Is Your Customer Delivery Experience In A Tailspin? – Know The 6 Steps For More Delighted Customers

All eCommerce shoppers are going to experience a bad package delivery at some point. More importantly for eCommerce businesses, most of these customers will not buy from that business in the future. Worst of all, the customer will likely leave a bad review online. Indeed, a bad customer delivery experience for any business is a tragedy. To explain, this article spells out the terrible business costs for a bad delivery experience. Moreover, get my recommended 6 step process to improve your customers’ delivery experience. Keep your customers delighted. 

The 3 Major Costs When Your Customer Experiences a Bad Delivery.

For many eCommerce businesses, their customer’s delivery experience is more an afterthought or something to leave up to the delivery carriers. So if this describes your business, you need to really understand the impact these bad experiences have on your brand. For specifics, see below for the 3 major costs to your business when one of your customers has a bad delivery experience. 

1. Reduced Loyalty From Existing Customers. 

As most businesses rely on repeat customers, even one negative delivery experience can result in losing a loyal customer. For example, surveys show that 84% of customers will not return to a retailer after one poor delivery experience.

2. More Overhead and Shipping Costs. 

No matter your policies on refunds or order cancellations, a delivery exception is going to cost you. As a minimum, you can incur additional shipping charges such as address correction charges or paying for the shipment’s return charges. Additionally, you will have additional customer service costs with an increase in calls from customers to resolve delivery issues. Lastly, there is the cost of damaged goods and refused shipments.

3. Reduced New Sales Due To Customers Posting Negative Reviews. 

The majority of your potential customers and prospects will check reviews online before purchasing a product. Subsequently,if one of your customers posts a negative review about a bad delivery experience, potential customers may read the review. As a consequence, those who read the review will more than likely not make that first-time purchase. In these cases, you can blame the carrier, but that will just go so far. The bottom line is that your customer’s bad delivery experience reflects on your company

See FarEye’s Bad Delivery Experiences for more information on the costs of a bad delivery experience.  

6 Steps on How To Improve Your Customers’ Delivery Experience.

Every business aspires to delight their customers. Also, this is true in the eCommerce business, and specifically  in regard to your customers’ delivery experience. Now, Amazon has set the bar on what is a good delivery experience.  However, you do not need to replicate Amazon’s delivery experience, but it is a starting point. Specifically, you need to have a customer delivery experience tailored to your business. What’s more, you need to balance costs versus meeting  and exceeding customers’ expectations. Below are 5 steps for any business to work toward achieving 100% positive delivery experience for all their customers.

1. Tailor Your Shipping Options To Your Brand. 

Are you selling luxury goods or selling heavily discounted items? Another question you need to ask yourself includes are your products bulky or small items that can fit in a mailbox? Namely there are a wide range of shipping options, but you only offer shipping options that match your brand and the product you ship. For example if you are selling furniture, you do not need to offer a next day air service. In another case if your customers are environmentally conscious, you can offer a carbon neutral shipping option. Indeed, do remember Amazon sets the standard with “free” 2 day shipping with Amazon Prime, but tailor your shipping options to your brand and your customers. 

2. Simple Checkout Process That Assures A Positive Delivery Experience. 

A customer’s delivery experience is tied to their overall customer experience. So at checkout, do not bewilder your customers with a bunch of confusing delivery options. This will not delight the customer, and may even result in a lost sale. Also, provide an estimated delivery date for each shipping option. Additionally, it is best to have a default shipping option, and then where appropriate, offer other shipping options. Indeed the question to ask yourself – will you lose sales if you do not offer particular shipping options? Examples of other shipping options are: next day delivery at additional cost, slower delivery with free shipping, “white gloves” delivery versus curb delivery, 

3. Add A Post-Purchase Delivery Experience Strategy To Your Overall Customer Experience Solution. 

If you are shipping packages to customers and do not have a post delivery experience strategy, you need to get one. Emphatically, you own your customers’ delivery experience, not the delivery service. To illustrate, you need to think of the delivery service as your sales clerk. If you think about what a sales clerk does in a traditional retail store, there is only one thing that has changed with eCommerce. Specifically with eCommerce purchase, you have elongated the time between purchase and customer’s receipt of their purchase. So you need to come up with a delivery experience strategy. To explain, there are two parts to a post-purchase delivery strategy described below.

First, You Need a Customer Communications Strategy That Assures Constant and Transparent Communications.

The customer wants to know: has my order been processed? Where is my package? What is the ETA? Moreover, customers do not want to get a text that says “the shipping label was created.” Ideally, your business should provide branded messages about product delivery status. This enhances communications and can even provide opportunities for cross-selling.

Second, You Need A Plan To Assure That Your Supply Chain Is Competent.

Is your supply chain stuck in the last century where they are on a two to six week shipping schedule? See SC Tech Insights’ Unlock Your Outbound Logistics – How To Make Your Customers Rave for four recommended goals to assure your customers have a positive delivery experience. 

4. Integrate Delivery Experience Data Into Your Overall Order Fulfillment Solution. 

Even if you have a good customer service organization, they are useless if they do not have real-time access to your customers’ order status. Positively, they must have actionable information, and ideally be proactive to prevent delivery exceptions. Additionally, customers want convenience and results, not excuses or not my department.

All eCommerce companies need a data integration plan. Specifically, how do they get shipment status data from the parcel carrier to their customer service system? Also, how do they get data from their 3rd party order fulfillment system? Lastly, how do they get data from the shipping department? In addition, there are a lot of different terms for this type of data visibility, like “unified view”, “source of truth”, and “control tower”. Whatever you call it, you need it. For more details on data integration, see Want To Integrate Data For Better Business Visibility? Here’s How To Do It. 

5. Delight Your Customers – Manage Your Customers’ Delivery Experience.

So you have a customer delivery experience plan and have access to the data you need – what’s next? The next step, and the most important step, is you need to manage each and every one of your customers’ deliveries. First, the key is to keep it simple. Ideally, there should be one person who is empowered and accountable for customers’ delivery experience. Second, there should be one system that holds the information to manage your customers’ delivery experience. Both of these prerequisites may have challenges, but your customers do not want excuses.

It is not good, if your customer service agents blame a bad delivery experience on the parcel carrier, the warehouse, the shipping department, or worst the customer service rep knows less than the customer. If you are a large business, you may consider a dedicated Delivery Experience Management (DEM) system.  Specifically, these systems may work for some companies as they are built exclusively for helping companies manage their customers’ delivery experience. For a business case for a DEM system, see GetConvey’s Delivery Experience Management is the Future of the Last Mile.

In a lot of cases, you may be able to use an existing in-house system. Examples of such systems would be as used for customer service, order fulfillment, shipping system, transportation management system, or a custom data warehouse with business intelligence reporting.

6. Personalize The Delivery Experience. 

Besides just good communications and supply chain competence, you can also delight your customers by adding personal touches. For small businesses and even large companies, personalized service can distinguish your company from the competition. As an example, this could include such things as flexible delivery options, sustainable packaging,  or handwritten notes.

For more information and perspectives on improving your customers’ delivery experience, see ParcelIndustry’s 10 Tips to Improve the Delivery Experience, Qualtrics’ Delivery Experience, GetCircuit’s What Makes a Great Delivery Experience, TheFutureofeCommerce’s How to Create the Best Delivery Experience, Forbes’ Five things eCommerce Sellers Should Do To Provide a quality delivery experience, and Bringg’s Customer Experience in Delivery and Fulfillment.

For more information from Unvarnished Facts, see articles on supply chains and eCommerce. Additionally, see related article, Supply Chain Tech Insights’ Package Delivery – See How To Stop Surging Costs And Make Your Customers Happy