Behind the Scenes with OGOship’s Customer Service Team

OGOship is an innovative forerunner in online retail logistics and warehousing. We offer a modern 3PL service to help e-commerce merchants speed up delivery times, reduce costs, and optimize the supply chain. We handle the physical distribution of online retail goods with transparency, cost-efficiency, and ease of use. Our core value focuses on the growth of our online stores’ customers since as they grow, we grow too.

We work towards e-commerce logistics as easy and hustle-free as possible. At OGOship, we do more than just ship out orders to customers. Here, we work efficiently to get your products in, handle your inventory management, carry out stock checks, shelf management, warehousing, picking and packing in preparation for shipment, and lastly, product delivery.

Customers at the core

Our customer service team plays a vital role in our business. This team helps with all customer questions and solves them, communicates with different departments in OGOship, and handles external communication with the courier companies. As our point of contact with customers, the team focuses on providing excellent customer service and ensuring that we fully satisfy our customers with our services.

While the service team’s focus is mainly handling customers’ queries, as a company, we greatly value teamwork as we co-operate with different departments on multiple levels daily. Our agents are excellent communicators who can juggle problem-solving, consulting, and coordination while paying attention to details and remaining organized.

To understand better how the OGOship’s customer service team works, we took time to look behind the scenes. To take us there, we had a chat with the head of the Merchant Care / Customer Service team, Miia Nummela.

Sneak peek behind the scenes

Our multi-national team of customer service agents serves customers in English, Swedish, Finnish, and Estonian. We understand how important it is to many customers to serve them in their local language. And, when we launch into new geographical areas, our customer service team grows accordingly.

But, as Miia Nummela points out, it takes more than just the headcount to make a difference. It takes skills, the ability to work efficiently, and the right kind of attitude to be able to provide quality customer service to all – regardless of where and how they contact OGOship.

– Our team is the face of OGOship, and, we need to ensure that our customers get all the assistance they need. We also need to keep developing our skills and be prepared to improve our processes constantly, Miia adds.

The customer service team handles routine inquiries from customers, both straightforward and those that require more work. The typical questions are things like: which documents are required when shipping outside the European Union? How should the merchants label incoming goods to the warehouse? What is the status of an individual shipment? 

Sometimes the quickest way to advise something is by showing it. – Our team likes to make these little instructional videos and send them to customers, which I think is pretty cool, Miia says. 

Industry trends and foresight

As Miia speaks with e-commerce merchants worldwide on a daily basis she has noticed some trends and tendencies that might have bigger overall importance to the industry. Here are a few observations.

1. Longer planning cycles

E-commerce trends tend to be headed towards longer planning cycles and taking a step back from the ‘’get me everything asap” mentality that has dominated in recent years. Global challenges like the blocked Suez Canal that disrupted the entire global trade and the shortage of electronic components experienced throughout the year have probably been some of the factors that led to this change in mindset. These challenges have helped highlight the need for business leaders to reserve more time to manage and plan things. And, it’s not a bad thing at all.

2. Demand for sustainable solutions

The demand for sustainable solutions has been apparent in so many industries, and with e-commerce merchants becoming more and more aware of this topic, they want to be part of the solution. For example, we have seen increased requests for sustainable packaging options, the development of re-usable packaging, and so on.

3. Digitalizing paperwork

Continuing the topic in the previous point, the shipment process traditionally has a lot of paperwork. There are order lists, receipts, return instructions, and many more. Digitalizing the shipping printouts means less wastage, which, when thinking on a global scale, constitutes a meaningful initiative to reduce the environmental burden.

4. Multi-warehousing

Packaging is just one aspect of the big picture in CO2 emissions. The most significant impact is the overall logistics chain by keeping shipping miles short, also allowing for eco-friendly delivery methods. When the shipping distance is long, the quickest way to ship is by air cargo, with one of the highest CO2 emissions at the same time.

For this reason, we always try to keep the distance between the customer and the warehouse as short as possible through multi-warehousing. Our e-commerce merchants work with our customer service agents to find out the optimal mix. Distributing inventory to multiple warehouses and then determining which warehouses should fulfill and ship each order. In practice, this is done by setting various automation rules in the order management system.

Shipping from the warehouse nearest to the customer will be faster, eco-friendly, and less expensive.

5. Customization

Customization is one of the trends that we see too. There have been increased customization requests for packaging or setting different shipment rules, varying from adding a voucher or product to the order to a custom way to pack the order – for example.

With the growth in e-commerce, demand for more complex setups grows. At OGOship, we understand this and endeavor to enable our customers as much flexibility as possible.

Practical tips for e-commerce merchants

Finally, Miia has some practical tips for e-commerce merchants who want to make sure the order fulfillment process works as smoothly as possible, noting that we are entering the busiest season for e-commerce merchants towards the end of the year and the period is when shipment volumes are peak high globally. 

It is important that the merchants adequately prepare their incoming goods to the warehouse. When the incoming goods are well prepared, it saves the time that warehouses use to receive and handle them. This means that the goods will be in stock on the e-commerce merchant’s site a lot faster.

• Always ensure that your SKU’s barcode is scannable, like an EAN code. If you currently don’t have a scannable barcode on all your merchandise, make the supplier your first point of contact.
• Ensure that each parcel has only one type of SKU.
• Each parcel should be marked with the SKU it contains. That is, what’s inside the parcel and how many items there are.
• Always inform the customer service team when you send incoming goods. This way we know to be ready for your goods.
  

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