Enhancing customer experience: The benefits of ecommerce automation

3 key takeaways

   –> Easily prevent stock outs by integrating your ERP and key applications.   
   –> Process orders instantly and ensure speedy delivery with automated processes.   
   –> Refund your customers quicker and send clear status updates with automation.

In today’s ecommerce market, smooth operations could mean the difference between thriving and barely surviving. This is especially true when it comes to customer experience. Delivering an excellent customer experience is key to building customer loyalty and can be a way to stand out from your competition. In fact, organizations offering a unified commerce experience by moving customers through journeys without friction will see at least a 20% uplift in total revenue.

Unfortunately, accelerated channel proliferation and blurred lines between digital storefronts, social, search, and more make it more difficult than ever to deliver smooth shopper experiences. On top of that, customers have come to expect error-free orders, excellent customer service, and lightning fast shipping speed.

So how do you ensure a flawless customer experience and hassle free operations? You get your entire tech stack working together by automating processes end-to-end with ecommerce integration.

Let’s dive into the ecommerce processes that you can automate to deliver a better customer experience.

Inventory management

In order to ensure your inventory data is accurate, it’s essential to connect your ecommerce storefront to your ERP. By doing so, you can automate processes between your ERP, ecommerce storefront and warehouse or 3PL systems.

With your ERP and key applications integrated, you can automatically update your website when a product is out of stock. This prevents customer frustration when their item is delayed or unable to be fulfilled. It’s a simple yet effective way to enhance the overall customer experience.

Shipping and fulfillment

Order processing automation plays a key role in delivering an exceptional customer experience. By automating your ecommerce operations, you can process orders instantly–resulting in faster order fulfillment. With this streamlined approach, you can promise quicker delivery and stay competitive in a market where two-day shipping has become the norm.

Not only can you deliver orders quicker, you can also send automatic emails to keep your customers informed about their order confirmation, shipping date, and estimated delivery. Your customers will be thrilled now that they aren’t in the dark about their order status.

Delivering products at the lightning speed customers have come to expect can be challenging, especially when your fulfillment process involves manual tasks and third party providers. For example, relying on warehouse employees to locate products and update inventory information before sending the package to ship is tedious and time-consuming.

Luckily, automating these manual tasks allows you to easily keep track of multiple SKUs, trace orders, and eliminate errors and delays. You can also connect your accounting and analytics systems to get valuable business insights like where you’re turning the best profits or which warehouse fulfills order quickest–all without manual intervention.

By integrating your fulfillment and shipping systems, your customers gain better visibility into order status. They can conveniently use in-app or online trackers that will automatically update with real-time information showing if their order is processed, packaged, shipped, in transit, or delivered.

Returns

If your goal is to deliver an overall excellent customer experience, you can’t ignore returns. By automating your returns process, you can ensure end-to-end accuracy. For example, when a return is finalized, your inventory will update automatically, and your website will show the item back in stock.

You can also automatically process the returned payment in your ERP. This means customers will get refunded quicker and receive clear status updates via email.

To learn more about optimizing your returns management process check out our blog: Returns made easy: How integration streamlines returns management operations.

Ultimately, automation makes ecommerce processes much more accurate and efficient,
and therefore, more reliable. As a result, your business is able to foster customer loyalty and build a positive reputation in the space.

Ready to get started? Check out our ecommerce automation guide for details on how to automate your business processes.