A customer has ordered a lot of items from your business. They have paid you their hard-earned money and have chosen your business to shop from.
They went through many different searches, many different kinds of products to find the types that they wanted. It took time and effort plus a conscious effort to stick to your business and buy what they wanted and needed. They gave you their precious details i.e. their credit card and address. The customer went through all of this, only to then be angered by not receiving what they had just paid for. They might have only received a part of their order and the rest just doesn’t appear at their front door. They go back online to see what the status of their order is and to their dismay, the status says ‘completed’. Why would the customer ever buy from you ever again when this kind of things occurs? This is what’s called a substantial order error. The internals of your business need to be swept for ineptitudes.
Respond almost immediately
It’s going to take a business a lot of time to figure out what went wrong, where as the customer notices the moment their item arrives. After all they have been waiting and waiting to receive their products and only some or none of their items arrive. They will undoubtedly contact you about this first. Commonly, this will be done through your ‘contact us’ page or via email. Either way you must respond very quickly, almost immediately to their outrage and or concern. For this to happen you need very good customer service employees. They must have sharp eyes to spot certain words in the titles and body of the emails they get. It could be hundreds of emails and queries a day so they have to have the skills to manually sift through and respond to the most urgent ones first.
Let the customer know that you are working on it and that you will contact them back. Do not respond in an ‘open and shut case’ style. Tell them that you will take a look at their order, see what items they ordered, which ones have been delivered or sent on route and which have not. Then make sure that your customer service employees end the email very courteously and apologise for the delay. Make sure that you are the one to contact the customer back and keep them updated on the progress that is being made.
Where did the chain break?
The order of an order is quite simple yet it can be made complex by so many little simple errors. For example, the first to come into contact with an order that has been placed will be the sales team. The sales team will process the order and send it on to the warehouse storage. The managers will then go over the order and then put it onto a list along with the items that need to be chosen. The employees will then go around the warehouse and fulfil the orders by placing them all into moveable storage carts. The employees will then bring the items back to the assortment area and then the orders will be packaged and made ready to be loaded. This is just the first part. Next comes the delivery from your warehouse to a depot, and then onto a local storage area before finally being met by a courier.
Your job should be to find out where on earth this chain of order fulfilment broke. Something went badly wrong and needs to be understood before it can be rectified. Follow up the exact places and people who were dealing with the order in question. Maybe the right items were not picked out but it was only noticed after the order had been sent off for delivery. Maybe all the items were not chosen and some or even just one was left out. Could it be that the items were somehow misplaced during the delivery phase itself? Then you need to call up your depot managers and find out. This will be a time-consuming and laborious task but if you don’t want this happening again, you have to do the legwork and rack your brain.
Rectify a damaged reputation
The relationship with a customer is absolutely vital to your success. Nobody should have to remind you, how badly you need your reputation to stay on the good side of the consumers. It’s not just about trust but just basic professionalism. If a customer bought something from your business online, you need to fulfil that order in a timely fashion. None of these things are difficult to understand at all. But when this kind of thing happens, how can you at least salvage some of your harmed reputation? Well, firstly you need to apologise to the customer, let them know that their outstanding and now late order, is being given priority over recently placed orders. This will give them some confidence and trust in your business back.
However, once you have made good of their order from your end, then you need to release a rapid response delivery to make sure they get their order as soon as possible. For that you should consider hiring fast delivery services like those shown if you click here. A next-day delivery service needs to have a next-day courier system in place that is active 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Preferably one that has thousands of vehicles all across the nation. The same day collection can be done from anywhere in the country within 60 minutes. The courier employees will also help you with any problem you have so you get what you need in very short time.
Make good on your relationship
The customer must not just be given an apology if the order has been outstanding for a long time. For example, if Andrew purchases products from your business online on Monday and the delivery time given to him is Thursday, an order arriving by Friday is not that late. It’s still not what he paid for regarding delivery charges but it’s not going to ruin the rest of his week. However, if the order doesn’t come until next week Friday, then this is incredibly late and extremely unprofessional. Granted it may have took some time trying to fix the issue but even still, this is over a week than what was promised.
Therefore to heal this damaged relationship, you should do something that is more than just an apology. For example, give them store credit so they have a discount for any items they purchase the next time around. You could give them vouchers for free delivery too. Give them something in the way of making it up to them. You’ll also make them want to shop with you again despite their recent bad experience. Going the extra mile is kind of the default position at this point when you have made a substantial order error.
When a very grave order error occurs in your business, you need to have a long hard think about where it could have possibly happened. The trouble is, it could have happened anywhere so you really have to search high and low for it. However, you need to keep in mind the relationship you have with your customer. Apologies aren’t enough, you need to keep the customer updated on the situation. However, giving them some kind of discount gift would seriously help to heal some wounds. A quick delivery response service would end the concern completely by delivery the package to them by the very next day.