Customer Experience: 4 Ways Supply Chains Can Improve

This Article originally appeared in Morai Logistics on January 8, 2020.

Customer experience is on its way to becoming the most important factor in supply chain success-here are 4 ways to improve it.

Making supply chains as customer-centric as possible is set to become priority number 1 for companies. It’s what makes companies stand out. In turn, it’s what makes customers want to do repeat business with them. As such, companies are focusing on ways to use their supply chains to enhance customer experience.

As covered in a recent Supply Chain Movement article,

Customer experience will soon be the most important factor for a successful supply chain – even more important than low costs, according to six out of ten supply chain professionals. They ranked it as the number one brand differentiator in the coming years, putting it ahead of a price and product in a recent global survey.

This article by Morai Logistics highlights 4 of the most critical ways in which companies can improve their customer experience via their supply chains.

Listen to and Study Your Customers

These are certainly obvious considerations. Nevertheless, they’re worth addressing. Customers want and often expect a personalized experience. If companies can provide it to them, they often gain longtime loyal consumers. Fortunately, there’s a fairly straightforward two-pronged approach to meeting this customer requirement.

The first thing companies can do is simply listen to their customers as well as specifically ask for feedback through whatever channels they have available. Secondly, once they have sufficient data on their customers, companies should create multiple buyer personas. These personas should include exactly what these potential buyers would want on their customer journey. This process should be dynamic, adapting to new customers and new expectations.

Eliminate Data Silos

The various teams, processes, and operations within a supply chain should have data flowing freely between them. More than that, all their data being collected should be consolidated and kept in a single, unified platform. The easiest avenue to achieving this is digital transformation, But regardless of how companies do so, they need their all data to be easily accessible and easy to sort through.

As a result of this, companies can then keep up with the functioning of supply chain on all levels. And, in turn, keep their customers informed as well. This is also helpful in the case of any issues that arise. After all, customers are much more understanding of companies that are proactive in mentioning and addressing their mistakes, as opposed to ones that wait for negative feedback to respond.

Enhance Visibility

If companies want to be able to avoid and fix for impediments within their supply chains, it’s crucial that they have visibility across them. If an order is late or having problems, it’s of utmost importance that companies be aware of that. Otherwise, orders may never arrive. Thus, companies have to ensure they utilize integrated and transparent supply chain management.

Visibility isn’t only important for the company itself, however. A post by Bringg distinguishes between the two types of visibility needed:

Internally, businesses need to have full visibility over their own fleets, inventory, warehouse and drivers. On the customer end, consumers today want to have full visibility over their delivery – from when it leaves the warehouse, restaurant, or service center until it arrives to their house.

Embrace Data, Analytics, and Machine Learning

Data is a company’s primary resource to transform into top notch customer experience. This is because, through data collection, companies can gain insights into how their various operations are doing through analytics. Which, in turn, can be conveyed to customers or used to mitigate any supply chain breakdowns. Moreover, that gathered data can also be used for machine learning. A function of AI that helps with predicting demand and forecasting.