Sashank RavindranathThe holiday shopping season means an entirely different thing for shoppers and merchants. For the latter, it’s not just about festivities, gift-giving, and visiting places but the busiest time of year, when they have to work amidst the incoming rush if they’re looking to stay ahead of the competition and maximize sales.
In the case of physical stores, the customer collecting their purchase and leaving the store marks the end of a sales cycle. However, with order delivery and the other aspects that follow, the order getting accepted is only half the battle done for e-commerce merchants. Moreover, with a surge in orders and customer inquiries, thanks to the holiday rush, managing order deliveries during the holiday season gets tougher than usual.
If you’re an e-commerce merchant who is looking to navigate the holiday rush with ease and efficiency, this article is for you.
But first, let’s get to the basics to understand the magnitude of what we’re dealing with.
Understanding the Holiday Rush
The holiday rush as a concept is pretty simple.
Witnessing a spike in consumer spending towards the end of the year, particularly on days like Thanksgiving and Christmas, stores decided to create special offers to spur existing customers to spend even more and to bring in more customers. This soon created a norm where customers rushed to stores to get things at the lowest rates before they went out of stock — leading to the coining of the term.
With time and technological advancements, the shopping trend continued with e-commerce, bringing in a huge revenue opportunity in the form of consumer spending. However, there exists one small problem. Shoppers expect the same level of experience from physical stores to e-commerce. What they don’t realize is the fact that e-commerce businesses and shipping carriers strain their capacity and resources during the peak season to deliver orders properly and on time.
E-commerce brands too, with the goal of staying profitable during the holiday season, strive to provide shoppers with a great experience. Their only catch? Prone to face multiple hurdles that make their efforts to provide quality post-purchase experiences difficult.
Frequent post-purchase challenges e-commerce businesses face during the holiday rush
- Increased shipping delays: Increased order volume during the holiday season amplifies the odds of shipping delays, which in turn have the capability to frustrate customers and damage the business’s reputation.
- Increased customer support inquiries: The holiday season is also a time when customers are more likely to have questions or problems with their orders. This can lead to an increase in customer support inquiries and consume all of the customer support team’s time.
- Increased returns and refunds: When things go wrong with their orders, customers don’t hesitate to expect returns and refund requests. Issues like this further put pressure on the already strained capacity of shipping carriers and cost you efforts and money.
While these challenges are concerning enough on their own, they can also have adverse effects on your business in the form of operational inefficiency and potentially harm long-term customer relationships and brand reputation.
Prevention is better than cure. An old saying but holds true to this context. All these issues can be easily prevented by making use of an order-tracking software from placement to delivery.
How An Order Tracking Software Can Help You Tackle Post-Purchase Challenges With Respect To The Holiday Rush
A post-purchase order tracking software can help e-commerce businesses during the holiday rush in a number of ways, which we’ll take a look at each of them in the form of problem statements.
1. "I’m an e-commerce merchant. Like every other business owner out there, I always look forward to the holiday season to make the most out of it and improve profits. But for the past few years, my profit margins have been really looking low — thanks to delays and other shipping issues, which are causing my customers to drop off".
This is a really frustrating situation for e-commerce merchants.
Imagine having to face the consequences of something that happens due to no fault of your own.
With shipping carriers straining capacity as a result of the holiday rush, coordinating shipping logistics can be complex and error-prone. Hence, delivery incidents like late deliveries can become frequent and result in dissatisfied customers.
What makes the situation even worse is that disgruntled customers are quick to blame you for delays and other delivery errors, leading to increased costs such as customer acquisition and service recovery.
On average, 1 in 5 parcels shipped face delivery issues resulting in high customer frustration and negative shopping experiences.
Now imagine the whole scenario with an order tracking system in place.
Thanks to real-time tracking, you now have the ability to receive alerts for critical delivery failures and proactively notify customers when there’s an issue with their order. This way, you can practically ensure that your customers’ frustration levels are mitigated and thereby achieve CSAT (Customer Satisfaction) scores of 80+ even when delivery issues occur.
2. "As a customer support representative, I’ve always felt most of my time is being spent on answering customer queries, mainly related to their order status (WISMO). This is taking away from my ability to handle other customer inquiries and tasks and at the end of the day, customers too want a quicker resolution and often get frustrated when things get late. If only there was a way for me to improve the way that I handle WISMO inquiries…"
Customers get increasingly anxious in the post-purchase phase when they are left in the dark regarding their orders, making them prone to bombard your support reps with WISMO requests.
So much so that WISMO requests that they make approx. 50% of customer inquiries and overloaded customer support teams. This number is only going to shoot up during the holiday rush when order volumes are high and orders hold high emotional value for customers.
To prevent this from happening, you need to empower your support reps to properly address customer issues and display your strong commitment to the high standards of customer service you offer. Here’s how you can do just that:
As an extension of tracking your orders in real time — provide proactive delivery status updates to keep your customers in the loop about the whereabouts of their orders and free up your support time to focus on more pressing issues. This can help you reduce WISMO requests by up to 70% and also revive customers’ trust in your brand.
You can also take it one step further and let customers check the status of their deliveries at any time they need to by embedding a 24×7 order lookup widget on your website and chat tool to make tracking self-service.
TLDR;
- Enhanced Customer Experience – By determining the status and location of their orders in real-time, you can now be transparent with your customers regarding delivery issues thereby enhancing the overall customer experience. Even if there are no issues, you can still share proactive order updates and reduce customer inquiries.
- Reduced Customer Support Workload – When they’re informed throughout the order delivery process, customers are less likely to contact customer support for order status inquiries. This frees up customer support teams to focus on resolving more complex issues and providing exceptional service.
How Lateshipment.Com’s DEM Platform Can Help You With Post-Purchase Order Tracking Needs
1. Identify shipments facing issues at a glance
LateShipment.com’s Delivery Experience Management (DEM) makes it ridiculously easy for you to keep a watch on your packages in transit and identify issues around package deliveries. With the help of real-time parcel data:
- Know what’s happening with your parcels
- Take preemptive action before customer impact where needed
2. Resolve critical shipping incidents before they happen
Delivery issues are inevitable but that doesn’t mean you just watch as they happen. Instead, you can step in before customer impact by proactively addressing them.
- Automatically have tickets triggered to your helpdesk system and
- Send timely and customized notifications
For critical delivery events and thereby instill confidence in your customers.
3. Reduce delivery inquiries by 70% with real-time updates
Keep customers in the loop of their orders via:
- Automated email and SMS notifications
- Self-serve order tracking widget anywhere on your website
And Replace angry WISMO calls with seamless order tracking experiences
BONUS:
4. Boost revenue from repeat purchases by up to 12%
DEM also helps you provide ‘branded’ tracking experiences via tracking pages and emails. Not just to provide complete order tracking information, you can also use your tracking assets as a real-estate for marketing campaigns to double your chances at driving repeat sales
Final Word
That’s all from us for now. Preparing for the holiday rush is critical. By investing in an order tracking software, you can streamline your operations, enhance customer satisfaction, and set yourself up for success during this busy season.
With real-time order monitoring and proactive customer communication, you can navigate the holiday rush with ease, turn customer frustration into delight, and make the holiday season an enjoyable time of the year for your business.
