Are your drivers complaining about being routed to a back-alley of an address, or to a tunnel, or a highway? If so, you may want to consider switching your account or API requests to use HERE services instead of Google.

When our users submit an address, we use Google services by default to pinpoint that address on a map (this process is called geocoding). Most of the time drivers are routed to the right street, but occasionally they get routed to an adjacent street or alley. This is because Google puts its marker at the centre of the delivery location, which is usually a building. Then drivers get routed to the street nearest the marker, which could be a back-alley of the building.

Here's an example. The correct delivery location is on Cambie Street, but because of the way geocoding with Google works, the driver to routed to the nearby alley instead.

Problems like this can be solved by switching to our alternate geocoder, powered by HERE services. HERE places its markers on the street rather than on buildings, so your drivers get routed to the main access point of the address to pick up or deliver packages.

This picture shows how HERE services placed the marker for the same Cambie Street address we used before:

How do you opt in to HERE services for geocoding your addresses?

As part of your optimization request, you can now choose to enable an option to geocode with HERE services. If this option is not part of your request, we would geocode with Google by default. Checkout our API docs for more details.