Running a business comes with many priorities, but there’s nothing more important than ensuring happy customers. After all, if you don’t have happy customers, your business isn’t going to thrive.
When running a business online, you’re not interacting with the customer face to face, which is why you should ensure your delivery service is beyond exceptional. Customers express a desire for fast delivery, free delivery or free next day delivery, with more of them opting for free delivery.
But, despite all this, you need to make sure that your delivery service is amazing from start to finish. We’ve highlighted how you can give your customers the best online delivery experience below.
Table of Contents
Be there from the start
When it comes to your customers, they expect excellent communication from the very start. This means your delivery options and information should be visible on the product page of the item they’re looking to buy. You may even have it as a key point on the home page. Don’t forget, customers don’t want to go digging for information and if they don’t get it from you straight away, they’ll be able to find it somewhere else in a few clicks.
Keep customers updated
The key to a great delivery experience is communication all the way. From receiving an email to confirm everything, to offering a tracking service, this will help to give your customers peace of mind, as they’ll know where their item is in the delivery process. It’ll also help to create trust between your brand and the consumer for future purchases.
See also: Sample Retail Business Plan (free download)
The delivery
Despite the journey, if the delivery isn’t excellent, all your previous hard work would have been for nothing. Ensuring your packaging and distribution is in good order is vitally important to the business. It’s not only key to ensuring good customer relations, but it can also influence profits and the business in the future.
Because of this, making sure you work with a good courier service is key, while providing a time slot and guaranteed delivery time is something consumers have expressed a desire for.
Returns
Finally, make sure you consider your returns. Research has suggested that a lot of online purchases will be returned. Because of this, you need to make sure that returning parcels is super easy for your customers.
You could do this by offering free returns, which could be in place of free deliveries if the cost is too much. Or, you could use a courier service in the same way as deliveries, to ensure they return quickly. Also, make sure you outline the time it’ll take for money to return, and inform customers when you get the parcel returned, so they know when to expect their refund.
Of course, there’s much more than just deliveries when operating an online business. But, if you want to build your brand and loyalty, this step is one of the top priorities you’ll need to get right.
