Retailers who Improve Visibility, Improve Customer Satisfaction...Here's Why

There are plenty of reasons why retail supply chain managers strive to improve the visibility of their supply chains. From reducing damaged cargo to assisting with inventory management to creating  more efficient and cost-effective supply chains, the benefits of supply chain visibility are multifaceted. One such benefit that is often overlooked, though, is the fact that visibility improves customer satisfaction. By leveraging visibility solutions such as Tive, you can set your retail company apart from the competition and provide the visibility that today's customers demand.

The Current State of Customer-Facing Visibility

The ability to track the location and status of their shipments is something that modern customers have come to expect. Many point to more and more customers becoming spoiled by Amazon's fast shipping and accurate tracking. However, the retail industry has trended in this direction across the board. Any company that doesn't offer track and trace capabilities to its customers is sure to be behind its competition.

The Two Types of Visibility Demanded by Today's Customers

Transportation visibility — or visibility into in-transit shipments — can be divided into two categories, and both are important for optimizing customer satisfaction.

Hyper-accurate Location

As we've already discussed, the ability to track the hyper-accurate location of shipments is something customers have come to expect as a bare-minimum requirement from retail companies. However, enabling customers to track their shipments isn't the only way real-time visibility solutions boost customer satisfaction.

Shipment Condition Visibility

Shipment condition isn't often a type of customer-facing visibility. For reasons we will explain in the next section, it is still key to customer satisfaction nonetheless. Shipment condition  entails the ability to monitor the condition of shipments in real-time - such as temperature, humidity, shock, and light exposure. Real-time shipment condition visibility provides several essential benefits for retail companies shipping perishable, valuable or fragile products.

How Visibility Boosts Customer Satisfaction

Now that we've defined the two main types of transportation visibility, let's look at exactly how these two types of visibility boost customer satisfaction. Starting with track and trace visibility, being able to track the location and status of shipments in real-time means that you will be able to provide timely and reliable shipping updates to your customers — which is once again something that most customers demand.

Along with keeping your customers in the loop, though, track and trace visibility also helps retailers develop an optimized inventory management strategy that ensures products rarely go out of stock. Few things are more frustrating to customers than not being able to purchase the product they need because it's on backorder. Once they are forced to look elsewhere for the product, they might not ever come back to your brand again. By providing a complete picture of what's moving in and out of your warehouses, track and trace capabilities help ensure optimized inventory levels and help prevent your products from going out of stock.

Meanwhile, real-time shipment condition visibility boosts customer satisfaction by ensuring that damaged products never slip through the cracks. In some cases, even the most meticulous quality control processes cannot determine when a product has incurred damage. Real-time shipment condition visibility solutions such as Tive's GPS trackers, though, send automated alerts anytime a shipment might have been damaged, helping retailers prevent damaged or unsafe products from being sent out to customers.

Other Benefits of Shipment Condition Visibility

Along with helping prevent damaged products from going unnoticed and making it into the hands of your customers, shipment condition visibility provides a couple of other noteworthy benefits. For one, shipment condition visibility helps empower an effective loss prevention strategy that will keep your products from ever being damaged in the first place. By making it easy to pinpoint where, when, and why the damage occurred, shipment condition visibility enables retail supply chain managers to identify and correct reoccurring problems that lead to damaged shipments.

In some cases, real-time shipment condition visibility even enables retail companies to stop damage as it is happening. For example, if you receive an alert that the temperature of your frozen shipment is rising, you may be able to contact the carrier and have them fix the problem before your products spoil.

How to Provide Your Customers With Shipment Visibility

At Tive, we make it easy for retail customers to achieve real-time shipment condition visibility and track and trace capabilities. With Tive's GPS trackers, you will be able to monitor the temperature, humidity, light exposure, and shock absorption of your shipments in addition to monitoring their real-time location and status. By providing complete transportation visibility in a single solution, Tive's GPS trackers offer retail companies the capabilities needed to boost customer satisfaction and improve loss prevention and inventory management.

Satisfy Customers’ Craving for Visibility with Tive

Retailers who improve visibility also boost customer satisfaction in more ways than one. If you would like to learn more about how Tive's industry-leading GPS trackers can provide your company with complete transportation visibility, be sure to contact us today!