“Hi, any update on our delivery today?” If you run your own trucks, you know this call. The customer calls the office, the office calls the driver, and the driver answers while driving. Three people stop what they're doing over one question.
We built Cargoat, delivery tracking for distributors that run their own drivers, to answer “where's my order?” before anyone calls. It's in private beta. Most of what follows is about the message, not the software.
Quick Answer
How do you reduce “where's my order?” calls?
Tell customers before they ask. Give every order a private tracking link and send an email at four moments: order placed, out for delivery, close, and delivered with the photo. Show an arrival time only on that customer's turn, worked out from live drive time. When something goes wrong at the door, say what happened and what happens next, then stop. And count what the calls cost you now, with your own numbers.
- →The call comes from silence: no time before the drop, no proof after it
- →Four emails: order placed, out for delivery, close, delivered
- →One arrival time, shown on their turn
- →Bad days get one calm line: what happened, what happens next
Why do customers call about their delivery?
There are two questions behind it.
When is it coming? Picture a restaurant waiting on a delivery, with someone needed at the back door to take it. Nobody told them when it's coming, so they phone. Your office doesn't know either, so it phones the driver.
Did it arrive, and who signed? That call comes after the drop. If the proof is a paper slip in the truck, someone has to go and find it, and a signature nobody can find doesn't settle much when a customer says it never came.
Both calls come from silence. So the fix isn't a faster truck. It's telling people what they'd otherwise call to ask, at the moment it changes.
Which four moments are worth an email?
When we built Cargoat, we settled on four customer emails. Each one answers a question someone would otherwise phone in.
- Order placed. The subject is “We have your order” and the order number, with the tracking link inside. It answers “did you get our order?”
- Out for delivery. Sent when the order leaves, with the same link. It answers “is it coming today?”
- Close. “Your delivery is close”, sent once, when the driver crosses your heads-up line (10 km out, at our demo company), and only to the stop the driver is heading to. It answers “should someone be at the door?”
- Delivered. A thank-you with the delivery photo, while the tracking page shows who signed. Your office gets its own confirmation with the proof links. It answers “did it come?” before anyone asks.
That's the whole list. No email while the order is being prepared, and none to say nothing has changed. Everything in between lives on the tracking page, which updates itself. If a customer says the link never arrived, the office can resend it.
Which of those four does your office send today?
What should a delivery update email say?
How many delivery emails is too many?
Why wait until it's their turn to show an arrival time?
The tempting move is to show every customer a time the moment the truck leaves. We didn't. A time worked out straight to their door skips the stops before theirs, so it's early. When an early time comes and goes, the phone rings anyway.
So the page waits. Before their turn, it says where they are in line: “Two deliveries before yours”, a row of dots, “Yours is third”, and “Nothing to do for now. We'll email you when Sam is within 10 km.” No map and no time yet. (Sam is a driver at our demo company, a made-up wine distributor.)
On their turn, the page shows “Arriving today” and the time, big: “About 2:40 pm”, with one plain sentence: “Sam is on the way to you.” A live map, updated about once a minute while the driver's route is on, shows the driver heading their way, with a card giving the driver's first name, face and vehicle. Never a phone number.
Notice the word “About”. The time comes from live drive time, so it's an estimate, and it reads like one. One honest time on their turn beats a confident guess made when the truck left the yard.
What do you tell a customer when a delivery goes wrong?
Some days nobody's there to sign, the door is locked, or a case arrives damaged. Our rule: say what happened and what happens next, then stop.
When nobody was there, the tracking page says this, word for word from our demo company:
Sorry we missed you. Sam came by at 2:14 pm and nobody was there to receive it. We'll sort out the next step and this page will show it.
It has a clock time, an apology and a next step. It leaves out the driver's note, the problem photo and the driver's position. While a delivery is on hold there's no map and no arrival time, and the page updates by itself once your office decides.
The other problems get their own calm lines. If the driver couldn't get in, the page says “Sam couldn't get in”. If the order was damaged, refused or something else went wrong: “There's a hold-up. Your delivery is on hold for now.”
Borrow our rules for every line a customer reads: a real clock time, never “soon”, and no exclamation marks.
What are “where's my order?” calls costing you?
Before you buy anything, ours included, count the calls. Put a sheet by the phone for a week and mark every delivery-status call. Then time a few, counting the whole loop: the call, the hold, the call to the driver and the call back.
Now put your numbers into the where's my order call cost calculator: delivery-status calls a day, minutes per call (chasing the driver included), working days a month (the default is yours to change) and the hourly cost of whoever answers. It gives you hours a month and cost a month.
It doesn't promise a saving, because we don't know your calls. If the number is small, good: you've got bigger things to fix. If it isn't, now you know what the calls are worth.
Calls that ring out unanswered need a different fix: how to automate missed calls.
Where do you start?
- Count a week of delivery-status calls, and time a few.
- Write one plain sentence for each of your four moments.
- Decide when customers see an arrival time. Ours: on their turn.
- Write your bad-day lines while nothing is going wrong.
That's the work, with or without software. If you'd rather have it running, Cargoat answers “where's my order?” before anyone calls, under your own brand. Your own server, your own database, your data.
For the wider picture, start with delivery tracking for distributors, explained. And for what a customer actually receives, here's how we drove our own first delivery through it.
Cargoat is in private beta. Book a demo if you'd like to see what your customers would see. Bring your call count. If the numbers say the calls aren't worth fixing, we'll say so.
