I’m told our retailer pitch is a tad long… so thought would distil down to what really matters over a series of blog posts.

Why does happiness matter?

Delivery is usually the last step in the customer journey, and therefore the final touch point of a retailer’s brand.  If a retailer wants that customer to keep coming back, they need to make ensure that interaction is a happy one.

We see  Shutl as a key means for a retailer to improve the loyalty of their customers (more on this in a future post), and with this in mind we are dead keen on making shoppers happy.  After all, we have a vested interest in doing so… shoppers must actively choose Shutl over other standard delivery options which are rarely branded.  They are very much our customers too and we must therefore make them happy if we want to keep them coming back.  Normal courier companies do not have this alignment; they treat the retailer as their customer.  Yes, I know the retailer obviously wants happy customers however the alignment is not direct, especially when the retailer is unaware of the shopper satisfaction.

Measuring happiness @Shutl

When I read about the UK government’s plans to measure the happiness of their customers,  it struck me that if the coalition were capable of achieving such an ephemeral ambition, then surely so must we.

Lo and behold… Shutl has a series of satisfaction questions which we send to Shutl shoppers via email as soon as they have received their delivery.  Whilst we do not pretend that it is a good indicator of how happy they are in life, we feel it is a decent indicator of their delivery satisfaction.

34% of Shutl customers have provided feedback since August (when we started asking for it) and that proportion is increasing month on month.

Over the same period, our average satisfaction score has been 94% across Ease of use, Value for money, Speed of delivery & the delivery person.

Since we started asking a Net Promoter Score question in September, Shutl’s NPS has been 80%.   This means that 85% of shoppers are rating themselves a 9-10/10 for the likelihood of them recommending Shutl to a friend or colleague.

There is also a free text field on the feedback form where shoppers can leave general feedback. These comments are posted automatically, live and unedited, onto www.shutl.co.uk, Twitter and Tumblr.

We want our service to be transparent so that shoppers (not just retailers) will want to trust us with their orders.  We want to know if there are problems and what these are so that we can fix them while we are still small and flexible.  In many ways we are fortunate to be starting from scratch so that we can do this from day 1 (well day 150 give/take).

How happy does non-Shutl delivery make shoppers?

Unfortunately we don’t possess like-for-like data from conventional delivery companies… in fact I am not aware of any conventional courier firm that actively requests this feedback from all of their customers, let alone shares it with the rest of the world.  Until such time as conventional courier companies are providing this data,  I thought a good (enough) way of judging satisfaction would be to look across social media channels to see what consumers are saying about normal delivery.

Yes, I am aware that we’re not comparing apples and apples.  Consumers tend to only broadcast extremes of opinion.  Albeit to a lesser extent, the same can be said of consumers that respond to feedback surveys…  My point is that we are aware of the bias, however we believe that we are still talking fruit.

We used Ubervu’s awesome product to analyse what consumers have been saying about their non-Shutl deliveries over the last 30 days.   We took the 10 largest delivery companies – the ones that retailers currently use. We looked only at blog posts, comments, Twitter & Facebook posts that mentioned the name of the delivery company and the term “courier” or “deliver” or “delivery” and then measured the sentiment.   We ended up excluding the Royal Mail because the volume was just too large and we also do not consider them a direct competitor.  We also excluded DHL, UPS & TNT because a lot of conversations were not coming out of UK and Ubervu did not have the means of effectively filtering this out.  The remaining companies we ended up including in the sample were: Home Delivery Network / Yodel, City Link, DPD, Interlink Express, UK Mail & Parcel Force.

I was expecting it to be bad based on my own anecdotal experience… but I had no idea just how bad.  For the month of January, 52% of all comments were negative,   41 % of all the feedback was neutral and only 7% was positive.  If that was a Net Promoter Score it would be negative.  Really negative.  -45% to be precise.

I then tried to equate this sentiment to our satisfaction score.  Assuming a negative to be 25%, neutral 50% and positive 90%, their weighted satisfaction score would be around 39%.  Again this is really best guess since we are not comparing like for like.

Given that I am not exactly a neutral observer, I have put together a pack containing all this data and our (basic) analysis for anyone to play with.

Conclusion

We already know that almost 2/3 shoppers that drop out of checkout cite delivery factors as a reason for not completing their purchase. And those are the shoppers that are considering purchasing online – who is counting the people whose experiences are turning shoppers away from the internet? One can only guess as to the true extent of delivery’s impact upon online retailers.

I don’t know about you but if I were a retailer wanting to improve customer experience & loyalty, ergo sales & profitability, I would look to find ways of making customers happier about delivery. We are not the only company innovating in this space. ByBox & Collect+ have been at it for years. “Click and Collect” (allowing customers to order online and collect in store) has been offered by Argos for the best part of a decade.

As a starting point, I would want to know just how big of a problem this was. Maybe its time to start asking your customers how happy they really are about delivery?

I can suggest an email template for anyone that wants it.  If Dave/Nick are listening, I suggest they don’t send it out at the end of the month…