Using OMS to Improve your Customer Service

For an eCommerce platform to be successful in this crowded marketplace, they have to provide a great shopping experience. Customers today have very high expectations when it comes to shopping online or using a retail app.

Online customers are hesitant to share their credit card details online. So when they're willing to pay online, they expect great service, quick delivery times, and accurate order fulfilment. Which means that order fulfilment is more crucial than ever before to the success of any online retailer. You have to ensure that each order is processed quickly and accurately.

Use Order Fulfilment to Stand Out

It is a tremendous boost to customer confidence when you're able to ship items quickly to them after they place an order. Research shows that two-thirds of customers consider quick delivery times as a primary reason for shopping with a specific retailer. A third of online shoppers frequent specific online retailers because of their order delivery speeds.

On the flip side, almost half of shoppers won't use a specific retailer again if their delivery experience was poor. A quarter of online customers have cancelled orders because of lagging delivery times. About half have reported abandoning a shopping cart because the shipping times were too long or could not be provided by the website.

Customers want fast, flexible, efficient, and affordable shipping of their orders. If you look at online surveys, 80% of customers would like same-day shipping of their goods. More than half of online shoppers would be willing to pay more for such a service—but less than half of online retailers offer this service.

The above information provides a real opportunity for online retailers to get new customers. If you have a winning delivery strategy that provides an edge over the competition, you will win the loyalty of your customers.

If you can get this right, you will definitely stand out in the market. As word-of-mouth becomes more important in the online retail space, some customers will avoid you altogether if your business has a reputation of slow and inaccurate order fulfilment.

The OMS Solution

When you look at the above numbers, it's easy to think that customer expectations are just too high when it comes to online shopping. Or it might seem that no retailer could realistically offer the level of service customers demand these days.

But that's not true at all. If you choose the right Order Management System (OMS) software to handle your order fulfilment, you can meet and even exceed their high expectations.

OMS software will allow you to optimise the time between when a customer places an order and when the order is finally fulfilled. The software will also optimise the process of receiving, packaging and shipping the orders and ensure that costs and shipping times are both kept low. In this way, you will be able to provide better customer experience while minimising back orders, channel conflicts, and delayed delivery.

The software will also allow you to track customer activities to identify trends in the way your customers shop. You will also be able to improve their shopping experience and find ways to engage them in new and interesting ways to increase sales. You will also be able to monitor your high value customers by their spending habits, and identify your best customers with regards to sales figures and number of items purchased.

In short, an OMS will help your business stand out in the market. You won't just be able to meet your customers’ high expectations, you will be able to delight them with your service.

How OMS Improves Customer Service

There are several ways that an OMS can make your business run smoother and more efficiently— which instantly translates into a better experience for your customers:

1. Business Automation

Retailers need to work harder than ever before to get and keep customers. Consumers have more choice than ever before in the online retail space, and it's easier than ever to switch loyalties between retailers. Which means that you need to be laser focused on winning new customers and keeping them happy.

Exceptional customer service isn't a pipe dream, it's essential if you want to stand out in a busy marketplace. You need to spend at least as much time keeping your existing customers happy as winning new ones.

This starts with shipping the product your customer orders on time and accurately. Your order management and fulfilment processes need to run smoothly, efficiently, and speedily.

Doing proper order management is time-consuming and tricky. But with the right OMS software, a business can automate many of its order fulfilment processes. If your software handles some of the more mundane aspects of order management, your staff is freed up to handle the more complex tasks. They will also have more time to work directly with customers instead of manually processing orders.

2. Eliminating Human Error

When people are involved in a process, human error is inevitable. Even the best and most diligent employees make mistakes. This can have significant repercussions for your order fulfilment workflow. For example, look at the following scenarios:

• A customer orders five items on your website, but the employee mistakenly registers an order for 50 items. This will mean that the warehouse will send out ten times the number of items than what the customer ordered.
• Someone in the warehouse marks an order as being shipped before it actually leaves the warehouse. Something happens and they get distracted—and the order is never actually shipped. The problem is that the system still recorded this order as being shipped, even though it wasn't actually completed.
• A customer places an urgent order on a third-party website. But someone on your team forgets to check the third-party orders for a couple of days, and the customers don't get their product in time.

When a business uses an OMS, several of the above tasks will be handled by an automatic system. Workflow automation ensures that most of the above problems can be averted. Simple errors can be caught before they snowball into a major catastrophe.

3. Real-Time, Accurate Reporting System

Even if your staff is on top of handling your orders, the actual process of completing the orders and then registering it on the system takes time and effort. This is especially true if your business uses several different software packages for the different stages of the order fulfilment process. The result is that your order tracking and fulfilment data, as well as your inventory levels, will not be up to date.

If you have an unified OMS software to handle all of these functions, these problems will be averted. With a proper OMS software system in place, you will have access to real-time data about your current orders, inventory levels, customer information, and other information—which is the information you need to make proper decisions in your business.

Real-time and accurate reporting will instantly give you a step up above your competitors. You will also be able to monitor sales patterns, customer behaviour, and retail trends. Which will allow you to make the right decision for your current business situation and plan for the future.

4. Exceptional Customer Service

With an OMS system, you will be able to provide the superior customer service your business needs to go to the next level. For example:

• Your customer service agents will be able to reply to customer inquiries with ease and in a timely manner.
• You will have access to current and accurate shipping and delivery data.
• Stock inventory levels will be accurate and marked correctly in the system.
  
  

Conclusion

Whether you're just starting out in the eCommerce sphere, or you're a veteran in the market, you must make effective order management a top priority. Online customers are getting more sophisticated and demand quick delivery times. You need the right software to keep up with their demands.

An OMS will help you take control of the entire order fulfilment process to ensure that a product is in stock when the customer places the order, the goods are processed in short order in the back office, and then finally gets shipped as quickly as possible.

You can't afford to lose customers due to goods not arriving on time, or not informing them when  shipping schedules fall behind. You also have to avoid backorders and constantly keep up with demand to avoid slow shipping times.

An OMS can help a business process orders faster, with a high degree of efficiency,  while avoiding processing errors—all factors that are crucial to the success of a modern eCommerce retailer. As an online retailer, you want to delight your customers. An OMS will help your business stay ahead of the trends and also what your competition is doing in the online retail space.