Rohan Rinaldo Felix
Sashank RavindranathCustomers are no longer just interested in low prices, fast shipping, and free returns have constantly been the three must-haves for an online business to make the cut in today’s market.
They want e-commerce brands to treat them with the proper experience that can lead them to shop again.
However, most brands unwillingly make the mistake of not giving the same level of attention to their post-purchase as they do to their pre-purchase. This is because brands feel the customer journey ends with the ‘buy’ button. Which is not the case.
This lack of attention and leaving out the post-purchase order delivery phase at the hands of the shipping carrier often leads to bad delivery experiences and ultimately a post-purchase CX gap that can cost you customers and money.
In order to close this existing gap and create the opportunity to delight customers in the post-purchase phase, brands must start crafting stellar delivery experiences. Here comes Delivery Experience Management (DEM) that can help you do just that.
To get better context, let’s start with what DEM stands for.
What is Delivery Experience Management (DEM)?
Delivery Experience Management (DEM) is the process of being proactive in ensuring that your customers receive their orders on time and how they expect. It also involves taking action as required to correct delivery issues and constantly engaging customers in the post-purchase phase to validate brand promises.
Organizationally Delivery Experience Management (DEM) sits at the very intersection of onsite customer experience, post-purchase customer experience, and order fulfillment.
DEM is all about offering each of your customers a memorable post-purchase experience that not merely satisfies but also delights and makes them advocates of your brand.
But why does your e-commerce business in particular need DEM?
Why Does Your Business Need Delivery Experience Management (DEM)
DEM, still largely untapped, is sure to provide you a competitive advantage and allow your hitherto unprecedented control over your post-purchase phase. Here are only a few reasons why your business needs DEM:
- Resolve critical shipping incidents before they happen with real-time updates – leads to 70% reduction in delivery inquiries
- Strengthen customer relationships by keeping your customers informed of their orders – open rates are around 80% for personalized email and SMS notifications
- Leverage tracking moments to increase brand awareness – 30% increase in brand recall
- Decode customer sentiment and engagement to provide a positive delivery experience – 25% lift in repeat purchases
DEM is chock-a-block filled with aspects, if I may, that can help you craft the perfect delivery experience and drive customer delight. Let’s take a deeper look at tools for a complete understanding on DEM.
How DEM Helps You Craft the Perfect Delivery Experience and Drive Customer Delight
Real-time visibility is an aspect of DEM that allows you to stay on the pulse of each of your parcels in transit (from the moment they’re picked up by a shipping carrier up until it is delivered to its designated destination) and identify issues they face, thereby giving you ample time to set things right.
A lack of visibility into your delivery often comes with a horde of challenges, in the form of:
- You, the business becoming aware of a delivery issue only when an angry customer calls in and
- Your customer support reps are forced to handle repeated WISMO (Where Is My Order?) inquiries as there is a lack of information to deal proactively with delivery issues.
However, DEM simply eliminates this case by affording a real-time view of all parcels in transit across different shipping carriers and also working predictively to flag delivery issues even before they arise. This arms businesses with all the actionable information required to thwart a possible negative delivery issue for the customer even before it arises, thus enabling customer loyalty over time.
Proactive customer service is enabling your customer support reps to address and mitigate delivery issues before customer impact. This shows your strong commitment to keeping up with the high standard of customer experience you offer.
Not just unresolved issues, even simply being reactive to delivery issues can also hurt your business in the following ways:
- Even your most loyal customer can stop shopping with you, leading to lower lifetime value (CLV) and higher acquisition costs (CAC)
- Your brand’s online reputation takes a massive hit as frustrated customers post a negative review on social media and demotivate their followers, friends, and family from shopping with you.
This is where a DEM solution can make a major difference.
By providing unbiased real-time insights on the status of each of your parcels in transit, it can prepare you to respond in time when a specific parcel is facing a delay. This is a surefire way for your business to demonstrate to each customer that they are valued, thereby preventing the possibility of them switching over to a competitor.
Also, it considerably reduces the number of calls about parcel whereabouts that a support agent has to face and frees up their time to tend to product-specific issues. Over time, this helps in improving the scores of every member of the support team for which they will be thankful to you!
Handing over the control of the package causes a broken customer experience in the order delivery phase and is also a lost opportunity to monetize tracking moments.
Delivery Experience Management corrects this imbalance by helping e-commerce businesses provide on-brand order tracking experiences that can make more of a mark on their customers and, indeed, delight them.
In terms of branded customer engagement, DEM helps you:
- Keep customers informed of delivery status through automated & personalized email and SMS notifications that are triggered and sent to customers when their parcels reach specific events during the shipping process.
- Provide customizable branded tracking pages that makes it possible for a customer to track their parcels within your website rather than being taken to the tracking page of a shipping carrier.
Leveraging order tracking moments can work as your e-commerce store’s next marketing advantage by ensuring brand recall and opening up upselling and cross-selling opportunities for your business. Also, adding relevant product information can help reduce unwanted returns.
There has always been a dearth of data when it comes to the error-prone stage of the logistics cycle, the post-purchase phase. This includes the gap in understanding customer satisfaction metrics as well.
While you have CSAT and NPS to know how satisfied your customers are and how likely they are to recommend your brand to others, you still don’t have clarity on when exactly customers feel let down by your business.
Worry not! DEM provides access to a wealth of unbiased data on the delivery performance of your shipping partner(s); data hitherto unavailable to e-commerce businesses like yours; data that shipping carriers have always been hesitant to share with businesses.
This unbiased view of customer sentiment about the quality of delivery experience you offer enables you to:
- Take delivery-related decisions that are bound to delight your customers
- Know how your shipping carriers’ performance impacts your customers and hold this data to account for their SLAs
- Shine a light on the quality of your post-purchase phase
- Helps protect your brand’s reputation from negative feedback.
How DEM Integrates with Your Existing Tech Stack
The beauty of a good DEM solution lies in the fact that it allows you to simplify workflows and boost organizational productivity without disrupting your pre-existing solutions.
For instance, a DEM platform like LateShipment.com gives you everything you need to create delightful delivery experiences for every shopper, every time. And the best part, it works with all the tools you work with.
LateShipment.com’s DEM suite is designed to seamlessly integrate with most shipping carriers, eCommerce platforms, order management platforms, CRMs, and helpdesk tools.
Additionally, LateShipment.com also can integrate with custom-built tools and platforms. Our API makes it easy to enable such integrations. This allows you to tap into all the great benefits that can take your business to the next level.
Do Bigger Things with Your Post-purchase
Don’t stop with a great delivery experience. With LateShipment.com, go all out with your post-purchase excellence. It combines stellar delivery experiences with easy, seamless returns – all while significantly reducing your shipping spend by auditing your invoices and recovering eligible refunds from your carriers.
It takes less than 2 minutes to see LateShipment.com in action without any change to your existing workflow.
