Marketplaces like Amazon have revolutionized the customer experience. Kept in a well-defined environment, customers experience a seamless purchasing journey. Through every step of the journey, customers receive curated notifications, embedded tracking pages, and easy-to-access customer service all supported by marketplace platforms.  

This is great for consumers, but for brands, the exceptional customer journeys enabled by marketplaces are causing skyrocketing customer service expectations–a difficult and expensive challenge to overcome. 

Both brands and consumers benefit from purchases made on merchants’ own webshops. For consumers–88% of whom prefer purchasing directly from brands–it means exclusive access to a full selection of the latest products, better prices, and more promotions. For brands, keeping customers in their own environment helps them build customer loyalty, increase sales with upselling or cross-selling, and eliminate distractions from competitors.

However, the problem is that brands often fail to provide consumers with adequate visibility over the delivery process through their own webshops. After checkout, customers are often frustrated by the inability to track deliveries and lagging customer service responses. 

56% of customers report being generally disappointed with post-purchase experiences. And for 80% of buyers, a single bad customer service experience would deter them from making a repeat purchase from the same brand. That means a failure to take charge of your delivery processes could lead to your business losing customers to marketplaces or worse, competitors.

How to build an effective customer service strategy with logistics data

Data is central to a successful business strategy. Most businesses already manage their performance marketing data, customer shopping data, and more but what many merchants neglect is logistics data.

Leveraging this can be transformative for your business. Logistics data is essential for your logistics teams to monitor and sustain carrier performance, and to make the best carrier choices for your business. But on top of this, it can also empower your customer service teams by reducing inbound inquiries and enabling them to effectively and swiftly resolve any WISMO inquiries that do arise.  

Managing your logistics data, however, is no easy task. Each delivery journey produces multiple data points for every event in the delivery journey, swamping businesses with an overwhelming amount of data. And, to make matters worse, each carrier records delivery data differently. Businesses might find themselves with information in different languages, time zones, and formats. Some carriers might also offer simple reports whilst others provide granular visibility over the delivery journey, all with potentially different event names, further complicating things.  

From data to actionable insights

Just having access to your logistics data is not enough. To deliver improvements for your team and customers, you’ll need to be able to make sense of it. Building a data solution to handle and standardize billions of data points is a stressful task that could take years and distract merchants from their main business.

Instead, engaging a provider experienced in the data, e-commerce, and logistics fields could help your brand save on resources. By taking advantage of teams committed to crafting the most efficient and comprehensive logistics data solutions, you'll have access to dedicated customer service support and sophisticated analytics to help you build better post-checkout  experiences for your brand.

In today’s climate of rising competition and customer expectations, great customer experience can be a make-or-break differentiator for brands. By taking charge of the post-purchase experience, merchants could stand to increase their CLV,  streamline operations, save costs, and, ultimately get ahead in the e-commerce game. 

Download our e-book “Complete Guide to Driving Customer Lifetime Value for E-commerce Brands” and learn how you can give your brand an edge in today’s competitive e-commerce marketplace.