Most brands fail to meet customers’ expectations during the post-purchase journey

A seamless delivery process is crucial to achieving the smooth post-purchase journey your customers demand. Flawless delivery journeys, however, aren’t always possible. With global events like supply chain disruptions and even mundane complications like warehousing delays, many elements are out of your control and can stand in the way of quick delivery. 

Despite this, your customers will still hold you responsible for their delivery experiences. The key to winning their hearts in these challenging circumstances is to reclaim control over the delivery journey with clear, consistent, and accurate communication.

Today’s customers are fickle, and the stakes couldn't be higher for getting customer service right. With an abundance of choices in the e-commerce space, 80% of consumers reported that they would switch brands because of poor customer service experiences. 

Once you’ve earned a customer’s trust, however, they want to remain loyal. 

93% of customers indicate that they make repeat purchases with companies that offer excellent customer service. 68% of consumers would even pay more for products and services from brands they are confident will provide good customer service. 

With 56% of customers finding the post-checkout experience underwhelming, making sure yours is perfect is vital to growing your brand through customer loyalty. 

Each of your teams is under pressure to ensure customers have great post-checkout experiences. Here are some tips on how to help them contribute to a seamless post-checkout process and reduce their workloads. 

#1 Streamline delivery journeys with your logistics teams

Your customer service teams might be top of mind when it comes to customer experience. But your logistics teams are front and center in your mission to create seamless delivery journeys for customers. 

Ensure that your logistics teams can access standardized real-time data. Data gathered from carriers and warehouses may reach you in different languages, with different event names for each point in the delivery journey. That makes it difficult and time-consuming to make sense of this information on your own.

Instead, you can provide your logistics team with tools that give them instant visibility over your deliveries, so they can make quick decisions with confidence. Make sure your solution enables them to make sophisticated analyses for insights into critical functions, including SLA compliance, location-based performance, or capacity during peak periods. This way, they can have the necessary information to choose the right carriers for every delivery circumstance. 

Customer ratings are another important factor that your logistics teams can use to make better decisions for your brand. Give them access to this data to get insights into issues that aren't captured in tracking data but affect customer happiness. 

For example, customers might experience bad deliveries if carriers leave parcels in locations that are inconvenient for customers to access. Without customer ratings, you would only see this as a completed delivery and miss out on an opportunity to improve your services.

#2 Help your e-commerce experts upsell with engaging delivery notifications your customers will love 

The post-purchase journey is not just important for building customer relationships. For your e-commerce experts, it can be a great avenue to push sales and drive repeat purchases. 

To achieve that, you can keep your customers informed and engaged with integrated tracking pages. Not only will this tool help reduce WISMO (where is my order) tickets for your customer service teams, it will also quickly satisfy your customers– 69% of whom will attempt to resolve issues on their own before contacting customer service.  

That’s because branded tracking pages give your customers instant access to useful and detailed information about their deliveries. Customer anxieties are high during the delivery period so having information at their fingertips can go a long way to reassure them.

If you provide them with a personalized link, you can seamlessly bring them to a page that displays all their order information, delivery updates, and even relevant product suggestions to promote cross-selling. By keeping this in languages your customers speak, you also give your tracking page the personalized touch that 71% of consumers expect from your business.

#3 Tackle delivery issues quickly and effectively with your customer service teams

Today’s customers are impatient. They want their answers accurately and quickly, with over half reporting that they would hang up after just 5-10 minutes on hold. 

To address this, you can equip your customer service teams with the right tools that empower them to respond proactively during the delivery process and resolve issues before they cause your customers any frustration. 

Sophisticated customer service dashboards–which allow your teams to flag particular orders and create internal alerts when SLAs are not being met–will be a game-changer for your team. With these, they can screen delivery data for potential delays and work with carriers to resolve issues before customers notice. 

This will simultaneously reduce their workloads and increase customer satisfaction, a win for both parties!

Delays are frustrating, but they can also be opportunities to show customers you care, and establish deeper trust in your brand. 

In these stressful times, keeping your customers in the loop and reassuring them that you're able to handle delivery challenges can impress them instead. At the same time, offering tokens like discounts can help temper frustrations and encourage repeat sales.

And let’s not forget the final step in the delivery journey. Successful deliveries are exciting moments. Celebrate them with your customers and thank them for their purchases to conclude their buying journey. Timing is everything so use this golden opportunity where customers are most excited to request for ratings that boost your NPS scores.

Give your teams the support they need with dedicated post-purchase platforms

Getting the delivery journey right can be complicated since there are multiple teams involved. To ensure a flawless delivery process, support your teams with the right technology that helps keep the logistics data they need at their fingertips. With a dedicated post-purchase platform, your logistics, e-commerce, and customer service teams will be able to manage customer journeys faster, and more intuitively. It can also reduce pressures on your teams and increase customer satisfaction.

Learn more about how getting the post-purchase experience right can help drive CLV for your brand with our comprehensive e-book. Download it here!