Customer Experience Archives | Lateshipment.com

Branded Return and Exchange Portal: What Makes One And How It Works

Sashank Ravindranath — Mon, 04 Nov 2024 06:18:13 +0000

A high return rate is a concern for any e-commerce business. However, most brands still don’t have a proper returns system in place to optimize the final leg of the post-purchase loop.

In most cases, customers who initiate returns didn’t expect things to go this way in the first place, thus, the key is to NOT make the returns process even more stressful for them. That brings us to today’s customers demanding seamless, hassle-free returns and exchanges, and your efforts to deliver on them to build customer loyalty.

To make the returns process as smooth as it can get, it is best to use a ‘Branded Returns and Exchange Portal’ that you can build for your e-commerce store. To get a better context, here are some benefits that you stand to gain from using a returns and exchange portal.

What Makes a ‘Branded’ Return and Exchange Portal?

A returns and exchanges portal is an addition to your e-commerce store that customers can use to do ‘everything returns’ from initiating to tracking. Any system that works as an app instead of back-and-forth emails or support conversations can be classified as a returns portal.

The ‘branded’ factor comes through in how the portal acts as a vital extension of your brand experience. When customers initiate a return or exchange, they’re still interacting with your brand, and it’s an opportunity to make a lasting positive impression that helps boost customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Here are several essential features that make the returns process seamless for customers and manageable for retailers:

1. Enhanced Customer Loyalty Access to clear and transparent return policies

Customers appreciate transparency, especially when it comes to returns. Therefore, provide your customers with easily accessible return policies directly from your portal. By ensuring that customers are aware of their options, you can ensure that they make informed decisions and thereby prevent misunderstandings and potential frustration.

In the long term, this seamless return experience reassures customers and enhances loyalty. Here’s how it works — when customers feel valued and have a positive return experience, they’re more likely to shop with you again, even if their initial purchase didn’t work out.

2. Reduction in support volume through self-service returns

A return portal makes returns self-service for customers, allowing them to initiate returns or exchanges with ease. They can select reasons for returns, choose whether to exchange or refund and print return labels — all without needing to contact customer support.

Another common pain point in the return process is the uncertainty about when refunds or exchanges will be processed. A return portal eliminates this challenge by keeping customers informed at every step, from receiving their return to processing the refund or shipping the exchange item, thereby minimizing the WISMR (Where is my return) queries.

Both of these actions play a major role in freeing up your support team to focus on more complex issues. Ultimately, this improvement not only enhances customer satisfaction but also lowers operational costs.

Lateshipment.com’s Returns Experience Management (R.E.M): Self-Serve Returns And Exchanges That Boost Buyer Confidence

There are not one but three reasons why brands who prioritize CX, opt for self-service returns

Witness an increase of up to 92% in repeat purchases from hassle-free returns
Make returns initiation 3x faster for shoppers
There’s a revenue retention of up to 40% through easy exchanges and store credits

Meet LateShipment.com’s R.E.M, a solution to help you offer return experiences that customers will truly love.

R.E.M houses a Branded Returns and Exchange Portal that works to help your customers return products without your help via:

Driving customers to a portal completes your brand experience in the post-purchase order returns phase
Allowing customers to easily start a return from the order tracking page, delivery notifications, or anywhere else in your store
Helping customers better understand your return policy by highlighting return windows, non-returnable items, and more
Enabling customers to easily initiate returns from a self-serve portal that lets them choose what, why, and how they’d want to return in seconds

That’s not all! For a customer, the return portal is where the return takes place. But there’s also the back-end side to it, that’s where automation meets unprecedented visibility. Your return portal gives you in-depth analytics that reveal return trends, common issues with products, and customer feedback.

These detailed analytics allow you to identify patterns, such as frequently returned items or common return reasons, which empower you to make product or process improvements, potentially reducing future return rates, and improving overall customer satisfaction.

The post Branded Return and Exchange Portal: What Makes One And How It Works appeared first on Lateshipment.com.

Package Delivery (and Returns) Satisfaction Ratings: Driving Customer Retention and Revenue Growth

Sashank Ravindranath — Sun, 20 Oct 2024 09:44:09 +0000

Today’s consumers have more choices than ever when it comes to their shopping needs.

With customer experience (CX) being a cornerstone of customers choosing brands to shop with, you need to go above and beyond to provide a positive delivery and returns experience in order to keep customers coming back.

Here’s what the stats have to say:

95% of customers share negative experiences online, compared to 47% who share positive experiences online
93% of customers read online reviews before making a purchase.
74% of consumers say they would stop doing business if they had a bad experience.
86% of buyers are willing to pay more for a great customer experience.

Fierce competition and a low threshold for customer tolerance. There’s only one way to counter both. Raise the bar with your CX and spread the word out to attract other potential shoppers. The best way to do both — simply ask them.

Satisfaction Ratings: A Metric to Measure Delivery Experience Quality

At its heart, the Satisfaction rating (SAT score) is a surprisingly simple system that allows your customers to rate their delivery experiences on a scale of 1–5.

After each successful delivery or return, these ratings give you a clear and unbiased view of customer sentiment about the quality of the experience you offer. They act as a window into the world of customer experience, allowing businesses to gauge how well they’re meeting their customers’ expectations.

These unprecedented insights stand to benefit your e-commerce business by helping you:

Measure Post-Purchase Customer Experience on Par with Pre-Checkout Customer Experience – While most businesses place a great deal of emphasis on the onsite experience they offer their customers, the post-purchase phase is inevitably neglected. While CSAT and NPS provide an idea of customer sentiment in the pre-checkout stage, DSAT and RSAT can help shine a light on the quality of your post-purchase phase

Identify Which Areas of Your Logistics Operation Need Attention – The feedback mechanism that the DSAT or RSAT system provides allows you to unambiguously identify which areas of your logistics operation need attention in order to allay customer concerns. By identifying areas of improvement and taking appropriate action, you can now address issues, rectify mistakes, and streamline your delivery and returns processes. In the long run, this leads to operational efficiency, cost savings, and improved customer experiences.

Understanding customer satisfaction levels in the order delivery or returns phase is just one part of things, the important challenge remains in the form of amplifying customer satisfaction, as it translates to increased retention and profits.

The Importance of Positive Customer Feedback Around Delivery and Returns Satisfaction Ratings

Satisfaction Ratings: A Window into Customer Retention

DSAT (Delivery Satisfaction) ratings provide a detailed assessment of customers’ delivery experiences by measuring key factors such as delivery timeliness, tracking accuracy, and the quality of communication throughout the shipping process.

RSAT (Returns Satisfaction) ratings provide e-commerce businesses with a comprehensive measure of their customers’ returns experience. Customers can rate their experiences based on factors such as ease of returns processing, clarity of returns policies, returns status communication, and speed of refunds.

These ratings provide customers with a platform to voice their opinions and share their experiences. By giving regular feedback, customers now feel heard and will more likely continue their association with your brand.

That’s not all! Each time a negative review is taken seriously and improvements are made, customers will begin to trust the brand with their choices. As this becomes a routine, happy customers become loyal patrons and will return time and again.

On the other hand, for your business, these ratings offer valuable insights into how satisfied customers are with the delivery and return process, helps you identify areas for improvement.

The Domino Effect: Revenue Growth

Customer retention is closely linked to revenue growth.

Satisfied customers not only come back for more, but they also become brand advocates. They recommend the brand to friends, family, and even share their positive experiences on social media.

Moreover, satisfied customers are more likely to explore other offerings from the same brand. Cross-selling and upselling opportunities increase as customers gain confidence in your efforts to improve the delivery experience. This translates directly into higher average order values and increased revenue per customer.

How E-Commerce Businesses Can Improve Delivery Satisfaction Ratings

Here are some ways your retail business can boost customer satisfaction in the last mile:

Improve on-time deliveries: One of the top-most expectations of customers when it comes to delivery satisfaction is their packages being delivered on time or even earlier. On the other hand, each time there’s an unannounced delay, there’s a possibility of a negative review that can affect your overall satisfaction scores.
Improve returns processes: Offer a seamless, self-service returns experience to customers where they can easily initiate returns, print return labels, and track the status of their refunds.
Ensure proactive communication: Delays are inevitable and almost all customers understand this. This is why, despite the underlying disappointment, they will appreciate your efforts to keep them informed about the status of their orders.
Focus on proper packaging: Ensure that the contents of your customer’s purchase are well-protected from damage during the shipping process via proper packaging techniques such as using the right box, sufficient protective measures, and fragile stickers (if necessary). During times like the holiday season, customers also appreciate receiving their packages in themed and personalized packaging.
Bring in efficiency to your customer support: The chances of all your customers’ parcels facing issues while it’s on its way to reaching their doorstep are low but never zero. In such cases, customers expect to be able to get the help they deserve from your customer support representative. By empowering your customer support team to step in before customer impact and proactively address issues, you can boost your customers’ confidence to keep shopping with you.
Invest in technology: There are a number of technologies that can help businesses improve their delivery processes, such as real-time and self-serve tracking, predictive analytics, automated ticket creation, proactive notifications, etc. These technologies can help businesses to improve on-time deliveries and to provide customers with more information about the status of their orders (delivery and returns).

In the quest for constant enhancement of delivery and return satisfaction ratings, you can adopt these data-driven strategies to take a proactive approach that not only prevents future disappointments but also showcases the brand’s commitment to providing your customers with a great post-purchase experience.

Decode customer actions in the post-purchase order delivery phase with LateShipment.com

LateShipment.com doesn’t just help you deliver phenomenal experiences but also helps you understand whether all that money, time and effort spent is working in your favor or not.

By capturing customers’ delivery and returns experience ratings, you can now learn from your customers about the experience your brand delivered. All you have to do now is to consistently direct efforts and get those 5-star ratings that promote brand credibility.

That’s not all! LateShipment.com also helps you gain insights on:

User engagement metrics – To measure how your customers are engaging with your brand post-purchase via your tracking page, emails, and SMS notifications and to know what your most effective channels are
Carrier Performance Scores – To review your carrier choices based on a detailed assessment of how your carrier’s delivery performance fares against service-specific delivery standards.

Conclusion

In the ever-evolving landscape of e-commerce, package delivery and return satisfaction ratings emerge as a critical factor in driving customer retention and revenue growth. They offer customers a voice, allowing them to shape the way brands operate. By paying attention to these ratings, businesses can build trust, enhance customer experiences, and pave the way for long-term success. After all, a satisfied customer today is an ambassador for the brand tomorrow.

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WISMO: What it means and how to reduce it?

Ian — Sun, 15 Sep 2024 09:42:58 +0000

This post-purchase phase, where customers are awaiting their parcels, holds more importance than you think.

While most e-commerce businesses assume to just “hope no things go wrong until the customer gets their hands at their order“, the truth is far.

From the moment the order gets shipped, till it gets delivered, there is a window of opportunity to boost customer loyalty by ensuring hassle-free order delivery experiences that reward your brand with repeat sales in the future.

The catch? Customers love to stay in the know and receive updates on their delivery status and expect you to proactively do so. And when you fail to do so, your support teams are flooded with tickets from anxious customers, all with the same question – WISMO?

What Are WISMO Inquiries?

Customers tend to get anxious during the post-purchase phase, especially when they have limited visibility into the exact whereabouts of their order and often have to depend on opaque carrier tracking pages for clarity about their order’s ETA.

That’s where they typically come in the form of emails, phone calls, or chat messages asking, “Where IS My Order?” WISMO roughly translates to the customer wanting to track their shipment or at least know the status of their order.

The problem here is that carrier tracking pages don’t really disclose the depth of the situation when it comes to delayed packages. This lack of communication for a customer’s simple need for reassurance not only adds to customer service workloads but also signals a potential gap in the post-purchase experience.

Why WISMO Inquiries Are a Major Concern for E-Commerce Businesses

When anxious customers are unable to determine the status of their package, they tend to get frustrated. Of course, there’s the option of them reaching out to you and you can send them to the carrier’s tracking page. However, by that time, the damage was already done. To add fuel to the fire, when they don’t get what they want (even after reaching out), the post-purchase experience takes a huge hit, leading to negative reviews and ultimately loss of repeat business, both of which can harm your growth.

Cutting straight to the point, WISMO calls take up about 40% of your customer support queries, and according to a study by Gorgias – a customer service agent spends an average of 10-minutes per ‘where is my order?’ request. Do the math, if your business receives 1000 WISMO queries a week – at 10-minutes per ticket, that’s about 160 hours of your customer support’s time. Now that’s an alarming number!

That’s not all. High volumes of WISMO inquiries stretch your support team thin, leading to longer response times and higher operational costs. Also, addressing repeated WISMO issues can be costly, as it pulls resources away from other essential business functions.

So, what is it you can do as a business to reduce the number of WISMO calls to optimize the customer experience and save those big bucks in operating costs?

How to Reduce WISMO Inquiries

By now you would’ve already figured out the crux. Dealing with WISMO requires you taking a proactive approach to cut them down, even before your customers get the thought about asking the question.

Here are the different ways through which you can get proactive with your efforts to curb WISMO.

1) Be transparent about your delivery dates :

Unrealistic expectations are one of the foremost reasons for WISMO inquiries. This can be an even more serious issue during times like the peak season when unexpected delays are higher than usual.

As a start, you can include an estimated order delivery date on your product page to give the customer a realistic delivery timeline. For instance, you can categorize these dates based on the customer’s location and chosen shipping method.

There’s still a concern in the form of consistent delays that happen seasonally or due to uncommon reasons such as weather or road closures. In such cases, you can explicitly let your customer know that there might be delays with their order – on your website and checkout page.

2) Over-communicate delivery information :

Despite estimated delivery dates and warnings, WISMO inquiries can still be frequent at the hands of customers whose packages are particularly facing issues. These stem from the lack of communication regarding order status information.

In this case, you can make use of a delivery experience management software that takes all possible delays and discrepancies. You can proactively share this information to keep your customers informed at all times and avoid giving them unpleasant surprises.

Here’s how you can make this work. Send email or SMS notifications as the order progressively updates — from “shipped” to “out for delivery” and “delivered” or delivery exceptions. Remember, it’s always better if any kind of updates (be it good or bad) come from your end rather than customers reaching out to them.

This way, there’s a possibility that the customer’s anxiety and resulting frustration will be mitigated by your efforts to resolve their issues.

Apart from shipping notifications, you can also share order information with customers via self-serve, ‘branded’ tracking pages.

3) Provide self-serve, real-time order tracking :

Offering a branded tracking page that allows customers to track their orders whenever they want from your website rather than the carrier’s tracking page (that is dull and off-brand).

By redirecting your customers to tracking pages that are hosted in your domain, you have an opportunity to reinforce your brand identity and stay on the top of customers’ minds while keeping them engaged with order tracking information.

Additionally, they provide opportunities to offer additional promotions or product recommendations, thereby serving both as a convenience for your customers and a marketing opportunity for your brand.

Also, these branded tracking experiences can be extended to shipping notifications as a way to capitalize their high open rates to double your chances at driving repeat sales.

4) Optimize Your FAQ section and chatbots to deal with WISMO inquiries

Alongside estimated delivery dates and alerts on website/app floaters, many WISMO inquiries can be preemptively resolved by offering a comprehensive FAQ section and help center.

The section can include questions related to order tracking, delivery times, and what to do if a package is delayed. This way, customers can find the answers themselves and are less likely to reach out to your support team. You just have to ensure that this content is easy to find on your website.

You can also extend your efforts at offering proactive customer support by offering multiple support channels like chatbots. This AI-powered chatbot can instantly answer common questions like WISMO and provide tracking information. This reduces the workload on your customer service team without the need for human intervention.

If the inquiry is more complex or if the customer requires additional information, you can also include the provision to easily escalate the conversation to a live agent.

5) WISMO done, WISMR next

Returns often lead to a second wave of inquiries under WISMR or Where is my return, with customers asking about the status of their return, exchange, or refund.

You don’t have to do anything particular here, simply replicate the order tracking initiatives with a seamless returns process.

For instance, include easy-to-follow return instructions with the shipment and on your website. Provide real-time updates on the return status just as you would for the initial shipment. Then, follow up with proactive return notifications to notify customers once their return has been initiated, processed, or their refund issued.

Handling WISMO questions proactively makes things easy. To make things even easier, you can make use of a post-purchase tool like LateShipment.com.

How top brands leverage LateShipment.com to reduce/avoid WISMO calls and cut down on operational costs

In the context of WISMO, LateShipment.com provides your customers with a self-serve order tracking system and sends out regular delivery notifications apart from giving them a real-time delivery estimate but they still choose to reach out to your customer support regarding the whereabouts of their order.

With LateShipment.com’s Delivery Experience Management (DEM) platform, you can effortlessly :

Receive Predictive Delay Alerts – Pay attention to daily deliveries with predictive delay alerts and more on a purpose-built dashboard for support reps.
Resolve Issues Proactively – Proactively communicate with customers to prevent them from having bad experiences due to delivery failures.
Send out Delivery Status Notifications – Send custom or automated delivery status notifications to your customers for traditional events such as “shipped”, “attempted”, “delivered” and exceptions such as “in transit with delays”, “failed deliveries”, etc.
Provide Branded Order Tracking – Build fully-customizable order tracking pages for your customers to improve brand recall and sales.

And so much more…

With DEM, you can resolve WISMO as a pain point for both customers yourself. By implementing proactive communication, offering branded tracking, and optimizing customer support, merchants can significantly reduce these inquiries, enhance the customer experience, and improve operational efficiency (and profits).

In short, resolving WISMO is not only a smart operational move but a marketing strategy that builds trust, increases customer retention, and acts as a competitive differentiator for your brand.

The post WISMO: What it means and how to reduce it? appeared first on Lateshipment.com.

What is a Delivery Exception and How E-commerce Business Can Handle It?

Sashank Ravindranath — Wed, 24 Jul 2024 08:10:32 +0000

You don’t need major issues such as packages getting lost or damaged, even small incidents like a ‘delivery exception’ can create unexpected roadblocks that disrupt the smooth journey of a package to its destination and pose a challenge for your e-commerce businesses.

With the excitement of sales and fixation on issues like late deliveries and lost packages, delivery exceptions tend to be often overlooked. However, their impact on customer satisfaction, operational efficiency, and overall business reputation is profound as they have the power to hurt your customer relationships and lead to increased costs.

To better handle the delivery exception, we’ve come up with this article that starts with the basics: what do they mean, why do they happen, and what can you do about it?

What Does a Delivery Exception Mean?

A delivery exception occurs when a package deviates from its planned delivery route due to unforeseen circumstances. These disruptions can range from minor delays to complete delivery failures.

A package in transit is exempted from delivery, i.e., marked as a ‘delivery exception’ at the hands of the shipping carrier when it faces any hindrance that makes it take longer than expected to reach your customers’ doorstep.

In simple terms, this indicates to the recipient that:

The package has crossed its intended delivery timeline
This is not a case of a delay at the hands of the carrier
The courier will deliver the package soon (based on the reason for the exception).

We’ll break down delivery exceptions further to get a better context.

Why do delivery exceptions occur?

We discussed how exceptions are predictable and happen due to external influence in most cases. But how exactly? Here’s how.

Failed delivery attempts – Also known as missed drop-off. Deliveries are marked incomplete due to the recipient’s or an adult’s (in case of special deliveries) unavailability at the drop-off location to sign and receive the package
Address-related issues – Incorrect, incomplete, or ambiguous addresses can also lead to failed delivery attempts and subsequent delays. For instance, when the address on the label is unrecognized or is at an undeliverable location, etc
Man-made causes – Packages are prone to be damaged at sorting facilities and at times, the carrier would abstain from making the delivery citing this
Customs delays – International shipments are subject to customs clearance procedures, which can be time-consuming and prone to unexpected delays
Natural disasters – Severe weather conditions such as earthquakes, hurricanes, wildfires, blizzards, or heavy rain can disrupt transportation networks and cause the package to be held back at the facility to safeguard
Carrier-related problems – Issues with the shipping carrier, including lost or misplaced packages, vehicle breakdowns, or labor shortages
Federal holidays – When carriers refrain from making deliveries on particular days due to federal holidays in the country of origin or destination.
Peak season challenges – Increased order volume during holiday periods or promotional events can strain shipping resources, leading to longer delivery times

These are some of the most frequent reasons behind the carriers getting an exemption from fulfilling the delivery. They are valid and in many cases, you can choose to ignore them with so much as a “It’s just one day, the delivery will be made tomorrow“.

However, can you afford to do that? is the question. And that question is what led e-commerce businesses to take the initiative to address delivery exceptions for more reasons than one.

Why is it Important For E-Commerce Businesses To Address A Delivery Exception?

The consequences of delivery exceptions extend beyond mere inconvenience for the customer. They can have a ripple effect on various aspects of an e-commerce business:

Increased WISMO inquiries – Even when the delivery exception is minor, the customer who isn’t aware of it constantly bombards your support reps with WISMO calls that consume all of their time
Customer dissatisfaction – Frequent delays or failed deliveries that come along with delivery exceptions also come with the potential to erode customer trust and loyalty, leading to negative reviews and social media backlash. In the long term, this can lead to a drop in customer satisfaction metrics such as retention rate and lifetime value
Return processing challenge – When delivery exceptions are due to damages or undeliverable packages necessitates a possibility for the customer to opt for a return that can complicate inventory management
Operational inefficiencies – Delivery exceptions result in frequent re-deliveries from warehouses or returns that can disrupt shipping schedules and operations
Financial losses – Ultimately, returns-related costs (processing costs and refunds), unwanted support tickets, increased labor costs, and acquisition costs due to delivery issues can significantly impact a business’s bottom line

The cost of delivery exceptions for your business is evident. Therefore, it is important to handle them effectively. To make things easier for you, we’ve also come up with some of the best ways for you to handle delivery exceptions.

How To Handle Delivery Exceptions?

Most e-commerce businesses take this myopic approach of resolving delivery exceptions only when your customers are impacted by them. However, given the high expectations of today’s customers, it doesn’t matter how quickly you solve it because the damage is already done. Therefore, all you have to do is comply with your customers’ expectations — solve delivery exceptions even before they become an issue.

Through integrated solutions and metrics, you can be proactive when it comes to handling delivery exceptions and thereby set them up for a great delivery experience.

Handling delivery exceptions: The aftermath

Let’s assume the delivery exception happens, what now?

First, promptly acknowledge the exception by informing your customer about it. You can then follow up with clear and transparent communication regarding the nature of the exception by rerouting or rescheduling deliveries based on convenience to manage customer expectations.
Have a strategy early in place for delivery exceptions, i.e., develop clear guidelines for customer support and operational teams to make adjustments and handle things as effectively as possible.
If the exception is major, possibly due to packages that are lost or damaged, then you need to consider implementing shipping insurance into your existing business practices.

Preventing delivery exceptions from occurring in the first place

Delivery exceptions can happen due to external causes and at times inevitable. But that doesn’t mean you do nothing about it. As an e-commerce merchant, you have the power to cut down exceptions in occurrence.

By implementing proactive issue resolution strategies, you can not only reduce delivery exceptions but also unlock new opportunities to reduce costs and improve customer experiences.

Start by informing potential delivery exception-causing incidents such as carrier strikes, federal holidays, weather-related issues, etc. on your homepage and product page to let customers know that their orders might face issues and avoid disappointments.
Leverage data and evaluate the performance of different shipping carriers to select reliable partners with fewer cases of delivery exceptions and a strong track record of on-time deliveries.
The next step involves making use of real-time tracking to identify potential issues even before they happen and take proactive measures to rectify them.
Extend the capabilities of real-time tracking data by keeping customers informed about shipment status and potential exceptions.
In times like peak periods like the holiday season, you need to anticipate an increase in order volume and adjust staffing, inventory levels, and shipping capacity accordingly.

Bottom Line

While delivery exceptions are inevitable occurrences, addressing them promptly is not only possible but also essential for ensuring a positive delivery experience. By acknowledging and resolving issues quickly, you can effectively minimize customer frustration, maintain trust, and uphold their reputation for reliability and customer-centricity.

Also, don’t forget to prioritize proactive communication through shipping notifications and branded tracking pages to turn delivery exceptions into opportunities that strengthen customer relationships and foster long-term loyalty.

The post What is a Delivery Exception and How E-commerce Business Can Handle It? appeared first on Lateshipment.com.

Pre-Parcel Anxiety And The Problems It Brings To Your E-Commerce Business

Sashank Ravindranath — Wed, 26 Jun 2024 06:55:13 +0000

We’re all worried about things at times. How is this day going to turn out? How is my business going to thrive with the rising competition? Will the Chiefs win this year’s Super Bowl? What is going to be my costume for Halloween? Or Where is my order?

Now each of these questions has a reason to exist. The last question — that’s because of this relatively new condition called pre-parcel anxiety that is affecting several online shoppers today.

What is Pre-Parcel Anxiety?

The concept of ‘pre-parcel anxiety’ comes with the understanding of the ‘post-purchase’ phase.

To bring this into more context, let’s picture this scenario: We’ve all placed orders in online stores, right?

That means we’ve all wondered where our orders were at some point. So, this anxiety is normal or that’s what we think. But pre-parcel anxiety isn’t that. It’s what happens later — when customers cannot determine the status of their orders with the business they shopped with.

When such things happen and customers are left in the dark regarding their orders, they tend to get anxious, assuming the worst, leading to increased support inquiries or WISMO requests.

Pre-parcel anxiety is the psychological condition a customer undergoes while awaiting their parcels that they have no direction about. It keeps customers impatient about their orders, often checking the carrier’s tracking page and bombarding the brand’s support teams with WISMO calls.

While frequent order status inquiries mean anxiety for the customer, they mean something entirely different for the merchant.

The Effects of Pre-Parcel Anxiety on Your E-Commerce Business

Let’s take a look back — pre-parcel anxiety is a feeling of unease and impatience while waiting for an online order to arrive, and can be a significant hurdle for e-commerce businesses.

As we mentioned earlier, the first sign of frustration from pre-parcel anxiety is increased support inquiries.

Repeated inquiries like WISMO can be frustrating for both customers and support staff. For instance, customers waiting anxiously for their orders are prone to leave negative reviews and complaints on social media, leading to a decreased brand reputation.

On the other hand, customers experiencing pre-parcel anxiety are more likely to contact your support team with questions about their order status. This can strain your resources and lead to longer wait times for genuine inquiries.

Support tickets with a longer resolution time can cause customer frustration and negative experiences. Ultimately, customers who have a negative experience with waiting for a previous order may be less likely to purchase from your store again.

TLDR: Here’s how pre-parcel anxiety affects your business:

Increased support inquiries
Lower brand reputation
Reduced customer satisfaction
Lost opportunities to drive repeat purchases

Fortunately, there are steps you can take to address pre-parcel anxiety and improve the customer experience you offer.

How E-Commerce Businesses Can Mitigate Pre-Parcel Anxiety And Its Impact

1. Transparency in communication

First and foremost, letting your customers know that their orders are in safe hands is a great start in your attempt to mitigate their anxiety. There are multiple actions that you can take to achieve that.

For starters, you can provide clear and accurate information about estimated delivery times on product pages and during checkout to make sure that your customers don’t feel the urgency to contact your support team with the need to get tracking information.

You can then double it down by offering real-time tracking information with detailed and regular updates to keep your customers in the loop of their orders.

P.S. You don’t have to wait for customers to hit your support reps with WISMO calls, instead, you can send proactive email or SMS notifications about their delivery status.

2. Setting Realistic Expectations

Second and most importantly, don’t over-promise on delivery times.

Be realistic about timeframes, especially during peak seasons. I.e. Delivery during peak season times like the holidays can take longer than usual, in such cases you can let the customers know about these updated delivery timelines and reasons for delays.

Setting delivery expectations right by showing order arrival dates on your website like product, cart, and checkout pages helps you improve conversions, reduce cart abandonment, and ultimately works towards building trust and boosting conversions.

Of course, you can always put these steps into action on your own but your shipping partner might not be straightforward with delays, given to not project themselves in a bad light.

On the other hand, implementing these steps is relatively simple — when you have an efficient package tracking system in place that works on your behalf.

How a last-mile tracking solution like lateshipment.com can help

LateShipment.com’s Delivery Experience Management (DEM) is the perfect solution for you to craft order tracking experiences that boost engagement and repeat purchases — all while reducing customer service costs.

DEM can help you reduce WISMO calls by 72% by sending delivery status updates in the form of:

Automated shipping notifications proactively sent on channels like email, SMS or WhatsApp based on triggers for every step of the package journey from order ‘shipped’ to ‘delivered’ to ‘delayed’ and
Self-serve order lookup that enables customers to track their orders without any help, embed an order lookup widget on your website or chat.

Like Jane Norman of Nola Skinsentials says, “Many brands think their relationship stops after shipping the package, which is not true”. Thus, the need to make the post-purchase phase customer-friendly is a must if you plan to stay ahead of the curve.

By addressing detractors like pre-parcel anxiety, you can create a smoother and more positive post-purchase CX that leads to increased customer satisfaction, improved brand loyalty, and ultimately, higher sales for your e-commerce business.

Also, while you’re there, try LateShipment.com for not just seamless delivery experiences but all your post-purchase needs. Curious about how we might work for your business? Talk to us.

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How To Automate E-Commerce Customer Service

Sashank Ravindranath — Wed, 01 May 2024 14:08:44 +0000

Customer service is an important aspect of running a successful business. Whether you are selling products through your e-commerce website or a marketplace, effective customer service that is 24*7 is beneficial can be beneficial to boost sales and acquire loyal customers.

96% of customers admitted that customer service is an important factor in determining their loyalty towards a brand.

For starters, leveraging automation in customer service helps you solve your customers’ queries without any involvement of support agents. It also creates opportunities for you to deliver personalized shopping experiences.

In this post, we will explore the best ways to automate e-commerce customer service and delight your customers.

But first,

What is E-commerce Customer Service Automation?

E-commerce customer service automation is the process of integrating customer service with technology to streamline operations and provide quick and consistent responses to customer queries. The focus of automating customer service is to tend to customer requests as efficiently as possible without the need for human intervention or time consumption.

E-commerce customer service automation is a must if –

Your support team spends a lot of time working on repetitive support tasks
Your support inbox is always full of hundreds of requests and queries

Before we take a look at the different ways to bring in automation into your support processes, let us explore some of the benefits of leveraging this strategy for simplifying customer interactions.

Benefits of E-commerce Customer Service Automation

Automated customer service offers a multitude of benefits for e-commerce businesses because:

24*7 Availability – It offers 24*7 support to your customers irrespective of the time zone or location they are situated at. You can resolve customer queries even when your team is offline.
Increased Productivity – With automation, you can respond to more support tickets in less time. This speeds up the entire query resolution process, allowing your support agents more time to spend on priority tickets.
Real-time & Quick Responses – Automation lowers the ticket resolution time for your customers as you deliver quicker responses to their queries. It also reduces the amount of human errors in the responses.
Reduced Costs & Overheads – It brings together multiple support channels under a centralized platform allowing you to switch between various channels with ease. You do not have to invest in multiple tools to manage customer queries. As automation takes over manual repetitive tasks, you do not need to hire and train additional support representatives to handle large volumes of customer queries.
Empowered Customers – This allows customers to utilize self-service solutions like a customer portal, knowledge base, chatbots, and more to find quick resolutions to their problems. They do not have to contact human agents or rely on them to get their doubts solved.

5 Ways to Automate E-commerce Customer Service

E-commerce customer service automation offers proactive support to customers with what they need without having to contact any human agent. Here are a few ways you can automate your e-commerce customer service.

1. Automated Ticketing Management

The next aspect of customer service that you can automate is streamlining the process of customer service ticket assignment. No support agent would be happy sorting through dozens of support tickets to find the ones that are relevant to their department.

By using an automated ticket management system, you can categorize customer queries based on the problem type or department and automatically assign them to the correct team. The system also checks for the number of open tickets, availability of support agents, and a host of other factors before assignment. This ensures that your support agents have a balanced queue of support tickets and enough time to resolve them successfully.

You can also configure auto-responders or triggers to send acknowledgment emails to customers that their request has been received by the concerned team and is being currently processed.

2. Chatbots

AI-powered chatbots have become an indispensable part of E-commerce websites these days. They help customers at every step of their shopping journey by addressing their queries around the clock. They can also handle large volumes of queries simultaneously which is impossible for human agents. From providing answers to basic questions to addressing complex queries, chatbots take your customer service to the next level by helping you forge stronger customer relationships.

Investing in AI-powered chatbots can automate your query resolution process and offer personalized assistance to customers as well. Based on the customer queries, the AI engine can detect the ones that might require human intervention and forward them to the relevant support department. It can seamlessly conduct this agent handover without disrupting the customer experience.

3. Centralized Inbox

The first effective automation you can utilize is to have a centralized inbox for managing all your customer queries. This includes incoming questions from various channels like live chats, email, social media, WhatsApp, and so on. A unified inbox gathers all these queries and presents them in a single platform for easy access and timely resolution.

As customers today look for seamless omnichannel support, it is advisable to consolidate their inquiries from various channels into a single dashboard. This enables quicker and more organized responses. Furthermore, a shared inbox will automatically alert your team about the new messages. This will ensure that no customer query goes unnoticed. Any customer queries, regardless of which channel they are received on, will have minimal response times.

Jason Mueller from a1autotransport.com states: “Having a central inbox can be handy for any type of business. As we deal with many types of car shipments coming in from a variety of different sources and emails, having it in one inbox makes customer support a breeze, and it leaves you better organized as well.”

4. Hands-free Responses

Most of the time, e-commerce customers have similar inquiries like order-related updates, returns process, refund status, and so on. Hence, instead of spending time crafting individual responses, you can automate this process by creating templates. You can import the template into your messages in just a few clicks and send responses to your customers in no time.

Templates are pre-written messages that are automatically sent to the customers as a response to their standard questions. You can personalize the messages by adding desired dynamic content fields, such as customer name, shipment tracking link, order ID, and so on.

5. Self-serve Customer Portal

Last but not least, you can set up a self-service portal that allows customers to discover solutions to their queries on their own. In fact, 70% of customers expect brand websites to include a self-service application.

A self-service portal like document360 provides customers with all the necessary information to resolve simple and repetitive issues themselves. This portal is usually connected to a knowledge base that offers the right information to customers thereby reducing the need to rely on a human support agent. This reduces the number of customer inquiries being sent to your support team.

For example, Amazon offers an intuitive self-service portal that allows customers to directly contact the team or figure out things on their own. Check out the screenshot below that allows customers to track their orders, receive assistance with respect to their Prime membership, manage their payment information, and more.

Wrapping Up

E-commerce customer service automation helps you deliver high-quality customer service at all times. It refines and streamlines customer interactions using various tools like AI-powered chatbots, self-service portals, messaging templates, and more. This reduces the workload on your support team and enables them to cater to other important tasks.

Customer service automation when done in the right manner can make every customer interaction a delightful experience. It will show your customers that you care and boost loyalty. Leverage automation to simplify your e-commerce customer service and amp up your overall customer experience.

This is a guest post by Kruti Shah

Kruti Shah is a content writer and marketer at The Marketing Drama. She loves to write about insights on current trends in Technology, Business, and Marketing. In her free time, she loves baking and watching Netflix. You can connect with her on Linkedin.

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How Has Customer Experience Been Transforming and What Value It Holds In The Future?

Sashank Ravindranath — Sun, 28 Apr 2024 13:07:08 +0000

From brick-and-mortar to e-commerce, businesses have been running successfully all these years by building their foundation on just a question — “What do customers want?”

In the case of physical stores, products of good quality, stores with sufficient inventory, convenient locations, interactions from the staff, etc, were some of the primary things customers considered as a reason to frequent.

All of this with the addition of faster deliveries, efficient returns, effective post-purchase engagement, etc, started as a special feature or USP of brands as the gradual shift to e-commerce took place but since then has become a necessity in customer expectations.

So, coming back to the question, “What do customers want?” Stands for the increasing and ever-changing customer expectations with your business and the answer of meeting or rather exceeding these expectations stands for what one would call ‘a great customer experience’.

The Need To Focus On CX In Today's Business Landscape

Customer demands are never the same. However, what’s been the same in the recent past is businesses increasingly prioritizing CX to facilitate repeat purchases.

45.9% business professionals rated CX as their priority and thereby are consistently investing more in improving it.

That brings us to the #1 reason — To stay in the competition.

While product quality might have been the criteria two-three years ago, it’s no longer the reason why customers choose to do business with you. Today, it’s all about who offers the best customer experience. So, if you’d like to stay noticed by your prospective customers, you have no option but to put your focus to improving customer experience.

Not just your peers, but even customers will agree with it. CX makes or breaks customer loyalty.

According to PwC, 1-in-3 customers will leave a brand after just one bad experience, making reason #2 — CX acts as the key differentiator between today’s brands and when done right, can become a competitive advantage.

Well, if customers want something and your competitors are adhering to it then, there must surely be something beneficial for both parties. And that’s reason #3 Improved CX = Increased loyalty and revenue.

Think about it. It’s not rocket science! You give your customers something they want and that impresses them to the extent that they want to keep shopping with you. With loyal customers at hand, you can create opportunities to improve revenue by making them spend more and cut down costs by lowering acquisition rates.

Just like E-commerce, CX is also transforming while still being an integral part of the shopping channel and innovations can’t be left out. Why? Because of the scale at which customers are shopping online, you need to keep innovating to stay ahead of the curve, and not to forget, customer demands are ever-increasing!

The Evolution of Customer Experience and Key Drivers of this Transformation

As an e-commerce merchant, understanding the evolution of e-commerce and the key drivers behind it can be crucial for you in remaining competitive and thereby seeking success in the modern marketplace. So, let’s delve into the evolution of customer experience (CX) and the key drivers of this transformation:

Traditional customer experience vs. modern CX – The primary difference between traditional and modern approaches to customer experience is embracing digital transformation and prioritizing customer-centricity. Businesses that do that can differentiate themselves and build stronger relationships with their customers.
Changing consumer expectations and behaviors – Understanding and adapting to changing consumer expectations and behaviors is essential for businesses seeking to deliver exceptional customer experiences.
Shift from transactional to relationship-based interactions – The shift from transactional to relationship-based interactions reflects a strategic evolution in how businesses approach customer engagement. By prioritizing it, businesses can cultivate loyal customers who become advocates for their brand and drive sustained growth.

Understanding the evolution of CX to its current state or ‘trend’ helps you stay relevant and survive among a multitude of competing businesses. But knowing what’s going to come in the future gives you a head start in the rat race with your competitors.

To gain that head start and thereby get enough time to optimize things, here are some insights on what the future of customer experience will look like and how you can adapt to it.

Future Trends in Customer Experience

Hyper-personalization and predictive analytics

We’ll start with a trend that is slowly moving away from being called a ‘trend’ to becoming a standard that all e-commerce businesses would like to get hold of in the coming months, particularly before peak season times as a resort to improve their sales numbers.

If you look at it, hyper-personalization is just an advanced way of doing personalization using technologies that keep taking e-commerce by storm to create highly relevant experiences by understanding customer behavior in real-time.

Currently and in the future, hyper-personalization is about using AI, data analytics, and automation

Here’s an in-depth look at how it works:

Make use of marketing automation tools that not only provide you with a goldmine of data in the form of browsing and purchase behavior, shopper demographics, and preferences (search queries) but also help you with predictive analytics in the form of real-time reports and insights in the form of predicting which products a customer is likely to purchase, forecasting trends, identifying potential churn risks, etc. With these actionable insights, you can identify distinct customer personas and understand exactly how you can cater to them.
With personas identified, the next step is to customize the direction of personalization based on the stage of repeat purchase funnel they’re in. For instance, personalized product recommendations for customers if they are still on the lookout, targeted campaigns and personalized discounts if they have items added to their cart, proactively addressing issues during order tracking, etc.
As businesses strive to deliver personalized experiences, they must also navigate complexities in the form of transparent data collection, secure privacy regulations, and most importantly, maintain customer trust while delivering personalized experiences.

TLDR: The future of CX with hyper-personalization is promising, thanks to continuous advancements in technology. Businesses that can navigate and take hyper-personalization initiatives while upholding ethical standards are the ones that are poised to thrive.

Integration with AI and automation

The idea of integrating Artificial Intelligence (AI) and automation into an e-commerce system is already in the talks and the basic opinion has been that these technologies promise to bring unprecedented efficiency and innovation and that businesses must adapt to these changes.

Automation AI represents the blend of automation tools with AI to create a system that can not only automate tasks but also learn and improve over time. Here are some ways in which this integration or ‘intelligence automation’ can potentially help transform the CX:

Chatbots and Virtual Assistants: AI-powered chatbots and virtual assistants will play an inevitable role in providing instant support and assistance to customers throughout their shopping journey. These chatbots will automate routine customer service tasks such as order status inquiries, return processing, facilitating transactions, etc., and free up human agents to focus on more complex issues that require human intervention.
Supply Chain Optimization: AI and automation will play a critical role in optimizing e-commerce supply chains, from inventory management and demand forecasting to order fulfillment and logistics. With the help of predictive analytics, you can anticipate demand fluctuations, optimize inventory levels, and orchestrate fulfillment operations to ensure timely delivery and minimize costs as a bonus.

TLDR: In a rapidly evolving marketplace, stagnation is not an option. Businesses that fail to adapt to technological advancements risk falling behind. Therefore, you MUST make use of intelligent automation to improve efficiency, accuracy, and offer more personalized experiences.

Final Word

The evolution of customer experience (CX) has been nothing short of transformative, shaping the way businesses engage with their customers and driving new standards of excellence in the digital age.

As we look to the future, the value of CX will only continue to grow, with hyper-personalization, seamless omnichannel integration, and relentless innovation at the forefront of delivering exceptional customer experiences.

By embracing these trends and prioritizing customer-centricity in all aspects of their operations, businesses can forge deeper connections, foster loyalty, and unlock new opportunities for growth and success in the dynamic landscape of tomorrow’s e-commerce marketplace.

An important phase of the CX that is also the most difficult is the post-purchase. This is because it represents the final touchpoint in the customer journey and any incident that happens during this phase can be the last thing your customers remember about your brand. Therefore, the impact of it on your satisfaction levels and repeat purchase rates is imminent.

For businesses that have been looking to optimize their post-purchase CX, it is time to invest in post-purchase technology that comes with ways to foster meaningful connections and ultimately drive loyalty (and revenue).

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6 Post-Purchase Pain Points & Solutions for E-commerce Customers

Sashank Ravindranath — Tue, 09 Apr 2024 07:09:23 +0000

If you’re an e-commerce merchant who wants their business to become successful, you need to become the customers’ favorite (offer them a great experience, stay ahead of the competition, improve profit margins, and whatnot).

However, a customer’s journey with your e-commerce business is filled with multiple issues regarding the website, payment, checkout, and much more…

But our focus is not on these issues. Of course, not dismissing them as trivial but when you think about it the hurdles or pain points on your customers’ pre and purchase phase of the journey account for minimal damage and are easily rectifiable since most of it is under your control. Post-purchase issues, on the other hand, are an even tougher challenge.

Pain Points in Other Phases Vs Post-Purchase Pain Points

Here’s a comparison of pain points in the post-purchase phase to other phases of e-commerce to begin with.

Pre-purchase or the familiarity stage: Product discovery, website usability, and concerns around trusting your website.
Purchase or the decisive stage: Payment errors, sudden costs, product being out of stock, or a lengthy checkout process.

Such issues can deter customers from completing their purchases and lead to abandoned carts.

But think about it, worst case scenario: what do you think happens when a customer abandons their cart?

There is a lost opportunity to convert a potential sale
There is a lower return on investment (ROI) for marketing efforts

The priority of resolving post-purchase pain points

Now let’s do a little time jump. Assuming the issues get resolved and you convert the sale, the customer makes the ‘purchase’ and awaits the product — what do you think happens when they face an issue at this ‘post-purchase’ phase of their customer journey?

Here’s a chronology of the events that might follow:

They stop shopping with the brand, leading to a drop in loyalty and revenue and a rise in acquisition costs, shipping costs (returns/ cancellations), product costs (loss and damages), etc.
Their frustration doesn’t end there as they vent their frustrations on social media, thereby demotivating their friends and family (your potential customers) from shopping with you, leading to a poor brand reputation.

You can compare things for yourself — the worst-case scenario for a pain point in the pre and purchase phases comes at the earliest stage in the post-purchase phase, putting the stakes much higher.

It’s not just all doom and gloom. Let’s take a look at some positives as well. Assuming there are no post-purchase pain points or they’ve been resolved timely, the verdict is a great post-purchase experience, and here’s what it can bring to your business.

6 Pain Points For E-Commerce Customers In The Post-Purchase Phase And How You Can Fix Them

1. Lack of order updates

The first and foremost point of frustration for your customers is when they’ve placed their order but become uncertain about its status as time goes by. This can be problematic for your business, as customers often feel anxious when they can’t track their orders, leading to increased support inquiries and a decrease in trust and satisfaction.

Solution: Keep customers informed about their order status at all times. However, manually notifying all customers throughout the delivery lifecycle can be difficult. To make things easy, you can make use of a real-time tracking solution that monitors all your shipments and also enables you to send shipping updates via email or SMS.

2. Shipping issues (Delays, loss, and damage)

A shipper and a customer’s worst nightmare — a package facing an issue while en route from the former to the latter. Unfortunately, for both, delivery issues are inevitable and common occurrences in shipping as even with today’s technology, 1-in-5 parcels shipped face delivery issues on average. To make things worse, delivery issues cause high customer frustration, negative shopping experiences, bad reviews, and ultimately decreased loyalty.

Solution: Proactively communicate shipping issues such as delays and offer solutions like expedited shipping or refunds. This helps you demonstrate commitment towards customer satisfaction and thereby retains customer trust.

3. Difficulty contacting customer support

Delivery issues might have scared you a little but what if I told you there are actually not the worst of the worst? TBH, customers are indeed somewhat forgiving and are willing to offer you a chance to fix their bad experience. However, imagine them having difficulty reaching out to customer support or not receiving timely assistance. This can infuriate them even further to the extent that you never hear back from them.

Solution: Offer multiple support channels like chatbots that are active 24/7 and offer minimum support to customers such as catering to WISMO calls and other common post-purchase inquiries. You can make things convenient by clearly displaying options for them to reach your support team on your website and tracking assets. However, the best part lies in making use of a post-purchase solution that sends alerts for critical delivery failures and proactively notifies customers from within your help desk.

4. Damaged shipments

7% to 11% of customers’ online orders arrive broken or damaged, making us emphasize the focus of businesses tending to them more than preemptively notifying customers. Additionally, sending out replacements for each damage can cost you valuable dollars. With real-time tracking effectively helping you fight late deliveries and lost packages, what is that you can do to reduce damage?

Solution: Ensure products are securely packaged to prevent damage during transit. You can use appropriate and effective packaging materials and padding to protect fragile items. Additionally, you can consider using branded packaging as an opportunity to enhance the unboxing experience and reinforce your brand identity.

5. Lack of personalization

The missing piece in the puzzle of great post-purchase experiences is exceeding your customers’ high expectations, being tailor-made experiences that cater to them and treat them as more valuable customers than just someone without an identity. Remember, failure to meet these expectations can result in reduced engagement and loyalty.

Solution: Implement personalized communication strategies while engaging with them, i.e., send them a ‘thank you’ note, product usage information, etc. You can also drive repeat purchases through personalized product recommendations and targeted promotions, based on customer preferences and behavior.

6. Complicated returns process

Even merchants who decide “Okay, I’ve got to do something about improving my delivery experiences” unwillingly ignore extending their efforts in the returns phases. This happens primarily due to misconceptions of them seeing returns as a burden and cost center. However, the truth is far from it.

Solution: Streamline your returns process to change the perception of your brand, create a positive reputation, and gain higher retention rates. For instance, simplify return procedures with prepaid return labels, clear instructions, and multiple return options to make it easy for customers to initiate returns.

What's next?

Pain points and frustrations are a small but valuable part of your customers’ post-purchase experiences. On one hand, merchants have realized that they are inevitable and want to ensure customer satisfaction despite bad delivery experiences. On the other hand, some merchants like to turn the tide and are looking for ways to keep customers happy throughout the order journey.

For every kind of merchant, who’d like to optimize their post-purchase efforts, we have more exciting content coming up to answer all of your questions. Stay tuned and keep implementing these strategies for your business to improve loyalty and reduce costs.

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10+ E-Commerce Memes On Post-Purchase Experiences

Sashank Ravindranath — Tue, 13 Feb 2024 04:56:22 +0000

Not just post-purchase or even e-commerce, but most blogs that you sit down to read, either in your leisure time or on the go — tell you two things. You can either do this or do not do this. How about something different for a bit? How about sitting and just looking at memes that perfectly describe the rollercoaster of emotions that you usually go through at your work?

Well, most work memes describe conditions at the workplace or a specific situation, like a customer coming in with a weird request. How about another change? Let’s talk about memes that capture what your customers (and maybe even you!) experience in the post-purchase — shipping, delivery, and returns phases as well as decode the process they represent.

Think of this article as putting down everything you’re doing to scroll through your social account and laugh at a video of the two cats talking to each other. For people working in the hectic area of e-commerce, especially in the post-purchase phase, we’d like to call this article the digital embodiment of TGIF.

Let’s start with the most relatable memes and progress to the most thought-provoking ones.

ICYMI, here’s the first part of this article — e-commerce memes that exclusively cover just the order delivery phase.

1. Estimated Delivery Date

Meeting customers’ high expectations regarding order deliveries might not be so easy but remember, there are a lot of brands out there that would easily replace you as their choice unless you’re making efforts to give them what they want.

To keep up with the rising competition, you need to constantly create an opportunity for the customer to trust your brand.

A great way to start your efforts is to set them with the right delivery expectations and show that a great post-purchase experience awaits them. You can do this by showing the estimated order arrival date on multiple areas of your website such as product, cart, and checkout pages.

Knowing the delivery timeline, keeps their expectations in check and helps you improve conversions and reduce cart abandonment. Just make sure to not break their trust.

2. Lack of Updates

A situation where all of us as customers would have definitely been at least once. That really speaks volumes about the relatability of this issue, we might say.

We place an order, it gets confirmed, we get ecstatic… Then what? We’d have to wait 2-3 business days until the package to be mysteriously delivered. This happens in most cases and should be highly avoided if you’re the merchant.

Because, here’s what happens — On average, 1 in 5 parcels shipped face delivery issues, such as delays and getting lost, and customers are aware of this — making them constantly worry that their package would be one of them. This puts them in a perpetual state of anxiety, causing them to bombard your support reps with WISMO inquiries, thereby consuming all of your support team’s time and leading to increased costs.

3. Issue Resolution

The post-purchase phase is notorious for issues that have the potential to hurt customer satisfaction if left unattended and when one such incident happens, all your efforts to provide the customer with a great shopping experience won’t matter if a subpar post-purchase experience is all your customers are going to remember about your brand.

You don’t have to do anything new or special. Just include proactive shipping notifications for events such as delays, lost in transit, failed delivery attempts, etc, and assure the customer that efforts are being made to rectify the issue at hand. This prevents customer frustration and thereby complaints and bad reviews.

With customers satisfied, you can follow up by sending a replacement or issuing coupons for upcoming purchases, whatever they prefer to exceed the expectations of your brand.

4. Complex Return Policies and Procedures

Everything went well with the delivery process and the customer is excited to open their package. But it was not what they expected — the order was of the wrong size or color, then there’s no choice for the customer but to return their purchase, the one that they’ve waited for all this time.

Contrary to the myths, returns are not a bad thing. In fact, they open doors for new CX opportunities in the post-purchase phase. But that doesn’t mean customers are excited to do returns each time, so make sure the experience isn’t even stressful for them.

Simplify returns for them with your policies and procedures:

Make your return policy easily accessible on your website
Clearly outline the return window, eligible items, refund options (full, partial, store credit), and any restocking fees
Make initiating returns easy via a self-serve returns portal
Allow returns to multiple locations (stores, drop-off points) or offer pick-up services
Provide customers with real-time tracking information for their return shipment
Just like delivery status notifications, send timely email updates on the status of the return and refund.

5. Customer Service Nightmares

Let’s assume a brand missed out on doing each of the aforementioned steps or even just one of them.

What do you think happens next?

All of your support reps’ time is wasted tending to customer queries and complaints, preventing other important stuff like product-related inquiries from getting addressed. This leads to additional costs in the form of unwanted support tickets.

Also, too many support inquiries to handle, results in slower response and first resolution times, and ultimately putting your customer in a state of outrage.

By making use of a real-time tracking solution like LateShipment.com’s Delivery Experience Management, you can provide support agents with order status info inside your helpdesk to enable fast resolution of delivery issues. Overtime, this enables a better control to measure and improve support operations and post-purchase CX with accuracy & speed.

6. High Shipping Costs

One of the major reasons behind cart abandonment is customers facing the shock of high shipping costs as they’re about to checkout (48%). When this becomes repetitive, you have no option but to absorb these costs, giving up a percent of your profit in return for conversions.

There’s a better way to do this with not one, but multiple solutions — explore regional fulfillment centers to shorten distances, offer BOPIS options, negotiate better rates with carriers, and offer transparent shipping options with clear cost breakdowns.

Additionally, you can consider offering free shipping and return shipping as a marketing tool to attract customers and boost conversion rates.

7. Benefits of Insuring Packages

Adding to increased shipping costs cometh the costs associated with order delivery issues such as lost and damaged incidents that are more frequent in occurrence than you think.

This is where shipping insurance comes in. If you’re an e-commerce merchant who regularly has to ship out parcels with expensive content, try getting them insured.

Shipping insurance gives you financial security against potential loss or damage and allows you to ship out parcels without worrying about significant losses due to said delivery issues. The best part, despite its numerous benefits, insurance is easier to get than most people think.

Especially with third-party, merchant-led insurance options like LateShipment.com — you can bring in comprehensive coverage options, automate insurance based on custom rules, and effortlessly manage claims.

8. Refunds for Carrier Errors

Apart from loss and damage, there exist over 50 carrier errors including delivery issues such as late deliveries and billing errors such as unwanted surcharges that go into your shipping invoices.

The issue? These costs (although smaller in isolation), are common and severe in the long run, adding an extra 20% or so on your shipping bills.

But as with all other problems mentioned above, we also have a solution for it. Start auditing your parcels and claim refunds for 50+ service failures and save on shipping costs.

However, it may not be easy as manually auditing all your shipping invoices is an exhaustive task. Thus, get your hands on automation to submit refund claims and recover every dollar that is rightfully yours.

9. Optimizing Shipping Processes

Regularly auditing your invoices and claiming refunds also shows you which areas of your shipping and delivery need improvement.

For example, what delivery issues or billing errors are a more common sighting, which carrier performs with the most inefficiencies, how much are you spending on shipping, etc.

All these insights can help you negotiate better carrier rates, make better shipping choices, and ultimately curate your most profitable shipping strategy.

10. Savings on Returns

Another great way to start saving on shipping costs is to reduce as many returns as you can.

One approach is to mention all return details correctly in your shipping policy, ensure products are of the highest quality, etc, and cut down on unwanted returns. Another approach is to make sure that not all returns are refunded but instead opportunities for repeat shopping.

For example, you can encourage customers to exchange and store credits over refunds to secure the sale and make customers shop with you again.

11. Post-Purchase Branding

You might think savings are the best thing to come out of your post-purchase.

But what if I told you there’s something better? And that is post-purchase being a revenue channel of its own when put to maximum use.

The first step towards that course is to replace traditional order tracking in carrier pages with custom-built branded tracking experiences.

For instance, populate the tracking pages built on your domain and shipping notifications with your branded elements such as color, font, etc, to keep customers in a brand-immersive experience and ensure your brand remains on the top of the customers’ minds.

12. Post-Purchase As A Marketing Channel

Customers track their order 6 to 8 times before delivery, that’s 6 to 8 lost opportunities to generate more sales during order tracking.

Once you’ve made sure your customers have had a positive experience and your brand recall game is done right, the next step is to transform tracking moments into recurring revenue opportunities with effective cross-sell techniques.

A great way to do that is to include personalized product recommendations, discounts, and other sales promotions on your tracking page and shipping notifications to double your chances at driving sales.

Final Word

So, there you have it – a glimpse into hilarious (and relatable) post-purchase memes. While laughter is certainly the best medicine, remember, these memes aren’t just for amusement. They hold valuable insights into your customers’ minds and experiences.

So embrace the meme, embrace the feedback, and keep creating an e-commerce experience that’s anything but meme-worthy (in a bad way, that is)!

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Post-Purchase Experience And Customer Lifetime Value (CLV): Relationship Goals

Sashank Ravindranath — Tue, 06 Feb 2024 08:26:56 +0000

The success of an e-commerce business depends on a lot of factors — venturing into new markets, net profits made during a quarter, rapport shared with customers and the general public, offering quality products and services, etc. As a merchant, you initiate and perform a list of activities that contribute to said success — be it by improving the shopping experience, coming up with offers, or leveraging tools.

Success may be a very broad topic but there are narrow, definite ways to measure the outcome of success for particular aspects of your business. One such measure is Customer Lifetime Value, which provides insights into aspects like customer satisfaction, repeat shopping, and revenue generation.

Understanding Customer Lifetime Value

Just like the name says, Customer Lifetime Value is the total amount of money that a customer spends in the time they were doing business with you. In other words, a.k.a. industry terminology, Customer Lifetime Value is a metric that represents the total revenue a customer generates for their business throughout their relationship with your company. Both CLV and CLTV are common acronyms for Customer Lifetime Value and are interchangeably used.

Talking about CLV, it’s a calculation used to assess the long-term financial value of a customer. Take this scenario, you possess a Netflix subscription that you renew for $22.99 every month. Now, if you’ve been a subscriber for more than 9 months, your lifetime value would be $206.91.

The idea behind using Netflix as an example is that CLV is easy to calculate for a subscription-based business. But when it comes to an e-commerce business where product values and consumer spending differ, there is no actual guarantee on the specific amount or time of the customer’s next spending.

However, with a little ‘extra’ effort, you can ensure an assured increase in CLV. But before we get into the efforts, let’s look at how CLV actually spells ‘success’ for your business.

How CLV measures the success of your business

CLV is not just a metric that talks about revenue but also gives you insights on various metrics that spell long-term success for your business.

Profitability: By subtracting Customer Acquisition Costs (CAC) from CLV, a business can determine the profitability of acquiring and retaining customers (a metric known as adjusted CLV or CLV to CAC ratio).
Retention rates: A non-subscription model and higher CLV often translate to better customer retention rates, i.e., an indication that they are satisfied with the products or services.
Long-Term Strategy: CLV encourages businesses to focus on long-term success, thereby promoting strategies that prioritize customer satisfaction, loyalty, and even brand advocacy.

It is clear that CLV is a powerful metric that measures the success of a business by assessing its revenue generation, profitability, customer retention, etc. So, what do e-commerce businesses generally do to improve their business’ CLV?

The impact of post-purchase experiences on CLV and other metrics of growth

ICYMI, the post-purchase experience comprises of all customer interactions that take place once the order has been shipped until it reaches the customer’s destination or in some cases is making its way back to the warehouse. It makes up 50% of the overall order experience, meaning that when done right, it is a goldmine of opportunity to increase retention and so much more.

However, most businesses (like you, probably) neglect the customer experience after checkout. This may not be a good move, considering the post-purchase, when unattended is a time that is marred by frequent issues such as delays and customer rants on support channels that have the power to jeopardize the CLV.

Customers don’t care much about the workings of the parcel behind the screen. What matters is that customers have a low tolerance for delivery issues and will shift to a competitor after one poor experience. This brings us to the first metric, retention rates.

Customer Retention Rate (CRR) – A measure to identify if your customers are indeed happy and are still shopping with you at the end of a period compared to at the start of it. Remember, increasing your customer retention rate even by 5% could lead to increased profits of between 25% and 95%.
Customer Acquisition Costs (CAC) – In simple terms, Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) is the cost of convincing a potential customer to purchase your product/service. This includes the cost of marketing and sales. When businesses have low retention rates (thanks to poor CX), their immediate choice is to look after new customers. What they don’t realize is that it is 5x to acquire a new customer than retain an existing customer.
Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) – Low retention rates and high acquisition rates are a direct sign of low CLV because naturally, the longer a customer chooses to buy from a business, the greater their lifetime value. High CLV rates are a must for businesses as loyal customers are worth 10 times as much as the value of their first purchase.

The message is loud and clear. For a higher CLV, you have to create a great post-purchase experience and that brings us to the focus of this article and the question in your head — what should I be doing to my post-purchase if I need to increase my CLV?

We’ve heard you and drafted a list of post-purchase techniques that you need to follow if your focus is CLV.

Post-Purchase Strategies to Boost CLV

1. Data-driven personalization

Data-driven personalization in Customer Experience (CX) refers to leveraging data analytics and technology to create highly customized and relevant experiences for each customer such as tailoring interactions, product recommendations, and other content based on their past behaviors, preferences, and demographic information.

In a report by Salesforce, 52% of the consumers said they would switch to a different business if the CX was not personalized.

Here are some examples of data-driven personalization in post-purchase CX.

1.1 Leverage Customer feedback to improve post-purchase engagement and operations

There’s no better way for businesses to gain insights into their customers’ experiences and preferences than actively seeking and analyzing customer feedback. Know what your customers think of your post-purchase operations, what their expectations are, etc, and work on meeting exceeding them.

Here’s how customer feedback contributes to data-driven personalization and improving CLV:

Engagement analytics: Leverage insights from post-purchase engagement KPIs like tracking page visits, open and click-through rates on notifications to include personalized and branded elements that put your brand on top of the customers’ minds.
Optimize fulfillment (delivery and returns) operations and post-purchase CX: Gain access to a goldmine of data in the form of customer satisfaction feedback on delivery and return-related experiences to make post-purchase enhancements.

P.S. Apart from customer feedback, regularly tracking your customers’ parcels in the delivery and returns phases also gives you shipping intelligence on aspects such as on-time performance, returns trends, and other insights, etc, that help you unlock opportunities that improve your post-purchase operations.

1.2 Repeat purchase strategies

Providing a great post-purchase CX is 90% of the work done to ensure your customers keep picking your business over your competitors. All they need is a little encouragement in the form of product recommendations & promotions that double the chances.

Personalized product recommendations: Convert visits to your order tracking page into repeat purchases with personalized product recommendations based on your customers’ recent purchases.
Targeted marketing campaigns: Use your tracking pages and email campaigns as real estate to drive more sales through targeted campaigns, discounts, and sales promotions.

2. Effective post-purchase customer engagement

Personalization in post-purchase marketing is an essential part of keeping customers really excited about repeat shopping with you but it doesn’t work unless your customers are happy with the delivery experience they’ve received. And trust me, this is an important hurdle to cross as the post-purchase is a phase where issues are frequent and have the potential to create bad experiences that demotivate customers from choosing you.

This is where an effective post-purchase engagement strategy that nurtures customer relationships, drives additional sales, and creates a positive feedback loop comes into place.

Proactive notifications: Make use of a post-purchase automation platform that sends out proactive alerts for delivery issues and enables you to proactively notify customers. Even if you are unable to take measures to correct the course, your customers will appreciate your efforts and thereby give you a chance to avoid a bad delivery experience.
Timely shipping updates: Even if everything seems to be going well, you can still capitalize on the post-purchase opportunity to engage your customers with timely email and SMS shipping notifications that keep them in the loop of their orders and mitigate their anticipation.

3. Seamless returns experiences

Most e-commerce merchants often assume returns to be a bad thing for their e-commerce business but that’s only when they’re left unattended. When taken care of in the best possible way, returns are the perfect opportunity to turn a potentially negative interaction into loyalty and growth.

Here are some ways businesses can provide a returns process that builds customer trust and contributes to CLV growth.

Easy returns: As the first step to making returns hassle-free, you can begin with an easy initiation process and follow up with return status updates and self-serve return status tracking.
Promoting exchanges over refunds: Not all returns have to be refunded and end in a lost sale. Instead, you can offer convenient exchange and store credit options that encourage customers to confidently shop with you again.

Final word

A great way to measure the success of yours is the strong customer relationships that are created from positive customer experiences, fortified by your post-purchase phase efforts such as hassle-free returns, hype-personalization, and effective customer engagement.

These are no secret ingredients but something businesses like yours have unwillingly neglected over the years for multiple reasons. So, if you’re looking to supercharge your post-purchase strategies and improve CLV, LateShipment.com is your one-stop solution.

With LateShipment.com’s suite of solutions, businesses can seamlessly provide seamless post-purchase experience that customers crave and ultimately boost loyalty and revenue.

Interested to know more? Check out the different ways in which LateShipment.com can work for your e-commerce business.

Still have queries? Talk to us

The post Post-Purchase Experience And Customer Lifetime Value (CLV): Relationship Goals appeared first on Lateshipment.com.

5-Point Checklist To Reduce Post-Purchase Customer Inquiries

Sashank Ravindranath — Tue, 30 Jan 2024 10:22:21 +0000

The post-purchase is an exciting phase for your customers, as it is the last station before they get to their destination called happiness from collecting their orders. However, with most e-commerce merchants not having much awareness about the post-purchase phase and unwillingly neglecting its events, the ‘exciting phase’ is also one of the ‘most anxious’ phases for customers.

This anticipation of order deliveries facing issues (understandable, as 1-in-5 parcels shipped face delivery issues) leads to customers bombarding your support team with WISMO or Where IS My Order? Inquiries.

WISMO requests alone make up approximately 50% of the overall customer inquiries.

Stats highlight that customers’ expectations when it comes to delivery and returns experiences are only becoming higher, yes — but when you think about it, here are some of their primary expectations:

“I’d like to stay in the know of my package at all times”
“If there’s an issue with my package, I’d like to know it beforehand”.

It sounds quite reasonable if you ask.

However, there is an increased frustration among customers because most businesses they shop with fall under the category of not meeting their “bare minimum” expectations.

Forget the stats for a moment — as an e-commerce merchant, you would’ve witnessed countless times, when a customer contacts your support team demanding to know the status of their orders as they grew increasingly anxious about its arrival.

Not just for the sake of your customers, even your support reps would agree that frequently tending to post-purchase issues and pacifying disgruntled customers only consumes all of your support team’s time, thereby preventing them from tending to other important tasks at hand.

30% of the customer support team’s time and effort is WASTED handling repetitive delivery and return-related inquiries

The good news is that with the right course of action, post-purchase queries can be contained extensively so that your support team now saves quality time and you can improve customer satisfaction by mitigating frustrations.

Here’s a checklist containing steps that you can take to reduce customer queries (particularly WISMO) and provide a great post-purchase customer experience. Without further ado, let’s get started.

5-Point Checklist To Reduce Post-Purchase Customer Inquiries

1. Keep customers in the loop of their orders via delivery status updates

A. Automate important shipping notifications

In the era of instant gratification, the only thing that keeps customers from bombarding your business with order status inquiries or ‘WISMO calls’ is your initiative to keep them constantly updated on their orders in transit.

The best way to do this is to automate notifications for important shipping events such as order confirmed, shipped, out-for-delivery, etc. Such notifications assure the customer that their order is making its way and give them the confidence to keep shopping with you.

Remember, the key is to keep these notifications proactive and cover multiple channels such as email, SMS, or WhatsApp to reach customers where they are most active.

B. Make order tracking self-service

Another opportunity that you can create to keep your customers aware of their orders at all times is to simply enable them to track orders on their own.

Here’s how it can be done: once the order gets shipped, you can notify customers with a ‘track your order’ link or embed a button on your website or chat.

By tracking orders on their own, your customers can look up the status of their deliveries any time they need and thereby are less prone to get your support team’s help.

2. Fix delivery issues before they happen

A. Receive alerts for critical issues

Staying reactive and doing damage control for delivery issues is an option. However, this may not be the best option, given that the customer is already impacted by the issue.

Here’s the thing about just being reactive to delivery issues: on the one hand, support reps are tired of constantly hearing angry rants from customers and tending to them. On the other hand, manually checking all of the customers’ parcels for issues and personally catering to them is an exhaustive and almost impossible task (especially if your shipping volume is a bit high).

A great way to get started on dealing with these two birds with one stone is to make use of a real-time tracking solution that triggers alerts for critical delivery issues like delays, lost in transit, failed delivery attempts, etc, and enables your support team to take proactive action.

B. Proactively resolve delivery issues

An extension of automated notifications and real-time alerts is the newfound ability to proactively reach out to customers whose parcels are facing critical delivery issues and take appropriate measures to course correctly.

Even if you are unable to fix the issue in the end, your customers will be appreciative of your efforts to rectify the issue and provide them with a positive experience.

Ultimately, this helps you not only mitigate their frustration levels but also create an opportunity to make them choose your brand again despite a delivery issue incident.

C. Integrate your help desk system

One of the major reasons for slow response times amidst a high incoming volume of queries, leading to poor satisfaction levels in customer service is the lack of sufficient data and the right tools to empower staff to help customers better.

For instance, in the case of a delay, your support representatives have to go back and forth on the carrier’s tracking page for package information and the help desk tool to fix the issue. However, this process is inefficient and as mentioned can negatively impact your Average Handle Time.

Instead, work with a real-time tracking solution that empowers support agents with information related to customer order delivery and return status inside your helpdesk so they can quickly respond and proactively resolve post-purchase issues without switching between tools.

3. Extend the capabilities of order-tracking

A. Share the estimated delivery timeline information

The customer gets curious about their order and asks you about the status. You can share a link to the carrier’s tracking page, where the customer tracks their order as it gets periodically updated. This is how order tracking has traditionally been done. But what if there’s a better way to do this?

Display estimated order delivery dates on your product, cart, and checkout pages to let the customer know when their order might be reaching them even before the order is placed. This way, your customers will be less prone to check with you for WISMO inquiries.

You can also add an order countdown timer to create an urgency. Ultimately, this can help you improve conversions and reduce cart abandonment.

B. Include options for the customer to easily access things directly from the tracking page

Another way to achieve a great post-purchase customer experience in the order phase is to include elements such as options to exchange or return, contact customer service, view offers of similar products that go along with their purchase, and much more.

By putting your focus on customer convenience via easy access, your customers are less likely to require your help while requiring an answer for frequent post-purchase queries such as “how to initiate a return?”.

A great CX paired with branding in the post-purchase helps in brand recall and increases the chances of repeat shopping.

4. Initiate steps to reduce post-purchase inquiries even before an order is placed

A. Include all necessary information on the shipping policy page

Not just a quality order tracking experience but much more can be done on your part, even before an order is placed which can reduce customer inquiries to a greater extent.

For starters, make sure to include information such as available shipping methods, international shipping options, and other FAQs such as how to edit order details such as updating the cart, changing delivery address, etc. on your shipping policy page.

P.S. Make sure these page(s) are frequently updated from time to time to prevent any miscommunication.

B. Let customers know about uncommon delivery-related news

E-commerce is an uncertain space where there can be instances of uncommon delivery delays such as supply chain crises and weather-related incidents.

While such incidents happen outside of your control, you can still minimize the damage by notifying your customers of such incidents happening on your homepage and email campaigns.

Proactively addressing the issue builds trust and prevents customers from needing to reach out to you worried about their parcels. Also, with your customers staying informed, you can manage their expectations to a large extent and ease potential frustration.

C. Automate responses via a chatbot

A great option to reduce the burden of frequent post-purchase customer inquiries is to make use of automated chatbots on your website.

These chatbots can be programmed to proactively reach out to customers after their purchase to confirm orders, provide estimated delivery times, and offer tracking, return and exchange information.

The best part is that these chatbots can provide immediate answers 24/7, even outside of your business hours, reducing customer frustration and wait times.

5. Make the process of returns and exchanges seamless

A. Self-service returns and exchanges

Post-purchase customer inquiries don’t stop when the order has been delivered. In fact, they continue through order returns and exchange processes as well.

Don’t just stop by highlighting return-related information such as policies but carry it through until the end of that order experience via hassle-free returns.

The first step is to enable shoppers to initiate and proceed with a return/exchange requiring the most minimal or zero help via self-service returns that guide them with detailed shipping instructions, generate downloadable labels, etc.

B. Returns tracking and notifications

Once your customers have successfully initiated a return, make sure they are in the know of their return status until it is completed, be it reaching the warehouse or even getting denied from your end.

Similar to the order delivery phase, you can ensure seamless tracking in the returns phase as well via

Personalized, proactive return status updates via email and SMS
Enabling customers to look up real-time status updates on their returns on their own
Present real-time status updates and detailed information on your return tracking pages

By providing a hassle-free returns experience, you can ensure that an order return won’t be the last you hear from the customer but they keep shopping with you for a long time to come.

Implementing all the steps mentioned in this checklist can be easily done in no time but we’d like to make it even easier for you. Instead of manual action, you can make use of a solution like LateShipment.com that automates your post-purchase tasks while helping you reap the benefits of a great post-purchase customer experience.

How Lateshipment.Com Can Help You Reduce Post-purchase Customer Inquiries

In the context of seamless order delivery and returns experience, LateShipment.com helps craft great experiences that boost loyalty and revenue for your e-commerce business.

Via effective automation techniques, LateShipment.com also guarantees a reduction in support tickets by up to 72%.

Here’s how LateShipment.com’s post-purchase solution tackles frequent customer inquiries:

Automated notifications to keep customers informed and reduce their need to reach out for updates.
Proactively identify potential delays and inform customers before they arise, thereby managing expectations and preventing frustration.
Self-service portals to look up order statuses and initiate returns and exchanges to reduce reliance on support for these common actions.
Delivery and return feedback to gain insights into customer behavior and identify areas for improvement in post-purchase communication strategies.

By making use of LateShipment.com for your post-purchase needs, you can significantly reduce customer inquiries and reduce the burden on your support team and provide a smoother post-purchase experience for your customers.

The post 5-Point Checklist To Reduce Post-Purchase Customer Inquiries appeared first on Lateshipment.com.

How To Exceed Your Customers’ Expectations For The Holiday Season

Sashank Ravindranath — Wed, 15 Nov 2023 08:15:47 +0000

Want to truly stand out in this competitive e-commerce landscape and enjoy the fruits of holiday season success?

Easy. Give your customers what they want.

What customers want

The increase in e-commerce-based technology, changes in the status quo of online shopping, ever-dynamic trends, etc have all turned customers’ wants into needs. Don’t forget, these interests keep on changing YoY.

Sure, you can do the bare minimum and just meet ends. But that doesn’t cut through today’s landscape.

You really need to understand your customers’ mindset, go the extra mile, and give more than what they want

To help you do that, we’ve tried to cover some of the most crucial things your customers expect from your brand and how you can exceed their expectations.

How To Exceed Your Customers' Expectations For The Holiday Season

Here are several strategies and tips that can help you not only meet but exceed customers’ expectations to ensure that your e-commerce business shines during the holiday season.

Let’s delve into these techniques and make this holiday season one to remember.

1. Store, marketing, and the holiday spirit

Let’s start with one of the early expectations for customers when choosing an e-commerce store to shop with during the holiday season — a trustworthy and interesting store.

Imagine ending up on a website or application for your particular holiday season needs and finding it outdated. It really makes one question the authenticity of the store and keeps it easy to move on to the next option.

So, what can you do to prevent this from happening to your business?

Populate your store’s website with a holiday-themed design that includes banners, icons, graphics, colors, and imagery
Consider incorporating interactive features such as holiday-themed quizzes, interactive product showcases, and other virtual experiences into your marketing campaigns to engage customers
Set up personalized email campaigns to prevent abandoned cart incidents. You can also take this up a notch and include holiday-special offers to motivate your customers even further
Offer branded tracking pages to improve convenience for the customer with seamless order tracking and brand recall

2. Gift guides, bundles, and special initiatives

Moving on to our next holiday-specific initiatives — 36% of holiday season orders are gifts for someone else. Here are some ideas for you to capitalize on this opportunity and maximize your selling capabilities.

Create gift guides tailored to different recipient types or occasions, such as “Gifts for Pet Lovers” or “Holiday Party Essentials.” Organize these guides on your website for easy access
Offer bundled product packages that combine related items at a discounted price
Provide optional holiday-themed gift-wrapping services during the checkout process to add an extra layer of convenience
Allow customers to add personalized notes and gift-giving options to make the unboxing experience exciting

3. Shipping, fulfillment, and timely deliveries

Thanks to the growth of e-commerce, apart from looking across products and choosing a brand to buy them, today’s customers also have high expectations when it comes to order deliveries.

Their need for timely and intact order deliveries is understandable and somewhat from their perspective, the bare minimum.

However, with shipping carriers straining capacity during each holiday season to deliver a huge volume of packages, tasks like getting orders out on time become an uphill task.

Optimize your order fulfillment process to reduce processing times. Consider using automated systems to streamline order handling
Offer multiple shipping options such as BOPIS and expedited shipping options for customers who need their purchases urgently
Collaborate with multiple shipping partners based on their pros and cons to ensure on-time delivery and minimize the risk of shipping delays
Consider free shipping (with certain conditions such as order value or for exclusive members) to spur shoppers to spend more

4. Communication, engagement, and positive CX

Not just during the holiday season, something to always keep in mind with your customers is to prevent unnecessary frustrations from bad shopping experiences.

The bad news is that there are a lot of instances that arise from high customer expectations that can result in these bad experiences.

The good news is that proper communication can help you mitigate customer frustrations and ensure a positive customer experience.

Clearly outline your holiday shipping and return policies on your website. Include information about shipping deadlines, costs, and return windows
Communicate your customer support hours during the holiday season. Provide multiple contact options such as live chat, email, and phone support
Proactively resolve order issues before your customers become aware of them in the first place
Offer real-time order tracking, delivery and return status updates so that customers can monitor the progress of their purchases

5. Feedback, gratitude, and a personalized touch

One of the best ways to exceed your customers’ expectations apart from your regular offerings is to connect with them on a personal level.

In the current e-commerce landscape, where almost all of your competitors offer the same products, it is the experiences that you offer that give you an advantage.

Encourage customers to leave feedback and reviews after their holiday purchases. Express your appreciation for their input and use their feedback to improve your services
Send personalized thank-you emails to customers after their holiday purchases. Express your gratitude for their support and include a heartfelt message. You can also consider including handwritten thank-you notes in packages to add a personal touch. These notes convey your appreciation and make customers feel valued
As a token of your gratitude, offer exclusive discounts or promotions to loyal customers. This not only shows appreciation but also incentivizes repeat business
Include personalized order recommendations based on customer history in your tracking pages and delivery notifications to improve cross-selling opportunities and covert order tracking into a separate revenue channel.

Final Word

By implementing these comprehensive strategies and tips, you can not only meet but exceed your customers’ expectations during the holiday season.

Remember that the holiday season offers an opportunity to create memorable experiences and foster lasting customer relationships that extend beyond the festive period.

Wishing you a joyful and successful holiday season filled with happy customers and thriving sales!

The post How To Exceed Your Customers’ Expectations For The Holiday Season appeared first on Lateshipment.com.

E-Commerce Post-Purchase CX Playbook For The Up-And-Coming Holiday Season

Sashank Ravindranath — Mon, 30 Oct 2023 15:05:20 +0000

The Post-purchase CX Mandate

Knowing what’s coming and staying ahead of delivery and return-related issues is key to perfecting post-purchase.

However, e-commerce post-purchase issues are nothing out of the ordinary, especially during times like the Holiday Season. The impact they bring is catastrophic — wrecking customer experience, straining customer support teams, and ultimately threatening profit margins.

Regardless of who the shipping partner is, a leading carrier or a 3PL, some hard truths that you deal with are.

E-commerce post-purchase is a missed opportunity in the current state

The ‘post-purchase customer experience (CX)’ is an integral but often overlooked function in any e-commerce business. When done right, it has the potential to ensure your customers have a hassle-free ‘order delivery’ and ‘return’ experience. In the long run, this can help you boost customer loyalty, efficiency, as well as profits.

That said, let’s see why post-purchase is a huge missed opportunity for most businesses out there.

Up to 20% of shipments face issues such as late delivery, attempted-failed delivery, lost or damaged in transit
30% of customer support team’s time and effort is wasted handling repetitive delivery and return related inquiries
12% of revenue is lost because businesses don’t encourage repeat purchases during order and return tracking moments
35% of all products purchased online are returned

The link between Post-Purchase CX and Customer Loyalty

As mentioned earlier, post-purchase CX has everything to do with what happens after the customer makes a purchase.

To make things more familiar, shipping updates, order tracking, or in some cases returns and exchanges. Either way, this is the last thing your customers are going to remember about their experience with your brand. Therefore, you have to ensure that it stays memorable.

Remember, a positive post-purchase experience can lead to increased customer satisfaction and loyalty, while a negative post-purchase experience can lead to customer churn.

78% of shoppers won’t buy from the brand again after just ONE bad delivery or return experience.

Now, one might ask: On whom does the onus of perfecting the post-purchase CX really fall?

The answer is: on everyone — from marketing to sales, to operations and customer service. By bringing all business functions together and working towards excelling in both, your post-purchase customer experience and operations at every stage of the process is vital.

To help you provide a great post-purchase experience and reap its benefits, we have developed a playbook covering everything you need to know about creating an e-commerce post-purchase strategy that will improve the customer experience and boost customer retention this Holiday Season and beyond.

6 Post-purchase Plays to Dominate Customer Experience During the Holiday Season

1. Enabling real-time tracking and delivery alerts

With unprecedented visibility into the status of their order in transit, you can stay in the know of all your packages at any given moment. This also gives you the ability to gain real-time alerts and be able to identify potential issues, such as delays much ahead of the customer.

You can leverage this data to proactively address problems, such as offering solutions or even just informing customers.

Such actions can ensure that customers’ frustration levels are significantly reduced and as a result, there is a positive brand perception.

2. Engaging in regular and personalized order status notifications

Even when things are going perfectly, you can keep your customers engaged with order updates and personalized conversations by making use of the customer and order information in your hand.

Send email and SMS shipping notifications at every stage of the post-purchase package journey, i.e., delivery and return status events such as in-transit, delivered, and returned, etc, to keep customers informed at all times. This makes them less prone to getting anxious regarding their parcels, reduces the volume of WISMO inquiries, and allows support teams to focus on more complex customer issues.

Such personalized conversations also let the customers know that you are committed to delivering them a positive post-purchase experience which leads to increased customer satisfaction.

3. Leveraging memorable tracking experiences

An extension of real-time tracking and proactive order communication is making use of a “branded” tracking page that is hosted on your website, from where your customers can track their orders whenever they want to.

Apart from tracking details, your tracking page can also include additional content such as an on-brand website design (color, font, etc), a complete order summary to let customers if they’ve entered the correct details, delivery satisfaction ratings to collect customer feedback, easy returns initiation and reaching out to customer support to provide hassle-free experiences, and so on.

The best part, you can add elements such as sale announcements and personalized product recommendations to ensure an increase in cross-selling. All of this helps in reinforcing your brand identity, leaving a lasting experience, improving your brand reputation, and ultimately driving more sales.

4. Enhancing packaging and unboxing experience

Receiving their orders might be the moment your customers have been expecting since they hit that ‘buy’ button. Make that moment etched into their memories with the right packaging and unboxing techniques.

Packaging plays a much bigger role than just covering your product. Firstly, a great-looking package creates a positive first impression, setting the stage for a great post-purchase experience. Following these are the branded elements that reinforce identity, good quality that ensures lower chances of damage and frustration, and sustainable materials used to improve brand image.

Following packaging, there comes the relatively new trend of unwrapping/ unboxing experience being capitalized by e-commerce brands. Ensure customers share their unboxing videos on social media as user-generated content to create larger brand awareness and attract new customers.

5. Handling returns and exchanges effectively

Your efforts to provide a positive post-purchase experience do not end with the delivery being made, as there are always chances of your customers returning their purchase.

But remember, customers don’t always look forward to returning their purchases — so, don’t make the experience frustrating for them. Keep things as seamless as you can via easy and quick returns, multiple return options (exchanges and store credits), clear returns policy, transparent return status communications, etc.

When handled effectively, returns can be an opportunity to demonstrate customer-centricity, resolve issues efficiently, build trust and loyalty, and enhance customer satisfaction and brand reputation.

6. Encouraging reviews and ratings

A great post-purchase experience is one that is constantly evolving. So, give room for it to grow and fasten the process by encouraging your customers to provide feedback on the post-purchase experience that they received.

You can start by making it easier for customers to leave their feedback — probably in the order delivered/ returned email or on the order tracking page, once the progress is completed. In case there’s a review and a place where you don’t want them leaving one, try to reach out to them at the earliest and offer a solution that they expect in order to change the emotion of the feedback from negative to positive. You can also take a step ahead and reward customers via incentives for their feedback to ensure that they leave more and spread good word-of-mouth.

By resolving their negative comments or displaying their positive review on your website or social media, you are conveying that their feedback matters and as a result builds strong customer relationships. Either way, reviews and ratings from customers provide an opportunity to make regular improvements and reach a wider audience.

How LateShipment.com Can Help Power your Post-purchase Success

LateShipment.com is the ultimate all-in-one post-purchase success platform for e-commerce retailers, D2C brands, and businesses shipping small parcels, regardless of their size or shipping volume.

Our Post-Purchase Success platform includes:

Delivery Experience Management (DEM): To build memorable order delivery experiences and boost recurring revenue during order tracking moments.
Returns Experience Management (REM): To make returns hassle-free with flexible return options and smart automations to help retain revenue.
Parcel Audit and Shipping Refunds: To save big on shipping costs through automated shipping refunds and drive supply-chain optimization with in-depth shipping analytics and insights.

Also, LateShipment.com seamlessly integrates with 600+ Shipping Carriers and Business Tools that include E-commerce platforms, Order Management Systems, Helpdesks, and Marketing Automation tools to help you drive post-purchase experiences and shipping cost savings at scale.

The post E-Commerce Post-Purchase CX Playbook For The Up-And-Coming Holiday Season appeared first on Lateshipment.com.

[Gorgias X Lateshipment.Com] Strengthening Customer Relationships With Post-Purchase Automation For 11 Key Events

Sashank Ravindranath — Fri, 27 Oct 2023 19:20:47 +0000

Customer service in the post-purchase phase is really a hectic time for support teams. It is their time and opportunity to become sales agents, offering discounts to encourage repeat purchases, etc.

However, due to the unpredictable nature of the post-purchase phase, support teams are often forced to spend most of their time resolving customer issues. In fact, up to 30% of a customer support team’s time and effort is wasted handling repetitive delivery and return related inquiries.

Thus, the need for post-purchase customer support automation and proactive delivery issue resolution is very evident. This is where Gorgias and LateShipment.com come together to arm your support reps with the capability to strengthen customer relationships.

For those of you who are here and unaware of what we do, Gorgias is a powerful customer service helpdesk software that strives to help e-commerce merchants provide exceptional customer service and turn your customer service into a profit center. LateShipment.com is an automation platform specializing in providing solutions for e-commerce businesses to enhance their post-purchase customer experience.

Together, our integration helps businesses deliver a superior customer experience and build customer trust and loyalty in the competitive e-commerce landscape.

We developed this guide (along with a downloadable handbook!) to set up LateShipment.com with Gorgias and equip your support team to get better at understanding and responding to different post-purchase events and have meaningful conversations that drive quality experiences and ultimately impact your revenue.

11 Post-Purchase Events That You Can Automate With Lateshipment.Com And Gorgias

One of the biggest challenges e-commerce merchants face when it comes to resolving post-purchase issues and queries is the lack of information that prevents quick and efficient issue resolution.

Automation takes care of the management of these areas. With the help of Tags to organize and Rules to automate within Gorgias, LateShipment.com helps you extend automation for 11 order delivery and returns events and extend your efforts to provide high-quality customer support to the most critical part of the customer journey — the post-purchase phase.

Event 1: Packages delivered with delays

Rule: Priority: Delayed Delivery

Rule description: Set a higher priority for tickets with the “Delayed Delivery” tag to ensure quicker resolution.

Rule benefit:

Set priority based on delay severity
Add internal notes for future reference
Automatically adjust the priority based on tags, allowing the team to focus on higher-priority tickets first

Suggested automations and actions:

Set up tags to automatically assigns a higher priority to tickets with the “Delayed Delivery” tag. This will ensure quicker resolution and put tickets on priority at the top of the queue..
Set up macros to notify customers when their order has been delivered late and apologize for the delay to reduce customer frustration.
Include solutions such as offering a discount or a gift card on your next purchase to compensate them for upcoming purchases in your macros to maintain a high level of customer satisfaction despite the delay.

Event 2: In transit with delays

Rule: Priority: In-Transit Delayed

Rule description: Auto-assign based on tags “In-Transit Delayed, Priority Medium”

Rule benefit:

Set response time SLA based on delay
Assign to specific agent/team based on delay
Automatically assign tickets to specific agents or teams based on tags to streamline handling

Suggested automations and actions:

Set up macros to proactively notify customers when their shipment is in transit with delays.
In your pre-made reponses, ensure you apologize for the delay and provide an updated estimated delivery date.
Set up tags that assign in-transit delay tickets to the right support agents or teams for faster and more effective resolution.
Automatically follow up with customers about the status of their in-transit shipments.

Such actions can help you keep customers updated and reduce the number of tickets you receive about the status of in-transit shipments.

Event 3: Failed Deliveries

Rule: Escalate to Tier 2 Support

Rule description: Escalate the ticket to a higher support level if delivery retries fail, ensuring faster issue resolution.

Rule benefit:

Escalate to a higher support level if retries fail
Trigger notifications to relevant parties for failed deliveries
Notify supervisors when tickets with failed deliveries are encountered, ensuring prompt attention

Suggested automations and actions:

Automate macros with potential solutions, such as scheduling a re-delivery, requesting updated delivery information, etc based on the reason behind the failed delivery
Create tags for escalating the ticket to a higher level support agent if delivery retries fail, ensuring faster issue resolution and prevention of unnecessary returns.
Guide customers through the resolution process by sending them order updates or allowing them to track their parcels

Event 4: Predicted Delays

Rule: Priority: Predicted Delay

Rule description: Assign a lower priority for predicted delay tickets to ensure timely resolution while managing expectations.

Rule benefit:

Update order status with predicted delay
Notify customers about the delay via email
Automatically send an email to customers to alert them about potential delays and offer support options

Suggested automations and actions:

Proactively communicate macros to the customer, informing them about the predicted delay, the reasons for it, and the new estimated delivery date.
Provide the customer with options in your macros to mitigate the impact of the predicted delay. This may include offering expedited shipping, issuing a partial refund, or allowing the customer to cancel their order.

Event 5: Packages Suspected Lost

Rule: Escalate for Lost Package Investigation

Rule description: Escalate tickets with “Lost Package” and “Investigation” tags to the team responsible for investigations.

Rule benefit:

Create tasks for agents to follow up on investigation
Update customer profile with lost package status
Automatically assign tickets with the “Lost Package” tag to the team handling package investigations

Suggested automations and actions:

Set up macros that acknowledge the issue and lets the customer know when they can expect to receive an update.
Assure customers of the investigation process and provide updates regularly to explain that you are actively investigating the situation.

Event 6: Lost/Damaged shipments

Rule: Send Survey After Resolution

Rule description: Automatically send a survey to customers after resolution of lost/damaged shipment tickets to gather feedback.

Rule benefit:

Auto-send satisfaction survey
Add the satisfaction score to the ticket

Suggested automations and actions:

Start by acknowledging and apologizing for the incident and assure the customer that you are actively working to fix the situation.
Offer and explain the detailed steps for compensation through detailed steps for resolution, including returns, replacements, or refunding their purchase.

Not just for delivery incidents, with the LateShipment.com and Gorgias integration, you can extend performing necessary actions in the order returns stage as well and display your commitment towards offering a superior post-purchase customer experience.

Event 7: Return Initiated

Rule: Set Reminders for Return Processing Milestones

Rule description: Automatically set reminders for key return processing milestones to ensure timely handling and communication.

Rule benefit: Automatically update inventory levels when a return is initiated to maintain accurate stock information.

Suggested automations and actions:

Macros that highlight the successful initiation of the return process and outline the next steps.
Update your FAQ or knowledge base with information on what customers need to know during the return process.
If your policy includes providing return shipping labels, automate the process of generating and sending a return label to the customer.

Event 8: Return Canceled

Rule: Remove Tags and Actions for Canceled Returns

Rule description: Automatically remove specific tags and actions when a return is canceled to keep the ticket organized.

Rule benefit:

Trigger re-approval process once the return is reactivated
Adjust return processing timeline based on delay
Automatically assign tickets for return reactivation cases to the team handling return approvals.

Suggested automations and actions:

Start your pre-made response by acknowledging the ticket and informing the customer that there has been a return cancellation request from their end.
Follow up with the message that the return has been successfully canceled.
Customize this rule to meet your specific needs. For example, add information about how customers can contact you if they have any questions or concerns.

Event 9: Return Received

Rule: Notify Warehouse for Return Receipt

Rule description: Automatically notify the warehouse or inventory team when items are received as part of a return

Rule benefit: Automatically update your order history with return receipt status to maintain accurate records

Suggested automations and actions:

Inform the customer that their return has been received and is being processed.
Follow up by letting them know that the resolution is in progress.
Provide an estimated timeframe for processing their return.

Event 10: Return Approved

Rule: Create Tasks for Refund/Exchange Initiation

Rule description: Automatically create follow-up tasks to initiate the refund or exchange process after return approval.

Rule benefit: Automatically assign tickets for refund/exchange initiation to the team handling these processes.

Suggested automations and actions:

Notify the customer that their return request has been approved and is being processed.
Update them with the next course of action (the process of initiating refunds or replacement) once the product inspection is complete.

Event 11: Return Rejected

Rule: Offer Alternatives for Rejected Returns

Rule description: Automatically offer alternative solutions to customers if their return request is rejected.

Rule benefit: Automatically offer alternative solutions to customers if their return request is rejected.

Suggested automations and actions:

Inform the customer that their return has been rejected.
Provide a clear and detailed explanation to the customer regarding why their return was rejected. Include any relevant policy information to support your statement.
Be sure to provide the customer with clear instructions on how to proceed, get their doubts or questions cleared, etc.

Overall, you can use automation to resolve post-purchase issues and queries with the LateShipment.com-Gorgias integration to improve their customer experience, reduce customer churn, and ultimately build customer relationships.

To take even quicker actions, here’s a free downloadable cheat sheet filled with different post-purchase events, suggested macros, appropriate actions that you need to take, etc.

Why Using Automation To Resolve Post-Purchase Issues And Queries Is A Good Idea

Post-purchase issues and queries can be a major pain point for businesses and customers. Customers want their orders delivered on time and in good condition, and businesses want to avoid customer churn. Using automation to resolve post-purchase issues and queries can help both parties.

Here are several benefits of using automation with the LateShipment.com-Gorgias integration:

Prioritize post-purchase issues and queries based on their severity and impact on the customer. This can help businesses resolve the most important issues first, which can improve customer satisfaction and reduce customer churn.
Automatically route tickets to the appropriate support team to automate customer notifications during each resolution process and improve workflow.
Provide customers with self-service options or to automatically escalate tickets to a higher support level if needed. This is a faster and more efficient way to resolve issues and ultimately helps to improve the customer experience.
Gain better visibility into their post-purchase issues and queries. This information can be used to identify trends and patterns, which can help businesses improve their delivery process and reduce the risk of future problems.
Automating repetitive tasks such as responding to common customer inquiries or sending order status updates. This can free up support representatives to focus on more complex issues and improve efficiency.

Macro Templates for Post-Purchase Events

Inside Gorgias, macros are pre-made responses you can use to respond to your customers faster. They can be customized with specific information, such as the customer’s name, order number, and product information.

Macros are useful if a lot of your customers tend to ask similar things or comment on similar topics and can help agents decrease response times by eliminating the need to repeatedly respond to customer inquiries and complaints.

Here are some macro templates formulated by the LateShipment.com and Gorgias integration to help you automate proactive responses to delivery issues and regular post-purchase communication such as delivery status notifications and return status emails.

Use these macros to bring in efficiency to your purchase communication and provide customers with a more consistent and personalized experience.

How You Can Set Up LateShipment.com and Gorgias Integration

Connecting your Gorgias account to your LateShipment.com account lets you seamlessly stay on top of delivery events that may require your attention. With the Gorgias integration, you can have tickets automatically created for delivery events that you select.

Any updates on the delivery status for a shipment in-transit for which a ticket has already been created, are made available on the same ticket. This ensures that support agents have all the information they need around a shipment in one place.

Getting started with connecting LateShipment.com with Gorgias can be done with simple steps.

‍ Login to your LateShipment.com account.

Click on the Settings icon.
Select Connect Helpdesk
On the “Select your Helpdesk” dropdown, pick “Gorgias”
Enter the email ID that you’ve connected with your Gorgias account.
Against the events for which you would like tickets created, turn the toggle “ON”
Hit Submit to complete the setup.

The post [Gorgias X Lateshipment.Com] Strengthening Customer Relationships With Post-Purchase Automation For 11 Key Events appeared first on Lateshipment.com.

Streamlining Your Checkout Page for success this Holiday Season

Raksna Anand — Wed, 18 Oct 2023 17:59:24 +0000

Did you know that 7 in 10 customers abandon their cart?(statista). The number one reason for cart abandonment is the additional charges levied during checkout. Streamlining your checkout processes and making sure that your checkout page provides as much information as it can,is a key factor to turning a potential customer into an actual customer. Especially with the holiday rush coming in, you need to optimize every single page.

Why Optimizing a Checkout Page is Important this Holiday Season?

The holiday season is when the cart abandonment rate is really high compared to the normal days. We have already established the fact that additional charges levied during payment is the number reason for this to happen.

Reasons to streamline your checkout page

Reduce cart abandonment rate
Increase transactions speed
Provide personalization
Offer convenience
Minimizing errors

The holiday season is when you receive a lot of traffic. Imagine converting all abandoned cart with a streamlined checkout page and we’ll show you how.

Streamlining Your Checkout Page for success

1. Provide Multiple Payment Options

Add multiple payment options during the checkout. For example, Visa, MasterCard, AMX, PayPal are some of the popular payment options that merchants offer. But Buy now, Pay Later (BNPL) payment model is now becoming increasingly popular among the Gen Z and the Millennials. During the holidays is when customers tend to spend a lot even over their budget. But brands should understand this and facilitate customers into buying products using the Buy Now Pay Later platform.

2. Display Accurate Shipping info

Presenting the shipping information again would allow customers to once again go through all the information that they’ve entered to avoid any mistakes. Mentioning the estimated delivery date also sets the delivery expectations right. This also can lead to higher conversion rates since the customer knows that their package would arrive within the timeline that they want. Specifying the shipping cost or free shipping would also be very helpful to customers into deciding if they should buy from you. Offering shipping optionally also gives the customer the freedom to choose when they want their product to be delivered. Usually a customer who wants the order to arrive early, would probably pay more for shipping. Specifying those details would be convenient for decision making.

3. Add Gifting Options

Enable gifting options for your customers, this is a very big boon in disguise. This allows you to offer gifting options to save time for customers, but at the same time it offers you a unique opportunity to enforce your branding elements into the wrapping papers as well, once again opening a channel for communication with the customers.

4. Add a ‘Personalized Notes’ option

Personalization is key, but personalization can also be established on checkout pages by allowing the customers to add personalized moods for their loved ones. This provides a positive customer experience for the customer.

5. Collect necessary information for retargeting

Make sure that you get all the key data that you need during checkout, like the email addresses, first name, last name, and the shipping address, the billing address, and contact information. Save the information and allow the customers to autofill the next time, making the checkout experience even more convenients . This saves time for your customers. This information that you get, make sure that you can use it for promotional purposes. Of course, it’s not right to use a customer’s information without their permission, but with their permission, you can use their contact information to send them targeted personalized emails and SMSs.

6. Add Gift card option in your checkout page

Adding a gift card option leans more towards profiting the brand rather than the customer. It’s about selling gift cards and setting the stage for customer retention. Speaking from the customer’s side, gift cards are an easy way to purchase a certain value of credits from your store to give them to allowed ones. This is a free word-of-mouth promotion for your brand as well.

7. Display Shopping cart summary with discounts

Cart abandonment rates are really high, especially during the checkout phase, when customers see additional charges when they make the way to pay for the order. It’s imperative that you show the summary of your shopping cart along with the items that they’ve ordered with all the shipping charges and the taxes and any other extra charge that you’re going to levy on your customers. This sets the customer expectations right and avoids unnecessary cart abandonment. It also reduces the number of returns if you specify precisely the items that the customer has added in the cart.

Anatomy of a Checkout Page

A checkout page should contain the following

Cart summary
Addiptnap chagers levered
Gift card options
Gift wrapping options
Refund and return policy link
Total amount saved on coupons and discounts
Shipping details – Estimated delivery date, shipping charges
Multiple payment options
Personalized recommendations
Trust badges from various card providers
Customer support information
Shipping optionality

Final Word

Make sure that you streamline the checkout process and make it really convenient for your customers. Provide as many options that you can in that single page. Ensure that it is optimized to mobiles since most payments are made through mobiles. that they are compatible with wallet payment methods also. But remember that the customer journey does not end with the sale button. That’s when the post-purchase customer journey starts. Optimize your post-purchase customer journey for maximum impact on retention.

The post Streamlining Your Checkout Page for success this Holiday Season appeared first on Lateshipment.com.

Shipping as a marketing tool: Drive delight this holiday season

Raksna Anand — Thu, 12 Oct 2023 10:30:55 +0000

Ever thought of ecommerce shipping as a marketing tool? E-commerce brands often focus on various channels during the holiday season like marketing, website design, product variations, emails and social media. We’re here to say that e-commerce shipping is also a great marketing tool that e-commerce brands should consider.

E-commerce shipping is the last part of the pre-purchase customer journey before the buy button is clicked. Holiday buyers look at the shipping options and buy their gifts. Entice buyers with shipping and we’ll teach you how.

Ecommerce Shipping: The Ultimate Marketing tool

1. Free shipping, duh

90% of customers would shop online more often if free shipping is offered. (savemycent.com)

Free shipping would

Improve conversion rate,

Reduce cart abatement rates,
Positive customer experience.

We understand that every business cannot offer free shipping. In that case, we suggest that you do the following

Offer free shipping above a certain value,

Offer free shipping on certain products only
Offer free shipping only to members or email subscribers to make them feel exclusive

2. Ecommerce Shipping optionality

With shipping optionality in the play, brands offer freedom to customers to choose what they want in terms of shipping. There are many types of ecommerce shipping options that are trending right now.

Expedited shipping – Expedited shipping is an umbrella term which has many options, which are two-day delivery, same-day delivery, and overnight shipping. 54% of consumers under the age of 25 state that same-day shipping is crucial when shopping online. (Walker Sanders)

Many customers who opt for expedited shipping often are willing to pay extra for faster shipping options. These expedited shipping solutions are practically a way to reduce cart abandonment rates and increase conversion rates.

Local delivery – Local delivery is when a product is delivered from your local store to the customer’s doorstep. It is a great option for brands to acquire local customers.

International shipping

Eco-friendly shipping options – Gen Z and the millennials are obsessed with sustainability and knowing good for the earth. Eco-friendly shipping options opt for biodegradable packaging, carbon offset programs, and recyclable packages. Often, these eco-friendly shipping methods take much time to reach the customer as they opt for ground shipping. But customers are still considering eco-friendly shipping in order to save the world.

A Statista study says that product packaging accounts for the greatest portion of greenhouse gas emissions in the e-commerce industry. There are options to increase shipping efficiency and reduce unwanted packaging boxes,

Pack orders efficiently,

Let customers know that you are practicing sustainable shipping methods,

Allow customers to offset carbon at checkout,

Consolidate orders,

Promote the use of reusing and recycling packages,

Opt for eco-friendly shipping and fulfillment partners,
Reduce returns.

3. Gifting options

With the holiday season, festive cheers would be everywhere. Even the brand’s website would be decorated with festive elements to set the holiday mood. Why not offer that gift-wrapping option in your e-commerce shipping as well? This saves enormous time for your customers and time is everything during the holiday season. Your customers or people in general would want to spend their time with their loved ones. You are supporting that by reducing the time for them to wrap gifts. Provide multiple gift-wrapping options in your ecommerce shipping.

4. Personalized notes

A personalized note is also a time-saving element which you can use as a part of your shipping process. Gifts are often bought from e-commerce brands and this customizable personal note when given as an option would add a personal touch to your entire product and improve customer satisfaction.

5. Estimated delivery date

8 out of 10 shoppers agree that the more valuable their package, the more important it is to have an accurate EDD. (Forbes)

Customers are often anxious about their products being delivered on time. Especially during the holiday season, the anxiety peaks. In order to alleviate this anxiety, estimated delivery dates should be specified.

Mentioning the holiday shipping deadlines would also be helpful in this case, as it gives a real-time scenario of what’s going on in the shipping industry as well. Shipping deadline is the latest date in which you can ship your packages and send them their way to the customers to reach them on time. In order to reduce anxiety or obliviousness, brands can offer shipping.

6. Shipping cost calculator

Factors to consider:

Dimension

Weight

Destination

Type of shipping
Supply chain disruptions
Shipping deadlines

Various shipping costs for various types of shipping services could be displayed in order to give a real-time image of how much shipping costs for the customer. A customer on a budget would be able to get a clear idea of what type of service he or she wants.

7. Customisable packaging

Oreo’s ColorFilled campaign is the best example to depict how important customizable packaging is. Oreo ran a campaign called the ColorFilled campaign where customers had the liberty to choose packaging of their own and they even designed packaging of their own. Oreo announced that this would be a limited edition. Oreo being Oreo, their fan base felt crazy and ordered a lot of products from Oreo. This campaign was a huge hit. Customizable packaging is one competitive advantage you can use in terms of ecommerce shipping to further nudge customers into converting.

Customer journey after the buy button

The customer journey does not end after the buy button. The phase after the ‘buy button click’ is called the post-purchase phase. Brands often overlook the post-purchase part. Right from the mail which says ‘your order has been placed’ to delivering the product, sets the stage for retention.

Retaining old customers costs less than acquiring new ones. Shipping happens through 3rd party logistics partners. Brands should assume responsibility for any shipping mishaps even though they’re not responsible for anything which happens after the product has been shipped. Taking up responsibility offers a very big competitive advantage in terms of offering last-minute delivery delight.

Final word

While e-commerce brands do a lot of things to drive traffic to their website, the elements in the website clearly play an important role in pushing the customers towards converting. E-commerce brands often offer discounts, spin-the-wheel offers, customized coupons, and gift bundles in order to lure customers to convert. But shipping is the last touch point or the last element that you can add to further improve the conversion rate. When customers find the shipping Options they want and when the package arrives the way they want, customers click the buy button.

The post Shipping as a marketing tool: Drive delight this holiday season appeared first on Lateshipment.com.

Key Ecommerce Personalization areas to focus on

Raksna Anand — Tue, 10 Oct 2023 04:21:50 +0000

Personalization has become a norm rather than just being something that e-commerce brands do to just sway customers. Ecommerce Personalization has become just more than that in this bustling world.

66% of consumers want businesses to understand their specific requirements and expectations. (Salesforce).

77% of consumers have chosen, recommended, or paid more for a brand that provides a personalized experience (Forrester).

Why is Ecommerce personalization important?

Better user experience: More and more relevance your customer finds in your brand and in your products through personalization, stronger the relationship you can cement with your customers.

Increase AOV: The holiday season is one period in which customers keep their wallet open and they would want to spend on their gifts. Even though inflation is a major factor this year and that it’s been influencing people spending their money on products, people are still ready to spend a lot on holidays this year what more ways do you need to increase your average order value rather than personalizing?

Competitive advantage: Personalization could be a key differentiator in setting you apart from the crowd. Through Enhanced Customer Satisfaction and Customer Engagement with your website, lets you collect a lot of data from what the pattern of the customer. This gives you uninterrupted access to data that you can use on customers to re-target them.

Upselling and cross-selling opportunity: Personalization is a great way to upsell and cross-sell products from your website to a customer who is just browsing through your website.

Given the importance of personalization, just personalizing doesn’t cut it anymore. Hyper-personalization is the way. And let’s take a look at how you can create a seamless but exceptional e-commerce personalization by hyper-personalization.

Key Ecommerce Personalization areas to focus on:

Search personalization

Site search is 1.8x more effective at producing conversions. Why not personalize your site search property?

You can start by doing the following things. (Most of these techniques work better if you have a good customer segmentation game).

Boost popular brands and items.
Tailor results by gender-based categories.
Highlight high-value items.
Customize results by user preferences.
Display popular gift ideas or gift guides

Recommended products personalization

Personalization is hard, especially during the holiday season. The customer might have a big list of gifts that has to be shopped on your website. Say for example, if a customer is browsing a hoodie to be gifted during the holiday season and that they found the hoodie after various personal recommendations. But what if the customer has moved to another product which is in their long list of gifts and is searching for a different product now? In this case, the e-commerce brand must use various indicators to change the personalized product recommendations in this case. This in turn makes it very convenient for customers to browse through your website and this will help with your conversion rate.

A Branded tracking page could be a game-changer. On an average, a person visits a tracking page six to eight times in order to track their package. If your brand offers a branded tracking page, this improves brand recall and produces an opportunity to upsell and cross-sell your products. With personalization in the picture of upselling and cross-selling products based on previous customer history, it creates a separate revenue channel.

Quick tip: Try prioritizing products in the recommendations that have offers or products that are on sale to increase the conversion rate.

Ways to present personalized recommendations: Best sellers, trending, bundles offered with the product being viewed, what’s new, recently viewed.

Nearly 70% of customers revisit a website several times before they make their purchase decision. (Forbes) In this case, if you offer a tab that says recently viewed, this influences the customer to recall the product and this in turn will help in conversion.

Personalized marketing

Social media is one of the top channels through which people search for holiday gift ideas. Now with the advent of Meta Custom Audience and E-mail marketing custom audiences, you can create different customer segments and target them through personalized ads. This remains a great advantage for brands to target different audiences with different products, different messages and different creatives too.

Retargeting through personalization: 97% of people who visit your website do not buy anything from you the first time. Retargeting is a good way to bring in those customers who left after one session. Retargeting can also be personalized by leveraging data and analyzing what the customer viewed. This can be done through social media, emails and SMS marketing. when you retarget a customer, it is not only essential that you personalize the recommendations for them, but it is also important to personalize the coupons in order to get them back to your website. You should know what trigger works for a particular segment of customers. If a customer knows that the particular product they viewed is on a limited offer deal or is now offered with a coupon they can redeem it and buy the product. These customers will be more interested in coming back to your website and converting.

Quick tip: Include social proof in product pages to decrease the bounce rates.

Final word

The more personalized your website, the more impact it will have on the conversion rate. One size fits all personalization technique doesn’t work out anymore. Many brands really go out there and put so much effort into converting their customers and giving them a very good experience and you cannot compromise on personalizing the customer experience. Personalization is the future.

We live in a relationship economy rather than a transactional economy. Customers expect a brand to establish a relationship with them and personalization is one good way to appeal to the customers, not only increasing sales but leaving a remarkable image on the consumer’s mind.

The post Key Ecommerce Personalization areas to focus on appeared first on Lateshipment.com.