This is a guest post by Rohan Rinaldo Felix, Content strategist at LateShipment.com.
With unstoppable growth in online sales, what according to you is the single most important concern for every business?
Customer Experience.
But, as an online merchant, handing off your “order fulfillment” process to third-party shipping carriers means leaving the critical post-purchase experience in the hands of third-party vendors.
Parcel deliveries are more error-prone than shipping carriers admit. Customers who face delays with a brand tend to switch to a competitor for subsequent purchases. It doesn’t help that shipping carriers are notoriously opaque with data about delays, and even if some information is provided, details are scant.
An error-prone post-purchase phase combined with a lack of accountability on the part of your shipping carrier has severe consequences for your business. All the effort that went into providing a delightful on-site shopping experience is negated.
Your support team needs to take proactive steps to prevent or rectify post-purchase issues that impact customer experience and retention.
The post-purchase customer experience gap and its consequences
While you might do everything right in terms of providing customers a memorable on-site experience up to checkout, once a parcel has been handed over to a shipping carrier, a third party, you lose control of the experience you offer.
Any customer anxiously awaiting their parcel expects you to ensure timely delivery. Pointing a finger at your shipping carrier after a delay doesn’t help.
How delivery issues impact your business
1. You lose loyal customers
2. Your brand reputation is hurt through negative online reviews and word-of-mouth that deters prospective customers.
To take control when these situations happen and prevent them from happening again, empower your support executives with a quality independent solution to proactively handle post-purchase customer issues.
Supercharge your customer support with the LateShipment.com and Zoho Desk integration
LateShipment.com is an independent Delivery Experience Management (DEM) platform that makes it possible for support executives to gain visibility into in-transit parcels and proactively engage with and delight customers in the post-purchase parcel-delivery phase.
The LateShipment.com integration for Zoho Desk has a variety of use cases to address the pain points of your remote customer support team. Here are some of them:
As a customer support executive, I often have to respond to anxious customers because their parcels are delayed. If it were possible for me to have visibility into issues before customer impact, I would be better able to handle such situations.
Anxiety while awaiting parcels is very and common. LateShipment.com lets you strategically respond to anxious shoppers by providing you unprecedented visibility into in-transit parcels across over 40 carriers in real-time within its interface.
Using the real-time information on offer, it is possible to address delivery issues before customer impact: a capability that can provide you a definite edge over competitors.
In order to afford you a broad overview of the parcels in transit for the day, they are intuitively categorized based on status. Views like Today’s Expected Deliveries, Predicted Delays, Failed Deliveries, and In-Transit with Delays help you get up-to-speed quickly. You can also view additional categories such as Returned Shipments, Damaged Shipments, and Just Shipped.
As a customer support executive, my job would be easier if it were possible for me to proactively take action from within my help desk to fix late deliveries before customer impact.
LateShipment.com’s intelligent algorithms are capable of predicting delivery delays well before the fact. Enabling the integration automatically triggers delivery-related tickets to be preemptively pushed to Zoho Desk from LateShipment.com.
The integration allows you to have seven types of tickets triggered and automatically sent to Zoho Desk for issues including In-Transit with Delays, Delayed Deliveries, and Returned. This will afford you enough time to deal with issues in the post-purchase phase before your customers even know of them!
I am required to ensure parcels reach customers on time. However, I find relatively uncommon situations like weather-related exceptions and the COVID-19 pandemic challenging because I am unable to inform specific customers in time that their parcels will be delayed.
Uncommon situations like the current COVID-19 pandemic or weather-related exceptions can disrupt logistics operations as many distribution centers are inactive. This necessitates empathetic communication from support executives to inform impacted customers in time.
Alongside Zoho Desk, LateShipment.com makes it possible to reach out through customizable emails to specific customers whose orders are facing delays and keep them informed of revised timelines for delivery. A coupon code for a subsequent purchase could be added to such an email, an action that can make a positive impact on an affected customer and turn a challenging situation around.
I receive a high volume of WISMO (Where Is My Order) calls from anxious customers who are in the dark about the whereabouts of their parcels. I’d be able to focus on more critical support tasks with a scalable way to inform customers of parcel status.
WISMO calls are a hassle for support executives. They steal away time from addressing critical product-related issues.
LateShipment.com helps you address this situation by making it possible to send automated email and SMS updates to customers on the completion of standard shipping events like Shipped, Out for delivery, Attempted, and Delivered.
The post-purchase phase is a part of the customer journey that is often neglected. Consequently, it ends up being a weakness for businesses. Fortunately, businesses can regain control of it by proactively resolving delivery-related issues through top-quality customer support and automation. Taking charge of the post-purchase experience increases customer retention and lifetime value.
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