Receive more positive customer reviews and fewer customer enquiries

SportsAndMore (SAM), an online store for sporting goods and clothing, has been using parcelLab's solution for two years. This came about in a roundabout way: The ERP software company 4Sellers has already been working with SportsAndMore for almost ten years and also had an existing partnership with parcelLab. Due to the positive experience with parcelLab, 4Sellers acted as a quasi interface and recommended the parcelLab solution to SAM.

The cooperation of both sides with 4Sellers laid the foundation for the collaboration of parcelLab and SAM.
SportsAndMore saw the need for seamless communication with their customers after the order process, which was left to shipping service providers before the collaboration. The company wanted to gain control over messaging and stop simply handing off these important touchpoints to third-party providers.
Another goal was to ease the burden on the customer service team by reducing customer inquiries about shipping status.

The team was able to find all of this at parcelLab and didn't have to think twice to enter into a collaboration.

In March 2020, at the time of the first lockdowns, SportsAndMore faced a flood of customer inquiries. Like many other e-commerce retailers at the time, the company simply couldn't handle the mass of customer inquiries associated with the rush of orders.

Many inquiries were related to shipping status or delivery delays - typical customer inquiries like "Where is my package?" that many brands are probably familiar with. But this is also where the problem lies: although such inquiries are usually not complicated to answer, manual processing requires a certain amount of time as well as resources on the company side.
If customer e-mails are not answered for a long time or telephone queries cannot be answered because the team lacks resources, this leads to disgruntlement on the part of the customers. They then often leave negative reviews on the Internet, which in turn can lead to monetary damage for the brand, because as a result fewer people will order in the future and customer loyalty will crumble. So what can be done?

Thanks to parcelLab's customizable post-purchase communication, the SportsAndMore team is now in control of the messaging and can adapt it directly to the situation at hand. If there are any delivery delays, the affected customers are automatically notified via dispatch delay emails. SAM can also inform its customers itself in the event of delays caused by shipping service providers and no longer has to rely on carrier communications.
On the one hand, this gives the team full control, and on the other, it can also offer immediate solutions without customers having to contact them themselves. This helps enormously in managing customer expectations and thus leads to more satisfied and well-informed customers. Furthermore, the SportsAndMore team now has more evaluation options available to measure the success of delivery communication.

One of the main goals was to improve communication with the customer, which has proven to be more than deficient, especially in the first Lockdown 2020 and the exploding demand:

And that's going down extremely well with customers, too:

Almost every day, SAM receives several positive reviews on independent rating platforms such as TrustedShops, Google, Idealo etc. about how well the delivery communication works.

This is also evidenced by the transactional email open rate, which has increased to between 60% and 70%, depending on the type of email. What was interesting for the team was that since working with parcelLab, the open rates of other mails, such as for invoicing, have also increased by up to 15% - even though these are usually less appealing.

Another key goal was to reduce customer inquiries to ease the burden on the customer service team.

Quick information that is already in the system and that customers would otherwise often ask for by phone is now sent out automatically and individualized. Overall, customer inquiries have been reduced by 22% as a result. This allows the team to focus on other, more complex service issues.

Where does the journey continue for SportsAndMore and parcelLab?

Fading in items that complement the purchase made on the tracking page could be one way to do this. We at parcelLab are looking forward to the further cooperation with SAM & 4Sellers and the next steps of our joint collaboration.