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We've all been there, you've ordered food, you're counting down the minutes until you can start eating, and with every minute that goes by, your hunger continues to grow, but then, it's late. With a late order, you risk your customer being upset, and you have to work that much harder to provide a positive dining experience. Accurate delivery times make for happy customers, and happy customers are return customers.
To help get you on the path to faster deliveries and happier customers, here are three ways you can better manage delivery times.
1. Communicate With the Customer
Most people can understand and appreciate that things happen and don't always go as planned, whether the meal had to be remade for some reason, there was traffic on the route, or maybe the driver got lost. But the key for people being understanding and accepting of these situations is that you communicate with them. If, for some reason, it's going to take longer than expected to make their food - notify the customer, and chances are they will understand because you communicated with them.
2. Knowing Where You Are Going
A big part of delivery time accuracy is where you are delivering to compared to your restaurant, which means knowing where you are going and how to get there. If you simply guess and tell a customer the delivery time is 15 minutes, but it takes 25 minutes to get there, then there's a good chance your customer won't be happy. But, if you can see that it should only take 8 minutes in current traffic conditions, you can tell them 15 minutes and give yourself some buffer time. This way, your customer will probably be excited that it was faster than anticipated.
3. Accurate Delivery Zone System
By having delivery zones, you can better understand the time it takes to deliver to certain areas and charge customers accordingly. You can also set your delivery zone to within a certain distance of your restaurant to help ensure you are making your quoted delivery times.
SpeedLine allows you to customize your delivery zones in two ways. The first is to set a radius around your pizzeria and anything applicable for delivery. The second is pre-determined streets and addresses on a map broken into different delivery fee zones, cut-off areas, or no-go zones.
Ultimately, there are many ways that you can manage your delivery times to help make sure they are accurate and are keeping your customers happy.