Keeping Customer Experience on Track with Supply Chain Visibility

With an increase in customer expectations, shoppers now demand more visibility in their deliveries. With 93% of consumers wanting to receive updates on their shipments, visibility isn’t just a consumer demand, but an expectation. They expect to never wonder “Where is my Order?” (WISMO), and they certainly do not want to call customer service or a delivery company to ask.

As retailers evolve their final mile supply chain, they have to balance supply chain visibility with cost and customer experience, without compromising any factor. Visibility in the post-purchase experience is key for consumers to have peace of mind until a delivery gets to their door.

Increasing supply chain visibility and CX without compromising cost

The good news is that this challenge is actually an opportunity for growth. Providing visibility is not just one of the most cost-effective ways to improve your supply chain, it also leads to double-digit growth in NPS, up to 75% reduction in WISMO calls, and even reduced transit time. Every retailer takes a slightly different approach to enable these kinds of results, but there are two common activities that are effective for everyone.

At Convey, we view visibility as the first, critical step to winning the Final Mile. When we work with a client, we start by ingesting all their shipment, carrier, and order data so that we can create better visibility for everyone involved in delivery: customers, carriers, customer support, logistics teams, and anyone else up the chain. This data is then used to drive a better customer experience without having to change their carriers or deploy new fundamental technologies.

Right off the bat, we can set up three capabilities that are easy to implement and have a big impact with little effort or cost: real-time APIs to carriers, a branded tracking page, and delivery alerts.

Set Clear Expectations from the Beginning of your Customer Journey

Like it or not, most people have come to expect two-day delivery as the standard, thanks to Amazon Prime. Most companies don’t have the infrastructure to support this, so there are an increasing number of WISMO calls that happen on day 3 of any order.

A good way to get in front of this is to clearly enumerate the Estimated Delivery Date (EDD) at checkout and in the confirmation email. It’s also important to be consistent and notify if this changes. A growing number of companies are leveraging visibility tools that track, and they alert on EDD from checkout until it is in the customer’s hands.

Create a Consistent, Branded Experience

Every communication after your confirmation email should direct users to a similar, trust-worthy, branded experience. If it is a large item traveling via multiple carriers, why not explain the shipping process for them? If it is a parcel, why not create a tracking experience that doesn’t send them to a generic carrier site (where they are asked to create or sign in to yet another account)?

Convey provides branded tracking pages that not only include shipment location and status in real time, but have space for additional marketing, educational content, manual updates in case of exception, a space for feedback to the carrier and shipper, and a way to rate the experience, providing customer disposition.

Communicate, especially when a delivery goes sideways

According to our data, general delays, weather delays, and changed delivery dates account for over half (55%) of all exceptions for parcel shipments. While it is impossible to completely eliminate these types of issues, shippers can do a better job of communicating them to their customers. There are two solutions for communicating these shipping issues:

• Send alerts if an EDD is changed by a carrier, or if a delivery exception happens while the package is en route. Convey supports this capability today and it is paying off huge for one of the largest home furnishing companies in the world as their call center call volume has been decreasing by double digits every week.
• Create reassurance alerts that fire off after a configurable number of days to let the customer know that their shipment is still coming at the expected time. Consistent communication helps prevent customers asking about shipments that take longer than two days. This is especially important for bulky shipments like furniture or fitness equipment that can take 1-2 weeks to make the journey to a customer.

Optimize your customer experience

Connecting available data helps create better supply chain visibility within your delivery experience. Using connected data to trigger automated actions and improve customer communications via tracking pages with Reassurance and Revised EDD alerts helps preempt support calls and increase customer satisfaction. In addition to the time saved for Customer Care teams, the data on how customers interact with the messages and tracking pages can help you improve your operations and marketing. This way, you can better balance the communication with costs to optimize your customer experience based on real data, and not just intuition or guesswork.

Learn how Convey’s delivery management platform can help keep your customer care team on track, or check out how our customer, UncommonGoods, was able to improve their customer experience through proactive communication.