Regardless of whether you are an ecommerce business or sell through more traditional channels, poor reviews are always very damaging for your brand. Consider these statistics, compiled by Fera – and they should know, their entire business is based around reviews.

72% of customers in their survey admitted they will not take any action until they read reviews about your business and having any reviews at all will improve conversion rates. In fact, just a single review can improve conversion rates by 10% or more and hitting 30 reviews can improve sales conversions by 25% or more. Things get really interesting when the reviews are for premium priced products. Reviews on higher-priced goods can increase conversion rates by 380%, compared with 190% from cheaper products.

Let’s look at the flip side. What happens when your business has negative reviews? It’s simple and unequivocal, negative reviews have a very negative impact on sales. More than four negative reviews can decrease sales by up to 70% and will dent a brand’s reputation and customer confidence. Longer term, poor reviews will make customers less likely to purchase. 86% of customers surveyed said they hesitated to purchase from online stores with negative reviews and the same number of customers also said that reading a negative review would change their mind about making a purchase. Negative reviews are to be avoided at all cost.

The trouble is that in some cases, the negative review results from poor order fulfilment and delivery execution. There is nothing wrong with the company’s products per se, but the actual user experience, the transaction experience, was poor. This is a common outcome for companies that do not have any warehouse management automation in place. They still rely on paper pick sheets and manual processes to get sales orders out the door and they need to invest in technology to oversee their operations.

The exact problem happened to a customer of ours. They were not using a warehouse management system (WMS) because they didn’t realise they needed one and then experienced a succession of negative reviews. Customers were not getting what they ordered and became frustrated.

Shipments to customers were often delayed, and stock accuracy was low. Products appeared as available on the website, but were in fact out of stock, resulting in order cancellations or only partial fulfillment of customer orders.

Even more annoying for customers and employees, the contact centre wasn’t able to help either – the call centre staff had the same poor stock visibility as the customers and whilst they did their best to manage expectations this usually only ends in one place – the customer was angry!

This company had experienced a period of rapid growth and their warehouse was simply overwhelmed by the paper-based systems they relied on. It was clear they needed a strategy to rapidly increase their site review rankings and implementing a WMS would help solve many of these problems. Introducing a WMS helped the client to see a rapid improvement to customer satisfaction levels. There were multiple ways their investment in a WMS generated clear benefits for warehouse efficiency, improved contact centre morale and helped the client to replace its negative reviews with glowing ones.

3 ways a WMS can reverse poor customer reviews

Here are three ways that implementing a WMS has a rapid and direct impact on improving customer review scores:

1. Better inventory management

Inventory is perhaps the biggest overhead in a manufacturing business and a WMS makes a significant contribution to improved inventory management. It enhances inventory visibility and control by providing real-time tracking of stock levels, locations, and statuses. This then allows for more accurate demand forecasting and the flexibility to employ just-in-time inventory strategies; the ability to set automated alerts for low stock levels and expiration dates, set up specific inventory management techniques like FIFO and LIFO and generally eliminate out of stock issues.

2. Greater operational efficiency

A WMS acts as the control centre of a warehouse, automating and streamlining every warehouse process. This in turn leads to rapid improvements like:

• Faster order processing and reduced labour costs;
• Optimised picking routes by plotting the most efficient routes and reducing travel time within the warehouse;
• Automated generation of shipping documents and packing instructions;
• Reduced need for manual paperwork because accompanying documentation is generated and sent electronically.

3. Improved customer service

A WMS directly contributes to better customer satisfaction (and customer review ratings), by enabling accurate order fulfilment and timely deliveries. When warehouse processes are driven through a WMS it becomes almost impossible to make mistakes, eliminating any accuracy issues. In addition, because orders are shipped on time in full, more realistic delivery dates can be provided, based on real-time product availability.

Finally, perhaps the most important benefit of a WMS in the warehouse is the ability it offers for achieving continuous improvements. A best of breed WMS includes many powerful analytics tools that allow warehouse managers to monitor every aspect of operations, delivering valuable insights and performance data. This information can be used to set targets for continuous improvement and will also help to improve future decision-making capabilities, because any decision can be based on real-time data.

By implementing a WMS our customer was able to reverse the negative impact of poor reviews in a very short space of time, and now reaps the many other benefits of their investment in warehouse automation.