The key to happy customers and growing your clientele is providing a great experience for your customers. This is usually achieved through customer service, services offered, and the work your business does. However, managing a company and ensuring your customers have the best experience can sometimes be difficult.
Partnering with a 3PL can help with this. Their experience and services they offer to you and your customers, can hugely increase your customer’s experience. This is because a 3PL provides you with cost-effective access to time- and money-saving services. Here are some ways a 3PL can help boost customer satisfaction.
Delivery That Gets to Your Customers, Quickly
It goes without saying that in today’s world, people want the fastest possible delivery when they purchase something.
This expectation also applies in the eCommerce world. Offering the quickest shipping to your customers can greatly improve customer experience and entice new clients. However, offering your own delivery services can be costly and hard to get up and running, wasting your customer’s precious time.
Many 3PL partners include delivery within their services, with one or two-day shipping coming standard. The delivery services offered by a 3PL will greatly increase your customer experience and satisfaction. A delivery management system is often how a 3PL is able to manage and execute their many deliveries, efficiently.
A Delivery Management system enables you to:
- Manage, create or delete orders from the road
- locate delivery destinations with driving instructions
- optimize routes on the go
- track damaged, lost, or refused items in the field
- track proof of delivery with signatures and store stamps
- print or email invoices from the road
- accept payments on the spot
Through the use of their own fleet, a 3PL has more control and flexibility than a conventional delivery service. They can delegate more or fewer resources out for deliveries in order to complete them.
By working with a 3PL and using their delivery services, you can improve your customers’ experience and rest assured that your product will arrive at their doors in time.
Get It Right the First Time With Improved Order Accuracy
In order to maintain your current customers, and attract new ones, your service must be excellent. Order accuracy is a make-it-or-break-it issue when it comes to customer experience and satisfaction.
If a customer’s order is frequently subpar quality or incorrect, they won’t be staying with you for much longer. Partnering with a 3PL is one of the best ways to ensure order accuracy and to maintain your customer satisfaction.
3PLs have the technology to ensure the right products are on hand when you need them. For example, most effective 3PLs use order management systems to make this easy. An OMS, or order management system, brings you and your vendors closer together with effective, time-saving solutions.
However before an OMS can even be efficiently implemented, inventory needs to be accurate. This can be done through an IMS or inventory management system.
An IMS enables you to:
- receive purchase orders
- restock products into inventory
- move products between zones and bins
- keep track of damaged products
- pick and pack products to fulfill orders
- load orders with product or order segmentation
- communicate with a Digital Control Tower
These all greatly boost efficiency during the picking and packing stages. This results in a great customer experience with minimal shortages and allows you to offer the best of your products to your customers.
An improved customer experience comes from the reliability of their products coming through with no issues. Since this begins with inventory and ordering, improper management of these result in your customer’s experience declining.
Improved Communication and Transparency for All
Keeping doors open between you and your customers is essential to maintaining a good relationship. However, this can be hard if you are not able to relay information to them in a timely manner.
Open communication and having visibility in your operations are essential to maintaining a positive customer experience. A 3PL partner helps you keep communication and transparency through your day-to-day operations.
Disconnects can arise when working with companies that don't allow you clear access to the information you need to relay to customers.
This can be information regarding:
- Delivery
- Inventory
- Orders
Partnering with a 3PL promotes visibility and allows for open communication across the many services they provide you.
3PL partners provide you with the technology to achieve open communication and transparency.
Customer order portals and digital control towers are just two of the many technologies available that provide open communication and visibility to you and your customers.
Customer Order Portals
Having a seamless system to manage customer orders is essential when serving hundreds or thousands of customers. Without, managing your customers' orders is a time-consuming process. It can allow mistakes to arise when customers submit their requests to your order management team.
With a self-serve Customer Order Portal, you can offer your customers a secure and personalized experience that’s easy to adopt and access. With your customers managing their own orders, your team can devote more of their time to other customer service issues or areas of your business.
Digital Control Tower
A Digital Control Tower acts as the center of all supply chain operations, giving users full access to everything they need to create and maintain a seamless supply chain. A Digital Control Tower localizes all your data into a single dashboard.
The overview provided by the Digital Control Tower makes both day-to-day operations and broad analysis streamlined, convenient, and accurate. The DCT provides improved visibility into the supply chain, from product and inventory management to routing and delivery.
Alongside these great technologies, a customer support team is usually on hand to assist with any questions when they come up. Having dedicated support from your 3PL partner allows you to get your answers quickly and get back to helping your own end customer.
At Birkby, We Make It Easy to Please Your Customers
Birkby offers comprehensive 3PL services for our clients. Our data-driven mindset and experience in the industry allow us to provide start-to-finish resources. We meet our clients’ needs and ensure you have the resources to boost your customer experience.
Our 3PL services include:
- Performance insights and reporting for every part of the supply chain
- Dedicated fulfillment and service support teams to keep your customers happy
- Temperature-controlled warehousing
- World-class technology, powered by Routeique™
- Infrastructure and resources to accommodate your growth
Looking for a 3PL Provider?
Contact us today to learn more about Birkby’s comprehensive 3PL Solutions.
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