Getting the Most out of Online Deliveries - Proactive Customer Contacting in E-Fulfillment
36 Pages Posted: 13 Mar 2023
Date Written: March 7, 2023
Abstract
During the COVID-19 pandemic, some e-grocers began to proactively reach out to certain customers, giving them priority access to online grocery ordering. In this paper, we explore how this concept of proactively approaching customers can be implemented and leveraged in post-crisis times.
We propose to integrate proactive customer contacting at the end of the classical booking process to generate additional, good-fitting demand if it is anticipated that not enough inquiries will emerge via the normal booking process. In this paper, we explore under which circumstances it is beneficial to proactively contact customers, how much additional demand to generate and which customers to target. To this end, we propose an optimization formulation to solve the contacting problem and compare the results in a numerical study with simple contacting strategies and a sampled ex post optimal solution to evaluate the merit of proactively contacting customers.
We demonstrate that proactive customer contacting can exploit available untapped resources; show that contacting the marginal best customers is not always optimal, as the optimal contacting decision depends on the customers available for contacting; and reveal that none of the simple contacting strategies is universally superior.
Keywords: Demand Management, E-Groceries, Attended Home Delivery, Proactive Customer Contacting
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