave Route Manager, for instance, allows users to create guest roles for customers at their discretion. This provides them with “view only” access to the orders associated with their unique login, allowing you to give your customers insight into how their deliveries are optimized without pulling the curtain back fully. This can relieve any concerns your customers have and reaffirm their decision to use your services for efficient deliveries.

Focus on Familiarity

One factor that plays into decision making for businesses when choosing a third party courier is the courier company’s experience within their unique industry. Seeing that a delivery service has experience in the same vertical can ease many concerns for many businesses, especially if they operate in an industry with unique requirements or restrictions.

Think of someone who’s looking for a dogsitter. They may not need someone with experience caring for the exact same breed as their dog, but they’re more likely to be comfortable with someone who can show they’ve cared for dogs of a similar size, with similar specific needs, or with a similar temperament. At a minimum, they’ll likely want to know that the potential dogsitter has owned or cared for a dog in the past.

In the delivery business, different clients will be looking for different degrees or experience and familiarity depending on what you’ll be responsible for delivering. This doesn’t mean you have to have experience with their exact product or industry, but rather that you should be able to demonstrate familiarity and competence when it comes to their deliveries. A company in the medical field, for instance, would likely prefer that you have relevant delivery experience, but may be open to working with you if you can show you have experience with refrigerated vehicles and time sensitive deliveries.

Bringing It All Together

When aiming to work with a business in a new industry, it is always to your benefit to keep value and transparency in mind. Demonstrating your ability to adapt to changing priorities, optimize your routes for true efficiency, and take your client’s specific needs and parameters into account can build their confidence in your ability to complete their deliveries on time and keep their customers satisfied which, in turn, keeps your customers satisfied.

To learn more about how you can set your delivery business up for success by using route optimization software and how Route Manager’s Guest Role feature can help to build trust in your business, explore Route Manager and schedule your free demo today.

Author

Nicole Fevrin, Senior Product Marketing Manager, has been with WorkWave for over four years. She works on the Route Manager, GPS, and ServMan products. Nicole has over 21 years of experience in B2B and B2C Marketing in various industries and possess a Master’s Degree in Communication Studies. Her background industries range from ultra-luxury and cosmetics to commodities and home services. This range has afforded her a well-rounded perspective of customer insights and various business models.