Communicating Supply Chain Delays Better To Customers
Contrary to popular belief, supply chain trainers emphasize on maintaining happy customers, as it is the most important factor that can influence your brand’s image online. It is not only about being the best in your field, but also ensuring that your customers know your worth.
Many businesses are great at manufacturing better quality products than their competitors, but lack a strong customer-interaction team, which gives them a hard time to secure their place in the market.
When you are lacking behind at some point of your supply chain, the customers want you to acknowledge the circumstances they face and wait for a clear, reasonable answer. Failing to do so, obviously, results in customer dissatisfaction and poor customer experience.Â
In this blog, we will talk about tactics to communicate supply chain shortages and delays to your customers in a healthy way.
- Role Of Supply Chain Leaders:
Many businesses fail to understand the need for honest, straight-forward communication. While customer-management teams are the frontline communicators, there must be a collaboration between supply chain leaders and customer-care specialists in any event of disruption.
The customers may not welcome the shortages and delays, but they will always appreciate your transparency which drives more credibility to your brand’s name. Supply chain trainers can provide more authentic, real-time information about the issues that can provide a better customer experience, and hence more satisfied customers.
- Key Practices To Employ At All Times:
The most important practice is cross-functionality. Bring the supply/demand planners, logistics, marketing, and manufacturing teams all at one page to get a better visibility of which customers are served and which are not. The impact of imbalance is best recorded when all the teams are working together, and hence helps in delivering a unified image/answer externally when a disruption hits.
Another key is to set priorities. You may use a variety of priority techniques, such as first-come, first-served or priorities based on marketplaces or profitability. The key is for the management to support best use of resources both internally and with customers, establish clear guidelines, and align on the core values.
Last, but not the least, develop tailored messaging for all accounts. The reach differs between top-tier and low-tier accounts, hence the communication should be done accordingly. Post proper updates, brief regularly about how you are working to mitigate the issues, and how soon the problem will be resolved; ensure that you keep the customers in loop!
- Transparency – Do, Or Don’t?
Transparency is a 100% do, but the extent must be clearly defined. Various businesses struggle to find the right balance between what to tell the customer and what not. Customers should know if the problem’s root cause is under control and manageable, or not.
However, ensure that they have faith in your capability to proactively handle interruptions throughout the entire supply chain. Inform your clients of the steps you are currently taking, and keep them informed of any long-term strategy or investment adjustments that can assist reduce risk. That is how transparent you should be!
Best Way To Go About A Delay:
There is no universal method that works for all consumer communications. Customers differ in their choices for frequency and format. Count on sales to communicate with clients frequently to comprehend their preferences.
Supply chain trainers suggest ensuring that all your teams are working together and give off a positive brand image altogether by communicating appropriate information at the right time – both internally, and externally.
