Demand fulfilment is an important area of logistics that requires careful planning, execution, and coordination. Failing to fulfill demand can lead to costly sales loss, dissatisfied customers, and even legal troubles if you don’t address complaints in a timely manner. To help ensure demand fulfilment goes smoothly, here are 10 tips you can use to improve your efforts.
Increase Customer Fulfilment Awareness
Whether you have an e-commerce site or a provider of customer support, any business that relies on sales to provide income will benefit from increasing demand fulfilment, thats why its important to know about sites like Supliful.com. Customers who are satisfied with their experience are more likely to shop with you again and tell their friends about it, increasing your customer base and revenue stream.
Use these 10 tips to increase customer satisfaction and awareness of demand fulfilment. Attract & Cultivate Quality Leads: Creating leads is only half of demand fulfilment; nurturing them into active users is just as important. The easiest way to do so is by providing educational content around your products and services.
Minimize Lost Customers
One reason that demand fulfilment often falls short is that companies and retailers lose too many customers during delivery. Take steps to ensure that deliveries get through, including planning routes and back-up systems with post offices or logistics partners.
Even if there’s no opportunity to do anything about lost shipments, you can communicate more frequently with customers when orders are delayed, giving them a chance to reschedule their shipment before it gets delivered. Additionally, checking in on customers after they receive products—through surveys or feedback forms—gives companies insights into how well they’re meeting customer needs and will inform future product development. It also reduces returns due to errors in order fulfillment.
If a company finds out that its teapots aren’t coming with enough instruction manuals (to say nothing of its kettles), it can change its packaging at minimal cost before delivering its next set of products.
Maximize Reorder Accuracy
When you’re running low on products, it’s tempting to place a few extra orders and get more of what you need. But don’t place too many orders! It can be difficult to determine how much inventory is too much when multiple products are involved.
To streamline demand fulfilment efforts and avoid excess stock, make a list of your reorder levels and strive to maintain that accuracy each time you restock. You may find that you only need to send an order once every 30 days instead of once every 15. This approach also enables you to reduce costs by using fewer shipments.
Reduce Excessive Returns
Are you accepting any returns that weren’t ordered by a customer? If so, it’s time to go back to your customers and try to negotiate with them on their return policy.
Get rid of excessive returns and suddenly, you have more stock available than ever. Customers like that! They’ll respond in kind by buying more from you. And, as an added bonus, each item will sell faster because there are fewer items available at any given time. A great way to improve demand fulfilment!
Increase On-Time Delivery
Many businesses find that they are unable to deliver on-time to customers. This leads to customer dissatisfaction and poor service ratings, which cause increased costs in order volume and marketing expenses. To avoid all these problems, you should connect with proven e-commerce fulfillment companies.
There are many factors that can negatively affect on-time delivery rates; developing and implementing a strategy that addresses these factors can significantly improve on-time delivery. Companies should pay special attention to customers with high order volumes; these customers often rely heavily on their vendors to meet deadlines, so it is especially important that they receive their products on time.
Use Technology To Automate Fulfilment
When companies are able to automate their entire supply chain and delivery process, they’re able to improve their overall efficiency, reduce costs, and expedite product delivery times. This can mean higher customer satisfaction levels due to reduced lead times on orders.
In some cases, it can also be a way of reducing operating costs. If you’re looking at ways to improve efficiency in your supply chain, look into investing in new technologies that can help automate order-fulfilment and other tasks throughout your process.
Train Staff On Fulfilment
One of the main issues in customer service is incorrectly fulfilling orders. If an item needs to be shipped to a specific location, but you send it somewhere else, that’s a huge problem. According to customer satisfaction website results, improper order fulfilment was by far and away one of customers’ biggest dissatisfiers (the top two were shipping charges and delivery timeframe). As such, staff need to know where items need to go—and how quickly they should get there.
Communicate With Fulfilment Partners Directly
Customers expect that their orders will be fulfilled quickly, and often base their buying decisions on how fast a business promises to ship an order. When communication is lacking with fulfilment partners, customers are left in limbo and might never purchase from you again. Instead of using third-party fulfilment centres, try dealing directly with these businesses to improve communication.
Monitor and Report on Fulfilment Issues
The most important thing to do is monitor and report on any fulfilment issues. Take a survey from customers who have had issues with your supply chain, find out what went wrong, and how you can improve in these areas.
The key here is to keep these people around, as they are not only dissatisfied with the service they have received but could potentially be one of your greatest advocates if their concerns are addressed.
Maintain Proper Inventory Levels
One of the easiest ways to improve your business is to maintain proper inventory levels. Inventory management is both art and science, but it’s important that you strike a balance between carrying too much inventory (which means tying up valuable capital) and not enough (which means you’re often without products when customers want them). It also makes sense to implement a stock rotation policy so that older products are sold before newer ones.
