Failed Delivery Attempt Tracker

Residential parcel operations commonly see 5–15% first-attempt failure, varying with geography (apartments and gated access fail more than suburban doorsteps), product (signature-required and COD fail more than leave-safe), and notification quality. Anything above ~10% usually signals a fixable process gap rather than bad luck. B2B delivery runs much lower (business hours, staffed docks). The number to manage is your own trend by route and reason — the tracker's month-over-month pattern — because the global average hides exactly the local causes you can fix.

Direct cost: a full stop's worth of driver time, vehicle and fuel — $5–15 for most parcel operations, more for two-person or bulky delivery. Add the re-delivery (another stop), the customer-service contact (a meaningful fraction of WISMO calls are failed-delivery follow-ups), and the tail risks: refunds, chargebacks and churn from customers whose parcel bounced twice. RTS is the worst case — return freight plus restocking plus often a lost sale. Against these numbers, prevention (notifications, windows, address validation, lockers) is almost always cheaper than the failures it removes.

Shrink the uncertainty window and give the customer agency: day-before notification with a delivery window, day-of narrowing (live ETA where possible), and an easy path to redirect — reschedule, neighbor, safe place, locker or pickup point — BEFORE the attempt. Unattended-delivery options with photo proof convert absence from a failure into a completion for low-risk parcels. For signature/COD deliveries that can't be left, pre-confirmation (a reply-to-confirm message the evening before) filters the attempts most likely to bounce. Each tactic is cheap against $10-a-failure economics at scale.

After the first or at most second failed attempt for most operations — third attempts fail at the highest rate of all because the underlying cause (work-hours absence, access problems) persists. Diverting to a locker or pickup shop converts an open-ended re-delivery loop into a single drop the customer resolves on their own schedule, and customers increasingly prefer it to waiting on a window. The exceptions are bulky goods and restricted items where collection is impractical. Encode the rule into the resolution path ('attempt 2 failed → locker by default') and the re-delivery bill drops mechanically.