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COVID-19 has shaken up the whole world and placed a strain on quite a few industries, especially delivery companies. You must be wondering how you can quickly adapt and capitalize on this opportunity.

Logistics and operations can be very well managed remotely. You just need good collaboration tools, an up-to-date database, and a skeletal staff on site who can take care of the actual packaging and dispatch. Let’s discuss this in more detail. What would you need?

We have listed 10 different ways you can keep supplying all your customers and maintain as much normalcy as possible.

1. Display Social Responsibility

Ensure that your in-house operations have preventative systems in place and all your employees have protective equipment. Your business runs because of your employees, so taking care of them will only help your own bottom line. An added bonus—your customers will have greater confidence that they will be receiving non-contaminated products. That will give you an immediate edge over your competition during the COVID-19 pandemic.

2. Minimum Contact Delivery

This must be one of the first things that you should take care of in light of this global pandemic. Your customers should not feel like they are putting themselves at risk while receiving packages. Introduce curbside delivery with a notification so the customer can pick it up before someone else does. Minimum contact delivery is the way to go, both for your customers and to keep your employees safe.

3. Adjust the Packaging

Something as simple as multi-layered packaging can boost customer trust in your business’ hygiene standards. Add an outer layer of packaging that can be easily discarded by your customers before taking the items inside their houses. Make your customers’ lives easier and reap the benefits in the form of greater sales despite COVID-19.

4. Easier Online Payment Methods

Expand your online, no-contact payment mechanism to include more methods, especially allowing for local preferences. If you only stick to bank transfers and credit card payments, you may lose out on a considerable chunk of your target market.

5. Good Collaboration Tools

Get better worker collaboration and communication tools so you can get in touch with your workers from anywhere, at any time during business hours. Audio and video conferencing tools like Zoom and UberConference, chat software like Slack and Skype, mobile collaboration tools like Telegram, and project management tools like Trello are all free for you to try out with your team and judge their utility yourself. You don’t even need to issue company headsets for business lines. Invest in a good-quality VoIP like RingCentral and get softphones that your employees can use from anywhere, just as long as they have a stable and good Internet connection.

6. Redirect Your Workforce

Move your in-store team towards managing online sales, taking orders through social media, and promoting your business to their personal networks. The faster and more efficiently you can handle online sales, the better it is for your bottom line.

7. Change Hiring Practices

Hire workers who are experienced at remotely handling tasks. That way they can handle your delivery operations from anywhere in the world. The most important point in favor of this approach is that these remote workers have experience in productively doing their jobs in a remote setting. Trying to permanently move an in-house employee towards remote work may not be as effective or accomplished as quickly.

8. Effective Logistics Team

Your business must have an effective logistics team that ensures your inventory records are up to date and your customer support and sales team get quick responses from the warehouses. You don’t need to keep this team on-site. Rather, pare down your on-site team to the bare minimum needed to package and deliver the products and move everyone else to remote work.

9. Faster Customer Support Response

The speed of your customer service team’s response is crucially important for retaining customers. Social distancing is allowing your customers more time to pick and choose which businesses they want to patronize. You are also competing with all other online businesses for your customers. Hence, you want to respond as fast as possible with order confirmation, tracking information, answers to customer questions, and troubleshooting advice.

Look into partnering with a 24 hour call center or after-hours call center to achieve this goal without going through the hassle of recruiting, managing, and monitoring the agents yourself.

10. Better Tracking Mechanism

With the majority of your customers stuck at home and most delivery services bogged down by extra orders and insufficient staff during the COVID-19 pandemic, customers are even more interested in real-time tracking of their orders. If you don’t have an efficient system in place already, remedy that oversight immediately. Track your delivery trucks and plan routes more efficiently, to be able to handle and deliver as many orders as quickly as possible.

Even if the delivery cannot be faster or is unavoidably delayed due to quarantine or lockdown rules, keeping customers informed keeps them satisfied.

Conclusion

These strategies will lower your overhead costs and make your business more competitive despite the COVID-19 pandemic. Switching some of your office jobs to remote roles will directly decrease business expenses, improving your bottom line. Your business will be able to survive and even flourish in tough economic times. Do not waste your time. Look into how these tips apply to your business and make the changes necessary before you are mired down by new problems created by deficiencies in your systems.

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