A customer hasn't received their package, what do you do?
It's one of the common yet embarrassing things that happens to all retail businesses. Somehow, somewhere down the line their package was lost or simply had a number of unfortunate things happen to it. They have sent you an email, they’ve used the ‘contact us’ feature of your business and they may have even been on the phone talking with your customer service.
They have every right to be angry because they paid for their items and yet they did not arrive at the time and date that was given to them. The confirmation email is their proof, they know they are completely in the right and so do you. But what do you do to find their package and get it to them quickly?
Cross-departmental communication
If you have your own delivery service then you need to speak with the warehouse manager and the fleet manager to find out what happened. The fleet manager will have been the last person to see the package or at least was the last person of authority to sign off on it. The warehouse manager will have handled the package for the longest, tracking the order all the way from the storage racks, workers who were responsible for transporting it to the loading dock and the finally, packing everything into one freight truck.
Cross-departmental communication is vital at this point. It could be something as simple as finding out that the package wasn’t chosen by the worker on duty and they missed it or took the wrong one. Or it could be that everyone in your business did a good job and the delivery driver might have lost it.
Notify the customer
When you have located the missing package or simply shipped another package of the same items they ordered to them, you need to notify them quickly. However, a customer may not read their email until the afternoon or late at night. This can cause the email to potentially be lost in all the other emails they’ve been sent. Thus, you need to contact them back via the phone.
Customer service has evolved to the point that now, businesses have to and must make calls back to their customers so that a real person can inform them of what’s going on. The added advantage is that the customer service employee can answer any further questions the customer might have which can help to mend the somewhat broken trust.
No messing around
If you are tight for time, you might not be able to ship their new package out to them with the rest of the delivery. It might be late at night or early in the morning and you simply don’t have the fleet you need. It might also be that their order becomes out of stock during the day because you waited too long.
That’s where a same day courier service comes in to save the day. They have flexibility that your business might not, so use this kind of service when time is of the essence.
The key is to keep a constant cross-departmental communication line open so that you can quickly locate the customer’s lost package or simply work together to re-do the order.