6 Ways to Get Feedback that Improves the Delivery Experience

Last-mile delivery can make or break the customer experience. In a recent study commissioned by Descartes, 41% of consumers indicated that a negative delivery experience would make them less likely to buy online in future.

By gathering feedback, distributors can spot delivery problems early, deal with them quickly and keep buyers coming back. But often, customer surveys are treated as an afterthought.

Feedback is sought too late, leading to low response rates. Submissions sit untouched in a customer relationship management (CRM) system, never to be analysed or acted on.

Leading retailers and distributors don’t reduce customer satisfaction to an annual statistic. Instead, they collect delivery-specific feedback that flags inefficiencies and helps to win back dissatisfied customers.

Here are six ways to build a feedback process to improve the delivery experience and grow sales revenue.

What Does Better Delivery Feedback Look Like?

Let’s take a step back and define what we mean by better feedback.

We aren’t looking at how to get more positive feedback – although all of these measures can help you to achieve that goal. Rather, we’re looking at how to get better quality feedback: feedback that actually helps you improve last-mile performance.

Here are four characteristics of good quality feedback:

• Complete: Drawing responses from as many customers as possible creates a balanced picture of delivery experience.
• Specific: Feedback is tied to individual orders, deliveries and drivers.
• Timely and Accurate: Customers correctly recall their experiences at the time it happens.
• Actionable: Feedback allows your business to quickly address urgent issues as well as spotting trends and inefficiencies over time.

How to Get Feedback that Improves Delivery Experience

1. Request feedback every time

Surveying only a handful of customers makes it difficult to spot patterns. Perhaps deliveries from a particular branch regularly arrive damaged due to poor loading. A random sample of feedback might not pick up this regional nuance.

To collect feedback for each and every delivery, you’ll need some level of automation. Customer engagement software can send a survey each time a drop-off is completed, so there’s no heavy lifting for customer service teams. With this approach, staff can focus on customers who really need a follow-up call.

2. Send timely customer surveys

When you request feedback hours after a service, customers don't tend to respond. Results will be skewed towards those who had a particularly good or bad experience – a phenomenon known as the halo and horns effect. By sending a survey right away, you can improve the volume and reliability of submissions.

There’s an important caveat here. Businesses might be tempted to get instant feedback by having the driver hand customers a survey. For several reasons, this isn't the best way forward:

1. The presence of the driver might influence responses.
2. This approach increases service times and driver workload.
3. Passing customers a clipboard or mobile device makes contactless delivery impossible.

Instead, consider automatically sending an SMS (text message) and/or email once the driver has left the property. You’ll need a feedback tool that’s closely tied to delivery execution technology. This will allow you to trigger a message as soon as the drop-off is complete.

Descartes partnered with one retailer who had been batching feedback requests at the end of the day. When they switched to real-time surveys, their response rate more than quadrupled.

3. Request feedback via the right channel

For a high response rate, you’ll need to reach customers on a channel that gets their attention. Normally, that’s the channel where they received order tracking notifications. When a feedback request feels like an extension of the delivery experience, customers are more likely to engage.

If you’re sending tracking updates by SMS, follow up with a survey link via text. Customers typically open texts within minutes, so the delivery will still be top-of-mind.

For high-value and business-to-business (B2B) deliveries, email may be the expected channel. It feels natural to include a feedback link alongside proof of delivery details. By using the right channel, businesses get more feedback responses, faster. This builds an accurate picture of customer sentiment and allows for timely service recovery.

4. Reduce form fill friction

So now you’ve asked for feedback at the right time, via the right channel. The next step is for customers to fill in the form. To maximise responses, avoid vague requests like “Help us improve!”. Instead, tie the feedback to a concrete outcome that will benefit the customer: “Help us improve your next delivery!”

Once a visitor lands on the form, keep it brief. Each additional question reduces completion rates, so stick to what you really need to know. Start with basic star or emoji ratings and then allow customers to add more context through multiple choice questions or open-text fields.

Customer survey software should provide data that enables you to continuously refine feedback forms. Are customers opening the survey link? Are they completing the form? How quickly do they respond? By answering each of these questions, you can pinpoint where customers are dropping off. This will allow you to increase form fills by optimising channels, messaging and design.

5. Separate driver and overall feedback

There are many moving parts that can make or break a delivery. When feedback is presented as a single rating, it’s difficult to identify what caused a negative or positive response. Scores may reflect on drivers for issues beyond their control.

Recently, I had a bulky furniture delivery where the staff were professional, friendly and did the best they could. But they arrived two hours earlier than scheduled, and the room wasn’t prepared. The workers had to make their way around obstacles and leave boxes in awkward places.

The drivers did a great job, but route planning and customer communication were lacking. A simple "How would you rate your delivery?" wouldn’t capture this nuance. An alternative is to evaluate drivers separately from the overall experience.

Although it adds a step, separating the ratings can reduce friction for customers. They don’t have to waste energy deciding which aspect of the delivery should be reflected in their score. By decoupling driver performance from overall satisfaction, you can pinpoint whether issues stem from processes or personnel. This makes it easier recognise high performers and provide timely coaching.

6. Make feedback actionable

Collecting quality submissions is only the first step. For feedback to be valuable, your business needs to be able to act on it.

In the short term, staff needs the ability to address issues as they happen. When someone submits a negative review, your team should be able to act in a matter of minutes rather than hours or days. A well-timed follow-up call can turn an unhappy buyer into a recurring customer.

One EU-based grocery distributor found that customers who received follow-up communication after submitting negative feedback saw an 18% increase in reorder rate compared to the average. In contrast, customers who submitted a negative rating but received no follow up reordered 80% less often than the average customer.

By acting on negative feedback, the company restored trust and recovered revenue that was at risk.

In the long term, your team should be able to identify patterns, recurring issues, and systemic opportunities for improvement. A poor delivery experience can highlight issues with scheduling, warehousing, loading, route planning and driver behaviour. All these areas can drive up delivery costs if they aren’t addressed.

To turn feedback into meaningful action, you’ll need to:

• Tie responses to individual jobs and drivers. Avoid relying on broad, averaged stats reviewed once or twice a year. Granular feedback helps pinpoint where interventions are needed.
• Notify your customer service team in real time when a customer submits negative feedback, so they can respond quickly and effectively.
• Centralise feedback in a dashboard where you can find a detailed breakdown of responses as well as high-level trends.

Getting started with delivery feedback

A proactive approach to feedback allows businesses to increase satisfaction, identify inefficiencies and protect future sales. To collect feedback that’s representative and actionable, you’ll need a survey tool that works at scale. Ideally, the solution should tie into delivery execution software so you can send a message at the right time, every time.