The cost of your fulfilment services provider should be analysed with respect to the level and agility of the service it is able to give you. By providing warehousing and dispatch services, it’s able to give your company a more professional customer facing front – but what other services can it deliver on your behalf?
Some of these services are inward facing, rather than directed immediately at your customers. For example, some fulfilment services are able to offer you an account manager who acts like an employee of your own company – communicating with the necessary arms of your business on a daily basis to ensure quick, efficient fulfilment from picking to final delivery.
The account manager is also responsible for running a direct to customer complaints department, solving any issues your customers may have with fulfilment directly. This means the customer is not subject to the confusing and irritating scenario of being handed over from your internal complaints department to the warehousing team you have subcontracted your fulfilment to. So it technically saves you money on phone bills – but more importantly it saves you time, and it pays off highly in the currency of customer satisfaction.
When you’re looking at the cost effectiveness of your current shipping solutions, and potentially considering a new fulfilment services partner, you need to look not only at the actual cost of using the service, but the potential that service can give you for saving money in the long term. International and UK shipping are both areas in which a good fulfilment partner can have a real money saving effect.
Your potential fulfilment partner already has a thick contact book full of UK and international couriers – and will have established long and mutually profitable working relationships with all of them. So when you start using those fulfilment services to get your own orders out with the best possible speed, you also begin to take advantage of the best possible delivery rates. Your fulfilment partner negotiates good prices for delivery on your behalf and sets up the whole connection from its own premises.
Reporting is also a big part of the value of a fulfilment company. You can’t improve your in house practices unless you can see where things are slowing down or even actively going wrong – and you can’t see that unless you have access to meaningful reporting. How many orders are being dropped? How many orders are missing your promise to customers? How is your website working with your database? The reports supplied by a fulfilment accounts manager are there to help you streamline your orders process. When you interpret them in conjunction with the account manager, you are able to develop new, more cost effective ways of doing business.
A fulfilment services company is there to do more than simply pick and pack on your behalf. It is there to make you work better, for less.