How to Provide a Contactless Drop-off Experience

As Supermarkets and Restaurants transition to delivery during the coronavirus pandemic, they need to be able to meet the needs of customers seeking to distance themselves from unnecessary interpersonal contact. Since delivery personnel come into contact with dozens of people spread out over a wide area on a daily basis, it makes sense to be concerned over a potential source of infection and take steps to make customers more comfortable. With this in mind, any delivery service should be able to offer contactless home delivery to customers as an option they can select when ordering.

How Apps Make Contactless Delivery Possible

Restaurants and grocery stores have made great strides in offering convenient ordering options for customers. With on demand delivery apps, customers can choose store pickup or home delivery based on their preference, and contactless drop-off delivery is a simple feature that can increase safety and customer satisfaction, making them more likely to continue ordering in the future. Services such as DoorDash, Postmates, and Instacart have enabled such features, letting customers choose to meet the delivery driver at the door, curbside, or have it dropped off. 

Using the latest technology solves the problems that would have presented obstacles to contactless drop-off in the past. Choosing a contactless delivery option would restrict cash-on-delivery as a payment option, but with digital payment options including tip selection through an ordering app, there is no need to complete a physical transaction with a delivery worker. Food ordering apps can support a variety of payment gateways and complete the transaction between customer and restaurant easily. 

The app can also present the delivery options automatically rather than requiring the customer to go out of their way to make a special request, making the choice of contactless drop-off much simpler to arrange. However, if additional directions are needed, custom delivery instruction fields can be used to provide more specific requests to delivery workers to help them reach the right place requested by the customer.

Improving Drop-off experience

Drop-offs may also be favored by drivers since they can reduce the amount of time spent on individual deliveries if they don’t need to wait for customers to answer their door, or are able to avoid leaving their vehicles. 

Effective usage of app features can solve the problem of making sure delivery occurs successfully in the absence of direct delivery-to-customer interaction. Order tracking systems notify the customer when an order is out for delivery so they know when to expect it. If the customer requests outdoor curbside pickup, they can be contacted by chat or phone to go out and pick up their order from the driver. For contactless drop-off, when the order is fulfilled, the delivery worker can indicate that the delivery is complete, notifying customers that their food or grocery is waiting for them. 

In order to improve customer experience, stores can train their delivery workers to follow customer instructions carefully in order to make drop-off as convenient as possible. In order to confirm delivery they can be instructed to take a photo of the drop-off location with the intact package of food, providing evidence to customers and the seller that there were no mishaps on their end. 
There are good reasons to think that contactless drop-off will stay around even as fears of infection lessen over time. Some customers will always prefer less contact, and not having to come to the door to receive an order promptly can make drop-off desirable. Restaurants and delivery workers can benefit from the improved efficiency that the additional option can provide. As businesses step up to introduce new solutions to the problems posed by the pandemic, food ordering apps and grocery delivery apps can make more options available to stores and their customers.