Portray a Professional Business Image with Fulfilment Services
Mar 27th, 2012 by by admin No Comments »
The image of your business is crucial. Fulfilment lets the experts take care of all your shipping needs leaving you to take care of creating and marketing your products properly.
The more involvement your fulfilment service provider has in the delivery processes of your business, the more professional the image you’ll present. Look at customer service as an example.
From a customer’s point of view, where do you go when you have to ask a question, make a complaint or resolve an issue? The company from which you bought the product in question. But if your complaint or query involves the shipping and/or delivery of the item, the information you need actually resides with the fulfilment services provider.
For the professional image of your business, you want your customers to be coming to you with queries and issues. Otherwise you start looking fragmented or uninformed in the customer’s eyes. But you don’t want a customer to come to you and ask you questions you can answer immediately, or which you will have to refer them on for in order to get them the information they need.
A good order fulfilment services partner will allow your end users to contact them through you – giving you an orders email address, which looks as though it is part of your company’s communications network but which is actually directed straight to the accounts manager you have with your orders fulfilment partner.
In this scenario of course it’s imperative that your order fulfilment services partner communicates well with you. You need to know what your customers are saying in order to continue to project the professional image you want to have. To this end the fulfilment partner gives you an account manager who retains close contact with you and who is the fulfilment partner that will help you raise your game.
The flow of information is crucial to every part of your supply chain operation. A good fulfilment services partner can manage your stock levels too – ensuring that your customers are never fobbed off with an out of stock notification on a product they want. And when the order is in transit your fulfilment partner is able to provide information both to you and to the end user, which makes sure everyone knows where everything is at all times.
Good order fulfilment is about control. At any point in the order process your customer may ask you questions – where is my stuff, for example, or when will it be despatched. If you don’t know the answers it looks like you have no control. And when your customer thinks you have no control over his or her order (which is effectively the same thing as having control over his or her money), he or she is disposed to look somewhere else.
Ultimately you’re looking for your fulfilment services partner to be your warehousing department – a genuinely professional addition to your company. Get the right partner and your customer service will be managed with skill.