Three different questions wearing the same words #
"Where is my delivery" is asked by people wanting three quite different things, and a transport office that treats them identically spends its day on the cheapest of the three.
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Did it go out, and is it still coming? A lookup
The office already knows.
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Did it already deliver, and who signed? A lookup
If the proof of delivery is filed.
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It is going to be late. What are you going to do about it? A decision
Made by somebody with authority.
The first two are the volume. The third is the one that matters, and it is the one that gets squeezed, because the planner who should be making it is on the phone confirming that yesterday's pallet did in fact go out yesterday.
Why the answer to the second question is so often unavailable #
A call asking whether something delivered should be the easiest of the three. It is frequently the hardest, because the document that proves it is travelling in a cab. We set out why that happens, and what the signature is actually evidence of, on getting PODs back.
The practical effect on the phone is that a question with a one word answer turns into a callback, and the callback turns into a second call when nobody rings back.
Why an ETA moves, and why that is not a planning failure #
Customers often read a slipping ETA as carelessness. It is usually arithmetic. Under the assimilated drivers' hours rules the day a planner is working inside is bounded before it starts.
9 hours
Daily driving, extendable to 10 hours twice a week
GOV.UK, drivers hours assimilated rules
45 minutes
Break or breaks after no more than 4 hours 30 minutes driving
GOV.UK, drivers hours assimilated rules
56 hours
Driving in a week
GOV.UK, drivers hours assimilated rules
90 hours
Driving in any 2 consecutive weeks
GOV.UK, drivers hours assimilated rules
Those limits do not bend for traffic. An hour lost at a busy collection does not cost an hour at the far end: it moves the break, which moves the remaining driving, which can push the last drop past a closing delivery window and into tomorrow. The full set of limits and the records that evidence them are on drivers' hours record keeping.
There is a rule worth knowing on the other side of this too.
Operators must not make payments to drivers related to speed of delivery, distances travelled or the amount of goods carried if that would encourage breaches of the rules
Whatever pressure arrives on the phone, it cannot lawfully be converted into an incentive to drive through a limit.
When a status call becomes a legal event #
Two clocks worth knowing, because they change how a late load should be recorded rather than just discussed.
On international road carriage, Article 30 of the CMR Convention requires a claim in respect of delay to be made by a reservation in writing within twenty-one days from the time the goods were placed at the disposal of the consignee.
On consumer sales, section 28 of the Consumer Rights Act 2015 requires a trader to deliver goods without undue delay and in any event not more than 30 days after the day the contract is entered into, unless a different time is agreed. A courier delivering to households is operating inside somebody else's obligation to that consumer.
Which parts of the status call run on rules #
Runs on rules
- Confirming a consignment is loaded and on a vehicle, which is a lookup
- Confirming a consignment delivered, with the time and signatory, if the POD is filed
- Telling a customer which drop number they are on a route, which is position in a sequence
- Noticing that a vehicle will not clear its route inside the driving limits, where the rules produce the warning and a planner decides the response
- Recording that a customer was notified, and when, which is a log entry
Needs a planner
- Deciding whether to recover a load, reschedule it or run a second vehicle, which is a cost decision
- Deciding what to tell a customer whose window has closed, which is a relationship decision
- Deciding whether a repeated failure is a route problem or a customer problem, which is a management responsibility
The pattern here is the same one that runs through out of hours calls in lettings: a high volume of questions with known answers, mixed in with a small number that genuinely need the most experienced person in the building, arriving through the same channel with no way to tell them apart until somebody picks up.
To see what the volume is costing, the missed calls calculator puts a figure on the calls that do not get answered, and the cost of admin time calculator does the same for the ones that do. The booking end of the same cycle, where the facts that answer these calls are first captured, is on booking in loads.