Make Ship Happen: A Blog for Shipping Professionals

Today I stumbled upon an article from Internet Retailer that literally floored me with its statistics about shipping automation and so I had to share it with you.

Did you know that:

Last week we looked at the affect of poor customer service on the part of the parcel shipping carrier on your organization's reputation with its customers. Based on the feedback I received, it's clear that you believe poor customer service anywhere in the shipping process--whether within your control or not--affects your reputation.

In enterprise shipping, how does carrier performance affect your organization?

In tooling around the web today I stumbled upon a forum of disgruntled consumers who had used a certain parcel carrier (whose name I will not repeat here because the reviews were so incredibly terrible) on purchases they had made and who were unhappy with the service they received.

If you read this blog each week, you probably know that I am a HUGE supported of integrating your enterprise shipping function with the rest of your business systems.

I recently got an email from one of my dedicated readers with an enterprise shipping question that I didn't immediately have a good answer for, so I thought I would offer you the question and see if you can help me come up with a reasonable answer.

A quick true/false quiz:

True or false: Anything that improves a customer's experience with your company is a good thing.

True.

Right!

While enterprise shipping may not seem to have a direct effect on customer experience, it does. Consider shipping automation. A feature that is often billed as a way to improve a shipping department’s productivity and increase throughput, shipping automation drives an improved customer experience as well.

Does your enterprise shipping staff have a clear understanding of which order should be shipped first each day? Or are they blindly filling orders as they come down the line without consideration as to which customer is receiving the order?

The First Shipper.

The first shipper was buried in shipments that needed to be shipped by a variety of carriers: UPS, FedEx, United States Postal Service and a number of LTL companies. To complete his shipments, the shipper manually entered the package information into each of the carriers’ unique shipping systems.