How Last-Mile Delivery Impacts High-Value Customer Loyalty — with Ryan Leigh

Most retailers know delivery matters yet few recognize how directly it impacts the loyalty of their highest-value customers.

On this episode of Deliver: The Last-Mile Performance Podcast, Sales Engineering Lead Raquel Zanoni sits down with Bringg Field CTO Ryan Leigh. Their conversation digs into findings from Bringg's 2026 Delivery Experience Study and its implications for how retailers think about delivery promises, customer segmentation, and long-term profitability.

Ryan brings nearly a decade of experience helping global retail and logistics executives connect last-mile performance with customer experience, brand trust, and cost efficiency. He works closely with Bringg's go-to-market teams and spends much of his time in the field designing solutions for new customers and coaching sales teams on how to translate operational complexity into business value.

Watch the full interview to learn:

• Why "power shoppers" generate outsized revenue but are twice as likely to leave after a bad delivery
• How the post-COVID shift from speed to cost reduction misses the bigger profitability picture
• Why delivery cost and delivery price are different levers, and how smart retailers decouple them
• The systems that need to work together behind the scenes to keep a delivery promise and maintain customer loyalty

Get the key takeaways and full transcript below. Subscribe on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or YouTube to get the latest episodes.

Key takeaways

Speed isn't the delivery advantage it used to be

• Many retailers still treat speed as the top priority, and customers still expect free returns, intact packaging, and fast shipping. However, they’re table stakes and don't differentiate.
• Delivering on the promise drives loyalty now: on-time arrival within a predictable window, with proactive communication.
• Retailers that slowed down delivery but introduced narrower time slots and better communication saw stronger repeat business than those chasing same-day.

Speed got retailers into the game. Reliability and predictability are what keep customers coming back. When a retailer makes a promise and keeps it, that builds the kind of trust that compounds into long-term brand loyalty.

Power shoppers are the most valuable customers and the easiest to lose

• Power shoppers, consumers who order 11 or more times per month, represent a small share of shoppers but generate outsized revenue and are less forgiving of delivery failures.
• 68% of power shoppers have stopped buying from a brand after a single bad delivery experience, compared to 47% of regular shoppers.
• 81% of power shoppers will reorder from a retailer because of a great delivery experience, even at a higher price.

Retailers that treat all customers the same leave money on the table. Power shoppers reward consistency and punish broken promises faster than any other segment.

Profitable delivery is about increasing customer lifetime value, not cost reduction

• Most retailers define "profitable delivery" as cheaper delivery but profitability should be measured across the full customer relationship, not a single order.
• A power shopper who regularly spends $50–$100 per order shouldn't be charged for delivery on a cheaper item that falls below the free shipping threshold. That long-term relationship is worth more than the margin on one transaction.
• The delivery costs and prices are two different levers. Smart retailers decouple them based on customer value, not just basket size.

The pivot from speed to cost reduction is real, but it's incomplete. The same operational decisions that protect customer lifetime value, accurate promises, smarter segmentation, connected systems, also reduce cost. It's not one or the other. The next step is using delivery pricing as a loyalty tool, not just a margin calculation.

eCommerce and operations teams can't work in silos

• A persistent disconnect exists between the teams that make delivery promises (eCommerce, marketing) and the teams that fulfill them (operations, transportation).
• During COVID, retailers launched same-day delivery without inventory visibility, picking capacity, or carrier networks to support it. Some accepted orders knowing they'd cancel the ones they couldn't fulfill.
• A reliable delivery promise requires real-time data flowing between marketing, eCommerce, inventory, warehouse management, transportation, and CRM systems.

The front door is the highest-stakes moment in the customer relationship. It's where the brand promise becomes physical. When delivery is treated as an operational afterthought, that moment breaks. And when it breaks, the customer leaves, often without the retailer ever knowing why.

The last mile can't be an afterthought. It's a growth lever.

• Late delivery is the number one cause of negative delivery experiences, and negative experiences drive permanent customer loss, according to the 2026 Delivery Experience Study.
• Mature retailers treat the last mile as an embedded part of the customer experience, tied to customer lifetime value.
• Delivery is the fastest way to protect customer lifetime value but also the fastest way to destroy it.

The retailers that win long-term will be the ones that stop optimizing delivery in isolation and treat it as a core driver of loyalty, revenue, and competitive differentiation.

Evolve past last-mile table stakes

Raquel Zanoni: You've been in this industry for almost a decade, and we've seen in those 10 years such an evolution in delivery and final mile. I'm curious what your thoughts are on ideas or misconceptions that retail leaders have today that need to be retired, or maybe they’re actively hurting their business?

 Ryan Leigh: One thing that is still a bit of a misconception is the idea that speed wins over every other part of the experience…During COVID and post-COVID, we spoke a lot about speed. There was a bit of a race to the bottom when it came to delivery speed. And I still feel like there's some degree of, it's not quite the 15-minute bottom that we were seeing before, but I still feel like [many are still] viewing speed is the be all and end all of making a delivery experience great but that's not necessarily the case.

Raquel Zanoni: We have table stakes and delivery speed is one of them. What are some of the other table stake items? And what are new trends or new things that retailers should be focusing on related to the final mile that will level them up with their customers?

Ryan Leigh: We spoke about speed. There's convenient returns and ideally free returns. If I were shopping, I'd want free returns or at least some reasonable, predictable return process that doesn't involve taking my stuff halfway across town then waiting six weeks for it to be processed. There’s eco-friendly packaging. [And ensuring packages] aren’t damaged when they’re delivered. All of that is the basics of delivery. A lot of customers expect this. It's entry level stuff. 

But beyond that, when you make a promise, deliver on that promise. On-time arrival matters. Don’t deliver too early because I might not be home, and certainly don’t deliver too late because lateness is very bad, as we’ll come to later.

If you make a promise, it should be kept. And when looking at the best delivery experiences, the retailers that do this well set a clear expectation, like “it will arrive tomorrow,” and then it shows up at the time they said it would.

Raquel Zanoni: So Amazon aside, because we know they're kind of a gold standard when it comes to delivery, can you give examples of retailers that are adapting to this new reality well? And on the flip side, how are others struggling to adapt?

Ryan Leigh: I can think of retailers that invested heavily in same-day delivery to speed up the delivery promise to the customer. But when you buy something the same day, the delivery window itself is very broad—it could be several hours long. So if it's a high-value item or it needs a signature, I have to wait the rest of the day for that thing to be delivered. I have no idea when it's going to come. That's a pretty frustrating experience.

That is a good example of where the retailer sees speed as the be all and end all of the delivery experience, but actually the predictability of having a specific window is a bigger driver of better customer experience and therefore repeat business. Other retailers have moved away from that same-day delivery promise because that's really expensive to deliver. [Instead, they're] slowing down delivery a little bit but introducing narrower time slots, like a one or two hour slot for tomorrow, with proactive communication arrival. That's a much more compelling customer experience and more likely to drive repeat business.

The ideal delivery journey

Raquel Zanoni: Can you walk me through what an ideal delivery experience looks like from start to finish? And then explain why that's so difficult for retailers to achieve?

Ryan Leigh: This applies to my work designing solutions for customers and personal experience. Before I start shopping, I want to have a fair idea of when that item or items could be available for delivery. Even before I arrive at a website, I've already pre-filtered brands that I think are going to have a suitable delivery experience and get something to me within the timeframe that I need it. And when I arrive at the website, I expect to have that promise available to me. So if brands are marketing next-day delivery within a time window, I expect that option to be available when I arrive at the website, potentially with other options for a specific day of the week. Maybe I’m doing a DIY job at home and I need things on Saturday. I want options depending on the type of purchase I'm making. 

So it’s having promises that make sense to the customer and will drive traffic to the website, then encourage consumers to put items in their basket. Then at checkout, I expect those options to continue to be available. I don't expect any discrepancy between the product page and checkout. And obviously the price should be reasonable. It doesn't necessarily mean it's free if I'm ordering a heavy tool, but it needs to make sense in terms of its relationship to the value of the basket. It should also take in my value as a customer. If I'm constantly shopping with that retailer, then I'd expect some sort of benefit to that relationship. 

So far, we've spoken about loads of stuff that, on the face of it, doesn't have anything to do with delivery itself. A lot of this is on the eCommerce side of the business and customer experience- and shopping-related. But you can get a lot of this data from your last-mile. This data needs to be available to make a suitable promise, because there's a problem if you make a promise and you can't deliver on it. If there's a discrepancy between what you've told me and what you've actually done, that's actually more damaging than not making the promise in the first place.

Read the full study, Power Shoppers Are the Biggest Loyalty Risk, to learn more

The link between customer loyalty and the delivery experience

Raquel Zanoni: You said you would narrow down a list of retailers you know will be able to get you what you want when you want it, which creates a direct link between customer loyalty and their delivery experience. And oftentimes that gets underestimated. 

When retailers underestimate that link, where do we see that impact? Does it usually impact conversion, repeat purchase, or brand trust? Where does it show up when a retailer can't honor that delivery experience or when they have a bad delivery experience?

Ryan Leigh: The best delivery experience answers those questions before customers ask them. When you create that trust with the consumer base—and it doesn't have to be individual customers, this is a brand reputation thing—you're creating trust with a broad range of consumers. That means when they shop with you, you're going to deliver on that promise. And as you break that trust, you're going to lose not only individual baskets but a consumer base, and that loyalty will disappear.

That speaks to the main outcome, which is if you don't do that correctly at the front, you won't know because those consumers won't even be visible on your website…These consumers have just gone somewhere else.

If I'm selling washing machines and my washing machines are the cheapest on the market, I'm playing a zero-sum price game, which I don't want to be playing as a retailer. I could make a promise to the market saying my goods are always going to be cheaper than anybody else's. But if my delivery experience is not good enough or I can't get things to you in the timeframe that you need them, it doesn't really matter how cheap those things are, you're not going to get the traffic to the website in the first place.

Raquel Zanoni: That's what we're seeing in the Power Shoppers study—the majority of customers aren't going to come back to a retailer if they have a bad delivery experience. And I've certainly had that happen. I'll order something, but it doesn't get delivered when I want and mentally I'll blacklist that retailer and never order from them again…I’d like to think that's a pretty common experience.

Ryan Leigh: I had an experience that really annoyed me just before Christmas. I've gotten into shopping for secondhand clothes and shoes on a reseller's website that delivers through logistics partners. I bought a pair of discontinued sneakers that I was looking for for a long time. They shipped just before Christmas. Probably not the best time to buy something and have it shipped because of all the traffic in the networks, but still they were available so I bought them. Then they went into a black hole and never surfaced. I had to wait about four working weeks for the shoes to never arrive at my house, then I raised a query. 

I got my money back—that wasn't the problem. But the sneakers just disappeared within the network. And that drives me mad because it's not like I can buy them somewhere else. So the seller got their compensation for the trainers, and I got my money back. But ultimately, those trainers were kind of floating around in the network in Schrodinger's parcel, neither delivered nor not delivered until someone opens the parcel and figures out whether they're available or not. It was very frustrating.

The delivery promise gap: eCommerce vs. operations

Raquel Zanoni: Why did that sneaker situation take four weeks? Why is it so hard to get people things that they need? 

Ryan Leigh: It comes back to one point of companies treating the customer experience side and the eCommerce side of the business as separate things from the operational aspect of making the delivery. There's a disconnect. It’s a “make a promise and then deal with it later,” kind of approach.

If you look at the survey data, making a promise and delivering on that promise puts a lot more emphasis on the operations side of the business than the customer side. Because if you can deliver on a promise and create that trust with your customer base, you can drive a lot more revenue, customer lifetime value, and loyalty, especially with high-value shoppers and repeat shoppers. That is more important than many other aspects of eCommerce. Last-mile delivery, making sure you get that right and doing what you say you're going to do, is a real driver of loyalty and revenue.

A lot of the companies don't see it that way. They see it as a cost center rather than a driver of loyalty and revenue.

Raquel Zanoni: We've heard from other podcast guests that the last mile isn't a cost center. It's a part of your brand. It's a part of your offering. So when you are looking to offer something like same-day, next-day, or two-day shipping, it's not just a digital experience. It has to be backed up by something real. There has to be an operations team actually making that happen on the back end. 

And those two are sometimes disconnected from one another. It's the business saying, "We want to do this. Operations, make it happen." But the "make it happen" part is what tends to get ignored or not invested in well enough until you start to see it affecting customer loyalty and repeat purchases.

Power shoppers are the highest-value, highest-risk segment

Raquel Zanoni: I want to move into a piece of the study that really spoke to me personally: customer segments. One of them is described as the "power shopper," defined as a consumer who makes more than 11 purchases online a month. I read that and said, "That's me, I'm a power shopper." But why do those segments matter? Why should retailers care about these different types of shoppers?

Ryan Leigh: If you really dig into the data, the most valuable customers available to you are also the hardest to keep. The data pretty consistently showed that regardless of why—if you break a promise, if something's late, if you deliver something damaged, if the returns process isn't good—the more regularly a customer shops and the more they spend online, the less forgiving they are of those kinds of mistakes.

It depends on how you want to build your business. If you want to build a business that relies on frequent customer acquisition, you can afford to make those mistakes because you can acquire one-off customers regularly and your customer payback can be pretty low. But if your business has a high cost of customer acquisition, with groceries, for example it's difficult to acquire a customer, and when you do, you really need to keep them. The payback period is long because margins are lower. So when you acquire a customer, you really have to deliver on the promise.

In that relationship, if your only physical touch point with the customer is through delivery—which it is with my grocer, at least—and that was consistently outside of the time window or more expensive than I had signed up for, those things would impact my desire to shop with them. If I'm one of those power shoppers ordering 11 or more times a month, you have the opportunity to make a lot of money from me if you keep me happy. That allows you to focus on a smaller customer base, but a more loyal customer base where you can drive a much higher customer lifetime value.

Last-mile priorities vary by retailer and customer segment

Raquel Zanoni: I want to get really specific on what you were talking about. You mentioned grocery and its specific attributes. Can you describe some other types of retailers and maybe what they should be focusing on as far as the types of customers they're appealing to and what those customers would care about?

Ryan Leigh: We've spoken about groceries but if you look at the opposite end of the spectrum, you're still in the realm where delivery matters because the customer needs to be at home. With groceries, a customer needs to be at home to unpack stuff. You can't just dump it on the doorstep when there are refrigerated or frozen items. 

So if we want to look at a similar delivery experience but a different type of retailer with a different requirement for the delivery promise, you could look at white-glove goods like appliances. I want to buy a washing machine. I have to be at home for that to be delivered. It's not going to be left on the driveway. 

So it's an attended delivery, which means it's got a similar profile to a grocery delivery. But the difference is I certainly don't intend to buy washing machines very regularly. So your opportunity to drive revenue from me as a consumer is pretty irregular compared to groceries, and that has a different impact on the way you would design your ideal consumer experience.

Read the full study, Power Shoppers Are the Biggest Loyalty Risk, to learn more

With groceries, a lot of the stuff is commodity. There's very little differentiation between who sells me Heinz baked beans. So the differentiation comes in price, delivery experience, flexibility, and convenience. Whereas with white-glove goods like a washing machine, I would actually pay more for the item if I can get it delivered at the time I need it. And I'd even pay more for the delivery as well. You could be selling me a washing machine for $500 and I would pay you $550 if I can get it this evening or tomorrow morning when my engineer is here, because my washing machine is broken, my washing is piling up, and my kids need clothes for school on Friday. These are things that drive a different need within the customer experience.

Raquel Zanoni: Delivery experience is important, but the actual aspects of that experience, whether it's returns management, free delivery, speed of delivery, white-glove services, or full-service delivery, each one has a different level of importance for specific retailers. To your point, for grocery delivery it might be more valuable to get it there in 30 minutes, where obviously that's unrealistic for a washing machine and not needed. So speed of delivery isn't as important.

COVID's same-day delivery hangover

Raquel Zanoni: That's something important for retailers to think about because we saw this trend around COVID where every retailer was saying, "I have to offer same-day." And some of them just operationally couldn't do same-day. They didn't have the inventory or the visibility or the network to do it. So it's about thinking about what actually drives loyalty for your customers when it comes to delivery and being very specific.

Ryan Leigh: You're prompting me to remember some times during COVID where, like you said, there were retailers racing to do same-day delivery. We spoke to them about the options they had on the table and they'd tell us they had no visibility over the inventory in the store. 

We'd ask, “How are we going to make a promise to the customer about delivery in two hours when you don't even know if a sweatshirt is in the store?” And they'd say, “Don't worry about it, we'll take the orders and then just cancel the ones we don't have.” What a crazy way to lose customers.

Raquel Zanoni: So there's an operational side of that. But knowing your customer segment can also help define that delivery experience because different customer motives will have different expectations for delivery. With a lot of the retailers that tried to stand up same-day, not only could they not operationally handle it, but oftentimes people just didn't need it. I don't need a sweatshirt in two hours. It's not a huge revenue driver. So that's an interesting piece of the customer segmentation, mapping out delivery to customers' expectations and motives.

Ryan Leigh: There's also something here around delivery as a siloed problem. Inventory is one thing we've mentioned, but it's not the only thing. There are other aspects that could stop you from making a delivery. Same-day is an easy example because it has more constraints, but any delivery has constraints. For example, have you got the picking and packing capacity? It's not just whether the inventory is available, are the people available in the store? So if you're going to launch a same-day service, not only do you need a good level of confidence on the stock, you also need confidence in the team in the store. On top of that, are you happy to pull them away from dealing with physical customers? 

These are things that hadn't really been thought through at that time, and they're things we try to encourage our customers to think about when we're designing solutions. Do you have the transportation options? The picking capacity? Are pickers available or are they going to have to wait for waves of picking at certain times during the day? Are you going to have to hire people for that picking? Have you even got a process for picking in the store? How is that going to impact the physical shopping experience? If you start parking trolleys all around your store, that's going to negatively impact what's usually a curated in-store experience, especially for higher-value brands.

And then there's your customer profile data and your CRM. Going back to the power shopper concept, if you are lucky enough to have the loyalty of a power shopper, how do you treat that data? Are you using it to make smart decisions about the offers you make to that customer? Most brands are pretty good at offering vouchers or discounts on goods. But when it comes to the delivery experience, it's not just, “How valuable is this basket,” but, “how valuable is this customer overall? How often do they shop with me? How much have they spent over the last five years? How regularly do they return things?”

These are all data points that aren't directly connected to transportation cost or availability, but would impact how you position a delivery promise to a customer.

Raquel Zanoni: COVID was an inflection point in delivery. How has the mindset shifted since then? I saw retailers focus on either standing up delivery or getting same-day up and running. I don't think that's the case anymore. Where do you see the focus now?

Ryan Leigh: The race to the bottom on speed seems to have calmed down. There's a lot more focus on profitable delivery. But when people say profitable delivery, what they really mean is cheaper delivery. I don't think profitable is the way most retailers are looking at it. It's driving cost down operationally rather than looking at the genuine profitability of a transaction in the context of a wider relationship with that consumer, which is what we're talking about here; the value of a power shopper over a longer period of time than one transaction. 

Most retailers we speak to are still more fixated on lower cost and less aware of the longer-term value of a customer. But the pivot that has happened in the last couple of years is a move away from speed and towards reducing cost.

Profitable delivery doesn't mean cheaper delivery

Raquel Zanoni: Can you tease that [reducing costs] out a little bit more? 

Ryan Leigh : When we talk to retailers, they talk about profitability of delivery. But what they really mean is making a delivery more profitable by reducing cost to create a larger margin. There are different ways of making your relationship with a consumer more profitable and it doesn't necessarily mean making the delivery cheaper. It could be incentivizing that consumer to shop with you more regularly, both physically and online, and joining the dots between those different transactions. It could be considering all the data points I mentioned earlier, especially the long-term, CRM data around the relationship with that consumer.

Online, it's very easy to track this stuff. When there's a power shopper, you should be using that data. As our data has shown, those shoppers are much more valuable to your brand, and making sure that you deliver on the promise is a powerful differentiator to keep them. That's what [I mean] when I'm talking about making a relationship profitable as opposed to making individual transactions profitable.

You're clearly a power shopper. You might regularly spend $50, $60, $100 with me. Then on one occasion, you might just need a pair of socks. But I know that you regularly spend money with me. Why should I charge you for the delivery on that pair of socks, even though it's below the threshold this time? That's the kind of long-term decision-making that I don't think exists right now for most retailers we talk to.

Delivery costs versus delivery price

Raquel Zanoni: That brings us full circle from our conversation earlier about the importance of these types of shoppers and the trends we're seeing. If you look at the study, 81% of power shoppers reorder from a retailer because of a great delivery experience, even if there's a higher price involved. That means speed is not as important as retailers might think. That gets us into the price of delivery versus cost of delivery, which comes up a lot in my conversations with retailers.

Can you help our listeners understand the difference between the two and how that translates to influencing buying decisions for these different segments?

Ryan Leigh: Cost is what it costs your business to do something. If I'm contracting a third party to deliver a pair of sneakers, that third party is going to charge me $8. That $8 is my cost for that delivery. There are other costs on top of that, handling costs in the store or warehouse or packaging costs, but let's just look at that cost of delivery as $8.

The price is what I'm going to charge the consumer for that service. Those two things are often related but they don't have to be. The example I gave earlier on a pair of socks: let's say it's a three-pack for $15, and it's below the $40 threshold for free delivery. I'm going to charge $5 for that delivery, even though it's going to cost me $8 to make that delivery. I don't have to charge $5. I could make that zero. I could say, “You're a loyal shopper with us, Raquel. Thanks for shopping with us 55 times in the last two years. Even though this is below the basket threshold, we're going to make this one free.”

So I'm completely detaching the cost of an individual transaction from the price of that transaction in order to drive more loyalty. Because I know that you're a power shopper with long-term loyalty to my brand and you've spent [a lot with us] over time. That's where we talk about cost and price of a service.

Raquel Zanoni: So we’ve defined the two. Going back to the earlier point, this is where the disconnect shows up. Retailers surface price to the customer through the digital eCommerce experience, while cost is what's happening behind the scenes.

There’s a strong emphasis on free delivery, which has become the default eCommerce experience. But that often doesn’t reflect what’s happening on the backend. Do retailers actually have a clear handle on delivery costs? Do they understand the true cost per order on an incremental basis? What are you seeing?

Ryan Leigh: It’s probably a bit easier to work out your per-delivery costs when it’s done through a third party. You get your invoice at the end of the month, they tell you how many deliveries you’ve done, what the average cost is, and all the rest of it. But it’s a simplified view. As mentioned earlier, just looking at the cost of transportation is a very simplified equation of what it actually costs you to service that order.

When working on a business case for a new customer, the goal is to draw out all of the relevant costs within the business that might, in some way, be attributed to an individual transaction. That could be packaging costs, picking and packing within a store or warehouse, or even the square footage needed to stage goods.

If you’re doing waves of delivery and need a bigger floor space to stage lots of routes, then clearly there’s a requirement for a larger warehouse than if you’re doing more of a rolling dispatch process. A rolling dispatch process has other costs, but it doesn’t need lots of square footage in the same way as a one-time dispatch of multiple trucks.

These are all costs that you could roll up into a per-transaction view.

Whether retailers, and logistics companies included, are doing that in an effective way comes down to the maturity of that business. Some on the more mature end have a pretty good handle on those costs. It’s an area that’s had a lot of focus over the last couple of years. And there are others that probably don’t—they’re still using equations that are a few years out of date.

Raquel Zanoni: I agree. I think what we’ve seen is that there are retailers who are a bit more mature and are starting to look at this. And then there are still a lot of retailers who are arbitrarily offering $2.99 delivery or free delivery, but they don’t have a real understanding of what their cost is for that specific delivery.

To wrap that up, if a retailer doesn’t have a good understanding of their costs, it will impact the delivery experience. There are moments where they could offer free delivery and don’t, and others where it makes sense to charge for delivery and they don’t.

That’s the important link many retailers are missing. It directly influences the delivery experience, customer lifetime value, repeat customers, and so on.

Ryan Leigh: Yeah, I think it’s a data point. Cost of delivery is a data point, one of a few that you’d want to consider when pricing a delivery service. It’s not the only one.

We mentioned some earlier, like inventory availability. If there’s a backlog of stock that’s going out of date or has a limited shelf life, and that stock sits within a particular store, then discounted delivery can be used to drive a higher purchase rate for that stock.

That becomes a way to drive more revenue and also reduce cost in the business from stock going out of date. And it doesn’t necessarily mean grocery. It could be other types of stock with a limited shelf life. These are all things that can be used to influence pricing.

Raquel Zanoni: Linking cost and price together…ultimately impacts the delivery experience, which then affects revenue drivers like repeat purchases and customer lifetime value.

The systems behind a reliable delivery promise

What systems behind the scenes need to work together to make this happen? We touched on inventory management and mentioned picking and packing. But it’s worth stepping back and painting a more complete picture of what needs to be working well behind the scenes to actually enable this.

Ryan Leigh: All of this actually starts with marketing. It starts with the data you provide to marketing on the promise you can commit to and the service levels you can offer to the customers you want to acquire.

To drive traffic to your website or app, you need a competitive offering. Some of that is table stakes, like free shipping, eco-friendly packaging, and free returns. But beyond that, there are additional paid services like day-of-choice delivery or white-glove services. These are things power shoppers expect, and they show up clearly in the survey. They’re added-value promises that drive traction and traffic. But that requires marketing teams to have a high degree of confidence that what they’re promising is something the business can actually deliver.

That means the data needs to be available, and it needs to come from all of the systems involved, with a high degree of confidence. Then there’s the eCommerce experience itself, whether through an app or website. That needs a real-time connection to transportation, picking and packing, inventory, and CRM systems to ensure that when a promise is made and priced, it can actually be fulfilled.

And while that experience needs to be seamless for the consumer, with minimal delay, it still has to be connected to real, accurate data. It needs to be connected to the real availability of vehicles and drivers. And as mentioned earlier with inventory, there needs to be a clear understanding of what’s available and what the backlog looks like in order to make a promise on a specific day. So there needs to be some pretty robust integration between the front-end systems, like eCommerce and the app, and the backend systems that power that data.

Behind that, there are several systems involved. There’s the order management system and the inventory system, which may be combined or separate, but that ultimately track where inventory is, whether it’s available, and whether it can be picked and packed in time.

There’s also some form of warehouse management system. That may include capacity and throughput constraints, or in a store environment, a picking algorithm that looks at how long it takes to pick items, the offset from now, and the availability of staff.

And then there needs to be robust technology to manage drivers, vehicles, and the resource constraints within transportation and operations. That’s where this comes together. When surfacing delivery options and transportation constraints, it has to happen in near real time. It’s about understanding what’s already in motion, what additional capacity is available, and how efficiently that can be fulfilled.

And finally, there’s the CRM. That’s another input into the system to help make smarter decisions about the offers that are presented.

Raquel Zanoni: Got it. So in case you missed that, you need everything, folks. And every system needs to talk to one another....My point in saying that is just to illustrate that, when we say “the last mile,” that doesn't mean it's the end cap. It's not something to think about at the very end. It's integrated throughout the entire delivery experience, whether you realize it or not, if you want to be able to offer a top-tier delivery experience. 

Work with 3PLs without breaking the delivery promise

I have a follow up question around having your own assets versus working with third party carriers. Because in the scenario you described, it was focused on having your own drivers to manage.

The challenge often seen with retailers is when they rely on third-party carriers, it’s difficult to connect all of these systems together in a way that enables accurate time windows, delivery visibility, and other table stakes or even differentiators. In many cases, the carriers themselves don’t have these capabilities, or they’re difficult to integrate and work with. What should those retailers do if they want to get to that top tier?

Ryan Leigh: Part of operating this way means separating the promise made to the customer from the reality of delivering on that promise. That’s a challenge that needs to be solved. In some way, control over that delivery promise is handed to a third party, so there needs to be a high degree of confidence that those partners can actually deliver on it. It’s a common challenge and something that comes up regularly with retailers.

The timeline of the delivery also matters. If it’s same-day delivery within a couple of hours, then just as there needs to be confidence that inventory is available, there also needs to be confidence that delivery options are robust. In those cases, the carriers that operate in that space tend to have technology that can integrate with real-time data and support those promises, partly because the window to fix issues is short.

On the other hand, if the delivery window is longer, a few days for example, there’s more time to work through potential issues. But even then, there still needs to be a strong level of confidence in the carriers. They may not provide real-time capacity in the same way, so the promise and the SLA depend more on trust. And if that breaks down, it directly impacts customer loyalty and lifetime value, as discussed throughout.

The last mile can’t be an afterthought

Raquel Zanoni: That's a great answer. I have one last question: When you think of the last mile and the industry as a whole, are there problems being solved right now that you are most excited about?

Ryan Leigh: To summarize what’s been discussed, if customer lifetime value is the goal, then delivery is one of the fastest ways to protect it, but also one of the fastest ways to destroy it.

There are strong data points showing how much impact late delivery, and even early delivery, have on whether a customer stays with a brand. But late delivery in particular has a very negative impact.

What’s becoming more encouraging is that some retailers on the more mature end are starting to move away from treating the last mile as an after-the-fact problem. Instead, they’re starting to see it for what it is: an embedded, intrinsic part of the customer experience, and something directly connected to customer lifetime value.

That shift matters. It reflects an understanding that all of the complexity discussed, all of the different data points required to drive better and the more profitable interactions over time, include the delivery experience.

And that delivery experience plays a key role in whether a customer stays with a brand. That’s what makes this space interesting. It positions the last mile and the problems it presents as a central part of how retailers grow and retain their customer base moving forward.

Read the full study, Power Shoppers Are the Biggest Loyalty Risk, to learn more