We are currently in the run-up to Christmas and if your company sells products then you will know only too well what a busy, and potentially stressful time of year this can be. Speaking of Christmas, I faced a huge learning curve four years ago when we were approaching our very first Christmas. In truth, we weren’t nearly as prepared as we could have been and as a result, we had numerous customers who didn’t receive orders and couldn’t speak with us to find out what was going on. Consequentially, we lost a lot of customers and money.
The year after that fateful Christmas, I took action to ensure that delivery would never be an issue again. This can happen at any time of the year, of course, not just Christmas, and here are some ways in which you can give your customers a better delivery service.
EDI Drop Shipping
EDI stands for electronic data interchange, which in basic terms is the automation of traditional methods, through the conversion to computers. I had already been using EDI in many otters aspects of the business but hadn’t realized about the EDI drop shipping program, which you can use to give your clients the best delivery service. This software makes the entry process automated and works within e-commerce solutions, vendor outreach support as well as testing and reporting to give you the information you need to best serve your customers. Originally I was concerned about the amount of money I would have to pump into the company to fix our mistakes, but this sophisticated and highly functional software solution turned out to be the only thing that we needed.
After Care Team
Part of the reason the Christmas was so disastrous was that we had no additional support and no aftercare team in place. This meant that once we believed that a product had been shipped, we didn’t ask any questions and we weren’t there to follow up. Problems can arise from time to time and it is vital that you are on hand to fix a customer’s problems. In actual fact, I think that if you can offer someone outstanding service when there is an issue, the customer is going to leave the situation with a positive view of the company, rather than focusing on the original issue itself.
However, we learned our lesson the hard way and swore never to repeat the same mistake again. As a company, we are the ones who should be in charge of ensuring that all our customers are taken care of to their contentment. It was our mistake to entirely leave the care of our customers to another company. EDI has proven to be very useful to us due to the various options it provides for giving and receiving feedback from our customers. Yes, we have employed EDI to enable our company to function efficiently and effectively, but we have also taken extra steps to ascertain that everything runs well. Thanks to EDI, which has many options for feedback, we didn’t have to do so much. Now we can track the progress of any of our transactions on the go. No man gets left behind.
Using The Best
If you are serious about giving your customers the best delivery service, then it is vital that your company is using a trusted and reliable delivery courier. One of the many issues which we had over that Christmas time four years ago was that we had decided to go with a cheap and relatively new delivery service and it was, in fact, them who let us down the most. Cost cutting is fine as long as you don’t do so to the detriment of your customers. Today we are using EDI, which is a much better and reliable service. You can clearly see that the company we worked with before cost us a lot of money; both the money we paid for their services, as well as the money we could have made form all the customers we lost. EDI is a more efficient and reliable system compared to what the other company was using. Ever since we started to use it, our business transactions with the current customers we had, went smoothly, and we have gained even more long-term customers. The price of a quality service cannot be compared to what will be gained from it. By switching from a cheap and poor service company to one that’s slightly more expensive but offers quality, we have been able to improve the efficiency and productivity of our drop shipping services, as well as the performance of our company.
