Using Returns Data to Improve the Customer Experience

Analytics is a trending topic for companies dealing with product returns. Returns data provides an incredible amount of insight into why returns are happening so patterns can be broken, returns minimized, and the overall customer experience improved.

Knowing why your products are being returned and analyzing which products are returned most, for example, is incredibly powerful. You can improve inventory planning, conduct more in-depth product testing, and make adjustments to your products to improve your sales and return rates.

Why Fast & Efficient Returns Matter

The faster and more efficiently product returns are processed, the better the customer experience. Online customer portals are one way to expedite the returns process and empower customers to solve their own product support questions quickly. If a refund is required, they can request and print return shipping labels from the portal without involving your customer support team, improving their experience and your bottom line.

How Returns Build Value

There is a significant opportunity to build value through product returns. Here are some ways to leverage the existing relationship with a paying customer to convert product returns into valuable sales conversions using proper returns management:

1. Create an excellent customer experience to encourage future sales
2. Suggest related products to optimize exchanges vs. returns
3. Offer a post-return coupon to incent future purchases
4. Send a survey to better understand the reason for returns
5. Use returns management software to create a more efficient returns process

When you are able to collect insight from your customers directly, you can plan better and strengthen those relationships to drive more sales.

The Role of Returns Data

Gaining insight from returns data helps you learn about your customers and appreciate their expectations of your products. To compete with an ever-increasing number of companies offering robust, omnichannel product support, you should absolutely consider using returns data to tighten up your processes and maximize the value of each customer and return.

Returns data provides an incredible amount of insight into customers’ behavioral data, product-specific data (i.e. cost, quality), and logistics processes that can truly change your business. From inventory planning to customer service, reporting on product return trends is something all companies should be doing.

In fact, the importance of business intelligence and product returns analytics is so important that Gartner is dedicating an entire event to it early next year called the “Gartner Business Intelligence & Analytics Summit”. It’s all about self-service customer service, automated processes, and advanced business analytics and the role they play in business.

Final Takeaway

Product returns are critical to the success of your business, and analyzing those returns is going to become a regular business practice for companies if it is not already. To effectively compete and maintain high product sales and positive customer experiences, you should look to returns data analytics. To see how our product support software incorporates this type of analytical data into the returns process, check out our product videos.