Order accuracy is a critical aspect of eCommerce fulfillment. If orders are incomplete or incorrect, your customers will become dissatisfied and are likely to take their business elsewhere. Measuring order accuracy is essential to ensure that you're delivering the best possible experience to your customers. In this blog post, we will discuss five tips for measuring order accuracy and how Capabl can help you improve your order accuracy and avoid costly mistakes.
The first step in measuring order accuracy is to define your order accuracy metrics. These metrics should be specific, measurable, and aligned with your business goals. Outside of the obvious metric of making sure that SKU A is shipped when ordered, brands should also work to define how things like appropriate shelf life, presentation, or customization should be considered.
Capabl can help you define your order accuracy metrics by providing automated scorecards and analytics for eCommerce fulfillment. Capabl's technology can help you identify the key metrics to track and provide insights into your performance, allowing you to take action to improve your order accuracy.
Conducting regular audits of your fulfillment operations is another essential tip for measuring order accuracy. These audits can help you identify issues that may be impacting your order accuracy and take corrective action to address them. If budgets and distance allow, brands should plan on a face to face meeting at their provider’s location at least twice a year- more often if the relationship is new or has been stressed. During these audits you should inspect your returns or other product that are on hold status, observe the kitting and bundling process, and pay special attention to any parts of the operation that have struggled with accuracy or other performance.
Capabl can help you conduct regular audits by providing automated scorecards and analytics for eCommerce fulfillment. Capabl's technology can help you identify errors and discrepancies in your fulfillment process, providing you with actionable insights to improve your order accuracy.
Your internal operations team is the backbone of your business and their training is critical to ensuring order accuracy. Ensure that they have a working knowledge of the basics of Root Cause Methodology (RCA) including Why Why Analysis & ECRS. Having an appreication of these methodologies will help them capture the appropriate data that you’ll need for a full RCA analysis and allow them to begin asking the right questions on their own.
Capabl’s reporting suite already includes some essential data and graphics that help identify root causes.
Hopefully any complaints or issues are few and far between, but ensuring that you have a strong tracking system and source of record for when they do happen is an important step. If you product is governed by a regulatory body like the FDA then you’ll actually be legally required to show your complaint log and the data that you collect. Even if the complaints are outside of the 3PL’s control or are outside the purview of a regulatory agency, the best brands keep track of all of this customer sentiment in an organized fashion and look for trends that they can address.
Oftentimes these issues live in a google sheet file that may or may not be shared widely or contain all of the relevant details. Capabl has robust complaint tracking that can act as a system of record for the customer service, operations, and fulfillment teams.
Finally, continuous improvement mindset is critical to maintaining high order accuracy. When speaking of quality control systems generally, a common analogy is that of an iceberg. The complaints that you do hear about are usually just the tip of the iceberg consisting of the most vocal consumers. You could easily hypothesize that for every complaint you receive, 2-5 other consumers experienced something similar and either didn’t complain or didn’t recognize the error. This means that you should treat every error as a big deal and perform a detailed root cause analysis, implement countermeasures, and ensure that those measure’s hold.
Capabl can help you continuously improve by providing access to automated scorecards and analytics for eCommerce fulfillment. Capabl's technology can help you identify areas where you can improve your order accuracy, providing you with actionable insights to implement changes and continuously improve your operations.
Measuring order accuracy is critical to ensuring that you're delivering the best possible experience to your customers. By defining your order accuracy metrics, conducting regular audits, training your staff, structuring your reporting, and being committed to continuous improvement you’ll be well on your way to running a world class operation.
