Running a delivery business brings lots of challenges. Managing clients, paying employees, maintaining vehicles, bearing operational costs, and whatnot. Among these, one of the bigger challenges is to improve overall sales.
In order to up-graph your delivery business, it is necessary to keep updated about the latest trends and adopt smart ways to make the processes easy. One of those smart ways is to opt for a route planning software that helps you plan a multi-stop delivery route.
In this blog, we will discuss route planners and how they can help you boost your company’s revenue.
What is a Route Planner?
Route Planner is a software or an application that helps you plan and optimize routes. Now the question is, what is the difference between a route planner and Google Maps? Basically, Google Maps is a navigation tool, not a route optimization tool. It just gives you driving directions from point A to B, B to C, and C to D.
On the other hand, route planner apps optimize all the destinations and provide you with the most cost-efficient route that saves delivery time and fuel costs. So, in this case, the most efficient route is A to C, C to B, and B to D.
This way route planner plans the route and generates scope for a bigger revenue.
5 Ways to Boost Revenue using a Route Planner
There are a number of pros of using a route planner that directly affects the revenue of your delivery business. Below are the top 5 ways to boost revenue using a route planner.
1. Forget Manual Work and Paperwork
Planning a route could be hectic if you have more than 10 routes, whereas Google Maps is no more useful because of its limit of 10 destinations only. Also, you cannot allot multiple drivers to multiple routes simultaneously in Google Maps.
This brings a necessity to switch to manual route planning. You will need details of the delivery address and available drivers. This paperwork consumes a lot of time and creates room for many human errors.
To its solution, a route planner eradicates paperwork as you can directly add or select an address from the map. All you need is the list of delivery addresses and available drivers, or you can even import an excel sheet. Now, the route planner will create an optimized route in no time.
Quick dispatching features of route planner apps help you dispatch drivers to the delivery destinations in no time. All you need to do is schedule routes, assign drivers and dispatch them quickly. Some apps provide smart scheduling that helps lets you modify jobs and reassign them to someone else.
2. Reducing Cost Per Delivery
In a delivery business, fuel charges hold the major part of expenses. Reducing it can directly help you save on fuel charges. By optimizing routes, you get the shortest path covering all the destinations, so less fuel is used, and you can directly save on fuel charges.
Also, with the optimized routes, delivery drivers do not need to roam around the city to find addresses. They get clear directions for their whole route ultimately, saving fuel in the same way and helping you manage your finances.
3. Save time, Deliver More
By planning routes using route planner software, you save a lot of planning time. As a result, It lets you assign delivery drivers faster, and they can deliver faster. So, in a nutshell, saved time helps you reach more destinations and deliver more people.
Saving time can help you economically as well because you get an extra time window to plan other things and find ways to grow your business.
4. Stay Updated With Reports
If you want to run your business smoothly, it is necessary to be aware of your company’s figures. The route planner app lets you generate your company’s performance reports at different time intervals.
As a business owner, you can get a bird’s eye view of your drivers’ activities. If they are not delivering packages in the time-bounded for each delivery by the route planner app, it means they are wasting their time somewhere else. Thus, you can get track of their daily activities and help them improvise.
Route planner also allows you to track performance reports of your delivery drivers. It gets you the statistics like the number of deliveries, time taken for each delivery, date, proof of delivery, missed stops, and much more.
You can keep track of your company’s sales reports. Get P&L reports to know your revenue better and take steps to incline your company’s growth. Also, you can download the PDF file of these reports to share it with the concerned person.
5. Gain Customer Recognition
“Customer is The King,” and we know it. The growth of your business is not possible without customers’ support, and to gain customer support and recognition. You need to be at the top in providing services.
Using a route planner helps you optimize routes so you can reach the delivery destinations before time and deliver parcels faster. Faster deliveries mean fewer customer inquiries. Customers appreciate it if they don’t need to follow up with the delivery executives regarding the status of their packages.
Delivering in less time lets you deliver more packages in a day. So, it directly boosts your revenue.
Getting customer recognition is important as satisfied customers will prefer your services only. Also, there’s a possibility that their positive response and rating help attract more customers and eventually grow your business and sales to a bigger scale.
To conclude
Scaling up your delivery business needs a lot of hands like using updated equipment, managing time, using a route planner software, getting customer recognition, staying updated with the ongoing market trends, and knowing the figures of your company.
Using old business methods might not help you much compared to using technologically advanced methods. So, the sooner you start implementing new business strategies, the sooner you can upscale your graph of revenue.