View the webinar recording on YouTube
STREAM gives you, your partners and your customers with accurate and real-time information on orders. From a customer service perspective, greater visibility of the entire order lifecycle means fewer disputes and ultimately, happier customers. In this webinar, STREAM Product Manager, Shahid Latif guides you through this lifecycle and looks at some typical issues that affect retailers when delivering products to customers.
In the live demonstration, Shahid will show you how the automatic email notifications throughout the process keep everyone involved in the process informed every step of the way.
Read the transcript of the webinar below:
Hello everybody, I’d like to welcome you to the first ever STREAM webinar. My name is Shahid and I am the Product Manager for STREAM at Proximity.
Today we’re going to be looking at the life of a troublesome order, working through the lifecycle within STREAM and show how STREAM can help resolve some of the customer service issues that you might be facing.
So the format today is its going to be a half hour webinar within that we are going to be performing a live demonstration of STREAM, obviously not in real-time, but at the end of the event we can have some questions.
So, just to confirm hopefully everyone can see my screen quite clearly and hear me, and if not please let me know during the webinar.
Ok, so let’s start by taking a look at the STREAM order lifecycle. So, initially an order is placed, normally at a website for a retailer for example, or you can also put those orders directly into STREAM – we do have those facilities.
Once the order is in STREAM, we would normally allocate the stock, we could do that manually, but also depending on the integration you might have with stream this can be done in an automated way, which is what we have done with Brightpearl. Once the allocation is done, we move onto delivery planning and at this stage we are determining the route for the drivers and based on that, we will receive an estimated time of arrival which we will use to calculate delivery times for the customers.
Once we’ve got all that information, we can then contact the customer, arrange the time, fix it and move on and actually delivering the order.
STREAM again helps in this situation where we have a mobile app that provides the driver with the ability to record POD’s, take images and also provide status updates throughout their journey.
Hopefully, this should all lead to a successful completion of the order.
Now, bringing this all together is the customer services aspect. Now this is obviously a key role within a lot of organisations, and it is the frontline to the consumers. And the way STREAM helps this is a lot of these functions such as the warehousing, the transport and planning and the drivers are all feeding information into STREAM which is then available to the customer services department to keep your customers up-to-date and resolve any issues that might arise.
Now, due to the flexible configuration of STREAM, all these functions – warehousing, customer services and transport and planning can be undertaken by different departments within your organisation, they can be working in the same office or they could be in different offices, or they could, in fact be third parties depending on what scenarios you require.
The idea being that STREAM is a cloud-based solution that promotes the collaborative aspects, allowing different partners and groups to work together.
Ok, so let’s look at some issues that you might be facing and see how STREAM can help resolve those.
We are going to focus on a couple of main issues today, one being the need to re-plan an order, so for instance when you provide a delivery time to a customer, they might have an issue with that and you might need to re-plan it, but also delivery failures, so what you would do within STREAM if the delivery failed when the driver initial went out to deliver it.
Just to let you know today, I’ve got my colleague Rob sitting alongside me. He will be acting as my warehouse and my transport and delivery departments. He’ll be keeping up with me hopefully, so just be aware that we might have the odd delay here and there.
Ok, so let’s assume that I work for a company called ‘Furniture Direct’ and I am a customer services agent. We have access to STREAM, in fact our whole company uses STREAM. All those departments we see there are using STREAM as well and providing the information as shown.
So, if I log into STREAM, which will be this screen that some of you will might be familiar with. I log in and I can see all of the orders that we’ve got currently.
Now, for this demo, we’re going to have an order placed by a Mrs Banks. She’s ordering a new bunk bed and, as you might have seen there, we’ve received an email notification of her order giving me some basic details about the actual order itself.
We can then return to STREAM, and search for that order. Now as you can see in the search criteria here, we have a lot of options available to us, but let’s just keep it simple for now and we’ll just search for the beginning of her name let’s say, and there we go. That’s the order that came through and yep, that’s today’s date.
So, we’ve received the email notification and we can also see it within STREAM itself. And now, what we want to do is actually take a look at this order. So, the order itself. The way this screen is built up to give you some background is, we have the order information here just giving the basic information about the order itself, some references maybe to a customer. We’ve also got some information to which parties have provided that information, in this case a distribution company has been defined and us being Furniture Direct.
We’ve also got the delivery information down here, and any contact details right down at the bottom. The section here is obviously the items that have been requested – so they are looking for two bunk beds.
On the right-hand side we have an events section. Now, what happens – any updates or changes to the order are logged as events within STREAM. So, this table will grow with more and more information as the order progresses through the lifecycle.
And down here at the bottom, we’ve got delivery information. We’re able to see what the transport department is doing with the order, when they’re planning to deliver it for example. And that information is updated and visible to us in customer services.
Ok, so what would normally happen now is that this order would be passed onto our warehousing department who would allocate the stock and then pass it on to the transport department for the delivery to be planned. During the planning, STREAM would come up with an estimated time of arrival and based on that, calculate delivery times that they are expecting to deliver the items.
So, for instance, in this particular order now it is expected to be delivered between eight and ten in the morning, but you will have noticed that the order is not confirmed. What that actually means is that the customer has not been contacted and we haven’t confirmed with them that we will be delivering to them at that particular time.
Let’s assume that the transport department tries to make contact with the customer, but there is no answer. They can log that by putting information in down here in the customer contact notes. So hopefully the transport department has made some updates to our order. We can take a look to see what might have occurred.
If we look here, they have tried to contact the customer initially and there was no answer, so that is obviously 13:10, then just after that they made further contact and finally got through to Mrs Banks, but the request for the slot has been rejected and Mrs Banks would like a slot in the afternoon as we can see there.
Again, the transport department will provide another slot, so in fact we should be able to see the new slot if we go back in to the order itself – and there we have a new slot now taking place in the afternoon.
Now what can happen at this point is that if that is all ok with the customer they would then confirm that slot and that would provide another email notification as we’ve got down here. So this is a breakdown really of the order and the scheduled slot appears there. Now this email is, at the moment, actually coming to myself as a customer services agent, but could quite easily be sent to the customer if we had their email address in the order itself. We could do that by configuration.
In addition, to keep the customer informed about what’s happening with the order you may have noticed at the bottom of the emails, there is a link to track this order, which is the same link I can provide through this button here, which allows me to go to what we call the consumer tracking screen.
We can see there that we have a basic overview of the status of the order which you can see at the top. So, right now we can see that the order has been planned for delivery. We have a breakdown of the order details themselves and we’ve also got, more importantly the order tracking details. As you can see all the events that took place against the order. This screen is available to customers, which we provide via the email or you could use it yourself if you find it helpful.
Just in addition, to let you know, there is a new feature coming with STREAM in the near future where we are allowing the customer themselves to be able to accept or reject the proposed delivery slot. They’ll be sent an email and through that email they’ll be able to make that decision. So on this screen they’ll be an accept or reject facility and that should hopefully reduce the workload for customer services.
Ok, let’s just flick back and see where we’ve got to with the order lifecycle. So right now, we’ve managed to place the order, allocate stock to it through my colleague Rob and my transport department has planned delivery of the order and confirm the time. So, Mrs Banks is fully aware of her order, when it’s coming and we’ve got a record of all the communications that we’ve had with her.
So, at this stage I was wondering if anyone had any questions that they had?
Ok, we can now move on to the next stage in the process. So, we finally get around to the day of the delivery and if we return back to the order itself. Although there is not much we will be doing directly at this stage, because at this stage the van is being loaded with Mrs Banks’ bunk bed and our driver, or Rob in this case, will be using our STREAM mobile app to record the progress of the deliveries.
Assuming he reaches Mrs Banks’ home, knocks on the door, but unfortunately no body is home. So, in this case he is able to record the fact that the delivery has failed and also he is able to take photographic evidence of where he is for example. Again, STREAM logs the fact that the delivery has failed, we’ve received another email notification to confirm that and, if we head back into STREAM to the order itself, we can hopefully see the fact that there has been a failure – so there we go we’ve got a failed delivery saying, basically that there was no one home to accept the delivery.
We can, in addition take a look at where that event took place. So, if we click on the event, certain events we can click within STREAM and delivery failed is one of them, where it will show us exactly where on a map where that event was recorded. So, we know that this event took place at this location. If we put our little Streetview on, and we can see that this was taken literally outside our door at our offices, but obviously it is useful to know where the driver was from a customer point of view.
Let’s head back to the order. Imagine, an hour or so later we get a call from a very irate Mrs Banks basically not understanding why her bed was not delivered. What we are able to do on the phone is take a look at the order as we’ve seen just now, take a look exactly where the event took place and show her the information for herself because as we’ve mentioned earlier she’s able to look at this information through the consumer tracking screen, which I’m going to go back to now, which will hopefully update with the latest information.
And there you go. Now she can see that the delivery failed at that time and that also that a photo was taken, so if we pop that up. There you go, so let’s imagine that is Mrs Banks door – a nice front door in fact. So, we’d hope at that stage that Mrs Banks would understand the situation and she’d probably confirm that she was out for a certain amount of time when the delivery driver came round to visit, in which case we would probably rearrange the delivery.
We can record all of that as well on the actual order again in the events if we wanted to – record all the information in the section down here. So, we’ve agreed to redeliver this. The email notification that we received on the failure would more than likely go to the transport department so they are fully aware that something needs to happen on the delivery and they can take on board the re-planning.
Let’s assume that the re-planning has taken place – the transport department has rearranged it for another time. This time it is a successful delivery.
What we can do is again, we can receive an email notification that the delivery has been ok and we can pass that information onto Mrs Banks, or she can receive this information herself keeping her fully informed of the status of the order. So, we should now have a very happy Mrs Banks with her brand new bunk bed ready to use.
We can now go back into the order itself and we’ve got a log of all of the history that took place on this order for Mrs Banks. We’ve got the notes, we know exactly what time things took place. We also know exact GPS locations of certain events that took place.
In addition, we are providing a facility on the consumer tracking screen for yourselves or the customer the ability to print this information, so you’ll be able to see the events and the images on a document that could be used in the future if you need to go back.
Just to recap where we’ve now got to, if I head back to here. As you can see, we’ve gone through a whole order lifecycle. We’ve planned it all the way through, we’ve confirmed the times, redeliver in this case and we’ve recorded some information on the POD and all of these functions have provided invaluable information for our customer services department who’ve been informed throughout the cycle.
Hopefully you’ve got a good idea there of how STREAM can be an enormous help to customer services by providing visibility throughout the lifecycle, proving those updates via email based on certain events based on your configuration, but also that the information held in STREAM is accessible by myself as a customer services agent, but also different departments in my organisation, my partners and also the customer, which can be a great help being able to do these things proactively – leading to happy customers.
That’s really what I wanted to cover in the webinar. Now I was wondering if there were any questions, or any similar issues other people were having in their business?
Attendee: No issues really, but I was wondering what the PDF summary would look like?
Yes, I’ve got one, which I can give you a quick look at. Hopefully this should be in the next release of STREAM, so it is coming really soon. If I take a look here – and there you go.
It is an order summary as we like to call it. At the top we have the order information, we’ve got a breakdown of the items – now this is only sample test data so don’t worry too much about the content.
Then, we’ve got a log of all of the events that take place against a certain order and in addition we’ve got some pretty pictures at the bottom. Now I’m now certain whose dog that is, but all the photo is now available on that document that can be accessed and passed onto the customer if necessary.
If you do find that you do have any questions now, or in the future by all means let me know and we’d be happy to take a look at those things. If you’ve got any suggestions on how STREAM could help your business and how the product could be improved then we’d be happy to hear them.
Feel free to contact me on my email address or you can contact us on the STREAM support email address as well if you need to.
For now, that’s all we wanted to cover for today. Thank you very much for your time. Good bye.