Benchmark your cost of post-order care

How much waste is baked into your Customer Service process?

Simply put, if you’re depending on phone calls and emails to Customer Service reps for routine post-order care, you may be paying too much.

So what’s a good benchmark for your cost of post-order care? 

Use our clients’ cost savings as a starting point. Below, we’ve gathered stats for Corevist clients who’ve enabled Corevist Order Tracking for their customers, either separately or as part of the Corevist Commerce suite. These manufacturers have slashed their cost of post-order care by transitioning routine lookups to a self-service portal. 

Corevist Order Tracking isn’t only about cost savings, though. With a 30-day launch timeframe, it also offers a great entry point to B2B eCommerce—but we’ll cover that below.

First, here are the numbers.

Corevist clients’ savings in post-order care

To benchmark the cost of post-order care, we looked at post-order status checks and invoice lookups among a representative subset of 13 Corevist clients. These are manufacturers from numerous verticals, including medical/pharma, industrial, CPG, commercial products, and more.

To cover variability in CSR salary and time spent per lookup, we assumed a cost of $7.50 per customer service interaction. You may want to calculate your own average cost per interaction.

Here’s how much that subset of Corevist clients saves by using Corevist Order Tracking:

AGGREGATE:

• 161,109 order status checks/year
• $1,208,317.50 cost savings/year for order status checks
• 82,058 invoice lookups/year
• $615,435.00 cost savings/year for invoice lookups
• $1,823,752.50 total cost savings/year for routine post-order lookups

AVERAGE PER CLIENT:

• 12,393 order status checks/year
• $92,947.50 cost savings/year for order status checks
• 6,312 invoice lookups/year
• $47,340.00 cost savings/year for invoice lookups
• $140,287.50 total cost savings/year for routine post-order lookups

 

What the numbers DON’T tell you

The numbers are impressive, but they don’t tell the whole story. That’s because Corevist Order Tracking offers value beyond simple cost reduction in post-order care.

Some of these manufacturers began their B2B eCommerce journey with Corevist Order Tracking only. In other words, they didn’t immediately move their customers off of phone/fax/email ordering and onto eCommerce. Doing so may require an incentivization program to drive the largest number of customers to the site and turn them into repeat users. That’s why many manufacturers choose to approach the digital transition in an Agile manner, getting a quick win with Order Tracking, then building on that success in future phases as they add eCommerce functionality to the portal. 

Corevist Order Tracking makes it easy to drive digital adoption because the portal has the adoption incentive baked in.

No one wants to call Customer Service to get order status. That’s a highly inefficient way to present a few lines of data. If customers can get this basic information in a self-service portal, they’ll use it. They don’t need any further incentive to come to the B2B portal.

There’s a hidden power here, an opportunity to build digital capital among your customers. That digital capital makes it much easier to transition to full eCommerce when the time is right.

The power of starting your eCommerce journey with Order Tracking

Starting with Online Order Tracking is a brilliant way to move into eCommerce:

• Since Corevist Order Tracking launches in 30 days, it offers a fast, low-effort path into digital customer experience. 
• With a solution like Corevist Order Tracking, you put our scalable SAP integration architecture in place, which you can reuse for full eCommerce with online browsing and ordering.  
• Corevist Order Tracking allows your customers to get familiar with digital interaction. As they perform non-threatening, routine tasks in an intuitive interface, your customers get comfortable with online processes for doing business with you.  
• Launching Corevist Order Tracking first, with SAP integration, aligns your internal business processes and primes them to support a full SAP-integrated eCommerce solution like Corevist Commerce.

We like to think of this progression in terms of “Crawl/Walk/Run.” It’s a great path for transitioning your customer experience from phone/fax/email to B2B eCommerce. In a nutshell, using Order Tracking as an entry point, a typical Crawl/Walk/Run progression might look like this:

1. CRAWL—Launch Corevist Order Tracking

With Corevist Order Tracking, you can transition customers to self-service for post-order care (and away from phone/fax/email interaction). Customers experience Order Tracking as a value add, rather than a paradigm shift in doing business with you. Since tracking orders and invoices is a low-stress process in Corevist’s intuitive interface, your customers’ first experience with digital commerce is positive. What’s more, they now have a login to the same portal in which you’ll roll out eCommerce in the next phase.

2. WALK—Add eCommerce for online catalog browsing + online ordering

Build out your Corevist solution with the addition of eCommerce (online catalog browsing + online ordering). Corevist’s Order Tracking integration architecture includes everything necessary for your full eCommerce integration to SAP, which means you expand your digital customer experience without duplicate investment in your integration architecture.  

Since your customers already have logins to Corevist Order Tracking (and they’re familiar with the intuitive interface), they’ll experience your new, full eCommerce functionality as another value-add, rather than a disruptive change in your ordering process.

3. RUN—Expand your eCommerce channel

This stage looks different at every manufacturer, but the idea is always the same: Take your success from the first two stages and do the very next thing in improving your customer experience.

Depending on your business, that could take several different forms:

• Enable Corevist Bill Pay for electronic payments. If you didn’t include self-service payments in one of the first two phases, this is a great next step. Our Bill Pay module empowers your customers to pay down open invoices through credit/debit card, ACH, eCheck, Paypal, and more. It also allows your eCommerce buyers to pay for orders at checkout with your preferred electronic payment methods (rather than a payment method of Invoice, which is standard in Corevist Commerce).
• Bring more sales areas online with their own Corevist Commerce storefronts. If your SAP ERP configurations are templatized, or if all divisions run on one central SAP ERP instance, you can take advantage of our economies of scale. In this scenario, Corevist’s scalable SAP integration architecture makes it incredibly efficient to stand up multiple storefronts for additional brands & sales areas.

The Takeaway: Deliver quick value with Order Tracking (and prepare your path to B2B eCommerce)

Corevist Order Tracking offers you a smart way to transition your customers to eCommerce. You can onboard all your users to your Order Tracking portal, which offers a low barrier to entry and launches in 30 days. Once you’ve hit your target for user adoption, you can roll out eCommerce browsing and ordering within your Corevist portal.