With customers’ delivery expectations ranging from 1-2 days to a few hours, there is a lot of pressure on retailers, making it evident that delivery performance should be prioritized. An improved first-attempt delivery rate (FADR) is key to a stellar customer experience. To put it simply— it is a direct indication of successful deliveries made in the first attempt.
Also Read: Five Strategies to Reduce Return to Origin
Whether it is a retail or a CEP business, first-attempt delivery success can reduce costs involved in executing multiple deliveries (for the same order), storage of packages and management of personnel. However, achieving this is not as easy as it sounds.
What’s stopping retailers and CEPs from achieving a high First Attempt Delivery Rate (FADR)?
There are many challenges, including traffic, imprecise addresses, vehicle shortage, and delivery personnel’s route knowledge, to name a few.
Let’s talk about how these translate to logistics challenges
Legacy Routing
One major obstacle to achieving a high First Attempt Delivery Rate (FADR) is legacy routing. With rapid urbanization, manual routing plans just won’t cut it. On-ground challenges like traffic and road closures make manual routing strategies ineffective, leading to delivery delays and poor driver and customer experiences. Hiring more drivers and owning more trucks won’t necessarily achieve high FADR; it will only increase operational costs. The ability to accommodate on-demand orders is another challenge that retailers face. Adopting smart technology is the only logical next step for retail businesses.
Also read: What is a delivery Exception
Capacity Conundrum
According to Statista research, global retail sales in 2023 are $30 trillion and are expected to reach $32 trillion by 2026. Even though orders are high, they are usually spread throughout the year, except during the holiday and festive season. During these seasons, the volume of orders skyrockets. In the United States alone, the NRF predicts retail sales to be around $966 billion. With the ever-growing demand for faster delivery and more customers opting for online shopping, it becomes a Herculean task for retailers to manage their capacity without automation.
Broken Chain of Custody
In a multi-stop delivery involving both inbound and outbound legs, or a multi-leg journey, the chain of custody is a crucial tool for maintaining visibility. If any delay occurs at one of the stops, such as a sub-warehouse, and the chain of custody is not updated accordingly, this oversight can lead to missed delays in overall estimated time of arrivals (ETAs), directly impacting FADRs.
Failed Deliveries Due to Incorrect Addresses:
Research shows that 71% of retail businesses are aware that incorrect delivery addresses are one of the top reasons for delivery failure. As the volume of orders will grow, customers expect orders to be delivered on the first attempt, leading to decreased customer satisfaction and revenue.
Now, smaller and medium-sized retailers usually can’t afford reattempts due to capacity issues. Adopting a smart routing system with geocoding capabilities can greatly reduce this challenge for businesses.
By managing your logistics operations manually, you cannot deliver the orders on time. Hence, to increase the chances of a successful first-time delivery attempt, it is necessary to invest in a battle-tested all-mile logistics solution.
Reach New Benchmarks for FADR With Locus
Locus integrated all-mile logistics and customer experience platform for you to rely on from order to delivery. It has a host of modular, easily deployable solutions that boost FADR, including:
Dynamic Routing
Locus’ dynamic routing solution adapts to the dynamic nature of the current delivery era by factoring in 200+ real-world constraints and providing the most economical and fastest route for every delivery. Locus’ Route Planning Solution is also adaptive to accommodate ad-hoc orders on the fly and a new route plan is provided to accommodate this without compromising the SLA of existing orders.
Optimized Capacity Planning
Leverage a capacity planning system that helps retailers plan capacity ahead of time so that they can accommodate orders even during festive and holiday seasons. Plan capacity by factoring in holiday and driver time-off, making your capacity management precise and robust.
Accurately Pin Down Your customers’ address
Locus’ smart routing system is capable of robust geocoding that can convert incorrect customer addresses to precise latitude and longitude coordinates before dispatching of orders. Corrected addresses are sent to the driver who then leverages a Driver Companion App to get turn-by-turn navigation to the exact addresses. The application even shows the right entry point in the case of large apartments to avoid the hassle of waiting at the wrong gate and adding further to the delay.
Gain Uninterrupted Visibility From Dispatch To Doorstep
Configure custom workflows at each hub to include proof of delivery and chain of custody transfer to drive immediate visibility at each hop. Robust inbound and outbound scanning becomes a key element that fortifies every leg of the fulfillment against delays due to missing orders.
Why Locus?
Locus has been helping many retail titans like Croma, Lulu Group, and many others with optimizing logistics operations and improving FADR.
| SLA | Decrease in sorting time | On-demand routing | Logistics cost saved | Total Deliveries across the globe |
| 99.5% | 64% | <10 seconds | $300 million | 1 Billion |
If your delivery performance is taking a hit due to manual logistics operations or inefficient solutions, Locus may be able to turn things around for you.