If your business does a fair amount of shipping, it’s important that your shipping practices reflect a desire to see clients satisfied. Companies that put little thought or effort into their shipping practices often have a hard time attracting new business and maintaining the trust of existing customers. Fortunately, embracing responsible shipping practices is much easier than many businesses make it look. A little additional effort on your end can result in increased client satisfaction and positive word of mouth. When working to refine your enterprise’s approach to shipping, take care to avoid the following blunders.
Doing Business with Unreliable Freighting Companies
Your choice of freighting company plays a vital role in determining how timely and safely your shipments are delivered. While some transport services are obliging and reliable, others have no qualms about delivering items in poor condition and well past their projected arrival dates. Not only does this disregard for customer service reflect poorly on freighting companies, it also makes your business look bad. Even if a late or damaged shipment is entirely the fault of a transport company, most clients are liable to hold you responsible.
That being the case, it pays to be discerning when shopping around for the right freighting service. Unfortunately, some business owners continue to employ lackluster freighting companies because they regard finding new ones as too much of a hassle. While it’s true that finding a new company will require a little bit of effort on your part, this endeavor shouldn’t prove terribly draining to your time or energy. Keep in mind that the longer you continue to use an unreliable freighting service, the more business you stand to lose. Even if you’ve been working with a company for years, you shouldn’t feel obligated to keep giving them business if they’ve proven themselves to be consistently unreliable.
Not Investing in Shipment Monitoring Devices
Shipment monitoring devices are essential tools for providing businesses, their clients, and freighting companies with peace of mind. There are many ways for shipments to incur damage and while some types of damage are fairly obvious, others don’t present themselves until long after shipments reach their destinations. This is where the aforementioned tools can really come in handy. Investing in responsive impact recorders, temperature monitors, and shock absorbers will ensure that your clients receive an accurate account of any hardships their shipment endured throughout its journey.
Outfitting your shipments with these devices is an effective way to illustrate your commitment to client satisfaction. Although monitoring devices may require a little bit of additional spending, the peace of mind they provide is worth the small amount of capital you’ll put forth.
Refusing to Accept Responsibility for Mistakes
As a customer, having a shipment arrive late or damaged is frustrating enough without having to deal with a business who shirk responsibility at every turn. With this in mind, make a point of accepting responsibility for shipping mistakes that fall within your business’s purview. For example, if a shipment went out past its projected departure date or became damaged as a result of improper packaging, be as apologetic as possible and do whatever you can to make amends.
When confronted about shipping problems, many business owners will instinctively deflect or attempt to reassign blame. While this reaction is understandable, it’s not going to get you anywhere with clients. Just remember – it’s much harder to stay mad at someone who openly admits fault and accepts responsibility accordingly.
If shipping represents a large part of your business, you can’t afford to treat your shipping practices as an afterthought as poor shipping practices commonly result in late deliveries, damaged items and justifiably displeased clients. On the flipside, putting in the effort to refine your business’s shipping practices can impact your enterprise in a number of positive ways. So, if you’re ready to whip your business’s shipping practices into shape, you’d do well to avoid the mistakes discussed above.
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