Redelivery is the most expensive kilometre you drive. Most of it is bought back at order capture, not on the route.
Key takeaways
First-attempt failures are overwhelmingly an information problem, not a driving problem: a wrong or incomplete address, a consignee who does not know the parcel is coming, no agreed instruction for what to do if nobody answers, and no fallback that is cheaper than driving back. Fix those four and the redelivery rate moves. Everything else — route density, stop sequencing, van loading — only changes how expensive each failure is.
The second thing worth knowing before you design the process is what the law already says about an undelivered shipment, because it gives you options that most operators never use.
Which rules apply depends on where the load starts. For an extra-provincial truck undertaking, the conditions of carriage and limitations of liability are those set out in the laws of the province in which the transport originates, and in the absence of a provincial enactment dealing specifically with conditions of carriage, those agreed to by the undertaking. So a British Columbia–origin parcel carries British Columbia’s conditions into Alberta.
British Columbia’s are worth reading because they are explicit. Under the specified conditions of carriage, if through no fault of the carrier goods cannot be delivered, the carrier — after giving notice to the consignor and consignee that delivery has not been made, and after requesting disposal instructions — may store the goods in its own warehouse subject to a reasonable charge for storage, or move them to a public or licensed warehouse at the consignor’s expense, subject to a lien for all freight and other lawful charges. And if the notice goes unanswered, where no disposal instructions have been received within 10 days after the date of that notice, the carrier may return the undelivered shipment to the consignor at the consignor’s expense.
The clock is different when you never delivered
A claim for loss, damage or delay must be notified in writing within 60 days after the delivery of the goods. But in the case of failure to make delivery, notice runs within 9 months after the date of shipment, with the final statement of claim filed within 9 months after the date of shipment, together with a copy of the paid freight bill. A failed delivery therefore leaves an exposure open far longer than a completed one — which is a reason to close it out deliberately rather than let it sit in a warehouse corner.
Address quality at the point of order. A unit number that never made it into the shipping system cannot be recovered by the driver at 4:40pm. Validate at capture, not at dispatch, and treat a missing unit or buzzer number in a multi-residential address as a blocking field rather than an optional one.
A reachable consignee. A mobile number is worth more than an email for last-mile, and it is personal information, so collect it for a stated purpose. Under Canadian federal privacy law an organization may collect, use or disclose personal information only for purposes that a reasonable person would consider are appropriate in the circumstances, and consent is only valid if it is reasonable to expect that the individual would understand the nature, purpose and consequences of the collection, use or disclosure. “To notify you about this delivery” clears that bar easily; quietly adding the number to a marketing list does not.
A notification the recipient actually receives. Sending it is generally not blocked by anti-spam law, but the message still has obligations attached — see the next section.
An agreed fallback. A safe-drop instruction, a neighbour, a parcel locker or a held-for-pickup location, captured before the first attempt rather than after the first failure. This is also where the conditions of carriage above become useful: storage with a lien and a 10-day disposal clock is a defined path, and it beats a fourth attempt.
A delivery notice for an order the recipient placed is not a cold marketing message, and the Act reflects that: the consent requirement does not apply to a commercial electronic message that solely facilitates, completes or confirms a commercial transaction that the person to whom the message is sent previously agreed to enter into. What does still apply is the form of the message. It must identify the person who sent it and the person on whose behalf it is sent, enable the recipient to readily contact one of them, and set out an unsubscribe mechanism, and that contact information must stay valid for a minimum of 60 days after the message is sent. A tracking SMS from an unattended short code with no identification and no reply path is the common failure.
Automated voice calls are a separate regime. Where you use an automatic dialing-announcing device to make unsolicited calls with no attempt to solicit — a delivery-window call is the classic case — the CRTC rules restrict them to 9:00 a.m. to 9:30 p.m. on weekdays and 10:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. on weekends, in the hours of the person receiving the call, and require that they begin with a clear message identifying the person on whose behalf the call is made and briefly describing its purpose, including an email or postal address and a local or toll-free number at which a representative can be reached. The call must also display the originating number, and the equipment must disconnect within ten seconds of the recipient hanging up.
Take a Burnaby courier running 900 residential stops a day whose own dispatch report shows 54 first-attempt failures — the fleet’s figure, not an industry one. If a second attempt costs an average of 7 minutes of route time, the redelivery load is 54 × 7 = 378 minutes, or 6.3 hours a day. Against an eight-hour driver day that is 6.3 ÷ 8 = 79 per cent of one full driver, spent going back.
The fleet makes the mobile number a blocking field at order capture and adds a same-morning notification with a two-hour window. Suppose failures fall to 36 a day. The saving is 18 fewer redeliveries × 7 minutes = 126 minutes, or 2.1 hours a day — a quarter of a driver, recovered without adding a van.
For the 36 that still fail, the process now has an ending rather than a queue. Notice of non-delivery goes to the consignor and consignee the same evening with a request for disposal instructions; the parcel is held under storage charge; and if no instructions arrive within 10 days of that notice the shipment goes back to the consignor at the consignor’s expense. Nothing sits in the corner for a month accruing a nine-month claim window.
The useful work is clerical and it is real. Parsing free-text address lines and delivery notes into structured fields so a missing unit number is caught at capture. Reading the driver’s failure reason code and the door photograph into a consistent category, so “no answer” and “no safe place” stop being the same bucket. Drafting the non-delivery notice to consignor and consignee with the shipment particulars already filled in, and starting the 10-day clock. Watching the aged undelivered list against the nine-month claim window.
What it does not do is decide whether a parcel is safe to leave, whether a claim should be paid, or whether a notice has been properly given. Those are judgements a person makes and signs.
Generally not for the notification itself: the consent requirement does not apply to a message that solely facilitates, completes or confirms a transaction the recipient previously agreed to enter into. The identification, contact and unsubscribe requirements in the same section still apply, and the contact details must stay valid for at least 60 days.
That is a contractual question, not a regulatory one, and it turns on the conditions of carriage that apply — which for extra-provincial work are those of the province in which the transport originates. Capture an explicit safe-drop instruction and record it against the shipment; a general term buried in a rate schedule is a weaker position than an instruction the consignee gave you.
Under British Columbia’s conditions, the carrier may store the goods and hold a lien for all freight and other lawful charges, including a reasonable charge for storage, or move them to a licensed warehouse at the consignor’s expense — but only after notice to consignor and consignee and a request for disposal instructions. Skip the notice and you have skipped the step that creates the right.
No. Damage or delay is notified within 60 days after delivery; failure to make delivery is notified within 9 months after the date of shipment, with the final claim filed in the same nine-month window. Undelivered freight stays live much longer.
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