Appointment Booking System for Deliveries
Improve the delivery customer experience with our proven delivery window appointment booking system. Get the balance right between providing a great customer experience and controlling your fleet’s operating costs.
Descartes enables your customers to self-select their delivery or service window appointments, based on your fleet’s availability, capacity and previous orders, only offering those delivery slots that are profitable.
Utilising continuous route optimisation, we generate delivery window appointments in real-time based on the best options for deliveries, e.g. alongside deliveries in the same area or where your fleet has available capacity.
Benefits
- Customers get to choose and select the best delivery day and time slot for them resulting in fewer missed deliveries / redeliveries and higher customer satisfaction.
- Enabling customers to select and know their delivery window at the point of sale means fewer abandoned baskets on ecommerce websites.
- As a retailer/delivery company you can offer green delivery slots around the same time another local delivery is being made.
- Deliveries are automatically smoothed across days and geographies, levelling workload and capacity issues. Some customers may not want a next-day delivery and may select a lower cost delivery slot in the future that better suits them.
How Descartes’ delivery window appointment booking works:
- The system considers factors such as road networks, traffic flows and delivery days alongside previous orders already in the system coupled with your delivery policies.
- It generates a number of feasible delivery window appointments, that can be scored and costed according to your requirements.
- You control the options presented to the customer. This can be done manually or automatically, you choose the appointment times that best align with your delivery cost management strategies.
This level of flexibility ensures you can cater to your customers' needs while maintaining efficient and profitable operations.
Features
Dynamic scoring
The system scores each delivery option considering factors like cost and service level. This lets you choose the options that best fit your needs and present those you select to your customers, creating a personalised delivery experience.
Real-time results
Customers will see a variety of delivery options at the point of sale presented in real-time.
Increase in feasible deliveries
Only viable delivery windows are presented after the system has considered all the factors including, vehicles available, current delivery capacity and external factors such as traffic data and geographical location.
Continuous optimisation
Because the system optimises routes after each order is received the delivery plan is always up-to-date and new delivery slots are quickly found and presented as options. You decide how far in advance delivery slots can be allocated.
Eco-friendly options
Easily identify and present to customers those delivery slots with a low delivery mileage that are environmentally friendly and more cost-effective.
Integrated end-to-end deliveries
From the selection of a delivery window appointment to delivery, customer notifications along the way, proof of delivery and customer feedback, you can manage all aspects of the customer’s delivery experience.
Customer Sucessess
“Descartes Reservations™ and Route Planner™ solutions were integral to our strategy of offering a more extensive, but unified delivery service. The advanced optimisation capabilities and architecture of the Descartes solutions were critical, bringing new delivery service options to our customers in an economically feasible way. ”
Andrew Gay - Systems Manager
Fulfilment costs reduced £1.8m
Increased delivery productivity 35%
Delivery windows provided at POS
“Working with Descartes, we’ve saved 13% on annual fuel costs, which equates to approximately 354,000 fewer miles driven.”
Lee Holmes, Transport and Logistics Director
Annual Fuel bill reduced 13%
Productivity improved 56%
Annual savings £2 million
“Redefining the Customer Experience in the Tyre Replacement Market”
Jobs/van/day increased 194%
Mileage reduced 13%
Fleet size 400+
“We were impressed by the investment and support that Descartes put into this product and the roadmap. This technology has allowed us to be agile, forward-thinking and work optimally with our fleet with benefits on costs, sales and satisfaction across the business and with our customers. ”
Edward Corbett - Head of Programme
Delivery capacity increased 25%
OTIF deliveries increased 15%
Fleet size 500+
You may also be interested in
Delivery Route Scheduling
The concept of delivery route scheduling is to determine which delivery vehicle an order should be transported on and the best order in which a delivery vehicle should make its deliveries.
Route Optimisation
Use clever mathematical algorithms and artificial intelligence to dynamically optimise delivery routes from the latest road network data in real time.
Delivery Tracking
Enable customers to track the ETA of their own deliveries and avoid the "where's my delivery?" telephone calls with reliable delivery tracking.
Last Mile Delivery
Improving customer satisfaction with your deliveries, from delivery slot selection to customer tracking apps and digital proof of delivery with our last mile delivery services.