Building a robust post-checkout experience within eCommerce software with Artificial Intelligence

The last leg of the eCommerce journey is oft forgotten about. There is a lot of focus from businesses and product teams on making a lovely UI to entice the customer to purchase. There is a lot of investment into the design of 'express checkout', we want the customer to purchase as efficiently as possible. All of these changes have very valid a strong business value, easier it is to purchase increase the return on investment with each transaction.

However, it misses out a key piece of the customer journey, it misses out on the post-checkout customer experience, namely the fulfilment process. many e-commerce checkout processes go straight from payment processing to a generic success page, with some information around the sales invoice, delivery method, expected delivery date (sometimes).

Post-checkout customer today

As mentioned previously, the customer successfully purchases the product they are interested in, then they are sent an email with their sales invoice and their delivery details. Then there is a checkpoint as to whether the package has been delivery, if it has been delivered we check for customer satisfaction if not then open a case with the customer help team. Likewise, if the customer is satisfied then the post-checkout journey ends there, but if the customer is not satisfied then open a case with the Customer Help Team.

Post-checkout customer tomorrow

Fulfilment ecosystem should have the customer at the heart of any fufilment journey, it is key to ensure the post-checkout experience is to ensure the seamless experience continues from purchase to delivery. The aim of the Post-checkout customer in the future will be to keep the customer abreast of any changes in the delivery updates, and proactively informing the customer rather than await customer initiated touch points. eCommerce teams need to proactively be exceeding customer expectations.

Proposed Solution

So how can organisations start implementing a proactive post-checkout customer journey.

• Regular interfacing with delivery partner systems, this could occurs by a service on top of a Delivery Gateway interface which polls all active deliveryID's for their status on the customer delivery. This is putting the 'Customer-First' principle at heart of the solution. A company doesn't need to wait until the customer receives the package, to know if the package was not delivered.

In which case, a system or sequence like the diagram below could be useful.

For a more detailed explanation of this diagram, please see the full link on Github here. Link to Github

One possible pattern to implement is from this sequence any application would be able to poll an order status check after the point of creation. So if a separate application polls pending orders can use this sequence. For example an AI engine could be useful in identifying the patterns and triggering a workflow off the back of this. For example a customer who has placed an order 1 week over the estimated delivery date still has an orderStatus of pending could be picked up by the AI engine and trigger a workflow to investigate the cause of the delay.

Conclusion

These small adjustments will improve the customer experience, by anticipating and resolving the problems before they already occur. Many problems in the last-mile of the customer journey are often left as an after-thought because it is after the point of payment collection. However the customer journey is only complete once they receive their final product. So it is imperative that the customer experience is considered in its entirety, and the technology solution must evolve to create a better journey.