What do consumers want out of deliveries? It seems like an easy question, but as the world of delivery gets more competitive, the answer seems to elude more and more businesses.

According to DispatchTrack’s research, consumers universally want the ability to track their orders. They also want the delivery to show up at the right time — neither late nor early. If the delivery needs to be rescheduled, they want the process to be quick and easy, rather than laborious and frustrating.

No single study can paint the complete picture, but the findings are pretty telling. Ultimately, it all comes down to trust. Whether you’re a retailer fulfilling e-commerce orders or a beer distributor making the rounds to big-box grocery stores, customers need to trust that deliveries will be made at the right time.

Needless to say, actually delivering at the right time is crucial. But trust isn’t just about hitting an ETA window; it’s about giving customers a reason to be confident that when you make promises, you’re actually going to keep them. Making that possible starts with last mile visibility.

What Should Visibility Mean?

People often throw around the word visibility to talk about GPS tracking of trucks during the day of delivery. But this kind of tracking, even if it looks attractive, is yesterday’s visibility. It doesn’t remotely go far enough. Not to mention that giving customers this type of visibility has the potential to do real brand damage when delivery runs go wrong.

Today’s visibility is much more substantial: it’s the ability to visualize how your last-mile logistics plans are unfolding in real time, captured in a single glance so that potential obstacles can be avoided proactively, not reactively, after a delivery goes off track. Today’s visibility means making full use of the right data, at the right time, and disseminating it to the right people so every delivery is seamless, predictable and accurate.

That’s no mean feat — you need order status updates from drivers for every delivery, visualization of every truck and route on a map, live ETAs that update in real time, and the ability to spot exceptions and issues without digging around for them. Again, it’s a matter of the right data, in the right place, at the right time.

Today’s visibility means tracking deliveries and making decisions at the speed of business. For instance, when potential late deliveries are spotted at a glance, you can proactively call customers to let them know, and determine if the delivery needs to be rescheduled. Without seeing a potential missed ETA at a glance, there’s essentially no way to make that happen.

By the same token, once this level of delivery visibility is achieved — the kind where you actually know what’s going on in real time — it’s easy to turn it around and provide better visibility to customers. They might not see everything you’re seeing (and shouldn’t) but you can provide them with live ETAs and updates. When customers can see the status of their orders themselves (without having to call in to ask), they can be much more confident that their deliveries will arrive at the right time. And that’s good for the brand.

Challenges in Building Trust

Delighting customers is about more than just hitting ETA windows; it’s about making promises and keeping them. This means delivering at the right time, in a transparent way, and staying flexible on the day of delivery so that you can respond to whatever unexpected events might crop up.

It’s easier said than done, which is precisely why consumer frustration with deliveries is at such a high point now. What makes this so challenging to get right? There are a few things at play:

• Estimating delivery times is a huge challenge. Without properly factoring in service time, historical traffic patterns, and differences in driver speed, ETAs will be off for the entire route. 
• True visibility is hard to come by. To be sure, GPS tracking is easy, but getting enough information to actually understand deliveries as they’re unfolding is no mean feat; it requires connectivity across the board. 
• Supply chain disruptions are the norm. Even when plans are perfect, it’s critical to still have the agility to respond to the unexpected when it happens.
• Customers need information. When customers don’t feel like they have insight into deliveries before, during and after, it’s impossible to effectively build trust. 
• Legacy technology decreases efficiency. Getting the delivery process right from end to end isn’t easy — and it’s even harder when your tools and technology aren’t up to the task. 

No single concept or technology is a panacea, but when it comes to meeting the needs of modern consumers (and businesses), using last-mile delivery visibility to build trust can be a powerful tactic for overcoming some of the challenges above.

Here are a few concrete ways to turn visibility into greater trust and confidence from your customers — to say nothing of the improvements to your bottom line that come from repeat business.

• Combine artificial intelligence and real-time data to improve ETAs. With so many live data streams coming in regarding each delivery on a given route, AI-powered delivery software is a great tool to turn that data into increasingly accurate ETAs. By offering this to customers, they’ll feel like they actually know what to expect.
• Offer live visibility to customers. When customers are able to track their own deliveries from their own devices, they feel more confident that the truck will arrive when it’s supposed to. As a bonus, there’s less need for them to call and ask your customer support team where their order is.
• Get proactive about incident responses. In the past era of less connectivity, there was little way to know what was happening once deliveries were underway. With a fully connected last mile supply chain and the right visualization tools, the last mile is an open book. This allows deliverers to take an agile, proactive approach to spotting and managing the issues that can and do arise, even when plans are sound.
• Bridge the gap between planning and execution. With the right plans in place, deliveries should be low-anxiety. But with full visibility into what’s happening as deliveries are being carried out, you’re actually flexible enough to ensure that the execution is even better than the plan, by accommodating last-minute requests and changes with relative ease. 

When visibility is used in this way, delivery management is powered up from end to end. The result? You’re able to keep the promises made to customers, and show you’re working to deliver on them every step of the way. This doesn’t just fend off disruptions and minimize phone time; it actually builds the foundation for greater trust between you and your customers. In such a competitive delivery environment, it’s hard to overstate how important that is to success.

Shailu Satish is co-founder and chief operating officer of DispatchTrack, a provider of delivery-management software.