What is Mobile Pet Grooming Route Planning & How Does it Help your Business?

Grooming your pet is essential to its overall health and cleanliness. Plus, regular grooming can help them prevent certain health problems. 

With the surging demand for professional grooming services, the number of mobile pet care service providers is increasing. The global market is booming due to the busy lifestyles of pet owners, the convenience of pet owners, and the comfort of pets.

The U.S. pet grooming services revenue reached USD 590 million in 2021 and is estimated to grow by 5% by 2026. The simple accessibility of mobile pet care service providers at the convenience of pet owners will positively impact business revenue.  

Through this blog, we will help you understand how mobile pet grooming route planning will benefit your business.

What is a Pet Grooming Business?

The pet grooming salon is all about bathing, hair and nail trimming, hand scissoring, and styling the pets. It includes the health and beauty of your pets, which requires a pet grooming experience. This type of business is generally focused on a particular service area (or zip code).

There are several pet groomers in the marketplace; some specialize in specific breeds, whereas some provide services to all breeds. All mobile groomers have a team, grooming equipment, and a van to provide the services.

Major Challenges Faced by Groomers

Pet grooming comes with its own set of challenges, as each breed has specific grooming requirements. Here are a few of them:

• The Dispatcher-Driver Problem: In many mobile dog grooming and pet groomers, 2 different people are scheduling and driving. The scheduler will create each appointment as it comes in and seeks to fill the schedule gaps. This can often lead to big distances between each appointment.

• The Optimal Distribution Problem: The second problem is how the planner knows the optimal route for each groomer. For instance, if you have 80 clients, are there 5 routes for optimal 5 days? If so, what are they?

• Intra-Day Route Optimization Problem: The third problem is the intra-day route optimization problem. A human can’t guess what the best route for any given day is. When you go up to 10 addresses or stops, you get a staggering 3,628,800 combinations of routes! This means no human can find the best route forward. This is called the Travelling Salesperson Problem.

Business owners can now switch to automated route planning to reduce their manual work. So, let us check some benefits of automated processes. 

How Automated Route Planning Helps Mobile Pet Grooming Business?

The automated route planning solution can help you scale your pet grooming business. It ensures that the groomers follow the well-planned routes to complete the requested service in a minimal time.

Automated route planning benefits the delivery segment of your business in a number of ways. We have listed some of the benefits below: 

• Less planning time: Routing software helps save time with optimized routes and improves business productivity and efficiency. Drivers can be assigned routes provided by the delivery manager. For instance, route planning software like Upper can save 10 hours of route planning time each week.

• Reach destination 3x faster: The automated routing process takes the help of route optimization features to increase delivery vehicle efficiency and meet business goals. Multiple delivery addresses can be added, and routes can be planned to keep the delivery operation smooth.

• Real-time updates: Advanced software helps you manage the real-time visibility of your groomers to stay updated with their activities. Moreover, groomers can be monitored to ensure that they are providing professional services.

• No manual interference: A route planning software bypasses the issues faced in manual processing. It automates delivery management operations, ensuring maximum accuracy. Professional software can ensure that you adapt to new technologies and strengthen your delivery ecosystem.

These are some of the benefits that can be seen in most automated tools. Let us now discover how Upper plans automated routes for your business. 

Plan Most-Efficient Routes for Your Pet Grooming Business with Upper

Upper Route Planner is one of the trusted route planning software. Advanced features like route planning, route optimization, and route scheduling help you find cost-effective routes in minutes. It eradicates the wastage of time due to manual route planning.

With Upper, you can plan your routes months in advance and share them with the drivers via SMS or email. Another notable feature of Upper is that drivers can collect proof of delivery after completing a task. This keeps the entire pet care services team up-to-date.

Additionally, the delivery managers can view the report of successful or unsuccessful deliveries. This report can be filtered by choosing a specific date range, route, and route status.

You can take a 7 days free trial to learn more about the features of Upper. 

How to Plan Routes for Mobile Pet Grooming Using Upper?

We highly recommend mobile groomers manage their routes with a quality route planner. Upper Route Planner helps to improve efficiency, quality of service, and increase profits. You can follow the steps below to plan routes for pet grooming services:

Step 1: Plan multi-stop routes 

With Upper, you can plan multi-stop routes with a single click. You can plan routes for up to 500 addresses within a few minutes. This will help to improve the productivity and profit of your team. 

Step 2: Import stops

There are two ways to import the stops- one is manually, and the other is through an Excel or CSV file. Once the stops are imported, you also get the option to ‘Edit stops’. This option includes editing the full name, address, the type of stop, priority of the parcel, and many more. 

Step 3: Review your route plan 

After the finalized routes are prepared, you can review them from the timeline view at the top right corner. It provides you with the options like manual scheduling, lock route, swap routes, reverse route, and other options as well. 

Step 4: Share routes with drivers

Once you have reviewed the final routes, you can share them with your drivers. The routes can be shared on the driver’s mobile either via the driver app or through a text/email with the URL. The drivers can take printouts of routes shared through PDF. Once the drivers receive their route, they can start their tasks.

Besides the above steps, Upper generates the optimized routes with the route optimization feature. It finds the best route combination saving 40% on fuel costs. You can use the  ‘Users/Drivers’ tab to assign the role and input other details related to the driver like name, email, vehicle type, phone number, and so on. 

Now that you know how Upper works, what about giving it a trial? You can take the 7 days free trial today. 

Conclusion

Mobile pet care services have truly been revolutionary for pet owners across the world. This is because it considers the convenience of pet owners and the comfort of pets. But with the expansion the grooming industry is experiencing, it requires advanced software to achieve business goals.

In that case, you can leave the hassle of route planning to Upper and focus on your business strategies to make more revenue. It comes with a number of features like one-click dispatch, route optimization, route scheduling, proof of delivery, and API integration. These features can streamline your business and offer the best service to customers.

Book a demo with us to find out how you can save hours of route planning time for your pet care services.