By Lokendra Ranawat, Co-Founder and CEO, WoodenStreet
Supply chain, better known as logistic services are one of the most important factors in ensuring customer satisfaction. Without a smooth supply chain, no business can thrive or grow even with the best marketing strategies. The simple reason for this is, one can create a lot of demand for a product or service through extensive publicity and marketing but a delay in meeting that demand will ultimately create customer dissatisfaction.
“Any supply chain is only as strong as its weakest link. A company can move a product from China to the United States, clear it through Customs, move it to a distribution center, and fulfill it in record time. But if it doesn’t deliver the product to consumers quickly enough, they are not happy, and the company’s supply chain has failed,” -Inbound Logistics Magazine
It is imperative to know how to measure a customer’s satisfaction or how happy a customer is with a business enterprise before ensuring it.
The pointers, which help in measuring customer satisfaction, are:
- By measuring the number of customers enlisting themselves with a business each day
- By knowing how valuable any individual customer is for a business.
- By knowing the common complaints that customers have and narrowing it down to the sector, that receives the maximum number of complaints.
- By analysing the common reasons that lead to the loss of existing and potential customer base of a business.
Research says that these pointers have helped to identify customer satisfaction to be linked directly with a strong and steady supply chain. After a thorough study, it was found that there are three main reasons as to how supply chains affect customer experience and reviews.
Three reasons how a strong supply chain ensures a happy customer
The time of delivery
Ever since online shopping of products and services has gained momentum, the time of receiving the products and services has become gradually important. Almost all online retailers compete with each other to ensure fastest delivery.
- The patience of people is decreasing in general that is why fast as well as on time delivery is crucial.
- When businesses make an on-time delivery promise, it has to make sure to keep it in order to retain customer trust. Only a strong and proper supply chain can ensure on-time delivery.
- Missed delivery can lead to loss of loyal customers and create a bad reputation for the company.
- Use of good technology to track products and enhance visibility
Good technology is a very important component of a strong supply chain and logistic planning. Technology has led to automation of warehouse activities leading to better warehouse management systems (WMS). This creates a better user experience as well as creation of error free management of tasks at the back-end of a business.
This is 2021 and customers want to track every movement of their orders. The days are gone when the delivery process occurred in the dark. Businesses, which ensure good technology for tracking the supply process, keep their customers happy.
For Example- Active Intelligence and Machine learning algorithms has helped business enterprises to identify gaps and mishaps in supply chain. 61 per cent of business executives have stated that AI has helped them recur reduced costs while 53 per cent of them reported to have seen increased revenues.
Fulfilment of demands of customers as soon as possible
Businesses practically run on the demands of customers. Creating customer needs and demands are the responsibilities of the marketing department but fulfilling that need is the job of a strong supply chain. Creating a demand but not being able to fulfil it creates a bad image for the business. ‘Out of stock’ creates dissatisfaction among customers.
However, just fulfilling customer demands is not enough; businesses have to make sure that they do that on time. For this purpose, a strong supply chain and logistics should be maintained. This is how on-time delivery can take place for keeping customers happy and retaining them.
Be it a rush sale or not, on demand fulfilment is necessary for customer satisfaction and only a strong supply chain can guarantee that.
