5 teams you need to plan a good post-purchase service

For your strategy to be absolutely clear and understandable, good preparation and organization is the be-all and end-all. For the beginning, therefore, a kick-off meeting with all those teams that would be affected by a new after-sales service is a good idea. Their support and know-how is immensely important - both to present the project convincingly to the boardroom and to implement it successfully in the company afterwards.

As a little support we have compiled a list of teams that you should bring on board during the planning. Assuming, of course, that your company has that many different teams.

1. Customer Experience

One of the first teams that a post-purchase service will directly impact is the customer experience team. Aside from feedback-based scores, such as NPS (= Net Promotor Score) and CSAT (= Customer Satisfaction Score), it can be difficult to measure the impact of Customer Experience on business profits. Yet today it is more important than ever to keep customers coming back to your store with a good shopping experience and to find the right customer retention measures for them. This is the task of the customer experience team: to win and strengthen the trust and loyalty of customers. One way to achieve this is to make the post-purchase experience as consistent and individual as possible. What tweaks you can make to further optimize the post-purchase experience is best asked of this team. Input that you should definitely get!

2. e-commerce

Team #2, which is affected by post-purchase service is the e-commerce team. They are the ones who embed the code into the website. And they re responsible for all purchase movements, including cross-selling, up-selling and shopping cart size. Therefore, you should secure their support as early as possible! You have to convince the e-commerce team that the extra effort will be worth it for them in the end.

It s best to emphasize how the new after-sales service will help them improve and measure their KPIs. For one thing, communication is likely to improve simply by providing the expected delivery date from the outset. For another a dedicated track & trace page as a new touchpoint in the customer journey boosts sales even further. And if that is not enough: The simpler, more straightforward and seamless the returns management is designed for customers, the more their loyalty increases - and with it the repurchase rate.

3. marketing

Marketing is all about ROI. That's why you get the team well into the post-purchase boat with a proper order and returns tracking system. And if you re just going to talk about the customer experience journey anyway, it's best to take the opportunity to ask questions like: How exactly do you currently measure your performance? And what would you improve in the post-purchase experience if you could?

A super way to present your own assets to even more customers and check their development based on click-through rates and conversion rates is shipment tracking. For example, offers to sign up for newsletters can be sent out with dispatch messages to customers. Or links to one's Facebook or Instagram channel to generate more followers. And of course, related products can also be promoted well in the status messages - as long as they are relevant to the customers. For example, if someone has ordered a pair of trousers, you can offer them matching sweaters. Someone who has just bought a bike is probably interested in accessories such as a helmet, bike lock or a nice basket for the luggage rack. The open rate of these messages of more than 70 percent is huge! You can often only dream of this with other marketing measures. Thus, in combination with the integrated Track & Trace page the repurchase rate can be increased by up to 0.5 percent.

4. customer service / call center

The customer care team can probably be excited about more post-purchase services with the prospect of fewer WISMO inquiries (WISMO stands for "Where is my Order?"). Our experience has shown that after the introduction of proactive shipping communication the corresponding customer inquiries have dropped by up to 25 percent in some cases! This makes the work in customer service enormously easier and allows resources to be better allocated. Instead of wasting time and energy on answering basic delivery and return requests, the team can focus on the more urgent and important customer service issues.

5. Logistics / Supply Chain

And of course, don t leave out the logistics and supply chain team: They maintain the relationship with logistics service providers and want to know how the software integrates with their system. How does it affect their workload? And how does it help them overcome their biggest challenges? To get this team on your side, you can show how work processes can be improved.

The customer feedback on the shipping process for example, provides important insights into the customer experience with the logistics service providers - and shows where things might not be going quite right yet. Since for customers the shipment tracking always runs the same way, even if several parcel delivery companies are involved, the status gap between "Shipped" and "Scanned" is closed. Result: the customer is less confused and logistics can also track parcels more easily and clearly. In addition work in distribution centers can be better planned when incoming returns are handled more transparently. And finally, real-time monitoring of parcel volumes also provides more transparency as well as a precise overview of what the status of all shipped shipments is, so that immediate action can be taken in the event of "problem cases".

Everybody on board? Then nothing stands in the way of a good Post Purchase service

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If you ve finally talked to all the teams mentioned above and managed to convince them of your idea, there is nothing standing in the way of a successful presentation. If you need more arguments and information on why a good post-purchase experience is so important, you can find another blogpost on the topic here here.