7 steps to choosing the right courier service for your courier parcels
If your business requires a large number of parcels to be delivered to your customers, then you may need some reliable courier services. Accurate courier services play a pivotal role in your business, as they can help your shipments reach customers worldwide quickly. But you can’t just choose the first one that appears in a Google search. Often the first one is a paid advertisement.
Choosing the best same-day courier service for your business is an absolute art and a science. Read on for the 7 steps you need to take to choose the best international courier service for you.
Step 1 – Ask for recommendations from reliable sources
You may know other business owners who use courier services regularly, or you may have suppliers or customers who rave about their exact courier service. Either way, the first step in finding the right courier service for you is to get some recommendations from a reliable source. This doesn’t mean your aunt’s cousin’s sister unless she/he has an international shipping business.
In this way, you can get some reliable courier services that have been vetted and checked by people whose judgement you trust.
Step 2 – Don’t forget to check online customer reviews
Of course, you shouldn’t underestimate the power of the internet. You wouldn’t buy a digital SLR camera without an online community review, so why wouldn’t you do the same when looking for a reliable courier service for your business? Check the online reputation of the courier service you mentioned in the previous step.
You can read their Google reviews, or you can see what their current customers have to say about them (knowing that they may be a little biased) by watching testimonial videos on their website. The more you know about the courier service, the easier it will be for you to make a decision. So don’t hold back. Read as much as you can about them.
Step 3 – Check their customer service
By this point you probably have a shortlist of contenders, so now you can start calling courier services yourself and start asking detailed questions about them. One of the most important things a good courier service will have is excellent customer service.
Call their customer service and ask them questions. This will give you a good idea of how they treat their customers and potential customers. How eager are they to answer all your questions? Do they become impatient and try to get you off the phone, or are they patient enough to deal with all your idiosyncrasies?
Also, see how long it takes you to talk to a real person, rather than a recording or machine. This will be important when you are trying to get customer service in an emergency courier situation.
Step 4 – How much experience do they have in this area of courier logistics?
Another important thing to note is how much experience the courier service has in your particular industry. If you must always deliver unusual entities, such as human organs or vaccines, you will want to make sure that the courier service you choose has the expertise to handle your deliveries.
In addition, you will want to ask how much experience they generally have. That is, how long they have been in the business. You don’t want to choose a courier service and have them disappear or go out of business a year or a few months after you start working with them. That would be annoying. And it can be very damaging to the reliability of your business.
Step 5 – Ask them for information on tracking and customer portals
These days, many courier services have online customer portals where you can enter shipments, track deliveries, and pay for services. Having it is very convenient, especially because you don’t have to wait forever to speak to a customer service agent and you have everything related to delivery in one place.
Make sure to ask your potential courier service what their tracking capabilities are. and what their online customer portal looks like. You could even ask someone in-house to look at it to see how user-friendly it is.
Step 6 – Check the areas they cover
Many courier services have industries that they specialise in and areas that they cover. Make sure the courier service you are going to choose can cover all the areas you are interested in delivering to.
If they are an international courier service, then you don’t need to worry. However, if they are a local courier service that only offers services within the province, then you may need to reconsider.
Step 7 – Ship your trial package with them
If possible, try shipping a trial package via a courier service and see what your experience is like from top to bottom. Nothing will give you a better idea of what your future relationship with a courier service will look like.
In this way, you will know exactly what will happen when you hire that courier service as your exclusive delivery partner in the future.
How is the courier service priced?
As a good courier service is a good value for money, pricing should not be an important consideration in your decision-making process. But, of course, if you can find a reasonably priced and accurate courier service, then that’s a bonus you can’t afford to miss.
Consider pricing, but don’t choose the cheapest courier service on the list, just by default. There’s probably a reason they’re priced so low, so don’t fall for it.
