eCommerce brands are constantly looking forward to improve their services at every touchpoint to build a loyal customer tribe and grow. And one way they are advancing in their said vision is by constantly adopting newer technology in every area of operations — such as product discovery and website optimization.
All of this boils down to providing immaculate CX and increasing their operational efficiency, given we as a market are moving towards an experience-based economy from the previous price-based economy.
Over 45% of business professionals say that CX is the number one priority for them (rather than price and the product itself) when it comes to repeat shopping.
Understanding how you can leverage technology to enhance the experience on your store is pivotal in picking the right tool to support your scaling efforts and improve your customers’ experiences at every stage of their journey.
However, the grim reality is that most businesses today are ready to invest in pre-purchase and purchase phases of the customer journey, but often oversee the post-purchase phase. In fact, it is the post-purchase phase that truly builds trust and confidence in customers before they choose to shop from you again.
The post-purchase experience takes up 50% of the overall order experience and is key to boosting repeat purchases.
With advanced shipment tracking, delivery, and returns management tech, brands big or small can easily provide great post-purchase experiences that drive fierce customer loyalty.
But before we dive into that, let’s understand the need for a great post-purchase experience.
Why Do Brands Need to Provide Their Customers with a Great Post-Purchase Experience?
Offering a great post-purchase customer experience is not an option but more of a necessity. The CX in the post-purchase phase makes up 50% of the overall order experience. Not paying attention to your customers at this phase, creates a big CX gap that comes with a lot of consequences in the form of:
- 1-in-3 customers abandon a brand after just one bad delivery or returns experience
- 30% of customers share negative experiences with close ones and on social media, demotivating other prospects from shopping with you
- Up to 40% of customer support tickets created are shipping, delivery, or returns related
- 8 to 10 customer engagement and revenue growth opportunities are lost during the post-purchase customer journey
- Average NPS scores are 4 or below for customers facing delivery or returns issues.
An alarming 22% – 30% of your Holiday parcels will face delivery issues due to shipping network congestions.
This is more than enough to show that you are entitled to miss out on lot of things by not paying attention to your post-purchase experience.
Worry not!
This is the right time to kick off your journey to providing a stellar post-purchase experience, given that he holiday season is a time when eCommerce witnesses a spike in orders.
So, here’s how you can enhance your customers’ post-purchase experience. And for the best part, here are some ways for you to do that without making any changes to the existing tools that you’re using.
Leverage Existing Tools to Enhance Your Customers' Holiday Post-Purchase Experience
Offering your customers a great post-purchase experience was never out of your grasp. All you needed to do was to extend your capabilities of delivery and returns management. This Holiday season, take control of how your customers interact with your brand post-purchase without changing the tools you use.
Drive post-purchase CX success with tools to:
1. Gain real-time visibility into shipments in transit
Delivery issues such as delays are 1.5x – 2x during the Holiday season.
Having a third-party real-time tracking solution and integrating your shipping carriers and delivery partners such as USPS, DHL, FedEx, or UPS, Canada Post, Purolator, etc gives you an unbiased, unprecedented visibility into your shipments in transit (across carriers, services, and geographies).
A mere look at your dashboard can now provide you an immediate idea about how many of your parcels will be delivered during the day and how many are likely to face delivery issues.
2. Identify delivery failures/issues before customers are affected by them
Receiving predictive alerts whenever your parcels are more inclined to fail, lets you step in where necessary and take necessary corrective measures.
By getting delivery delays identified for you well before they happen, you can take preemptive action before the issues impact your customer. Such actions display would result in your customers appreciating your efforts, which can prove to be fruitful during times like the Holiday season.
Extend post-purchase visibility to your helpdesk platform such as Freshdesk, Gorgias, Zendesk, etc to take preemptive action on parcels facing issues this Holiday season.
Automatically trigger delivery-related tickets for several common delivery issues and enable your customer support team to take quick action.
Proactively resolve delivery issues by informing your customers of the issue and offer them a solution for the same.
Being proactive mitigates your customers’ worries and sets them on the path towards satisfaction. Moreover, It also reduces the burden on your support team during the busy season and lets them focus on product-related queries.
4. Effectively engage and communicate with customers post checkout
Once you have proactively resolved issues, you must look forward to meaningfully communicate with your customers.
Integrating your email marketing automation tools such as Klaviyo, Mailchimp and CRM platforms such as Zoho CRM and Freshsales, etc, and take customer engagement in the post-purchase phase to an all-new level.
Communicating relevant information at the right time to customers makes a whole world of difference for a customer anticipating their order (especially during the Holiday season when their parcels are prone to delays). Therefore, lookout to send post-purchase transactional Emails and SMS notifications to keep your customers in the loop of their orders throughout the delivery lifecycle.
Not just shipping transactional notifications, you can also effectively use customer engagement when your customers’ parcels are facing uncommon delivery issues such as weather-related delays during the Holiday season.
5. Delight your customers with branded order tracking experiences
After proactive issue resolution and meaningful customer communication, comes hyper-engagement.
Connect your eCommerce platform such as Shopify, Shift4Shop, etc and hyper-engage your customers via branded order tracking experiences in order to delight them and increase your customers’ retention rates and lifetime value.
Apart from enabling your customers to seamlessly track their orders, you can also use this post-purchase touchpoint as a means to drive sales via product recommendations and marketing campaigns.
6. Enable easy and frictionless returns for your customers
Integrate your eCommerce store or Order Management Systems such as Linnworks, GoShippo, etc, and provide your customers with a seamless returns experience along with rewarding delivery experiences.
- Having a clear-cut returns policy
- Offering free and flexible returns
- Automating your returns process and make order returns as easy as shopping, etc
Can all help you make returns easy, frictionless, and an integral part of your post-purchase strategy.
One Simple Integration, a World of Retail Benefits
Pairing LateShipment.com to your existing CRM, eCommerce, order management and helpdesk tools allow you to tap into all the great benefits that can take your business to the next level.
LateShipment.com integrates seamlessly with your existing tools and makes it possible to boost their capabilities in the following ways:
Additionally, LateShipment.com also can integrate with custom-built tools and platforms. Our API makes it easy to enable such integrations.
At LateShipment.com, we are committed to enabling your business to wrest control of the post-purchase experience you provide customers. Therefore, integrate your tech-stacks with LateShipment.com and stand apart from your competitors by offering your customers near white-glove service in the post-purchase phase.
Ready to try out some of our integrations? – Get Started
Still, having doubts? – Talk to our integration expert
