Why Real-Time Supply Chain Visibility is Crucial for eCommerce Customer Experience

We have good news and bad news.

The good news is that making customers happy can improve your bottom line. Customer experience-focused companies are 60% more profitable.

The bad news is that customers are not easy to please. Seventy-two percent of customers expect immediate service, while one in two customers would leave a brand they’d been loyal to for a year because of  poor customer experience.

It is clear that excellent customer experience is crucial to retention and profitability. 

To this end, real-time supply chain visibility, particularly on last-mile operations, can help eCommerce retailers deliver delightful customer experiences.

Real-Time Supply Chain Visibility

Real-time supply chain visibility means exactly what it says: visibility over the supply chain. It is having live location, state/condition and delivery status information on products, raw materials or supplies (i.e., inventory) as they move from one point (e.g., the manufacturer) to another (e.g., the fulfillment center) in the supply chain.

For instance, a global pharmaceutical company with real-time visibility on its supply chain should have to-the-minute (maybe even to-the-second) data on the medicines being transported to their warehouses or clients. This data can include precise location information and the temperature readings of the refrigerated vans transporting the inventory.

Real-Time Last-Mile Visibility

In eCommerce, last-mile visibility is tracking a product’s movement through the last mile, i.e., the product’s journey from the warehouse or fulfillment center to the customer’s doorstep. Carriers typically fulfill last-mile deliveries for eCommerce merchants.

Customers expect fast and efficient delivery, so the last mile is crucial to how good or bad your customers will perceive and rate their experience with your company.

To give customers an excellent customer experience and ensure brand stickiness, you must stay on top of your last-mile operations. A delivery management software that provides holistic yet detailed last-mile intelligence can help.

The Benefits of Last-Mile Visibility in eCommerce

Last-mile visibility delivers significant operational benefits for eCommerce businesses. The following are the advantages of using delivery management software that provides last-mile intelligence:

1. Highlight issues to avert negative customer experiences.

You can’t resolve issues if you don’t know they exist. Carriyo’s last-mile intelligence provides this visibility through real-time alerts about delivery issues.

Additionally, it gives you a top-line view of delivery delays and exceptions. One look at the control tower gives you live information on the number of shipments that:

• Are late for pickup
• Have been canceled by the carrier
• Are late for processing
• Are late for delivery
• Have been lost, damaged or ended in delivery failure

By monitoring delivery issues in real time, you can stay on top of your last-mile logistics processes and resolve on-the-ground problems before they impact the customer experience.

You can reassign carrier-canceled shipments, provide missing documentation or follow up with delivery partners to minimize delays. 

When delays are unavoidable due to extraordinary circumstances (e.g., force majeure), you can be proactive by getting your staff to contact affected customers, explain the problem in detail, and reassure them you’re on top of things and will resolve the situation.

2. Get detailed shipment histories to provide contextual customer support.

According to Zendesk, 70% of customers expect those they interact with to have full context. In short, when someone calls customer service to inquire about their shipment, they expect the person on the other line to know everything about it, such as:

• When the order was placed
• How much it is
• The shipping fee cost (if any)
• The contents of the package
• The ship-out date
• The carrier delivering the parcel
• The expected time of delivery.

Visibility on shipments, in the form of individual shipment history, can help enormously with customer service. When customers call to inquire about their orders, your team can provide detailed and, more importantly, real time, in-context information about the status of their shipments.

Integrate your last-mile intelligence platform with an eCommerce customer engagement software, and you can even automate customer notifications according to shipment status triggers. This allows you to set clear customer expectations, reducing customer inquiries and complaints.

Carriyo seamlessly integrates last-mile intelligence with customer engagement and has been proven to reduce customer service calls by 30% within one month of implementation.

3. Compare carriers to keep them accountable.

Carriyo lets you track carrier-specific performance data such as average delivery and average transit times. Use this information to negotiate better rates, gain concessions or remind the carriers about your service level agreements.

Carriyo also provides a comparative carrier performance report that lets you see, at a glance, which carriers are helping you live up to your customer promise of fast and efficient deliveries. You can use this as a basis for modifying your shipment automation rules so they favor high-performing carriers.

4. Minimize errors to save on last-mile delivery costs.

Last-mile visibility software can help you identify shipping errors. Are your parcels frequently getting lost or damaged? Is a significant percentage of your shipments not getting delivered?

Shipping errors translate to extra costs. You need to replace lost and damaged items, and you have to reattempt failed deliveries.

Unfortunately, you must bear the brunt of these shipping error costs. Free shipping is the norm, after all, with as much as 96% of eCommerce retailers offering zero-cost shipping.

Once you have identified the errors jacking up your last-mile delivery costs, you can do something about them. For instance, you can use a shipping automation system to reduce manual shipping processes.

Carriyo’s turn-key delivery management solution has an integrated shipping automation platform that automates carrier assignment, ensuring every shipment is automatically assigned to the most suitable and cost-effective delivery partner. Automating shipping label and document printing also minimizes human errors that can lead to delivery failures.

5. Track important last-mile metrics to improve delivery speeds.

A McKinsey report shows about 65% of consumers deem two to three days the standard delivery timeframe. Only around 6% report a delivery speed expectation of four to seven days. The rest, approximately 29%, expect their parcels within the same day or the next day at the latest.

Carriyo provides a bird’s eye view of key last-mile metrics. Generate reports on your transit times, shipment ageing, service levels, and shipment errors. This will help you assess operational efficiency.

For instance, if you’re constantly failing your processing, collection, delivery, and customer promise service level targets, you can dig deep into your last-mile data to determine the cause. 

Is it a regional problem? Are you experiencing packaging and mislabeling problems? Perhaps carriers are always canceling shipments or taking longer than expected to transport orders.

Once you know what’s contributing to your low performance, you can institute measures to resolve these problems and, thus, achieve your ultimate goal of providing fast, efficient and maybe even free delivery to your customers. This will improve the customer experience overall.

Since you get real-time visibility, moreover, you can be sure you have relevant and timely data for decision-making.

Real-Time Supply Chain Visibility: For a Delightful Customer Experience

Use delivery management software to gain last-mile visibility on your delivery operations. This will help you identify issues, resolve them as they happen, provide stellar customer support, keep carriers accountable, minimize costly errors, and devise measures to make your last-mile operations more efficient.

The result of all this? A delightful customer experience due to fast and cost-effective shipping and excellent customer service.

Carriyo is a delivery management software with a last-mile intelligence platform, giving eCommerce retailers a holistic and detailed view of their last-mile operations. It has other functions, including shipping automation, carrier management, customer engagement, and data integration.
Book a demo to learn how Carriyo can help accelerate the growth of your eCommerce business.