How a national flower and gift retailer turned scattered delivery photos into instant proof
1 min read
National flower and gift retailer with same-day delivery
Hundreds of same-day deliveries a day, every one requiring photographic proof — and that proof lived in WhatsApp threads, couriers' personal phones and unnamed folders. When a customer complained, Customer Service went hunting. We automated capture, filing and retrieval inside the Google Workspace the company already owned, without asking a single courier to learn a new app.
The Client
National flower and gift retailer with same-day delivery
Anonymized · NDA- Retail · Flowers, gifts and same-day delivery
- México · nationwide
A leading Mexican retailer of flowers, gifts and occasion products, delivering nationwide on the same day. Hundreds of daily deliveries are fulfilled by a distributed network of external couriers — motorcyclists and drivers — which makes proof of delivery a core part of the customer promise, not a back-office detail.
Diagnosis
What was broken
- [01]
Delivery evidence scattered across WhatsApp threads, personal phones and unstructured folders
- [02]
No reliable way to tie a photo back to the sales order it belonged to
- [03]
Customer Service spent significant time hunting for images during a complaint
- [04]
Slow claim resolution directly hurt internal service-quality metrics
- [05]
Manual filing introduced human error — misplaced, misnamed or lost evidence
- [06]
External couriers rotate; any solution requiring training would decay quickly
Business Impact
Every claim opened without evidence at hand turned a two-minute answer into a search. That delay compounded across hundreds of daily deliveries, degrading response times and the internal quality metrics the operation is measured on.
Why previous attempts failed
The evidence requirement was already policy — the gap was never intent, it was that the process depended on people manually organizing files at the end of a delivery shift.
03
Our Approach
How we solved it
01
Operational diagnosis
Before writing code we followed the evidence end to end: how a courier captures the photo, where it lands, who touches it next, and what Customer Service actually needs at the moment a claim arrives. The decisive finding was that the bottleneck was not capture — couriers were taking the photos. It was everything after: naming, filing and retrieval.
Deliverables
- End-to-end map of the delivery-evidence flow
- Inventory of where evidence was actually landing
- Definition of the retrieval moment that mattered (the claim)
02
Solution design inside the existing stack
The company already ran on Google Workspace and administered every sales order in a master Google Sheet. Rather than introduce a new platform, we designed the automation to live where the work already happened — so adoption cost was effectively zero and no license or vendor was added.
Deliverables
- Architecture designed on Google Apps Script + Drive + Sheets
- Folder and naming convention keyed to the order number
- Zero-training interaction model for couriers
03
Build and automation
We built the pipeline in Google Apps Script: the courier uploads a photo, and the system identifies the order number, creates a dedicated folder for that order, files the images, generates the folder link and writes that link into the correct row of the master sheet. No human step in between.
Deliverables
- Apps Script automation for identification, filing and linking
- Automatic per-order folder creation in Drive
- Link write-back into the master sales-order sheet
04
Rollout and handover
Because couriers' behaviour didn't change — upload the photo, nothing else — rollout was about validating the pipeline against real daily volume and making sure Customer Service knew that the answer now lived one click away in the row they already had open.
Deliverables
- Validation against live delivery volume
- Customer Service walkthrough of the new lookup path
Tech Stack
Tools & technologies
Google Apps Script
Automation
Google Drive
Storage
Google Sheets
Operations
Google Workspace
Platform
Results
Quantified outcomes
Eliminated
Manual evidence search
no more hunting through WhatsApp or personal phones
Reduced
Claim resolution time
significantly — evidence is retrieved from the order row, not searched for
Improved
Delivery traceability
notably — every order has its own evidence folder
Zero
New apps for couriers
the interaction stayed a photo upload
Key Takeaways
What we learned
01
The bottleneck is rarely where the work is visible
Couriers were already doing their part — the photos existed. The cost lived in the invisible steps afterward: naming, filing and finding. Automating the visible step would have changed nothing.
Useful when: Any operation where field staff already generate the data but the office pays to organize it.
02
The best platform is often the one already paid for
Google Workspace was already licensed, already administering every sales order, and already familiar to the team. Building inside it removed the adoption curve, the procurement conversation and the integration risk in one decision.
Useful when: Mid-size operations with an established Workspace or Microsoft 365 footprint.
03
Design for turnover, not for the ideal user
External couriers rotate. A solution requiring training would have degraded within months. Keeping the courier's interaction to a single photo upload made the automation durable by design.
Useful when: Any process depending on contractors, seasonal staff or high-turnover roles.
04
Put the answer where the question is asked
Customer Service already worked from the master sheet. Writing the evidence link into that exact row meant no context switch, no second system and no training — the answer simply appeared where they were already looking.
Useful when: Support and back-office teams that live inside one operational system of record.
FAQ
Frequently asked
01How do you automate proof of delivery without a dedicated logistics app?
By automating the steps after capture rather than the capture itself. In this project couriers kept uploading a photo exactly as before; Google Apps Script then identified the order number, created a dedicated Drive folder, filed the images, generated the link and wrote it into the master Google Sheet. No dedicated app, no courier training, no new vendor.
02Why use Google Apps Script instead of building a custom platform?
Because the company already ran its operation on Google Workspace and administered every sales order in a master Sheet. Apps Script let the automation live inside that existing environment, which removed adoption cost, avoided a new license and kept the operation on tools the team already trusted. A new platform would have solved the same problem while adding training, procurement and integration risk.
03What is the real cost of disorganized delivery evidence?
It shows up as time. Every claim without evidence at hand converts a short answer into a search across WhatsApp threads, personal phones and folders. Multiplied across hundreds of daily deliveries, that search time degrades response speed and the internal service-quality metrics the operation is measured on — before counting the claims that can't be resolved at all because the evidence was lost.
04Does this approach work for other last-mile operations?
Yes. The pattern — capture stays unchanged, filing and retrieval become automatic, and the result lands in the system of record the team already uses — applies to any operation where field staff generate evidence that the office later needs to find: last-mile delivery, field service, installations, inspections or maintenance.
05How long does an automation like this take to implement?
Scope drives the timeline, but projects of this shape are measured in weeks rather than months, because they build on an existing platform instead of standing up a new one. The heavier part is usually the operational diagnosis — mapping how evidence really flows — not the code itself.
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