Welcome to the latest Dimension Report in our IREU Top500 series. This time around we take a second look at Operations & Logistics, an area of RetailCraft that has become integral to the overall customer experience.
For retailers, this leads to a dilemma. Customers expect prompt delivery, flexible service and, with certain kinds of upmarket retail brands, packaging that goes beyond the functional.
Yet providing this level of service within delivery and fulfilment operations is expensive, especially for retailers operating at scale across multiple European territories, and customers are often reluctant to pay the market cost of such services.
That explains why so many of the retailers we highlight in this Dimension Report are making substantial technology and logistics infrastructure investments. In this way, they hope to cut costs without skimping on service levels.
So does the approach work? By and large, we would suggest yes, especially as brand-conscious customers are surprisingly savvy when it comes to knowing what service levels certain kinds of retailers can realistically offer.
But it is important to realise customer expectations change rapidly, which means retailers at the very least have to be constantly vigilant to ensure they can meet these expectations.
Ian Jindal,
Editor-In-Chief
ian@internetretailing.net
