An Overview:
Chapter 1: Taking Our First Step To Make Shipping Count
Chapter 2: Importance Of Carrier Accountability In The Last Mile
Chapter 3: Technology To Put You In Command of Shipping and Delivery
Chapter 4: Leveraging the Power of Shipping Data
Chapter 5: The Pulse Of Your Last Mile In Real- Time
Chapter 6: Give Your Business An Edge With LateShipment.com
Chapter 7: Our Vision For the Future
The magic word that can provide a definite competitive edge in retail is ‘last mile’. Every retailer faces the challenge of keeping up with demanding shoppers who are spoilt for choice. One misstep, and the customer walks off to a competitor. It’s all about speed. Anywhere. Anytime. Anyhow. Do you offer that to your customers?
Every single one of you would be aware of the fact that your loss of control over the last mile usually stems from outsourcing it to shipping carriers who make it all the more difficult.
That’s why LateShipment.com. Technology that gives you a competitive advantage when it comes to your last mile. Here’s our story.
Chapter 1
Taking Our First Step To Make Shipping Count
That’s right. We do.
If you take a look at how retail is doing today, you’ll realize the pervasive presence of omnichannel strategies and extensive use of technology. We’re talking intelligent drones, AI powered shopping, and AR for dynamic personalization.
The world of retail has come so far from the times of trade and barter. But there is one aspect of retail that has been loathe to change over the years. Shipping. Despite the fact that technology has invaded every other field, the tech resistant shipping industry has been holding retailers on edge for far too long. Last mile visibility has become something of a luxury. Unless you have a superior in house system to track every package leaving your warehouse, you are at risk of reaching out to customers in the dark (quite literally). What constitutes one of the most important facets of a customer’s journey simply cannot be allowed to be muddled by a third party carrier who does not have the same interests at heart.
Carrier accountability has never been a given, as sheer necessity has forced retailers into letting carriers wield the upper hand. Shipping carriers have taken advantage of this and made their refund claim processes deliberately complex and time consuming to ensure many retailers never file the claims. The shipping industry makes billions of dollars every year just because the claim process is not automated!
As a retailer, your prime focus should be on sales. The operational side of the business has to be a well oiled machine that does not require much of your time. In an era of automation and data intelligence, it isn’t quite difficult to get a competitive advantage with technology. What’s essential is to take a grounded look at how shipping successfully finishes what a retailer began on site. Crafting a remarkable customer experience hinges on the last mile of the journey.
It is this idea that gave birth to LateShipment.com. The company moves to bring in more trust and transparency to the world of shipping as a whole, by making available the kind of technology used by industry giants to businesses of every size. At the core, we aim to help businesses build a strong last mile strategy by ensuring carrier accountability through these factors:
Chapter 2
Importance Of Carrier Accountability In The Last Mile
Claiming refunds is an integral part of carrier accountability. Carriers tend to perform much better when certain shipments are constantly monitored and refund claims are filed immediately.
You do not have to choose between which carrier’s shipments you want to track or file claims for separately. LateShipment.com’s intelligent automation ensures that multiple carriers are tracked simultaneously and claims are filed on your behalf.
The claim process is purposely made expensive and time consuming by shipping carriers specifically to dissuade shippers from filing for refunds in case of service errors. This gains the shipping industry over $3 billion in unclaimed refunds every year! To bring an end to this and hold carriers accountable for their performance, it is extremely important for shippers to claim the refunds that are rightfully theirs. LateShipment.com for instance claims refunds for over 50 carrier errors. You can read more about the 50 errors here.
An automated parcel audit is the way to go if you want to optimize on shipping costs for your business. But it is important that you take a look at the other side of the picture as well.
Despite shipping refunds making you feel great and saving you quite a bit of shipping costs at the end of the day, the other side of the story is not that good for your business.
At the tail end of every refund you receive for a shipping carrier error, is a frustrated and angry customer whose order didn’t make it on time. Or whose order was damaged upon arrival.
When you look at it from a customer centric perspective, the joy of receiving refunds does not really cut it when an unhappy customer is on the line. Over 50% of customers rarely choose to shop from the same retailer again after a bad delivery experience. Repeat shoppers are another story altogether.
Providing a memorable last mile experience to customers needs to top your list in order to earn the trust of repeat customers and entice new customers to keep coming back for more.
The key herein is to have an eye on the refunds while your focus is on the bigger picture- the customer.
Keeping this in mind, we decided to help retailers provide a seamless delivery experience. With our completely automated service, you can not only collect every refund that is your due, but also focus on holding carriers accountable for their performance. We give you the space to work on things that hold first priority in your business, and take over the heavy lifting on secondary activities like shipping and monitoring carriers.
Chapter 3
Technology To Put You In Command of Shipping and Delivery
We’re not gonna say we’re working on it, and it’s a prototype. We’ve got you covered.
At LateShipment.com, we believe that a shopper is not only at the core of creating a great customer experience, but also at the centre of your supply chain. In this era of shopper-led retail strategy, supply chains need to revolve around them to maintain market competitiveness. Offering a seamless customer experience is therefore key to your omnichannel success.
When our journey began, our prime focus was on creating awareness among retailers of the money back guarantee policy and claiming refunds for every eligible service failure to keep a lid on shipping costs.
Once the entire claim process became automated, we realized we held a lot of data that would highly benefit retailers of all sizes. This was data that was not available elsewhere! This led us to expand into helping improve carrier performance and prevent last mile mistakes before they happen.
So gradually, a more customer centric approach came into play.
How could we benefit customers more?
What could we offer that would give them an edge?
We realized the importance of making data available to customers that wasn’t easy to get from shipping carriers.
Sure, customers wanted to track their packages and file claims for delivery exceptions. But they also needed handy information that would help them build better shipping strategies. And that was something we could do. After tracking over 25 billion packages we had ample data on carrier performance and stats to help out customers who needed access to the data.
Some of the benefits of LateShipment.com include
- Intelligent automation: investigate your shipments for over 50 carrier service failures like lost parcels and instantly file for refund claims.
- Advanced shipment tracking: capture 130 data points to track parcels in real- time and get deeper transit and delivery status insights
- Predictive error detection: instantly get notifications on potential delivery failures like delivery delays or lost packages and fix issues before they affect customers.
- Actionable logistics reports: make data driven decisions to evaluate carrier performance and optimize supply chains
- Ease of use: cloud based service integrates easily with existing business processes
- Smart dashboard: monitor all shipments across multiple carriers on a single platform and get instant notifications for delivery exceptions.
Taking control of your last mile is made much easier with this tool. It integrates across platforms and can work with any existing system you might be using.
Chapter 4
Leveraging the Power of Shipping Data
As the data required by customers had to be broken down into segments for ease of use, we set about cataloguing them.
After working out what reports would best suit specific teams of a business, we built them into our dashboard for easy access.
These extensive reports give you data on everything from geography specific carrier performance to delays divided by service type. Let me take you through all the reports we currently offer.
Shipment Report
This report is designed to give you overall shipment data in one place. The shipments that leave your warehouse are categorized by date, service type, and shipping costs. You can also see how many claims have been filed and their cumulative value.
Shipping Spend Report
If you’re looking for data on how much you’ve been spending on shipping, or the difference between last year’s discount and this year’s, then this is the report for you. Yearly shipment values can be segregated by date, and the average cost per shipment can be measured and analyzed. This report also includes a graphical representation of this data on a monthly basis.
Chronological Report
This report is for when you need to know the value of either individual or bulk shipments in a specific window of time. It gives you a detailed monthly and yearly break up of shipment value.
Carrier Performance Report
If you’re wondering how to evaluate your shipping carrier, then this report is for you. It gives you an in depth report on carrier performance for the last six months. The report also includes a graph that shows package delay rate divided by hours delayed and days delayed.
Claims Filed Report
You can keep track of all the claims we have found eligible for refunds with this report. It shows the number of claims submitted by LateShipment.com on your behalf. You can also see the carrier, account and service type for which each claim has been filed.
Refund Credits Report (by service and invoice type)
For easy reference of all the refunds credited to your account versus those that are still being processed, you can use this report. The refund credits report is separated into a service type report and an invoice type report. In the service type report, you can see which service types have been granted refunds, the amount credited in your account for individual tracking numbers, etc.
Geographic Report
We understand that you will need specific stats on carrier performance based on different geographic locations you ship to. Let’s say you want to figure out where to situate your next fulfilment centre at. Then this will be your go to report. You can get a geographic mapping of the destination country and state each package is shipped to. This will give you an estimate of which areas receive faster or better delivery service as compared to others from the same service provider.
Comprehensive Report
When you need an overview of which shipments are scheduled when, then this is your go to report. It offers you a comprehensive view of each tracking number, the estimated date of delivery for that number, the actual delivery date, and delays if any.
Billing Report
Finally, you would definitely want to know how you’re being billed for our services. LateShipment.com’s billing process is clearly accounted for each return and can be seen on a monthly basis. You can see a summary of the amount payable for individual claims or shipments as well. All paid and pending payments are listed in a detailed manner.
Apart from the reports, LateShipment.com automatically files refund claims for all eligible packages. No matter how many carriers you use, we can ensure on time claim filing as per the contract you have with your carrier. Your shipping carrier data is protected with bank grade security, and you can read more on our security measures here.
Chapter 5
The Pulse Of Your Last Mile In Real- Time
Pulse is our real time shipment tracking software that can simultaneously track all your packages (no matter how many you ship), across carriers (no matter how many you use).
Your support team will be fully equipped to identify and mitigate last mile mistakes effectively with a tool like Pulse. It also helps you inform customers about potential delays, missed deliveries, rescheduled deliveries, failed deliveries, misrouted packages and the like.
The Pulse dashboard is designed to give you valuable insight into the current status of your packages.
A few highlights of Pulse include:
- Real time shipment tracking facility
- Predictive notifications for packages bound to be late/lost
- Notifications to customers when delivery exceptions are detected
- Intimation about returns en route to your warehouse at any given time
- Flagging orders that require immediate attention
Your game plan for the holiday season can be at its best this year if you can proactively prevent most delivery errors before they even occur.
No more frantic customer calls demanding to know where the delivery is.
No more increased customer churn because of delivery mishaps.
No more loss of revenue owing to a difficult refund claim process.
You can gear up this season and bring your customers the best experience they have availed so far. Pulse can give you the necessary edge that will set you apart from competitors.
You can read more about Pulse here.
Chapter 6
Give Your Business An Edge With LateShipment.com
Are you just starting out in the retail space? Or are you a veteran well versed in the fickle trends that possess the industry? LateShipment.com can suit your business no matter how big or small.
Join us and
- Increase customer retention
- Bring down delivery exceptions
- Proactively prevent delays
- Decrease customer churn rate
- Save up to 20% of your shipping costs through refund claims.
Allow our experts to chart out a shipping strategy that will be tailor made to suit your needs. We can also provide helpful data that will make a huge difference in your negotiations with your carrier.
To know more about how LateShipment.com has helped different retailers, you can read our case studies here.
Not only can you grant your business the power of last mile visibility, you can focus on other things that demand your attention and leave the shipping audit to us.
You’d be surprised to hear how our pricing policy works. We do not get paid unless we collect a refund for you. Every other service (the reports, the shipment tracking, et al) comes free of charge. When we do get a refund, we collect 50% of the claimed amount as our fee. That’s basically no out of pocket costs for you!
Chapter 7
Our Vision For the Future
To put things in perspective, we at LateShipment.com firmly believe that every business should have the tools and data necessary to take control of their last mile deliveries. Unbiased shipping data should be readily available for a retailer to hold shipping carriers accountable for their performance, and overpaying for shipping should never be an issue.
A lucid and transparent shipping policy is the way to solve all this, and we aim to achieve that with our efforts. LateShipment.com was built with the purpose of leveling the playing field for retailers. From our humble beginnings, we have now grown to tracking more than 75 Million shipments on behalf of our customers and would love to add your shipments to the list.
Join us in our mission of making the last mile delivery space more transparent and fair.
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