3 Ideas on How Retailers Can Improve the Delivery Experience for Their Customers

Customers are the core of every business and should always be in our top priority.

In today’s COVID-19 pandemic environment, the Supply Chain function can either make or break your business.

The best marketing plans or the most efficient inventory management strategy are unable to compensate for the lack of stock or bad last-mile delivery experience

Supply Chain Management is all about reliability on the core functions such as procurement process, inventory management and last-mile delivery.

These are critical elements of business success, and you should focus on keeping your customers happy and satisfied with great products and excellent service.

Here are three strategies that can help you improve your delivery service standards.

1. Evaluate Current Customer Shipping Experience and the Cost of Service

To provide excellent shipping service to your customers, you need to understand first the performance of your shipping partners in details, by region, by category of products and by type of delivery service. For this, you will need from your shipping partners detailed daily reports for each region where your customers are.

Now, it is not the time for consolidated performance view by month and by the carrier!

You should be able to compare carrier performance at a detailed level and be aware of all your customer’s good and bad experiences when interacting with your brand. Connecting with your shipping partners to gather feedback and analytics has many benefits

It makes you better at understanding where room for improvements is!

Second, you should evaluate the cost of shipping service in relation to several criteria, such as type of orders, the number of parcels by order, percentage of deliveries where carriers are invoicing additional fees for extra km or additional fees for services like open package or insurance.

Romania is probably the only country in EU where carriers are charging an extra fee for kilometres depending on the distance from their nearest office. For example, for an order delivered from Bucharest to the city of Petrosani, with a population of 34,331 you might have to pay an additional fee for 90 km or no additional fee at all, depending on the carrier you are using. Another example is Vatra Dornei, Suceava County, with a population of 14.429, where one carrier is charging an extra fee for 117 km. In contrast, other three carriers do not apply any additional charge for delivery.

The point is that, even though carriers have thousands of cities that they cover without additional charges, these cities are different from one carrier to another.

Through this, you gain real insights on what you are doing well, and which areas require improvement.

2. Use Multi Carriers Shipping Platforms

Many businesses are struggling with the complexity of last-mile delivery due to high customer demands for different delivery options, quality of service, changing preferences and cost.
To overcome this struggle, businesses can streamline their order delivery processes by using Multi Carriers Shipping Platforms.

Such systems help retailers increase the quality of their shipping service and decrease costs while improving the overall customer experience!

Here are some of the benefits of using smart Multi Carriers Shipping Platforms:

• One single point of integration with all carriers that provides real-time trends in the rise or decline of delivery performance by each shipping partner
• Focus on controlling the cost performance through automatic and dynamic order allocation making you able to obtain cost savings up to 25% on shipping and at the same time to increase the delivery performance
• Cut card abandonment at check-out by offering your customers multiple delivery options. Some need it right now, and some want it later. Some want to pick it up, and some are home on Thursdays. Choices increase conversion rate and can reduce cart abandonment, lower points of failure by offering carrier alternatives and extend the carrier base through switches according to pick-up times.
• Create an easy returns process and increase trust and loyalty to your brand. As we like to say: a smooth return process makes customers return. Retailers get complete reports with real-time insights on each delivery, return percentage and return times for each carrier, an accelerated return process, and the possibility to get products back on the market with cash flow improvements.
• A simple, one-time integration that gets fast access to any carrier, local or international, using a more extensive carrier library that helps you quickly access external markets.
• Use data to drive continuous improvement. Helps you regularly revisit business shipping performance to identify areas of good and poor performance. The increasing supply of data provides an opportunity to identify issues and spot causes of poor performance that would have been opaque a decade ago. For example, you may be able to create custom business rules to let you decide what matters to you more and your customers.

3. Leverage Multi-Channel strategies

Customers prefer to buy from brands that offer a consistent experience across multiple channels, which is why brands need to provide omnichannel options.

If you are a retailer that has physical stores, you should use them as warehouses for online sales resulting in maintaining extra warehouse space for little costs. Since most stores are already close to the end customer, that means you will have the biggest and most effective “shipping network” comparing to your competitors.

In the same time, it will increase your capacity for same-day delivery from online. Shipping is one of the highest costs in online, and with this strategy, you can make a big difference in profit.

Ultra-fast shipping is the final frontier in the online retail wars. Those who figure out how to deliver stuff the fastest—while keeping their cost under control—will be the winners.

In a World of “Free Shipping,” you will have the Upper Hand Over others.

Final Thoughts

You would have much to gain from improving your customer shipping experience. A great customer shipping experience can help you build trust, improve brand awareness, earn customer loyalty, drive sales, and also attract new customers through valuable recommendations.

Sometimes to go the extra mile for your customers, what is missing is a great technology and know-how partner.

Innoship is the advanced multi-carrier shipping software your retail business needs. With state-of-the-art algorithms developed and driven by dedicated, experienced people, Innoship keeps your costs down while increasing the quality of your shipping service. From check-out and shipping to tracking, returns and analytics, Innoship helps you safely deliver on promises made to your customers.