According to the Office of National Statistics most recent figures the UK’s e-commerce sales were £668.9 billion rising by over 29 billion from 2018.
Many businesses have started trading online or increased their focus on e-commerce as a response to the pandemic in the last few years. But with so many businesses now online we need to make sure that customer satisfaction is taken into account to ensure repeat custom.
What impacts customer satisfaction?
Many things impact customer satisfaction in e-commerce such as how easy your site is to use, the price and quality of your products and your customer service. Most of those things are completely within your control which is great news as you can put strategies in place to improve customer satisfaction straight away.
However, e-commerce businesses still need to post out products which is where hand over the control and put our trust in the postal system to safely deliver our customers items. Which is sometimes where things go wrong.
Customer Satisfaction and Delivery
Delivery has a big impact on customer satisfaction. Unfortunately, as the Royal Mail say on their own website, “sometimes things go wrong”. Even though the delivery part of our business is often out of our hands consumers will still leave with a bad taste in their mouth if they have a bad experience when trying to receive their purchases.
And can you blame them? Is there anything more infuriating than getting excited to receive your order and it taking longer than you expected because of delivery problems or even lost?!
Why do deliveries go wrong?
In Royal Mail’s defence, they perform a thankless task. There are a myriad of things that may go wrong in the delivery process. One of the biggest causes of mis-deliveries is incorrect addresses. Addresses can be complicated to format, especially in the UK and if written or formatted incorrectly it can easily cause post to go missing.
In 2019 the Royal Mail received over 578,000 complaints. That’s a lot of post that’s gone missing and a massive impact on e-commerce businesses. But the good news is that even though you can’t hand deliver all of your items yourself there are some easy ways you can maximise the chances of a successful delivery.
How can Postcodes4U Help?
One simple way to minimise this problem and increase customer satisfaction is by using an address lookup service in your checkout process so that customers can provide a validated delivery address in a trusted, official format. Postcodes4U can help you do just that. We use the Postcode Address File (PAF®) from the Royal Mail which is the most up-to-date and complete address database in the UK containing over 31 million addresses.
We have plugins available for most e-commerce platforms to install immediately and you can get started with 30 free search credits. You can also contact us if you need a custom integration created for you completely free of charge.
So get in touch and don’t hesitate to make this easy change that could drastically improve your customer satisfaction.
