Reducing costs and enhancing customer service with courier integration

Collaborating with external third-parties necessitates a strong focus on delivering the best possible customer experience. A key component of this is having an effective courier management system. 

However, to guarantee optimal customer satisfaction, it's crucial that every operation within your supply chain runs with utmost efficiency and accuracy. 

When thinking about your current courier management system: Does it really fulfil these requirements?

Managing courier operations when relying on:

1. Third-parties

A courier management system supports businesses that ship and despatch multiple deliveries via third-party courier services. It does this by providing them access to end-to-end visibility on order fulfilment and delivery routing.

As a solution, a courier management system enhances the communication between businesses and external couriers through improved order tracking, customer updates and returns processes. By using a courier management system, you can more efficiently and effectively plan delivery routes, analyse courier performance, and schedule shipments.

2. Manual processes

Even with the support of a courier management system, handling large volumes of order data is still complicated, especially if your business uses multiple third-party providers.

Processing and managing vital order information on a courier management system often requires manual data inputting. You need to type and re-type delivery addresses and consignment numbers, across multiple platforms and databases.

These lengthy manual processes increase human errors; thus, creating inaccurate data on the courier management system, which inflicts further pitfalls and errors throughout the delivery process. The consequences may be late deliveries, packages being sent and delivered to the wrong addresses, or the wrong items being picked and despatched.

In addition to the time and money wasted, rectifying these errors causes further expense and may result in returned goods and refunds, which otherwise would not have occurred. Providing a poor customer experience will damage your relationship with your consumers, threatening customer retention levels.

Ultimately, if you’re attempting to manage your courier operations through a courier management system which requires manual processes and involves disjointed platforms, you expose your business to several risks. These include wasting stock, plummeting your profits, and sending your disgruntled consumers into the open arms of your competitors.

3. Integration

By integrating your internal courier management system with your third-party courier service providers, you reduce the need to manually rekey and send data between different platforms.

All the data you require to run a smooth courier operation is all available in one centralised solution. Everything from orders and transactions, stock levels, despatch and shipping, courier schedules and routes, and customer details are all available, in real-time, from anywhere. All with the click of a button.

The optimised accuracy on the traceability of order fulfilment means you can keep your customers well updated on consignment details which are automatically generated and recorded against the relevant order transaction which an unintegrated courier management system could not achieve. 

Additionally, your third-party couriers can also be updated on amendments to delivery requirements, enabling them to plan the best routes, maximising their potential.