The Snocksulting Podcast is a leading business podcast for e-commerce nerds and entrepreneurs, hosted by Johannes Kliesch, Managing Director and Founder of SNOCKS, and Romy Riffel, Manager of SNOCKS. The show welcomes esteemed e-commerce experts to share their success stories and insights around current industry topics such as online marketing, Amazon FBA, and more.

Our Founder and Chief Commercial Officer, Dana von der Heide, was invited to share her thoughts on delivery experience best practices and logistics optimization.

Here are the key takeaways for e-commerce and DTC leaders from the podcast:

Parcel tracking data only helps customers to track their shipment - true or false? 

The short answer is: False. 

With parcel tracking data, you can create unique delivery experiences that inform your customers about the status of their shipments and reach the full potential of customer loyalty and upselling.

Routing your customers to branded tracking pages instead of carrier websites is essential to this strategy. Imagine the customer's experience on a random carrier tracking page: irrelevant or cryptic information, missing links to their ordered items; plus, your customer is effectively moving outside your brand environment. 

On a branded tracking page embedded in the web shop, your customer does not only have all their order and tracking information at their fingertips - you as a merchant have the chance to upsell and cross-sell without investing in another acquisition channel. Your customer returns to your webshop voluntarily, which is a unique opportunity to build brand loyalty without spending a marketing dollar. Upselling and cross-selling work particularly well for products that complement or categorically build on what the customer has just purchased. You can push product recommendations based on the purchase history through dynamic web banners. 

Another option are delivery notification emails containing the purchase line items and recommending specific products through dynamic banner ads. A sideline mentioned by the Snocksulting experts: the opening rate for these tracking notification emails is a whopping 60-80% - besides the upselling potential, this presents a remarkable brand-building opportunity.

What can merchants do when things go wrong in the delivery experience?

By default, you're running into trouble when things go wrong in the delivery experience, or? What happens, for example, if a package is delivered to a neighbor and the customer was never informed? 

Snocksulting expert advice: an advanced notification strategy can help, because proactively informing customers where their parcel is, makes them very happy.

But once a parcel is late or missing, your customers most likely reach out to your hotline or service chat. This records as a WISMO (Where is my order?) inquiry and will take your team's time and effort to resolve. 

The good news is that if your customer service teams have full access to parcel tracking data, they can help customers in this sensitive phase. A customer's experience when anticipating their order defines brand loyalty and determines repurchases. 

Dana's advice: With a Delivery Experience Platform that offers complete transparency into all shipping processes, your service teams can build functional watch lists of parcels with identifiable high-risk problems such as last mile delays. Customer service can then proactively reach out to affected customers. With an apology email and a voucher promising x% off on the next order, you have an excellent chance to turn the delivery experience around despite the negative starting point.

More potential in risk mitigation of the delivery experience lies in tighter monitoring of shipping processes that involve high-value items - for example, tech products, jewelry, or designer clothes. Another option is to build designated watch lists for high-value shoppers, brand ambassadors, or high-frequency shoppers. 

And speaking of WISMO, the Snocksulting experts state that full transparency for both sides - the customer and the internal teams - can reduce WISMO inquiries from initially 15% down to only 1%. E-commerce leaders should look at their customer service portal and identify the types of issues service teams are most confronted with - this is where a massive cost-saving potential lies. 

How many carriers should e-commerce vendors work with to make customers happy? 

There's no magic number. The selection of carriers depends on what you ship (type, size, value), the volume of shipments, your shipping countries, regions, and of course, your customers' preferences. 

Dana advises giving customers a certain level of freedom to select a carrier and the speed of delivery. At the same time, customers should not be overwhelmed by too many selection options. Here it is best practice to leverage pre-selection algorithms based on the contents of the shopping cart. Customers will then only be presented with a comfortable number of carriers that won't stifle their conversion to hit "order".

Dana advises merchants to look at their contracts with logistics and carrier partners: With a Delivery Experience Platform that offers logistics analytics, you can monitor how well service level agreements (SLAs) are fulfilled. This information allows you to keep an eye on carrier performance, optimize carrier selection and negotiate better contracts with your partners as you grow and have more sales volume. 

My NPS scores are underwhelming. How can I bring them up?

NPS scores ultimately reflect your customer's experience throughout their purchase journey. Have you invested heavily into this experience, but NPS results are still lacking behind? Are you struggling with a low response rate for your NPS queries? The Snocksulting experts emphasize that the right timing is key to success.

If you send NPS query emails by default 6 or 7 days after the parcel shipment date some customers might not give feedback as they already received their parcel 3 or 4 days ago. The most emotional stage where they are willing to pass great feedback is over. Other customers might not have received their parcel yet as it is stuck someplace or was not collected yet from a parcel locker. These customers are inclined to give negative feedback and express disappointments via email, which will keep your customer service teams very busy.

So how do you get the timing right? With a Delivery Experience Platform like Parcel Perform, merchants know precisely when a parcel is delivered to the customer - not to the neighbor. You will know when it is in the hands of the customer. Building triggers based on this knowledge empowers you to send out NPS requests at precisely the right time. The Snocksulting experts state that this helped them increase their NPS feedback rate by over 20%. 

And speaking of the right timing, the cheering effect - celebrating the new purchase with your customer via email - is affecting brand loyalty at length.

The Snocksulting experts conclude.

Successful merchants invest in consumer-centric delivery experience strategies that strengthen their brand value and empower them to delight increasingly demanding customers. By leveraging parcel tracking data for customer communication and improving internal processes, DTC merchants can reduce their WISMO inquiries and costs.

Do you want to hear all advice given by Johannes, Romy, and Dana? Listen to the full podcast episode here. The podcast is available on Apple and Spotify in German.