What is Delivery Experience Management?
Delivery Experience Management (DEM) is the process of being proactive in ensuring that your customers receive their orders on-time and how they expect. It involves taking action as required to correct issues in the last mile and constantly engaging customers to validate brand promises.
DEM is all about offering each of your customers a memorable last-mile shipping experience that not merely satisfies but also delights and makes them advocates of your brand.
However, the last-mile is most often controlled by third-party shipping carriers.
This unfortunately results in a situation where your customers’ delivery experience suffers tremendously during this critical phase of the customer journey leading to irreparable problems and lost opportunities.
Let’s take a look at some of the issues you will inevitably encounter in the last-mile without a solution to manage delivery experiences that can hurt your business in multiple ways.
Issues Your Brand Will Face Without a Solution to Manage Delivery Experiences
1. Losing Customers to Bad Delivery Experiences
The last-mile is error prone. No matter how efficient shipping carriers claim they are, 8 to 10 percent of parcels inevitably get delayed.
And when delays do happen, more often than not, customers blame the retailer rather than the shipping carrier for the bad delivery experience.
It is a fact that 47% of customers won’t shop with your brand following a bad delivery experience. Worse, they will vent their ire on social media, making it incumbent on you to offer a great delivery experience.
2. Broken Post-Purchase Experience With Inadequate Customer Engagement
While a retailer may have exclusive control of a customer’s on-site experience, this is lost once the parcel has been handed off to their shipping partner.
This is because the post-purchase order delivery phase and its activities such as giving customers the ability to track their parcels and sending them delivery status updates are considered to be functions of the shipping carrier.
This leads to grossly inadequate customer engagement from the retailer’s side in the last mile, making customers move away from the brand as a result of a broken shopper experience.