In 2022 the ecommerce returns management landscape has evolved quickly. Recent consumer trends have added new complexities to return management, encouraging retailers to adopt more efficient strategies.

To address these challenges, the need to understand the top Best Return Management Software to make the most of your return touchpoints is a must.

In this post, we'll guide you through the critical return customer touchpoints that reassure customers they have fulfilled their obligations and that a refund or replacement item is forthcoming.

The first global trend we are seeing is the increasing expectations of convenience. In fact, nowadays consumers are buying from a wide range of websites and comparing experiences. This means that they now expect the convenience of large retailers such as Amazon, ASOS, etc. In the world of returns this means a free and easy touchpoint.

The second global trend is what we refer to as the virtual fitting room. When shoppers purchase clothes in a physical store, they try them on and then decide what they buy. In the world of online fashion, the fitting room is now at home when shoppers receive the package. Consumers now will buy many products, and then decide what to keep after trying them at home. Accordingly, 80–90% of returned fashion products are due to fit or style.

The return process plays a crucial role in purchase decisions, though some retailers have yet to fully optimize this aspect

When combined, these two powerful trends increase the rate of returns, and makes the return touchpoint an imperative, to be handled expertly, in order to keep and grow customers, and to ultimately deliver profit.

While consumer expectations for free returns have been consistent since 2017, currently only a quarter of merchants offer this option. It is becoming increasingly clear: merchants need to equip themselves with tools and best practices to meet their customer’s expectations. 

• 83% of consumers read the return policy before buying: the return touchpoint has an impact on conversions.
• 72% of consumers are likely to shop more with a retailer that made the return process easier: the return touchpoint has an impact on customer lifetime value (LTV).
• 89% of consumers have returned an online purchase in the last three years. The return touchpoint is now mainstream and affects most of your customers.

Understanding the Critical Role of Return Touchpoints in E-Commerce

In today's e-commerce landscape, efficiently handling returns can significantly impact a business's bottom line. Returns are more than just a cost to be minimised; they are a critical touchpoint that can enhance customer loyalty, improve brand reputation, and increase lifetime value. By optimising these touchpoints, returns can be transformed from a pain point into a competitive advantage.

What are customer Touchpoints?

“What is a customer touch point” - This is a query that almost every ecommerce business has to understand in order to work towards their product return management strategy. Let’s take a closer look below:

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Customer touchpoints in the ecommerce industry refer to all the various points of interaction between a customer and an ecommerce business throughout the customer journey. These touchpoints can occur across multiple channels and platforms, both online and offline.

These generally include social media, mobile app, website, live chat, email, customer review, etc.

Basis the product you sell, these touch points can be moulded as per convenience. 

What are Customer Touchpoints in E-commerce?

E-commerce customer touchpoints are the points of contact a customer has with a firm during their buying process. Touchpoints are significant since they are used by the customer as a basis to judge the brand.

Every touchpoint-conception stage, from the first glimpse of an advert by a prospective customer, through the actual delivery of the purchase to the possible return-provides an opportunity for a business to create a positive experience.

Key touch points include visiting the website, communicating with customer service, receiving confirmation emails regarding the product, and even the post-purchase returns process.

Customer touchpoints are not limited to the singular channel of e-commerce; they occur across different interfaces, such as social media, email, mobile applications, live chat, and physical delivery while exhibiting an omnichannel experience. Mapping these instances help a business understand the needs of its customers in a better way and respond accordingly.

Why Customer Touchpoints Matter

The critical determinants of success or failure of e-commerce are the customers' touchpoints. Every touchpoint is an opportunity for creating trust, servicing customer expectations, and even influencing choice.

Companies would be able to satisfy their customers much more easily, increase loyalty, and eventually realise higher conversion rates if they could manage and optimise touchpoints appropriately.

For instance, the ease of return process gives assurance to customers that the business seriously cares for their satisfaction. As such, research shows that 72% of customers are willing to increase shopping with a retailer if they make it easy for returns, that is, post-purchase experience is also fundamental and has to be handled with due care.

Moreover, customer touchpoints determine brand reputation and its long-term profitability since happy customers have the potential to become repeat shoppers and recommend to others similar businesses.

How to Map Customer Touchpoints

Mapping the touchpoints of the customers considers all interactions a customer has when going through the journey in your brand. This process therefore allows businesses to get something that can be improved on with regard to optimised customer experiences.

Pre-purchase touchpoints: This includes visiting your website, engaging with your brand on social media, and reading reviews. The ease of return also may be affected by the visibility of your return policy and how simple it is to understand for customers making that purchase decision, since customers will feel that they can easily return goods if necessary.

To Convert: Purchase Touchpoints When buying, inform the customer about the return procedure. This can help lower cart abandonment and boost conversion rates. If customers know how easy it is to return, they will tend to buy more.

Post-Purchase Touchpoints: Return process: Return is one of the most important post-purchase touchpoints. Making the return process easily accessible and allowing customers to track the return process, in real time, and providing an automated return portal can be a very smooth process that helps the customer be more trustful and willing to come again.

Through such analyses about each of these stages, one can get to know more about how customers act and where touchpoints may be improved to get better outcomes for their business.

Why Post-Return Touchpoints Matter

Post-return touchpoints are crucial because they directly influence customer satisfaction and loyalty. A smooth, hassle-free return process reassures customers, making them more likely to shop with you again.

Research shows that 72% of consumers are likely to shop more with a retailer that makes the return process easier, underscoring the importance of a well-managed post-return experience.

Mapping Your Customer Touchpoints for Better Return Management

To manage returns effectively, it's essential to map out your customer touchpoints and identify where improvements can be made.

Pre-Purchase Customer Touchpoints: Customers need clear information about return policies before making a purchase. This stage is crucial because it sets expectations and can influence purchasing decisions.

Ensure your return policy is easily accessible and straightforward. Display key points prominently on product pages and during checkout to reduce customer anxiety and increase conversion rates.

During Purchase Customer Touchpoints: Continue to reinforce the convenience of your return policy during the purchase process. Use reassuring messaging that lets customers know that if the product doesn’t meet their expectations, returning it will be simple and hassle-free. This can help reduce cart abandonment and boost sales.

Post-Purchase Customer Touchpoints: After the purchase, the return touchpoint becomes critical. Ensure customers have easy access to return instructions and support.

Use automated return portals, provide real-time tracking, and keep customers informed throughout the process. These actions help build trust and encourage repeat business.

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Transform E-commerce Returns into Purchases

In e-commerce, the process of returns cannot be regarded as only a cost or nuisance. Proper strategy may make a great profit source by making customer loyalty even increase.

Personalized Promotions: Using return data to suggest complementary products or give them an exclusive discount. For example, if a customer returns a dress, suggesting that she may need a matching accessory at a discounted price can increase the chances of getting her to make another purchase.

Store Credits: Instead of cash refunds, you should encourage use of store credits. Offering incentives like free return with a store credit but having to pay for cash refund may make the customer more willing to get credits over cash. That way, you keep the refund within your store, and maintain an efficient flow of cash and encourage repeat purchase.

Upsell at return: A recommendation engine can be added to the returns process in order to up-sell additional items from the customer based on his preferences. Just like you get recommendations of hotels at the time of booking a flight, you can suggest a product when a return is placed; and that can lead to new sales while processing the original return.

Reverse Logistics Optimisation can be invested with effective reverse logistics operations wherein stock not damaged gets restocked immediately or otherwise sold locally through regional return centres. This way, losses are prevented and a returned stock is capitalised on sooner.

Handling returns as a positive experience will significantly impact customers' retention, satisfaction, and profitability overall.

This content is meant to fill out your optimization strategy with insight into customer touch points and ways of converting returns into business gold. Let me know if you want any changes or additional sections!

The 6 Most Important Returns Touchpoints

Our insights come from data of 250k+ returns from over 500 merchants in India, with a large portion in apparel, luxury and beauty products.
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1: Promote convenience

Promote Free or Easy Returns on your landing page. By simply including a banner, you can impact your conversion rate: we know of retailers who use free returns promotions as a “panic button” when their conversion rate is trending down. In any case, make sure you communicate your Return Management Ecommerce Workflow clearly across your customers

Secondly, make your returns policy sexy (sort of). Since 83% of shoppers do read your return policy, it is worth thinking carefully about the user experience (UX). Here is a good and a bad example.

Good example: Clear, quick, structured.

Bad example: Wordy, unclear, looks like a contract. And who says contract says lawyer; and who says lawyer says “where is the catch”?!
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This type of unclear returns policy that looks like fine prints probably doesn’t help build brand trust. Consumers need to feel that the return process will be hassle-free and that the retailer has their best interest at heart in order to build trust and loyalty.

Lastly, in order to promote convenience, give your customers more control on the returns process. Control is a form of convenience, and by allowing the customer to be in charge, they feel more invested in your brand.

Most retailers initiate a return with a customer service phone call or email, where back and forth ensues until the customer has received all the info they need. This creates friction, since customers have shopped at Amazon, Nike, etc. where they can handle returns easily and quickly, all by themselves.

Instead of using phone or email to initiate a return, embed customer return portals on your site to automate RMA’s and shippings labels.

2: Increase store credit refunds

In his previous job my co-founder once tried to implement a “store credit only” return policy. Not surprisingly, customers revolted because they were not offered the choice to receive a cash refund. Because their experience was impacted negatively, it had an immediate negative impact on conversion and LTV. Needless to say, that policy did not last long.

Interestingly, there is a way to drive more store credit refunds that presents a positive impact for the customer experience. By providing multiple return options to the customer, or what we call choice convenience, such as cash refund, exchanges and store credit, they will feel more positive about opting for a store credit.

In fact, highly engaging brands’ engagement tend to see higher choice of store credit refunds. One can argue that a store credit refund signals a real intent to buy again soon, and could be seen as a proxy for a strong Net Promoter Score (NPS) from your loyal customers.

As a case study example, top D2C brands saw up to 85% of refunds being processed in store credits. This has a positive impact on cash flow and margins since the orders refunded in store credits remain in the store. In order to drive this kind of behaviour, in some cases merchants did charge a return fee for cash refunds, and offered free store credits. By creating an extra incentive, it did leave the choice up to the customers, without negatively impacting their return experience.
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3: Protect profits with a smart return policy

Not every customer or every transaction is equally profitable. So why treat them all the same? With a smart rules engine, you can segment the returns data and customise the return experience based on a number of dimensions to your policy, such as return reason, product margin, country of the order, customer LTV, discounted products, etc.

In order to protect profits you can decide, for example, to offer free returns only for damaged products, high margin products, local order, high value customers, and regular priced items.

Conversely, you are able to deduct the cost of the return label from the refund (i.e the customer pays for it) in cases where the product is returned because of fit, is a low margin product, an international order, a low value customer and on discount items.

By segmenting the return data and by customising the experience you can make sure to invest in the experience where it makes most sense to optimise profit, and drive customer LTV, etc. and avoid investing too much in unprofitable transactions.
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4: Leverage real time data

With a front end return portal you can capture a sizable amount of real time data on returns, customers, products, etc. This provides tremendous insights to improve inventory decisions. We have seen this happen previously with many of our high volume merchants. 

They saved tens of thousands each day by understanding that the sizings were an issue driving returns. Once they adjusted their inventory purchasing decisions accordingly, they were able to drastically reduce loss and discounts caused by returned products.
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5: Use the return touchpoint to increase revenue

With data on returns on who is buying and what is in their basket, you can understand some important information to drive more sales. For example, you can understand what customers would prefer in exchange for an item being returned, or what they want to keep when they bought the same product in multiple sizes. 

Today retailers think about returns as a painful process, they do not look at returns as a channel to drive more revenue. But, while the customer is requesting a return, what if you could recommend a complementary product to increase basket size? For example, if you know that a loyal customer has bought the same dress in two sizes and is going to keep one of them, why not recommend a matching belt at a discount to complete the outfit, and increase basket size in the process?

A recommendation engine leveraging data on returns could deliver promotions via the customer return portal (similar to when you buy a plane ticket and you are asked if you wish to book a hotel within the checkout).

This recommendation engine could also serve promotions directly inside confirmation emails. What is interesting about confirmation emails is their open rate, since it contains critical information, people do pay attention and engage with them.

Why not use this email touchpoint to convey critical information, and also say: “by the way have you considered this matching product too?”
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6: Invest in reverse logistics

Finally, we should also mention there are a number of ways to improve the net margin on returned products. While not customer facing, these ideas are used by some retailers to make the most of their growing pains associated with returns:

• Cross-border returns centre: Use a 3PL provider for pan India return needs. For example a Karnataka retailer selling in the north could manage returns within the north and resell them locally with the next north region orders. This is what major D2C’s are doing in India, instead of shipping back to the brands’ home, returned products are resold locally. It saves shipping and customs fees. Some 3PL providers do offer a shared inventory management solution, so you do not need to have a huge scale for this to make sense for your store.
• Predictive Restocking: You can track in real time the status of returned packages. If you know that an item is not damaged and can be resold, why not put the item back into inventory sooner and turn inventory faster to improve profit? For example: If a specific high demand item is seeing more demand than what is currently available in inventory, you could sell the item from a previous order, knowing from the real time data that it will be back in your warehouse within 48 hours. Increasing sales velocity and reducing loss could amount to sizable extra profit.
• Liquidation Channels: Today most retailers handle returns in one of two ways: restock or destroy. However, there are other alternatives to handle returns that may be more appealing to optimise for profits. Essentially, other liquidation channels can allow you to recover more profit than restocking or destroying options. For example, you can resell products as second-hand on eBay, Amazon, etc. You can donate returned products, which is great for buy-one-give-one brands, since they can give the returned items to charity. Even for retailers that do not offer buy-one-get-one, the donations can result in sizable tax credits. These are just a few examples, there are multiple alternative channels that are worth investigating.

Why do customer touchpoints matter during a return?

As we saw above, customer touchpoints are crucial for maintaining positive relationships with customers. But it’s equally important to invest in a seamless and customer-centric return process that can yield significant long-term benefits for ecommerce businesses. These benefits include, but are not limited to:

1. Customer Experience
2. Brand Reputation
3. Customer Loyalty and Lifetime Value
4. Competitive Advantage
5. Insight into Product and Service Improvement
6. Regulatory Compliance

Customer Touchpoint Examples

The challenge of returns is real. It is growing in line with consumer expectations for free and easy returns. The good news is, that retailers have a number of strategies available to rethink returns and take action to deliver more value, and ultimately drive more revenue and profit.

Let’s look at some of the major customer touch points examples across the industry:

• Return Impact on Customer Loyalty: Customer retention increases by 20% when a seamless return experience is provided, leading to a subsequent 15% rise in repeat purchases over a six-month period.
• Analytics for Informed Decision Making: Businesses utilising data analytics in return management witness a 25% reduction in return rates by identifying and addressing specific product quality issues, resulting in a 30% improvement in customer satisfaction scores.
• Customer Experience Enhancement: A well-designed return touchpoint contributes to a 15% increase in customer satisfaction ratings, with 80% of customers reporting a willingness to recommend the brand based on their positive return experience.
• Operational Efficiency Gains: Implementing automated systems results in a 30% reduction in manual processing time, allowing businesses to handle returns 20% more efficiently, with a 25% decrease in operational costs related to returns.
• Personalisation Opportunities: Personalised post-return communications lead to a 10% higher conversion rate for follow-up purchases, and targeted product recommendations based on return data result in a 15% increase in the average order value.
• Brand Reputation Management: Brands with positive return experiences enjoy a 25% higher online rating and a 20% increase in positive customer reviews, while those mishandling returns experience a 15% decline in customer trust and satisfaction scores.

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Pragma’s Return Management System (RMS)

Pragma’s RMS has reached far and wide in India due to 1 major reason - its levels of customisable brand functionality, as it helps you integrate with 50+ Indian Multi-carrier/logistics partners, with a dedicated and branded Competitive Ecommerce Return Management return request page.

Brands can make sure that their return process looks personalised to the customer.

Exchange or Refund products with Pragma’s RMS

Furthermore, with return requests rising in number, you can put Return restrictions on select products that help the customer be aware of the no-return policy well in advance like; innerware, electronics above Rs. 2,500, etc.

This is further complemented by the addition of a Customisable multi-step approval process for accepting return requests, making sure you don’t receive random return requests from customers.

Customisable Multi-step approval for accepting return requests

While most of the RMS in the market provide a customisable dashboard, it becomes important to have a dashboard that has everything in one place.
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With Pragma, the brand gets access to:

1. Perform QC, Generate payment links, Store credit and initiate shipments all in one place

2. Leave comments to customers against their request - Add more details or reasons for rejection.
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With that being said, Pragma’s RMS is relentlessly empowering millions of users via a customer base of 450+. Let’s also see what benefits these features have on customers:

• The user feels personalised - Brand logo and colour customisations.

• One-click return/exchange request for users provides a seamless user experience.

• Get support for different kinds of refunds - Source, Coupons, Bank transfers and Store credit.

• Seamless browsing and selection during the exchange

• Accept exchange difference via COD or Prepaid

• Exchange with same or different product category
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Customising experience for a Customer-first approach

Do you know what’s the best part about Pragma?
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It's the Deep Analytical insights about customer behaviour that it provides. These can be very helpful in setting up an RMS largely due to the following reasons:

1. In-depth analytics on product performance, and pincode performance.

2. Access to Live data to build strategies on the go.

3. Multi-level nested reasons for better customer understanding. 

4. Assign different return reasons for different product types.

5. Flagging of risky users during order placement or return placement.
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It is important to understand that as you work towards enhancing the user experience, it is equally important to safeguard against fraudulent buyers exploiting the convenient return process for malicious purposes. 

Consequently, by utilising data gathered from over 400 brands, Pragma can assist you in addressing these deceptive individuals.
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