Own a courier business? You’re managing multiple inbound and outgoing streams. Bookings come in via telephone, email and web form. Drivers need jobs and job detail. Customers want to know where their jobs are and when they will arrive. You need to invoice. When each function lives in a different system, or worse in notebooks and spreadsheets, the real work is managing information instead of deliveries.
Courier businesses don’t start out with integration issues. When you have five drivers and 30 deliveries a day, copying information from one system to another seems manageable. Someone books the job via telephone, writes it down in the dispatch book, texts it to the driver and then later, enters it into QuickBooks to send for billing. It works. Sort of. But it creates issues down the line when the business scales.
When Information Lives in Too Many Places
The first sign of integration woes is when someone asks “where did you see that?” multiple times a day. A customer calls asking for delivery status. The person answering can check in the dispatch system, then text the driver, and then maybe check on a spreadsheet to see if the job’s completed. Sure. The information is there. But it lives in three different systems/sources.
This becomes costly in ways that are not immediately apparent. Employees spend massive amounts of time searching for information that should be at their fingertips—how many deliveries did we complete last week? Well, now they have to go through five different spreadsheets counting up from here to there to find out. Want to know how many deliveries were profitable? Good luck finding out from booking, which is in another system, never mind job completions.
Data errors multiply when information is transferred between systems. Someone enters the delivery address in the booking system. Later, it gets entered into the dispatch system and then again when creating the invoice. Not to mention different spellings of street names or address numbers getting lost in translation—a missed 10th street apartment 10B here and a wrong 2nd street number 10 there leads to failed deliveries and unhappy customers.
Where Booking and Dispatching Are Done With Separate Systems
This is where things go wrong—taking the booking for a job and getting it dispatched to a driver. Someone takes all the information needed to fulfill a request—pickup location, delivery address, contents, size, time requirements, special requests—and then all that information gets conveyed to a dispatcher who needs to pass it off to drivers.
In separate systems—in systems not speaking to one another—dispatchers book info via phone or text. They get repeated requests from drivers asking “what’s the apartment number?” or “where do I go after this delivery?” The information is right there—booking—but it has no where proper to go without someone manually passing it along.
Courier management software with integrated booking, dispatching and driving dynamics helps everyone do their jobs without having to send information through inefficient means like phones and texts. A job gets booked and details go right to the dispatcher. Requirements and special notes show up right away. Drivers know exactly where they’re going and when since they’re getting the information in real time on their devices.
Time-sensitive deliveries expose integration issues between booking and dispatching the most. When a last minute call comes in requesting a delivery that must be picked up in 30 minutes, it’s hard for dispatch not to stop what they’re doing, find the closest driver and call/text them the job details. It adds time to operations. Multiple calls must be made to confirm which driver is available. However, with integrated systems, an urgent request can be flagged automatically and match up with the closest driver with minimal delay.
When It’s Time to Bill
When it’s time to bill, someone has to match the completed jobs with what’s needed in the invoice creation line.
In separate systems this means checking delivery information against whats needed for billing (booking system), figuring in what’s been delivered (gratuities) or additional charges (waiting time) that might have been picked up by noting them down at job completion means additional trips to bring this information to billing.
That’s how revenue is lost—jobs completed but never billed because information didn’t make its way across necessary systems. Additional charges for waiting time or multiple drop offs never happen because there’s no system linking notes from the field back to something billing would use.
This involves massive amounts of time spent sitting at a computer generating invoices when all that should happen is a completed job equals a generated invoice with all charges included.
Payment tracking gets complicated by different systems as well. Which invoices are paid? Which are not? How much does a customer owe? When financials are separated from operational details, getting this info involves going through multiple platforms at once to explain answers.
This means the customer calls asking why their invoice number arrived at this dollar amount; explaining it requires checking detailed accounts in multiple tracks/systems.
What Fails When Volume Increases
Integration issues that are frustrating when 50 deliveries occur per day fail exponentially occur when 200 per day occur.
The manual transfers and transmissions of information needed to do certain jobs aren’t an inconvenience anymore—they take up an entire staff person’s workday.
Customer satisfaction decreases when they call and ask “where’s my delivery” and someone has to check in three different locations before getting back to them—which might frustrate them on their end as much as they’re frustrating employees who just want answers at their fingertips.
Drivers get upset when they have to text/request information that’s already known—what’s my next drop off? What time is my pick up? Is there special handling involved?
Finishing jobs increases when someone from billing needs to read through detailed invoices in ordering groups that don’t help get applicable pieces from one platform to another effectively.
Management frustration occurs when they know that switching now will be just as disruptive as transitioning was down the line—but at what growing point does it make sense? The answer gets consistently pushed further down the line—and by no fault of its own—as delayed because its growing potential keeps being diminished by its operational growing pains that occur without integration.
Courier companies don’t want to switch platforms either because learning a new software will take time away from integrating growing data—but at what cost?
The cost of losing employees whose main job was entering data that never made sense? The cost of having unhappy customers and unreliable drivers? The cost of having inaccurate financial records?
Businesses continually think they’ll save money down the line by not switching when in reality, the influx of revenue continually gets drained before it even has a chance at adulthood.
The businesses that don’t scale are those that integrate before they absolutely have to; they note frustrations coming down the pike before those frustrations turn into disastrous implications that require implementation under pressure as opposed to methodically growing into new routines.
Integration is not costly—it’s easy, effective and efficient when everyone is on one page at once from management through out-of-house accomplishments.
Making sure topics flow naturally through a business so people can serve their customers instead of serving data is key; when booking delivers are consistent with an effective tech system is part of larger operations with tracking applications, courier businesses can make money without worrying about losing it through unnecessary inefficiencies.
