Smart logistics solutions are ‘in demand’ for on-demand services

This is a good time to be a customer. Yeah, really! Almost everything you need is an app away. 

Want a cab? Open Uber or Lyft or Didi or Ola, depending on your geography; want food reviews? Open Yelp or Zomato; want your house to be cleaned? Open a home services app. 

You get the drift, don’t you? ‘Click’ety clack your task away.  

But, it’s not so easy for the companies, especially if the company’s services depend on its human force’s efficiency. 

Say, for example, you want your washing machine to be repaired at 11 am on a Saturday morning. The on-demand home delivery or services app has to find the best electrician available during your requested time slot and has the required expertise to resolve your washing machine’s particular problem. 

This is just for one particular task, imagine the number of such tasks a services company has to process in a day. 

With the ‘on-demand’ nature of services now, it is becoming increasingly complex for companies to handle their vast operations. Here’s a bird’s eye view of what some of these services companies deal with every day-

• Mapping the right service executives to the demand
• Dealing with multiple scheduling and cancellations of orders
• Real-time factors like traffic, vehicle breakdown, the health of executives
• Lack of on-ground updates

The age of on-demand home services

According to the 2019 World Trade Report, “Thanks to digitalization, the internet and low-cost telecommunications, many services sectors that were once non-tradable – because they had to be delivered face-to-face in a fixed location – have become highly tradable – because they can now be delivered remotely over long distances.”

The report also says that— between 1980 and 2015, the average share of services in GDP across all developing countries grew from 42 to 55 percent (UNCTAD, 2017).

The point being, with smartphones becoming ubiquitous and internet becoming highly affordable, the services sector is undergoing a transformation like never before. All of this transformation is pressure testing the logistics setup of these companies.

Your app can be swanky, but is your logistics smart enough to deliver your promises? 

Locus to the rescue

New-age technologies such as Artificial Intelligence are now making it easier for services firms to serve their end customers, thanks to the availability of abundant data. 

Take, for example, a services company that is revolutionizing the way used cars are sold in India. The company works with a lot of drivers who are responsible for picking up and dropping cars to customers. A person from the head office usually coordinates with these drivers via SMS, emails or calls to guide the drivers on their daily operations. 

This company, which has operations in about 60 cities, onboarded Locus to streamline its logistics operations and last-mile delivery. 

Locus helped the company bring in efficiency by optimizing its driver movement. This reduced their driver count by 30%. Apart from this, Locus ensured that the drivers knew their first service point, every day, without the need to coordinate with the head office. 

Locus’ automated route planner and driver allocation software ensures that the first service point is always close to the driver’s home so as to save on the traveling time. Locus also captures the distance traveled, as this is crucial for reimbursing the drivers. Additionally, the Point of Delivery (POD) is captured too, which later serves as proof, during claims.  

Locus helps services companies across varied industries and sectors save time and serve more clients by automating their routing and scheduling processes. Here’s what you can expect from Locus –

• Dispatch Automation for home services executives, respecting location preference, skills, ratings, experience, etc. of executives.
• Managing the high cancellation and reschedule rates by effective utilization of idle time to generate more revenue.
• Increased customer convenience by facilitating on-demand online order booking with no additional on-ground resources.
• Control tower application for transparency in operations and predictive alert system on delays and deviations to drive better operational control and customer experience.
• The most accurate mapping of service executives to the customer with automated dispatch planning for improved serviceability quotient of your brand.

Schedule a demo for streamlining you On-demand home delivery services and enhance customer experience with Locus: