What is Contactless Delivery? Complete Implementation Guide 2024

Since the introduction of the Covid-19 pandemic, contactless delivery has become a major part of our lives and is not going away anytime soon.

Moving on, it would be no surprise if the retail industry continues with a contactless delivery system for doing business. Thus, businesses adopting contactless delivery need to streamline the entire delivery process.

In this article, we will talk about the meaning, significance, and how to execute such a method in your delivery process. Alright, let’s jump straight into it.

Understanding Contactless Delivery

Definition and Core Concepts

Contactless delivery means that once the package has reached its final destination, it is left outside the doorstep of the recipients without making any direct, in-person contact with them. Hence, there would be less chances of contracting the virus.

The customer is notified regarding the successful contactless delivery of the product through a call, text, or email. The contactless delivery solution makes sure that there is no physical contact between the delivery person and consumers, making it safe for both parties involved in the exchange.

Not only do consumers expect contactless deliveries with extreme safety measures but also drivers, too, seek a safe working environment with no exposure to physical contact with anyone on the job. As many local administrations have introduced social distancing guidelines, contactless delivery has been strictly followed by many popular brands and consumers across the world.

Business Benefits and ROI

The concept of offering no contact delivery is not new as we all know how Covid- 19 pandemic insisted on strict contactless deliveries. Therefore, restaurants, grocery stores, and other essential services provide delivery orders ensuring safety and taking extra precautions. 

As people are isolated or working from home for extended periods of time, the demand for groceries and medical supplies to be delivered to their homes is constantly on the rise.

Thus, no wonder why there is a need for no contact delivery is increasing day by day. As a result, small businesses have also started implementing the contactless delivery option.

Cost Savings Analysis

In the previous year, almost 37% of respondents had already been using contactless delivery more than usual. 

According to a survey by Medallia Zingle regarding The Future of Commerce, over 87% of consumers prefer retailers and brands to offer contactless delivery options. 

Takeaways and fast food services witnessed a growth of 8% over the past year.

In order to keep up with the delivery demands, Amazon decided to hire 100,000 people for full-time and part-time positions at their fulfillment center. 

Before Covid-19, the percentage of consumers that visited retailers thrice a week was 78%, which has now dropped to just 34%.

These statistics are proof that this delivery option has now become a default way to deliver orders.

Safety Improvements

Contactless delivery offers customers the freedom to decide the time and place they want to receive their order without requiring any physical interaction. 

It, thus, minimizes the possibility of surface contamination, which helps maintain hygiene standards. This ensures your drivers’ and customers’ safety, ensuring a health-conscious delivery environment.

How Does Contactless Delivery Work?

If the customer has selected a no contact delivery for their product, then the delivery person will place the delivered item outside the customer’s doorstep. From updating the client to getting the delivery proof, the entire contactless delivery process will be contactless.

As soon as the order is confirmed by the seller, the delivery team will be informed to follow social distancing guidelines throughout the contactless delivery process. At the same time, consumers will be notified about the ongoing delivery process. Once the parcel has arrived at the buyer’s location, payment needs to be done through digital transactions instead of handing over cash.

For instance, let’s say you have ordered a meal from the food delivery app and requested contactless delivery. Once the order is confirmed, you can track the food on your phone. Then, the delivery person will place the food just outside your doorstep to make sure contactless food delivery services.

Implementing Contactless Delivery Systems

Technical Requirements

Technical requirements can be broadly classified into three categories, i.e. software solutions and hardware needs.

Software Solutions

Use advanced technology to streamline contactless delivery operations

In 2020, China-based startup, Neolix Technologies raised $29 million to ramp up the production of self-driving vehicles. In addition to boosting logistics efficiency, it will also reduce carbon emissions. 

The investments in boosting contactless delivery technology will only grow stronger and change the logistics experience. The use of such advanced technology helps you manage the fleets and stabilize the contactless delivery operations. Hence, you should invest in the best delivery software.

If your restaurant or store is not functional and no customers are visiting, it will be difficult to keep them updated on what you offer and how you are doing it. The best solution to this is to have a third-party app or a portal where customers can reach you.

Collaborate with third-party software to cope with new norms

If your restaurant or store is not functional and no customers are visiting, it will be difficult to keep them updated on what you offer and how you are doing it. The best solution to this is to have a third-party app or a portal where your customers can reach you. If you have a website or a third-party delivery app, regular customers, as well as new ones, will be able to come to you. Using the app or website, you can send major updates related to your business, products, or marketing to your customers.

Allow end-to-end communication between the delivery crew and the customer

No more in-person discussions with the dispatcher or fellow drivers. All the communication, right from dispatching their delivery routes to informing them about any changes, must be done through a mobile app. The same goes for the communication between your delivery driver and customers. With the support of technology, urgent communication can be sorted out between the drivers and the customers. Customers can add specific delivery instructions for the drivers. They can receive regular delivery notifications as well.

Staff Training Guidelines

Safety Protocols

Enforce driver safety measures

To keep both your drivers and customers safe, it’s important to have the appropriate driver safety measures in place. Most delivery drivers are required to wear personal protective equipment (PPE) when dropping off an order. This includes the proper wearing of gloves and a face mask.

Aside from wearing PPE, drivers should also have ample access to hand sanitizer and use it frequently, and all fulfillment center staff should be getting their temperature and blood oxygen level checked before starting their shift. This helps create a safe environment for both employees and customers.

The fulfillment center should be cleaned and disinfected often, no one should be allowed to enter unless they’ve followed the laid out safety measures, and social distancing should be in effect at all times (social distance markers on the floor can help with this).

Ensure your delivery members follow necessary safety measures

Your staff may or may not be trained for contactless delivery services. It is your responsibility to make them understand the need for it. They must be given all the tools & information that can help them be safe while performing their jobs. As an employer, you can boost their skills using technical training and management tools.

Allow end-to-end communication between the delivery crew and the customer

No more in-person discussions with the dispatcher or fellow drivers. All the communication, right from dispatching their delivery routes to informing them about any changes, must be done through a mobile app. The same goes for the communication between your delivery driver and customers. 

With the support of technology, urgent communication can be sorted out between the drivers and the customers. Customers can add specific delivery instructions for the drivers. They can receive regular delivery notifications as well.

Offer customers a no contact delivery option during the purchase

There should be an effective marketing strategy in place to inform your customers about offering contactless delivery. Communicate to them through various channels. Make them understand why you are doing it and how it will keep them safe. 

More than 35% of customers admitted that education about available options can easily improve customer experience.

Customer Communication Best Practices

Send accurate ETA and delivery updates to customers

Having the right set of technological tools will allow you to keep a record of each of your online orders and streamline your supply chain.

In addition to record-keeping, online tools can send the ETA to the recipient until the completion of contactless delivery. It allows you to gain necessary real-time insights into how your delivery process is functioning and whether you need to make any changes to it.

Get customer feedback post-delivery service

Once you start offering a no-content delivery option, start collecting feedback from your staff and your customers. This can give you an idea as to whether the option of contactless delivery work for you or not. This feedback will provide important insights and help you make informed decisions.

Following the customer feedback, you can make improvements to your contactless delivery operations and trained your delivery members in such a way that they strictly follow the no contact guidelines. This is the best way to uplift your business profit and attract new customers by making customer-friendly deliveries.

Always collect the delivery proof before leaving the delivery location

Whether you are delivering pizza or prescription drugs, you need to provide proof of delivery for each order. How do the drivers prove that they fulfilled all their daily deliveries? It’s quite easy, to use the driver app or auto-generated link to get the digital proof of delivery in the form of notes or photo capture to avoid false claims of package theft.

The digital proof of contactless delivery can be further shared with the dispatcher to confirm the fulfillment of the delivery order. This is another reason why adopting advanced technology can help a business in facilitating the contactless delivery process.

Optimizing Contactless Delivery Operations

Performance Metrics

On-Time Shipping Rate

On-time shipping rate is the ratio of orders delivered on or before the expected date, divided by the total number of orders. It helps evaluate supply chain performance, and a low number indicates issues with your last-mile delivery operations, including scheduling, routing, and dispatching.

Order Accuracy

This metric measures the total orders shipped without issues, which implies that they were sent out to the correct address within the specified time without any damage or reported incidents of missing items.

Average Cycle Time

In other words, this is the time to prepare orders before they reach their destination. It is the average time a product takes from when a customer places an order till it reaches your customer. While it varies based on the type of order, it is recommended to take measures to reduce it as much as possible.  

Transportation Costs

The average transportation cost is the sum total of costs involved in the entire fulfillment process, from order processing till delivery execution. They include expenses involved in administrative work, order processing, inventory management, storage or warehousing, and fuel and driver settlements. Finding out the most profitable stops can help you optimize delivery operations effectively.

Warehousing Costs

Warehousing includes the expenses involved in the products that enter or leave your warehouse, which includes equipment and maintenance costs, energy consumption for storage, ordering, and loading of goods, and labor costs. Monitoring warehousing costs can help identify and eliminate inefficiencies in warehouse operations. 

Shipment Volume 

The total number of orders shipped out of the warehouse that you must track is called shipment volume. This will provide you with a better idea of rush seasons, enabling you to allocate resources efficiently.  

Quality Control Measures

Delivery Verification Methods

Using a driver app can help you capture photos of delivered items, add notes, and send them to the dispatcher to confirm delivery completion. 

For restricted items, ID scanning and age verification must be used, which allows drivers to verify your recipient’s identity and age from a government ID and type in their birthdays digitally. For instance, delivery of products like prescription drugs, alcohol, or caffeine may require identity verification. 

Customer Feedback Systems

Gathering feedback from your drivers and customers when it comes to no-contact delivery is important, you must collect, take it constructively, and implement feasible suggestions. 

How to Choose Contactless Delivery Software?

Following the pandemic, social distancing guidelines are going nowhere in the future. It means delivery businesses have no choice except to implement contactless delivery. Similarly, consumers too want a no contact delivery option while placing the order. To perform such deliveries, you will need contactless delivery software for both the customer and the delivery driver.

Below are the things you should look for while choosing the contactless delivery software.

1. No Contact Payments

Using the advanced software, you must enable the online payment option. It is the first thing that customers notice while placing an order. Most online software allow them to choose a preferred payment mode for receiving early payment. 

Technology makes it extremely simple for customers to pay for each order online. Retailers present various contactless payments like debit cards, credit cards, Apple Pay, and PayPal using which customers can make transactions digitally. Digital payments make it easier for both parties involved to facilitate the transaction.

Thus, you need software that has an online payment gateway to transfer funds in real quick time. Also, you can offer an online post-delivery payment option for customers after receiving their parcel.

2. Delivery Notes

It is one of the significant contactless delivery features which is preferred by most online users. Adding delivery instructions before or during the delivery process should be available at the customer end. Or else, if required you should go for advanced routing software which allows you to put a delivery message from the admin side as well.

The reason is that if a customer or admin wants to send important delivery instructions regarding no contact delivery, they drop the comments in the delivery instructions section.

3. Automated Delivery Notifications

You should go for software that allows the customer to read the automated delivery notifications. These features are useful for customers to know if the delivery is on-time or delayed. 

It updates the customer about the contactless delivery process so that they can make themselves available at the time of contactless delivery. Hence, you will need a software where you can customize delivery notifications as per your wish.

4. Capturing Images

In some cases, where customers ask you to deliver the parcel at the doorstep, you need delivery proof which indicates the successful contactless delivery of the package. That’s why delivery software should allow the delivery executive to take pictures after they complete the contactless delivery. 

Some online tools also have a driver app to take the e-signature or capture the photos. Using such an app, the delivery executive can take photos ensuring no-contact physical contact with the recipient.

What is the Next Step to Make Your First Contactless Delivery?

It doesn’t matter if the pandemic is about to end or not, it is obvious that customers will continue demanding no contact delivery. They prefer adding delivery instructions, reading out messages, and getting the parcel delivered to their doorstep. 

Such things can be better done if you sign up on advanced delivery software like Upper Route Planner. It will help you manage the delivery operations just by importing the spreadsheet and generating the route map in less than a minute. 

Plus, it has the above-mentioned features to perform contactless deliveries for the drivers. From alerting the customers and sending delivery instruction to capturing the photos of delivered items, it provides proper contactless delivery. 

If you are into the delivery business experience your first contactless delivery using Upper Route Planner. Start a free trial at Upper and perform no contact delivery faster.

Are You Ready to Take on This Challenge?

With retail stores, restaurants, and grocery stores not being able to allow customers to enter, people resort to options like curbside pickup and no contact delivery. 

As a business, it can be quite challenging to train your staff, integrate more technology, keep customers safe, and transition into this new model of making deliveries with health and safety measures.

Fortunately, all the help and the information necessary for getting you started is available out there. If you have any questions, you can feel free to reach out to us.