How Returns Can Make or Break Your Business

You might have a business right now, or you plan to launch one soon. Maybe you sell products or offer services at a physical location. It could also be that you use the eCommerce model. Perhaps you do both, offering a physical storefront customers can visit and a website that accepts orders you ship around the country.

Let’s say you have a strictly eCommerce business model, or you use eCommerce, and you also have a physical storefront. You’ll want to ship what you make accurately so everyone gets what they ordered. If you can’t do that, your company will likely see negative online feedback.

On a related note, you should think about how to handle returns. Optimizing your customer’s return experience matters more than you might think, so let’s talk about that right now.

Why Does the Return Experience Matter So Much?

No business owner likes the idea of someone buying something and then wanting to return it. It’s just reality that’s going to happen sometimes, though. 

Maybe you ship something to someone, and it arrives broken. Perhaps they get the package, but it’s not what they ordered. They might also try out the item and find that it doesn’t work like they wanted, or it doesn’t fit.

It could be a gift for someone, and that person doesn’t like it. Plenty of additional reasons exist why someone may need to return a product. The point is that when they do it, they want to take care of it quickly and easily.

If you make it very difficult for someone to handle a return, that will no doubt leave a sour taste in their mouth. They may choose not to do business with you again, and they may also spread negative feedback about your brand online.

Social media allows customers to do that these days and people pay attention to negative feedback. If you have too much of that circulating around your brand, that might lead to you losing a lot of ground as your company tries to establish itself and beat out the competition within your niche.

What Can You Do to Make the Return Experience Better?

That brings us to the question of what you can do to improve the customer return experience. Speed is always of the essence. You might argue that matters more than anything else in this area.

You will want to have a return page where a customer can quickly figure out how to get the item back in the mail to you. If they struggle with the UX on your app or website, that’s bad news for you.

You should also make sure that your customer can track the return to know where they are in the process. They can go to a branded page that will show them whether the item is still in the mail or whether you have it back.

At that point, you’ll want to make sure they get their money back as quickly as possible. They won’t want any delays, so emphasize this feature as part of the whole return process.

How Can You Get Better at Returns?

If your company has existed for some time and you use the eCommerce business model, you have likely handled many returns. Maybe you feel like they have gone pretty well, but there’s almost always room for improvement.  

You might hire a company that offers a technology package to help you in this specific area. These companies exist now, and you can customize a package from them depending on what you feel you need the most.

You might engage one that can offer you return satisfaction analytics. It can deliver feedback to you based on customer surveys you give when someone returns an item. However, if you’ve ever tried to get feedback this way before, you might have noticed customer reluctance to answer any questions. Doing so takes time out of their day.

You can offer a customer an incentive to answer questions about the product return process. Maybe you’ll give them 10% off their next order or something along those lines.

When they answer questions about the return experience, the company you hire can deliver insights to you based on the responses you’re getting. It can help you to identify places where you can get better about your returns, and it can suggest some concrete ways you might do that.

Hiring a Company to Help with Your Returns Makes Sense

If you think that your product return setup can’t get any better, you may not need to hire one of these companies. Not many business entities feel that way, though.

Assuming you see some areas to improve regarding your returns, you might grumble about the initial cost outlay when you hire a business entity to help. What you’ll probably find, though, is that you will save some money on the back end.

You may not want to pay for the analytics, but once you know where to improve your product returns, you can streamline the process to the point where you no longer get any negative feedback or very little. If you can make it easy and fast for a customer to return your products and get their money back, they’re liable to go back to you instead of moving on to a competitor. It’s hard to overstate how much that matters.

You can get one of these companies to customize a product return policy package that has routing rules in place. That way, you’ll know that your products go back to the right location if they ship from more than one source.

You can get the company to set up a return management portal that both you and your customer can see. That way, you can quickly detect any frustration on a customer’s part regarding the whole process, and hopefully, you can alleviate it.

Make sure to get better at product returns as time passes, or your business will surely suffer.