You’re an eCommerce or Subscription Box business owner that needs to decide on what post-purchase experience you want to give your customers the best possible post-purchase experience.
There are many out-of-box solutions – a commercial, ready-made products targeted towards businesses just like yours. How do you pick the one that will deliver the best customer experience, save your company time and money by reducing support and order status inquiries, generate additional sales, improve Life Time Value and build brand loyalty?
It’s not an easy choice to make.
They all make claims to reduce your “WISMO” calls, generate repeat sales, and build brand loyalty. At the end of the day, the SAAS platform your business chooses may be the perfect solution or an expensive mistake.
Guidelines to follow
There are certain ground rules to look at when assessing the post-purchase solution. When your customer places an order on your website, it goes through several stages, from processing, fulfillment, to shipment and delivery. Each of these stages might have its pitfalls and variability and contribute to customer friction. Make sure that you completely understand your business before moving forward with a solution.
The ideal post-purchase experience platform should excel in delivering an accurate personalized order journey story through your brand’s voice at the time when your customer is most receptive to receiving messages from you.
How accurate is the order journey story?
Do your customers have an easy way to check on their order status? Once they place an order, do you tell them when they are going to get it should expect to receive it? How accurate are you with the estimation? How do you treat delays and exceptions? What happens when your warehouse gets busy and can’t ship orders fast enough? These are just a few questions from of a long list of questions you might be asking yourself when mapping the deciding on a road map for the best customer post-purchase experience.
Did you know that the majority of post-purchase experience solutions rely solely on the information from your shipping carrier, whether it is accurate or not?
That means that until the carrier scans the package and that information propagates through the carriers network, your customers will be faced with “Tracking information not available. Check back later” message with the low accuracy of estimated arrival time.
The ideal post-purchase experience solution should accurately convey the order journey story from the moment the order is placed until the moment your customer gets their order delivered to their doorsteps.
Fail to do that, and you will experience high “Where Is My Order” inquiry volume that will attribute failures in post-sale logistics to your brand, justified or not.
What is the level of brand adherence?
You must curate order status information through a brand voice through the most convenient (for your customer) channel. You need to drive brand familiarity factor in and get the time and number of touchpoints.
This is especially important during the stage when your customers are most anxious and very receptive and open to communication from you.
Combine that with an accurate order journey story, and you will build a lasting relationship with your clients.
And just think about it: most retailers miss this opportunity.
How customizable is the post-purchase experience platform?
When deploying a new post-purchase experience platform, ensure that the provider of your choice gives you the ability to customize the customer-facing components to match your brand requirements from visual presentation to frequency and message customization of alerts.
New website design, switching carriers, updating ERP, new fulfillment partners, or any other technological innovation…things change. Because your post-purchase experience platform is an integral part of building customer loyalty, it should be flexible enough to adjust quickly to continue delivering the best possible customer experience without interruption.
What are personalization and marketing capabilities?
The time between the moment your customer placed an order and the moment your customer got receives the order in their hands is the most crucial.
At this time, the buyer is most anxious and very receptive and open to any communication from you – the retailer.
Through creating an outstanding personalized order tracking experience environment, you can build and reinforce brand loyalty. Use this opportunity to create relevant offers that your customer wants without making it feel salesy.
It’s a difficult choice
Even with these guidelines, making the right choice for your business isn’t going to be easy. You don’t want to end up wasting money, and you definitely don’t want to end up with a software solution that doesn’t actually help you.
The most important aspect is to spend time understanding your post-purchase challenges and identifying the point of friction in your customer experience while ensuring that the provider of your choice is able to solve the problem now and evolve in the future.
Whether your post-purchase logistics are simple and you want to improve your customer post-sale satisfaction and increase repeat sales and brand loyalty, or you deal with complex set-up involving multiple carriers, fulfillment houses, international shipments, chat with us.
We’re always eager to talk about ways to make your customers fall in love with your brand and help you find the right path to reduce post-sale support costs, improve LTV, and repeat sales.
About us
WISMOlabs specializes in optimizing the post-purchase customer experience leading to 30X ROI, 100%+ LTV increase, building brand loyalty, and a HUGE reduction of post-purchase customer support costs (as much as 90%).
