The position of end customer and customer-centric organizations has been steadily rising in the list of top 10 priorities for every logistics provider. Managing customer expectations and nurturing lasting relationships with their customer base is fast becoming a core focus of this landscape ensuring a distinct competitive advantage. Interestingly, with the customer rising in prominence, the complexities of the relationship are also becoming exceedingly complex and demanding.
Customers have smartly realized their power, as is evident from their ever-increasing expectations and demands from the logistics ecosystem. What are these demands.
Let’s take a look.
The Ever-Growing List of Customer Expectations
Transparency and visibility across the ecosystem: The ability to track consignments from placement of order right up to delivery in real time is a common request. Track-and-trace involves having real-time information at your fingertips of the current status of consignments to immediate intimation of unanticipated delays.
Time is money: This phrase has incredible relevance in the logistics ecosystem, with timeliness becoming a primary indicator of Perfect Order and a strong logistic differentiator. Logistics service providers are hence looking for solutions that will help them work in a time-bound manner.
Seamless, end-to-end process: The expectation of a smooth process from order to delivery and invoicing has become the norm. Customers comprehend the complexities of the landscape, yet expect the provider to manage these intricacies in the background. The emphasis on seamless logistics is hence challenging the entire network.
Managing disruptions in real time: Customers expect a foolproof plan with zero deviation in implementation, but in reality, logistics providers have to constantly battle to stay on plan. The possibility of things going wrong is quite high – from poor weather and vehicle breakdown to poor road conditions and change in route plan. Handling such sudden disruptions is one of the toughest challenges of the landscape.
On-the-go: Mobility-first approaches across verticals have placed a lot of importance on anytime anywhere access. From access to information to carrying out simple to complex tasks seamlessly across multiple channels – from mobiles to desktops – has highlighted hurdles in terms of efficient integration, version control, and other challenges.
Logistics companies are hence forced to look at options that will help them deliver a top-notch performance and unmatched customer experience, without compromising on cost.
The Magic of Technology
Yes, the customer wish list is long, but with the magic lamp of technology at their service, logistics providers are effectively meeting most the customer expectations. Let’s look at a few examples.