In an industry where your primary customer touch comes from your fulfillment services, it’s vital that you get it right the first time.
There’s no doubt that eCommerce fulfillment and customer satisfaction are connected, otherwise customers wouldn’t be the ones driving so much change to the eCommerce industry. Just how those pieces fit together can be less than crystal-clear, however.
How Customer Satisfaction Has Shaped eCommerce Fulfillment
The reality of eCommerce retail is that no matter what you’re selling, there’s someone else selling it, too, and possibly at a better price. Because of this, you have to win at customer experience because price simply isn’t enough.
There are several ways that customer satisfaction has truly molded eCommerce fulfillment as we know it, including:
- Creating a need for predictive models and optimized inventory levels. Buying the right amount of inventory for your shop has always been a concern for retailers, but there was a time when running low or out of a product didn’t immediately send shoppers into the arms of the competition.Today, not having enough inventory means losing droves of shoppers to whoever does. Having too much inventory, of course, also means spending excessive money on storage and risking that you can’t sell it all before you have to discount the items just to get rid of them.
- Making the agile supply chain even more vital. Agile supply chains are one of the best things that have ever happened to eCommerce shoppers, but they’re also some of the most complicated to manage for eCommerce retailers.For customers, they mean faster deliveries, more products available to any market in days or hours, instead of weeks. Retailers who implement agile supply chains will win more customers simply due to their uncanny ability to move products faster than the next guy.
- Increasing demand for omnichannel sales. Today’s eCommerce shopper is all over the place. Mobile, desktop, in a retail location or pop-up store, it doesn’t matter to them. They expect to be able to pick up their shopping session wherever they left off and have the same experience as they go. Omnichannel has helped to create a seamless experience, even though it’s anything but seamless behind the scenes.
Customer satisfaction, as well as efficient fulfillment, is key to success with eCommerce, but part of that also includes understanding who your customers are. If you don’t know who your primary shopper is, now is a great time to figure that out so you can do more to improve the customer experience. After all, what a really good experience looks like to a single male aged 18-24 may be very different from a female aged 60-65.
