Sashank RavindranathAs an ecommerce brand, you put a lot of time and effort into your customer experiences (CX) to make them hit buy. But have you thought of what happens later?
The warehouse to your customer’s doorstep is only 50% of the order experience. The CX journey continues post-purchase with shipping, tracking, delivery, returns, reviews, and more.
However, what’s surprising or rather shocking is the fact that this phase is often unwittingly left out by brands who assume the customer journey to end with the ‘buy’ button.
This lack of effort by brands in the post-purchase leads to a big post-purchase gap coupled with carrier errors, customer anxiety, complicated delivery, and returns experiences. All of this takes a toll on your CX and ultimately your wallet.
The Big Post-Purchase CX Gap in Online Retail (And What It Really Means to Your Business)
The post-purchase CX gap (as it is called) is a result of businesses like yours losing control over the experience you provide to your customers after parcels have been handed over to third-party shipping carriers/partners, who may not share the same level of commitment towards ensuring a delightful and frictionless delivery experience.
This gap in turn creates a domino effect and can have a huge impact on your customers, resulting in far more consequences.
The Impact of Post-Purchase CX Gap on Consumers
- High customer anxiety before order delivery – The average customer tracks their order 6-8 times during delivery
- A surge in the volume of WISMO calls – Over 40% of customer support tickets created are SHIPPING, DELIVERY, or RETURNS related
- Customer frustration over order delays – 1-in-3 customers abandon a brand after just ONE bad delivery OR return experience
- Your brand’s reputation takes a massive hit – 86% of people hesitate to do business with an ecommerce store if it has negative reviews online
- Lost opportunity to drive repeat sales during order tracking moments – 8 to 10 customer engagement and revenue growth opportunities are LOST during the post-purchase customer journey
The aforementioned points evidently bring to light the existing gap in the post-purchase phase of your customer journey and its potential impact on your online business.
While these issues are inevitable, delivering stunning experiences post-purchase can help you turn customer frustrations into fierce loyalty and in turn help you save on shipping costs.
With that said, it’s time for you to close the existing post-purchase CX gap by adopting technology solutions and making full use of the post-purchase phase: a goldmine for brands that ship.
Here are some measures to help you provide your customers with a memorable CX after checkout and cement you as their go-to option. The following post-purchase strategies will have a positive impact on both your customers’ lifetime value and the retention rate of your business.
8 Proven Strategies to Ensure Post-Purchase CX Success
Planning a post-purchase CX strategy is not rocket science!
There are just 3 steps to be followed to ensure post-purchase CX success!
- Claim shipping refunds
- Deliver delightful delivery experiences
- Make returns easy
Let’s look at these steps in detail for a better understanding.
1.Stop overpaying your shipping carriers; Claim refunds
Did you know that there are over 50 shipping carrier errors (service failures and billing errors) such as late deliveries, lost shipments, damaged packages, incorrect surcharges, duplicate entries, etc that are eligible for refunds?
Refunds are just money left on the table. Not claiming them for your carriers’ failures means you’re losing valuable dollars month-on-month.
However, keep in mind that manually filing refund claims can be time-consuming, boring, and complicated. It is important to make use of a parcel audit solution that identifies and automatically submits relevant claims.
Apart from helping you save on your shipping costs month-on-month, regularly claiming shipping refunds also ensures better service quality by your shipping carriers.
2. Monitor your parcels in real-time; learn about delivery issues before they affect your customers
Sure refunds are great. But they don’t make up for the lost customers due to delivery issues.
In that case, you must effortlessly manage your delivery experiences to delight your customers.
The first step in your post-purchase CX action(able) plan is to gain visibility into your post-purchase, by monitoring your in-transit parcels in real-time and being in the know of all your parcels across carriers, locations, and service types.
Real-time tracking data gives you predictive analysis and an intuitive, 360-degree view into your post-purchase, so that you may know where you need to intervene.
3. Enable your support team to proactively handle delivery issues
With the help of real-time tracking, you can now empower your support reps to stay in the know of parcels that are error-prone, and proactively resolve them before customer impact. Such efforts can help you forge strong customer relationships and foster brand loyalty.
Ecommerce brands can also provide omnichannel support on their website, social media, etc, to avoid the issue being escalated and reduce the number of support tickets being created.
4. Send automated shipping notifications via email and SMS; when it matters the most
The significant downside to losing control of the post-purchase CX to the shipping carrier is the lost opportunity to engage with your customers during their order tracking moments, which creates a broken shopper experience that negatively impacts your business.
Therefore, it is important to correct this imbalance and provide ecommerce businesses the ability to engage with their customers in the post-purchase phase. This way, you can make more of a mark on their customers and, indeed, delight them.
5. Build branded post-purchase assets that are visually appealing
Providing post-purchase experiences that are on-brand can help you take a step further in your path toward meeting customer expectations and delighting them.
Make order tracking an extension of your brand experience by keeping your tracking pages aligned with your brand elements.
Instead of sending your customer to the carrier’s tracking page, which is often dull, you can create your own branded tracking pages that are both beautiful and brand-consistent.
You can also embed an “order track” button onto your website and transactional emails and SMS notifications and make order tracking self-service, thereby reducing the number of WISMO inquiries.
6. Drive repeat sales with product recommendations
Make your tracking experience more than just transactional by having product recommendations personalized for every customer.
Use the real estate on your order tracking pages to run relevant product promotional campaigns and upsell/cross-sell your products.
This can double your chances of driving repeat sales by running offers, sales, or marketing campaigns on your tracking page and transactional emails.
7. Get customer feedback around their delivery experience
Collecting delivery feedback is just as important as recording your product feedback. It tells you how your delivery experience fared and gives you important insights into your carrier’s performance as well.
These delivery satisfaction ratings work as an index of your brand’s performance in the post-purchase phase. You can leverage this data to make better delivery choices and consistently improve your brand’s post-purchase experience, to earn fierce customer loyalty in return.
Capturing these delivery satisfaction ratings will also in turn reflect on your overall customer satisfaction metrics such as CSAT and NPS.
8. Make order returns hassle-free
All that hard work you put into your customers’ shipping and delivery experiences will be thrown away the moment your customer wants to return a product and you do not have a proper returns management strategy in place.
Therefore, don’t stop with a great delivery experience. Go all out with your post-purchase CX by providing easy and seamless returns.
92% of shoppers say they will buy again if the returns process is easy.
To make returns an integral part of your post-purchase strategy, Here are some important tips that you can follow.
- Have a clear-cut returns policy
- Offer free and flexible returns
- Self-service returns with zero support interactions
- Make returns profitable for your business
- Provide live return status tracking and updates
All of this can help you redefine returns as a growth driver for your business and create loyal customers for life.
While each of these strategies may seem challenging to be implemented in the long run, it can be relatively easier with the help of post-purchase CX success tools such as LateShipment.com.
How Lateshipment.Com Helps You Drive Post-purchase CX Success
LateShipment.com is the world’s only logistics cloud tool that helps businesses of every size provide memorable delivery experiences to customers at scale.
At LateShipment.com, our focus has remained steadfastly on the post-purchase phase, typically the part of the logistics chain that is the most neglected.
Here’s how our Delivery Experience Management platform powers post-purchase CX success for your business.
- Stay on top of delays by tracking your in-transit parcels across carriers in real-time.
- Resolve delivery issues proactively with predictive alerts for shipments facing delays.
- Send automated delivery status notifications via email and SMS to reduce your customers’ anxiety.
- Build beautiful, branded order tracking pages, personalized for your customers.
- Capture your customers’ Delivery Satisfaction (DSAT) rating after every order delivery.
BONUS 1: Save you up to 20% on your shipping bills
With the help of our automated parcel audit and refunds solution, you can have your monthly shipping invoices automatically audited for 50+ shipping carrier service failures and claims refunds on your behalf. The claimed amount is directly deposited into your account. This can save you up to 20% of your overall shipping spend.
BONUS 2: Provide effortless returns experiences
Our Returns Experience Management platform helps you make returns easy and profitable by increasing important CSAT metrics such as conversion rate, repeat purchases, revenue retained, etc all while reducing the time taken per return.
BONUS 3: Plug-&-Play Integrations
LateShipment.com seamlessly integrates with all your tech stacks 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 take charge of your customers’ post-purchase journey and ensure outstanding CX.
The best part is that it takes less than 2 minutes to see LateShipment.com in action without any change to your existing workflow.
The value we add to businesses is most evident when experienced first-hand.
Interested? We at LateShipment.com can’t wait to help you grow your fanbase, savings, and business.
