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Logistics & Fulfilment

Cue now offering 30-minute click-and-collect

Australian fashion retailer Cue has one of the fastest online order fulfilment options in Australia.

The business recently changed its click-and-collect offering to include in-store pick-up within 30 minutes of a purchase being made online.

The retailer previously offered same-day pick-up for orders made via click-and-collect.

While a handful of retailers, including Supercheap Auto and Liquorland, also advertise 30-minute click-and-collect, many retailers  struggle to guarantee even same-day click-and-collect, because they often don’t have the necessary inventory visibility to know whether a particular store has the items in stock.

Cue’s chief information officer Shane Lenton told Internet Retailing  that an estimated 87 per cent of click-and-collect orders can be fulfilled within 30 minutes.

In cases where a store doesn’t have the desired items in-stock, customers are given the option to collect the order in one to three days to allow for items to be sent from the warehouse to the store.

“The goal [since Cue launched click-and-collect 18 months ago] was always to be quicker and offer a faster service for customers,” Lenton said, citing internal data, which indicate that many customers choose click-and-collect to save time.

“A lot of customers that are doing click-and-collect are in a rush. It’s a solution that works around their lifestyle, whether they’re picking something up on their way home from work or during lunch, they don’t have a lot of time.”

A unified approach

Cue over the last five has been developing a ‘unified commerce’ strategy, which involves investing in one core platform that supports the bulk of operations across every channel.

This gives Cue a single source of truth to manage its inventory, stores, order orchestration and customers.

Off the back of this visibility, the retailer has been able to do things like remove buffers to make products available online and for in-store pick-up down to the last item, and allow customers to choose a different fulfilment option for each item in their order.

Cue’s 30-minute promise for click-and-collect orders also came out of its unified commerce system, which includes a reporting solution that provides data on the average time it takes for each store to acknowledge an order, mark it as packed and for the customer to pick it up.

“Over time, we’ve been changing our SLAs [service-level agreements] to a point where stores have 10 minutes to acknowledge the order and 10 minutes to mark it as packed and ready to go,” Lenton said.

“We’ve seen such great results that we’re now in a position to meet that expectation for the customer who is on-the-go.”

A core part of Cue’s process is the customer care team, which receives an alert if a click-and-order is not acknowledged within 10 minutes. The team then sends a reminder to the store to address the order.

“If we didn’t have the customer care team monitoring [click-and-collect fulfilment] particularly in the early days, I don’t think we would have succeeded,” Lenton said.

According to Lenton, the business has not needed to increase the number of staff in stores to support the tight turnaround on click-and-collect orders.

He noted that online orders are allocated to the store that fulfils them, and since rosters are based on the number of sales each store gets, staffing should not be an issue.

Cue last week changed the language around click-and-collect from ‘same day’ to ’30 minutes’ on its website. The retailer will soon begin communicating the change to customers on social media, in stores and through email.

This story has been updated to reflect the fact that Supercheap Auto advertises 30-minute click-and-collect, not 60-minute click-and-collect as previously stated, and that Liquorland also offers the service. 

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