Ensure Customer Satisfaction This Peak Season
By Johannes Panzer, Head of Industry Solutions, Ecommerce, Descartes Systems Group
Peak season doesn’t have to be a stressful time filled with challenges for retailers. Instead, it can be a chance to impress your customers with your reliability and service quality. As you prepare, remember that sound peak season shipping practices can help transform fulfillment challenges into opportunities for growth and customer retention by helping you avoid costly delays and ensuring that your customers receive their orders on time. To help you navigate this busy period, here are five key considerations for a successful peak season shipping strategy.
One of the most important things you can do is to forecast demand for your products during peak season. Analyze your sales and shipping data from previous years to identify trends and anticipate the level of future demand. Use inventory forecasting formulas to put your data to work.
Once you have a clear idea of the amount of demand you expect, ensure you have a sufficient inventory of shipping supplies on hand, including labels, tape and packaging materials. Running out of these must-have items during peak season can cause unnecessary shipping delays. It can also eat into your profit if you package and ship items in larger boxes because you ran out of small sizes.
Peak season doesn’t have to be a stressful time filled with challenges for retailers. Instead, it can be a chance to impress your customers with your reliability and service quality.
- Johannes Panzer, Head of Industry Solutions - Ecommerce, Descartes Systems Group
Katelyn Daniell is an innovative leader in the digital and retail sectors. She’s co-founder of Precision Retail, an AI-powered survey tool for capturing zero-party data, and mplus, a tech stack solution for optimizing digital advertising.
Katelyn is passionate about building retailer-customer relationships through sustainable value exchanges and zero-party data. This venture is already making waves in the industry by enabling retailers to engage with their customers in more meaningful and impactful ways.
Since December 2021, Katelyn has also been the co-founder of mplus, where she has played a crucial role in the company's growth and success. Her leadership has been instrumental in establishing mplus as a key player in the digital adtech market.
Prior to her entrepreneurial endeavors, Katelyn served as the Chief Commercial Officer at MCap Group from August 2019 to July 2020. She has extensive experience at Dentsu Aegis Network where, over five and a half years, she held various positions, including Commercial Director, Digital Investment Manager, Digital Investment Supervisor, and Digital Strategist. Her responsibilities included managing revenue diversification, adopting new commercial models, overseeing media and ad tech supply-side management, and leading digital investment for major retail and CPG brands.
Once you’ve forecasted demand, you need to secure the best shipping rates with your shipping partners. This involves negotiating with shipping partners and diversifying your shipping options. This is especially important if you’re working with multiple carriers.
While it’s always a good idea to secure your own negotiated rates, leading parcel shipping software providers can extend their discounted carrier rates by providing you with access to their network of small parcel and even LTL carriers. This allows you to automatically compare rates and services from different carriers and choose the ones that best meet your needs—and the needs of your customers. Also, make sure your shipping platform allows you to use your own carrier rates without imposing heavy label fees. Some shipping solutions do not charge a label fee when you bring your own accounts, but others do.
Well before peak season hits, contact your carrier account representatives to negotiate rates and secure capacity. Do your research ahead of time and understand the discounts, fees, and surcharges your carrier is already providing. Then, collect data and create cost models, benchmarks, and rate simulations to justify your request for reduced rates. This is the time to lock in favorable terms that can help you manage costs during high-demand periods.
Efficiency in your fulfillment process directly impacts your ability to meet delivery promises. Here are some quick ways to automate manual tasks and streamline warehouse operations:
- Use shipping software to automate time-intensive tasks like rate shopping, batch label printing, box size selection, and carrier service selection. Automation can significantly reduce human error and speed up the fulfillment process. Here are some ideas for automation rules to use.
- When your business is growing and manually managing inventory and fulfillment begins to block efficiency and accuracy, consider implementing a warehouse management system built for ecommerce environments. Streamlined warehouse operations are crucial for quick and accurate order fulfillment. Consider placing fast-moving items in convenient locations for technology-driven pick/pack/ship processes. Forgo clipboards and paper in favor of mobile devices to not only guide the warehouse team on highly productive walking paths to pick orders, but also to eliminate costly mispicks. Situate a pack/ship station with a thermal label printer near the storage/staging area to minimize steps between picking and shipping.
- For retailers shipping large items (think kayak, bike racks, etc.), the use of a mobile printer may be even more practical, so the process becomes a pick/ship.
2. Secure the Best Shipping Rates
3. Optimize Your Fulfillment Process
1. Forecast Demand
4. Communicate with Your Customers
It’s especially important during peak season to communicate with customers about your shipping policies and procedures. This will help to avoid any surprises or disappointments. Clear and timely communication with your customers can make or break their experience. In fact, sometimes, this might be the difference between earning repeat business versus a one-time purchase.
Customer communication should always answer the key question, “Where is my package, and when will it get here?” Be upfront about shipping timelines and any potential delays. Providing branded delivery notifications and easy access to real-time tracking information can greatly enhance the customer experience and reduce the burden on your customer service team.
Ensure your customer service team is well-equipped to handle queries and complaints promptly. Extended live support hours or chatbot assistance can go a long way in managing customer expectations during peak season.
5. Have a Backup Plan
Even with the best planning, things can sometimes go wrong with peak season shipping. Preparing a backup plan for shipping partners and shipping insurance can help improve responsiveness to unexpected challenges.
Always have a secondary shipping partner on standby. If your primary partner faces issues or delays, you can quickly switch to the backup to keep your delivery promise and avoid shipping delays. Multi-carrier shipping software allows you to integrate multiple carrier accounts so you can easily switch from one carrier to another without having to learn a different software program or website.
Plus, by diversifying your carriers, you can take advantage of services that certain customers (but not all) need, such as guaranteed delivery by a certain date and time or signature services.
Make sure you have shipping insurance automatically applied to high-value orders to protect your customers from losses due to package theft and other delivery problems. Providing shipping protection at the point of purchase also facilitates quick claims processing and minimal disruption to peak season operations.
These five factors will help prepare your business for peak season shipping and ensure that your shipping operations are equipped to handle the surge in demand—leaving you free to focus on providing an excellent customer experience.
