It’s no secret that digital innovations continue to disrupt and advance the way we shop, consume, and transport materials across the globe. While the tech industry continues to demonstrate the value of digital investments, the transportation industry is now coming full circle in adopting technology to enhance the efficiency and productivity of digital tools and global logistics.
What is digital disruption and how to stay ahead?
While the transportation industry is advancing with great strides, the inherent complexity of the maritime industry has made adopting digital innovations more difficult than average. Given the complexity, more and more shipping companies are setting out on their own digital journey, shifting from a traditional selling business model to one that offers tangible value to customers. Now more than ever, digital expertise is the key factor in assuring a seamless global flow of goods and keeping customers happy with an experience they enjoy.
The following digital trends and strategies highlight how distribution leaders, including Drive Fulfillment, are becoming more disruptive and advanced through investing in digital and customer experiences, supply chain expertise, and talent to keep pace with emerging players.
Build customer connections through a unique ecosystem.
Effective digital players understand what it takes to excel by providing consumable-product categories that require little to no technical expertise. This means that customers know exactly what they want and where to replenish once they run out. It’s vital to combine benefits and understand the crossover between traditional distributors and digital leaders like extensive and transparent product availability, superb customer service, and technical expertise to gain an upper hand. More than that, the key to building customer connections is to understand their needs and pain points on the most basic level. Once you identify what pains a customer, building an interconnected ecosystem to resolve these issues or market absences can make a crucial difference in retention and loyalty. From packaging materials to order confirmation and delivery, finetuning each touchpoint along the supply chain with consumer pain points in mind is essential to digital growth.
Create a distinct supply chain model built for growth.
While a seamless supply chain is essential, s it’s not enough on its own to differentiate your impact against big digital players and retailers that promise deliverables like one-day delivery. One way to create a supply chain built for growth is by differentiating yourself from competitors by building on or advancing service capabilities to highlight your value over singular digital organizations and distributors. Across the board, it’s crucial to facilitate an omnichannel shopping experience by providing customers with engaging and seamless experiences through both physical and digital landscapes. This means accurately demanding forecasts and product placements with real-time inventory tracking across every channel. That way, no matter where or when a customer shops, their experience is equally as valuable and satisfactory each time.
Focus on real-time data and interactions.
A unique strength for traditional and digital distributors is the sheer volume and quality of SKUs and products in circulation. Here, there is a rich amount of data to dissect through the right personnel and analytic programs so that you can more accurately uncover valuable real-time insights. Having the right talent and tools to identify surfacing insights and make informed decisions about customer behavior is well worth the investment. It delivers accurate product recommendations and alternative solutions to achieve profitable growth. In the end, dynamically align your offerings with customer insights, important buying data, and a customers’ willingness to pay and for what. The challenge here is not when to start collecting and tracking data, but where. Exploring digital use cases and programs that highlight how to become more digitally enabled and use advanced analytics is key to optimizing your pricing, cross-selling, routing, and tracking methods to stay ahead.
Focus on tomorrow’s solutions.
Shoppers of every kind expect easy-to-navigate eCommerce marketplaces with advanced digital capabilities. A digitally-led omnichannel strategy far outvalues the traditional methods, especially since the pandemic and rise in remote experiences. This includes touchpoints like a point-of-sale system to an Instagram shoppable post. Tailoring experiences to a customers’ needs requires quickly capitalizing on and exploring data from inventory, mobile devices, third parties, desktops, and public sources of information. Creating custom solutions gives you a strong competitive advantage. Especially, in the e-commerce world where mobile use is will grow more than double the use of the desktop.
How we are is evolving to manage digital disruption?
At Drive Fulfillment, we have seen the trends and technology come full circle with decades of experience adapting innovative shipping and fulfillment solutions. While nearly every distributor is facing disruption as digital natives continue to garner success, It’s important to understand what customers need before taking steps to advance your operation. At Drive Fulfillment, investments in digital technology and fulfillment automation continue to benefit our clients’ and facilitate seamless growth and success expanding into new markets and channels.
For more information on our digital capabilities, in-house agency team, kitting and assembly automation, custom packaging, or technology-driven inventory management, get in touch today. Never has it been easier to set up and execute a scaling strategy that works than today than with Drive Fulfillment.
