Your supply chain affects your bottom line in more ways than you might imagine.
Obviously, the direct costs of warehousing and distribution are a big part of it, but your supply chain also influences the customer experience. When done right, that can translate into more sales, lots of word of mouth publicity, positive online reviews and other business-growing elements. That supply chain can be a huge boon.
Enhance Your Customer Experience With Your Supply Chain
Unfortunately, many eCommerce and bricks-and-clicks retailers don’t consider just how impactful their supply chain can be on the customer experience and neglect this vital aspect of their business. There’s a reason that 90 percent of Fortune 500 companies turn to a specialized 3rd party fulfillment company to handle their order fulfillment, that’s how much it really matters.
Here are just a few ways that top-notch fulfillment teams and supply chains can really improve your customer experience:
- Improved efficiency. There’s doing a thing, then there’s striving to always do a thing faster. Your 3PL or fulfillment center should always be seeking to tighten up their process, using both modern tools and software. This way, they can improve the speed at which pick, pack and ship happens and warehouses are restocked. Faster is better, especially when it cuts days off of the time it takes to get an order to your customer.
- Increased accuracy. Speed is good, but it’s nothing without accuracy. Using the same tools that make a 3PL facility fast, they can also make themselves highly accurate. Bar code scanning, for example, not only speeds up pick, pack and ship, but makes sure what’s packed is correct. Pickers know if they’ve collected the right products for each order before they return to the pack floor and the data collected can be used to improve the pick process.
- Foreseeing problems. Modern data modeling has made it possible for fulfillment houses to foresee problems long before they become a reality. Whether that means your stock needs to be resupplied to avoid a popular item from going into back order status or rerouting a shipment to ensure it makes it to the destination on time despite weather conditions interfering with the original route, it’s astounding what the members of the supply chain can do to ensure the customer experience is excellent.
Besides making it possible for customers to see where their packages are end-to-end, modern data-enhanced supply chains have created an atmosphere where customers feel they can trust eCommerce vendors to provide hassle free shopping experiences. The accuracy, efficiency and convenience your supply chain members work hard to create don’t hurt your reputation either.
