Harnessing the power of personalisation to bolster customer-centric fulfilment

At this year’s Leaders in Logistics Summit, we explored the growing impacts of personalisation and digital twins to help logistics operators understand how they can make foundational, operational improvements to deliver fulfilling customer experiences. What we found was that ultimately, to create highly targeted and effective customer-centric fulfilment strategies, logistics operators and retailers may want to consider the following to achieve customer-centric fulfilment: 

• Personalisation: Understand your customers to build a personalised post-purchase fulfilment process  
• Network: Build a customer-centric distribution network.   

Nowadays, long-term customer retention and satisfaction requires much more than simply successfully delivering products or services to their doorstep. Customer-centric fulfilment now requires logistics operators and retailers to carefully consider the role of personalisation and fuse their understanding of logistics and customers to meet the unique needs of each customer, turning fulfilment into a function that will benefit the organisation. Customer-centric fulfilment is therefore no longer regarded as a background aspect, it is now of prominent importance due to the tremendous difference it can bring to an organisation. 

So, how exactly can personalisation enhance customer-centric fulfilment? Why should logistics operators and retailers consider the impact of personalisation on their long-term performance and outcomes? What data and technology should logistics operators consider to achieve this? 

Investing in personalisation to improve customer fulfilment

Acquiring new customers requires a substantially higher investment than retaining customers. Building customer loyalty and retaining customers through personalised, customer-centric fulfilment is ultimately easier and more beneficial for a business’ long-term growth and profitability than purely investing in trying to get new audiences. In fact, research shows that:

Harnessing data & technology to enhance customer fulfilment in delivery

Data and technology enable customer-centric fulfilment by equipping logistics operators and retailers with an integral competitive advantage. In the customer journey, a well-executed fulfilment experience after their purchase, will result in them being more receptive to re-marketing, repeat sales, becoming an advocate and ultimately becoming highly profitable. Otherwise, if the fulfilment is poorly executed, customers will have a negative experience that then gets in the way of re-engagement in the future.   

Customer-centric fulfilment creates an opportunity for the logistics function to positively impact the business’ performance beyond keeping costs down – by enabling better profitability. This can be pivotal for both merchants and carriers. Merchants will find that this presents a direct opportunity to improve customer retention. For carriers, it’s an opportunity to differentiate services, retaining and winning more contracts. 

How can CACI help?

CACI can support you with the personalisation necessary to achieve customer-centric fulfilment. This begins with using the right data, AI and machine learning to understand each customer, predicting their preferences to ensure the right fulfilment journey can be put in place for them to achieve a positive experience.

This can start in the basket, when delivery options are first displayed to the customer. Personalised delivery options can be offered to fit the nuances of the customer, which may include understanding how tech-savvy the customer is to subtly change the language that is used, offering assistance to elderly customers, anticipating that young adult customers may be less likely to be at home during the day, suggesting other options (evening delivery or PUDO collection) and so on. This can be followed through all customer communications up to and including post-delivery. If a customer has this positive experience (and costs are kept down), the logistics function has fulfilled its role. 

CACI possesses the industry experience and data and consumer insights to help you deliver personalised customer-centric fulfilment and experiences cross-channel at all stages of the customer journey. To find out more about how we can help you reach these goals, contact us today.  

Stay tuned for the upcoming and final blog of this two-part series, where we’ll explore the role of the digital twin in augmenting logistics operations.