What does multi-carrier technology look like?

What are the key pieces of eCommerce technology needed for a multi-carrier delivery operation?

Make your shipping easy with multi-carrier technology

Thanks to customers’ continuous demand for choice and convenience (in both delivery and returns) you need to be operating at an optimum level. Add to this, the growing numbers of online marketplaces, omnichannel retail, and the need to provide in-flight delivery options, and it’s clear you need to be going above and beyond like never before. You’re no doubt already using multiple carriers to meet your customers’ needs, but this in itself presents challenges and complexity. Not even mentioning the technical integrations and multiple technologies, you’re probably finding that you have a disjointed and fragmented view of your operations. So, what is the solution? Well, given that a failure to provide customer satisfaction in today’s world can quickly result in bad reviews on sites like Trustpilot, you need to act fast.

With this in mind, what are the key pieces of technology you should look for to make multiple carrier and multi-channel shipping easy?

A complete solution

There is a variety of shipping and dispatch technologies that will ultimately meet most of your needs, but they lead to a disconnection in your process, and let’s be honest… headaches. So, what you need to do is choose a comprehensive solution that requires just one easy integration that can then be added to with simple bolt-ons. This approach allows you to ‘join the dots’ in your shipping and dispatch processes and make your entire operation faster and smarter. Look for a complete solution that provides the following capabilities…

1.   Point of sale

Give your customers better delivery choice and reduce cart abandonment with a delivery options plugin. Using intelligent shipping rules, the tech presents personalised delivery options at the checkout – maximising the customer experience and winning you sales. An innovative Duties and Taxes calculator will also help you decide if you want to combine duties and taxes in the cost, or let the customer choose to pay now or on delivery.

2.  Consolidate order data

Channel connector technology pulls orders from your various sales channels and extracts tracking data. You can then automatically return tracking information to your customers, no matter which sales channel they buy from. This untangles the complex flow of orders from multiple sales channels, connecting them together to unify the despatch and delivery experience.

3.  Label Production

An agile despatch platform optimises and streamlines your despatch operation, offering carrier-compliant label printing at a rate of up to 50,000 labels an hour, with automated parcel routing. This helps you get your orders out the door fast with full traceability, and ensures you send every parcel with the most suitable and economical carrier service.

4.  Track and trace

A multi-carrier tracking portal provides maximum transparency and control of your shipments. Track every parcel you send in one place and raise queries to action with a built-in actions manager feature.

5.  Analytics

With your very own delivery dashboard, you can gain a holistic view of all your shipping data, including parcel volumes, distribution across carriers, geographical locations, carrier performance and queries resolved. This enables you to make better-informed and smarter decisions in future.

6.  Customer service

Designed specifically for companies with customer service teams handling parcel issues, the latest technology empowers the team to proactively manage parcel exceptions quickly and effectively through direct contact with carriers and consignees, to reduce inbound customer queries and exceed consumer expectations.

7.  Returns

Returns can be a horrendous drain on resource, which is why a self-serve customer portal is the next step in delivery automation. Customers can not only choose the returns service that’s most convenient, but it also takes away back-end processing that can be costly and cumbersome.