Choosing a good courier to handle your items

Choosing the right company to manage your delivery and freight needs is crucial if you want your business to be perceived as reliable and professional. It is a service you need to get right from the offset and a service key to the running of a business. It is also a service vital to ensure a business has what it needs as and when it needs it. Regardless whether you ship fragile items or not, the way your courier handles them is important.

There are no end of services

There are many types of businesses for whom delivery of products to customers is a key part of their service. For example bakeries, flooring companies, printers, promotional merchandise, builders merchants, wholesalers, eBay sellers and machinery manufacturers all have road transportation requirements. Some businesses have their own van fleets, but many outsource the courier delivery of goods to third parties because they don’t want to worry about licences, fuel costs, regulations, driver training and tax.

The choice of outsourced logistics supplier may seem a relatively unimportant decision – until it goes wrong! Every customer interaction influences your business reputation, and an unprofessional or unreliable customer delivery will do untold damage. So choosing the right sameday courier company to manage your delivery and freight needs is crucial if you want your business to be perceived as reliable and professional.

Speed of service delivery is also key

This is perhaps one of the most important and common deciding factors when choosing between delivery services. For many businesses, speed of delivery is critical. Even if timing is usually not much of an issue, you never know when you might need to rush a delivery. So look at the average speed of delivery for each company, and what range of speeds they can deliver at. Some may only be able to offer standard and rush, while others will offer a wide range of delivery speeds to suit your every need.

Look too at staffing

The way in which courier companies hire their staff has a huge impact on the quality of service. Some are vetted, paid adequately and are held responsible for the parcels they deliver. Others allow anyone to become a driver, with minimal selection procedures in place, thereby inviting mistakes and mishaps. One way to identify the steps in the recruitment process for a courier is to find any job listings on sites like Indeed. If you have time to collate a few job listings, you can compare them to each other and find out more about the vetting process and pay for successful job applicants.

A money back guarantee?

Even with the perfect courier service, and smooth running process, you’ll need to prepare a ‘Plan B’ in case something goes wrong. When it comes to couriers, this could include products being delivered late, or packages turning up damaged to the customer. In these cases, it’s a good idea to choose couriers based on if they offer money-back when something goes wrong and it’s attributed to their service. You can usually find this in the terms and conditions from the couriers themselves, though you can always double check with their customer service team if you can’t find it straight away.

Assess the courier in terms of its customer service

You might have a shortlist of contenders by this point, so now you can start calling the courier service themselves and start asking detailed questions about them. One of the most important things a good courier service will have is great customer service. Call their customer service and ask them questions. This will give you a pretty good idea of how they treat customers and potential leads. How eager are they to answer all your questions? Do they get impatient and try to run you off the phone or are they patient enough to deal with all your idiosyncrasies? Also, see how long it takes you to speak to a real live human being, rather than a recording or a machine. This will be important when you are trying to get hold of customer service in an emergency courier situation.

Tracking - all of this is going to be key

Many courier services nowadays have online customer portals where you can enter shipments, track deliveries, and pay for services. It’s quite handy to have, especially since you don’t have to wait forever to speak to a customer service agent and you have everything related to your deliveries in one place. Make sure to inquire of your potential courier services what their tracking capabilities are. And what their online customer portal looks like. You could even ask to take an insider look at it to see how user-friendly it is.

Overall

It’s always worth checking how long each courier has been in business, and what level of experience they have. Ideally, you will choose a courier who is established and has worked with businesses similar to yours. That way, they can not only provide you with a good service, but they can advise you on best practices and improvements on your own process for delivery. If anything, this is a key area to look into before hiring in a courier firm.