How Integrated Online Ordering Software Can Improve Your Last-Mile Logistics

Throughout the past five years alone, food delivery services have steadily grown in popularity and necessity, with many restaurants rising to meet the demand. A primary reason is that diners love the perfect melange of restaurant quality and at-home comfort that food delivery offers. Backing up this claim, 63% of consumers agree that getting delivery is more convenient than dining out with a family. But as beneficial as delivery services can be, behind-the-scenes details like last-mile logistics can be expensive.

 Fortunately, implementing an online ordering system in your restaurant can improve last-mile logistics and help create an excellent at-home dining experience for your customers.

What Are Last Mile Logistics?

Last-mile logistics, also known as last-mile delivery, describes the transportation of goods from a distribution hub to their destination. The restaurant biz refers to the final miles of the delivery process where the order travels from the restaurant to your customer's front door. These logistics aim to get that delicious dish to your customers as quickly, efficiently, affordably, and accurately as possible.

A reoccurring challenge for many restaurant owners who offer delivery is optimizing their last-mile logistics and keeping costs low. Keeping your services affordable is crucial because the literal last mile of your delivery process accounts for 53% of your total "shipping" costs.

In conventional shipping, large delivery trucks carry bulk orders to one location. But food delivery trucks often have multiple orders to drop off, each with different destinations in different parts of town. This creates quite a challenge for business owners in the food industry. For one thing, many food deliveries are destined for residential areas, requiring extensive time spent on surface streets. The combination of a comprehensive delivery radius, lower average driving speeds, and frequent intersection stops means labor hours and gas mileage can pile up quickly. These factors come together to create one expensive yet necessary operation.

How Online Ordering Software Can Improve Your Last Mile Logistics

Heightens the Customer Experience

In the food service industry, everything you do is for the benefit of your customers. You cook delicious food to delight their palates, offer various dining options to match their needs and preferences and craft balanced menus to cater to every kind of eater. Everything is to ensure that customers have an excellent experience and return to dine with you repeatedly. 

Incorporating online ordering software to improve your last-mile logistics can positively impact your customer's experience, especially customer communication. Maintaining stellar customer communication is vital to creating loyal customers, helping show them that their experience and opinions are important to you.

During delivery, you can use your online ordering system to communicate with your customers expertly. Keep them updated on their order status from when it leaves the restaurant to when you're at their doorstep. Maintaining an open line of communication with customers also helps ensure the delivery arrives on time, as drivers can ask for clarification or special instructions when they reach the destination.

After the successful delivery, you can also follow up by sending customers automated messages to ask for feedback on orders or even offer customer appreciation discounts. Going the extra mile works wonders; HubSpot shares that 93% of customers will likely make repeat purchases with excellent customer service companies.

Helps You See a Complete Picture

A crucial part of having a successful delivery service is ensuring your process is as efficient and streamlined as possible. One of the ways you can whip your process into shape is by integrating online ordering software. Incorporating such software into your delivery operations gives you a complete picture of the delivery experience and how you can improve things.

With it, you can collect invaluable data on your restaurant's performance and make data-driven decisions that improve your last-mile logistics. You can improve delivery times, reduce mistakes, identify where slowdowns and errors happen most, and even monitor how long each delivery takes.

Offers Route Optimization

Restaurant owners can vouch that one of the top challenges of last-mile logistics is getting deliveries to customers quickly. There are multiple ways to navigate local streets, but delivering hot food can be challenging when traffic, construction, and road closures interfere.

 Integrating an online ordering system with the existing apps in your arsenal can help your drivers safely beat the arrive-by time. Not only can algorithms calculate and identify the fastest routes for drivers, but they can also monitor slowdowns to suggest delivery time slots to customers and adjust the estimated arrival in real time.

Improves Driver Safety

Being a delivery driver can be very gratifying, and each drop-off means you're brightening someone's day just by delivering food. Still, the job can also be dangerous. In a 2019 report, the Bureau of Labor stated that food delivery drivers accounted for 1,005 of 5,553 workplace fatalities in America. It is essential to ensure the safety of your employees, whether they're delivering the food or cooking it. Not to mention, safety protocols can drastically impact your last-mile logistics.

We recommend integrating an online ordering system with GPS technology and communicating seamlessly with your drivers' smartphones to ensure safety. This simple action tracks your drivers' location in real-time, allowing you to know their location. This information can help you assist them in the event of an accident, vehicle breakdown, order delay, or inability to find the destination.

Deliverect

Improving your last-mile logistics has a host of benefits. And if you're looking for a comprehensive online ordering system to streamline your last-mile logistics, Deliverect can help. Our restaurant management platform seamlessly integrates your current POS system, inventory, and order management.

If you want to learn more about how our platform can streamline your business, contact our team today!