Understanding & Mitigating those pesky Annual reviews
Building upon our ‘Lower Shipping costs‘ blog post, Lucro Solutions can advise and help you with proactively preparing and mitigating annual rate increases from your current courier partner.
Each year UK businesses whether they are growing rapidly or not, are exposed to annual account reviews from their courier partner, that brings along annual rate reviews, also called GRI’s. These are conditions embedded, as part of nearly all courier agreement that businesses will have with their courier partners. Most businesses never plan for this, so it is an easy win for couriers to cover their costs and increase revenue per customer.
So how do couriers justify rate increases?
Whilst there are general & valid reasons to justify annual rate reviews, more often than not, the reasons put forward and offered by couriers are minimal as most UK businesses tend not to challenge these increases, either through a lack of knowledge on process, how to manage these occurrences or simply, a lack of in house management of the department.
The valid reasons for potential rate increases can be down to many factors like global prices increasing, global conflicts (i.e.: wars) impacting supplies and leading to economic uncertainty. Also, businesses missing agreed volumes of parcels annually can be genuine reasons to raise commercials.
Outside of these reasons, other justification for rate increases can be operational inefficiencies by the retailer, whether it is packaging issues or parcel/pallet presentation issues which leads to additional manpower by the courier to address and remedy. Also, issues on shipment data can lead to many issues/delays which all lead to inefficient shipping which ultimately, drives up cost that gets passed onto the retailer.
The above are some of the ways courier companies justify rate increases & other additional charges.
The solution?
Be proactive, embrace best practice when shipping.. Lucro helps businesses across the UK in this area, it is not as hard as businesses think.
Some straight forward advice you can act on NOW!
- Package and send parcels in a way your courier requests.
- Shipping data is key with courier integration with the distributors.
- Labelling is extremely important.
- Make sure you do what you need to do, therefore minimising extra work for the courier partner.
- Knowing your shipment size/weight and using the best and most suitable service for it.
How Lucro Solutions can help your business
Lucro have years of customer experience behind us. We walked in your shoes so know the painpoints you face and cover any operational knowledge gaps that might be present in your shipping model.
We have dealt with all the main courier companies over the years so we are uniquely placed to advise your business on your current solution and what it offers, areas to consider for review, processes to improve upon and putting in place long term goals for your shipping solution and delivering on your customer promise.
UK businesses should know that if they are on top of what they are doing, being proactive then they are positioning themselves as best they can to mitigate courier rate increases.
Along with this, if you are a growing business where parcel volume is continually on the rise, then you really are best positioned to eliminate rate increases either with your current courier partner or within the industry itself as its very competitive and Lucro can help you implement this effectively.
Like a lot of things in the world, businesses can control what happens internally but have little control on what happens outside their company. However, they can control what is in-bound challenges and be proactive by having all their ducks in a row in order to effectively counter these.
We target improvements for all our clients as they grow & from the outset, Lucro solutions will:
Advise & support UK businesses on all shipment data issues.
Suggest suitable packaging approach and solutions.
Help you to know and understand the industry.
Partner you with the right solution for your specific shipping needs.
Provide leading account management for all UK businesses .
Lucro solutions will:
- Advise & support UK businesses on all shipment data issues.
- Suggest suitable packaging approach and solutions.
- Help you to know and understand the industry.
- Partner you with the right solution for your specific shipping needs.
- Provide leading account management for all UK businesses.
