Being a brand manager in the cutthroat world of retail is not for the faint-hearted. You promise customers lightning-fast deliveries because that’s what they demand, but keeping those promises? It’s often a chaotic orchestration of many service providers, and customer promises all too often fall through the cracks.
Zoning in on the Zone of Uncertainty
The nature of logistics is a piecemeal venture. Every brand must work with a variety of logistics services to service customers outside of their local area.
Service providers tend to do one thing, like deliveries or fulfillment, and do it well in their area. They support SLAs, but just for their function. This means that at some point there is a hand-off of your package passing from one service provider to the next, and will cross what we call the Zone of Uncertainty.
This is where many brands grapple with unexpected delays, unpredictable costs, and frustrated customers in their fulfillment process. This can stem from a complex web of factors, often involving:
- Fragmented Workflows: Juggling multiple vendors, systems, and processes can create inefficiencies and communication gaps.
- Multiple Service Level Agreements: Managing various agreements with different providers leads to inconsistencies and potential confusion.
- Limited Visibility and Control: Lack of clear oversight into the entire fulfillment journey makes it difficult to proactively address issues and ensure optimal performance.
This lack of holistic accountability means that brands are actually just paying for activities along the line, but are not guaranteed the outcomes they promised their customers. Deliveries may be overnight, but if fulfillment missed passing the package to the carrier by their deadline, your package will likely be late.
These challenges can take a toll on customer satisfaction, operational efficiency, and overall business success.
In today’s age of intelligence, there is no reason why this chaotic state-of-play has to remain the status quo. Piecemeal logistics, fueled by activity-based pricing, is a short-sighted strategy that ultimately hurts the industry as a whole. While 3PLs may gain in the short-term, retailers are left trying to navigate a disjointed network, struggling with fragmented data and inconsistent experiences and customers face delays, errors, and a lack of transparency. It’s a recipe for frustration and lost business.
But what if you could buck the norm of paying for activities, and you could just hire logistics certainty?
Choosing the Quiet life: Paying for outcomes not activities
At Quiet, we hear a lot from brands who find themselves stuck in a situation where they are paying for patchwork activities along the value chain—everything from receiving a shipment, moving it into inventory, picking an order from inventory, packing and packaging, applying the label, to shipping—and they never have any control over how these activities add up.
The truth is that brands have limited control over the outcome they need or, indeed, any of the many steps along the way that they are being billed for. And even if they work with excellent 3PL service providers, there is a lack of accountability and optimization of workflows between the fulfillment and delivery services. When things go wrong, including cost controls, the whole process often ends in finger-pointing for fault while the brand takes the beating.
To us, this is a fundamental issue with what’s not working in the current environment. It’s like trying to navigate a maze blindfolded, and it doesn’t end well either for brands or customers.
So, we fixed it.
One SLA, one outcome
To make it right, Quiet has flipped the situation with its pioneering Click2Door™ solution. We start with the outcome – the delighted customer – and offer an end-to-end service promise from the moment the customer clicks to purchase to when the product arrives at their door.
We don’t nickel and dime.
Everything is bundled in, resulting in a simple rate card and predictable costs per order, not per unit. There are no hidden fees, no surprises. And we promise to handle the problems. If anything goes wrong, we fix it—at no additional cost to our client.
Logistics transform to be Quietly predictable, and that’s tremendous for brands.
The results speak for themselves:
- Reduced costs: Quiet’s model can deliver an average of 10% savings per order, with additional savings from efficiencies around inventory, markdowns, and split shipments American Eagle was able to slash split shipments by 0.04 shipments per order (1.17 average to 1.13 average). This is massive, as every 0.01 decrease translates to about $1 million saved!
- Increased speed: Quiet’s data science driven technology, scale and optimized workflows can radically transform shipping distances and costs for the better. One client managed to halve the average delivery distance, leading to faster deliveries and happier customers.
- Improved quality: Consistent, optimized workflows and greater measurability and traceability from Click2Door™ ensure a positive brand experience for every customer, every time. One ecommerce brand used our network to expand from one central facility to four, and cut the average shipping distance by over 50%, saving 10% per order on shipping fees.
This is not just another service, it’s a complete paradigm shift, prioritizing customer experience and empowering brands with unprecedented control and transparency—over service and costs.
We’ve ripped off the blindfold and broken down the walls of the maze—and 3PL will never be the same again.
Contact us today for a free consultation and see how we can eliminate your Zone of Uncertainty and empower you to take control of your customer experience
