Visibility is vital in the grocery delivery game. Here’s why.

Welcome to our Grocery Delivery Lessons series, where we give you key insights into how best to build a grocery delivery service that works for customers, drivers, and grocers. Let’s get started:

We’ve all been there: After placing an order online or booking a visit from the cable guy, you get a delivery window of 9am to 3pm. But who actually has the time to spend 60% of their day waiting by the door?  

A 2018 survey, conducted by YouGov and GT Nexus, found that 80% of consumers will change their shopping habits if the brands they’re shopping online don’t provide them sufficient visibility into their purchased goods in transit. With groceries — particularly with varying COVID-19 restrictions in place — the need to know where your order is and when you’ll get it is nothing short of critical.

But here’s the good news for grocers looking to enter the world of delivery: We’ve found the best way to address these consumer concerns, and it’s twofold. 

• Accuracy

• Visibility

Customer disappointment comes from unmet expectations. Most grocery delivery vendors only allow users to select delivery times from standardized time slots, which can be as wide as two hours and still end up deviating from actual arrival times. In order to compete, grocers should provide a solid estimation based on customer preference, other orders in the queue, fleet status, and predicted traffic.  

Of course, the occasional delay is inevitable, which is why grocers must also offer a live interface for customers to track their driver’s location every step of the way. Users should receive timely updates to the ETA of their order and full transparency when it comes to the cause of the slowdown. 

Generating such precise estimates in real time requires a highly-sophisticated dispatch and routing engine, with strong prediction capabilities. But with such technology in place, grocers of any size can ensure the customer always gets a good arrival time estimate and transparent information throughout the delivery. 

A smooth delivery operation is one that both anticipates and addresses all of the various hiccups that can arise during that fateful last mile. Tech makes that happen.

With an intelligent last-mile delivery solution, grocers are able to guarantee delivery customers the same high quality of service they’d receive in-store, without having to grapple with the logistics of building a delivery operation from scratch. 

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