A hungry customer is an angry customer.
People opt for takeaways because they want their meals now or at least in some times. This fact has put enormous pressure on the delivery men to fulfill their orders at a lightning-fast speed. However, considering the number of roadblocks such as traffic jams and unpredictable weather conditions, it does become difficult for delivery men to reach customers faster. Ultimately, it takes a toll on the food delivery business.
What are the Challenges Faced by Online Food Delivery Startups?
In the overcrowded ecosystem of online food delivery businesses, there is a number of problems for food delivery startups. As the on-demand business model can be applied to any niche, its popularity has peaked in the transportation and food industry.
Sensing the lucrativeness of the online business, there has been an advent of a large number of food delivery startups, striving to serve the customers right. However, some of these challenges haven’t been resolved yet.
Below are some of the crucial challenges:
Logistics Dilemma
The dependency of a food delivery business is based on two aspects-food and delivery. Lack of adequate planning can delay the functioning of a business. A restaurant is the beginning node of the business, and so, delay in the preparation of the order can’t be tolerated.
However, in a much broader picture, delivery service lies at the end of the node and so, when there is any delay from the restaurant’s end, delivery men have to cope up with the time.
Read More: How last-mile delivery solutions can disrupt logistics business?
Fickle-minded Customers
In the era of already established food delivery businesses, customers may only consider placing their orders from other business if these offer faster delivery or better discounts. Now, your business can not always rely on discounts, as the pricing also depends on the restaurant.
In such a case, it is the ‘fast-delivery’ that a customer is looking at. If you are offering them their food in a time-efficient manner, you can retain them. Meanwhile, if one of your competitors decides to develop a food and beverage distribution software to offer convenience, consumers are theirs now.
Handling Delivery and Logistics
The last-mile delivery may just seem as simple as picking up the order from the restaurant and delivering it to the address. However, there are a lot of things playing a crucial role. For example, you may have 150 delivery men spread all across the city.
Let’s say, a customer orders some dish from restaurant A and you have a delivery man waiting just outside the restaurant. However, your system does not detect this person and sends a request to a person at some distance.
Besides this, the delivery man decides to take another route because he fears traffic would cause further delay. In such a scenario, the decision-making process of handling the delivery and logistics is based on assumption and no real-time data.
Competition from the Established Player
Your food delivery business may sound unique to you. However, to bring it to a level that it makes a breakthrough in the consumer space would require some sort of customer-centric feature. And, when we are talking about food, we are talking about fast delivery.
If you are not able to compete with the bigwigs in terms of speed, your business may suffer.
Four Problems, One Solution – Food Delivery Route Optimization
Did you know?
All the problems mentioned in the above section can be tackled by only one solution—Route optimization for last-mile operations. Customers of today have become sophisticated, and they need to know everything about their food order.
Below are some of the other aspects that a customer expects from food delivery operations, which can be fulfilled using a last-mile food delivery software:
1 Fast Delivery
Using a food delivery route planning system can help a business manage all the delivery men and ensure that the order request goes to the delivery men, who can help achieve order fulfilment in a stipulated timeframe.
Read More: How Drone Delivery will change the landscape of Global Logistics
2 Accurate Order Tracking
Popular food delivery apps such as Zomato offers the detail of minuscule grade to its customers. Customers know if their order is accepted by the restaurant, being prepared, or is handled for the delivery. This helps customers trust the food business, given the transparency that it offers.
On similar lines, the food delivery system with route planning and real-time delivery tracking system helps the business to scale through customer retention.
3 Convenience
With the integration of a last-mile route optimization software, customers have the convenience to see the estimated time of arrival of delivery men and can plan their schedule accordingly. The food delivery application provides the option to make additional notes for consumers.
They can ask the delivery men to contact them directly when they are at the door and do not ring the bell, etc. This makes the entire food and beverage delivery application environment a conducive one for the consumers.
Scale your Food Delivery Business by Leveraging the Prowess of Last-mile Software
The biggest growth impeders for food delivery businesses are high cost of operation and lack of transparency and efficiency. In the era of smart apps, relying on phone calls for assigning orders may not sound like a good idea.
If you wish to scale your business, you need to know where your money is flowing. Currently, without proper planning of routes and delivery men, a lot of the expense would have been going for fuels. And, the fuel costs are never that cheaper. For every mile covered wrongly and for every U-turn taken in the wrong direction, your delivery men are causing unnecessary expenses.
To channelize this expense in the right direction, you need to integrate a last-mile food delivery system in your mobile application to offer your delivery men the convenience to take the best possible route.
Save on fuel cost – Accomplished.
Next comes efficiency. By very core, the nature of the online food delivery business is complex. It is meant to handle voluminous requests coming in from the hangry consumers. In such a case, the service demands a large fleet of delivery men. The last-mile delivery solution can help you seamlessly handle these many delivery men.
Complexity of business – Resolved.
Another crucial aspect of last-mile food delivery software is its data analytics. Since it is an online platform, you can have a dashboard view of the number of trips taken by your delivery men, apart from the fuel consumed, and the time taken to reach the consumers.
Data analytics – Obtained.
Now that you have savings and time in your hand, you can analyse the data generated from the platform and utilize it to scale your operations. You can either decide to venture into a new territory or boost the customer satisfaction by introducing a new feature to your food delivery mobile application.
Happy business scaling!
