Using Delivery Tracking data to streamline the customer experience with Scurri’s Rory O’Connor (episode 261)

by Chloë Thomas

Rory O’Connor is the CEO and founder of Scurri. He’s been involved in retail and keeping customers happy for almost 30 years, and at Scurri he is providing retailers with innovative solutions for simple shipping that enable the optimisation of the ordering, shipping and delivery processes.

Subscribe on your Favourite Podcast App

Listen on Apple Podcasts
Listen on Spotify
listen on YouTube

Getting Started

Rory started his career at the brand Waterford-Wedgwood based between Ireland and the UK. During his tenure there, Rory says the company bought manufactured products and sold retail, which gave him a great breadth of experience.

As the online world developed, they created a catalog company to get closer to their customers and better understand their needs. Their initial website was a brochure website and Rory says his career has just grown from that point. One of his roles at Waterford was in marketing as head of consumer research—a position that allowed Rory to understand the role of well done research.

He wanted to share some insights into tracking, which has grown in importance along with the growth of eCommerce and recently published an in-depth report on the subject. 

If you want to read Rory’s report—which you should—it’s called: Using Tracking Data to Streamline the Customer Experience in eCommerce Delivery. That whitepaper is available on the tamebay.com website.

Tracking for Retailers

We all know that tracking is important to customers. But it’s important to retailers as well and they really want their customers to understand what’s going on with their shipments. Rory wanted to dig deeper into this less talked about side of the subject and along with his team surveyed 180 retailers to create his report.

One of the most shocking insights they found is that 1 in 5 orders generates a tracking support call. This happens because most of the time, customers aren’t alerted when something goes wrong. When they don’t receive their package, they end up calling in to find out what’s going on.

Most retailers rely on courier websites for that information and so quickly pass them on. 60%-70% of retailers want to have better control and communication of that process. WIMO calls (Where Is My Order) are the most frequent calls coming into a call center. The process, Rory says, is frustrating to him and he speculates completely infuriating to someone not in the industry.

The Complexities of Shipping and Delivery

Part of the complexity is the sheer number of hand-offs involved in shipping these days, which is why Rory founded Scurri—he saw a lot of opportunity to streamline that data.

He points out that the confusion is in part because businesses began trying to satisfy their customer’s needs by creating their own standards and so there is no set industry standard. 85% of retailers Rory surveyed give up completely when something goes awry and just send their customers to the couriers website to try and sort it out themselves.

Non-standardized tracking experiences are creating a lot of confusion from customers and retailers both. Scurri unifies data from across couriers and understands anomalies so that retailers can properly communicate to their consumers. Being proactive in this space will set retailers apart as the expectations of consumers continue to grow. 

Key Takeaways From the Report

  • Helps retailers understand the complexity of the tracking process. It’s just not that simple and worth educating yourself about.
  • Includes case studies as well as data so that readers can understand how data plays out in real-world scenarios.
  • Helps businesses understand the range of solutions so they can tailor unique solutions for their own tracking and shipping. 

eCommerce Book Top Tip

eCommerce Traffic Top Tip

  • Understand your customer and leverage personal contacts. People love doing business with people and personal relationships are really important. 

Tool Top Tip

  • Work Lean—not about being cheap but a way of working. Short development cycles, value to customers as fast as possible. 
  • Trello

Growth Top Tip

  • Understand your customers needs really intimately. Sometimes tricks work and sometimes they don’t. Go back to how you can serve your customer. 

Interview Links

Related episodes

Without the sponsors the podcast wouldn’t be possible – please do check them out:

Klaviyo

Klaviyo is a leading customer data and marketing automation platform dedicated to accelerating revenue and customer connection for online businesses. Klaviyo makes it easy to store, access, analyze and use transactional and behavioral data to power highly-targeted customer and prospect communications. The company’s hybrid customer-data and marketing-platform model allows companies to grow by fostering direct relationships with customers, without giving up their valuable data to popular big-tech ad platforms. Over 80,000 innovative companies like Unilever, Custom Ink, Living Proof and Huckberry sell more with Klaviyo. Learn more at www.klaviyo.com.
Give it a try today – get your free account

ecomdash

This episode is brought to you by the award-winning ecommerce inventory software – ecomdash. Affordably-priced and feature-rich, ecomdash has everything needed to manage your inventory and customer orders across 20+ platforms including Amazon, eBay, Shopify, and Etsy. Online sellers call ecomdash their “24/7 sales person” and say it “makes every part of the supply chain much simpler.”

See what the fuss is all about with their 15-day free trial. Masterplan listeners also get a very special offer too: 50% off their first 2 months with promo code: MASTERPLAN. Try it free at ecomdash.com/masterplan.