Parcel Tracking Archives | Lateshipment.com

WISMO: What it means and how to reduce it?

Ajith Srinivasan — Sun, 15 Sep 2024 09:42:58 +0000

This post-purchase phase, where customers are awaiting their parcels, holds more importance than you think.

While most e-commerce businesses assume to just “hope no things go wrong until the customer gets their hands at their order“, the truth is far.

From the moment the order gets shipped, till it gets delivered, there is a window of opportunity to boost customer loyalty by ensuring hassle-free order delivery experiences that reward your brand with repeat sales in the future.

The catch? Customers love to stay in the know and receive updates on their delivery status and expect you to proactively do so. And when you fail to do so, your support teams are flooded with tickets from anxious customers, all with the same question – WISMO?

What Are WISMO Inquiries?

Customers tend to get anxious during the post-purchase phase, especially when they have limited visibility into the exact whereabouts of their order and often have to depend on opaque carrier tracking pages for clarity about their order’s ETA.

That’s where they typically come in the form of emails, phone calls, or chat messages asking, “Where IS My Order?” WISMO roughly translates to the customer wanting to track their shipment or at least know the status of their order.

The problem here is that carrier tracking pages don’t really disclose the depth of the situation when it comes to delayed packages. This lack of communication for a customer’s simple need for reassurance not only adds to customer service workloads but also signals a potential gap in the post-purchase experience.

Why WISMO Inquiries Are a Major Concern for E-Commerce Businesses

When anxious customers are unable to determine the status of their package, they tend to get frustrated. Of course, there’s the option of them reaching out to you and you can send them to the carrier’s tracking page. However, by that time, the damage was already done. To add fuel to the fire, when they don’t get what they want (even after reaching out), the post-purchase experience takes a huge hit, leading to negative reviews and ultimately loss of repeat business, both of which can harm your growth.

Cutting straight to the point, WISMO calls take up about 40% of your customer support queries, and according to a study by Gorgias – a customer service agent spends an average of 10-minutes per ‘where is my order?’ request. Do the math, if your business receives 1000 WISMO queries a week – at 10-minutes per ticket, that’s about 160 hours of your customer support’s time. Now that’s an alarming number!

That’s not all. High volumes of WISMO inquiries stretch your support team thin, leading to longer response times and higher operational costs. Also, addressing repeated WISMO issues can be costly, as it pulls resources away from other essential business functions.

So, what is it you can do as a business to reduce the number of WISMO calls to optimize the customer experience and save those big bucks in operating costs?

How to Reduce WISMO Inquiries

By now you would’ve already figured out the crux. Dealing with WISMO requires you taking a proactive approach to cut them down, even before your customers get the thought about asking the question.

Here are the different ways through which you can get proactive with your efforts to curb WISMO.

1) Be transparent about your delivery dates :

Unrealistic expectations are one of the foremost reasons for WISMO inquiries. This can be an even more serious issue during times like the peak season when unexpected delays are higher than usual.

As a start, you can include an estimated order delivery date on your product page to give the customer a realistic delivery timeline. For instance, you can categorize these dates based on the customer’s location and chosen shipping method.

There’s still a concern in the form of consistent delays that happen seasonally or due to uncommon reasons such as weather or road closures. In such cases, you can explicitly let your customer know that there might be delays with their order – on your website and checkout page.

2) Over-communicate delivery information :

Despite estimated delivery dates and warnings, WISMO inquiries can still be frequent at the hands of customers whose packages are particularly facing issues. These stem from the lack of communication regarding order status information.

In this case, you can make use of a delivery experience management software that takes all possible delays and discrepancies. You can proactively share this information to keep your customers informed at all times and avoid giving them unpleasant surprises.

Here’s how you can make this work. Send email or SMS notifications as the order progressively updates — from “shipped” to “out for delivery” and “delivered” or delivery exceptions. Remember, it’s always better if any kind of updates (be it good or bad) come from your end rather than customers reaching out to them.

This way, there’s a possibility that the customer’s anxiety and resulting frustration will be mitigated by your efforts to resolve their issues.

Apart from shipping notifications, you can also share order information with customers via self-serve, ‘branded’ tracking pages.

3) Provide self-serve, real-time order tracking :

Offering a branded tracking page that allows customers to track their orders whenever they want from your website rather than the carrier’s tracking page (that is dull and off-brand).

By redirecting your customers to tracking pages that are hosted in your domain, you have an opportunity to reinforce your brand identity and stay on the top of customers’ minds while keeping them engaged with order tracking information.

Additionally, they provide opportunities to offer additional promotions or product recommendations, thereby serving both as a convenience for your customers and a marketing opportunity for your brand.

Also, these branded tracking experiences can be extended to shipping notifications as a way to capitalize their high open rates to double your chances at driving repeat sales.

4) Optimize Your FAQ section and chatbots to deal with WISMO inquiries

Alongside estimated delivery dates and alerts on website/app floaters, many WISMO inquiries can be preemptively resolved by offering a comprehensive FAQ section and help center.

The section can include questions related to order tracking, delivery times, and what to do if a package is delayed. This way, customers can find the answers themselves and are less likely to reach out to your support team. You just have to ensure that this content is easy to find on your website.

You can also extend your efforts at offering proactive customer support by offering multiple support channels like chatbots. This AI-powered chatbot can instantly answer common questions like WISMO and provide tracking information. This reduces the workload on your customer service team without the need for human intervention.

If the inquiry is more complex or if the customer requires additional information, you can also include the provision to easily escalate the conversation to a live agent.

5) WISMO done, WISMR next

Returns often lead to a second wave of inquiries under WISMR or Where is my return, with customers asking about the status of their return, exchange, or refund.

You don’t have to do anything particular here, simply replicate the order tracking initiatives with a seamless returns process.

For instance, include easy-to-follow return instructions with the shipment and on your website. Provide real-time updates on the return status just as you would for the initial shipment. Then, follow up with proactive return notifications to notify customers once their return has been initiated, processed, or their refund issued.

Handling WISMO questions proactively makes things easy. To make things even easier, you can make use of a post-purchase tool like LateShipment.com.

How top brands leverage LateShipment.com to reduce/avoid WISMO calls and cut down on operational costs

In the context of WISMO, LateShipment.com provides your customers with a self-serve order tracking system and sends out regular delivery notifications apart from giving them a real-time delivery estimate but they still choose to reach out to your customer support regarding the whereabouts of their order.

With LateShipment.com’s Delivery Experience Management (DEM) platform, you can effortlessly :

Receive Predictive Delay Alerts – Pay attention to daily deliveries with predictive delay alerts and more on a purpose-built dashboard for support reps.
Resolve Issues Proactively – Proactively communicate with customers to prevent them from having bad experiences due to delivery failures.
Send out Delivery Status Notifications – Send custom or automated delivery status notifications to your customers for traditional events such as “shipped”, “attempted”, “delivered” and exceptions such as “in transit with delays”, “failed deliveries”, etc.
Provide Branded Order Tracking – Build fully-customizable order tracking pages for your customers to improve brand recall and sales.

And so much more…

With DEM, you can resolve WISMO as a pain point for both customers yourself. By implementing proactive communication, offering branded tracking, and optimizing customer support, merchants can significantly reduce these inquiries, enhance the customer experience, and improve operational efficiency (and profits).

In short, resolving WISMO is not only a smart operational move but a marketing strategy that builds trust, increases customer retention, and acts as a competitive differentiator for your brand.

The post WISMO: What it means and how to reduce it? appeared first on Lateshipment.com.

How To Handle The Holiday Rush With Post-Purchase Order Tracking

Sashank Ravindranath — Fri, 08 Sep 2023 07:50:15 +0000

The 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.

The post How To Handle The Holiday Rush With Post-Purchase Order Tracking appeared first on Lateshipment.com.

Lost Packages 101: How to Handle Them

Joelah James — Thu, 25 Mar 2021 09:00:16 +0000

When you ship through DHL, FedEx, UPS, or USPS most packages make it to their destinations intact and on time. But, what about those rare occurrences when packages are lost in transit? Who exactly gets blamed when this happens? The seller or the shipper?

In most cases, it is the retailer who bites the bullet. This is because customers the accountability of the package from checkout to delivery falls on the business they ordered from rather than the shipping carrier, a third party.

Customers who’ve lost their packages are often aggrieved and take their grievances to social media and call out your brand. Just like this:

Hey @amazon thanks for ruining Christmas and losing my brother's Christmas present. What's the point in 2 day shipping if you lose the package?
— Eddie Smedley (@GettinSomeSmed) December 23, 2018

And what exactly happens when posts like this catch the attention of their followers/ your potential customers?

Your brand reputation takes a huge hit, customer churn rate hits the roof, and staying ahead of competitors becomes next to impossible (Uff 😤)

Worry not!

Here are some tips for retailers on how to handle lost packages, (spoiler alert!) save on shipping costs, and improve customer loyalty.

Step 1: Determine if the sent packages are really lost

If a package that was en route to a customer goes certifiably missing and has not arrived at their doorstep four or five days after schedule, then it can be officially considered lost.

When you suspect your packages as lost, wait it out a maximum of seven days beyond the day of expected delivery.

Sometimes, there are packages that turn up after being rerouted somewhere along the chain (they might have also been incorrectly scanned or sorted).

In most cases though, the issue is either a wrong address or a weather-related one. Quite simply, it is not unheard of for a package to turn up a day or two late.

In case the tracking number shows that the product has as ‘delivered’ and the customer still files a complaint about the package being lost, then it has to be treated as a stolen package.

Here’s how you can prevent package theft.

Step 2: The packages are lost. Now what?

In case if your customers’ packages are truly lost, they naturally expect a refund or a replacement.

If the shipping carrier is unable to locate the packages, you need to file an insurance claim to cover the combined insured value of the lost packages. This requires the tracking number, proof of value of the item, and proof of insurance.

When you’re shipping valuable products, it is always wise to insure the shipments.

Remember that apart from the insurance sum, the carrier also has to fully refund the shipping costs for failing to deliver the package safely to the buyer.

Once the claim is filed and investigated, you will receive your dues via the original mode of payment be it through check or credit card.

Meanwhile, make sure YOU send the customer a replacement or a refund with a sincere apology.

Step 3: File a Refund Claim for the Lost Packages

File refund claims for DHL lost packages here
File refund claims for FedEx lost packages here
File refund claims for UPS lost packages here
File refund claims for USPS lost packages here

Step 3.1: How do I file a claim for lost packages?

The tracker on your package is usually true to its name and rarely allows packages to get lost. But on the off chance that the shipping label comes off, or the package is torn and the contents scattered, you’ll have no choice but to file lost package claims with the carrier.

Here are a few things you need to keep in mind if you’re going to file a claim for FedEx lost packages.

If the contents of the package cost less than $100, you can complete the entire form online and request a refund without documentation.
In the event of the package costing anywhere above $100, proper documentation is necessary for the claim to get processed.
Documentation can include FedEx pickup records, photos of the damaged or lost contents, and proof of value documentation.
Claims have to be filed within 60 days for US shipments and in 21 calendar days for international shipments (with all supporting documentation filed within 9 months of delivery date).
The tracking number that was initially allocated to the package is vital to the process and has to be provided.

After a scheduled inspection, your claim will be processed and you can track its progress.

In the case of other shipping carriers, you can file claims online through the following links and within the following deadlines.

UPS lost packages claim (file within 5 months online, within 9 months through customer service, and within 45 days if it is an uncollected C.O.D)
USPS lost packages claim (file within 60 days for all services except Priority Mail Express, First class, and Surface Mail)
DHL lost packages claim (file within 30 days)

Note: Filing Refund Claims for Lost Packages by Yourself Is a Huge Hassle

Apart from running your hectic business, manually submitting claims with shipping carriers by yourself is a huge hassle for more reasons than one:

Tedious Process – The process to file a claim manually is an exhaustive one, you will have to deal with multiple forms, proofs, and document submissions

Time-Consuming – After submitting a claim, you won’t get your refund immediately, it takes at least 5-7 days or forever to get a refund for one single package

Not Cost-Effective – The amount of time and money you will spend to get a refund will be greater than the compensation you will probably receive
Inefficient Use of Resources – This process doesn’t have a definitive output and require lots of back and forth communication along with document re-submissions

Worry not! You can make use of a parcel audit solution such as LateShipment.com to help you effortlessly recover refunds for lost packages while you focus on your core business.

Step 4: How Lateshipment.Com Helps You Handle Your Lost Packages

LateShipment.com’s Parcel Audit and Refunds solution effortlessly audits your invoices and helps save up to 20% on your shipping costs. The best part is that it takes less than 2 minutes to set-up and seamlessly integrates with your existing workflow.

Our parcel audit and refunds solution:

Not only submits claims on your behalf but also constantly follows up till issue resolution.
Makes sure that all claims are submitted within the timeframe of the carrier(s).
Not just lost shipments, but also helps you recover refunds for 50+ service failures like late deliveries.
And best of all this, you don’t have to pay anything out of your pockets. We only charge 50% of the refunds you’ve received, that too only when it is successfully recovered.

Sure, refunds are great for your business. But getting them doesn’t help in mitigating the pain of a loyal customer who might have lost packages such as birthday gifts or an anniversary surprises.

That’s when our other feature Delivery Experience Management (DEM) platform can help. DEM is particularly helpful if you are a bulk shipper who uses multiple carriers and would prefer an efficient automated workflow.

Step 4.2: How Delivery Experience Management (DEM) Platform Works

Delivery Experience Management platform keeps you in check the status of the parcel and helps you stay ahead of lost or damaged packages with ease. It is easy to use and tracks every package you send via major carriers like FedEx or UPS.

When a certain package takes a detour, DEM sends out an alert to the sender and the receiver. This helps you foresee a delay and handle it proactively.

If you send out several packages at once, and some of them are suspected lost by our automated system, you are intimated of that as well.

Since you get to know well in advance if one or more packages are flagged as lost, it gives you an edge when you get in touch with the carrier to resolve the issue or send a quick replacement in case of a time-sensitive delivery.

The value we add to businesses is most evident when experienced first-hand.

Try LateShipment.com now.

Or, get in touch by writing to us at sales@lateshipment.com

The post Lost Packages 101: How to Handle Them appeared first on Lateshipment.com.

The Real Cost of Late Deliveries & How to Deal with Them

Rohan Rinaldo Felix — Mon, 15 Mar 2021 12:00:53 +0000

Online shoppers are clear with their order delivery expectations.

They want it free, they want it NOW, and they hate delays.

How much, you ask?

So much that late deliveries tend to drive customers away.

Read on further to know how much late deliveries can cost your business and how you can deal with them in order to spur customers to spend more on your brand!

The Human Cost of Late Deliveries

How would you feel if you were affected by any of the following situations?

Critical medicines being delivered late.
A birthday gift you send reaching the destination a day after the special day.
Santa delivering that particular Peppa Pig life-size toy your child has been coveting for months a day after Christmas.

You would surely not order from the same business again. You would most certainly not accept excuses like “We outsource our shipping needs to FedEx, UPS, or DHL, so please check with the shipping carrier.” Such an excuse would only infuriate you further.

My @loststock_ order placed 4th August still isn't here. Estimated delivery was 6 weeks but I knew they were running late. How long have you guys that have had orders delivered waited?
— TM (@Tattooed_Mummy) October 25, 2020

Now put your customer in the same situation.

Needless to say, they would be just as anguished as you would be in their shoes.

You Bear the Cost of Late Deliveries

What makes late deliveries worse is that despite paying a steep price to provide customers a top-notch eCommerce delivery experience, you are held accountable for delivery issues committed by your shipping carrier.

Since the onus is now on you provide a great post-purchase experience, you end up spending up to 20% more on shipping costs than you should. As if this were not bad enough, many such former customers end up posting damaging reviews on social media and forums that deter potential customers from buying with you!

And if you are planning to just replace one customer with another, you are in for a shock!

The hard truth is that acquiring new customers is costly work. It costs as much as seven times more to acquire a new customer than to retain an existing one. Also, an existing customer will buy more from you and recommend your business more than a new customer will.

For these reasons, it is critical you retain your existing customers at all costs.

The Impact of Late Deliveries on Key Metrics

You can get an unbiased picture of whether you are investing in the right areas and if you are getting commensurate returns by tracking key metrics like Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC), Customer Retention Rate (CRR), and Customer Lifetime Value (CLV).

Ready to take your post-purchase delivery experience to the next level?

Download our guide, ‘Supercharge Customer Lifetime Value & Retention Through a Stellar Post-Purchase Delivery Experience’ – for insights on key metrics that matter, and how you can leverage them to ensure a positive and seamless delivery experience.

Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC): Are You Spending Too Much on Acquiring Customers?

In simple terms, Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) is the cost of convincing a potential customer to purchase your product/service.

CAC includes the cost of marketing and sales. The higher your CAC, the more you need to charge your customers for using your product/service to make a profit.

The simplest way to calculate CAC is to divide marketing and sales costs combined for a period by the number of customers acquired during the period.

For example, let’s say a small business spends $100,000 in a year on marketing and sales. 2000 new customers buy its products during the year.

The CAC of this business can be arrived at by dividing 100,000 by 2000. The answer is 50, which means this small business spent $50 in marketing to acquire a new customer during the year.

The effect of late deliveries on CAC – Late deliveries increase the CAC of your business. This is on account of the negative social media reviews and word-of-mouth interactions that need to be countered.

Customer Retention Rate (CRR): Are You Keeping Your Customers Happy?

Customer Retention Rate (CRR) lets you know what percentage of customers still shop with you at the end of a period compared to at the beginning of it. The importance of customer retention cannot be overstated.

Loyal customers are worth up to 10 times as much as the value of their first purchase.

Studies have shown that increasing your customer retention rate even by 5% could lead to increased profits of between 25% and 95%

Let’s assume you want to calculate your customer retention rate (CRR) for a particular year. You started the year with 100 customers (S) and lost 5 of them during the period. You acquired 10 new customers during the year (N).

At the end of the year, the total number of customers you have (E) would be 105 (keeping in mind the ones you lost and gained).

Now, let’s apply the formula to calculate the CRR for the year.

CRR = [(E-N)/S] X 100

That is,

CRR = [(105-10)/100] X 100

The customer retention rate for the year works out to be 95%, which is a spectacularly great percentage indicating you have great customer retention programs in place.

The effect of late deliveries on CRR – Late deliveries has the effect of decreasing the CRR of your business. Most customers who experience a late delivery tend to abandon a business rather than stay on.

Another important metric to measure for eCommerce retail businesses is Customer Lifetime Value (CLV).

Customer Lifetime Value (CLV): How Much Are Customers Spending on Your Business?

Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) is a metric that is critical to the long-term viability of a business. It is the measure of how much a business can expect to earn off each customer during their relationship.

In other words, it is the measure of how much a customer is expected to spend on a business during their lifetime. The inference to be drawn here is that the longer a customer chooses to buy from a business, the greater their lifetime value. CLV is a forward-looking metric.

CLV also helps to make decisions about how much money to invest in the acquisition of new customers and the retention of the ones existing.

How to Calculate Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)

The way CLV is usually calculated is using the formula,

CLV = average purchase value for a customer segment X number of times a customer from a segment will purchase each year X average length of the customer relationship for the segment.

Let’s assume you run an eCommerce site selling shoes.

A professional runner who is a frequent buyer on your site might be worth this:

$100 per shoe pair X 4 pairs yearly X 8 years (average professional career length for the segment) = $3200

The mother of an infant might be worth this:

$20 per shoe pair X 5 pairs yearly X 3 years = $300

Now you know you will need to devote more attention to the professional runner than the mother of the infant to boost your bottom line moving forward.

This is the value of calculating CLV.

The effect of late deliveries on CLV – As far as CLV is concerned, it decreases (and drastically) because of late deliveries. Not surprising, considering that customers who experience delivery issues don’t stay loyal to a business.

How to Deal with Late Deliveries & Boost Customer Lifetime Value

Here’s how to improve customer satisfaction in the last mile and deal with shipping delays, while ensuring your customers enjoy a near-white-glove delivery experience:

Create a loyalty program to encourage customers to buy more and often.
Under-promise and over-deliver on delivery dates.
Track your shipments in real-time using a parcel-tracking service.
Keep your customers informed of package location at all times about important parcel-tracking events, including delivery issues.
Make use of a Delivery Experience Management (DEM) service to manage your customers’ post-purchase experience.
Ensure that your support reps are rightly equipped to handle customer queries and complaints regarding delivery delays across all channels, including social media.
Make the eCommerce returns process free and as simple as possible. This will contribute to the overall comfort level of your customers.
Compensate customers for late deliveries by offering them coupons or discounts on future purchases.
Audit your shipments and claim refunds for delivery failures, including late deliveries (but remember, refunds don’t prevent customer churn).
For every delivery failure that happens, do a thorough analysis to understand the reasons and track your carrier’s performance.

Final Word

Taking proactive measures to handle late deliveries helps provide a positive eCommerce customer experience and improves metrics like CRR, CAC, and CLV.

Improved customer service in the last mile translates to an improved bottom line for your business.

The post The Real Cost of Late Deliveries & How to Deal with Them appeared first on Lateshipment.com.

6 Ways to Improve a Customer’s Post-Purchase Delivery Experience

Rohan Rinaldo Felix — Fri, 28 Aug 2020 09:30:54 +0000

The Big Post-Purchase CX Gap in the Order Delivery Phase

Picture this.

A shopper visits your website after a friend raved about one of your products or after clicking a compelling ad on social media. They casually navigate through the essential products section and decide to make a purchase. Your checkout process is seamless with limited navigation, thanks to your focus on providing a great user experience on your site.

Thereafter, the shopper hits “buy” and selects their preferred payment and shipping options from the choices on your checkout page. You send them a well-crafted order confirmation mail that is to their satisfaction and then proceed to pick, pack, and ship the order out.

Your shipping partner then shares a tracking URL with you, which you share with the customer. Beyond this point, the customer periodically checks their order delivery status on the tracking page of the shipping carrier.

So far so good.

But not beyond this point.

Beyond this point, there exists a BIG customer-experience gap in which you unwittingly neglect post-purchase experience.

This gap is on account of the fact that your post-purchase phase is outsourced to your shipping carrier, a third party who likely does not share your commitment toward providing your customer a standout delivery experience.

Because of a lack of control over your customers’ post-purchase experience:

You’re unable to resolve customer issues proactively — The post-purchase phase is extremely error-prone with 1-in-5 parcels being routinely delayed. A lack of real-time visibility into shipments in transit makes you incapable of foreseeing delivery issues and offering a proactive resolution.

You’re not in a position to communicate adequately to reduce customer anxiety — Customers are always anxious about their parcels and are known to check the status of their orders frequently. When you’re not in control of the most anxious stage of your customers’ journey, you jeopardize your relationship with a lack of communication.

Your shipping carrier’s brand rather than your own is prominent in the customer’s field-of-view in the post-purchase phase. This is a lost upsell and cross-sell opportunity for you.

A loss of control over the post-purchase experience you offer has even more consequences.

Read till the end for a way to delight customers with a standout post-purchase CX.

Consequences of a Lack of Control in the Post-Purchase Phase

Here are some of the more damaging consequences of a post-purchase phase that is not in your control:

1. Increase in customer disloyalty

51% of customers will stop shopping with you after just one bad delivery experience.

The reason? Quite simple.

Customers want their orders delivered how and when they expect them. And they expect to be kept in the loop consistently.

In the case of a broken post-purchase experience, you’re unable to fulfill this expectation of a customer. Consequently, they are more likely to switch over to a competitor who can provide a more reliable delivery experience.

2. Damaged brand reputation

Frustrated customers don’t merely stop shopping with you. They further escalate the situation by dropping negative reviews on social media and by word-of-mouth thereby damaging your brand reputation.

This is significant because 93% of customers say online reviews impact their buying decisions. Negative reviews add to your woes by deterring potential customers from shopping with you.

3. Lost opportunities to monetize post-purchase tracking moments

On average, customers track their orders 6–8 times on shipping carrier tracking pages.

This is a lost opportunity on your part to place your brand in front of customers during parcel tracking and leverage the opportunity to upsell and cross-sell.

4. Increase in customer service inquiries

Not enabling customers to effectively track their parcels leads to a high volume of customer service inquiries around deliveries.

Shipping carriers often withhold information regarding parcels running late to prevent them from being shown in a bad light.

However, this leads to anxious and angry customers bombarding YOUR support team with WISMO (Where Is My Order?) calls, consuming all of their time.

However, it’s not all doom and gloom. With the right measures, you can turn the tide in your favor.

6 Ways to Improve a Customer's Post-Purchase Delivery Experience

Here are 6 ways to improve your post-purchase delivery experience and delight customers.

1. Proactively resolve customer issues

Proactively extend assistance in the post-purchase phase.

Enable your customer-support-reps with a solution that provides real-time shipping information for timely delivery issue resolution.

When you have real-time visibility into your shipments in transit, you stay on top of parcels in transit, particularly those likely to face delays.

Resolving a delivery issue preemptively before it impacts a customer sets you up on track to provide a great post-purchase experience.

2. Engage meaningfully and effectively at all times to reduce customer anxiety

How do I resolve uncommon delivery issues, you ask?

Here’s how. Meaningfully engage via timely order updates tailored to specific customers or situations to mitigate anxiety.

Engaging with your customers in the most anxious stage of their journey helps you build trust and fierce brand loyalty.

3. Reduce customer service inquiries with delivery status notifications

Notify customers of important order updates automatically via email and SMS.

When you keep your customers informed of order status, their anxiety is eased and they’re less likely to bombard your support-reps with WISMO calls.

This saves support-reps’ time and enables them to focus on other important things like tending to product-related concerns.

4. Offer custom branded tracking experiences

Extend your brand identity into tracking moments by offering customers the ability to track their parcels on a branded tracking page. Additionally, utilize self-serve order tracking widgets on your website and order shipping emails.

Providing on-brand delivery experiences creates brand-immersive experiences and post-purchase moments of delight.

5. Maximize sales by monetizing tracking moments

Use post-purchase touchpoints as a means to drive sales.

Make use of a service that allows you to host a tracking page on your eCommerce site.

Use the real-estate on your order tracking page to run relevant promotions and campaigns and create upselling and cross-selling opportunities.

6. Get customer feedback on delivery experiences

Capture user feedback around customer delivery experiences to understand the detractors of a great post-purchase experience.

Understanding your customers’ delivery expectations, make necessary operational changes to ensure customers who bore the brunt of bad delivery experiences are given greater attention.

LateShipment.com: Post-Purchase Solutions for Supercharged CX

LateShipment.com’s Delivery Experience Management platform helps you craft outstanding post-purchase experiences and build long-lasting customer relationships.

Our groundbreaking post-purchase solutions help businesses effortlessly bridge the post-purchase CX gap and discover new ways to delight and retain customers.

Our high-impact post-purchase offerings allow you to:

Stay on top of order deliveries, particularly those facing delays

Track in-transit shipments in real-time across multiple carriers on a single dashboard.

Receive predictive alerts about parcels facing delivery delays & take remedial action.

Over-communicate and reduce customer anxiety post-purchase

Proactively identify and communicate with customers facing delivery issues.

Automate order status notifications via eMail or SMS throughout the delivery lifecycle.

Reinforce your brand identity with custom order-tracking assets

Provide brand-consistent order tracking pages to customers & drive repeat purchases.

Embed self-serve order tracking widgets on your website and order-related emails.

Leverage order tracking moments to increase sales and reduce returns

Increase sales with personalized product recommendations on your tracking page.

Reduce returns by providing relevant product usage information on tracking assets.

Know if customers were satisfied or not with their delivery experience

Capture customers’ Delivery Satisfaction (DSAT) rating after every order delivery.

Measure the average DSAT score of every customer to optimize shipping & delivery processes.

Access data-rich reports

Gain critical insights about your shipping spend and carriers’ delivery performance across service types and geographies to take data-driven decisions and make shipping efficient.

That’s not all!

Bonus: Save up to 20% on Your Shipping Spend

LateShipment.com also allows you to 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% on your overall shipping spend.

Our automated shipping refunds solution:

Audits your monthly shipping invoices
Submits refund claims to your carrier(s) on your behalf
Deposits the refunded amount directly into your account

How good is that?

The best part is, 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. Try LateShipment.com now.

The post 6 Ways to Improve a Customer’s Post-Purchase Delivery Experience appeared first on Lateshipment.com.

Use Cases for LateShipment.com’s Delivery Experience Management Platform

Rohan Rinaldo Felix — Fri, 27 Mar 2020 00:39:57 +0000

What is Delivery Experience Management?

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.

DEM is all about offering each of your customers a memorable last-mile shipping experience that not merely satisfies but also delights and makes them advocates of your brand.

However, the last-mile is most often controlled by third-party shipping carriers.

This unfortunately results in a situation where your customers’ delivery experience suffers tremendously during this critical phase of the customer journey leading to irreparable problems and lost opportunities.

Let’s take a look at some of the issues you will inevitably encounter in the last-mile without a solution to manage delivery experiences that can hurt your business in multiple ways.

Issues Your Brand Will Face Without a Solution to Manage Delivery Experiences

1. Losing Customers to Bad Delivery Experiences

The last-mile is error prone. No matter how efficient shipping carriers claim they are, 8 to 10 percent of parcels inevitably get delayed.

And when delays do happen, more often than not, customers blame the retailer rather than the shipping carrier for the bad delivery experience.

It is a fact that 47% of customers won’t shop with your brand following a bad delivery experience. Worse, they will vent their ire on social media, making it incumbent on you to offer a great delivery experience.

2. Broken Post-Purchase Experience With Inadequate Customer Engagement

While a retailer may have exclusive control of a customer’s on-site experience, this is lost once the parcel has been handed off to their shipping partner.

This is because the post-purchase order delivery phase and its activities such as giving customers the ability to track their parcels and sending them delivery status updates are considered to be functions of the shipping carrier.

This leads to grossly inadequate customer engagement from the retailer’s side in the last mile, making customers move away from the brand as a result of a broken shopper experience.

3. Increased Customer Anxiety and Frustration Over Parcel Whereabouts

Customer anxiety while awaiting parcels forces support reps to handle a skyrocketing number of WISMO (Where Is My Order?) calls.

Not being equipped with the right technology leads to slow customer support response times and a bad delivery experience for customers.

Adding fuel to the fire, a high volume of WISMO requests affects your support team’s productivity by taking up all their time and prevents them from focusing on critical product-related concerns.

4. Lost Opportunities to Monetize Post-Purchase Tracking Moments

On average, customers track their parcels 6–8 times on a shipping carrier’s tracking page.

Unfortunately, carriers tend to withhold information on delivery exceptions such as delays, which can increase customer angst and result in a poor delivery experience.

Having insufficient or no technology in place to manage your delivery experiences is a lost opportunity to not just meaningfully engage with your customers but also to reinforce brand identity and drive sales through upselling and cross-selling.

The good news is LateShipment.com’s Delivery Experience Management (DEM) platform has a host of use cases for a variety of organizational roles pertaining to the last mile and beyond, which can help you resolve the issues we’ve discussed.

Use Cases for a Delivery Experience Management (DEM) Platform

Use Case #1: Gaining Real-Time Visibility Into Shipments in Transit

As a logistics manager, how many times have you found it hard to keep track of the parcels you’ve dispatched to your customers?

Worry not though! LateShipment.com’s Delivery Experience Management (DEM) platform is designed from the ground up to provide unprecedented visibility into every one of your shipments in transit, unlike the limited visibility provided on a shipping carrier’s website.

LateShipment.com intuitively categorizes all your parcels. So, a mere glance at your dashboard can provide you an immediate idea about how many of your parcels will be delivered during the day and how many are likely to be delayed.

Not just that, LateShipment.com helps you identify delays spread across carriers and service locations and provides you the ability to get as granular with your data as you please down to individual shipments.

And the best thing? Our system integrates with close to 50 shipping carriers, eCommerce platforms, order management systems, and CRMs, and this number is growing every week

Use Case #2: Keeping Support Reps on Top of Delivery Issues

As head of a customer support team, If there were some way to be aware of issues before customers knew of them, wouldn’t your customer support reps be better able to handle such situations?

Here’s a solution: Use a dedicated customer support dashboard that highlights delivery issues as soon as they are detected. This capability is present within LateShipment.com, and unlike our standard dashboard, this interface provides only the very essential data that you and your customer-support-team mates need to proactively resolve issues.

This solution not only helps you to predict delays and fix last-mile issues before they impact customers but gains your support-reps time when it comes to handling product complaints.

Use Case #3: Proactively Resolving Delivery Issues

As an online merchant, how many times have you struggled to handle relatively uncommon situations like weather-related exceptions because you were unable to inform specific customers in time that their parcels would be delayed?

At LateShipment.com, we are committed to helping you retain customers through the toughest of circumstances. This is why we provide you with the ability to send custom messages to specific customers whose parcels are experiencing uncommon delays like unexpected weather exceptions.

When your customer’s in-transit order is likely to go haywire, you can preemptively inform them of the issue and offer them a solution like re-shipping the order via an expedited shipping option, a discount, or a refund on their next purchase.

Use Case #4: Meaningfully Engaging With Your Customers Across the Last Mile

As a customer-centric retailer, how often have you wanted to keep your customers informed of parcel status so that they don’t need to constantly go to the shipping carrier’s website to check delivery status?

The solution is right here. LateShipment.com helps you set up automated email and SMS notifications that are triggered and sent to customers when their parcels reach specific events during the shipping process.

We provide you with the ability to send timely notifications to your customers about their orders for last-mile events such as “Shipped”, “Attempted”, and “Delivered”.

You can also provide a tracking link along with the mail to ease their anxiety and keep them in the know of their parcel’s whereabouts.

All you need to do to enjoy this feature is to connect your eCommerce store or CRM platform to our interface, and relevant customer data will be populated within our interface.

Use Case #5: Providing an On-Brand Delivery Experience

As an eCommerce retailer, are you taking efforts to ensure brand recall at all stages of the tracking and delivery process?

Since this is critical, LateShipment.com provides businesses like yours the ability to create a branded tracking page that customers can visit for information on their parcels.

Your branded tracking page will contain your logo and the language of your brand, thus enhancing brand recognition and keeping your brand foremost on your customers’ minds.

To unlock upsell and cross-sell opportunities, you can subtly populate your tracking page with engaging marketing assets such as personalized recommendations and offers.

LateShipment.com also provides you with the ability to place a tracking widget anywhere on your website, such as on the order confirmation/ history page. Customers can enter the tracking number in the widget and be immediately redirected to your branded tracking page.

Use Case #6: Improving Customer Satisfaction With Data-Driven Insights

As a business driven by data, do you measure customer feedback to make optimization decisions? After all, what gets measured, gets managed. Are you armed with data to help you measure the effectiveness of your delivery experience?

Unfortunately, shipping carriers generally don’t report back with relevant feedback on the delivery experiences of your customers in the last mile.

LateShipment.com’s Delivery Experience Management suite helps retailers like you add a Delivery Satisfaction (DSAT) score system within their tracking page. This allows customers to rate delivery performance, which in turn helps you monitor your carrier’s performance.

Also, you can link your tracking page to your Google Analytics account to know how your brand is perceived by customers.

The data-driven insights you gain from collecting customer feedback on a scale of good, not so good, or bad experiences will help your business do right by customers by gaining a deeper understanding of their delivery experiences.

At the end of the day, it boils down to keeping track of the delivery experience your customers have had every single time they’ve shopped with you and ensuring corrective measures are taken if a particular customer has repeatedly had a substandard delivery experience.

These insights also arm with you relevant data when it comes to negotiating with your shipping carrier.

How a DEM Platform Can Be a Competitive Differentiator for Your Business

1. Gain Control of Customers’ Delivery Experiences

A DEM suite allows you to provide your customers a frictionless delivery experience via tools that enhance visibility of parcels across carriers and that let you communicate at critical moments with customers.

By communicating with customers when it matters the most and resolving delivery exceptions even before they become an issue, you are making your loyal customers feel more valued and understand that you, the retailer, have their back.

2. Strengthen Customer Relationships in the Last Mile

Highly engaged customers become loyal customers.

DEM provides you with the ability to meaningfully engage with your customers in the last mile through automated and customizable email updates, SMSes, and more.

When you are actively engaging with your customers, you are fostering a connection by keeping them in constant loop of their order status.

This way, you are able to make more of a mark on your customers and, indeed, delight them.

3. Improve Retention and Customer Loyalty

Providing your customers with a smooth, hassle-free delivery experience allows you to encourage repeat purchases and forge long-lasting customer relationships. This inevitably leads to increased retention resulting in higher Customer Lifetime Value (CLV).

DEM arms businesses with all the actionable information required to thwart a possible negative delivery experience for the customer even before it arises, thus enabling businesses to be more empathetic towards their customers and encourage customer loyalty over time.

4. Increase Sales revenue and Reduce Costs

Customer loyalty is valuable for businesses. Studies show increasing customer retention rates by just 5% can increase your profits by more than 25%. Also, repeat customers are nine times more likely to buy from you than new customers.

By proactively reaching out to customers, retailers can mitigate customer pain and face less flak from angry customers.

Moreover, due to the efforts taken by a retailer like you, customers may avoid taking harsh decisions such as returns and continue shopping with you.

Given that it costs five times more to acquire a new customer than to retain an existing one, DEM helps you cut down on costs.

Final Word

In spite of the sky-high costs, tedious process, and accumulated complications, last-mile delivery will always remain the decisive leg of the supply-chain process.

At LateShipment.com, our focus has remained steadfastly on the last mile, typically the part of the logistics chain that is the most opaque.

LateShipment.com is the world’s only logistics cloud tool that helps businesses of every size reduce shipping costs by up to 20% and provide memorable delivery experiences to customers at scale.

The best part is, it takes less than 2 minutes to see LateShipment.com in action.

COVID-19 Note: To help tide over the current crisis, we are giving all businesses full and free access to our Delivery Experience Management Platform till June 30, 2020.

The value we add to businesses is most evident when experienced first-hand.

It’s that simple!

The post Use Cases for LateShipment.com’s Delivery Experience Management Platform appeared first on Lateshipment.com.

Know What Service Alerts In The US By UPS and FedEx Mean (And How To Handle Weather Delays)

Joelah James — Tue, 05 Feb 2019 18:02:49 +0000

Winter is here

We knew winter was coming, but not exactly like this.

The blizzard caused by the arctic blast in certain parts of the US and Canada has made life difficult for many. Several states in the Midwest witnessed temperatures of up to -50 degrees (which hasn’t been recorded in decades)!

Check out this picture of the arctic blast shared by NASA. Quite chilling.

Normal life has come to a standstill as people have been advised to stay indoors, and schools and offices have been closed. Unsurprisingly, package delivery has been delayed across the US and Canada.

Major shipping carriers like FedEx and UPS have issued service alerts on their websites and via email letting customers know which zip codes will experience delivery delays.

How are shipping carriers handling the blizzard?

Shipping carriers have shut down operations in the most affected areas and are working on contingency plans.

The UPS Worldport hub in Louisville, Kentucky for instance has operational difficulties and the carrier has notified customers in advance of the possible delay in all packages shipped out from there.

Most of us are familiar with the communication from carriers like UPS and FedEx stating cease of operations in certain areas as the safety of delivery personnel was in question. Even those hardened to extreme weather conditions happen to find this arctic blast quite intense. With weather cold enough to freeze boiling water midair, it certainly is unsafe for workers to be out delivering packages.

Amazon had to close fulfilment operations across several areas in the Midwest as freezing temperatures slowed operations down to a standstill.

You can check out UPS Service Alerts and FedEx Service Alerts here.

Is the freeze getting to retailers?

Retailers have also put up a delayed shipping tab on their websites so that shoppers are not disappointed with surprise late deliveries.

Despite the prior notifications, shippers have no way of identifying the exact packages that are delayed till its too late. Wouldn’t it be much easier if you could notify customers a little in advance about the certainty of a delay? Instead of a overall warning on the checkout page.

On the other hand, shippers will also be missing out on the refunds that they usually collect for late deliveries. This is because of the fact that any delays or exceptions caused due to weather conditions or natural disasters are not covered under the UPS Service Guarantee or the FedEx Money Back Guarantee (weather is out of their hands, after all).

So any refunds are out of the question. Unless they are for any of the other 50 odd service failures that are likely to occur without any assistance from the bad weather.

States with maximum impact on package delivery

Of all the states affected by the arctic blast, the worst affected ones are: Iowa, Illinois, Michigan, Chicago, South Dakota, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, New York, Minnesota and Nebraska.

LateShipment data collected since the arctic blast began show that the states with most number of delayed packages are Nebraska (9.3%), Minnesota (5.7%) and Illinois (4%).

UPS shipments faced maximum delays in the following states.

FedEx shipments were delayed mostly in the following states.

With UPS, the states with most number of delays so far are Minnesota, Illinois and Wisconsin.

As for FedEx, Nebraska, Minnesota and Wisconsin faced the most number of delays.

What can your business do?

Yes, it’s quite difficult to get into work and field those customer calls on packages that are dreadfully behind schedule. But there are a few things you can do to ensure things don’t go from bad to worse.

There are several online tools like LateShipment.com that track your packages for you across multiple carriers and let you know precisely which ones are likely to be delayed.

All you have to do is turn on the automatic notifications feature, and your customers get notified in advance! That’s like more than half your frustrated customer calls reduced.

Besides this, you can also work out a plan where customers can do free returns for products that have been damaged or perishables that have arrived too late. Offer a replacement or a discount voucher. That will ensure they stay on even after the disappointment.

Stay tuned for any service alerts from FedEx and UPS.

Do contact us if you need any more tracking information on packages delayed due to the weather.

Let’s bundle up till the weather lets up!

The post Know What Service Alerts In The US By UPS and FedEx Mean (And How To Handle Weather Delays) appeared first on Lateshipment.com.

What is digital logistics?

Bianca Barath — Thu, 04 Jan 2018 14:14:23 +0000

This is an age where dynamic and fundamental changes are shaping the logistics operations and strategy for the better. The communication and collaboration potential of the Internet as we know it today, are improving logistics strategies, processes and systems. The new paradigm in logistics will help in saving millions of dollars of operating costs, achieving better supply chain integration, and increasing market power through customer-focused fulfillment. The internet helps in tremendous increases in supply chain velocity and cost reduction by information sharing and logistics synchronization amidst all partners in the supply chain. This transformed logistics is called digital logistics. It uses a host of web-based, enterprise logistics applications for collaboration and optimization and a central logistics information system to provide visibility all around the enterprise and extended supply chain.

The most important areas in digital logistics are:

Distribution: Improved, current generation fulfillment processes and real-time warehouse management system (WMS) technology.
Transportation: Automated load building, optimization of inbound and outbound freight movements, and efficient management of carriers.

Digital logistics ensures that there is end-to-end visibility in inventory, orders, and shipments across the supply chain. It reduces network-wide inventory levels, maximizes customer satisfaction, and responds dynamically to logistics events. There is a central command and control centre to aid decision making. So, the system becomes very efficient. There is increased visibility to performance metrics that helps in continuous improvement. All information is accessible online and allows people to filter information and gain comprehensive knowledge on problems if any.

Everything becomes easy with GPS tracking system. A parcel can be tracked in real time from anywhere in the world. A slight delay in the parcel’s path is known immediately to everyone concerned. And if there is need for rerouting, it can be done as soon as possible. With the advent of digital logistics, it has become very easy to eliminate loss of packages, wrong destination deliveries and package delivery failures. Weather conditions are predicted and deliveries are scheduled accordingly. From the moment the item is picked from the warehouse to the second it reaches destination, the entire path is charted digitally. There is no room for error.

One of the important factors in moving to digital logistics is the need for flexibility to integrate with newer systems to communicate information, synchronize activities, and collaborate across processes. Digital applications are based on a central repository of all logistics information. Stakeholders can view information, add or modify details.

The incorporation of groundbreaking research like data analytics, data sciences, and machine learning are used in logistics, along with the digital know-how, to enhance the technologies and processes. People study previous data and come to conclusions on strategies. For example, last year’s peak season shipping data can help in shaping this year’s data.

Is logistics the new brand differentiator

Logistics Fulfilment Services

How to get a handle on your lost packages?

The post What is digital logistics? appeared first on Lateshipment.com.