Peak season fulfilment is about seamlessly coordinating all aspects of your logistics—from accurate stock management and efficient picking and packing to reliable deliveries. With so many moving parts, aligning these elements is essential for a successful Peak season, particularly when deficiencies in your fulfilment operation will only be magnified when order volumes far exceed daily normal averages.
So, as the dust settles on another busy Peak season, it’s time to reflect on what went well for the fulfilment of your brand and where improvements can be made to deliver an even stronger Peak next year.
A Guide to ‘Good’ and ‘Bad’ Fulfilment
At ILG, we want to enhance every aspect of our clients’ fulfilment strategy, through Peak seasons and throughout the rest of the year. Here’s a guide to what ‘good’ and ‘bad’ fulfilment may have looked like this Peak season across five of the most important areas—and how ILG can help you deliver a more successful Peak next year.
How Did Your Peak Season Fulfilment Measure Up?
1. Delivery
What Good Looks Like:
- Reliable, on-time deliveries even during high-demand periods
- Accurate tracking and proactive communication with customers about delivery statuses of their orders
- Flexible delivery options, such as next-day or specific time slots so your customers can choose how and when they receive their deliveries
- Working with a multi-carrier delivery partner to ensure you’re not relying solely on one carrier
What Bad Looks Like:
- Delayed shipments leading to customer dissatisfaction
- Poor communication resulting in frustrated customers being left in the dark
- Damaged or missing shipments due to poor handling by carriers
- Missed opportunities to provide alternative delivery solutions
Having a poor delivery experience can be a make or break for customers now. This could be from a multitude of reasons such as late deliveries, missing or damaged parcels or lack of delivery options – and when demand is as high as it is over the Peak period, these issues are often heightened. So, if your brand struggled with deliveries over Peak period, how can you improve the next time demand is high?
Working with a 3PL that has partnerships with multiple carriers means you can offer your customers flexible delivery options that work for them; some customers will want to pay more to receive their orders promptly and others are happy to wait. Having a fulfilment partner that allows you to offer multiple choices to your customers such as next-day delivery or sustainable delivery options will enhance customer experience and build loyalty to your brand. And, if something goes wrong with one carrier, you can switch to an alternative delivery partner to ensure your orders get to your customers on time.
Perhaps your current 3PL or in-house fulfilment operation didn’t meet the mark on your deliveries this year and it’s time to think about switching to a fulfilment partner to improve your delivery success rates?
2. Scalability and Labour
What Good Looks Like:
- Well-trained, scalable teams that can flex to handle surges in demand – as and when you need them
- Adequate staffing levels to keep up with demand and maintain quality
- Use of automation to support labour-intensive tasks
What Bad Looks Like:
- Insufficient staffing leading to bottlenecks in processing orders
- High error rates due to overwhelmed or undertrained teams
- Overreliance on manual processes
Having enough staff and a fulfilment partner who can easily scale to your needs is essential when keeping orders flowing over the Peak period. If your brand faced significant delays in processing orders or experienced a high volume of inaccurate orders reaching your customers, it may be time to find a new fulfilment partner before the next Peak season.
Peak planning for ILG starts in April and we ask our clients to provide their forecasted order volumes months in advance of the Peak season. This means we can accurately align labour where it’s needed in line with expected volume across our facilities. And to support our existing workforce, we recruit and train additional team members to keep up with demand. We also utilise technology and warehouse automation to reduce errors and speed up order fulfilment. So, when order volumes spike, our highly trained operations and award-winning customer service teams can scale to keep orders arriving to end-customers.
Does your current fulfilment solution give you the scalability you need to handle the next Peak effortlessly?
3. Customer Experience
What Good Looks Like:
- Maintaining brand standards even during busy periods, this includes personalisation, gift wrapping, on-brand packaging
- Seamless order tracking and proactive updates
- Easy returns and exchanges
- Personalised communication
- Aligning with your customers’ sustainability preferences
What Bad Looks Like:
- Lack of visibility into order status
- Difficult or unclear return policies that deter repeat customers
- Poor unboxing experiences due to badly packaged products, or products being stored in poor condition in the warehouse
- Inconsistent messaging
- Customer complaints
- Poor reviews
Whether you’re attracting new customers or trying to retain existing ones with your Peak period sales, good customer experience is essential. Maintaining your brand’s high quality standards, along with good communication, tracking and easy returns is key to ensuring your customers still have a positive unboxing experience. These standards shouldn’t be compromised, even during busy periods and are crucial to driving customer retention and loyalty.
With ILG’s integrated warehouse and carrier systems, value-added services and highly trained staff, we ensure your customers have full visibility of their orders at every stage and that they are delighted when their orders arrive. Do you need a partner to help you achieve this next Peak? Get in touch today.
4. Stock Management
What Good Looks Like:
- Planning ahead with accurate inventory forecasting to meet demand
- Efficient storage that ensures quick picking and packing
- Real-time stock updates to avoid over- or under-selling
What Bad Looks Like:
- Stockouts resulting in lost sales and disappointed customers
- Overstocking, leading to increased storage costs and potential wastage
- Lack of visibility into inventory across your e-commerce and retail channels, or across your different warehouse locations
Forecasting order volumes for the Peak period accurately is one of the most important aspects for a successful Peak. This makes sure that you have enough inventory without over- or under-stocking. Accurate forecasting combined with efficient and streamlined pick routes and stock locations means your orders can get out on time and avoids disappointing customers.
ILG’s stock management tools provide real-time insights to optimise inventory levels and we work with our clients to accurately forecast their demand, reducing the risk of stockouts or overstocking.
Did stock issues cost you sales this Peak? If so, could better inventory management through a new fulfilment partner help mitigate these risks?
5. Omnichannel Capabilities
What Good Looks Like:
- Balancing customer demand across all of your channels to make sure your customers can purchase wherever they wish to shop
- A unified brand experience across online and in-store channels
- Click-and-collect options for flexibility and convenience
- Improved efficiencies and economy of scale
What Bad Looks Like:
- Retailers running out of stock
- Your warehouse running out of stock for e-commerce orders
- Inventory inaccuracies between retail channel mix
- Penalties from retailers due to lack of compliance with their vendor manuals
- Having to manage two different 3PLs for your different sales channels
Making sure your brand is available to your customers wherever they are shopping is crucial to a successful Peak. Having poor omnichannel capability or having to rely on multiple fulfilment partners for your different sales channels can be messy and causes inefficiencies in your supply chain.
ILG has years of omnichannel fulfilment expertise, ensuring all sales channels work in harmony. From integrated systems to real-time stock visibility, you’ll be able to ensure all of your channels are perfectly stocked and reduce the risk of frustrating your customers, wherever they shop.
Is managing multiple fulfilment partners causing inefficiencies? Find out more about our omnichannel fulfilment.
Ready to Reset Your Fulfilment in 2025?
The Peak season can be a challenge, but with the right fulfilment partner and support, it’s also a time of huge opportunity. So, if you see some of these challenges in any aspect of your Peak fulfilment, ILG is here to support you turn the ‘bad’ into the ‘good’. Get in touch today.
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