Three Standard Operating Procedures Your Delivery Drivers Need to Know
Most mistakes in the laundromat are relatively easy to fix. However, mistakes in the delivery van can be devastating.
Delivering laundry is different from delivering pizza. An Uber driver is not used to the size, weight, personalization and emotional attachment that comes with the day-to-day of a laundry delivery driver.
If a pizza is delivered to the wrong house, it represents about $10 and 20 minutes that need to be replaced. If this happens with someone’s laundry order, it’s a much more expensive and emotional problem, which will take much longer to solve.
On top of that, with laundry, there is a pickup and a delivery. Laundry delivery is a double-touch delivery transaction, whereas most home services and food delivery is a single-touch delivery transaction. This means there are twice as many opportunities to make costly mistakes.
As a result, home delivery can be a money pit if you don’t have clear and distinct standard operating procedures. Here are three SOPs your delivery drivers definitely need to know:
1. Photograph everything
Laundry delivery drivers should photograph and document everything. When business happens over the counter, it’s easy to prove. However, when business happens at the customer’s door, a complaint often can mean that it’s your driver’s word, versus the client’s.
Today’s laundry delivery software enables your delivery drivers to photograph pickups, missed pickups and deliveries at every stop. With most software, drivers also can add pickup-and-delivery notes to each order’s record. This takes just an extra 15 to 20 seconds, and it can provide invaluable support to the company.
“We teach our team to photograph everything,” said Cristian Panesso, logistics manager at The Folde, a laundry pickup-and-delivery service based in Houston and Austin, Texas. “If a stop goes well, photograph it. If a stop is confusing, photograph it. When you aren’t sure what to do, photograph it. Photos prevent customers from trying to take advantage of drivers, and they also help hold drivers accountable for executing accurately at every stop on the route.”
When an order is tagged improperly, you have photographic evidence. When a customer claims your driver never came or that the laundry was indeed left outside, you have visual proof to the contrary. When a driver claims he or she was at the right location, you have proof showing that driver was actually at the neighbor’s house.
Every time delivery drivers reach a stop along the route, they should be logging photo proof of that stop’s outcome – whether picked up, missed or delivered.
2. Tag unlabeled bags immediately
Laundry delivery drivers should not rely on notes or memory until they get finished with their routes. Laundry bags, hampers, etc. should be tagged immediately with the tagging mechanism your laundry delivery software provides. If you’re not using the provided customer tags from the software, your delivery drivers can use temporary tags to keep track of the orders until they are replaced by the permanent tags at the laundromat.
Your delivery drivers should check all of the bags for tags when collecting. Just because a customer has a branded laundry bag, doesn’t mean it’s tagged with that customer’s information. Check all bags for tags before placing any pickups into the van.
“This is one of the worst mistakes your laundry delivery driver can make in day-to-day operations,” Panesso explained. “We stress to our drivers the importance of tagging their bags immediately. Driving is hard work – and it’s easy to make a simple mistake when you’re operating on autopilot. It’s important for our drivers to know that these protocols are in place to help them, not to waste their time. Protocols reinforce our trust in our drivers.”
3. Document communications
We’ve added steps into the missed-pickup protocol to document our efforts to pick up laundry from customers, to contact the customers, and to provide ample time to those customers before moving on with the route.
Missed pickups happen. We understand. However, our delivery drivers operate on very full routes. Every minute matters. If you operate a traditional laundry delivery route, these routes operate like a UPS or FedEx route – not a pizza delivery or an Uber ride.
Your drivers will notify the customers when they are on the way through your automated messaging system, which is tied to the laundry delivery software. If no clothes are left outside the door, the delivery driver will knock on the door or ring the doorbell.
“If there is no answer, we have our laundry delivery driver (1) call, (2) text, and then (3) call again.” Panesso noted. “These actions are all documented in our software. We let our laundry delivery drivers know that sending texts through the laundry delivery software and leaving voicemails will help prove their efforts to contact the customer, if these efforts are ever called into question. That prevents situations where we are second-guessing our own staff.”
At that point, if a delivery driver is unable to reach the customer in three to five minutes, that driver is instructed to move on with the route. And drivers will not be able to turn back.
Obtaining solid documentation from your delivery drivers helps you:
- Prove to customers that you did everything you could to service them.
- Prevents customers from bullying drivers by making false claims to your customer support operators.
Protocols Prevent Mistakes
No doubt, a successful and profitable laundry delivery operation will have many detailed standard operating procedures. However, these three SOPs can help you get your laundry delivery drivers on the right track.
A customer saying one thing and a driver saying another can be an incredibly divisive situation. This is why we have established certain protocols to document and prove our actions at friction points throughout the process.
“These procedures help everyone know that we’ve got their back,” Panesso said. “Our drivers need to know that their managers and their customer support team trust them. If they are following protocol, there’s no room for doubt – even when mistakes happen. It’s our goal to keep that divisive doubt out of the business.”
