Dispatched: All new notifications, improved tracking pages, improved ETAs and more!

Over the last couple of months, we’ve been hard at work building our own routing engine. This is what powers almost everything logistically behind the scenes — it means our drivers know where to go and when, our merchants know when we’re coming to collect and our recipients know when we’re going to deliver.

We’re very excited to announce that it is now live! Codenamed Pathfinder internally, it means we’ve just released a whole bunch of improvements.

Improved collection notifications

If you’re a merchant booking collections, you’ll now receive specific notifications from us via email and SMS telling you exactly when we’re going to collect and letting you track our driver. No more notifications that say you’re getting a delivery when it’s actually a collection!

Improved recipient tracking

Those same improvements also mean recipient notifications are much clearer now. Our “Out for delivery” notifications now come directly from Packfleet (rather than “Circuit”) with a 1-hour delivery window and include a live map showing exactly where our driver is and how long until they reach you. Every delivery notification will include a photo and notes (if applicable) and let recipients get in touch directly with us if needed.

Additionally, we now let recipients know when we’ve collected their parcel from you and that we’ll aim to deliver on the next working day, so there are no more surprise deliveries.

Cancellable collections on the day

Packfleet customers used to need to message us to cancel a collection on the day of collection. No longer! Just click Cancel in your dashboard and we’ll automatically remove it from our driver’s routes.

Same-day collections

Booking a collection for the same-day is now possible for all of our customers! We’ve written a blog post all about it here.

Improved ETAs across the board

Our ETAs now take into account live and historic traffic throughout the day, so they should be much more accurate both for merchants and recipients.

And more soon!

All of these are just the start; using our own routing engine enables a whole lot more in future that we can’t wait to show you! Watch this space for features like the ability to change delivery address in-flight (!), choose a really specific time for us to deliver as the recipient and much more…

PS: Dispatched started off as a weekly update blog post from behind the scenes. We realised as we were building Pathfinder that because so much of the work was deep, technical work that wouldn’t show customer impact for a while that writing weekly updates doesn’t always make sense. So we’ll now write them as and when we have things to show, so you never have to read a blog post that says "Bug fixes and performance enhancements" 😉