Context

Order Fulfillment

Many organizations share the same issues with the order fulfillment process due to the continued use of outdated methods such as manual or paper-based methods. 

These issues include:

Low organizational productivity and inefficiency

Having human customer service agents manually processing every order can be extremely time-consuming, especially when faced with high volumes. Alongside its time-consuming nature, manual data entry also heightens the risks of miscommunications and inaccuracies — increasing fulfillment times and negatively impacting brand image.

Poor inventory control

Poor inventory management raises numerous issues within the order fulfillment process, generally originating from a lack of real-time information. Operations teams commonly use inventory data to forecast demands and shortages to make mission-critical decisions, such as purchasing inventory without overstocking or understocking.

Overstocking inventory can significantly impact profitability, especially for organizations selling physical products with limited shelf lives or market seasons. Understocking products can also have a tangible impact, as insufficient inventory can damage brand reputation and force customers to consider options from competitors. Any of these situations can cause significant, long-term impacts on your organization.

Customer dissatisfaction

Consumers today have high expectations regarding order processing visibility, delivery tracking accuracy, and resolution time. For organizations with vast resources and large technical teams, fulfilling these expectations is easily accomplished with internal capabilities. 

However, a lack of resources or investment in new technologies causes many organizations to often fall short of meeting these consumer expectations. By providing customers with a less-than-ideal service experience, they are more likely to take their business elsewhere. 

Fortunately, organizations can solve this by Symphona’s automation and AI tools to set up automated order fulfillment.

What is Automated Order Fulfillment?

Automated order fulfillment is an operational tool powered by advanced software technology to eliminate unnecessary and repetitive manual tasks while reducing human errors. Automated order fulfillment typically involves several steps, including:

• Order capture
• Provisioning
• Delivery
• Closure

By automating order fulfillment, organizations can reduce errors, decrease fulfillment times, and provide an improved customer experience by automatically keeping customers in the loop about the status of their order. 

Solution

How Symphona Helps 

Order fulfillment processes are great candidates for automation because they are strictly defined and logical processes. Symphona can help reduce the manual effort for digital tasks and help orchestrate and manage fulfillment process pipelines.

You can use Symphona to automate your order fulfillment processes by using Flow and Resolve to set up automated workflows for repetitive processes, catch errors, and manage operations through Symphona’s dashboard. 

Symphona tools are no-code, allowing for people of any technical skill to use them. Furthermore, with Symphona operating on a usage-based system, your organization only pays based on how many automations you use.

Since every organization operates differently, order fulfillment processes vary company-to-company. For reference, here’s an example of an order fulfillment process:

1. Validate customer order information
2. Send confirmation email
3. Retrieve customer account information
4. Confirm available product inventory
5. Submit order to fulfillment system
6. Wait for order shipment
7. Send shipment notification email

Symphona for Order Fulfillment Automation

Orchestrate order processing from start to finish with Flow’s advanced workflow automation capabilities. 

• Automatically validate business rules, send outbound emails and text messages, integrate with existing internal and third-party systems via API, and more as part of your cutting-edge order fulfillment workflows. 
• Combine manual and automatic steps to upgrade and modernize existing processes. 
• No-code editors enable both technical and non-technical team members to make modifications to workflows with ease.

Manage and automatically triage business exceptions (fallouts) generated by workflows using Resolve. 

• Errors in manual and automatic business processes are inevitable, from simple issues like unavailable downstream APIs to more advanced ones related to failed validation checks. 
• Resolve integrates tightly with Flow to reduce exception resolution effort and help your organization focus more on your core mission.

If you’ve created customer service agents through Converse, you can also set up some of your automated workflows within your agents so that customers can ask an agent for their order status and receive real-time information. 

Alongside these two products, Symphona offers automatic email report generation and advanced dashboards for KPI tracking, so you can have a birds-eye view of your organization’s order fulfillment processes. Flexibly scale Symphona depending upon the size of your order fulfilment. 

With Symphona, you can implement advanced order fulfillment flows while managing business exceptions as they occur.