Why make connections with another delivery service?

As a delivery service, you have an obligation to provide the best possible service to your customers and potential customers. Of course, if your delivery service is quite small, you may not always be able to deliver the packages your customers need.

In this situation you have two options. You can tell them you can’t do what they ask, or you can point them in another direction. It could say that you have contacts in the business, one of whom might be the right person to do the job for them.

Now, if you dismiss them with a “sorry, but we can’t help you” response, they’ll likely go elsewhere and forget about your business. However, the second option, providing them with the service they need, courtesy of another company, could produce an interesting result.

You see, even though you have not been able to provide them with the delivery service they wanted, you have still been able to help them. This means that you can be sure that your company name will stay in their minds as useful, and they may come back to you in the future, even if you weren’t able to help them directly this time.

This may sound strange, but it actually makes sense to make connections to a second delivery service this way. It can be done in a “I’ll scratch your back if you scratch mine” deal. While you may be able to send them some jobs, surely they’ll be able to do the same in reverse, too, if they ever have deliveries they can’t handle. This agreement will benefit both parties and will also benefit customers who come to any of the businesses.

It’s very easy to say no to a client when you know you can’t help them directly. It’s easy to see that you can’t make money with them, so your interest in them wanes and you move on to the next prospect. However, if you help them by sending them in the right direction to have their package delivered by another company, you might be surprised at the consequences. People tend to remember companies going the extra mile to help them in this way. It means you could end up with a returning customer even though you couldn’t help them to begin with.

The world we live in today seems to have few examples of good service like this. Instead of viewing connections to other companies as competition, perhaps you should look at it the other way around. You may find that you can get a really good result from making such connections, because your customers are more likely to remember you for good service in the future.