According to Statista, the average retention rate in the transportation sector is 83%, and the UK Transportation and Storage industry generates $214 billion in revenue annually (Nov 2021 and July 2022) as reported by The Loadstar.
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This equates to businesses losing £36bn of turnover to their competition – every year. Reducing that by 20-30% would have an enormous impact on each business. The 2014 book, The Effortless Experience, built a compelling case that customer service only drives loyalty if it reduces customer effort. It correlated how removing the hassle for customers impacts customer loyalty and ultimately retention positively. Among the market leaders, customer retention had moved to centre stage.
79% of market leaders felt that customer retention was one of their most important measures, up from 57% in 2018. Always know what`s happening to your customers` orders and bookings. We saw how digital drove major benefits in operations, customer loyalty and subsequently top- and bottom-line growth.
Digital at a higher pace and much lower cost
For instance, the DPD Group in the UK has developed a strong brand and premium reputation by providing exceptional, hassle-free client experiences. By removing significant bottlenecks and sticking places, it has effectively connected operations, digital technology, and data. This has sped up the progressive development of its operational performance over time.
Maersk improved its understanding of client questions and issues, which resulted in a 20% reduction in inbound interactions to its service centre. The average number of emails per customer order has decreased to four.
Does offering a simpler, more efficient, more seamless client experience cost more money? On the contrary, it eliminates a significant amount of wasted work and causes investments to pay off sooner.
So, how do our most successful customers remove the hassle from their customers’ lives?
- Market leaders are proactive and engage in real-time and proactively.
How?
By leveraging state-of-the-art tools. For example, proactive comms about delays, texts for consumers, instructions for drivers, and more.
Why?
It manages expectations and reduces contacts. DPD built its premium brand on better customer servicing. - Market leaders strive to be digital first.
How?
They enable their many stakeholders to do business-as-usual online. For example, reports, invoices, chatbots, instructions for airport drop-offs, customs, etc.
Why? CitySprint customers run their own reports, and in doing so this reduces customer effort, as well as CitySprint’s own reporting efforts by 90%. - Market leaders are consistent at every touch point, physically and digitally.
How?
They create a “single view of the customer” and give the full team access to it so that everyone (sales, contact centres, depots, drivers, chatbots, etc) is empowered to give consistent answers.
Why?
Service is more competent, first call resolution rates are vastly improved and more. - Market leaders use data to fix problems in operations.
How?
Digital turns every customer touch point into a data point. Analytics and AI highlight where the friction points, bottlenecks and blockers are.
Why?
It removes systemic issues from operations – for example, greater insight into problems drove around 20% of contacts at Maersk.
Significant improvements are being driven by digital, data, and artificial intelligence throughout the whole freight & logistics industry. At Salesforce, we make significant investments in the freight sector, our customers, and partners, and we enjoy assisting our customers in cultivating stronger relationships with their clients, increasing customer retention by 20–30% on average. If an organisation is interested in learning how much money they can save, we are pleased to set up a private benchmarking session.
You are cordially invited to watch our latest conversation on Salesforce+ with Woodland Logistics Group and DPD UK where we talk about how adopting a digital-first mentality is making a big difference.
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Source: The Loadstar
