Today, just delivering shipments fast is not enough. You need to look at other factors to create a high-positive customer experience for your logistics company.
In this article, we’re getting into why you need to bother about providing great customer service and what you can do to improve your logistics customer experience dramatically.
What is the role of customer service in logistics?
Delivering high-quality customer service and creating a great experience for your customers makes you the go-to logistics company for your customers. Basically, customers don’t want to make any more effort than they need to, but if you offer substandard service and don’t deliver a good customer experience, you’re forcing them to make the effort of hunting for a better logistics company. If you serve up a bad customer experience, then next time they’re looking for a logistics company your name would certainly come to the top of their minds, but not for the right reasons. You’ll be ranked high on their list of ‘Companies to not do business with’.
Create great experiences, though, and these customers will stick with you for a long time, thus increasing your customer lifetime value and the returns you earn on your marketing spend.
If you deliver high-quality customer service, especially proactive customer service, and build a strong relationship with your customers, they’re going to feel much better about you. This would make them far more likely to oblige when you ask them for a review or a customer testimonial that you could display on your website, social media pages, and your other digital properties.
This social proof displayed on your digital properties shows other potential customers that you’re the real deal and makes them feel better about doing business with you. It’s one of the most powerful marketing and sales weapons that you could have in your business arsenal.
Customers love the feeling of telling their friends and family about businesses that will give them a great experience. It basically makes them feel like experts. So delivering exceptional customer experiences will definitely cause your customers to recommend your logistics company to their friends and family. Also, if you provide proper logistics costs for your services, your client base will be even more inclined to your company.
But, the converse is also true here. If you deliver a particularly bad experience, your customers will still be telling the people in their circles about you, just the praises you were hoping that they would shower upon you would turn into warnings against doing business with you.
How do you provide excellent customer service in logistics?
Customers have lots of queries about their shipments at weird hours of the day (and the night), and you need to be ready with answers, shooting them out as soon as the questions flow in.
So, what do you do? Keep your customer support team working 24/7? Yea, that’s probably not the best idea….
Maybe you’re thinking about hiring more agents and making them work in shifts. But that isn’t really scalable, or necessary, for that matter. Your best move here is to get yourself an AI-powered chatbot through which around 80% of your customers’ questions are answered in real-time, without needing your agents to be online.
How easy is it for your customers to schedule their shipments? What about tracking or canceling them? Do their need to open up your website, log in to your portal and then do that? Could you find an easier way to do that?
What if you just allowed them to do all that on a messaging app like WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger? That would reduce your customer effort substantially and improve your logistics company’s customer experience dramatically.
When you use an AI-powered chatbot deployed on WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Telegram, etc. you can make this happen with great ease.
If you have a Shopify website, then adding this Microsoft Dynamics integration will help you automate your logistics and post purchase experiences.
The Redefining Final Mile Delivery in the Age of the Customer study conducted a survey of 200 supply chain professionals. Around 72% of these supply chain professionals stated that it is critical to provide better access to data regarding in-transit shipments across their customer service, operations, and packers & movers teams.
One of the biggest obstacles to customer-centricity in the logistics industry is customer data is stored in multiple databases and that the supply chain businesses do not have sufficient system integration across their channels.
Breaking down data silos and integrating systems is going to be one of the most effective ways to improve customer experience in supply chain businesses.
Supply chain companies need to focus heavily on condition monitoring and data logging. Especially if your logistics company focuses on transporting critical items like medicines and medical equipment or perishable items like food, you need to have and use software that can monitor and track temperature, humidity, and other factors that are relevant to the transportation of these items. You don’t want to deal with high levels of spoilage or wastage, so you need to use the right technology that can help you avoid it as far as possible. Several logistics and transportation companies are implementing Mobile Device Management solutions that help their business and their on-field teams to leverage prominent features such as location tracking, secure content and file sharing, instant remote troubleshooting and much more to simplify their operations, increase productivity and in turn deliver an improved end-customer experience.
You want your customers to be able to reach you on whichever channel they prefer using, but you also want them to have the ability to switch across channels seamlessly, without needing to start the interaction fro scratch as soon as they switch channels. You need to make it possible for your customers to continue from where they left off on the previous channel.
Let’s take customer service as an example. You want to make it possible for your customers to talk to your bot and your agents on the channels they prefer. But there are times when they’re going to want to switch across channels. 89% of customers report that they get rather frustrated when they have to repeat their queries, so your bot and your agents need to have context about the previous conversations.
At Engati, we make this possible by stitching together conversations with the same user across 14+ channels so that your bot and your agents always have context about past conversations and interactions, allowing you to create an omnichannel customer experience for your logistics company.
You’ve got an enormous amount of data available about your customers, it’s time for you to look at it in a closer manner. Maybe you can’t physically go through all this data. But technology can come to your aid here.
Use AI-powered systems to crunch the data and present valuable insights that you can use to get into your customers’ heads and understand what their actual problems are and what you can do to solve them.
Intuition is powerful, but you need to look at data if you want to serve your customers in the best way possible.
This is especially important for your supply chain and logistics company when you’re operating across and have customers in multiple regions and countries. You need to be able to serve your customers in their own language, otherwise they’ll just not want to do business with you at all. You’ve got to make them feel comfortable doing business with you, but you also need to be able to scale it up. We’ve got you covered on this front too. Our chatbots can interact with your customers and serve them in 50+ languages, ensuring that you always deliver a high-quality, personalized customer experience.
One of the most annoying thing about customer service is the routing. People don’t want to keep jumping across your customer service representatives all day, going through 17 different agents till they can find one that can handle the issue they are facing.
What you need to do is auto-route the query to the correct agent the first time itself.
When you get a complex query coming in, let your bot first deal with it, and if it cannot handle the query, it will intelligently route the query to the appropriate agent, based on the context of the message. This ensures that your customers do not have to jump across agents and that they get their queries answered in a faster manner.
Creating a great customer experience is not just your customer service and marketing team’s job. Everyone has to get involved. You need to make customer-centricity a core driving force and a vital value in your organization. Everyone should see how their function impacts the overall customer experience and you need to get the entire organization to buy-in on creating a great experience for your customers.
This might not be obvious, but it’s a vital part of your customer experience. If you don’t create a positive employee experience, you can’t really expect to be able to deliver a great customer experience either. They go hand-in-hand. Make sure your teams have all the equipment they need to succeed, and don't forget to implement end-to-end supply chain visibility solutions for easy monitoring.
If your employees don’t feel good, they aren’t going to bother about creating highly-positive customer experiences. They’ll just give up on the whole task. Bad employee experiences almost always lead to negative customer experiences.
