One of the easiest ways to lose customers is by offering a poor delivery experience. They’ll either not shop with you in the first place or won’t again. Customers are quick to judge and three-quarters won’t recommend a retailer after a poor delivery experience. The consequences can be costly. We invite you to learn more about the power of fast and transparent deliveries by reading this article.
Alternatively, if you would like to get a full overview of how to achieve a 360-degree excellent customer experience in retail, you can download our report straight away.
Here you will find:
- Customer expectations are skyrocketing
- The need for speed and transparency
- How click and collect helps solve many delivery challenges
- How to capture the opportunity
Customer expectations are skyrocketing
Customers have many questions about delivery, whether their order is coming to their home, to a store or a third-party location for collection. Is it fast? Is it free? Is there a sustainable delivery option available? What options are there to collect orders and can a customer see the stock available in-store?
And that’s just the start of what they might want to know before they click the buy button.
Once they’ve ordered their item there are even further hurdles to overcome, especially when the item is on its way. Where is their order? Is it on time? What happens if it’s not?
Add to that the challenge that customer expectations around delivery are growing all the time and it can be hard to meet the demands of today’s customers regarding when, where and how they will receive their parcels.
It all makes delivery a challenge at the best of times. Yet in the last two years, everything from the blockage of the Suez Canal and a shortage of HGV drivers has put even greater pressures on retailers’ delivery infrastructures.
At the start of the pandemic, customer expectations were set against a realization that delivery companies and infrastructures were under strain. But today customers have little tolerance for a poor delivery experience, even for the circumstances that are out of your control.
Customers have little tolerance for a poor delivery experience. Three-quarters won’t recommend a retailer after a poor delivery experience
The need for speed and transparency
So how can you overcome such a range of challenges? The solution is to be clear about the delivery proposition that your customers want and execute it flawlessly. As a retailer, you need to understand your customers’ needs, especially since it’s easy to be distracted by what other retailers are doing around. Easier said than done, of course.
Generally, customers will demand speed of delivery, with next day a popular option. Why wouldn’t they? The change in their expectations of delivery has been huge, thanks in part to the likes of Amazon Prime.
With the emergence of rapid delivery providers, especially in the grocery sector, speed has increased even further. Such providers promise delivery in many regions in as little as ten minutes, faster than many shoppers could get to the store themselves.
With these sorts of capabilities being offered, it’s easy for customers to assume that other retailers can manage the same sort of speed without thinking about the implications of cost. That means you need to ask yourself how important delivery speed and cost is for your customer and whether you can meet their needs profitably. Do your customers want items quickly and don’t mind paying, or do they prefer longer delivery if it means it’s free? Or are you in a sector where they demand both and your competitors are doing the same?
Consumers also want better transparency of delivery. Your customers expect to be able to track their orders throughout the delivery journey and to be informed proactively of any potential problems around delivery. This has been especially important in the last year when shipping cross-border with regulatory changes often slowing down deliveries and causing disruption.-png-1.png)
How "click and collect" helps solve many delivery challenges
One solution that helps to overcome many of the challenges around delivery is "click and collect". It allows customers to order and pay online but collect their goods instore. Customers may also click and reserve, paying for the product once they collect it. Its popularity continues to grow for the convenience and certainty it offers.
Click and collect saw huge growth during the pandemic. It allowed customers to still receive products when stores were closed during lockdowns and delivery infrastructures were overstretched. In the US alone click and collect saw a 106.9% growth rate in 2020 compared to 2019 and grew from 5.8% share of all retail commerce sales to 9.1%.
Click and collect strategies previously focussed on stores, lockers or third-party locations such as convenience stores. But during pandemic lockdowns, we saw a growing increase of curbside pick-up too, where shoppers are able to have goods delivered into the boot of their cars rather than having to go in-store, as well as initiatives such as virtual queuing to allow contactless collection. And it’s big business. Walmart, for example, saw click and collect sales nearly triple over two years to hit $20.4 billion in 2021 and now has curbside pickup at more than 3,700 stores.
For the customer click and collect ensures they can get their orders when they want them, putting them firmly in control. For you, the retailer, and sometimes the consumer, it’s also a cheaper option. Even if you are fulfilling your click and collect orders from a warehouse to a store that’s still one drop compared to the multiple drops of home delivery.
And it drives customers in-store, providing valuable opportunities to boost sales. However, this relies on your staff effectively up and cross-selling once the customer is with them.
Enabling options such as click and collect, as well as improving the efficiency of delivery overall, relies heavily on inventory visibility and transparency within your supply chain
Another advantage is that it allows instant returns or exchanges if the customer isn’t satisfied with their order or it’s not what they were expecting. It offers a valuable opportunity to recapture that sale and even potentially sell more to that customer while they are in-store, especially if the retailer is offering a return anywhere best practice policy.
How to capture the opportunity
It’s important for you as a retailer to understand customer hunger for such services, such as how and where your customers want to collect their parcels and expectations around the time between ordering and collecting. For instance, in Finland consumers rank collecting at a parcel box as their number one delivery preference. And at many retailers, one-hour click and collect services, or at least same-day collection, are increasingly becoming the norm.
At Currys plc, for example, its click and collect service (order and collect) accounted for nearly 18% of online sales for its UK Currys brand in 2021, with over half of those orders being for same-day collection. In the Nordics, where it operates stores including Elkjøp (Norway), Elgiganten (Sweden and Denmark), and Gigantti (Finland) a third (34%) of online sales for the retailer were made through click and collect last year.
Enabling options such as click and collect, as well as improving the efficiency and effectiveness of delivery overall, relies heavily on inventory visibility and transparency within your supply chain.
This visibility needs to extend to customers too. This allows them to browse for products online and choose between delivery or click and collect depending on their preferences or needs. Ideally, this visibility needs to extend to a store-level inventory view to allow a customer to see how that order would be fulfilled. For instance, is the product already instore which enables more immediate pick-up or would it be delivered via a warehouse to the store. The latter will usually add a day or so to click and collect times.
This clearer communication of real-time visibility also prevents your customers from turning up without having completed a click-and-collect order to buy in-store instead, assuming that the product is in stock and instead leaving disappointed.
Whichever delivery options your customers prefer real-time visibility of your stock is essential to maximize sales and customer satisfaction, allowing you to deliver what your customers need.
