Customer Experience Optimization: Eliminating Warehouse And Inventory Errors
Never underestimate it, customer experience optimization is important to all companies. Think about it, how many times have you shopped at the same place after having a bad customer experience? Exactly, most of us don’t and wouldn’t.
There’s a number of different stats and studies that show this is a concrete fact.
For most online stores, inventory management is one of the biggest challenges. While growing sales and customers are awesome, your inventory management systems can crumble with a big rise in demand. Even worse, you could start to see high customer experience marks start to fall.
Customer Experience Optimization = Amazing Customer Experience
Yes, amazing customer experiences is what we want for all our customers. There’s no question great customer experience is vital to the success of your business.
When you look at the biggest brands in the world, they all have one thing in common, “great customer service.” You already knew that, so how do we focus on customer experience optimization?
How do we make your customer experience better?
Since inventory management plays such a vital role in customer experience optimization, let’s look at a few of the ways you can continue to give great customer service.
Oversells
There’s no question that oversells are a common issue among online ecommerce businesses. Overselling occurs when you sell more product than you have in stock. As you can imagine, if you’re a customer and order a product you want only to find out later it’s not in stock, you’re going to be upset. This results in what we call (OOS) or out of stock order.
Out of stock orders can cause stress for both customers and retailers. They lead to lost sales and they can lead to negative reviews from mad customers. Using order management software reduces such errors.
Stocksells And Undersells
A stockout is an item you don’t have in stock that is currently listed on your site as unavailable.
Now, we know what you’re thinking, why would this be an inventory mistake? Consider this, in this scenario, it’s obviously a product that sells well or you wouldn’t be sold out. You’re likely keeping customers notified when it will be back in stock.
None the less, this is a sure fire way to disappoint your customers and let’s be honest, it shouldn’t have happened. It’s more like a tease if anything, but a bad one because you lose the sell and likely that customer for life. Not the customer experience optimization you planned on.
This is where your inventory management system comes in, helping you avoid this embarrassing scenario.
Forecasting product inventory properly is important.
Undersells are similar to stockouts in that the product has a listing and you’re intending to sell it. What defines an undersell is when you have a product in your warehouse, but some or all quantities aren’t listed for sale.
Generally speaking, this is a sign of bad warehouse management and it’s time for you to make changes. Having barcodes and SKUs keeps your warehouse more organized and easier to manage.
Shipping And Picking Errors
Both picking and shipping errors can lead to disgruntled customers too.
While inventory management has several different processes, it’s Quality Control that helps eliminate the errors in picking and shipping.
Having a Quality Control process in place in various areas of your order fulfillment process is important.
As you can see, there’s many things that can work against you in inventory control, ultimately causing you bad customer experiences. Eliminating these errors will help you with your customer experience optimization.
