How to integrate order and return tracking with customer service
Tara Daly
·August 12, 2024
As a brand, you can offer the best products on the market—but if your customer support doesn’t match the quality of your goods, then you won’t go far.
All top brands know that providing a great customer experience is crucial for building brand loyalty. Businesses that prioritize the customer experience see nearly double the revenue growth of non customer-first businesses, Forrester found. Meanwhile, more than half of all customers say they’d switch to a competitor after a single poor experience with a brand’s customer support team.
Delivering a great customer experience at every touchpoint is key to building a thriving brand—and that extends to the post-purchase experience.
In this article, we’ll look at how you can integrate customer support with order tracking for a seamless customer experience.
Why order tracking matters
Increasingly, customers are demanding real-time visibility into the status of their orders. Verte found that 91% of shoppers track their packages—with 39% admitting to tracking them once a day, and 19% tracking them multiple times a day.
Order tracking visibility builds trust in your brand, and gives customers the data they need so that they can make plans around their package deliveries. If they need to be home to receive an order, they’ll be able to receive an alert hours in advance to ensure that they make it home on time. They’ll also get access to updates around delivery delays, so they won’t be blindsided if a package doesn’t arrive as expected.
By offering shoppers access to a self-service portal for tracking delivery status, you’ll make it easier for them to find the information they need without waiting in a customer support queue. That said, there are valuable opportunities to integrate order tracking with customer support to deliver a superior customer experience across the board.
Integrating order tracking with customer support
To elevate the customer experience, it’s important to build a platform that integrates all of your customer data in one centralized customer support platform. You should be able to get a holistic view of each customer’s interactions with your brand, including behavioral and shopping data, the current status of their orders, and their interactions with your customer support team. By bringing all of your customer information together, you’ll have the relevant context to deliver a personalized experience for each customer.
You’ll be able to enhance customer support interactions with the help of your order tracking data, such as:
- “Where’s my order?”
If a customer contacts customer support to check on their order status, you’ll be able to send them an automated message that links to their real-time order updates, ensuring that they can track the package on their own from that point. - Order delays
If an order is delayed en route, you can create a triggered notification based on this status update, which will send the customer a message alerting them to the delay and to the new delivery timeline. Proactively addressing delays will help to alleviate customer frustration. - Order damaged or missing
If the order is reported as damaged or missing by the carrier, your customer support platform can send an automated message to the customer, alerting them to the news and providing them with options. Would they like a refund for the order, or an immediate replacement? You might also consider offering them bonus store credit to compensate for the error.
By integrating your order tracking data with your customer support platform, you’ll be able to respond to questions and concerns easily, and proactively offer solutions for problems with the shipping process. All of these interactions can be easily automated through your customer support platform, with the option to elevate the customer’s concerns to the CX team if the situation can’t be resolved easily. You’ll be able to reduce the number of support tickets related to order status, while delivering a superior customer experience at every turn.
Order tracking in reverse logistics
It’s also important to offer return tracking when customers are returning products to your warehouse. Customers are often anxious about the risk of the package getting lost in transit, and being held responsible for the cost.
Whether the package is being picked up from the shopper’s home, or from a nearby drop-off center, they should receive an order pick-up notice as soon as the order is scanned in, and have access to real-time order tracking for the order’s return voyage. If the return must be inspected at your warehouse before the customer receives their refund, they should receive an alert when the item has been received, and get a notification of approval or denial once the item has been inspected, with a message letting them know when to expect their refund if they’re eligible.
However, to provide an even better return experience, consider offering some customers their refund instantly when the item is scanned in by the carrier. It’s beyond their control to ensure that the package is received once it’s shipped, so processing their refund up front takes the responsibility off of the customer and reduces their stress associated with the return process.
Using a best-in-class returns management solution like Loop can help you to streamline the returns process, ensuring that customers can easily set up and manage their returns, with options for an instant exchange, store credit, or direct refunds.
Using data to improve the customer experience
By analyzing your order tracking data in aggregate, you’ll be able to generate tracking insights that you can use to improve the customer experience. Which carriers often delay deliveries? Which ones are most accurate in their delivery timelines? Which carriers are customers most likely to report product damage for?
Paying attention to your carrier data can help you look beyond pricing, and evaluate the quality of the delivery services you use. By analyzing data on delivery delays, accuracy, and product damage reports, you can identify areas for improvement and make strategic decisions to improve the overall customer experience.
In today’s competitive market, providing a top-notch delivery experience is crucial for retaining and attracting new customers. So don’t neglect your order tracking data—use it to continuously improve your delivery processes and exceed customer expectations.
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