How To Be An E-Commerce Champion for Your Company
Can your e-commerce business benefit from a post-purchase solution?
Of course you can! A quality post-purchase experience can make the difference between a disgruntled, one-time customer and a loyal customer for life.
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Perhaps you’re already convinced that your company could benefit from a post-purchase platform and want to drive change in your organization.
But, how do you get the buy-in for a post-purchase platform from your executive team and colleagues?
As an e-commerce champion, your task is to communicate how the company stands to gain from a new solution. Specifically, how a post-purchase solution can minimize pain points, address concerns and how they gain from these changes.
In this article, we’ve laid out the five key stakeholders, their chief concerns and how to appeal to them while building your case for a post-purchase solution.
1. E-commerce managers
E-commerce managers take care of strategic digital marketing plans, managing content and website elements. They’ll be responsible for the overall customer purchase journey and defining customer touchpoints along the entire journey.
Getting the support of your e-commerce manager is critical as they’ll be directly responsible for managing the website and any sales or marketing efforts from your e-commerce channel. Naturally, they’ll be most concerned with the solution’s value on the customer’s average order value and the number of repeat purchases over a given period of time.
How to get your e-commerce department’s support:
Focus on how a post-purchase solution can help improve and measure their KPIs. For example, getting full visibility on your customer journey after checkout and including personalized sales and marketing messaging will help them get that much-coveted repeat purchase.
Email delivery notifications are nifty to help cross-sell and upsell potential customers at valuable contact points. With e-commerce sales as an important KPI, your e-commerce team will be excited at an easier, more effective sales channel.
Brainstorm and suggest a few ideas to help your e-commerce team increase sales at the post-purchase stage. Kickstart the discussion with a few thought starters such as referral codes or ideas to get your customers to become ambassadors of your product by asking them to share a positive review.
Crate & Barrel does a great job in using their delivery emails as a customer engagement point
2. Logistics and supply chain managers
Logistics managers are responsible for managing the supply chain of your business; including selecting carriers, researching the best shipping methods, evaluating carrier performance and optimizing trade routes. They also ensure all delivery operations adhere to local and international laws and guidelines.
To get their buy-in, focus on how a post-purchase solution integrates with their current carrier systems. Illustrating how the solution provides full visibility on complex logistics decisions would be your best approach. They’ll also want to understand how easy or robust the solution is for data analysis.
How to get your logistics department’s support:
Does your post-purchase solution support the logistics carriers your business is using? Show them the wealth of data and actionable insights they’ll obtain to help their reporting processes.
Illustrate how the solution provides full visibility on logistics performance throughout the delivery journey; from first pick up, in transit, point of delivery and any returns.
Large organizations often work with multiple logistics carriers. Often, each logistics carrier has their own way of presenting data. Show how the solution can standardize the presentation of data across multiple carriers for ease of reporting. Propose how much time and effort this will save your logistics team on reporting.
Read More: 5 Logistics Reports to Make Sense of Your Logistics Data
3. Customer service teams
Your customer service teams are the first point of contact for all your customer inquiries. They answer all service-related questions, manage delivery expectations and Where Is My Order (WISMO) customer calls.
Did you know WISMO calls can make up to 70-80% of average call volume during peak season? This can be a tremendous drain on resources and time that can be spent delighting customers instead.
How to get your customer service department’s support for a post-purchase solution:
What’s your WISMO (where is my order) rate?
They can make up 70-80% of all customer inquiries during peak periods.
Get your teams excited about dramatically reducing the volume of WISMO calls – simply by proactively communicating delivery statuses to your consumers.
Your customer service team’s productivity and performance is often measured by metrics such as how long it takes to resolve a query or the total number of calls per agent. Make their jobs easier by presenting all parcel and order data in a standardized overview. Your customer service team will benefit hugely from easy filters and search capabilities
Come up with an estimate of how much a post-purchase solution will save your customer service teams. Multiply the average number of WISMO calls your team receives by the cost per call and subtract that amount from your overall customer service expenses.
4. Marketing teams
The marketing team’s primary objectives are to generate brand awareness and leads to the sales team while proving the ROI of their marketing dollars for the business.
They’re obsessed with finding the best performing marketing channel to showcase the business. Your post-purchase solution should highlight the efficiency and power of the post-purchase marketing channels.
How to get your marketing team’s support for a post-purchase solution:
There’s a tremendous opportunity for marketing in the post-purchase experience. Did you know a parcel tracking page converts up to 50% higher than a typical business website? Or delivery notification emails command excellent open rates of up to 80%? Such phenomenal engagement rates combined with the right content offers can do wonders to expose your brand and drive lead generation.
Customers can visit a branded tracking page up to 5 times per order; giving your marketing team undue opportunities to expose your brand, get clickthroughs and conversions on their content offers and ultimately drive engagement and repeat purchases from already-engaged customers.
5. Customer experience manager
Customer experience teams are entrusted with building consumer trust and loyalty through high-quality interactions at each step of the customer journey. With customer experience now a crucial component of driving customer lifetime value and business growth, companies are now making this a priority.
How to get your customer experience team’s support for a post-purchase solution:
A seamless, branded post-purchase experience is one of the best ways to build consumer trust and loyalty. Perk your customer experience team by showcasing how much value an extraordinary post-purchase experience adds to your customer touchpoints.
Get their input about how your brand can improve the customer experience it’s currently providing. Which points in the customer journey can be improved? What challenges are the team facing?
Assuming a customer returns more frequently thanks to a fantastic post-purchase experience, you can determine an estimated increase in Customer Lifetime Value. A low estimate can be one additional visit for 25% of your customers per year, multiplied by average order value.
E-commerce champions inspire change and take initiative
Getting teams onboard a new software can be daunting, but understanding what pain points a department faces and how a post-purchase experience can help solve the challenges of each department will help tremendously.
Perhaps it’s a great opportunity to enrich your organization with your leadership skills and initiative to become a catalyst for change and true e-commerce champion!
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