Bianca BarathToday’s e-commerce businesses are hardwired to build an amazing customer experience. However, retailers struggle to control the last leg of delivery, the first touch point of customer engagement. Most e-commerce businesses are heavily dependent on their logistics partners such as FedEx or UPS to carry out the last mile delivery. Unfortunately, when shipping carriers miss the delivery deadline or lose a parcel, customers pin the blame on the e-comm player and not the carrier.
How should businesses cope?
Analyze Customer Data: Would your customer prefer to pick up the parcel or would she rather have it delivered on a Saturday? Aggregate the past behaviors of your customer to predict and craft the delivery experience your customer craves for. This could easily mitigate the risk of dropping in the parcel at the wrong time, save on multiple delivery attempts and reduce back and forth package delivery communication with the customer.
Delivery Visibility: Constantly communicate the location of the package to the customer. Has it been dispatched from your warehouse? Is it nearing the intended destination? Keeping the communication lines open, is one of the easiest ways to show how much you value their business. Enable your customers to track all their packages in real time to keep them constantly updated on the shipment status.
Proactive Delivery Support: As soon as you sense a detour in the shipment route or delay in package delivery, make sure to notify the customer. Don’t wait for the customer to inform you about a lost or damaged shipment. You could either dispatch a replacement or process refunds, when you suspect a package is lost or damaged. A positive delivery experience will help in deepening customer relationship.
Easy Returns: The most dreaded part of logistics management for any ecommerce business is processing returns. To evade dealing with returns, businesses set tough return policies or even worse, hide the return policies. Complicated return policy is a big turn off forcing your customers to switch to your competitor. Instead, at the time of purchase, outline the terms of return policy in clear and simple language so that customer can return at ease.
Focussing on an end to end customer experience is increasingly gaining importance among retailers. From creating a branded tracking page to personalized delivery experience, retailers are vying hard to build customer loyalty and brand reputation.
Check our 5 metrics to measure online customer satisfaction
At LateShipment, we are hosting a webinar on simple strategies to gain control of last mile delivery experience. Join us for the webinar on 13th April, 2 PM EST. You are guaranteed to walk away with fresh insights that can have an immediate positive impact on customer happiness. To register click here.
Check out other related blogs:
5 last mile delivery challenges to overcome in e-commerce.
What is the real cost of delivering packages late to your customers?