Rohan Rinaldo Felix
Sashank RavindranathWhat 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!
