Is Route Planning Important For Businesses?
For years, businesses have innovated ways to meet their customers’ expectations. But in this new age, it seems like there are other factors that they should also consider.
Regardless of what your business provides—either services or goods, you must have an idea of the driving direction to your customers’ addresses.
In this way, you could deliver what you promised to these people. If you fail to do so, your reputation would be stained, and you’ll lose your credibility in the industry.
How can route planning help my business?
There are tons of reasons why you should invest in route planning tools. And we’re going to discuss some of them below:
Low transportation cost
If you’re managing a mid-sized business, there is a chance that you have a full schedule. And this is usually accompanied by multiple destinations to your customer base.
Without a concrete plan for handling multiple trips, you’ll be seeing yourself facing enormous expenses towards the fuel for the company’s vehicles.
Not only that, but you’ll also gain insight from the company’s reports about the wasted time from driving around the blocks since your drivers are lost or in the middle of nowhere, which you all could’ve used for providing more customer service or sending more deliverables than the initial quota for that day.
Improved productivity in the workplace
Wasteful practices or those that consume a lot of time could be detrimental to the company’s overall performance.
If you’re the owner, you should be aware that efficiency and timeliness are the keys to the success of your current projects.
There’s a reason you have customers, and one of them is because they trust that you’ll deliver the solution to their needs.
But how could you do so when the staff is occupied with other tasks? Tasks that are not even part of their job just so the business could stay afloat.
Yet if you have a route planning tool, we bet that there’ll be an increase in productivity within the company. And tasks would be completed promptly, too.
The idea of rushing to finish the backlogged duties due to failed route planning would never happen again because you have already outlined the best routes that take little time, don’t waste too much fuel, and is easier for your drivers to navigate.
Of course, you could’ve just opted to use Google Maps. Yet, if you’d analyze the situation, this application only works on a stop-by-stop basis. So it’s not possible for a company that needs to reach 50 or 100 destinations in a single day.
In this way, the route planning tool that you should utilize should consider the following for an adequate flow of work and avoid backtracking incidents:
- Timeframe
- Number of stops
- Driver shifts
- Stop changes
Better customer service performance
Since we’ve mentioned that route planning helps decrease expenses, it means that you’ll have a sufficient amount to allocate to your products/services instead.
For a fruitful business venture, you must know how to satisfy your customers’ needs by providing better customer service and improved goods/services.
By combining these two, you’re allowing the company to grow more in size as 96% of customers tend to shop again with retailers who provided a positive buyer experience, according to the latest 2015 delivering consumer report.
Investing in enhancing customer service performance would ensure that no customer is getting left behind. There is always someone who could support them with their complaints or assisting them with the purchasing and delivery processes.
