Rapidly soaring demand for online deliveries is resulting in immense resource crunches for retailers, online food delivery providers, grocery stores among other businesses in the US. Their in-house capacity to scale delivery requirements and meet evolving customer demands like same-day deliveries is simply not making the cut. A recent report revealed that 80% of customers in the US want ‘same-day’ delivery as an option when they checkout. Another survey highlighted that 63% of customers want their orders to deliver within 1-3 hours of placing the same.
These numbers are not new. It has been floating across media reports for a long time now. What’s new is how some savvy businesses are meeting these numbers. The answer is simple yet lesser-known–crowdsourcing.
Understanding Crowdsourcing and The role it Plays In Logistics
Last-mile delivery challenges are sprawling across the US. Inability to scale deliveries, deliver on same-day delivery expectations and reducing operating costs are rapidly feeding into the bottom lines of businesses. Even logistics middlemen like 3PL and LTL providers are not able to successfully respond to demand-shocks as they mostly operate at full capacities already. Taking an absolutely different path, savvy businesses are shifting focus on leveraging crowdsourcing technologies.
In simple terms, crowdsourcing logistics can be referred to as a process that empowers shippers, retailers, and grocery stores to dodge the middlemen and directly reach out to temporary or part-time delivery executives. To keep things in perspective, one can imagine this to a ride-hailing service. The difference is that instead of commuters, goods and packages are being transported through this process.
Now, especially with the ongoing pandemic and nationwide lockdowns, crowdsourcing is not just a ‘good to have’ it’s rapidly rising to the ranks of being a necessity for online retailers and even for brick-mortar stores. An interesting survey back in 2018 accurately captured the growing phenomenon of crowdsourcing in the world of online delivery. It highlighted that the need to compete with Amazon has resulted in nearly 10% of retailers making use of crowdsourced delivery, with an additional 26% planning to do so in the future.
Top Five Reasons To Embrace Logistics Crowdsourcing
- Scaling delivery operations
- Shrinking delivery turn-around-time
- Ensure less dependency on middlemen
- Balancing costs and scale
- Quickly respond to urgent deliveries & demand shocks
Rapid Increase In Demand: What Numbers Say
300%
Growth has been seen in digital ordering and delivery than dine-in traffic
86%
Of customers use delivery service at least once a month
70%
Of customers, by the end of 2020, will leave a restaurant that does not offer online services
82%
Of customers blame restaurants for poor delivery service
100,0000
Is the number of employees Amazon is planning to hire to meet demand shocks
How FarEye’s Crowdsourcing Capabilities is Transforming Delivery Operations
FarEye’s Crowdsourcing Platform empowers logistics teams especially fulfillment managers, dispatch managers, and transportation managers centrally manage and scale driver operations digitally. It makes routine tasks like driver registration and assessment seamless and efficient.
Efficient Driver Operations
Through crowdsourcing, enterprises can meet elastic demands without affecting profitability and bottom-line. This paves way for a more economically efficient and viable means to run driver operations.
Swift & Easy Driver Onboarding
FarEye helps businesses quickly onboard drivers in a really short time by leveraging a user-friendly mobile application. The easy-to-use app allows a variety of things like driver registrations. uploading identity proofs, and check driver status in real-time.
Centralized Operations Management
FarEye ensures that delivery stakeholders can centrally manage all driver operations on a single pane of glass. This, in turn, ensures quick decision making, high levels of operational visibility, enhanced KPI benchmarking and greater fleet control. It also makes core delivery processes like roster management seamless by ensuring one-click roster upload, driver check-in, and check-out and scheduling breaks.
KPI & Performance Management
The platform empowers enterprises to gain seamless access to data regarding driver performance like delivery success rate, delivery delays, delivery completion, cost incurred per delivery so on and so forth. It also helps delivery stakeholders to align delivery KPIs with core business objectives like ensuring high levels of productivity, better customer experience, and delivery profitability. To motivate drivers to be highly productive, FarEye’s platform leverages gamification tools. The drivers get a real-time update about the number of deliveries completed by himself and his peers, customer ratings, jobs left and so on.
Five Easy Steps To Onboard Drivers Using FarEye
1.Driver registration
Quickly onboard drivers by scanning across multiple markets by leveraging digital tools to ensure highly compliant registrations.
2.Assessment of a driver
FarEye’s platform scans through historical data of drivers and generates critical insights on aspects like driver productivity, efficiency, experience, compliance levels and more.
3.One-click to upload a driver’s roster
Delivery stakeholders can create rosters and send it immediately to delivery executives by uploading the same on the driver’s app just by a single click.
4.Leaderboard access for analyzing driver KPIs
Delivery managers can easily access all the KPIs related to deliveries operations like the number of deliveries completed, delivery delays, driver productivity, costs incurred and so on, on a single pane of glass.
5.Training drivers through a mobile app
Businesses can train drivers by sharing information on safety measures and standards, compliance, how to improve the delivery experience and more, by using a user-friendly mobile application.
Click to Transform Your Driver Operations
The report is published by FarEye.
FarEye is a leading SaaS platform for predictive visibility. It enables brands to achieve more from their logistics operations and delivery experiences. FarEye enables enterprises to cross the digital chasm which results in not just margin growth but provides real-time visibility of logistics processes to all key stakeholders. Through the no-code digital logistics platform, enterprises can leverage the power of cloud to run their operations thereby overcoming challenges such as scale, surge in transactions due to demand shocks and provide a seamless, timely and well-coordinated experience to their end consumers.
FarEye has garnered the trust of the world’s largest enterprises and recognitions from industry-leading bodies such as Gartner (12+ mentions), World Post & Parcel, Deloitte Tech Fast 50 to quote a few. The company has also been awarded the ‘Digital Disruptor’ title by IDC.