3% of customers say they won’t shop with a retailer again for at least a month after a negative delivery experience. Another 38% of customers say they won’t shop with retailers again at all. 

Because of this, it is imperative that your customer service constantly remains one of our top priorities. From communicating how easy it is to navigate your site and handling complaints, you need to have processes in place to be able to appropriately handle customers with excellence and ease from start to finish.

One element that can influence the way customers think about your company once they have purchased from you, is how effectively you can deliver that order, and to what degree can you exceed their expectations. If you over-promise and under-deliver, you will not only cost yourself and your company time and money but you will upset the customer and lose business as well. An upset customer is also likely to leave a negative review, which could change future business.

What people think and feel about your company is branding.

Some scenarios you might be familiar with:

Imagine having a leaky faucet. The water is actively running and you can’t turn the handle far enough to get it to shut off. What do you do?

First, reach out to your device. Then, you remember seeing a nice truck at the stoplight next to you just a few days ago with the words “We stop leaky faucets” scrawled across its side. Do you remember the name? You can look them up and go to their website. It looks great and you can sign up for an appointment for tomorrow morning. Great! You put a bucket under the faucet and move on, happy to make an appointment. If you feel empowered to have a resolution!

Morning rolls around. You’ve been able to replace buckets this morning and haven’t lost too much water overall. You did spill a bit on the floor and got your socks wet. Ugh.

You anticipate the plumber showing up any minute now per the confirmation email.

But nobody shows up.

You wait an hour and finally call the number at the bottom of their email and website.

“I’m sorry, Ma’am, I do see your name on the calendar, but we don’t have enough technicians working today. Can we schedule for later this week?”

Insert your favorite cuss words here.

It doesn’t matter how good your marketing is if you can’t fulfill the orders. Trust is broken, and you both lose.

When it comes to tracking systems, the cleaner the better

Whatever tracking system software you use, it needs to be easy to use and available to all team members anytime and anywhere. I personally love to use and recommend Trello. It’s free for basic users and has incredible workflow processes that make things easy to delegate and track all in one convenient location. All someone needs to sign up is an email address and internet connection. You can work with teams the world over in one location with ease.

There is no amount of marketing you can do if you can’t fulfill your orders quickly while maintaining quality.

Your Fulfillment Process

Your fulfillment process will take a bit of work to determine, but the more automated it can be, the better your chances of growing your profits and reducing errors on a continual basis.

Here is an example of what your process could look like:

• Order received through your website (channel)
• New card created in project management software with contact information, products ordered, additional order details and transaction number.
• Contact info is added to CRM / order is assigned to a Project Manager
• Order approved by leadership
• Order assigned to project manager to determine which team will fulfill the request
• Project Manager (PM) moves the project to a team specialist to fulfill
• Order is shipped by team specialist
• PM sends confirmation email
• PM follow up
• The onboarding drip sequence is deployed

While this is very common sense stuff here, it will make a world of difference in your team’s productivity and feeling of accomplishment if you can clearly define it and communicate that process to your team.

You will most likely have other steps in your process that make your company, products, and services unique, so embrace those and make them fit your needs! Most important is that you’re continuing to deliver valuable service to your clients on a timely basis while putting effort into stewarding current and new customer relationships.

“Building a good customer experience does not happen by accident, it happens by design.” – Clare Muscutt

The six most common business pain points are listed below. If one of these pain points resonates with you, go ahead and click it to find out what you can do to alleviate your challenges:

• Failing Business Model
• Poor Leadership Communication
• Lack of Brand
• Lack of Promotion
• Lack of Sales Funnel
• Undefined Systemsh

Download a copy of our free team marketing worksheets here. Want to learn even more? Check out our book and video course, Unify Your Marketing.