What is First-attempt delivery rate?
The percentage of deliveries completed on the first visit — the clearest single measure of how much money an operation is losing to repeat trips.
First-attempt delivery rate is the share of deliveries that complete without a second visit. It is the metric with the most direct line to money in local delivery: every point of improvement removes a whole repeat trip from the week.
The arithmetic is worth doing once. A fleet at 92% and a fleet at 84%, running identical volume, are not doing similar work — the second is making roughly twice as many wasted trips, paying for the fuel, the hours and the customer contact on every one.
Improving it is rarely about drivers. Track the failure reasons and the top cause is almost always an arriving-soon notification that goes out too late to be useful, an address book with real errors in it, or access instructions that were never captured at order time.
In PrivateMile: first-attempt outcomes are recorded per stop with a reason, arriving-soon notifications are computed from live ETAs rather than a schedule, and access notes travel with the order to the driver’s screen.