4 Tips to Help You Avoid Late Shipments that Hurt Your Brand

There are few things worse than late freight deliveries and they can cause significant damage to your brand, especially if they are frequent occurrences. Accurate, damage-free, and on-time deliveries are crucial for business success.

In fact, delivery issues, delays, damage, and shortships can wreak havoc on your brand reputation, impact customer satisfaction, and slow cash flow. In fact, here are 4 ways that late freight shipments can negatively impact your business.

Chargeback Penalties

If you miss a delivery appointment or deadline, a retailer or customer may assess a chargeback, a penalty for not being in compliance with their requirements. In other words, make a late delivery, make less money.

Higher Costs

Late or missed freight deliveries mean having to make another delivery, which incurs additional costs for fuel, driver time, and additional charges from your freight carrier.

Customer Loss

If you incur enough late deliveries, your vendor scorecard grades could place you in serious jeopardy of losing the business.

Increased Customer Acquisition Cost

Losing a customer is bad, but replacing a lost customer is extremely expensive. As everyone knows, it’s much less costly to keep an existing customer than find a new one.

Impacts to Your Planning and Production

Late inbound freight shipments can delay production, which impacts inventory levels, which can impact sales; all of which negatively impacts cash flow.

To help ensure that your business remains healthy and successful, here are 4 tips to help you avoid late freight shipments and protect your brand reputation:

Improve Supply Chain Visibility

Having visibility into your supply chain is more important than ever considering recent challenges with shipping disruptions, longer delivery times, and delays. It is also important to know how these challenges can impact your company’s long-term planning and production goals. Using a Transportation Management System (TMS) will provide needed visibility into all of your shipments.

Improve Your Order Process and Systems

Reducing the time it takes you to process orders helps your shipping department and your carrier partners accurately schedule and fulfill pickups and deliveries based on transit time. Use order management software to download orders, create shipping labels, and produce pick and ship lists.

Use Responsive, Dependable, and Appropriate Carriers

Depending on where your orders are shipping to, you may want to use LTL or truckload carriers, or national or regional carriers. No matter where you are shipping, use carriers with good safety records and good on-time performance scores.

Use the Correct Shipping Service Level

Choose shipping methods that match your promises and capabilities. If picking and packing is a slow process, build an extra day into your shipping schedule. If you must meet a specific delivery window, use a guaranteed service. Don’t over-promise, don’t under-deliver.

Now, if for some reason your shipments don’t go as planned, here is the most important, and easy way to protect your brand and deal with shipping issues that arise:

Proactive Communication

When delays occur, prompt and responsive communication is critical to success. Be open with your customers so they can react to the delay. It allows you and your customer to come up with a contingency plan together, and that could lead to a deeper business relationship between your companies.

Research And Markets recently released its Global Freight Visibility Growth Opportunities report, which stated “The supply chain across industries is becoming more complex, and real-time freight visibility is the most sought factor among the logistics and transportation stakeholders for long-term competitiveness. For shippers and logistics fulfillment service providers, supply chain disruptions significantly affect the top and bottom lines.”

To learn how a true business partner can transform your supply chain, read this case study. Contact Jarrett to learn how we can help you gain visibility into your supply chain so you can reduce late shipments and protect your brand’s reputation and bottom line by calling 877-815-0279 or by visiting https://www.gojarrett.com/logistics/.