Peak Season: Key Moment of the Year
For e-tailers and carriers, peak season represents a major challenge. This time of year, between November and December, is marked by an unprecedented increase in orders. Carriers generally see a 30% increase in their flows.
How can you best prepare for this period while continuing to offer the best possible customer service? Find out in this article!
What is the Peak Season?
For some companies, peak season can represent up to 50% of annual sales.
The peak season, also known as the sales season or high season, is a time of year when all retailers experience a sharp increase in sales. This includes key moments such as Black Friday, Cyber Monday and the holiday season.
During this season, customers are actively looking for discounted products and gifts for their loved ones. This calls for careful planning and the involvement of all teams: from marketing and logistics to your carriers' teams, in order to meet the growing demand for deliveries. Savvy retailers use specific strategies to maximize their profits throughout the year, and even more so this season.
Here are a few key tips to help you emerge victorious from this season:
According to an IPSOS study in 2023, more than 30% of consumers who have had a bad delivery experience with a retailer will no longer buy from them.
Tip 1: Anticipate inventory and potential order volume
The first step in preparing for peak season is good inventory management. Poor inventory management can lead to financial losses or missed sales. Here are a few tips to help you plan ahead:
- Study statistics from previous years: There's nothing like looking back to anticipate the future. Analyze past trends to forecast the quantities of products you need to have in stock.
- Work with your Logistic teams: Set up an inventory of products to meet peak-season demand.
Tip no. 2: Prepare your teams
Your teams need to be well prepared to cope with increased workloads. Here's how you can help:
- Communicate objectives: Share the peak season's major objectives with your team, and clarify everyone's roles and missions. As always, communication is key.
- Anticipate hiring and training: Evaluate your needs and, if necessary, hire and train new recruits to absorb the peak in activity.
Tip 3: Optimize warehouse organization
Efficient warehouse organization is crucial to managing orders quickly and error-free. Here are a few practices to adopt:
- Classifying and arranging part numbers: Use methods such as ABC or Pareto to optimize access to the most ordered products.
- Picking circuits: Set up picking circuits to avoid unnecessary travel by order pickers.
Tip 4: Don't forget personalization and customer satisfaction
To build customer loyalty, it's essential to offer them an experience they'll remember. The last key moment in your experience is delivery: offer to personalize it to make it satisfying:
- Offer flexibility: propose several transport partners and/or with different delivery methods and timescales (home delivery, point relais, with or without signature... and in 24, 48, 72 hours...).
- Precise order tracking: Offer extremely precise and reliable order tracking by SMS and/or e-mail. This is usually offered when contracting with your carriers.
- Careful packaging: Remind your teams to take good care of your packaging, and integrate the environmental aspect into your packaging.
- Facilitate returns: Simplify the returns process for the consumer, and if you can, increase the possible timeframe for returns.
Peak Season: Choose Claisy
With peak season accounting for up to 50% of annual sales for some companies, mastery of logistics is essential. Without it, it's impossible to keep the promise of fast, high-quality delivery to the consumer, and thus build loyalty over the longer term. According to an IPSOS study, by 2023, over 30% of consumers who have had a bad delivery experience with a retailer will no longer buy from them.
In this context, we understand that people and technology are complementary key success factors:
- The workforce: Quickly trained and operational, they can handle peaks in activity thanks to their know-how and experience.
- Technology: It will offer working comfort, time savings, and automation of tedious and sometimes repetitive logistics processes.
At Claisy, we don't just offer parcel insurance that reimburses shippers up to €100,000. Our technological platform offers you the simplest and most reliable transport claims management experience on the market. What's more, the Claisy claims process is the fastest on the market, guaranteeing total satisfaction for you and your customers.
Conclusion
Peak season is a crucial time for e-tailers and carriers alike. By following the tips above, you'll maximize your chances of success. And set yourself apart from the competition by choosing Claisy for your parcel insurance needs. You'll minimize the risks associated with this busy period and increase your customers' satisfaction.
Please contact us to find out more about our services and how we can help you protect your shipments.
