A few months ago, I'd lost my Fantastic tier. My DWC had dropped and Amazon was starting to cut my routes.
Fewer routes means less revenue. And when your revenue drops, you can't afford to properly train your drivers — which pushes the DWC down further. It's a death spiral.
I manage 113 drivers at my station. Here's exactly what I did to get back to Fantastic in 6 weeks.
Week 1: find the real problems
The first mistake most DSP owners make is reacting to the overall score without understanding what's dragging it down. The DWC is a composite — it aggregates driving safety, delivery quality, customer experience, and compliance.
I took my scorecard and isolated each metric. The result: my driving safety was fine, my DCR too. The problem came from one specific area — my DNR (Delivered Not Received) rate was abnormally high, and my concessions had crept up.
Without this decomposition, I would have spread my efforts across everything. By identifying the real problem, I could focus 100% of my energy where it mattered.
Week 2: targeted coaching
Out of 113 drivers, 8 were responsible for 70% of my DNRs. Eight people.
It's almost always like this. The Pareto principle applies perfectly to DSP metrics: a handful of drivers drag your entire scores down.
For each of those 8 drivers, I did a 15-minute individual coaching session. Not a team meeting where nobody feels personally responsible. A one-on-one with the data in front of us. "Look, over the last 4 weeks, you've had 6 DNRs. Here are the addresses. What happened?"
Every time, the answer was the same: poorly taken delivery photos, packages left in hard-to-spot locations, or lack of communication with the customer when nobody answered the door.
The fix: a concrete reminder of photo best practices (wide angle, door number visible, package centre-frame) and a simple rule — if nobody answers, always call the customer before leaving the package.
Week 3: concessions and compliance
Alongside the DNRs, my concessions (returned packages, delivery failures) were dragging my score down. The problem: some drivers were marking packages as "undeliverable" too quickly instead of making the extra effort — calling the customer, checking with a neighbour, trying another access point.
I shared the data with the drivers concerned. Not to blame them, but to show the concrete impact: every avoidable concession costs DCR points, and every DCR point lost brings the station closer to a tier downgrade.
The concrete instruction: before marking a concession, always make a call to the customer and do a walk around the building. Two simple actions that cut my concessions in half within two weeks.
Weeks 4-5: daily tracking
This is where things really shifted. Instead of checking my numbers once a week (Wednesday when the scorecard drops), I started tracking my key metrics every single day.
Every morning, I looked at the previous day's DNR count, Netradyne safety alerts, and completion rate. If a driver had a DNR, I contacted them that same day — not a week later.
This daily tracking had a massive psychological effect on the team. When drivers know you're looking at the numbers every day, they pay more attention. It's not surveillance — it's active coaching.
Week 6: results
Fantastic tier restored.
DNRs dropped significantly. Concessions too. And the DCR actually ticked up as a bonus — drivers who take more care with their deliveries naturally improve multiple metrics at once.
What I learnt
Three lessons I'm keeping:
The overall score is misleading — always decompose. An 87% DWC can have very different causes from one DSP to another. Without decomposition, you're guessing. With it, you're acting.
Individual coaching beats team meetings. A 15-minute one-on-one with data has more impact than an hour-long group meeting. The driver can't hide behind the collective.
Speed matters more than perfection. Reacting same-day to a problem is worth more than a perfect plan next week. In the DSP world, every day counts in the weekly score.
The process, not the effort
The biggest change wasn't working harder. It was having a systematic process: identify the problems → target the relevant drivers → coach individually → track daily → measure results.
That's the process I automated in DSPilot. The tool automatically identifies struggling drivers, generates personalised coaching recommendations with AI, and sends individual reports via WhatsApp. What used to take me 5 hours a week now takes 30 minutes.
Want to spot the drivers dragging your DWC down — in one click? Discover DSPilot →