Sashank Ravindranath
Rohan Rinaldo FelixIf you run an eCommerce retail business, you probably leave no stone unturned to ensure shoppers have a great user experience on your site. You use the best possible images for your product listings, make navigation to checkout a breeze, and do everything it takes to make loading times fast.
However, once a shopper checks out and you hand over their package to your shipping partner for delivery, the situation moves out of your control.
While shipping carriers like FedEx & UPS often claim a near-perfect on-time delivery record, this isn’t accurate. 7–8 percent of all parcels are routinely delayed.
And to make matters worse, shipping carriers often fail to inform customers of parcel delays. This creates a situation of customer angst which is bound to reflect on your retention rates and customer lifetime value (CLV). After all, it costs at least 5 times more to acquire a new customer than to retain an existing one.
The loss of control over customer experience you encounter once you hand over a parcel to a shipping carrier is called the post-purchase experience gap.
Customers who face a poor delivery experience tend to vent their frustration on your brand’s social media channels or on review sites. Such feedback ends up dissuading over 90% of prospective shoppers, who read online reviews, from buying from you.
This challenging situation necessitates a proactive approach on your part to resolve.
Delivery Experience Management (DEM): The Answer to Your Last-Mile Troubles
Actively working to mitigate delivery issues and ensuring last-mile customer satisfaction is what’s needed for you to take control of your customers’ post-purchase experience. You need 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 involves taking action as required to correct issues in the last mile and constantly engaging customers to validate brand promises.
A meaningful Delivery Experience Management (DEM) solution allows you stay on top of the three pillars of delivery experience:
- Complete visibility
- Customer engagement
- Proactive issue resolution
While some aspects of delivery experience management may be performed in-house, others necessitate a dedicated third-party solution.
These are the questions you need to ask before choosing a dedicated third-party delivery experience management platform to help provide customers a memorable post-purchase experience:
- Will it help you gain real-time visibility into in-transit shipments?
- Will it allow you to proactively resolve delivery issues?
- Will it help Increase customer engagement in the last mile?
- Will it let you provide an on-brand post-purchase experience?
- Will it let you improve customer satisfaction with data-driven insights?
The delivery experience management platform that adequately addresses the above concerns will be a tremendous step forward for your business compared to legacy methods.
Legacy Methods of Parcel Tracking Vs. Modern Delivery Experience Management (DEM)
Delivery Experience Management (DEM) is a pioneering approach to handling parcel delivery that allows for unprecedented visibility and control over last-mile shipping as also better customer engagement in the last mile.
It places you in the driver’s seat in the post-purchase phase rather than being a mere bystander to your shipping carrier.
You can unlock all these advantages by integrating your existing CRM solution, eCommerce platform, order management system, and helpdesk with the best-in-class Delivery Experience Management (DEM) platform.
LateShipment.com: Best-in-Class Delivery Experience Management (DEM)
At LateShipment.com, we are committed to enabling your business to wrest control of the post-purchase experience you provide customers. Our experience in tracking over 100 million parcels for our customers has allowed us unprecedented visibility into last-mile pain points businesses like yours face. We came to realize that despite using industry-standard eCommerce, order management, CRM, and helpdesk tools, businesses like yours were still struggling to
- Gain unbiased real-time visibility into parcels in transit
- Meaningfully engage with customers in the post-purchase phase
- Respond proactively to delivery issues
- Identify weak areas to improve in the delivery phase
Addressing these pain points was the motivation behind our pioneering Delivery Experience Management (DEM) platform. LateShipment.com makes it possible for you to stand apart from your competitors by offering your customers near white-glove service in the delivery phase. We offer your retail business unprecedented, top-line DEM capabilities:
- Gain real-time, granular visibility into shipments in transit across carriers.
- Keep support reps on top of delivery issues using a dedicated customer support dashboard that displays delivery issues as soon as they are detected.
- Proactively handle delivery exceptions using our communication solution that helps send customized messages to specific customers regarding delivery status.
- Keep customers informed of delivery status through automated email and SMS notifications that are triggered and sent to customers when their parcels reach specific events during the shipping process.
- Provide an on-brand delivery experience by providing a branded tracking page that customers can visit for information on parcel status.
Pairing LateShipment.com to your existing CRM, eCommerce, order management, and helpdesk tools allows you to tap into all the great benefits that can take your business to the next level.
One Simple Integration, a World of Retail Benefits
Adopting a Delivery Experience Management (DEM) mindset does not mean disrupting your workflows or getting rid of the tools you already use. LateShipment.com integrates seamlessly with your existing tools and makes it possible to boost their capabilities in the following ways:
1. Contextual & meaningful customer communication
Integrating LateShipment.com with your customer relationship management (CRM) platform, order management system (OMS), or eCommerce platform allows you to take customer engagement in the post-purchase phase to an all-new level. After all, communicating relevant information at the right time to customers is critical to allaying their anxieties while they await their parcels.
A simple integration enables you to trigger automated email & SMS updates that are sent to customers from LateShipment.com on the completion of standard shipping events like “Shipped,” “In-Transit,” and “Delivered.”
Additionally, this integration also allows you to reach out to specific customers whose parcels are facing relatively uncommon exceptions like weather-related delays and allay their anxieties with custom email messaging.
For instance, using LateShipment.com, you could send a customer who’s parcel is facing a weather delay a personalized message with a discount coupon attached for a subsequent purchase. This will allow you to make a positive impression on the customer and also ensure that they don’t switch over to a competitor because of circumstances outside your control.
Tap into all the great ways LateShipment.com lets you engage with customers in the last mile by integrating your CRM, order management, and eCommerce tools with it.
- Shopify
- 3dcart
- Magento
- Freshsales & more!
2. Effortless control over delivery experience
Staying in control of every customer’s last-mile delivery experience is critical for support reps to proactively step in and prevent customer angst when issues arise in the delivery process.
LateShipment.com’s predictive algorithm is capable of flagging delivery issues before the fact, affording your customer support reps sufficient time to rectify the situation before customer impact.
LateShipment.com integrates with your existing helpdesk tool and automatically generates and pushes support tickets to it for possible delivery issues flagged by our predictive algorithms. Any changes in the status of a ticket already generated are pushed as updates to it, so one support representative is able to follow through on the ticket from issue to resolution.
Integrating LateShipment.com with your helpdesk solution can benefit your support team in 3 tangible ways:
- There is contextual info for every delivery issue at hand
- The support rep is enabled to resolve delivery issues in the manner of choice
- The support rep is able to respond to issues faster
Your support reps will thank you for integrating with LateShipment.com and providing them a virtually effortless way to address customer concerns in the post-purchase phase. After all, delivery issues constitute a large volume of tickets that take away from the attention due to product-related concerns.
3. Continuous customer feedback to improve the quality of deliveries
Here’s another reason to integrate your CRM platform, eCommerce platform, and order management system with LateShipment.com:
LateShipment.com’s Delivery Experience Management (DEM) platform automatically assigns a Delivery Satisfaction (DSAT) score to every one of your parcels. This is possible through our bleeding-edge predictive algorithms that have tracked over 100 million parcels.
The DSAT score allows you to gain a clear, unbiased understanding of probable customer sentiment around every delivery even without them reverting to you.
This score can be pushed to your integrated tool, making it possible to associate post-purchase delivery experience with individual customers. This places you in a strong position to make quick improvements in the best interest of your customers, enabling you to stand out from the competition.
Additionally, we also enable you to collect feedback scores from customers on a custom-branded tracking page that we provide you.
Give yourself visibility into customer sentiment in the last mile by integrating LateShipment.com with your CRM, order management, or eCommerce tool of choice.
- Shopify
- 3dcart
- Magento
- Freshsales
- Shippo
- Stamps.com
- Shipstation
- Shipping Easy & more!
Plug-&-Play Integrations
LateShipment.com easily integrates with your existing tools, whether CRM software, eCommerce platform, order management system (OMS), or customer support helpdesk solution. Our pre-built integrations work seamlessly on the backend to help you stay on top of your last-mile game.
Additionally, LateShipment.com also has the capability to integrate with custom-built tools and platforms. Our API makes it easy to enable such integrations.
We are committed to helping you take control of your last mile, & to help you get started, we are offering our comprehensive DEM suite at absolutely no cost to you until June 30, 2020. Our value is best experienced first-hand, so get started now!
