How to Leverage Customer Collaboration to Offset Shipping Losses
Published
A carrier loses or damages an order and you replace it, because the alternative is arguing with a customer about whose fault it was. That is the right call and it is not free: you are out the goods and the shipping, and the customer has had a bad delivery either way.
You can claim the cost back from the carrier. What makes that hard is that the carrier will usually want evidence the customer holds — photographs of the damage, confirmation the parcel never arrived, sometimes a signed statement — and by then the customer has their replacement and no reason to spend time on it.
So two things happen.
- You eat the cost.
- The customer’s experience of you is a parcel that did not turn up.
The fix is to give the customer a reason to stay involved after they have been made whole.
Offer something for their participation — a discount on the next order is the usual one — and the evidence arrives while the claim window is still open.
A worked example
A customer reports a $50 order damaged in transit. Two ways to handle it.
Replace it and move on. You are out $50 plus the shipping, twice — the original and the replacement. The customer is satisfied and the carrier keeps the money. Replace it and offer $25 off their next order for a photograph and a signed statement. The claim succeeds, you recover the $50 and the shipping, and the $25 is a credit against an order they have not placed yet rather than cash out the door.
The second one is not free either. It costs you the $25 and somebody’s time chasing the evidence, and carriers deny claims. But it turns a certain loss into a likely recovery, and the discount only costs you anything if they come back and spend.
How to run it
- Replace first, and say so. Tell the customer the replacement is going out before you ask them for anything.
- Then make the ask, with something attached. A discount on a future order, loyalty points, or cash.
- Close the loop. Tell them where the claim got to and that their photograph is what settled it.
The point of the third step is that it is the only part the customer sees any result from, and it is the one most operations skip.
Get it right and customers come back. Get it wrong and a competitor with a better one takes them.
Where the rate stops being the decision
Knowing how a carrier prices a parcel is useful. The harder question is which parcel to make — because the packing decision sets the dimensional weight and the cubic tier, and the cheapest box changes with the contents, the destination and the rate card.
There are eight situations where that decision has grown past what a rule can express. Most operations are in two or three of them.