If you have a weekly meal delivery business, you must be thinking how do I do these deliveries in an efficient manner.
You are rightfully worried - it’s not easy! After all delivering 50-60 locations on a single day is no joke.
To put things in perspective, a UPS driver would do about 120 -180 deliveries per day in a well defined dense route. So, doing 50-60 random locations few days a week is challenging and may take long time if you don’t carefully plan it.
So, here are some of our tips to plan your routes efficiently:
Divide and conquer: Don’t make a big route. Make 4-5 hour long routes. You can do one in the morning and another one in the afternoon. You can assign each customers to either morning and afternoon route to keep things easy.
Cluster first, route second: That’s actually a legitimate mathematical concept to solve multiple routing problems. First, put the addresses on a map and visually identify clusters of addresses. It’s easy to do it on the map than looking at addresses.
You can try QuestTag dispatch to find these clusters visually:
Create the optimal route: For each cluster of addresses, create the optimal route - i.e. the sequence of delivery stops that gives you the shortest distance and time. For that you can use many routing tools. At QuestTag, we offer a free tool that allows you to find the the optimal route with up to 20 stops. Here is the link, check it out.
Send ETA to customers: Once the route is created and assigned to a driver to start, you can then send ETA to the customers on the route. Letting them know when your delivery is coming. You can offer a 30 mins window for delivery.
It’s better to send a live delivery tracking page with updated ETA and a way to contact the driver incase customers want to change the time.
With right tools in place, it’s easy to manage your delivery routes in an efficient and customer friendly way.
Remember a bad delivery experience can ruin the taste of your meal.