3PL services have become key to scale up businesses. But do you know they play a crucial role in scaling up customer satisfaction as well?
Businesses often outsource their logistics functions to a third-party provider aka 3PL due to n-number of reasons such as reducing admin headache, cutting cost, improving operational efficiency, and various others. Among all these other business processes and operations-related reasons, one significant benefit that gets sidelined is the improvement in customer satisfaction.
A proficient 3PL strategic partner and advisor provides the industry know-how to organize and streamline your business operations to withstand any challenge and grow. An efficient 3PL brings to the table advanced and innovative technology coupled with predictive analytics that enables to overcome the roadblocks to the path of growth.
2017’s 21st Annual Third-Party Logistics Study showed that 75% of shippers and 93% of 3PL providers said that 3PL services helped reduce overall logistics costs. In the same study, 86% of shippers and 98% of 3PL providers stated that 3PL services improved customer service.
Ways to Improve Customer Satisfaction
Such astounding claims by shippers and 3PL providers alike show a surprising level of confidence on the quality of the service and the benefits provided. Let’s find the basis of this confidence and check how 3PLs contribute to improved customer satisfaction:
- Consistently seamless service. Nowadays, customers have high expectations and refuse to accept anything short of the highest standard of service from the brands. Consistency of experience and messaging across channels and devices is a crucial factor in customer satisfaction. Customers also expect variety in delivery options. A 3PL with its robust infrastructural and technological capabilities can help you deliver as per customer requirements.
3PLs can optimize inventory to help you deliver orders received from multiple sources. They leverage industry knowledge and experience to help you provide a seamless omnichannel experience.
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Constant visibility and order accuracy. In today’s online shopping world, customers check availability online or in-store and the product’s delivery time before placing an order. Most customers demand online reporting of the availability of a product in the store and do not check the store if the website does not report availability.
Your 3PL partner can help you provide correct information on product availability with the help of accurate, real-time inventory updates and up-to-the-minute order status and tracking information. They ensure order accuracy through efficient business processes and leverage advanced operational methodologies such as Lean and Six Sigma to help you identify improvement opportunities. - Help you focus on your business. Maintaining logistics and dealing with order fulfillment in house can be challenging, especially when your business is growing. A lot of company resources and effort go into managing the whole business process of efficiently delivering accurate products to your customers.
3PL, as a professional fulfillment service provider, can manage transportation, inventory, and warehouse. While they take care of order fulfillment, it provides you the time and resources to focus on the quality of your product to improve customer satisfaction.
- Personalization. Customers today expect customization and personalization in your service. You can make them feel special and let them wonder if their purchase is unique through specialty packs, gift wrapping, or packaging with engravings. If you succeed in providing this personalization, you can differentiate yourself in the marketplace, increase sales, and earn loyal customers.
However, such a level of personalization requires significant effort and resources, which might impact your overall business operations. 3PL provides various services and helps you expand your product offerings without the cost of excess inventory. 3PLs have strategically located facilities near your customers that help speedy delivery and enable you to respond to customer demand faster.
- Flexibility. Customers nowadays expect top-notch services and tend to be partial towards brands that provide faster delivery. Next-day delivery always provides you with a competitive advantage in the marketplace. This shift in customer behavior and expectations demand you to be more flexible in fulfilling customer demands.
3PL providers with their resources, experience, and industry knowledge can become your strategic partner to help you provide flexibility of fulfillment to your customers. A flexible supply chain operations enables your 3PL partner to react faster to the changing customer demands.
- Scalability. The shifting customer demands and shopping behaviour also demands operational scalability, which becomes difficult if you plan to undertake order fulfillment in-house. It might potentially end up in a messy situation, thus compromising customer satisfaction.
Professional 3PL providers have the required information technology to track shipments, materials, and products from the supply and delivery side of the operations. Such advanced systems are costly and require trained professionals to handle them efficiently. However, such solutions are what you need to scale your operations as per the shifting customer demands.
Conclusion:
You can always manage order fulfillment in-house with your resources. However, if you want to grow your business and gain loyal customers, it is recommended to hire a professional 3PL. They can help you focus on your product quality while taking care of all aspects of the supply chain and logistics. 3PLs managing fulfillment also lead to high-quality customer service, which goes a long way in gaining customer satisfaction and brand loyalty.
About XPDEL:
XPDEL is a leading hi-tech provider of fulfillment and logistics services on a mission to enable growth for eCommerce companies. Our existing customers know that everything we do or share is to help them grow. We are futuristic in our vision and constantly work on creating technology that allows us to meet customer expectations for today and tomorrow. We have a widespread network of fulfillment centers that enables us to efficiently handle nationwide delivery in the US – same day, next day, and 2-day delivery. Being located closer to the end consumer, we deliver much faster compared to others.
