How Our Fulfilment Clients Benefit from a Long-Term Partnership

Fulfilment is about so much more than packing and shipping orders; it’s also an opportunity for your 3PL to extend the experience your own customers have with your brand. At ILG, we believe that businesses achieve the best success when their fulfilment partner considers their needs at every step.

Successful 3PLs do this in a number of ways, from the very way their services are built to their flexibility and excellent communication with their customers. In this article, we’ll take a look at the factors that help a fulfilment partnership flourish, and showcase how ILG works to meet these criteria with our clients.

How Can Your 3PL Provide a Fruitful Fulfilment Partnership?

Excellent customer service is only one aspect of great fulfilment. The best 3PL companies have considerations about their customers built into every phase of how they function.

Operational capacity, warehouse space, technology integrations and specific fulfilment services; these all contribute to the success of a given fulfilment partnership.

Below are 4 ways ILG adds value to our clients, and how we help them achieve fulfilment success at each key stage.

1. Tailored fulfilment services

As with any business relationship, the most successful fulfilment partnerships require bespoke solutions to challenges. Fulfilment can be a sensitive component of commerce – and one that’s crucial to ensure lasting customer satisfaction.

To achieve this at ILG, we tailor our approach to each client. This alone can have a major impact on end-customer satisfaction and retention, which we believe is the holy grail of third-party logistics.

From onboarding to ongoing management, each solution is designed around the needs of the individual businesses we work with, taking into account a number of factors:

• The e-commerce platform they use
• Their distribution model
• The type of products they offer
• Who their end-customers are
• Their unique growth strategy
• Their geographic location and reach

Every business will have unique needs in each of these areas, so it’s vital we provide a solution that meets them where they’re at. This ensures clients get that ‘in-house’ feel from their 3PL, giving them the exact solutions they need and ultimately adding value. 

In a nutshell, fulfilment partners must approach clients as partners first and customers second in order to cultivate trust. This way, collaboration becomes the centrepiece of the working relationship.

But do we actually achieve this?

By investing in our clients as partners, we’ve achieved some great results for them. The bar graph below demonstrates the growth that some of our beauty and fashion clients have enjoyed over the years:

One of our valued clients, MALIN+GOETZ, had this to say about their ongoing partnership with ILG:

“Malin+Goetz have worked with ILG for 7 years now and in that time ILG have offered a consistently high service level with best-in-class customer service. Their commitment to understanding the brand and company objectives engenders a deep understanding of our business at every level and results in a more results-driven partnership. This has been key for us as we scale our business in the UK and abroad. We are very grateful to the ILG team for their continued support and forward-thinking approach.”

Simon Ford, General Manager Europe, MALIN+GOETZ

We’re proud to say that the vast majority of our clients have been with ILG for more than 5 years, and this strong retention is powered by our dedication to customer satisfaction. In March 2023, we ran a poll with our clients to determine how satisfied they were with certain aspects of our service – here’s how we fared:

2. Transparent communication at every step

Of course, it can all fall apart without clear communication between the 3PL provider and the client business. For ILG, our approach to communication hinges on knowing what our clients want and need at each stage. 

The businesses that trust us with their fulfilment are relying on us to act as a consumer-facing facet of their business. For that reason, we leave nothing to chance. Each of our clients is assigned their own Project Manager during the onboarding process, who helps set them up with everything they need before they are handed over to a dedicated member of our Customer Service team, who then oversees the day-to-day running of their account. Our Customer Service team itself is large enough to accommodate each of our clients comfortably, foregoing the call-centre model in favour of giving our clients direct access to dedicated CS experts without needing to jump through hoops to talk to the right person.

This way, we can give our clients frequent updates and see to their fulfilment needs at each touchpoint, enabling an open line of communication that ensures our clients are kept in the loop at all times.

3. Flexibility & adaptability

The nature of third-party logistics means flexibility is non-negotiable. E-commerce businesses need their 3PL to be adaptable and innovative to accommodate order spikes, changing warehouse storage space and general fluctuations in operational capacity.

ILG has the infrastructure, the technology and the people to make this possible. Our emphasis on open communication with our clients means we’re consistently well-positioned to facilitate their changing fulfilment needs, every step of the way.

Nothing illustrates this better than a recent testimonial from Charlotte Tilbury, who has been working with ILG for over a decade:

“We have worked with ILG for a number of years at our UK site and we recently awarded our Global operation to them. Working with ILG feels like working with an internal distribution team as they truly get the importance of customer service and flexibility to brands like Charlotte Tilbury. The Head of Client Services and the MD are always available and, even if things aren’t going to plan, I know I will get an honest assessment of the situation as well as pragmatic solutions to quickly turn things around.”

Jeremy Dixon-Wright, Global Supply Chain Director, Charlotte Tilbury

4. A ground-up approach to sustainability

There’s no getting around it: historically, the fulfilment industry has been responsible for high levels of carbon emissions. However, we’ve come a long way in a few short years; from the ground up, fulfilment companies can work to operate more sustainably, for their clients and for the planet.

At ILG, our dedication to sustainability is evidenced at every level, including our eco-friendly warehouse facilities, the outer packaging we use, and our dedication to minimising office waste.

Because order fulfilment is an extension of the brand experience for your customers, it’s important to partner with a 3PL that shares your values. Again, this contributes to the kind of lasting partnership that can take your order fulfilment to the next level. 

Enhance Your Fulfilment Today with ILG

At ILG, we specialise in helping our customers grow from start-ups to super-brands. For over 30 years, we’ve been refining our approach to deliver excellent fulfilment, and our clients have always been at the core of everything we do. Our highly experienced and well-equipped Customer Service team enables us to deliver a bespoke experience to each of our clients; this approach has seen us win the 2023 UKWA Award for Excellence in Customer Service.