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How to Use Real-time Tracking Software for your Business?

By Vishal Thakur 24th August 2021

The world is currently undergoing a massive digital transformation fuelled by lofty customer expectations. For example, 97% of them expect to track orders and receive communication throughout the delivery process. 

Additionally, the pandemic turned out to be a catalyst for this shift and turned most expectations from a good-to-have luxury to a must-have necessity. And with the on-demand delivery market to reach nearly $160 billion by 2023, you can expect a lot more competition to show up. 

Most customers now expect contactless delivery at the snap of their fingers and business owners have no option but to go with the current trends. Whether you have a food business, a laundry business, a grocery store, or even a pharmacy— your customers now expect you to deliver items to them upon their online or telephonic requests. 

No doubt it’d require additional efforts but the scenario also brings in the opportunity for exponential growth. It brings you into the contact of a much bigger pool, and you get to experience growth like never before. 

So what do you do now with this great opportunity knocking at your doorsteps? 

You get delivery tracking software for your business.

How to Use Real-time Tracking Software

An on-demand delivery software, aka real-time tracking software, aka delivery tracking software, ideally, provides you with an end-to-end solution for all your delivery management needs.

Depending on how advanced the tool is, you can also expect it to aid with smarter fleet management, and work seamlessly along with your other business operations. 

Delivery management and tracking software are becoming increasingly commonplace, and you should know how to efficiently use one for your business. In this ebook, we provide you with a step-by-step guide on how to use these tools. 

We’ll take you through all the nuances of this software that often go unrecognized and also tell you about all the must-have features in such a tool. By the time we are done, you’ll not only have the knowledge of how to use one such tool, but you’ll know the kind of tool you’d want for your business and its optimum growth. 

So let’s get started.

Subscribe to a tracking software

subscribe to tracking software: Real-time Tracking Software

To start using real-time tracking software for your business, you need to first get one. While this is the most obvious step, it is when you get the first curveball thrown at you. You’ll encounter two options when it comes to getting on-demand delivery software. 

The first option will be a custom-built software that you create entirely from scratch and the other one would be off-the-shelf delivery software. The end goal of both these kinds is to take care of all your delivery activities, but there are a few key points you need to consider before making a decision. 

Let’s have a quick look at what the two types of delivery software are all about.

Custom on-demand delivery software

custom on-demand delivery software: Real-time Tracking Software

A custom solution is something that you need to develop entirely from the beginning. 

The most prominent advantage of custom software is that everything is built to cater to your specific business needs. 

If built properly, custom software will address all your issues and even transcend the simplified user experience for your customers.

However, all these features come at a price— one that can break the bank for you. Custom software development is a costly affair. If you wish to deploy the best of resources and talents on your delivery software, it might cost you north of hundreds of thousands of dollars. 

And if you go for a slightly cheaper software development infrastructure, then it beats the entire purpose of custom development. Additionally, a hole in your pocket isn’t the only reason you should look beyond a custom solution. 

Building software from scratch you’ll still have to keep investing in maintenance and up-gradation of the tool can take months and years on end. And with the continuously evolving market trends, it won’t be a smart move to go with a long TAT. 

And even when you have the delivery software at your disposal.

Prepackaged on-demand delivery software

A prepackaged solution, on the other hand, costs you a fraction of the custom solution, takes minimal setup time, and provides you with all the world-class features to efficiently manage delivery operations. 

Since we are talking about a specific business need, i.e., delivery management, a decent delivery management platform can easily avail you of all the features you need. Since prepackaged tools come with multiple tier plans, they enable you to pay for only the features that you use. 

It turns out to be a smooth transition to digital operation since you don’t need a heavy investment upfront. Another prominent advantage of using off-the-shelf software is that subject matter experts contribute to their development. 

These experts come with a lot of experience under their belt and they are well aware of your business needs. They take care of all the R&D needed to keep up with the evolving trends while you get to benefit.

How to Use Real-time Tracking Software

Integrate the software with your current infrastructure

How to Use Real-time Tracking Software

Now that you’ve figured out the software type, you can start by merging it with your current infrastructure and introduce synergy between delivery and other operations. Let’s go through all the different facets you need to take care of before sending out items for delivery.

Payment Integration 

How to Use Real-time Tracking Software: payment integration

The first thing you’d want to take care of is payment integration. Any advanced on-demand delivery software will come with multiple payment gateway integration options for convenience. 

It is then up to you to decide how many and which payment options you wish to provide to your customers. Our suggestion would be to give them as many payment options as possible to reduce the threshold for payment. 

Credit cards, cash on delivery, payment wallets, etc., are some of the options that you should always try to include.

Geofencing

Before you start off with the delivery operations, you also need to define the area of operations. Geo-fencing is a key feature in this regard. It lets you mark the areas in which you want your delivery executives to operate. 

With geo-fencing, you get to bring more clarity to your operations and also get to make sure that none of the delivery agents accidentally move out of the operation zone.

API Access

It’s highly likely that once you start using the delivery software, you will want to use more digital tools in conjunction with it. There are so many different areas in which a business may want to use digital automation tools. 

It might be for better analytics, communication, customer management, and so on. Your job is to ensure that your delivery management software comes with API access so that you can integrate your other business tools before commencing operations.

Field Templates 

Based on the kind of business you have, you’ll have multiple forms and fields needed to be filled by agents as well as the customers. Now would be the best time to assort all such forms with the right fields. 

The delivery management tool can help you in this case by providing you options for custom fields that help you capture information with ease. We are talking about addresses, dates, quantity, time slot, and so on.

Inventory Integration 

Finally, you’d also want to integrate your inventory with the delivery management software. If you already have an inventory management tool then you only need to integrate it with the delivery software. 

If not, then you need to look for a delivery tool that would also let you keep track of the inventory. With the inventory synced with the delivery tool, you get to prevent a lot of unwanted confusion down the line

Complete the setup for delivery operations

How to Use Real-time Tracking Software

With the rest of things in sync with your delivery software, you can now start working towards provisions for deliveries. It includes deciding the kind of interactions you want the customers to have with delivery agents, how you want the delivery agents to interact with your business, and so on. 

Let’s go through the few things you’d want to keep in order in this regard.

Do you want to send out notifications to customers when the agents get out for delivery, or when the package is about to reach them, or any other time, or all of them? These are some of the questions you’ll have to ask yourself to design the best customer experiences. Once you have the answers, set up the custom notifications accordingly.

Decide Upon The Proof Of Delivery 

There are multiple ways you can ensure the completion of the delivery task. It can be through the customer’s digital signature, having the delivery agent take a picture upon delivering the package, scanning barcodes, or a combination of other such actions. It goes without saying that the delivery software you use should come with the option to record all these metrics to facilitate smoother transactions.

Agent Wallet

Your delivery agents will be responsible for most transactions that take place during operations. Therefore, it’s a smart idea to keep track of all the transactions done by individual delivery agents. An agent wallet lets you do exactly that. However, since it’s not a commonplace feature across delivery software, you need to keep an eye out for it before subscribing to a delivery tool.

Agent Capacity Management 

Automation tools don’t consider human limitations a thing until you tell them about it. This is why you’ll have to tell your on-demand delivery tool about the capacity per delivery agent. You can decide upon a number based on all the variables affecting your delivery business, and then feed the same information into the tool. Doing so will negate overburdened delivery agents during peak hours as it can lead to unpleasant customer experiences. 

Watch the delivery software In action

How to Use Real-time Tracking Software

With everything set up and taken care of, now is the time to see the delivery software in action. The extent of the advanced capabilities of your delivery software will determine how smooth and efficient things remain. The automation will take over while you can monitor operations. Here are a few things that can ensure streamlining of operations:

Route Optimisation 

As an order is placed and assigned to a delivery agent, the agent app will show them the optimum route to the destination. The top-notch delivery software considers various factors such as the type of vehicle, traffic conditions, and number of traffic signals along the way, among other things to come up with the best route possible for agents. The route optimization feature not only introduces pleasant customer experiences but also enables your business to utilize resources in the most profitable way.

Real-Time Tracking 

Modern-day consumers are restless. They want to stay updated with the status of their order every second. The real-time tracking feature satiates their desire of staying informed all the time. It gives the exact coordinates of the delivery agent to the customers and, in turn, there are a lot fewer queries for your customer support executives. Real-time tracking also gives you superior control over operations with the real-time information of every delivery agent at your disposal.

Communication Process 

Sometimes, just the knowledge of a delivery agent’s real-time location might not be enough for customers. In such cases, you need to establish communication channels between the agents and customers. Live chat and call options are among the most popular and convenient ways to do that. It once again eliminates a lot of friction between customers and businesses stemming from unclear communication.

Collect Feedback 

Every customer-centric business needs to listen closely to what the customers are saying. Feedbacks are a great way to get some actionable advice to improve and grow your business. Feedbacks collected by the delivery software can give you a great deal of insight into how satisfied the customers are from the entire experience. Make sure it’s easy to collect feedback through your delivery software and also monitor them carefully.

Improve and Grow 

How to Use Real-time Tracking Software

Things may or may not be running smoothly after the previous step. In any case, you need to look into all the data collected by the on-demand delivery software and identify the areas of improvement for your business. Here are a few features of on-demand delivery software that can help you with improving upon existing operations.

Behaviour Monitoring 

Managing a remote field workforce can be challenging. You don’t always know how they are conducting themselves on the ground. And since most of the customers interact only with this remote workforce, you need to ensure your fleet is at its best behavior when out for delivery. An advanced delivery software will tell you about your fleet’s idling time, rash driving instances, and other behavioral traits to help identify the areas of improvement.

Smart Analysis

Your advanced delivery automation tool will also give you a detailed summary of all the tasks augmented with intuitive graphs and charts. It helps you have a broader look at everything as well as deep dive into the details. Smart analytics also helps you keep close track of metrics that matter to you the most. You can set up notifications for these metrics to cross a particular threshold so that things don’t go out of control at any moment.

Fuel Efficiency

When you are overseeing delivery operations, fuel is always a key contributor to the overall success or failure of the setup. With smart delivery management software, you can keep a check on your fuel consumption, and therefore, your spending. The software can point out the areas where you can optimize operation to become more fuel-efficient and profitable in general. With all these features, it’ll be a lot easier for you to refine the operations and get more efficient at the delivery side of things.

Conclusion

How to Use Real-time Tracking Software

So we went through the five simple steps to use on-demand delivery software for your business. And you must’ve noticed how the inbuilt features of the tool dictate how successful your delivery business can be. 

And it should come as no surprise that a feature-rich delivery tool is a key to success for your delivery business. So the next step would be to look for a tool that comes packed in with all the advanced features, is easy to set up, and doesn’t break the bank. 

Tookan is an on-demand delivery software that just fits the bill. It gives you all the sophistication that we just discussed and more. It doesn’t take long to integrate it with your business infrastructure. And if you have any questions about its efficiency, then there’s a long list of happy and successful businesses using Tookan for their delivery operations. 

The names include the likes of Pizza Hut, KFC, McDonald’s, JSW Steel, Burger King, and so on. Tookan has got something for everyone right from a small startup to a well-established enterprise. 

The team behind this tool works tirelessly to bring in the most advanced capabilities and provide the owners as well as the customers an unparalleled experience. So while you are looking forward to using a delivery management tool for businesses, these are all the reasons why you should go with Tookan. 

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