Sagar Khatri works as a courier for a subcontractor, picking up parcels from various warehouses and delivering them same-day. He is paid per parcel — more efficient deliveries means that he can make more deliveries in a day, and the higher his take-home pay is.
Before he started using Spoke — our route management software — Sagar ran into complications common among courier drivers.
First, route planning was inefficient and time consuming.
As Sagar loads his vehicle with packages, he has to estimate how many packages he can deliver in a day. Without a route planning tool, he’d have to look at postcodes, check neighborhoods, and do his best to figure out how long a route would take and how long each stop is.
Note: While Sagar uses free navigational tools for route directions, those tools aren’t sufficient substitutes for route planning, as we explain why in our post on .
Second, inefficient package organization can lead to longer stops along the route.
The longer Sagar spent at stops, the less money he made. The most significant time waster at a stop was going through his vehicle and looking for the right package.
To solve these problems and more, Sagar’s contractor recommended he use Spoke, our route planning and management tool that works on your smartphone.
If you manage a team of drivers or are a courier who runs a route and you need a simple, cost-effective way to optimize your deliveries, sign up for a free trial of Spokesign up for a free trial of Spoke.
How Sagar Uses Spoke to Save Time
Immediately after installing the app on his smartphone, Sagar understood why it was recommended to him.
“Spoke is very easy to use,” Sagar said. “It makes optimal routes every time, helping me make my stops in less time.”
First, Sagar uses Spoke when he loads his truck to help with route planning.
As he loads his vehicle, Sagar adds the addresses to the Spoke app and creates an optimized route. Spoke tells him how long that route will take. Sagar adds roughly an hour to Spoke’s estimate, to account for any delays or lengthy stops. And now Sagar knows if he can add more parcels to his load. By having an optimized route in front of him with an accurate ETA, he can often take more parcels, which leads to higher pay.
Sagar also uses Spoke to help with package organization, letting him complete his stops faster.
When Sagar loads a parcel’s address into Spoke, he also uses the notes field to add some physical details about the package, such as whether it’s a large brown box or a small square white box. This way, when Sagar is at the stop, he looks down at this Spoke app to see his notes, and he can now easily find the right package. This time-saver adds up to hours saved when you consider how many packages Sagar delivers in a day.
“With Spoke’s route optimization feature and using Spoke to organize my vehicle, I can make roughly 50 stops in about 4 hours,” Sagar said. “Without Spoke, that same route would take me closer to 8 hours.”
Sagar also likes using Spoke’s priority feature.
On Spoke, you can select certain stops as high priority, and Spoke creates the fastest route around that stop being first.
This is helpful because sometimes Sagar has to change his route while it’s in progress. Just recently, Sagar had two pick-ups that he needed to complete before 5 p.m. He realized that with his current route, he wouldn’t make it to these pick-ups in time. So he added the two stops to his route, set them as high priority, and re-optimized the route.
Final Thoughts: How Couriers and Courier Teams Can Use Spoke
Sagar uses Spoke to make his life as a courier easier and more profitable. By optimizing his routes, he can deliver more stops in a day, and by using Spoke’s notes field to locate packages, he can complete each stop in less time.
What makes Spoke a valuable tool for just one courier can also be scaled up across larger teams.
Spoke Dispatch lets courier teams optimize routes across multiple delivery drivers, send out tracking information directly to customers, and collect proof of delivery at each stop.
If you manage a team of drivers or are a courier who runs a route and you need a simple, cost-effective way to optimize your deliveries, sign up for a free trial of Spoke.