Is Your Fulfillment Service Working for You?

Fulfillment Service – 6 Questions You Should ask Before Working with a Fulfillment Service Company

Consumers and business people head online almost every day to source products and solutions that fit their needs. Depending on the urgency of their needs, they might request some sales literature or samples, or locate nearby retail outlets to check out the items in person. All the while, they have a host of competitive options at their fingertips.  To hold on to leads today, marketers must embrace speed and relevance throughout the entire lead management cycle. So, from a fulfillment service perspective, it pays to tighten up your best practices with respect to inventory management, assembly, feedback cycles and digital delivery methods.   Without continuous assessment and improvement to keep program performance on track, you risk losing your hard-won customers to competitors or even potential customers’ changes of heart. Or there is the potential to overspend onfulfillment service, witch reduces return on investment and the profits that support growth of your lead generation efforts. The following are “best practices” guidelines that most fulfillment companies should follow or at least attempt to work with their customers on achieving these goals.   If you don’t already have a fulfillment service company these are questions you can ask prospective companies.  If your business already has a fulfillment service company, answer these questions in respect to your current company and see how it stacks up to business standards. See how closely your company’s practices, whether you handle fulfillment service in-house or outsource to a vendor, match up with our fulfillment service experts’ benchmarks and best practices on key processes.

How quickly should mailed lead requests be readied for shipment by my fulfillment service?

Mailed lead requests should be readied for shipment within eight to 12 hours during normal business days.  Research consistently shows that the quicker a company can get fulfillment service materials into leads’ hands, the higher the sales conversion rate.  In order to meet and even exceed delivery expectations, the benchmark for order handling is same-day processing so kits can enter the mail stream or get handed off to an expedited carrier in the same window. Of course, all fulfillment service facilities have daily cutoff times, after which incoming requests are counted as part of the next day’s volume. These cutoff times are coordinated with marketers’ data feed cycles as well as the time zones in which facilities are located.  To reach the benchmark of same-day processing, other benchmarks must be met. The appropriate material must be in stock, and the facility must offer some redundancy in procedures and equipment to ensure no single point of failure. For example, if printing goes down, either a similar printer should be available to pick up the slack or the fulfillment service firm should have the ability to route items to another facility acting as a standby.  Other contingency plans include setting a business rule that when warehoused pieces run low without reorders, the fulfillment service facility automatically can shift those items to print-on-demand production to avoid delays, as well as linking replacement items.  The goal is to present a fully executable order within seconds of receiving to always ship fulfillment service within the same day of the request.

WHICH IS THE MORE COST-EFFECTIVE FULFILLMENT SERVICE KITTING APPROACH?

Build to order is the more cost-effective approach.  While build to stock, meaning kits are preassembled in anticipation of demand according to volume forecasts, has been the standard practice for decades, the increasing adoption of digital printing to customize fulfillment service materials and reduce waste of obsolete materials has precipitated a shift to a build-to-order environment.  Cost comparisons show that build to stock is more expensive over the long term, due to the time and expense of dekitting to remove unwanted elements and then rekitting as appropriate. But, he adds, marketers don’t need to view kitting as an either/or scenario. Build to stock is useful in about 10 percent of programs.  On some very large programs or campaigns for which the immediate response can be forecasted accurately, the fulfillment service facility can compile the majority of the kit save for customized elements that would get printed on demand.

What is the minimum number of inventory alerts needed for a fulfillment service?

The minimum number of inventory alerts needed for a fulfillment service is three.  While inventory management involves a good deal of automation, the computer can’t make the decisions without the marketer’s guidance. Because human brains can juggle only so many priorities at a time, multiple inventory alerts work best to provide marketers with enough notice to either reorder or make small alterations to an item or supply an entirely new piece.  One alert to communicate is recommended when inventory levels hit established trigger points, one alert to signal a switch to print-on-demand production and another alert to signal the move back to the preferred production method. The threshold minimums should be set to identify quantities that will last longer than it takes to get the items printed without incurring rush charges. This level of explicit communication not only allows marketers to get ahead of opportunities to fine-tune or test kit elements, but also to adjust program costs for tighter budget tracking.

 What is the Best thing to do with digital fulfillment service?

Serve Web page with link during online visit.  For example, when fulfilling information requests online, turnaround should be immediate, the experts agree. Depending on the marketer’s Web site capabilities, it’s best to follow the successful completion of a form fill with the serving of a Web page that contains the link to the downloadable materials.  An alternate method is to have the form completion trigger an automated e-mail that provides a link to a landing page where the requested materials can be downloaded.  What’s increasingly being avoided in regard to digital fulfillment service is attaching the materials in PDF form to an e-mail.  Some companies’ servers filter e-mails with attachments that exceed certain size limits and people tend to be wary about opening attachments due to computer virus threats.  Marketers are cautioned to be careful of going all-digital with lead materials. He’s seen research that shows people might appreciate the immediacy of a digital format, but they also like to receive the materials in color by mail—especially if they want to place their orders via mail and there is no print-and-mail mechanism in the digital materials.  One final piece of advice on digital fulfillment service: Aim for the print and electronic materials to mirror each other as best as possible. If the electronic messaging is targeted, then the print kit should be, too.

How should completed order updates be communicated back to the marketer?

Well this can have multiple answers, either nightly, twice a day or in real time.  The best practice is for fulfillment service status data feeds to at least match the frequency of lead data feeds sent to the fulfillment service firm. So, if a marketer sends a daily blast, the fulfillment service vendor will reply with a daily update, usually at the end of the last work shift. If the leads are delivered to the fulfillment firm in real time, then that’s how the lead fulfillment service data should be processed.  With respect to the details shared, the update should include the status of the request, what was sent and, if the request was not fulfilled. Why? Because missing data points or data points that conflict with the marketer’s business rules. Then, the marketer and fulfillment service firm can work on any courses of action to process these leads according to the marketer’s lead management guidelines.  Most marketers have their fulfillment service database separate and do daily batch processing where the databases reconcile during the night. To reduce gaps in service and convert more leads, sophisticated marketers have invested in systems that tie in to their enterprise resource planning systems so information can be transferred in real time and leveraged for a more holistic viewpoint on customer interactions.  Such real-time visibility into the lead handling process rapidly is becoming a key requirement in business.  The days where you call the warehouse to find out what happened to your order or where your inventory level is should be gone. In addition, this seamless transparency results in the reduction of backup contingencies, along with improved customer service and systems availability. With immediate insight on inquiry volume, the supply chain moves from forecasting into nearly real-time operations management.  Today, you see all the demand coming in that needs to be fulfilled tomorrow.

The biggest missed opportunity in fulfillment service programs is?

The biggest missed opportunity in fulfillment service programs is not enough testing.  All types of communication programs should incorporate a learning process. Marketers always should be working different creative, channels, number of touches and other applicable aspects into their fulfillment service programs. Doing so as a matter of standard practice allows them to determine what works and then continually refine programs for the best possible results. It’s easy to say, but not so easy to do.  Marketers are advised to  build a foundation for testing into the program from conception, making sure there is access to the data needed for analysis and that the responding audience can be chopped into representative cells.

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