Convey, Austin, Texas, and eft Supply Chain and Logistics Business Intelligence, London, announced the results of a joint study examining the importance of customer experience (CX) in last-mile delivery, and the impact it has on supply chain performance and decision-making. The report, “The Perfect Order: Overcoming Roadblocks in Last Mile Experience,” surveyed more than 230 retail supply chain professionals.

Commissioned by Convey and conducted by eft, the study reveals that despite increased understanding and measurement of supply chain’s impact on CX, little progress has been made toward implementing tools or processes to improve outcomes in the last two years.

The survey data reveals that:

 CX metrics are crucial to measuring last mile performance.

●      96% consider CX important when measuring last mile supply chain performance, up from 83% in 2017.

●      66% are held accountable to CX metrics, up from 56% in 2017.

 However, technologies are still not addressing CX needs.

●      Only 5% report their current systems “fully support efforts to improve the customer experience,” compared with 3% two years ago.

●      Meanwhile, 61% report their existing systems do nothing to improve CX, only a 5% decrease since 2017.

●      Additionally, 89% are not confident they can balance CX demands with rising transportation costs.

Siloed data continues to be a roadblock to improved customer experiences.

●      66% say that connecting disparate data quickly is among the Top 3 challenges, and 18% report zero visibility into distressed shipments.

●      53% don't make delivery data accessible to their marketing teams.

●      60% of customer service and logistics teams don’t share delivery feedback or data about distressed packages with each other.

●      Despite this, 87% believe access to shared data and improved collaboration between teams is important to long-term success.

Other report findings include the importance of new supply chain metrics like shipment-to-order ratios, data around efforts to collaborate with common carriers and how environmental sustainability factors into supply chain decisions.