Nearly all supply chain managers responding to a recent survey said they consider customer experience to be important when measuring last-mile performance, while two-thirds of them say they’re held accountable for standard customer experience KPIs such as NPS and CSAT scores.
Ninety-six percent of respondents to the survey by Convey and eft Supply Chain and Logistics Business Intelligence said customer experience is a critical measure of last-mile success, up from 83% a year ago, while 66% are held accountable for CX KPIs, up from 56%.
Despite this, just 5% of respondents said their current systems fully support efforts to improve the customer experience, up slightly from 3%, while 61% said they do nothing to improve the customer experience.
“Customers are quick to let us know when we fail in last mile experience and that feedback is highly informative to experience improvements,” said Matt Bergerson, director of omnichannel experience and operations at REI in the report. “However, customers do not proactively reach out to let us know when we are winning with last mile service, leaving it to us to conduct satisfaction surveys and measure customer engagement to best understand where our service levels create inflection points in customer satisfaction and shopping behavior.”
While collaboration across departments including logistics, supply chain, ecommerce and customer care is critical to ensuring CX success, the report found over half of respondents (52.8%) don’t make delivery data accessible to other teams.
“Especially with so many blind handoffs and variables in the last mile, it’s imperative to communicate with customers and be transparent about what is happening with their delivery,” the report stated. “Without this information, customers often call in wondering where their packages are, leading to an avoidable loss of customer care time and dollars.”
Other findings from the report:
- 66% of supply chain executives said connecting disparate data quickly is among their top three challenges, while 18% reported zero visibility into distressed shipments
- 60% of customer service and logistics teams don’t share delivery feedback or data about distressed packages with each other
- 87% believe access to shared data and improved collaboration between teams is important to long-term success