Econsultancy has published this very interesting post “are retailers really this bad at delivery“. Basically the post is about a survey conducted by Which? on deliveries by online retailers, which found that nearly 7% of  customers were unhappy with their delivery.

One of the most shocking revelations was a customer experience when the delivery service threw a laptop over their 6 foot wall, another was thrown in the delivery package via the open window or the package was left on the doorstep visible to any by-passers, thus open to stealing.

As delivery of the product is a very important part of consumer experience, what  can you as a retailer do to improve it to please your consumer and to protect your business from the goods being stolen thus facing a charge back and loss of revenue?

1. check with your delivery company how they deal with packages which can’t be delivered due to the fact that the receiver isn’t at home, which could be common as a majority of your customers are very likely to be at work between 9 to 6. Do they leave a note with a phone number to rearrange the delivery and do they have a collection point close to your customers?

2. to check how good or bad your delivery company is send all your customers a post-purchase survey soon after the delivery has been received, asking them if they were happy with the delivery. Plus you can get this transactional email to work harder for you by placing product recommendations in there (this will require using personalized product recommendation tool from providers like Coremetrics, Omniture or ChoiceStream to be able to do that). Note: transactional email open rate is between 60-80%, the highest open rate of all email campaigns so don’t waste this opportunity.