The most obvious reason for this is that having a reliable fulfilment service means that your items are more likely to be delivered on time - which in turn means that you get to keep your happy customers, you have less complaints to deal with and everybody’s happy. The delivery part of the fulfilment process is only the tip of the iceberg however, there are many other parts to the process that come first.
When an order is first placed, there is a system in place so that it can be efficiently and easily dealt with. Often, 3PLs and fulfilment companies will integrate their systems with whatever system your website uses, for example, say your website uses Shopify, then your fulfilment service will integrate with this system to receive orders extremely fast so that they can start processing it. If you have a next day delivery option this part of the process needs to be quick - nobody wants to pay for next day delivery for it to turn up in a standard delivery time!
The next stage is the pick and pack stage. This part is the bit where your order goes from a few numbers online to a real life parcel to be sent out and delivered. This process involves finding the various items ordered by the customer and packing them together safely and efficiently. If these items are fragile this could include using a void fill to ensure that they don’t break or move around in the box. This part of the fulfilment process is then, evidently, crucial to ensuring you have happy customers because you don’t want your orders to be wrong. In order to get this part of the process correct, fulfilment services use state of the art technology and carefully organised warehousing systems to make sure that there are as few mistakes as possible i.e. sending the wrong colour, missing items off an order - the possibilities are endless!
So let’s imagine your order is correct and ready to go on time, and it gets delivered successfully, all good right? Well no, not quite, the next stage of the fulfilment process involves returns (yes, really that’s part of it too!) and your customers will always have means to complain if they can’t return their items easily and effectively. Obviously it would be great if people never had to return items but this is obviously not the case, so ensuring that your fulfilment process handles returns correctly can really improve your customer satisfaction.
Our fulfilment services here at Complete Packaging intends to help improve all areas of your business, such as your customer service and satisfaction! If you want to find out more about how Complete Packaging could help you, get in touch with us today.
