What is Non-Compliance Costing You?

When things go wrong it’s frustrating. But in addition to the frustration non-compliance can bring, it can be costing you a significant amount every year in operational expenses and customers.Here is what’s driving this expense and how you can avoid it:

Where Compliance is Costing

Non-compliance can appear in several ways, adding costs to your supply chain. Here are a few things to keep an eye out for:

• Late deliveries: Delivering hours or even days later than what was communicated to your clients can cause a poor delivery experience with your customer; tie up your customer service lines assisting this customer; and force your relationship with this customer to be cut short.
• No proof of delivery (POD): While a POD may seem trivial at times, it can be crucial in proving delivery in case of a discrepancy with your customer. Again, a frustrated customer can cost you.
• Delivery address and actual delivery location discrepancies: Being able to track the actual location a package was marked “delivered” vs. where the package was intended to be delivered is particularly important when checking records for lost or stolen packages.
• Damaged packages: When a package is damaged in transit, communication of the damage and photographic evidence should be reported back to you immediately. When a customer is awaiting their (perfect) order, time is of the essence.

A common theme in the above items is how each breach of compliance can affect your company’s relationship with the customer. Acquiring customers can be very costly, making maintaining the relationship with your existing customers extremely important. A bad final mile delivery experience can cut the relationship short, and you will not be able to maximize the lifetime value of that customer.

Setting Standards

With any good relationship, communication is key. Starting with the initial contract discussions, letting the expectations of compliance be known is important. Some items you may want to address to set a solid foundation are:

• Company vision and standards for customer service
• Delivery parameters for “on time” deliveries and conditions of packages
• Scheduling appointments and requirements
• Routing guidelines
• Returns and reverse logistics
• Accounting requirements
• Who pays for non-compliance issues

All expectations should correspond to measurable items that you can track internally to judge compliance.

Evaluating Performance

Once the relationship is underway, a carrier joins your network and you’ve established the compliance expectations, you must measure the results by looking at metrics that will provide insight to your carriers’ compliance.Data should be aggregated and filterable by region and carrier to observe macro- and microtrends. A regional trend in the data may point to a larger issues with the standards set such as cultural or geographic. Carrier specific data will highlight outliers to compliance: carriers who consistently fail to meet standards and carriers who consistently exceed them. Having the right tools to accomplish these evaluations is key.

Guarantee 100% Carrier Compliance

Building a carrier network can be difficult, then, ensuring these carriers consistently meet your companies requirements to ensure a good customer experience every time can seem like a large undertaking.At eTrac, we strive for 100% carrier compliance every time. As eTrac connects to each carrier’s current operational system or provides them with a system, the data can be transferred back to you in real time. The single point of integration allows for all data to be aggregated and viewed by delivery, carrier or region in your Business Intelligence Dashboard.Are you ready to stop spending money on non-compliance? Contact us today.