What is Delivery time window?
The span of time a customer is promised a delivery will arrive — “between 1pm and 4pm” — which planning, routing and driver ETAs are all measured against.
A window is a promise, and the width of the promise is a business decision. Narrow windows please customers when kept and cost dearly when missed; wider windows are easier to keep and, kept reliably, make customers happier than tight windows missed one time in five.
Windows are only useful if the day is planned against them. A route optimizer that ignores windows produces the shortest route and the most missed promises; one that respects them produces a slightly longer route that arrives when it said it would. A planning timeline — stops laid out against the hours — shows whether the windows are even possible before the van leaves.
In PrivateMile: windows sit on every order, flow into route optimization and the planning timeline, appear in the driver app and on the customer’s tracking page, and drive the predicted-late alert that fires while a window can still be saved.