Five Keys to “Click and Collect” Order Fulfillment

Depending on your service level agreement (SLA), customers expect orders to be ready for pickup usually within 1-3 hours.

Unfortunately, many retailers make this promise without first having the in-store workflows in place to keep it. And, by turning a potential customer convenience into a frustration, their first missed SLA might be their last.

Another common "click-and-collect" mistake retailers make is setting the SLA time too long and driving the customer to abandon the cart and possibly purchase from a competitor.

So, if you're thinking about offering click-and-collect to your customers, it's important to be prepared for the associated order fulfillment challenges. What follows are five keys to ensuring a successful consumer experience, and five ways our Store Solutions can help.

1. Plan the perfect pick route

Picking products in a retail store can be a lot like trying to find your way through a labyrinth: it's important to choose the most efficient pick path for every order, every time. What you need is a system that batches orders to create optimal routes for picking orders in a steady flow. Store Solutions plans the most optimized pick route and directs store associates along that path; i.e., no more doubling back for missed items.

2. Determine order fulfillment cycle time

If you don't know how long it's going to take to fulfill an order, there's really no way to consistently meet SLAs. Even before a worker begins the pick process, Store Solutions accurately determines an order's cycle time. This adds predictability and certainty to the SLA expectation by estimating how long it will take to complete each order.

3. Drive productivity and accuracy

Workers who have well-defined pick paths will not only know how long it should take to pick a specific order, but will also complete the task at hand with fewer errors. By providing optimized pick planning, performance expectations and item picking validation, Store Solutions helps drive worker productivity and accuracy on every order.

4. Allocate in-store resources

So, now that you're meeting BOPIS SLAs, are your everyday, in-store customers still receiving the service levels they've come to expect? Store Solutions provides the labor management tools to plan accordingly and effectively allocate resources to cover all your customer service bases. Labor planning is optimized to not disrupt other store activities and customer needs while filling orders.

5. Gather transactional data

Now that you've effectively solved the click-and-collect order fulfillment problem, there's an opportunity to take efficiencies to the next level. Store Solutions allows you to continuously fine-tune picking processes and worker performance by gathering valuable transactional data, such as: travel time and distance; planned pick time vs. actual pick time; path deviation, incorrect product locations and dwell times at product locations.

By following these steps, Store Solutions can help you predictably and efficiently meet click-and-collect SLAs - and even shorten them for an additional competitive advantage.

To learn how you can deploy Store Solutions in your retail outlet, please visit the Store Solutions section of our website.

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