As Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica major private data leak has clearly demonstrated, waiting to deal with customers’ issues until the very time they strike back is risky and highly counterproductive. Never wait until customers are disappointed: customer service and care must start way before people are unsatisfied with their experience. This is also true for online shopping and their delivery to customers’ doors or parcel lockers.
“DM us please” has become a recurring post-delivery failure mantra on main e-tailers’ and carriers’ social network accounts. Angry customers are posting their dissatisfaction with delivery experiences every day and online sellers are genuinely trying hard to establish a dialogue with these customers and handle their cases in the best possible manner ex post.
Yet dealing with disappointed customers, particularly after the delivery failed, is not only costly in the short run in terms of customer service but also in the medium and long run in terms of reputation and trust. While e-commerce transactions are growing at a double-digit rate thanks to ever more attractive online shopping platforms with millions of products and deals at a single click of more than two billion e-shoppers today, mishandling the delivery experience can jeopardize future business growth. This can both result in lower average shopping purchase values or conversion rates, both being key metrics of successful e-commerce development.
So why are bad delivery experiences mostly handled once the problems with the parcel appear?
At UPIdo, we believe this is closely related to the way tracking solutions are provided by carriers to e-shoppers and e-tailers. Tracking systems have been established to provide customers with end-to-end visibility of what already happened, or put in other words, are focused on providing visibility to both e-shoppers and e-sellers on the past rather than on the future. Today any e-shopper can increasingly “benefit” from a myriad of operational details on how her parcel is moving across the complexities of postal supply chains and logistics’ networks. However, she has no visibility on the likelihood of a delivery failure or delay. She is simply left with posting her disappointment on social networks, an angry call to customer service or just giving up future purchases. This is not what we can call a satisfactory state neither for e-shoppers nor carriers and even less for e-tailers.
A decisive step towards solving this problem is to continuously assess the probability of a final delivery failure or delay along the tracking events sequence. UPIdo’s tracking with artificial intelligence is designed with this very purpose.
It can scan and analyse any sequence of on-going tracking events and dynamically inform about what customers and parcels are most likely to be confronted to a delivery failure in real-time conditions. This means that both e-sellers and carriers can map and anticipate where the delivery problems will arise before they actually happen. They can better manage this risk. And, critically, this also means that the customer service can now become proactive, anticipate a conversation with unsatisfied customers instead of simply being left to angry voices.
In conclusion, at UPIdo, we believe tracking solutions must be shifted towards anticipative visibility focused on predicting what delivery transactions will fail before delivery failures actually happen, instead of only providing a picture of what already happened in a parcel’s complex journey towards the e-shopper.
In conclusion, at UPIdo, we believe tracking solutions must be shifted towards anticipative visibility focused on predicting what delivery transactions will fail before delivery failures actually happen, instead of only providing a picture of what already happened in a parcel’s complex journey towards the e-shopper. UPIdo’s artificial intelligence empowers e-shoppers, e-sellers and carriers with end-to-end predictability of failures along any tracked delivery process. By so-doing, dealing with delivery problems before customers start complaining becomes possible and a new harmony between all parts in any e-commerce transaction can be established. E-shoppers, e-sellers and carriers can achieve peace-of-mind together.
Please email us if you are interested in testing and applying UPIdo’s delivery failure tracking with artificial intelligence.