Challenges in Last Mile Logistics: Bad Addresses
3 min read
As our previous article “Challenges in Last Mile Logistics: Payment on Delivery” mentioned, when a delivery fails, the success rate falls – the percentage of deliveries that are successfully made at the first attempt.
In addition to the challenge of Payment on Delivery causing scheduling conflicts between couriers and customers, bad addresses also contribute to failed attempts.
| Bad Addresses
A significant barrier when it comes to last-mile logistics is that couriers often cannot locate a customer's exact drop off location. Many e-commerce websites do not make it easy for customers to fill out addresses correctly, and even more sites do not allow a customer to set their pin location. Many customers also don’t take the time to enter the correct address even when given the opportunity.
Filling out the name of the city may be easy, but when it comes to street names, buildings and unit numbers, customers take the liberty in filling them out however they know them since there is no common agreed upon standard. Some may write ‘Sama Tower, Electra Street, Zone 1, Abu Dhabi,’ whereas some may write ‘Zone 1, Electra Street, Sama Tower, Abu Dhabi.’ What courier companies receive, therefore, is a set of inconsistent and unclear addresses.
To overcome this, couriers typically call customers to confirm their addresses each time they are assigned a new delivery request. In addition to the unnecessary burden this places on the courier, this annoys customers and causes delays in deliveries, which makes the operation inconvenient and inefficient. If customers don’t receive the call, couriers can’t deliver the products at all. All in all, this contributes to a very bad customer experience.
| Smart Addressing
swftbox uses proprietary algorithms to predict a customer’s address. Called Smart Addressing, this sophisticated set of algorithms utilize NLP (Natural Language Processing) with deep learning techniques and knowledge graphs to translate any customer address input into an exact location on the map.
Traditional APIs such as Google Maps are typically designed for more structured urban environments, but swftbox’s algorithms are tailored to the region. They make sense of complex input addresses within the region and pinpoint the exact locations of the customers – a.k.a. geolocation. This geolocation is then automatically fed into our routing, batching and dispatching algorithms, which build routes for the courier.
Aside from this, there are a set of features that play a role in supporting Smart Addressing:
Archive of Addresses
When a courier has dropped off a shipment, the system takes the drop location of the courier and considers it as the customer’s drop location. So for the next delivery, the courier already has a correct pin location.
2. Pin Confidence Score
swftbox has created a scoring system that reflects the quality of the address provided and whether or not swftbox has delivered to a customer before. If the score is low, swftbox verifies the address by calling the customers or sending out an SMS to them so that they can confirm their pin.
Through these mechanisms, swftbox enables couriers to pinpoint the locations of the customers. But if you’re a customer who struggles with couriers calling you constantly for a pin location, then make sure you always write your full address with as many details as possible to help couriers make your delivery a memorable one.
*This article is the third and last part of the three-part weekly series.
