Los Gatos, CA, Aug. 7, 2018 — GrandCanals, the market leader in analytics-driven fulfillment, today announced the launch of version 4.0 of the Fulfillment Intelligence Cloud (FIC).
Purpose-built to optimize fulfillment and delivery, FIC 4.0 helps leading ecommerce and retail companies, including Urban Remedy, an organic food company that delivers ready-to-eat meals, juices, cleanses and snacks to your home, increase sales and deliver orders with confidence by improving their delivery experience.
Significant updates include Delivery Performance, a powerful new application for real-time monitoring of carrier delivery performance, and Customer Delivery Alerts and Tracking, which provides companies with the ability to share fully customizable shipment status updates with their customers via their own website, SMS or email messages.
“Once considered an afterthought, the consumers’ delivery experience has become a critical factor in converting ecommerce sales and building long-term positive relationships with consumers,” said Doug Jones, CEO of GrandCanals. “However most companies lack the visibility and analysis of both carrier cost and real-time carrier performance. This powerful combination allows companies to balance tradeoffs between cost and performance with ease and thus profitably optimize their customers’ delivery experience.”
Delivery Performance allows companies to see how their entire delivery network is performing. Every shipment to every customer is tracked in real time – normalized across all carriers – from manifest to delivery. It predicts when delivery delays are likely to occur, even before the carrier informs the eCommerce or retail company of a new estimated delivery date. Companies can use this to create an amazing experience by proactively reaching out to customers and remedying shipping delays before the customer is even aware of an issue.
Delivery Performance also ensures that the company and its customers are always on the same page with respect to delivery status. Customer Delivery Alerts and Tracking enables companies to proactively share delivery status updates with their customers via a simple API. This allows companies to fully customize their experience on their own website or via SMS and email, without losing control of the customer experience to a third party. This improved experience results in happier customers and less “where is my order” or WISMO calls to customer support.
“In our line of business, we need actionable insights into how to make customers happy and to make things go smoothly when they are not,” said Van Battle, Director, Voice of the Customer, Urban Remedy. “Utilizing GrandCanals’ FIC 4.0, I can improve my delivery network and stay on top of all of my customers’ shipments ultimately creating the best delivery experience possible.”
FIC is a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) application that enables analytics-driven fulfillment. The solution allows companies to present a customer delivery experience like that provided by Amazon.com, even when the analytics needed to drive the fulfillment experience isn’t their core competency. With its unique ability to combine real-time performance information with cost data, the FIC gives companies everything they need to provide an amazing delivery experience including fully customizable shipment status alerts for customers as well as visibility and analytics for logistics, operations and customer service teams to improve their delivery network and capabilities.
Among the new features in FIC 4.0 are:
Delivery Performance
- Get timely, accurate information about the performance of your company’s shipping network, including early, on-time and late deliveries
- Analyze and improve the delivery performance your customers are actually experiencing
- Give customer service professionals the tools to proactively fix problem deliveries before they become major customer service disasters by predicting at-risk shipments
Customer Delivery Alerts and Tracking
- Give consumers real-time delivery status updates from all of your carriers
- Share shipment status on your own website via a simple API and/or provide completely customizable customer notifications via SMS or email, without relying on 3rd parties
- Minimize expensive to handle “where is my order” or WISMO calls.
“Ecommerce is driving the majority of growth in retail and opportunities for wholesalers and manufacturers to expand their direct sales to end customers,” said Bill McBeath, Chief Research Officer, ChainLink Research. “A great fulfillment experience (on time, damage-free, real-time visibility, status updates) has become an increasingly critical part of overall ecommerce customer satisfaction and retention. The ability to leverage delivery data to continually improve actual delivery performance and notify customers early when delays are predicted—these are becoming essential to succeed and grow in today’s hyper-competitive marketplace.”
For more information on GrandCanals and the Fulfillment Intelligence Cloud, please visit www.grandcanals.com.
Media Contact:
John Kreuzer
(408) 896-3307