According to Gartner, businesses around 83% want supply chains to enhance the customer experience as a component of their digital business strategy. This statistic demonstrates the critical role that customer satisfaction plays in today’s competitive and rapidly changing marketplace.
Enabling greater delivery experiences for end customers while operating more profitably at scale remains a top priority of every business, regardless of the industry.
The question then becomes: what does it take to succeed in the logistics industry to enhance customer delivery experience?
Logistical challenges can have a significant impact on both businesses and their customers. Lack of real-time visibility to customers, reactive operations, and a lack of proactive issue resolution are substantial challenges companies face in providing excellent customer delivery experiences.
Let’s have a quick overview of the few major logistics challenges in delivering seamless customer experience in supply chain management.
Geodis’ 2017 Supply Chain Worldwide Survey revealed that only 6% of the 623 companies surveyed had complete visibility into their supply chains. In contrast, 77% of these firms had no visibility or a limited view, indicating that most companies need more comprehensive knowledge of their supply chain.
This deficiency can impede supply chain optimization and management, leading to chaos and continuous firefighting between logistics managers and sales teams.
Real-time visibility in logistics is crucial for efficient and effective supply chain management. With it, the communication chain can become faster and more efficient, from customers to sales to logistics and transporters. This can result in delayed communication, missed deadlines, and frustrated customers.
Real-time visibility allows logistics teams to track shipments, monitor inventory levels, and optimize routes in real-time, leading to increased efficiency, reduced costs, and improved customer satisfaction.
Here’s how you can gain real-time visibility:
Offer a customer portal with a centralized shipment view
Allow last-minute change requests from customers for increased satisfaction and retention
Continuously monitor EAT to ensure timely delivery
Track all enroute vehicles, including dedicated and marketed vehicles, to monitor their movement in real-time
Receive multi-channel real-time alerts to take proactive measures
Keep your end-to-end analytics accessible for the vertical heads for better decision-making
Receiving damaged or lost packages is another major challenge leading to poor customer experience. Mishandling during transit or inadequate packaging can result in products arriving in damaged condition.
Notably, 78% of companies globally need a proactive supply chain network and only react when disruptions occur. This was especially highlighted during the pandemic, as many businesses struggled to cope with sudden changes and disruptions in their supply chains.
Proactively resolving issues during transit is critical to ensure that the consignment is delivered on time and in good condition. This is particularly important in minimizing freight thefts, car accidents, and damaged goods incidents.
Compliance with regulations and delivery requirements is critical to successful transit operations. A reliable transportation management system (TMS) can track shipments, manage compliance documentation, and facilitate stakeholder communication.
Offering limited delivery options can be a hindrance for customers. If a brand doesn’t give flexible delivery choices such as weekend deliveries, express shipping, or multiple carrier options, it can restrict the customers’ convenience and satisfaction.
A lack of options can lead to discontentment and result in potential customers leaving their purchase.
Inadequate customer service can worsen delivery-related challenges. When customers encounter problems with their deliveries, they expect responsive and helpful support from the brand.
Unresponsive customer teams or failure to provide effective solutions significantly impact the overall customer experience.
Delays in deliveries or failed delivery attempts always result in dissatisfied customers. The unavailability of a customer during delivery can lead to multiple rescheduling attempts and inconvenience.
Additionally, if the delivery person fails to locate the right address or makes mistakes while attempting delivery, it can further contribute to a poor customer experience.
Lack of coordination and communication among suppliers, retailers, and logistics partners can cause delays in order processing, picking, packing, and shipping. External factors like weather conditions, transportation disruptions, or customs clearance issues can also impact shipment schedules.
Unorganized vendor management can originate from several factors. Inadequate communication channels between retailers and suppliers can result in miscommunication, delays in order placement, and quality issues.
Inconsistent performance expectations and a lack of standardized agreements can lead to varying service levels.
Low visibility into supplier performance metrics and inadequate monitoring systems can delay timely issue identification and resolution.
Little collaboration and information sharing between retailers and vendors can also hinder efficient supply chain management.
Also read: 5 Must Have Strategies To Improve Customer Satisfaction For Shippers
To beat the above-mentioned challenges and enhance customer experiences, you must implement advanced technology solutions prioritizing real-time visibility, proactive issue resolution, and optimized operations.
Here’s a sneak peek of how Fretron Tech Solution can help you streamline customer delivery operations.
This technology solution enables you to mitigate the chances of disputes and fast-tracked all billing and settlements. Over time, it would enhance the trust between the client and the vendors, which would help the system’s already-automated purchase orders and invoicing capabilities.
This solution helps optimize delivery routes, track vehicles, and enhance transparency using advanced algorithms. It incorporates features for tracking vehicle maintenance schedules and service requirements and proactively managing fleet maintenance to minimize the risks of breakdowns and delivery disruptions.
By implementing fleet management solutions effectively, brands can enhance operational efficiency, delivery performance, and overall customer satisfaction..
By placing the right technology in place, you can access complete shipment visibility right from the (order) creation point to the actual movement (shipment) tracking, all in real-time.
Furthermore, it enables you to track shipments at the warehouse, state, and country levels via multi-user access.
Intelligent route planning features help in ensuring timely delivery and minimizing rescheduling attempts. The AI-based route planning incorporates a real-time navigation feature that tracks the best routes for consignments in real-time.
With advanced Iot based tracking solutions, such as RFID, and GPS, one can keep track of every consignment.
Moreover, this kind of IoT-based tracking mechanism will save the time of the entire workforce engaged at every tracking checkpoint, giving you more precision and eradicating every scope for human errors to increase efficiency.
These steps can streamline your logistics operations, reduce inefficiencies, and improve overall customer satisfaction.
Now that we’ve discussed the importance of enhancing customer delivery experiences let’s take a closer look at the challenges businesses encounter when providing customer delivery experiences
This situation is common, and many businesses encounter similar challenges in meeting their customers’ high expectations. Implementing the measures mentioned in this blog can optimize your logistics operations, reduce inefficiencies, and enhance overall customer satisfaction. This can set your business apart and minimize supply chain volatility.
At Fretron, we understand the importance of providing enhanced customer experiences. Our logistics expertise helps Full Truck Load (FTL) shipment teams streamline, monitor, and optimize their end-to-end operations, solving the broken, tedious, and error-prone processes in many existing siloed competitors’ offerings.
Our platform addresses sub-optimal freight visibility, billing, and procurement, allowing businesses to focus on what matters most – delighting their customers. We have ensured delightful customer experiences and increased repeated orders by up to 5% for our customers using the approach outlined in this blog post.
Let Fretron’s logistics expertise help you achieve the same success in your business.
We are Fretron, India’s 1st cloud-based, collaborative Transport Management System, which connects Shippers, Logistic Service Providers, and Fleet Owners to enable a simpler, efficient & responsive logistics network.
Address: 7th Floor Plot 55P, Institutional Area, Sector 44, Gurugram, Haryana 122003
Email: sales@fretron.com
Phone: 9711799111
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