Knowing the best practices for hiring and training courier drivers is fundamental. Employers’ requirements for couriers are usually low. It is believed that anyone can perform the duties of a delivery person, as long as they have time to deliver orders. In practice, everything is more complicated. Responsibility, neatness, and the desire to work quickly and efficiently are important for a courier.
According to Workwave, There is also an optional, but very useful quality – the ability to conduct a competent dialogue. There is a lot of competition in the courier market, and people care about the quality of delivery, punctuality and politeness, the convenience of receiving an order, and not just the quality of the product itself.
Best practices for hiring courier drivers in the UK
Courier driver’s objective self-assessment
Experience matters. But no less important is the applicant’s objective self-assessment and how it relates to his or her future responsibilities. If during the interview the candidate excitedly tells how well he or she managed a small team, he or she is unlikely to work as a courier for long, and soon you will have to look for a replacement.
The courier driver must know all the algorithm of actions
The courier must know the algorithm of actions in all bad situations and strictly follow them. His or her task is not to lose the client’s loyalty and not allow a complete refusal of the ordered goods. The courier is often the face of the courier company, the only one the buyer sees. And he or she will then judge the courier business by how the courier driver treated them.
The courier driver must know the way to find the right address
No one knows their city better than couriers and postmen. And no one knows better than them how to get out of a situation when the address is not indicated in full. The easiest way is to call the client to clarify the office number. Turning around and leaving without even making an attempt to deliver is unacceptable.
Fundamental duties and responsibilities of couriers
- Performing technical inspections and making sure the car is healthy before transporting the load
- Getting to know the behavior of other drivers, especially on intercity roads, quick reaction and safe and secure driving.
- Planning and coordination for cargo transportation and delivery at the specified time
- Reporting to the company and workplace (required in some companies)
- Being committed and sticking to the schedule
- Supervise or assist with loading
- Ensuring that loads are correct and safe
- Delivery of cargo according to schedule and supervision and assistance in unloading cargo
- Complete familiarity with traffic laws, obey the laws, avoid risky behaviors and pay attention to the warnings of police officers.
- Good familiarity with the technical issues of heavy machinery and the ability to perform basic repairs such as changing tires and…
- Report any violation or incident to the traffic department as well as the workplace company
- Ability to drive in unpredictable and sensitive conditions such as snow, rain and heavy traffic
Also, the courier driver must have skills including time management, having a spirit of responsibility, calmness while driving, especially on long and heavy traffic routes, benefiting from car technical information, driving techniques, effective communication with others, social understanding, awareness of health and safety issues. Be relevant and have a spirit of responsibility. Because many employers, in order to hire suitable people for the job of driver, have asked job seekers about these mentioned skills in the job interview session in order to get more detailed information.
Selection of couriers and financial responsibility
A courier driver can be hired on a permanent basis with a salary, or paid only for delivered orders.
- If there are few orders. It is more reasonable to find a courier who can come on call and pay him or her only for the work done. The disadvantage of this method is that he may be busy or suddenly stop working.
- If there are many orders. There are two options for making payments – in the first case, pay some required minimum, plus a surcharge depending on the number of completed orders. In the second case, pay only for delivered orders, but at the same time ensure full workload.
In any case, it is not worth saving much on courier services, but it is better to introduce a bonus system. This will serve as a kind of incentive to work and provide high-quality services.
The courier is, so to speak, the face of the online store, as this is the only person with whom the buyer directly contacts. Whether the buyer will make a repeat order often depends on how he or she behaves.
It is necessary to approach the selection of couriers very carefully, since in case of a mistake you can lose both the goods and the money. You can find “black lists” of couriers on the Internet, and be sure to check all applicants. An agreement on financial responsibility is signed with the employee himself, so that in case of problems you can contact law enforcement agencies.
Before starting his or her work, it is advisable to conduct a short training – tell about the characteristics of the delivered goods, so that he or she can answer at least the most frequently asked questions of buyers and help with checking the functionality.
Best practices for training courier drivers in the UK
- Conduct training in a place convenient for all couriers, An astonishing life hack: already during the training, you can understand what abilities the applicants have for this profession, because some performers manage to get lost in the middle of nowhere. Such couriers will most likely be late even during work, and also distract clients and the support service so that they can get help building a route and finding the right point.
- Do not gather too many people at the training at the same time: you should be able to talk to each of them separately in order to carefully look at the person and assess his potential. If there are more than 10-15 couriers at the training, you will hardly be able to pay attention to each of them.
- If a courier behaves strangely or inappropriately during an interview, do not give them access to applications or at least make a note in their profile “Until the first comment”. This is exactly what personal meetings are for: in text communication, a person needs more time to “show themselves”, but in real life everything is immediately clear.
- To consolidate the information after the training, couriers can be given a small test. It allows you to assess how attentively the person listened to the trainer and learned the information. 10-12 questions from different blocks are enough: about money, timing, working with the application and communication ethics.
- If a courier successfully completed training but then disappeared from the radar, it is important to understand why the person never started working. Was he confused by something, did he go to competitors or did he just come because he had nothing better to do? Therefore, at the beginning of each month, call couriers who were activated a month ago but for some reason did not start working. In about 20% of cases, this helps to activate the “lost ones”.
Hourly hiring of couriers – hiring and outsourcing
Outsourcing is the most well-known scheme for hiring couriers by the hour for various business areas: a company turns to a third-party contractor and hires employees for temporary use. If necessary, in addition to the couriers themselves, the business can receive, for example, storage space for orders, if it is an online store. Or the contractor can offer help with accounting for orders and other paperwork.
Hiring is a new format for the courier market, very similar to outsourcing. The business also receives couriers with hourly pay and full equipment, who arrive at the customer company with transport. Plus there is a personal manager for each client.
Hiring couriers adhere to the standards of the business for which they become temporary employees. For example, if a gadget store promises its customers delivery within an hour, couriers fulfill this requirement. Or they can communicate with customers of a conventional restaurant using specific scripts that are used in this establishment.
Another important point and difference from outsourcing is that in hiring, the service provider offers courier routing. That is, a special polygon is connected for the partner, which coincides with its delivery zone, and automatic assignment is enabled. Also, the partner’s admin panel can be integrated into the service provider’s admin panel. In this case, when an order is received by the partner, it goes via API to the supplier’s application, and is automatically assigned to a courier who is on the partner’s hiring.
Why is hourly hiring more effective?
Shops and restaurants often organize delivery by connecting to an aggregator. They go to a large platform that provides its couriers with transport, uniform and equipment, full order management and marketing. It is convenient, but often very expensive. The average commission from an order from aggregators is 25-30%.
If the business is small, has just started to develop, it has few orders. It is difficult for it to give away a third of the earned amount each time. Delivery becomes, if not unprofitable, then at least unprofitable.
The only thing he wins is promotion, access to a large audience. And for large companies, marketing is sometimes not needed, so overpaying for it becomes absolutely unnecessary. Hiring is an alternative to connecting to an aggregator, but without the marketing part.
For those companies that cannot connect to the aggregator due to the specifics of the niche – for example, banks – their own staff of couriers becomes the main available way to organize delivery. The main problem with this path is the price of the issue:
- Payroll for a permanent salary, regardless of whether the couriers were fully or partially loaded today.
- The costs of hiring, searching, training, which takes about a week or more.
Plus, the company will either purchase conditional bicycles and scooters itself, if the budget allows, or will set strict search criteria: the courier must have some kind of vehicle. This is both time and money.
Hourly hiring is a way to optimize expenses, especially in times of crisis or when the business itself is not confident in its economic stability and sustainability. But whether hiring is really more profitable than full-time couriers depends on the specific business.
Hourly hiring formats for couriers
Classic hiring is a complete replacement of your couriers. The business places an order for a certain number of couriers a week in advance, they come out for at least 6 hours a day. The average payment per hour depends on the type of transport used for delivery. This scheme is suitable for those companies that have regular orders, but do not want or do not find it economically feasible to form their own staff.
In addition to the classic format, hourly hiring may include express delivery, ASAP. The business installs an application and through it, as needed, calls the required number of couriers who are needed here and now. This format is relevant when the company has sudden surges in demand for delivery, and the available resources are not enough to satisfy it. Moreover, it does not matter who is handling the main stable pool of orders – full-time couriers or those taken through classic hiring.
Who benefits from hiring hourly couriers
In various forms, it can suit any last-mile delivery, including express delivery, regardless of the product the business offers. For restaurants and grocery stores, hiring is especially convenient as an additional format to the existing delivery. For example, during normal times, full-time couriers handle orders, and during peak periods, hourly couriers are needed.
For small companies that have just decided to launch delivery and do not understand whether there will be demand, how exactly to organize everything, how much budget is needed for this, hiring is a good way to try and draw conclusions relatively inexpensively. You can hire 10 couriers for a week and see how they will cope with incoming orders, whether this number of people is enough for the products to reach all customers on time, and so on.
However, hiring is not suitable for businesses selling large-sized goods. Because, firstly, couriers are limited by the capabilities of a standard passenger car. And many also have motorcycles, scooters, and bicycles as their main transport. Secondly, couriers cannot always act as loaders and deliver a conventional refrigerator to a client.
What are the challenges for business and how to solve them?
The main barrier for business is the issue of economic feasibility. Both for a start-up company and for one that has been developing for a long time in any of the niches, doubts are relevant about how profitable it is to hire couriers on an hourly basis. If budgets are limited, you want to reduce the risks of losing money.
The only way to understand whether it is worth hiring by the hour is to calculate how much courier delivery currently costs. If the business has not yet implemented it, you need to study the market and estimate how much it will cost to launch delivery through your staff.
A common mistake is when a company compares only the cost of an hour of a courier on a hiring and an hour in the salary of its courier. But delivery costs include both salary and search, hiring, training, equipment, rotation risks if someone does not show up for an order and a replacement is needed, as well as payroll for the operations manager.
The second barrier is control over orders from third-party suppliers. If a company forms an internal delivery department and hires couriers, it understands how the processes work, where each employee is, where they went, where they didn’t get, what’s next in their plans. When hiring from a third-party contractor, there are concerns that it will not be possible to control the performers. In hiring, this problem is solved by routing from the supplier: integration of two admin panels — a conventional restaurant and a company providing couriers.
The third barrier is the business’s doubts that the quality of the third-party service will be the same as that of a full-time employee. The problem is relevant for companies with their own couriers, and which simply need to periodically add a few people from the outside. In hiring, each courier gets acquainted with the standards of the company to which he connects, and acts in the same way as a full-time employee.
How to interest couriers
Before entering the market with a list of requirements for performers, you need to have a good idea of what you can give them in return. The following phenomenal factors came to the fore:
- Clear payment terms
For example, when a courier takes an order, he sees that he will receive 350 rubles for delivery, and this price will not change during the process. The performer immediately sees both the final figure of his earnings and the service commission – everything is clear and transparent.
- Flexible schedule
It is fundamental for couriers to be able to combine this employment with their main job. For example, many of our couriers work as engineers, journalists, managers during the day – and in the evening, if they have time and desire to earn extra money, they deliver orders.
- Live support chats
If the contractor encounters a problem, for example, the customer does not open the door or indicates the wrong address in the application, it should be resolved within 3-5 minutes, even during peak periods.
How to organize a courier company’s orders?
Courier Software is a step towards this path that allows logistics and courier companies to simplify their current manual tasks and makes it easy for them to monitor every process in real-time. People these days want and expect instant gratification in everything, and courier delivery service enables them to track their parcels in real-time.
Courier Software is the advanced mechanism that meets the comprehensive needs of logistics companies and allows managing express delivery operations with easy-to-handle functions. From smart tracking in the platform to fleet management and driver activity monitoring, the Courier Software comes with a convenient interface that automates your business in no time.
Courier Software offers a white label parcel delivery software in the UK that is compatible and ensures that express delivery operations are fully automated, enabling accurate parcel delivery in the fastest possible time.
Conclusion
So, we understood the best practices for hiring and training courier drivers. Also, If a candidate honestly says that for him, working as a courier is a temporary part-time job until something better comes along, that’s not bad. You’ll close the vacancy for a while and won’t expect a specific employee to work for a long time. But if a candidate claims that he or she is ready to work “until retirement,” he or she is probably lying.
Contrary to popular belief, couriers also have the opportunity to build a career. For example, you can become a delivery manager. And if a candidate has no goals at all, perhaps he or she is weak-willed and irresponsible in other aspects of the job.
Hiring cannot be called a magic pill for all delivery problems and a universal option for every business. But given its flexibility, many companies can really choose an effective model for themselves and optimize costs, which is especially important in unstable and crisis times.
