E-commerce is a fast-moving game and major forces are changing the rules. Forward-thinking retailers are investing to maximize the potential of both physical and digital channels. Global players that once stood on the sidelines are now poised to compete in South East Asia. Just recently, Indonesian department store chain MatahariMal raised $500 million to develop their e-commerce venture. Alibaba too, has invested $249 million in SingPost to expand their delivery network in SEA.
As the world’s fastest growing internet region with 260 million users, South East Asia is fast becoming a unique e-commerce market. Primed for tough competition, e-commerce companies are fast prioritizing customer service as a way to stand out from their competitors. Keeping customers at the heart of their business strategy, and delivering the best possible value to them is becoming more important than ever.
Today, last-mile delivery has become a priority for both e-commerce companies and their customers. Ensuring speedy, but prompt delivery has been proven to give companies an edge in the competitive landscape, while showing customers that companies could go the extra mile for them.
In fact, local and regional players have still emerged as early winners, largely due to their ability to provide a better-tailored experience for local consumers than what global competitors usually offer. For instance, Singapore-based Lazada built local logistics footprints in each market to increase delivery reliability, and added motorbike fleets to provide speedier options to traditional truck deliveries.
That said, enhancing last-mile delivery for consumers in the region comes with its own set of challenges.
Consumer trust, diversity, slow infrastructure serve as roadblocks
Firstly, the lack of consumer trust is one of the challenges the Southeast Asian e-commerce market is facing. Consumers today are wary of making transactions online due to various security issues such as fraud. According to the e-conomy SEA report by Google and Temasek Holdings, 58 percent of citizens in South East Asia expressed concerns over financial information being shared online. With cyber attacks on the horizon, trust between customers and e-commerce companies have been shaken and today, assurances must be given to customers on a consistent basis to maintain strong relationships.
The region also encompasses a wide range of ethnicities, languages, consumer preferences and regulations, coupled by a politically and economically complex landscape. With such diversity, consumers in different markets have conflicting preferences and expectations, which means more time and money must be invested carefully into business planning to ensure that this is addressed adequately.
Despite the immensely positive steps taken towards ASEAN economic integration, there are still socio-political and economic issues that can put a dampener on overall business growth of regional delivery companies.
Southeast Asia also lacks a solid regional payment and logistics infrastructure, which were the foundation for China’s astounding digital-retail growth. Even though larger businesses today are investing in the development of delivery infrastructure, they are still weak and getting your goods delivered affordably and efficiently may still be an issue. As a result, organisations often find it a challenge to make a scalable business model work, and to justify the high levels of initial investment.
The use of SMS to represent reliability and optimization
In order to manage deliveries in a reliable and robust manner while ensuring customer trust is being built, e-commerce companies are looking at the option of sending SMS notifications to customers, and are turning to SMS services to manage the surge in SMSs.
SMS services have been selected over mobile apps as it is ideally equipped for both application-to-person (A2P) or machine-to-machine (M2M) applications. While not a popular choice of communication between people today, businesses still leverage SMS because it is always delivered even when customers do not have smartphones or data connection, representing reliability and consistency.
This step is critical for business continuity as it helps to ensure continued trust with customers. To best manage their communication processes when it comes to delivery, e-commerce companies can consider working with a messaging solutions provider to create a reliable and efficient distribution process and enhance overall customer experience.
By outsourcing their communication processes to messaging solutions, companies can efficiently manage the large volume of messages they send to customers and delivery partners, through unlimited scalability and transmission capacity.
Through implementing SMS messaging services, delivery processes are more convenient and transparent for e-commerce companies, their business partners and customers. SMS services can not only be used during the registration process to authenticate customers’ account mobile numbers, but also more importantly, update recipients on specific parcel delivery information such as estimated time of arrival.
By selecting a provider with high quality of service, reliability, security levels and transparency, e-commerce companies can experience increased customer and partner satisfaction as communication becomes more efficient with important messages being sent and delivered in seconds.