5 Route Planning Tips and Tricks for Businesses 2021

It can be challenging to send out employees to meet with your customers instead of having customers come to you. It means you have to worry about creating efficient routes for your drivers, all the while taking care of everything else involved with running your business. This is where route planning comes in handy.

What follows are five tips and tricks to help you plan routes for your employees.

1. Create a System to Assign Service Calls to Appropriate Technicians

If you run a service business, you’ll likely have to plan routes for your technicians. However, it’s not as simple as giving them directions to get to your customers. You also need to make sure that you’re sending the right technician for the job. Furthermore, some calls might be more urgent than others. So, how do you figure out which technician should go where, and how do you plan a service call route for them?

Instead of figuring all this out manually, your best bet is to use route planning tools. A route planning tool can help you tag service calls to ensure that the right technician gets assigned there. You can then plot the most efficient route between needs for each technician based on the tagged calls for them.

2. Plan Ahead so You Have Enough Drivers for Busy Delivery Times

If you’re in the delivery business, resource planning is essential. You need to know how many orders can fit in your delivery vehicles ahead of time and whether extra drivers are required.

To ensure that deliveries arrive on time and that no driver has more packages than they can handle, you should use route optimization software. This software will show you how many stops are possible within a specified period. In this way, you’ll know how many packages to give each driver.

3. Plan your Delivery Route and Then Print Shipping Labels

Two time-consuming tasks that delivery managers often have are route planning and printing and sorting shipping labels. To make things easier on yourself, you should consider planning your multi-stop route first, then save that route in CSV format. Next, add a column for delivery information and a column for the box label.

This will enable you to print the shipping labels in the order that the packages need to be delivered. As a result, everything will be sorted in proper order, and you can stay more organized.

4. Provide Your Drivers with Customer Details

Delivery service isn’t just about dropping off items to customers. It’s also about customer interaction. Your delivery drivers are direct representatives of your business, so they must represent you positively. To help them do this, you should provide them with details about the customers they’re delivering to.

The parties should include the customer’s name, contact number, and what the item is that they’re having delivered. You might also consider including information on the location they’re returning to and whether the customer has given any special instructions.

5. Keep Tabs on Your Delivery Drivers

If you pay your drivers by the hour or you have guaranteed delivery times, it’s essential to keep track of where your drivers are at all times. This will help you to reduce overtime pay and keep customers up-to-date on when their package will arrive.

Additionally, if you see that a driver’s route is taking longer than predicted, you can adjust their schedule. For instance, you could maybe give one of their stops to another driver or make changes to the driving route so they avoid high-traffic areas. In that same vein, if a driver finishes earlier than planned, you know to give them more stops.