Sashank RavindranathA report indicates that 90% of Fortune 500 businesses use 3PLs to handle their logistics and supply chain operations. The primary role of a 3PL provider is allowing their customers, i.e., primarily e-commerce and B2B businesses to scale without needing to invest in additional warehousing or labor. This includes warehousing, picking and packing, shipping, etc,.
Recently, there has been an increase in the herculean responsibility of the post-purchase phase (dealing with high customer expectations for timely, transparent, and reliable delivery). However, as your 3PL business scales and your customer base grows, managing post-purchase operations manually can become unmanageable.
The post-purchase phase comprises shipping, delivery, and returns — all of which you have almost no control over and have to rely on carriers and the experiences they provide.
As these areas, which you have no expertise in, now fall under your responsibility, achieving your fullest potential or meeting the end user’s expectations can be a real challenge.
Why Should 3PLs Reevaluate Their Post-Purchase Strategy?
1. You are overpaying shipping charges by 6-8%
Delivery issues like lost/damaged shipments pose a constant worry to the packages you’re in-charge of. While you can file claims and obtain refunds, the process to do it is difficult and time-consuming due to high shipping volumes. To make things worse, there are more than 50 carrier errors such as late deliveries, invalid delivery exceptions, incorrect surcharges, duplicate charges, etc. In the long term, this implies that you’re never actually getting full value from your carrier service.
Impact: When not kept in check, delivery issues and overcharges can lead to increased shipping costs and put a dent in your savings.
2. You have limited visibility into shipment status and carrier performance
As a 3PL provider, you often work with multiple businesses of different scales, in both e-commerce and brick-and-mortar formats, and ship through multiple carriers, each with their own tracking systems. This puts you in a position where you lack proper insights in the form of organized shipping analytics. Without a proper system in place, this can result in limited visibility into the exact status of shipments and the overall performance of carriers.
Impact: Limited visibility hinders your ability to provide accurate delivery estimates and proactively address potential issues. There’s also the lack of insights to optimize the overall efficiency of delivery operations (identifying underperforming carriers and optimizing carrier selection).
3. You lack opportunities to provide quality post-purchase experiences
3PL giants have their systems in place to scale, but what about the others? They have to compete amongst themselves to gain customers and keep them forever. Coming up with efforts to scale, such as value-added services to improve the customer experience, can be challenging, especially when you’re dealing with multiple carriers and a high volume of shipments.
Impact: E-commerce businesses always rely on 3PLs who offer the best possible service for them. This includes providers who emphasize customer experience. Lack of provisions here always puts you in the backseat, leading to low retention and revenue rates.
Of course, you can use up routine, repetitive tasks to manually optimize these processes and streamline workflows. However, these tasks are time-consuming and take away attention from more complex issues that need to be solved.
On the other hand, reducing manual effort provides you with more time to focus on important tasks around improving post-purchase processes. This can be achieved through technology and cost-saving measures, i.e, automation.
How Automation Helps 3PL Companies Maximize Value To Themselves And Their Customers
Automation is not the future. It’s already here (and you don’t want to stay left out).
By Integrating an intelligent post-purchase platform, you can join the many 3PLs that enable automation to optimize operations and thereby maximize value for you and your customers.
Automation for 3PL providers
1. Parcel audit and shipping refunds
As a 3PL provider, integrating automated parcel audit solutions into your service offerings acts as a differentiator in a competitive market.
How it works: A parcel audit system effortlessly goes through each and every invoice and manages all eligible claims, including those for lost and damaged shipments where service level agreements (SLAs) around delivery performance were not met, and automatically files claims for refunds for them.
Benefits: Automation of parcel audits and shipping refunds helps you recover costs by up to 20% associated with service failures and other billing errors. Also, by systematically identifying and addressing these discrepancies, you can reduce the time spent on manual audits and claims processing.
2. Shipping analytics
An extension of auditing shipping invoices and claiming refunds is its effect to give you detailed insights into carrier performance.
How it works: Audit systems help you with advanced shipping analytics that provide data-driven insights to identify patterns and trends, enabling you to make data-driven decisions about carrier and service selection. To make things even better, automation also allows you to track and monitor all customers’ shipments in-transit service failures in real-time and know what’s happening at a glance.
Benefits: Gain complete visibility into anticipating and resolving issues such as frequent delays. and other inefficiencies to make smarter shipping decisions that help in improving operations and optimizing shipping costs. This especially comes in handy during times like peak season, when shipping volumes are multifold and late delivery refunds with major carriers are temporarily suspended.
Automation for e-commerce businesses using 3PLs
3PL businesses need to differentiate themselves from competitors and customer retention acts as a key differentiating factor. It’s easy to connect these dots. You need to own your post-purchase process by delivering value-added services that go beyond the basics and help you improve retention (and revenue).
1. Reduce customer inquiries
Customers are always anticipating their orders and you’re staying dependent on carriers and their delivery experiences don’t really help.
How it works: Automating key aspects of the post-purchase journey, such as real-time order tracking, enables even more in the form of proactive issue resolution and automated notifications. For instance, you can enable e-commerce businesses to keep their customers informed about their orders at all times, including issues that happen, and suggestions to resolve them. Additionally, there are also post-purchase solutions that help businesses take things up a notch via branded tracking experiences.
Benefits for e-commerce businesses: Real-time shipment tracking with proactive order status updates and support alerts for shipment issues to reduce WISMO calls by 72%. Additionally, including marketing assets on order tracking pages and notifications can increase recurring revenue by 12%.
2. Streamlined returns experiences
Additionally, when things go wrong with deliveries, you don’t have to direct brands to external returns platforms by partnering with a post-purchase automation platform, you can integrate returns into your existing workflows.
How it works: Automated returns solutions make returns self-service for end users. For instance, customers with a need for a return will no longer have to reach out to support reps but instead initiate returns and exchanges on their own.
Benefits for e-commerce businesses: Post-purchase solutions with flexible return options, automated returns updates, and a self-service process can reduce returns processing time by up to 95% and increase revenue by 40%.
With a complete post-purchase automation system in place, you can now enable e-commerce merchants to offer excellent post-purchase experiences to their customers and have an assured chance at improving retention.
The exceptional value you can gain by implementing automation is evident. You can not only elevate your client relationships but also transform your logistics operations. This is where LateShipment.com comes in – to back up automation with post-purchase solutions that are designed specifically for 3PL providers.
Lateshipment.com: Empowering 3PL Businesses Like Yours To Deliver Exceptional Value To Your Customers
LateShipment.com understands the unique challenges faced by 3PL providers in the post-purchase space.
You can trust LateShipment.com to automate key post-purchase processes, optimize your delivery performance, protect your shipments, and keep your customers coming back for more.
Here’s how LateShipment.com can help you grow together – empowering your e-commerce clients while boosting your 3PL’s success:
- Gain full visibility into your shipping costs and recover lost revenue with precise, automated audits and claims management
- Enhance customer retention through branded sub accounts that offer a centralized master dashboard to track and monitor all customers’ shipments in-transit service failures in real time
- Boost your revenue via partner commissions for any additional LateShipment.com products your customers sign up for
In crust, our platform seamlessly integrates real-time order tracking, proactive issue resolution, automated shipping insurance, and efficient return management into ONE powerful solution.
LateShipment.com also integrates with leading e-commerce and helpdesk platforms to enable seamless automation of existing workflows
With LateShipment.com, 3PLs can enhance transparency, reduce operational costs, and improve customer satisfaction.
That’s it from us! It’s time to create a win-win partnership with advanced post-purchase solutions — help your clients retain customers while you gain increased retention, differentiated services, and greater efficiency. Together, we drive growth and success.
We specialize in empowering 3PL businesses like yours to deliver exceptional value to your customers.
See why top 3PLs choose LateShipment.com as their post-purchase partner:
- Discuss your strategic post-purchase goals, unique needs and challenges
- Put money back into your business with an in-depth understanding of your shipping performance for optimization and value-added features that enhance customer retention
- Learn about our 1200+ integrations with shipping carriers and e-commerce apps
Book a consultation call with our product experts today.
