The exclusive way to ensure customer retention, build the reliability of your business and your reputation as a quality construction company is to provide outstanding service. This is obvious. Achieving consistent and reliable services is the difficult part.
Whether it’s a B2B or B2C transaction, customers nowadays almost always rely on reviews, word-of-mouth and evidence of quality service to make decisions about who they engage with. Regardless of your operation’s radius, positive feedback speaks loud and clear, and can have a massive impact on the growth of your construction operation.
Each day, inevitable, and sometimes unpredictable disruptions prevent workers from carrying out the primary tasks, managing orders, and fulfilling deliveries as productively as they could. These delays are sometimes inevitable, but with the right system in place, they can be avoided, or the delays caused minimised.
So how can you focus on improving your operation, making it a better organised, more efficient, streamlined process for your team and your customers?
Powerful digital route planning, optimisation and monitoring systems can reduce the time spent planning and managing routes manually, allowing this time to be spent elsewhere in the business. Similarly, digital order management can speed up the entire order-to-payment process, with each stage feeding into the next, resulting in a smooth process that has deliveries processed quicker.
If your customers are kept in the loop and can benefit from a smoother, more convenient ordering process, loyalty will be built and your reputation as a consistently reliable and quality service provider will come as a result.
This article will break down the benefits of a digital system for managing orders, planning routes and executing deliveries from both your perspective and your customers’.
Digital Order Management
Align each of your sales order processes, from the web or e-commerce stores, telesales, fax, email or text so they seamlessly run into our system.
From here, you can plan daily and weekly routes and automate the progress from order placement, picking, packing & loading, driver tracking, proof-of-delivery, invoice creation and payment processing. Automatically-adjusted stocks ensure your inventory management is optimised through the entire process.
An organised, digital ordering system with key stages highlights any mistakes or delays, ensuring order fulfilment is maintained.
Route Planning & Optimisation
Our planning feature takes deliveries into a single screen, and the ‘drag & drop’ function allows you to drop each delivery onto the desired route.
The Route Planner indicates route types & stop types in different colours ensuring that the planner can use these visual indicators and plan appropriately. Any unassigned/skipped deliveries from past show up, ensuring no order falls through the cracks.
Appropriate icons indicate the status of each delivery; from creation to packaging. Achieve a bird's eye view over each delivery, with real-time updates. Your planner can work in parallel with the picker and packer, and allocate orders to routes while they are still being picked/packed.
Click on each tile to see extensive delivery information; customer info & specific client details, costs, items etc. This again eliminates the opportunity of error, resulting in a smoother workflow.
Plan for up to a week in advance, with standing orders and routine stops being automatically filtered into the workflow, so your team don’t have to manually enter them each week.
Using complex algorithms that take into account customer-specific delivery windows, RouteMagic will automatically calculate the quickest route for a driver once the orders have been allocated to his vehicle.
These calculations ensure specific ETA's are adhered to, reducing emissions and driving times in the process whilst promising each delivery is fulfilled.
Live updates from the field improve response times to those inevitable or unavoidable delays that slow down your drivers and result in missed ETA’s.
Each order for each route is set up in a tile, and colour indicators let your office team know when a delivery has been made.
Any proof-of-delivery reports are instantly accessible, highlighting any changes to orders that your drivers or customers have logged.
Customer Self-Service & Automated updates
With our client portal module, your customers can place their orders, oversee the status and receive updates without having to contact your customer service representatives.
This lets your customers access the information they need more conveniently, so your teams can reduce the time spent manually updating them.
Reinvest this time and effort, while your customers can access all of the records they need to stay in the loop.
Better service for a more reputable business
With a digital system in place that aligns your various ordering methods, and integrates your site and stock management systems into a single, sequential, process, you can minimise errors and mistakes while planning orders, speed up the delivery process whilst ensuring each delivery is made as per the order and customer requirements.
If deliveries are consistent, accurate, and punctual, your businesses’ reliability will ensure growth and an expansion of your customer base, and ultimately your profitability.
If you’d like to speak with one of our team members about your operation, which areas you want to see improve, or you want to discuss your plans for growth and the potential for RouteMagic to help you achieve those goals, then you can contact us using the details below.
Email: Paul.Harding@mobile-enteprise.co.uk
Telephone: 07984 685 403