Everyone knows that untracked parcels result in more ‘lost’ parcels and customer delivery queries, but it’s hard to quantify exactly what a difference tracking can make, but Stephensons Online who recently moved to global distribution specialist Air Business have managed to reduce their customer delivery questions by 23% which is a pretty staggering number.
“We moved to Air Business as it has enabled us to offer tracked postage across the globe at an achievable cost. It also has the flexibility to adapt to each bespoke area of needs in our complex business. After seeing our customer delivery queries reduce by almost a quarter within just two months of on-boarding, I am certain we have selected the best delivery partner.”
– Barry Tong, Managing Director of Stephensons Online
Using an untracked postal service with its previous distribution supplier, Stephensons Online was receiving an increasing number of daily customer delivery queries regarding orders from its health and beauty website solretail.co.uk. This was exerting a growing amount of pressure on its internal customer service team who had no tracking information to respond to these with.
Air Business devised a bespoke solution for Stephensons Online encompassing its whole range of e-commerce distribution services; from UK and International untracked and tracked postal services through to premium courier delivery. Of critical importance was that Air Business was able to provide these services within the client’s budget.
Air Business integrated its enhanced tracked shipping solution ProShipper with Stephenson Online’s order management system. Through this integration, solretail.co.uk customers receive branded pro-active email and carrier SMS notifications on the status of their deliveries
The results of this have been immediate. Between June, when it went live with Air Business, and August this year Stephensons Online reported a 23% reduction in customer delivery queries for its SolRetail website.
It doesn’t necessarily follow that all online retailers will see the same reduction in customer service queries, but if one retailer can reduce them by a quarter simply through tracking and top quality email and SMS messaging it would seem reasonable that all retailers would see a significant reduction.
Automation is the key here, especially if you’re selling on marketplaces. No one wants to cut and paste email addresses and telephone numbers from sales channels to carrier bookings and it’s also worth remembering that the tracking numbers from the carriers should also be copied back to the marketplace as they display the tracking information to buyers again cutting down on customer queries.
Tracking isn’t always affordable for the lowest cost products, but with Black Friday and Christmas this year once again to be predicted to be the busiest ever, perhaps it’s time to review your shipping profile and decide which products tracking is affordable for and ensuring that customers get notifications both at the point of shipping and during transit direct from the courier.
One Response
We had very few delivery problems via Royal mail, but having moved onto the 2D bar code tracking system, customers that complained of non delivery have dropped considerably.
For the few that still do complain, once we point out Royal Mail has tracked the item as being delivered, most seem to locate the item.
So yes, a big thumbs up to tracking….