Reasons Your Logistics Are Letting You Down

Nowadays, more and more businesses of all sizes are finding themselves directly in charge of how they get their products into the hands of customers. It allows you to add a bit of extra service onto what your business provides. But if you get it wrong, it can lead to some seriously unhappy customers and an arm of the business so inefficient it costs you more than it earns you.

Heading in the wrong direction

One of the concerns that is surprisingly troubling for newer businesses is just how easy it is to get it wrong simply because they don’t check the address. It’s understandable that a busy day can lead to the occasional mistake with detail. In delivery, however, your customer won’t find it acceptable that a wrong address leads to delays or even a failure to deliver. For one, keep your customer in the loop, communicating about the progress of the package. The can see for themselves and identify issues that you might not have caught onto yet. But it’s better to simply prevent the mess from ever happening by making use of address validation software if you can’t manually check the addresses. It’s one of the simplest mistakes you can make, but also one of the worst.

Dents and dings

It’s embarrassing to get called up about damage to a product or even to have your business publicly criticized for it. You might not have as much control over your own deliveries as you would like so you have to make sure that products are kept safe by any means necessary. This might mean using custom shipping cases for the more sensitive materials, for instance. In industries like computer parts, dead-on-arrival items are an unfortunate reality of the business. If you share that reality, then you should be providing warranties to cover those items. You shouldn’t make the mistakes of your delivery system (and by extension you) the responsibility of the customer.

You’re not taking enough control of the process (or you’re taking too much control)

If you’re suffering from a sluggish delivery service and you’re not able to get things shipped to customers in time, you have to look at how much influence you have directly on the process. If you’re handling it internally, you need to look at creating a more efficient mailing room by considering the most economic ways to get packages from one process to the next. You can also look at using telemetrics if you employ your own drivers to see the routes they’re using and the kind of time they’re seeing on their journeys. Of course, some businesses simply aren’t yet fit to handle the full responsibility of delivering their goods. If you’ve scaled into the responsibility too quickly, then you may wish to look into using outsourced fulfillment services.

You can’t simply treat the delivery side of the business like it’s just an accessory. It’s a big part of the service you provide and in some cases will wholly color a customer’s opinion of the business take it seriously.