OnPoint’s team of product service veterans has 65+ years of experience in the manufacturing, insurance, warranty, service fulfillment and service administration technology verticals. The team is well positioned to help you deliver the best customer service experience possible in the industry.
A key area in any CX strategy is parts logistics. However it’s often an afterthought, even for manufacturers. Ensuring adequate supply of parts, especially parts commonly used for repairs is essential to improving the consumer’s experience with both a product and a brand.
As new technology emerges, customer demands are evolving at lightning speed, impacting logistical requirements for service and repair. Not having an adaptive and future-focused parts forecasting and fulfillment infrastructure can create severe strains on both ends of the service and repair process. Backordered parts or mounting storage and shipping costs limits speed to service, efficiency and profitability. Below, we’ll address the most important things to look out for related to parts logistics.
3 Key Ways that Part Distribution Impacts CX
There are 3 can’t miss parts distribution concepts to address when considering a CX strategy.
- Evolving Customer Demands: Customer demands have transformed, posing a new set of challenges for logistics operators to tackle flexibility, visibility and transparency.
- Scalability Requirements: Logistics services demand increases during sale periods and holiday seasons and the technology should be quickly scalable.
- Constant Touch with Customer: Customers want to be kept in the loop with their package information and quickly get in touch with an agent that can check the delivery status.
Source: https://www.ameyo.com/blog/logistics-and-distribution-is-a-customer-service-business
Evolving Customer Demands:
Like it or not, customers are becoming more accustomed to having more information and flexibility in both ordering (and modifications) and delivery. Commons examples are order modifications and addons, saved checkout carts, and preferred delivery time windows. This can present a challenge to ensure the right allocation of resources. Having an experienced partner in this area can help tackle these challenges and minimize any negative impact to the customer.
Scalability Requirements:
Seasonality can be “make or break” periods from both a sales and logistic perspective. On the positive end, you may have increased sales. However, with this increased activity, you also run the risk of negative customer experiences if your logistics infrastructure is not scalable during this time. Preparing for service and repair is critical during this time and face the same logistical challenges. Customers will gauge their overall experience not only on the product or service itself but also by how quickly parts are replaced and/or service calls are resolved. Having a partner with the latest technology to help facilitate this process and can scale during peak seasonality is critical to creating a positive customer experience.
Constant Touch with Customer:
As mentioned earlier, customers are more empowered with information. Another critical piece is the method of communication throughout the customer experience from product delivery status to technician or replacement part arrival. Emails get filtered, calls get ignored, and direct mail gets tossed in the recycle bin. What’s the answer? Asking customers’ preferred means of communication and following up across multiple channels. Therefore, it’s critical to stay in constant contact with your customers through the process as well as ensuing your resources are allocated most effectively. We can help with this.
The OnPoint Warranty Difference:
- We recruit and train customer-centric front-line call center agents who work hard each day to better connect your Brand to your Customers through processes designed to create positive outcomes for every customer.
- We offer an omnichannel consumer portal, providing anytime, anywhere, any device access for product registration, plan quotes and sales, service requests and dispatching, appointment status updates and technician location
- We offer value added service and product offers- for every product in the entire home or facility, driving loyalty and high total lifetime value of each consumer relationship.
- We work with large scale and boutique logistics providers who can provide part management and product repair and fulfillment services from wholly outsourced to consignment models.
- We recruit, credential and onboard trained, professional service providers, ranging from onsite or field service to depot, advanced exchange, and replacement providers incentivized to deliver great service to your consumers.
Improving the customer experience, good old-fashioned people skills are still just as important to attracting and retaining customers as they were 60 years ago. Ensuring staff has both parts knowledge and customer rapport is key. Find out more from organizations that rely on OnPoint Warranty to provide the highest levels of customer satisfaction and NPS of any provider: https://www.onpointwarranty.com/our-solutions/service-fulfillment
