Two years ago we started texting customers automatically when a delivery was running late. The rule was simple and seemed obviously right: when the route planner's estimated arrival for a stop moved more than thirty minutes past the booked window, the customer received a message with the new time. Customer services had asked for it, and calls asking where a delivery was fell by about a fifth in the first month.
Over the following year the complaints changed character. People now rang to ask why they had been told a delivery would be late when it arrived on time, or why they had received three messages with three different times. A care home cancelled a delivery after being told it would arrive once their kitchen had closed, and the van turned up at the original time.
We replayed six weeks of routes against the messages sent. Twenty six percent of delay texts had gone out for deliveries that arrived inside the original window. The estimate jumped when a driver stopped for a legally required break, when a van lost its signal for a few minutes, and when stops were completed in a different order from the plan, and each jump recovered shortly afterwards. The planner's estimate was designed for dispatchers, who watch it continuously and know that it wobbles. Our automation had taken a number meant to be watched and treated every reading of it as news worth sending to a customer.
The rule now waits until an estimate has stayed late for fifteen minutes before it sends anything, and it ignores movement while a vehicle is parked for a break. A customer receives at most two updates per delivery, and the second only if the time has moved by more than an hour. The messages give a window rather than a minute. And any change to what we send customers is reviewed by customer services with a month of replayed routes, showing how often the new rule would have been wrong.
False delay messages are now about one in twenty, and the calls they created have largely stopped.
A dispatcher who sees an estimate slip waits a few minutes to see whether it holds before picking up the phone. The automation replaced the phone call and left out the wait, and the wait was doing most of the work.
– Serguey Shinder
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