IA Hones in on Freight Delivery Reliability and Customer Retention

Delivery exception data is often scrutinized by shippers through the lens of supply chain and logistics performance, however, the same data can also be leveraged to provide insight into customer satisfaction and retention.Intelligent Audit is the only freight audit firm digging into your shipping data to identify the connection between delivery issues - such as late, lost, or damaged - and customer retention. While we all know correlation does not imply direct cause, understanding the relationship can provide your business with additional strategies to drive improvement in customer retention and truly understand how your carriers can affect the end user's experience.Intelligent Audit's Chief Operating Officer, Hannah Testani, recently spoke with Alan Field, Special Correspondent at JOC.com, to discuss how IA helps its customers connect the dots using transportation data.In one project, IA uncovered that first-time customers who experienced carrier delivery issues only ordered 30% of the time, whereas first-time customers who did not experience any delivery issues ordered 70% of the time.Hannah explains, "the surprise is not that new users are less likely to forgive shipment exceptions, but that customers say, 'We've never even thought about looking at our transportation data, specifically carrier exceptions, to understand why we were unable to retain customers.'"Obviously, not all exceptions are avoidable and, in many cases, the issue may not have been the carrier's fault. For example, bad weather can cause late deliveries and poor packing execution could result in more damaged packages. Taking all of these factors into account, IA provides customers with a full breakdown of delivery exceptions by type and categorizes them based on what is likely 'controllable' versus 'uncontrollable.' This detail lets shippers focus efforts on that which can be improved and helps better identify the underlying cause of the problem and how to implement process changes to minimize future occurrences.Without the benefit of this analysis, the full cost impact of poor carrier performance is misunderstood and understated. But once the connection is made, shippers can go back to carriers and other service providers and hold them accountable and even negotiate new contract terms that keep interests aligned.To learn about all the ways that IA can help you unlock the value in your transportation data and drive spend reduction, contact us today.To learn more about how IA helped a leading global online food delivery service use its exception data to identify, understand, and take action, click here.To read the full article on JOC.com, click here.