We are pleased to let you know that we are rolling out an improvement In our system for notifications of estimated arrival times. In the long run, this will help give more precise information to our customers. In the interim as our driving team members get accustomed to using it, it may create some unexpected notifications or not give perfectly accurate times. We will be phasing this in and testing it over the next six weeks.
Currently, we manually estimate the distance between stops and base the notifications on that estimate. As things evolve during the day, there is no way to send a second, updated estimate.
The enhancement in our software will automatically track progress as our driving team members mark stops as having been completed. When the system estimates that a customer’s stop is likely to be reached within an hour, it will automatically send an updated, estimated time of arrival.
The notifications for when a pickup has been completed, when a delivery has been completed, or when we attempted a pickup and found no laundry left for pickup and no response to our attempts to reach a customer while on site, will all continue to be sent by the system based on when our driving team member manually marks what happened when on site. (Generally our team members do this immediately at each stop, but some of our drivers prefer to make these entries every several stops, generally based on parking or traffic considerations).
Some customers on our Monday, Wednesday, and Friday schedule may not immediately receive the benefit of this improvement. This is because we currently have two vans operating on these days. The logic the software uses will be able to track the progress of one van, while the stops being made by the second van will continue to have to be estimated manually at the start or the day. We hope a future revision will allow the improvement to work for multiple vehicles concurrently.
Please bear in mind that for pickups we still request that customers leave their laundry out for pickup at 900 a.m. so it is ready and waiting for our driving team members (unless special arrangements have been discussed and made with us, and are noted in your pickup and delivery instructions). Part of how we provide free pickup and delivery and still pay our driving team members well so we can attract good team members is to maximize the efficiency of our routes. If customers overly rely on the precision of a precise arrival time to place their laundry out, it increases the chance of laundry not being outside and ready. Even if our drivers call upon arrival when laundry is not ready, it is possible that a customer may not hear the phone or the doorbell, leading to a missed pickup fee.
Thank you for being a customer and for your referrals.
Sincerely,
The Marin Wash and Fold Team