Customers are no longer just interested in low prices, fast shipping, and free returns, which have, up until now, 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 experience 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), which can help you do just that.
If you’re wondering what this is, this article is for you. Here, we discuss everything you need to know about delivery experience management, from what it is and how to implement it to some brands that have benefited from it and the best practices.
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?
Key Components of Delivery Experience Management
Here’s a look at the critical components that make up delivery experience management. Getting these right helps you facilitate a streamlined and optimized post-purchase experience that ensures repeat purchases and improved sales:
Order Packaging
Your order’s packaging is crucial to ensure it reaches the customer in pristine condition. However, it’s essential that you don’t overdo it and incorporate sustainable practices to win the hearts of modern customers. You see, 56.8% of customers say sustainable shipping and packaging is important to them.
Accuracy of Order
If your customer opens their eagerly awaited package only to realize it’s not what they ordered, you’re running the risk of losing the customer entirely, in addition to a bad review. Therefore, you must ensure that the right product is delivered to the right customer. This requires robust order accuracy processes and constant monitoring of operational performance.
Package Tracking in Real Time
Today, 91% of customers actively track their orders. Customers want to know when they can expect their package to be delivered, especially if it’s time-sensitive. Good delivery experience management meets this customer need with real-time tracking capabilities and proactive updates.
Order Communication
Your team, carriers, late-mile delivery agents, and, most importantly, customers can have doubts after the order gets placed or even after it gets shipped. It’s important you make it easy for them to reach you. Consider offering a dedicated helpline or a responsive chat feature to keep communication lines open.
Delivery Location Accuracy
Consider leveraging tools to help manage delivery locations and aid in avoiding traffic, weather extremes, and operational delays, to facilitate a smooth delivery experience for your customers.
Ease of Returns
E-commerce returns cannot be avoided, no matter how hard you try. The only thing you can do is ensure the process is hassle-free for your customer. If they walk away, getting stuck with the product and receiving no help from you, you best believe they’re not coming back.
Customer Feedback
Nailing down your delivery experience also involves following up with your customers on their views about the delivery experience. This doesn’t just give you insight into what’s working and what’s not, but also makes your customers feel appreciated, valued, and more connected to your brand.
How To Implement Delivery Experience Management?
The answer is—Delivery Experience Management software by LateShipment.com. This tool automates your end-to-end delivery management processes, facilitating a seamless and optimized customer experience, a 72% reduction in Where is My Order (WISMO) inquiries, and a 12% rise in revenue from repeat purchases. It does this through advanced capabilities such as:
- Custom Order Tracking Page: Create an on-brand custom order tracking page with our no-code builder to ensure you deliver a consistent branded experience to your customers.
- Automated and Personalized Shipping Notifications: Share personalized shipping notifications with customers across WhatsApp, email, and SMS.
- Advanced Shipment Tracking: Empower customers to track all packages from a single page, whether it’s partial orders or multi-carrier shipments.
- Smart Incident Alerts: Get immediate alerts for crucial delivery issues such as lost-in-transit, delays, etc., to ensure you stay on top of customer experience.
- Personalized Product Recommendations: Make informed and relevant product recommendations to customers landing on your tracking page to drive repeat sales.
- Personalized Promotions and Discounts: Offer personalized discounts and sales promotions as your customer tracks their order.
- Product Review Requests: Follow up with customers to capture product feedback through optimized surveys triggered only after a successful delivery.
- In-depth Insight into Delivery Processes: Get detailed and accurate insight into your fulfillment processes, Delivery Satisfaction (DSAT) scores, and more.
- Seamless Integration with 1200+ Carriers and Tools: LateShipment.com’s tool integrates with business tools and carriers such as Shopify, BigCommerce, Shippo, ShipStation, Mailchimp, Klaviyo, Salesforce, Gorgias, FedEx, UPS, etc.
Best Practices for Effective Delivery Experience Management
We’ve discussed what delivery experience management is, its critical components, and how to implement it right. But if that was enough, every e-commerce business that implemented delivery experience management would be winning, right? We, and you, know that’s not the case. So, what’s the difference?
It’s funny you should ask because here are some best practices that could enhance your delivery experience management to ensure customers keep coming back:
Facilitate a Smooth Ordering Experience
A seamless ordering process sets the stage for a great delivery experience. From the moment customers land on your platform, make it easy for them to find what they need. Ensure intuitive navigation, clear product details, transparent pricing, and estimated delivery timelines. The fewer steps to checkout, the better—reducing friction means more completed orders and happier customers. Keep it simple, fast, and frustration-free!
Prioritize Efficient Delivery Logistics
Efficient delivery logistics are the backbone of a smooth customer experience. With high order volumes, manual processing can lead to delays and errors. A delivery experience management system automates key tasks like order processing and route optimization, ensuring speed and accuracy. If your team is overwhelmed, partnering with LateShipment.com can make operations seamless and customers satisfied.
Allow Your Customers to Choose Delivery Time
Giving customers the power to choose their delivery time is a game-changer in Delivery Experience Management. Convenience isn’t one-size-fits-all—some want their package ASAP, while others prefer a precise time slot that fits their schedule. By offering flexible options like same-day, express, and scheduled delivery, businesses can boost satisfaction, reduce missed deliveries, and build loyalty.
Consider Contactless Delivery Solutions
Contactless delivery isn’t just a pandemic-era trend—it’s now a consumer expectation. With more people prioritizing safety and efficiency, offering a seamless, no-contact option enhances trust and satisfaction. Whether for food, clothing, or everyday essentials, contactless delivery ensures a smooth, hassle-free experience. Businesses that adopt this approach can improve customer loyalty while staying ahead in an increasingly digital and convenience-driven market.
Personalize Your Customer Experience
A seamless, personalized experience makes all the difference in delivery. While online orders lack face-to-face interaction, businesses can bridge the gap with robust customization options. Let customers fine-tune their orders—whether it’s meal preferences, delivery instructions, or packaging choices.
Offer Post-Delivery Support
Delivery doesn’t end at the doorstep—it’s just the beginning of customer satisfaction. Offering exceptional post-delivery support ensures that any hiccup, like a damaged or incorrect order, turns into an opportunity to build trust. A responsive support team that quickly resolves concerns, processes returns, and offers refunds shows customers you care. By standing behind every delivery, you turn one-time buyers into loyal, lifelong customers.
Facilitate a Consistent Brand Experience
A seamless brand experience builds trust and customer loyalty. Whether shoppers browse, order, or receive deliveries, they should feel the same level of service and professionalism at every touchpoint. Maintain uniform messaging, a smooth ordering process, and reliable delivery updates. Consistency reassures customers, strengthens brand identity, and ensures every interaction reflects your brand’s commitment to excellence.
Case Studies of Successful Delivery Experience Management
We’ve been discussing delivery experience management in theory. Now, it’s time to understand how it has been helping real-world businesses to enhance their customer experience post-purchase. Here are three case studies of successful delivery experience management:
Fresh Prep
Company Information: Fresh Prep is a subscription-based, sustainability-focused meal kit delivery service that operates out of Canada. Being a vertically integrated company, Fresh Prep prefers doing everything in-house, allowing them better control over product quality and helping them maintain B-Corporation standards such as local and ethical sourcing.
Pain Points: Fresh Prep’s proprietary technology platform involves a customer-facing website page where customers can place orders, process payments, etc. However, the company recognized the need for a framework to improve order processing and delivery implementation.
How DEM helped: Fresh Prep integrated a delivery management experience platform to enhance route optimization and streamline the backend production process. You see, since they create their meal kits right before they get shipped to customers, Fresh Prep needs to ensure the food is fresh and the route chosen to the customer’s doorstep is the fastest. A DEM processes the order as well as alerts the team to ensure food production is completed right on time.
Curiada
Company Information: Curiada is an online spirits marketplace that curates collections of the most distinctive spirits across the world. They are based out of the US and leverage a network of distributors, distillers, and retailers to make spirits available to customers across the US.
Pain Points: Curiada struggled to provide customers with accurate order delivery status, consistent shipping timelines, and detailed visibility, a challenge compounded by their working with multiple retail partners that utilized different carriers, technologies, and processes. What they needed was proactive shipping notifications, a branded tracking page, and improved customer support integration.
How DEM helped: Curiada integrated LateShipment.com’s Delivery Experience Management software to streamline delivery timeline insights, provide personalized delivery updates for customers, and ensure accurate delivery statuses. As a result, they witnessed a 30% fall in new customer support tickets with a 360-degree view of all shipping operations and a decrease in fulfillment times.
Branch
Company Information: Branch Furniture Designs offers ergonomic office furniture that is specially created to help improve the posture and well-being of employees working long hours. It has come to become a popular office furniture supplier across the US and Canada and was even listed on CNN Underscored’s top picks in 2022.
Pain Points: Branch struggled with tracking complexities with multi-shipment orders, leading to their inability to offer customers information on delivery statuses, impacting their customer satisfaction and experience.
How DEM helped: The Branch integrated LateShipment.com’s Delivery Experience Management software to unify multi-shipment order insight, customize ‘Fulfillment status’ updates on a branded tracking page, and automate shipping notifications. This partnership reduced their WISMO inquiries by 37%, drove engagement per shipping notification by 2.5 times, and facilitated 16% clicks on product recommendations.
Future Trends in Delivery Experience Management
Technological advancements and changing customer preferences are driving the delivery experience management space at a breakneck speed. As an e-commerce business, you must stay on top of the trends shaping the future of delivery services. Here’s a look at these:
Artificial Intelligence (AI)
There is no industry that AI will not have its hands in soon. And when it comes to e-commerce post-purchase experience, AI is revolutionizing logistics by forecasting demand, managing inventory efficiently, and optimizing delivery routes. It is laying the foundation for a system that doesn’t just learn from past delivery patterns to make informed strategies but also adapts in real-time to address traffic snags, ensuring that at the end of the day, your customer receives their package as per promised timelines and you receive fewer WISMO inquiries.
Robotics
Innovations such as drones will make the final leg of the delivery journey—the last-mile delivery faster and more efficient. Brands like Walmart are already exploring drone delivery in Texas, underscoring just how possible a future where a small flying machine completes delivery is.
Sustainability Initiatives
Today, sustainability is a very real business consideration rather than a buzzword. In fact, Harvard Business Review reports that 65% of customers want to buy from purpose-driven businesses that advocate sustainability, with 26% actually doing it. What’s more, 77% of businesses say sustainability leads to an increase in customer loyalty.
This shift in customer behavior and expectation is giving initiatives such as electric vehicle delivery a boost. And why shouldn’t it? Going electric doesn’t just reduce carbon footprint but also reduces operational costs (elimination of fuel expenses).
Hyper-personalization of Delivery Options
Customers want a unique experience, and that translates to hyper-personalization and more customer control. Soon, e-commerce businesses will offer options such as alternative pick-up locations, contactless drop-offs, specific delivery windows, etc., to enhance customer experience, loyalty, and satisfaction.
Conclusion
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 is that 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 can also 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.
