Peter Langley, vice president, FedEx, Australasia explains the importance of the last mile delivery to enhance consumer understanding and satisfaction.
In today’s environment where customer experience is central to contemporary business practice, the role of the marketer has needed to expand to consider the entire interaction between customer and brand. While many businesses have honed their digital experience and transformed their bricks and mortar, for e-commerce, the last mile delivery remains one of the most significant challenges and underutilised tools to enhance consumer understanding and satisfaction.
With the exponential uptake of e-commerce, deliveries have become the lifeblood for many businesses. Utilising artificial intelligence, focussing on environmental sustainability, and leveraging data to drive insights are now key to ensuring efficient delivery to build customer loyalty. Ignoring these developments and overlooking the last leg of the customer journey, mean that brands risk not only losing repeat business but also potentially broader reputational impact.
But how does this involve marketers?
The service gap
According to FedEx What’s Next in Ecommerce report there is a significant gap in performance perception between SMEs and their customers. When it comes to delivery, Aussie SMEs believe their customers would rate their experience a 6.3 out of 10, while their customers actually rate their experience as low as 4.8 out of 10.
Paired with this, customer expectations are ramping up. According to Savvy Australia’s Online Shopping Behaviour Report, 67 per cent of consumers expect improvements in online delivery speed over the next 12 months. According to a HERE survey of shoppers, 81 per cent of shoppers said their delivery experience impacts future shopping choices, while only 6 per cent say they would go back to a retailer despite a poor delivery experience.
Delays in delivery service can also lead to negative reviews. A survey from Corra showed 73.2 per cent of customers leave bad reviews to save other consumers from terrible experiences, with service issues making up 52 per cent of the total number of complaints. In Australia and New Zealand 70 per cent of online shoppers read past reviews, and 40 to 45 per cent identify them as central factors in their purchase.
This may appear to be an operational matter at first but could quickly snowball. When the bulk of marketing spend is typically focussed on upper funnel activity, it would be important to ensure the investment made to acquire customers is translated into the ultimate marketing ROI – retention.
What this means is brand managers, need to be in control of the entire length of the customer journey and not only look at growing brand awareness. It’s important to invest the time to get to know the logistics supplier and build a good working relationship, treating them as an extension of the internal team. By partnering the logistics partner in the brand reputation conversation from the get go and emphasising their role in customer engagement, it will lead to better brand reputation outcomes.
The lines of communication should also be active and constant. Alert the logistics partner to any upcoming marketing activity that might translate into an uptick in purchases so the on the ground team is given sufficient bandwidth in anticipation of the increase in deliveries. It provides the added assurance that when the marketing activation goes live, customers will have the best possible end-to-end brand engagement.
Delivery as a data point
Every market is different, so local and regional knowledge is crucial, especially in a geographical large market as unique as Australia, where high population density is coupled with long distances between capital cities.
While traditional marketing levers such as social media and e-commerce platform analytics as well as EDM management tools provide a wealth of insights to help reach a widely- spread customer base, marketers need to pair this with their delivery data.
With advances in the digital tools utilised in the last mile of delivery, alongside improving efficiencies, it has generated useful data points (delivery preferences, area growth trends) that can be integrated into the customer profile and help inform business strategies.
For small and medium businesses, working with a logistics partner to access this stream of data can provide the valuable insights and benefits of scale usually afforded to large corporations.
As we venture into increasingly uncertain economic times, marketers need to be at the forefront of building strong and effective networks and maximising these relationships. Stress test partners and be bold enough to ask difficult questions because creating a positive customer experience is ever more crucial.
