Receive more positive customer reviews and fewer customer enquiries

SportsAndMore (SAM), an online shop for sports goods and clothing, has been using parcelLab's solution for two years. It 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 kind of interface and recommended the parcelLab solution to SAM.

The cooperation of both sides with 4Sellers laid the foundation for the collaboration between 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 no longer simply hand over these important touchpoints to third-party providers.
Another goal was to reduce the workload of the customer service team by reducing customer queries about shipping status.

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

In March 2020, at the time of the first lockdowns, SportsAndMore was faced with a flood of customer enquiries. Like many other e-commerce retailers at the time, the company simply could not cope with the mass of customer enquiries associated with the rush of orders.

Many enquiries were related to shipping status or delivery delays - typical customer queries such as "Where is my parcel?", which many brands are probably familiar with. But this is also where the problem lies: although such enquiries are usually not complicated to answer, manual processing requires a certain amount of time as well as resources on the company side.
If customer emails go unanswered 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 fewer people will order in the future and customer loyalty will crumble. So what can be done?

Thanks to parcelLab's customisable post-purchase communication, the SportsAndMore team is now in control of the messaging and can adapt it directly to the respective situation. If there are any delivery delays, the affected customers are automatically informed by means of dispatch delay emails. Even in the case of delays by the shipping service providers, SAM can inform its customers itself and no longer has to rely on the carriers' communication.
On the one hand, this gives the team full control and on the other hand, it can also offer immediate solutions without the 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 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 this is also excellently received by the customers:

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 objective was to reduce customer enquiries 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 automatically and individualised. Overall, customer enquiries have been reduced by 22% as a result. This allows the team to concentrate on other, more complex service issues.

Where does the journey continue for SportsAndMore and parcelLab?

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