Studies show that customers who experience friction when they want to make a return are less likely to shop again with your retail outlet in the future.
In other words, consumers expect a customer-centric experience throughout the retail journey - both in terms of purchasing and return. This starts from when the interest in your products is aroused via the purchase, to when the product is delivered, and the decision whether to retain, exchange, return or claim a refund.
In general, the return is often seen as a 'necessary evil' and lost business, even though the return has all the potential to be what makes you stand out and attract new customers. Despite this, a return is mostly treated as an afterthought, where the process is complicated, difficult to understand, or otherwise seen as fraught with friction, where the customer can easily be faced with an information vacuum.
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It's important to start at square one before starting to work on a return.
Step one is to make an inventory, with the help of representatives from each department with a link to the return process. For example, this could include customer service, warehousing/logistics, accounts, online/platform, etc. You need to review the entire experience and the data flow before making any decisions.
Make sure that you examine the flow for cancellations, exchanges, refund claims, and "edge cases", for example. Ultimately, it is very important that you offer a return experience on par with the shopping experience the consumer encounters in your webshop, and in different markets.
Sometimes a return is something delegated to a specific department. Which department this is may depend on the internal process at each individual business. But the fact is that a return ultimately affects the whole business. Not just parts of it.
Just as with a purchase, a return is a flow consisting of several parts:
Unfortunately, the issue of returns at many online retailers ends up in the lap of the person or department that experiences most problems with returns. Not necessarily based on who is most qualified to deal with the issue.
But without a complete understanding of how other departments and personnel are affected by a return, and without authority, it is difficult to make changes. Ultimately, it is also difficult to offer customers a good post-purchase experience.
Therefore, it is very important to appoint a representative at the company who will own the return issue and then take on the role of return manager. The person in question may belong to customer service, e-commerce, logistics, accounts, or another department.
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One of the most common reasons for a return, such as in fashion, is that the product is the wrong color or size. Through simple steps you can create a frictionless return process and allow the consumer to make an exchange for the right product/size/color.
By allowing consumers to exchange products without the need to involve customer service for automatic notifications and faster refunds, you can offer a frictionless return process that contributes to increased customer loyalty. You can easily achieve this by digitalizing and automating the many underlying processes.
A digitalized return process helps the consumer to easily register a return on a cell phone, laptop, or tablet in a few simple clicks. In exchange, your organization avoids having to process a handwritten return slip.
The digital process helps you to guide the consumer to make the 'right choice'. This leads to fewer queries, faster processing, and the opportunity to communicate with the consumer throughout the process, precisely when it is needed.
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In the same way that consumers want to know that an order has been dispatched and the date the parcel is expected to arrive, they will also prefer to receive a confirmation that a return has been registered, received, and processed.
Holding a transparent dialog, and being able to provide an estimate as to when the replacement will be sent or a refund given, contributes to a better customer experience and fewer queries to customer service.
Communication with consumers about a return, a refund claim or an exchange currently follows one particular static model: a static return page on the website, with all the conditions listed one after the other, followed by different rules and costs, and even links to files in some cases. Sometimes further information also follows, based on the market in which the consumer is located.
This makes it difficult for new visitors to an e-commerce site to understand how easy/hard it is to make a return.
Statistics show that 45 percent of online shoppers consider the return policy to be of great importance when making a purchase. 68 percent of all consumers read the existing return policy before making a purchase.
There is a great risk of losing online shoppers before they have started to browse through the product catalog, for the simple reason that the existing return policy is complicated to understand, and perceived as bothersome.
Structure and summarize the information. Provide a dynamic return process that is personalized and easy to understand.
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