This is a guest post by Sashank Ravindranath, LateShipment.com.
Customer experience is your customers’ holistic perception of their experience with your business or brand across every stage of their journey. The delightful marketing campaigns to catch prospects’ attention, the on-site experience in product discovery, the frictionless checkout process, and finally the delivery experience you provide all contribute to the overall customer experience.
The last one is all-too-often neglected and negates your efforts in the other areas.
Businesses lose control of their delivery experience when their shipping needs are outsourced to a third-party shipping carrier. While shipping carriers strive to deliver parcels on time, the truth is that more than 6% of parcels are routinely delayed. The problem with delays and other delivery issues is that they can hurt your business in more ways than one:
- They lead to poor delivery experiences, which in turn lead to customer dissatisfaction and drives customers to switch to your competitors.
- Apart from not shopping with you, disgruntled customers also vent their frustrations on social media and through word-of-mouth, deterring prospective customers from shopping with you.
- As if losing your loyal customers and brand reputation was not enough, bad delivery experiences cost you money in the form of low sales, reduced customer acquisition, and increased cost of returns.
While neglecting the post-purchase delivery experience you provided can be costly, taking proactive measures to improve it can help your retention and brand reputation. Here’s what you need to do:
ProTip 1: Ensure real-time visibility of your shipments in transit
When your shipment in transit is about to face an issue, being able to see where it is in the delivery process places you in the best position to deal with the situation. By tracking and tracing parcels to their current location, you can identify any issues that arise and resolve them.
If you ship a large volume of parcels, make use of technology that extends this post-purchase visibility to your help desk software by triggering support tickets.
Benefit: With the data in hand providing extensive post-purchase visibility, support executives can stay updated in real-time while handling delivery issues, and save time by resolving them before they can impact your customers.
ProTip 2: Proactively identify critical delivery issues that commonly occur with shipments in transit
By triggering alerts for various delivery related issues such as predicted delays, failed deliveries, and lost or damaged shipments, your support team can recognize at a glance issues that require intervention, and stay on top of them.
Benefit: With timely alerts, customer support executives can take preemptive action before an issue impacts customers, preventing a negative experience. Also, being proactive saves valuable support time by eliminating the need to sift through hours of data to identify an issue.
ProTip 3: Hyper-engage with customers through automated or custom order delivery notifications
Customers are anxious about their orders and always expect to be kept in the loop about their order’s status. This is why you need to take action and initiate communication with customers regarding their orders’ status and regularly update them, showing them that you’ve got their back.
Benefit: By notifying customers of important order updates automatically, you can reduce their pre-delivery anxiety and earn their trust, which ensures customer retention. Make use of a platform that provides you the option to create and manage your email templates while staying consistent with your brand language.
ProTip 4: Create your own branded tracking page and provide an on-brand post-purchase experience
88% of customers regularly track the status of their orders, underscoring the importance of order tracking pages. However, the tracking pages provided by shipping carriers are a lost opportunity, as they are often opaque on delivery issues and not in line with your brand.
This is why you should have your own branded tracking page and make order tracking an extension of your brand experience. Your tracking page should mirror your website in terms of language and design, to make your customer’s post-purchase experience feel like a continuous part of the overall brand experience.
Take advantage of technology that allows you to choose your style of layout, update your logo, and customize other brand elements on your branded order tracking page to create an immersive experience for the customer.
Benefit: This allows you to use post-purchase touchpoints to drive sales. Your branded tracking page ensures that your brand is on the top of customers’ minds. Also, your order tracking page is free real estate you can utilize to run relevant promotions and campaigns to leverage upselling and cross-selling opportunities.
ProTip 5: Be aware of your customers’ delivery expectations
Delivery Satisfaction or DSAT Ratings are a comprehensive, unbiased measure of how satisfied your customers are with their deliveries and help you evaluate your carrier’s delivery performance.
Capture your customers’ feedback after every delivery, thereby helping you make better shipping choices as well as identify areas of improvement in post-purchase customer satisfaction.
Benefit: Knowing how your shipping performance fares and what your customers think of their delivery experience helps you consistently make better delivery choices, thus improving your brand’s post-purchase experience, which in turn plays a huge role in customer retention.
Follow these pro tips to turn the tide in your favor and make a difference in the delivery experience you provide your customers. An effortless way to do this is with the LateShipment.com integration with Zoho Desk.
The LateShipment.com and Zoho Desk integration
With the LateShipment.com and Zoho Desk integration, you can stay ahead of your customers’ post-purchase issues and delight them with meaningful engagement.
LateShipment.com for Zoho Desk allows you to
- Automatically trigger delivery-related tickets for delivery errors that are preemptively pushed to Zoho Desk from LateShipment.com
- Send personalized messages to customers from Zoho Desk based on the tickets generated from LateShipment.com and ensure that their delivery issues are addressed
- Set up automated email notifications for shipping events like “Shipped,” “Out for delivery,” “Attempted,” and “Delivered” and proactively communicate with customers
- Provide customers with easy-to-track, branded tracking pages, so they can have quick access to their order delivery status
- Capture critical feedback from customers on their delivery satisfaction to improve delivery quality
LateShipment.com for Zoho Desk can be a win for your organization. It only takes two minutes to get started on providing your customers with memorable delivery experiences at scale and saving money.
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