5 ways to help improve the delivery experience

Charting the rise and rise of eCommerce

In 2020, almost 9 million Australian households shopped online, collectively contributing to a 57% year-on-year (YOY) growth in eCommerce.¹ This phenomenal growth raises a raft of new questions for retailers.

With so many of your customers now shopping online – and potentially missing out on the friendly exchange at the counter – how can you confidently deliver a great retail experience? How can you own the end-to-end purchase journey, when parts of it are out of your hands? And, ultimately, what can you do to make sure your customers will shop with you again?

To meet evolving customer expectations, retailers have their sights set on providing a more seamless experience across multiple channels. A big part of this is providing a clear and uncomplicated checkout and returns process, and, ultimately, getting purchases to shoppers where and how they want them, and as quickly as possible.

Delving into delivery data

To better understand what customers want when it comes to getting their hands on the goods they’ve bought online, Australia Post data experts unpacked huge volumes of delivery data – predominantly collected from 1 April 2019 to 31 March 2021.

This data includes more than 400 million parcel deliveries per year to 12.3 million physical delivery points, 3.3 million NPS survey responses and 5.7 million contacts to our call centre. From the data, our experts arrived at five practical, data-based recommendations for improving deliveries – which are explored in detail in our upcoming Delivery Experience Report.

Delivery strategies to delight customers

As the Delivery Experience Report reveals, there are many practical, simple things that retailers can do to improve the delivery experience. For example, the data shows that reducing signature on delivery can reduce the occurrence of ‘sorry we missed you’ cards by up to 89% – and that improving first time delivery rates has a positive impact on receiver NPS.

When it comes to offering collection points, almost half (49%) of online shoppers want to see more options for where they can collect their parcels. This is particularly true for the growing cohort of eCommerce customers who live in apartments – according to our data, deliveries to apartments have grown faster year-on-year than deliveries to houses.

The data also shows that the majority (74%) of customers prefer to be able to track their deliveries in real-time. To enable real-time tracking, it’s important for retailers to capture and share customer details with their delivery partners.

Register for your copy of the report

The above insights just scratch the surface of what’s inside the 2021 Delivery Experience Report, which will be available at the end of the month.

Register for your copy today by subscribing to get the latest eCommerce insights, so you can take a deeper dive into the five recommendations – and get practical tips and suggestions you can put into action to improve the delivery experience for your customers.