Your courier already sends an SMS. Your store already sends a WhatsApp message. Both are ignored, because the average Indian phone receives dozens of transactional messages a day and has learned to swipe them away without reading.
A voice call is different in one specific way: it interrupts. That makes it more expensive, more effective and much easier to overuse.
The only delivery call worth making
Not "your order has shipped". Not "your order is at the hub". Those are notifications and SMS handles them fine.
The call worth making is "someone is bringing this to you today — will you be there?" Because that one has an answer, and the answer changes what happens next.
A failed delivery costs you a re-attempt, sometimes two, and about a third of parcels that fail twice become returns. Preventing one failed attempt saves ₹60–120 depending on your courier. The call costs ₹1.3–1.5 as a one-way announcement, or ₹4–5 if you let the customer answer and reschedule.
One-way or two-way?
This is the decision that determines your bill, and most people get it backwards.
| One-way announcement | Two-way conversation | |
|---|---|---|
| Cost per minute | ₹1.3–1.5 | ₹4–5 |
| Customer can reply | No | Yes |
| Good for | "Out for delivery today, keep ₹{amount} ready" | "Will you be home? Should we come tomorrow instead?" |
| Use when | Delivery is going ahead regardless | Rescheduling actually saves you an attempt |
For a ₹400 prepaid order, one-way is right — you have their money and the parcel is coming. For a ₹2,500 COD order to a working professional, two-way pays for itself the first time someone says "not today, come Saturday". The full comparison is here.
The script, and the part everyone forgets
Say the amount. On a COD delivery, the most common reason a parcel comes back is that nobody in the house had cash. Naming the figure on the morning call fixes a surprising share of failures.
Frequency is the whole risk
The failure mode is not a bad script. It is calling too often. A customer who gets a voice call at dispatch, another at the hub and a third out-for-delivery will block your number, and you will have converted a working channel into a dead one.
One call per parcel. On the morning of delivery. Everything else stays as SMS.
The exception is a failed attempt: if the courier could not deliver, a second call the next morning is legitimate, because circumstances changed. That call is worth designing separately.
Timing
Call between 9 and 10:30 AM. Early enough that the customer can rearrange their day, late enough not to wake anyone. Do not call at 8 PM to say the parcel is arriving tomorrow — there is no action the customer can take and you have spent goodwill for nothing.
If you run multiple cities, keep it to one window — India is a single time zone, which removes the hardest part of this problem. Calling windows in practice.
What good looks like
Stores doing this well see first-attempt delivery success rise by 8 to 15 percentage points. The gain comes from two places roughly equally: people who rearranged to be home, and people who had the cash ready because you said the number out loud.
Both are cheap wins. Neither requires the customer to do anything except pick up the phone.
The e-commerce page has the rest of the call types, and COD confirmation before dispatch is the higher-return sibling of this one.