Some Facts About Fulfilment Warehousing and Response Handling
Fulfilment warehousing and response handling does a lot more for client businesses than you might think. For a start, fulfilment services are able to handle the despatch of mail and business to client communications as well as freight and packages. And that's only the beginning.
Your basic fulfilment partner is there to act as your own personal warehousing and despatch team. Fulfilment services aren't simply about throwing your items in a truck and leaving things at that. You'll get assistance with everything – from working out the best way to manage your stock to coming up with strategies for streamlining your order response times.
A fulfilment partner working to a high standard of client service will identify core goals with you, and conduct regular meetings to ensure these goals are being arrived at. Clearly you can't just identify goals and then hope they'll be achieved – so a good response handling and warehouse fulfilment services partner will give you a dedicated accounts manager, who's there to liaise between your staff and the warehouse.
The accounts manager in your fulfilment team will be responsible for fielding general enquiries and liaising both with your clients and your own staff; he or she will be responsible for getting you shipping quotations and giving you advice on the best way to ship your items; he or she will track all your consignments and will be the first port of call for all delivery issue resolution; and he or she will also run regular stock checks and notify you when new stock ordering is necessary.
The account manager supplied by your order fulfilment services partner, then, becomes more than simply a point of contact for you – he or she, and his or her team, become a number one point of contact for your own customers. That makes perfect customer service sense when you think about it – if a customer experiencing order problems comes to you, and you're using a third party fulfilment services team, you'll only have to send them on to that team anyway. So your fulfilment team steps up to the plate and become your front line customer service representative.
The more bespoke your order fulfilment partner, the better your customer service can be. A fulfilment services provider capable of supplying national and international delivery solutions for any type of delivery, however obscure or peculiar, is the kind of partner for whom nothing is a problem – and that' the kind of partner you will want to work with again and again.
Your fulfilment partner may also bypass fuel surcharges or extended area surcharges. Some levy these charges, others don't. The ones that don't tend to be the ones that have the greatest customer services impact on your clients. After all, that's an attention to customer service detail in itself.
Your basic fulfilment partner is there to act as your own personal warehousing and despatch team. Fulfilment services aren't simply about throwing your items in a truck and leaving things at that. You'll get assistance with everything – from working out the best way to manage your stock to coming up with strategies for streamlining your order response times.
A fulfilment partner working to a high standard of client service will identify core goals with you, and conduct regular meetings to ensure these goals are being arrived at. Clearly you can't just identify goals and then hope they'll be achieved – so a good response handling and warehouse fulfilment services partner will give you a dedicated accounts manager, who's there to liaise between your staff and the warehouse.
The accounts manager in your fulfilment team will be responsible for fielding general enquiries and liaising both with your clients and your own staff; he or she will be responsible for getting you shipping quotations and giving you advice on the best way to ship your items; he or she will track all your consignments and will be the first port of call for all delivery issue resolution; and he or she will also run regular stock checks and notify you when new stock ordering is necessary.
The account manager supplied by your order fulfilment services partner, then, becomes more than simply a point of contact for you – he or she, and his or her team, become a number one point of contact for your own customers. That makes perfect customer service sense when you think about it – if a customer experiencing order problems comes to you, and you're using a third party fulfilment services team, you'll only have to send them on to that team anyway. So your fulfilment team steps up to the plate and become your front line customer service representative.
The more bespoke your order fulfilment partner, the better your customer service can be. A fulfilment services provider capable of supplying national and international delivery solutions for any type of delivery, however obscure or peculiar, is the kind of partner for whom nothing is a problem – and that' the kind of partner you will want to work with again and again.
Your fulfilment partner may also bypass fuel surcharges or extended area surcharges. Some levy these charges, others don't. The ones that don't tend to be the ones that have the greatest customer services impact on your clients. After all, that's an attention to customer service detail in itself.