Parcel - January/February 2009 - (Page 29)

him know his delivery date and window. Customers can then use their touchtone phone to conﬁrm the appointment or request a change of date. All customers also get a call on the day of delivery from the driver team that’s handling their shipment, usually about 30 minutes to an hour before a truck will be at their home. When you combine this with the introductory email and optional emails and text messages some clients opt for, it may sound like an awful lot of contact. However, we believe these communications are a key reason we’ve been able to make our productive stop rate so high — about 96%. the client at the end of the sur vey.) Our systems also plug those results into per formance-related char ts and graphs that are shared with clients — and used by our company to ﬁne-tune future per formance. Some have asked us why we don’t make this survey more personal by using “live” surveyors. We’ve tried that, and it turned out we got a better response rate using the automated method. Considering that the automated method was also cheaper, it proved Our driver teams also use scanners to record and communicate any delivery exceptions that merit a return — wrong color, product defect, etc. — so our clients and their customer service departments can quickly begin corrective measures. Hand-Held Devices Admittedly, hand-held scanning devices aren’t cheap. A robust one can cost $3,000. However, their potential applications and advantages are more than worth the expense. Each morning, our driver teams use these devices to scan items onto trucks as they’re being loaded. They also scan items off of the trucks as they’re delivered, and they capture customer signatures once deliveries are completed. All of these scans are immediately transmitted to our company’s delivery management system, which constantly updates individual trucks’ delivery schedules and modiﬁes each appointment’s ETA as appropriate. If a truck’s modiﬁed ETAs fall outside of the delivery appointments that were scheduled, the system instantly alerts a dispatcher, who can then begin the appropriate exception management sequence. Our driver teams also use scanners to record and communicate any delivery exceptions that merit a return — wrong color, product defect, etc. — so our clients and their customer service departments can quickly begin corrective measures. Finally, the customer service signature on each hand-held device prompts our company’s delivery management system to begin the customer survey process, a step that’s one of the most important and productive in the entire home delivery equation. to be a win-win scenario. Web-Based Tracking What did any one of us do before the very aptly named “web”? Throughout the delivery experience, our company’s web portal is a vital communications thread between everyone here and key stakeholders in our clients’ organizations (including sales personnel, store managers, customer service reps and top management), granting password-protected, real-time visibility of everything. It’s not a substitute for the customized reports, phone calls and emails that also take place. But it does minimize the work involved with keeping everyone on the same page, including customers, if clients desire. P.S. On a ﬁnal note I’d like to make a brief product plug — one for the value proposition of better last-mile systems. While managing the last mile may seem comparatively less complex than the monumental effort required to shepherd products across the world it is still anything but simple, especially if you want to do it well. It may rock the corporate boat to request more advanced hardware and software funding for this function. But if our experience is any indication, it’s a move you, your company and your customers will never regret. Jonathan Turner is Chief Information Ofﬁcer for 3PD Inc. (www.3pd. com), one of North America’s largest and only national providers of last-mile delivery and logistics services. The company makes nearly ﬁve million home, business and job site deliveries per year via a North American Network that includes nearly 500 locations and 1,500 delivery teams. p Automated Surveys Whoever said what you don’t know can’t hurt you was obviously never in the delivery business. While our local managers would love to be everywhere at once and supervise each team making a customer delivery, the truth is they can’t. Customer feedback serves as our eyes and ears — and as an objective point of reference for our clients. We’ve programmed our system to call and do an automated phone survey within 30 minutes of a driver team’s departure from a customer’s house — a time when most people are likely to still be home and have their delivery experience top-of-mind. The sur vey takes less than two minutes, and individual results are immediately sent directly to our company and to the client for whom the deliver y was made. (Sur vey respondents also have an oppor tunity to leave a voicemail that goes directly to www.PARCELindustry.com / JANUARY - FEBRUARY 2009 29 http://www.3pd.com http://www.3pd.com http://www.PARCELindustry.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Parcel - January/February 2009

Parcel - January/February 2009 Contents Editor’s Note Going Global Transportation ABCs Mastering Management Regional Alternatives Practical IT Best Practices Packaging 12th Annual UPS Rate Analysis Navigating Dim Weight Charges More than Just a Postscript Understanding RFID PARCEL Counsel New Products Reality Check

Parcel - January/February 2009

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