Dont Just Survive Peak Season

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Don’t Just Survive Peak Season – Thrive with These 5 Planning Strategies

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Peak season is a make-or-break period for retailers. With heightened customer expectations and increased order volume, delivering exceptional experiences while maintaining efficiency is paramount. Unfortunately, the pressure to meet demand often leads to reactive strategies that can damage the brand reputation and the bottom line.

A staggering 76% of customers would stop doing business with a company after just one bad customer experience. No matter the time of year, customers expect the same service they’ve been accustomed to. They want their orders to be fulfilled on time and in full, and their returns to be free. These expectations don’t change at peak season. If you don’t have the systems to deliver on these expectations during peak season, customers will go elsewhere.

Strategic planning is the key to thriving, rather than surviving, peak season. By anticipating and accounting for peak seasons, you can shift from a reactive to a proactive approach, helping you meet omni-channel demands while balancing speed and cost during high-pressure times.

Five strategies to win during peak season

Regardless of when your peak season is — whether it’s during the Christmas period, summer holidays or big sales — there are five core capabilities your peak strategy should include.

1.    Seamless omni-channel experiences

Today’s customers expect flexibility in how they purchase and return items, including both online and offline channels. Forbes data shows that 73% of consumers shop  seamlessly across multiple channels. These omni-channel shoppers want the freedom to research products online, compare prices, and even make purchases before heading to a physical store to try on or pick up their items. Omni-channel shoppers also want to discover a product in-store and complete the purchase online, or through a mobile app.

Delivering a seamless omni-channel experience requires a high degree of integration between each channel. Retailers must ensure that product information, pricing, inventory levels and returns processes are consistent across all platforms.

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2.    Inventory visibility and control

Real-time inventory visibility is an essential cornerstone of peak season success. Knowing exactly what inventory is available, and where, is critical to optimize fulfillment, reduce stockouts and mee customer expectations by communicating what stock is available to purchase, from where.

Without a real-time capability, retailers will lose sales through stockouts, delayed orders and canceled orders, as well as erode customer trust and loyalty. If a product is out of stock, 40% of customers will either make a purchase elsewhere or refuse to purchase entirely.

3.    Efficient fulfillment

During peak season, fast and efficient fulfillment is more important than ever. Retailer need to make reliable promises and establish trust; 56% of abandoned carts are due to concerns about shipping and delivery — with most customers concerned that orders will not arrive fast enough.

By optimizing picking, packing and shipping operations to manage peak demand, retailers can reduce order fulfillment delays, improve customer satisfaction and reduce return rates from orders that arrive too late.

4.    Effective returns management

An efficient returns management system is also integral for all retailers, and its impact is seen most during peak seasons. Retailers must deal with high order and return volumes without losing profits or missing inventory — all while keeping customer satisfaction high.

Because product returns are the consumer’s last touchpoint with a retail brand, it’s even more important to get the customer experience right.  A full 81% of consumers will shift to a competitor following a bad returns experience. During holiday seasons, 68% of shoppers say they’re more likely to check the return policy before they buy, making the return journey a key decision factor for shopping with your brand in the first place.

5.    Optimal labor costs and availability

With a tight labor market and rising wages, it’s becoming increasingly difficult for retailers to access and secure the seasonal workforce they need to meet peak season demands. This is emerging as a core competency to provide the customer service shoppers are looking for, no matter what the season.

By using effective planning and advanced digital technology, retailers can implement more efficient operations to ensure that they have the systems in place to handle peak volumes with the workforce available. Retailers can also leverage technology to lower their labor costs by accelerating tasks and increasing their accuracy.

Transform from reactive to proactive

Tackling the challenges of peak season requires the best technology and systems. Retailers who rely on legacy systems often struggle to achieve the real-time visibility and dynamic flexibility necessary to optimize operations during peak periods.

Instead, retailers need modern, scalable systems that offer a network-wide view of operations, enabling them to anticipate and respond to fluctuations in demand. These solutions provide the foundation for dynamic fulfillment, allowing businesses to implement the most efficient strategies based on real-time data.

The true power of advanced digital systems is unleashed when they are fully integrated across the supply chain. End-to-end orchestration ensures that every department, from procurement to shipping, is aligned and working toward common goals — optimizing inventory levels, reducing the risk of stockouts, providing more efficient fulfillment and returns journeys, and reducing costs.

By embracing advanced technology and intelligent systems, retailers can transform peak season from a period of chaos to one of opportunity. Proactive planning and execution, driven by data-driven insights, not only helps retailers meet customer expectations, but also build a stronger foundation for year-round success.

Always In Stock and On Time, In Peak Season and Beyond

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Delight customers and thrive in Peak season with Blue Yonder

Peak season doesn’t have to be a dreaded period of uncertainty. By adopting a proactive approach and leveraging the right technology, retailers can transform this challenge into an opportunity for growth.

At Blue Yonder, our commerce and returns solutions help you thrive not only during peak season but all year round. By leveraging Blue Yonder’s composable architecture, retailers can pick and choose the services they need to optimize their operations. This includes:

  • Real-time, 360° inventory visibility services that provide insights into accurate stock levels, item locations and shopper demand — enabling informed decisions about replenishment, allocation and promotions
  • Industry-leading Commits services that leverage advanced algorithms to determine the best sourcing and fulfillment options for each order, considering factors like cost, speed and capacity
  • Commerce insights and action services that empower data-driven decisions using advanced analytics and machine learning to identify trends, patterns, opportunities and anomalies
  • Fulfillment sourcing simulations, which allow you to model and test different scenarios and their impact on costs, delivery times and customer satisfaction — without disrupting live operations

 

Returns initiation and orchestration services that provide consumers with easy returns journeys, while capturing returns data to optimize the return process by intelligently routing returns to the most appropriate location for processing, restocking or disposal — based on factors like product condition, return reason and inventory levels

Why not contact Blue Yonder to learn more about transforming your peak season performance? We’re ready to help you thrive, not just survive.