Originally physical stores opened the opportunity for retailers and business’s to express and create a superior shopper experience to help them to attract customers, build brand recognition and ultimately increase sales.
Today, almost everyone does their shopping online without ever leaving the comforts of their home. With how convenient online shopping is, it is no surprise that many shoppers prefer it. However, as a seller, how do you improve your customer’s experience without a physical store.
When it comes to eCommerce, it is really all about establishing a smooth and seamless post-purchase experience for the customer, from supplying quick and affordable shipping to offering a greater unboxing experience.
The customer’s post-purchase experience really falls upon the fulfilment process. The first interaction your customer has with your brand physically is receiving the delivery, so you need to give them a good first impression in order to help drive repeat business.
Here is how you can develop your customer supply chain to improve your customer experience.
What is the Experience when in comes to Fulfilment?
The fulfilment experience is basically the process of picking and packing, shipping and dispatching packages to customers to get orders delivered efficiently and correctly. The customer may not even see the parts of the fulfilment process, the efficiency of it still influences their experience and is linked with overall brand loyalty.
The Stages in Order Fulfilment that can Effect a Customer’s Experience with your Brand?
Order Confirmation
While the pre-purchase experience is still an important part of the customer experience process, many business’s focus too much attention to this side. The post-purchase experience is really what keeps customers coming back and is what drives repeat business.
This is initiated through starting a communication process with your customers by sending them an order confirmation. Communicating the shipping confirmation via email or even a text may seem a small thing but it is important to provide any updates on shipping times to the customer as soon as possible to keep the experience as smooth as possible.
Shipment Details & Tracking
Once your products have been picked, packaged and shipped, today’s customers expect updates during the delivery stage, although unless you are offering tracked shipping this may be hard to supply the details once the product has been shipped.
Speed of Delivery
Delivery speed is probably one of the most important factors in the post-purchase customer experience process. The majority of all the main couriers provide a range of services from 24 to 48 hour and tracked and signed for options, with UK Fulfilment you can offer your customer a range of shipment options from FedEx, DPD, Royal Mail, UK Mail, TNT and more. The main decision your business will have to take is whether to sink the cost of delivery and provide this extra speed and tracked services free of cost to the customer, or to pass these costs onto them and risk lower sales due to expensive delivery charges.
Un-Packaging Experience
The un-packaging experience is the first experience your customer will have with your brand, and it can help your brand stand out from your competitors. Not only may your customer be more inclined to make another purchase they are also more likely to share their experience with friends, almost half of online shoppers will share an image of their package if it came in branded packaging.
Returns Management
No matter how good your product is, customers with return products for a number of various reasons. Returns don’t always result in a lost sale and product exchanges can be offered as well as refunds, which is another way to improve your customer experience. A smooth returns and exchange process is likely to leave your buyer with a high customer experience, with brands who have invested in a well-run reverse supply chain seeing a 10% bump in customer satisfaction. With UK Fulfilment you can completely tailor how you want your returns processed.
How to Build a Fulfilment Experience your Customers will Love
From your packaging to order accuracy there are multiple ways to improve your fulfilment experience. This mostly will require sturdy fulfilment infrastructure along with fulfilment and order management technology to help provide a smooth experience. With UK Fulfilment you can integrate whatever sales platforms your business use, be it Amazon, eBay or your own website, with their fulfilment technology to give you complete visibility of the fulfilment process, from inventory management to seeing orders processed.
Rather spending your business’s time and money on building your own logistics supply chain, it will be more beneficial for your business to invest into digital marketing and product development.
1. Offer Affordable Fast Shipping Options
The majority of customers now expect free 2-day deliveries, dependant on your business’s margins you can either get a customer to pay an additional fee to get an order delivered faster, although high shipping costs are a big reason for cart abandonment.
2. Use Branded Custom Packaging
Many brands and businesses are now investing in bespoke packaging to make them stand out from their competition, again depending on your margins you may either want to go down the branded custom packaging route, boosting your customer experience, or is margins are tight a simple note inside normal packaging may do.
3. Forecast Demand
Inventory forecasting is a large factor when it comes to customer experience. Whilst it may be difficult to predict your sales, use historical sales data to try and forecast your future demand, running out of stock for some of your products can leave your customer’s feeling annoyed and affecting their experience negatively.
UK Fulfilment’s inventory management software can aid you in this and give you notifications when your stock is considered low and notify you to re-order to avoid ever being out of stock.
4. Customer Communication
As a rule of thumb better your customer communication the higher your customer satisfaction will be. There will always be slight errors when it comes to the delivery process from courier delays to couriers completely messing up deliveries. Even though this will be out of your hands, you will be able to rectify any negative experience your customer may have by communicating with them fully and quickly. Again with UK Fulfilment’s software you will be able to get a fully transparent view of each order and use the order management software to rectify any issues.
Creating a Positive Fulfilment Experience
When a buyer has a poor brand customer experience, two-thirds them will not make another purchase from an online business or brand. To supply the best customer experience for your customers you need the technology, infrastructure and customer support to provide a fast and accurate fulfilment experience for your customer.
Outsourcing your fulfilment process to UK Fulfilment, will not only alleviate the stress on your business of providing a smooth delivery process to your customers, it will also drive up your customer experience satisfaction rate, ironing out any issues you may have had in the fulfilment process.
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