The pace of online business increases enormously during the Christmas season – and with it, customer expectations for fast and smooth delivery. After all, all presents should be under the Christmas tree on time. Delays in delivery during this phase are considered particularly risky, because those who alienate customers in the Christmas business through late and non-transparent deliveries often lose them forever.
And now the good news: With our JTL-Track&Trace shipment tracking system, you can identify and solve problems before your customers even notice anything; and also keep them fully informed about the whereabouts of their orders. This will ensure your customers’ satisfaction and loyalty, especially during the critical Christmas period. In this article, we show you exactly how to do this!
Tracking as part of customer satisfaction
The goods have been picked and packed and you are now handing them over to the trustworthy hands of your shipping service provider. From this point onwards, you as a retailer can actually breathe a sigh of relief, because it is no longer up to you whether, when and in what condition the parcel arrives with your customers. But is that really true? The majority of you will probably agree that in most cases, customer queries will end up with you if the ordered goods are not delivered on time, are incomplete or damaged.
And who wants to have to respond to emails or phone calls from angry customers during the already stressful Christmas shopping season, who would rather choose the competition for future orders? Seamless shipment tracking quickly becomes a competitive advantage. According to a study by pwc, 90% of consumers say that the traceability of their parcels in online business is important or very important to them.
But how can you satisfy your customers if you cannot directly and indirectly influence the work of your shipping service providers? The answer is: With JTL-Track&Trace.
JTL-Track&Trace: Early information for better customer communication
With version 1.4 of JTL-Wawi we have already released our shipment tracking JTL-Track&Trace for DHL. With it, you can detect problems with the shipping of your DHL parcels (as well as DPD and GLS parcels! | Update JTL-Wawi 1.6.40.0, June 2022) at an early stage and reliably inform your customers about delivery delays. In addition, JTL-Track&Trace can be used to automatically create follow-up requests or configure notifications for your employees if quick intervention is necessary.
This not only improves your customer communication, but also lowers the returns rate and reduces your administrative workload for answering inquiries about the whereabouts of ordered goods.
How JTL-Track&Trace works
Did you know that the major shipping service providers such as DHL and DPD differentiate between up to one hundred shipment statuses? These include “Successfully collected”, “Second delivery attempt” or “Not accepted due to damage”. Normally, the status of your parcels can only be viewed via your logistics provider’s website. However, JTL-Wawi can read these shipment statuses via a special interface and make them available for JTL-Track&Trace.
Five folders for a better overview
JTL-Wawi automatically sorts them into five folders (A) so that you don’t lose track of the many different statuses: Created, In transit, Completed, Problem and Canceled. The entries in the Problem folder should be particularly relevant for your work as a merchant: Here you will find a list of all parcels that have not been successfully delivered. It is important to know that for logistics companies, a parcel is also considered delivered if it has been left with a neighbor or delivered to a post office.
List views with filter function and current status display
You will then find exact details of the whereabouts in the list view (B): Here you can see both the shipment status (e.g. “Delivery vehicle”) and the exact shipment information of the shipping service provider, which is updated regularly. The special search filters help you to find shipments specifically by shipment number, delivery address or customer name – a useful function, especially for retailers with high shipping volumes or at peak times such as Christmas.
In the lower section of the window (C), you can track the entire shipment history of a parcel and even use the external status at DHL to identify when a parcel has been delivered to a neighbor. This is indicated by the abbreviation “NGHBR”, which is an abbreviation of the word “neighbor”.
JTL-Track&Trace and JTL-Workflows: More options for your shipment tracking
Our JTL-Track&Trace shipment tracking system helps you to keep track of a large number of shipments at all times. However, you can only exploit the full potential of the possibilities if you combine JTL-Track&Trace with JTL-Workflows.
JTL-Workflows are available as standard in our ERP system JTL-Wawi as a tool for automating recurring processes. They can be used to automatically send emails to your customers as soon as a problem occurs with the delivery of a parcel. A possible use case here would be, for example, the automated sending of a message if there are delivery delays (e.g. due to a routing error or damage), in which you proactively inform your customers about the changed delivery times and announce the next steps.
Even if parcels are stored in a post office for a longer period of time, you can use JTL-Track&Trace and a time-delayed workflow to remind your customers to pick them up. Your systems automatically check in the background whether the shipment status of a parcel is still set to Storage in branch/agency and then send such a reminder email automatically.
Good thing about the combination of JTL-Track&Trace and JTL-Workflows: You define possible use cases and the corresponding messages to your customers yourself. To do this, you select a trigger for each workflow, specify one or more conditions and define the actions that are to be executed at the end.
Take a look at our JTL-Guide! There we have documented some useful workflows and their setup in detail for you.
Create automated research orders
Especially during peak times with high shipment volumes, such as in the months leading up to Christmas, it can easily happen that shipping takes an unexpectedly long time or that a parcel disappears completely. For customers waiting for their Christmas presents, this is of course a nightmare! With JTL-Track&Trace and JTL-Workflows, this no longer has to cause you sleepless nights as a merchant:
After a critical time period of 5 days, for example, have a workflow automatically check all parcels that have still not reached the “Delivered” status. Such shipments are then automatically moved to the Problem folder and you can decide how you want to proceed: Should an employee intervene manually to send a new parcel on its way, for example, or would you like to send an automated follow-up request to your shipping service provider?
The advantages of parcel tracking at a glance
As you can see, our JTL-Track&Trace shipment tracking system – especially in combination with JTL-Workflows – offers a whole package of useful functions that will make your everyday merchant life easier, especially during the Christmas season. We have summarized the advantages of parcel tracking below:
JTL-Track&Trace now available for DHL, DPD and GLS (Update: June 2022)
From June 2022, we will offer our shipment tracking not only for DHL, but also as a stable version for DPD and GLS (JTL-Wawi 1.6.40.0). This means that three shipping service providers will be available to you in JTL-Track&Trace, which account for well over half of the total market share in parcel shipping.
Particularly interesting: All registered parcels for DPD are free of charge during the Open Beta phase and are not included in the billing of the JTL-Track&Trace tariffs. Only after the end of the Open Beta will registered parcels for DPD be billed on a fee-based basis and depending on your selected tariff.
Of course, we will inform you in good time about the end of the open beta and the starting point of the fee-based tariff.
But until then, happy holidays with JTL-Track&Trace!
