Summary
What Is “White Glove Delivery Service”? When is it used?
The term “White Glove” is an expression for describing “excellence, extra care, exceptional service, or special attention”.
When used within the Logistics and Distribution business, it describes the process of transporting or delivering goods and products that need to be handled with greater care and attention than regular deliveries. This may be due to the fragility, value, or even the size of these parcels.
Experts of the “White Glove Delivery Service” are highly-trained at it and can assemble and install products on your premises. They use the utmost care, precaution, specialized equipment, and maintain ambient temperature (etc.) as may be required.
Both, individual customers as well as organizations, use white glove delivery services while transporting or receiving cargo that requires special attention during handling, delivery, and installation. This service almost always includes several optional add-on services including its assembly, installation, assembly, automatic shipments, and more.
Quite evidently, most customers use this service so that they have peace of mind and can rest assured that their precious cargo is taken care of by this specialized service. Important to remember, that customers also use this service since they deeply appreciate the humanized touch that this type of shipment offers.
What does White Glove Delivery Service include?
Various companies offer different services, but white glove delivery services typically include the following:
- Cargo inspection: In cases where a special configuration or setup is required for assembling the products, several companies offer inspection services at your location before and after the installation
- Safe packing: An important service offered by white glove companies is the stringent standards they maintain while packing your goods to ensure safety against any sort of damage during shipping and delivery, and also from moisture. These include the use of high-quality packing materials such as bubble wrap, cardboard, wooden crates, glass masks, Styrofoam, various types of protective wraps (etc.) to protect your cargo during transportation
- Trained handlers: The people that are responsible for executing white glove services, including drivers, packagers, loaders (etc.), are specially trained to handle such goods with extra care throughout the entire process
- Transportation: By extension of the point above, white glove delivery services are always particularly careful in using safe and clean transportation vehicles that are manned by suitably trained professionals
- Customer-service: White glove professionals are trained to tackle all your queries at all points of the shipment process. Even after the delivery has been successfully completed, they ask for specific feedback so as to continuously improve their services, and keep customers happy
- Product assembly or dismantling: Should you choose to use this service, white-glove teams deliver, setup, and assemble your goods exactly where you’d like it, including dismantling and ferrying away your existing/ old product
What are some benefits of the White Glove Delivery Service?
Given below are some benefits when you use a white glove delivery logistics team:
- Dependable service: As mentioned earlier, white-glove service eliminates any worry that may arise about mismanaged, damaged, or lost deliveries. Your shipment is handled by expert professionals who are trained in cargo handling. You receive timely updates, tracking information at every step of cargo movement, and are kept well informed about when it will reach you
- Stay assured: It is likely that products selected for white-glove service are valuable – which is why the customer opted for the service in the first place. Therefore, customers have peace of mind and can rest assured that their cargo will be protected against damage, loss, or theft.
- Damage protection: Using ambient temperature control, packing materials, and stringent safety measures, white glove delivery commits to keeping your goods safe through the entire process of packing, delivery, assembling (etc.)
- Comprehensive solutions: Make sure that you opt for a company that offers end-to-end supply-chain solutions including inventory management, order-return handling, customs management, automated shipping (etc.)
- Customer service: When the parcels are important enough for your customers to select a white glove delivery, it is your professional duty to your customers to keep them, too, in top priority. Therefore, customers are kept well informed at all times via omni-channel customer service facilities
Who Should Use White Glove Delivery Services?
When shipments are expensive, fragile, or perishable in nature, such a service is invaluable.
1) Independent consumers: Quite evidently, the number of consumers that are shopping on E-commerce platforms and online stores is only going north, hereon. Additionally, the pandemic has further ushered in the “online buying habit”. As a result, there is a whole new world of buyer behavior to be studied and understood i.e. how individual consumers discover, browse, buy, and receive their orders.
Sellers must remember that the first time an online shopper “experiences” his product physically is when the parcel arrives at his doorstep. And, especially in the case of expensive orders like TVs, cellphones, washing machines, refrigerators, or laptops, the consumer surely doesn’t want the parcel to arrive damaged or broken – or worse still, stolen!
White glove delivery ensures consumers that their online deliveries are protected from theft or damage. Therefore, individual consumers prefer using white glove delivery services when their orders are high-value or precious in some other way.
2) B2C and B2B firms: B2B, as well as B2C firms, are regular users of white-glove delivery services. Often, white-glove service is critical for certain deliveries when the delivery must absolutely reach the delivery address within the stipulated time e.g. a factory order that needs an important raw material or part to arrive at a stipulated time
For example:
- Essential/ emergency medical equipment for hospitals such as those used in operations or to treat patients in critical care
- Overnight delivery of essential equipment before the inauguration of an office e.g. computers, networking setup material, video conferencing equipment
- Grocery businesses may use white glove delivery services to ensure timely delivery of perishable products to large retailers or to large canteens in offices, hospitals, factories (etc.)
Conclusion: Quite evidently, valuable shipments use white glove delivery services and it requires significant planning and coordination by the delivery service. Therefore, using last mile delivery software to manage the entire process becomes imperative to ensure the safe and timely delivery of goods.