16 Jun How Inaccurate Order Fulfillment Ruins the Customer Experience
For retailers, attracting, satisfying and retaining customers remains job number one. Whether they’re trying to lure consumers into the physical location or get them to click ‘submit order’ on the website, significant work goes into building that relationship.
Consider the number of resources that are spent assembling each catalog, or ensuring the website is operating at peak performance. With customer acquisition costs ranging from $100 to more than $800 per customer, there remains little room for any error. Especially those that can easily be mitigated.
In Voxware’s 2020 holiday survey, 53 percent of respondents said that they will never place another order with certain retailers that mishandled their order fulfillment during the holiday season. Much of the success to meet customer expectations falls on warehouse services and their ability to move product promptly and accurately through the warehouse and fulfillment center. Unfortunately, a single error from within those four walls will make all the energy, time and resources spent acquiring that customer for naught.
Warehouse technologies can help companies meet their growing customer demands and overcome one of their biggest challenges, order accuracy. Voice automation, augmented reality and supply chain analytics are a few of the technologies that retailers have deployed to help drive a successful customer experience and reduce errors.
Voice automation, for example, optimizes workflows and employee performance for all distribution center functions, from receiving and put away to packing and loading shipments for delivery (and all processes in between). Voice-enabled workflows remove time and costly errors from warehouse activities.
Voxware’s Voice Management Suite (VMS) helps companies increase efficiency by more than 30 percent and improve accuracy to above 99.99 percent. Using Voxware VMS, warehouse operations realize immediate improvements in accuracy, double-digit productivity gains, reduced operating expenses and complete visibility across the entire distribution operation through supply chain analytics.
Supply chain analytics can help warehouse and fulfillment center operations react to changing conditions quickly and adjust staffing as necessary. Voxware’s enterprise supply chain analytics solution, VoxPilot®, aggregates and analyzes internal and external data sources and presents real-time and historical information, predicts future events and helps users navigate the right course of action to immediately resolve problems that may surface.
Through implementation of a robust analytics system like VoxPilot, retailers can expect 10-15 percent greater productivity. Descriptive, diagnostic, predictive and prescriptive analytics built for the supply chain create transparency around data, with implications to distribution operations including order entry, sales forecasts, employee performance metrics, transportation records, weather information and traffic reports.
VoxPilot’s dashboards collect all warehouse and supply chain information in an intuitive format with graphs and charts to pinpoint trouble spots for immediate action. This level of insight greatly expands possibilities for warehouse and fulfillment center improvements and the ability to cultivate higher lifetime customer value.
As mistakes continue to run rampant in the warehouse and fulfillment center, retailers will be left with a negative lasting impact on customer loyalty, reputation and ultimately their bottom line. Improving warehouse operations through automation and other warehouse technologies will be critical and retailers that have not taken the initiative to optimize their distribution centers will struggle to deliver the flawless experience customers expect.
To learn how Voxware can help reduce your errors and improve the relationship between you and your customers, contact us today.