The importance of building 3PL client relationships
As an essential part of many supply chains, many retailers rely on 3PLs to support their logistics from storage to shipping. In many cases, 3PLs are essential to a business’ success with 90% of Fortune 500 brands depending on 3PLs to run their operations.
No matter the size of your company, clients need to have confidence in you to deliver what you promise you will and that starts with building a strong client relationship that’s based on trust, transparency, support, and good communication.
Best Practices for 3PLs
By providing exceptional support, ensuring your team always acts with integrity, and offering a tailored service, you can help improve customer satisfaction levels and win clients’ long-term loyalties. Read on for our detailed list of the areas you should cultivate to help strengthen your client relationships.
1. Technology
By helping to centralise, automate, and streamline your operations, a great tech stack can provide speed and efficiency. This makes your tech an essential part of landing new clients and maintaining a partnership with them.
The tech you use to deliver your services can also be a deciding factor for customers when choosing their 3PL provider. For example, fulfillment speeds can be a huge draw for customers and the use of automation like picking and packing robots that use light or AR to pick and pack quickly and efficiently can save you hours and help workers avoid mistakes, improving the speed at which products get into the hands of customers.
While client portals and similar platforms that offer visibility into the ins-and-outs of your services and operations can give clients confidence and help provide a more seamless customer experience.
You can use 3PL warehouse management software to effectively support your client relations by easily tracking and managing client rates, inventory, and queries from one place.
2. Supplier & Partner Relationships
Your clients perceive your suppliers & partners as an extension of your business. How well they perform and the integrity they bring to the job will reflect either well or poorly on your business.
Strong supplier and partner relationships with capable, reputable suppliers that share your work ethos help ensure that you can deliver your services efficiently and on time, helping to make sure there are minimal delays or disruptions to fulfilling clients’ orders.
3. Tailored Services
When it comes to delivering a great client experience, it’s important to tailor your services to suit the individual needs of your client.
For every client, consider how you can provide tailored services to support their business needs such as gift wrapping, unboxing experiences, or branded customisation like name and logo printing. These efforts will help your clients feel valued, help them retain customers, and make you stand out as a provider who goes out of their way to provide an exceptional, personalised service.
4. Your Team
One of the most important elements of building client relationships is hiring people who will leave a great impression on your clients. 95% of B2B consumers say great customer service is important for them to feel loyal to a company. While companies that develop an emotional connection with clients see 85% more sales growth than their competitors.
To deliver consistently supportive customer service and build a strong emotional connection with your clients, hire people who are caring, warm, knowledgeable, and who act with integrity.
Account managers should be proactive, they should have an in-depth understanding of your clients’ needs, pain pants, and goals and be able to provide forward-looking insight on how they can improve their processes as well as provide information on the services that will support their operations best as their business grows.
5. Sustainability
Many retailers have ESG goals and are looking to partner with sustainable 3PLs that can align with or help them hit these goals. Making a commitment to sustainable 3PL warehousing best practices can help you both win new business, differentiate your business from your competitors, and help support customer loyalty.
Practices like carbon neutral delivery, using green energy, and ensuring good recycling procedures as well as using sustainable suppliers are all great ways to make moves towards becoming a more environmentally-conscious company.
6. Continual Improvement
The fulfillment industry moves quickly and is subject to sudden market changes. Customers expect responsiveness, reliability, and ever-faster delivery times. To help protect your client relationships, you must quickly respond to any market developments and shifting customer expectations and needs.
The 3PLs with the most loyal clients are the ones that don’t just look to impress customers at the acquisition stage but that continually look to improve their services and impress clients with their industry expertise, advanced technology, and personalised, supportive service. The most successful companies also regularly ask for and implement client feedback, showing their commitment to providing the best client experience for their loyal customers.
How Mintsoft can help you build & maintain client relationships
Mintsoft’s cloud-based 3PL warehouse management software was designed to help 3PL providers like you bring greater speed and efficiency to your operations through the automation of your most time-consuming processes, from shipping to storage.
You can use our client portal to effectively support your client relations by easily tracking and managing client rates, invoices, inventory, and queries from one place. A great thing about this feature is that you can give clients direct access and allow them to view inventory levels and order progress, import manual orders, and more.
Fully customisable, you can tailor services to your clients. Here’s Alex Large from Radius Warehouse and Logistic Services:
“The feature I get the most enjoyment from, is the ability to set up bespoke rules and features for our clients, a key ethos of the company.
“Fundamentally, our fulfillment customers all want their inventory handled safely and dispatched in time, but they all work differently and have quirks to how they operate, which are important to them. With Mintsoft, we can represent them as best we can, with different features such as order tags, automating order rules and means of dispatch.”
Read our post on the best 3PL software to see how we stack up to our main contenders or to find out more, book a demo.
