There are some great solo musicians out there, but they are not a band. A band practices together, collaborates regularly and works in tandem to hone their craft.
Similarly, staying engaged with your customers and employees is not an individual effort. You may love your Shopify site, your printing company, your promo provider and your fulfillment vendor. They all work really hard to meet your requirements. But the truth is, four individuals simply cannot match the power of a team working together to ensure that your project stays on budget and on time so it can ultimately produce the results you’re anticipating.
Whoever owns your company store has no idea what may be coming from your printer or promo vendor. Your printer and promo vender do not have daily insight into the inventory and usage at the fulfillment and assembly house. The fulfillment vendor receives items with no idea of their eventual intended usage.
Let’s look at a real life scenario as an example.
Your company’s 10th anniversary is coming up. The CEO wants to send every employee and key global customer a ‘Thank You’ gift. Everyone is given a unique task. One person compiles the list while someone else starts looking for the right items. Meanwhile, another employee calls the fulfillment house to discuss cost and timing while another team member is trying to set a budget and quickly figures out doing so is next to impossible.
Someone designed a gift box without consulting with promo vendor and now the items they want won’t fit in the box. Increasing the size of the box will also increase the cost of freight. Someone else decided they wanted a lithium battery charger, but the promo vender had no idea that these can only be shipped ground and require special hazardous material labeling and paperwork.
Everyone has a task, but the problem is, there are too many moving parts and the answers are coming in late and from multiple sources. The process is only just getting started, and now you’re concerned because the customer/employee list shows up and there are several missing phone numbers and incomplete addresses. So, now someone has to try and track down this missing information.
As you look closer at the list, you discover that some of the addresses are residential and some are businesses. Each of those need to be treated differently or the customer won’t get their gift. Thousands of dollars could potentially be saved or lost simply by labeling the shipments correctly.
The lesson here is that all of these things and many more should have been decided together by the team as a whole. Otherwise everything trickles downhill, which generally ends up negatively impacting the customer.
The solution for such a scenario is remarkably simple.
Hire a partner. Someone who asks all the right questions and has experience with everything from managing an employee store and landing pages to gathering the right information, including sizes, to determining the exact packaging that fits the items, the right items that fit the packaging and the right items and packaging that can be delivered on time, anywhere around the world.
If you want to be successful, don’t go with an individual musician. Go with a band that is well-versed in carrying out the entire process seamlessly, from end to end. Give OnFulfillment a call today and let’s see what kind of beautiful music we can make together to engage your customers and employees the right way.
