3 Minute Explainer: What is Delivery Exception Management?

Aggravated when your packages don’t arrive on time? Your customers are too. In this 3 Minute Explainer, we explain why delivery exception management is a must-have for parcel shippers.

In 2020, an iconic British retailer entered administration and later announced it would be liquidated. The brand was later bought by an online-only retailer that would not retain any of the company’s physical stores.

The closure of such a longstanding retailer was a huge blow to high streets, British and Irish shoppers — and most especially, the company’s thousands of employees. 

But if you’d ever tried purchasing goods online from this retailer, the closure may not have been a surprise. The delivery and customer service was, in my experience, terrible. 

The last time I purchased online from this retailer, one package arrived late. The second never arrived at all. Customer service refunded the purchase, but would not give me the service I actually wanted — to resend the package. I took my business elsewhere and never shopped online again with this retailer.

Poor Delivery Costs Business

At a time when e-commerce volumes are soaring, companies can no longer afford to be lax about the delivery experience. If they are, their competitors will win market share and customer loyalty.

If you ship high volumes of packages or high value goods, you need delivery management tools. Around 40 percent of us will not purchase from a company again after a poor delivery experience. After all, when you buy online, the delivery is the customer experience. 

For a long time, getting a parcel out the door and onto a carrier’s van meant that the job was done. After that, the parcel was the carrier’s problem. If a customer wanted to know the status of the delivery, they tracked it on the carrier’s website.

E-commerce is growing across many industries, not just retail. Companies that ship business-to-business may think that their customer expectations are lower than those who ship business-to-consumer. That is no longer the case. 

Whether you ship B2B or B2C, you are shipping to a person. Therefore, the delivery experience is critical.

How Delivery Exception Management Works

Delivery Exception Management offers shippers a centralized portal to track all shipments, with all carriers, anywhere in the world, in the same way.

Delivery Exception Management — or DEM — is a single location to get visibility into all shipments both to and from your customers from the time of carrier pick-up through to delivery. 

If you are using multiple carriers, managing visibility can be a challenge. Different carriers use different status updates. With DEM, shippers can harmonize these and share them internally and with customers. 

The real power of DEM, however, is “exception management.” 

With DEM, if a package is at risk of missing its promised delivery date, the solution will alert the appropriate personnel so that you can take action. Without exception based alerts, your customer service team will be inundated with WISMO calls — Where is my order? With exception alerts, you’ll know before your customer does if there is a problem. 

With DEM, you can raise tracers for lost or damaged shipments. This also allows you to contact the carrier and collaborate to resolve issues if and when they arise. 

All this functionality is available whether you are engaged in domestic  or international shipping.

Why Delivery Exception Management is Important

Offering excellent customer service is important to any organization that relies on repeat business. Accurate information regarding delivery is critical to this. None of us like having to chase late deliveries, whether we are shopping online for ourselves or purchasing critical items for a business.

DEM allows you to leverage real-time intelligent visibility. As a result, your customers are kept informed throughout the delivery journey. Benefits of using DEM include:

• The ability to offer flexible delivery options 

• Real-time data updates to your customers 

• Proactively respond if a package is at risk of missing its delivery date

• Chain of custody controls for high value items.

• Branded tracking alerts to showcase new products and offers

LET’S KEEP IN TOUCH

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Further Reading

THE NECESSITY OF E-COMMERCE DELIVERY OPTIMIZATION

HOW TO CHOOSE E-COMMERCE SHIPPING SOFTWARE

THE LAST MILE DELIVERY: CHALLENGES AND OPPORTUNITIES