How Customer Analytics Can Help Improve Processes and Scale Operations
To be successful, retailers and eCommerce businesses need to be constantly assessing their performance and looking for ways to improve. But who better to get this feedback from than your customers themselves? After all, they’re the ones on the receiving end of all the work your fulfillment teams do.
Getting feedback from your customers isn’t like sitting down for a performance review, though. You need to hear thousands of different voices to get an accurate picture of your customer relationships and pinpoint your operational inefficiencies.
In this post, we’ll highlight three things you can learn from customer interaction and sentiment analysis and show you how to apply these insights to improve your processes and scale your operations. Let’s get started.
Order Accuracy & Product Status
When your customers get a package, they expect the product inside to match the images and description on your eCommerce website. Unfortunately, this isn’t always the case. Products can arrive damaged or missing pieces. And sometimes shoppers receive the wrong item altogether.
Whether you realize this is a problem while reading negative online reviews or you hear about it from the support agents who are interacting with customers directly, it’s not something you can ignore. Both the sentiment extracted and the feedback given should inspire change.
How do you apply that knowledge? Simple. By improving your communication and order verification process. In doing so, you’ll not only ensure your customers get the products they purchased, but also that those items will come in good condition.
Order Cycle Time
Delivery speed is one of the most commonly tracked KPIs in fulfillment. But you need to keep tabs on your customer sentiment and feedback if you really want to know how well you’re doing.
Thankfully, it doesn’t take much to gather insight into your customers’ feelings and experiences. If your standard delivery times are too long or products arrive later than you promised, shoppers will let you know. Emails and direct messages will have signs of frustration littered throughout the text. Customers will sound irritated and impatient over the phone and video chat. And in-person encounters will have the added benefit of negative body language cues, like posture and facial expressions.
What do you do with this information once you have it? Make adjustments to your fulfillment processes by:
- Adding more fulfillment centers and staff to your operations
- Partnering with a 3PL that has the infrastructure and systems to scale with your demand
- Using an omnichannel order management system to streamline your order management and inventory management activities
Product Returns
In an ideal world, retailers and eCommerce businesses wouldn’t ever deal with product returns. Every package sent would be happily received.
But that isn’t the case. Items are returned for a myriad of reasons, from incorrect sizing to product damage. As a result, it’s important to make sure your returns process is as smooth as possible.
And here again, your customers can be a valuable asset in assessing your performance. You can analyze the sentiment in their emails and direct messages, listen carefully to their tone of voice in phone call recordings and review the specific feedback and suggestions they leave for you.
With this information in hand, you can find ways to optimize and scale your returns process, including giving customers pre-paid return labels and streamlining your warehouse operations from end to end.
Customer analytics isn’t just a valuable tool for marketing, sales, and product development teams. It can also hold critically important details for your fulfillment operations. From order accuracy to order cycle time and product returns, you can find loads of gems hidden in your customer interactions and sentiment, as long as you know where to look.
