Everyone hates losing valuable possessions. Losing unimportant everyday stuff won’t be a problem for most of us, but imagine the horror of losing your phone, wallet or essential documents. People get stressed because of potential troubles they can get into. Even the most attentive persons can end up losing their precious possessions.
Just as losing essential stuff will create stress, finding those items safely will be a huge relief on the other side. This is why several Lost and Found services started up to help people finding their belongings that have been lost.
However, a lot of businesses and organisations still don’t have a well thought out and effective Lost and Found process in place.
Although businesses focus on a whole range of services or processes to create a positive impact on their customers. But establishing a Lost and Found process for customers is not something that is talked about very often. When focusing on the customer journey you could even debate that for a lot of businesses or organisations losing something is the last customer touchpoint.
So let’s take a look at the importance of lost and found services, and why more businesses need to provide such services to customers.
Personal approach
Looking at how businesses operate, they spent most of their time on the quality, price and accessibility of the product or service they provide.
The personal approach, on the other hand, will make customers feel like they are part of a family. While focusing more on their needs, special wishes, requests and help them out where possible, customers will realise that they are more than just a source of income.
Sometimes companies or organisations are so busy running their business that they forgot to personalise their approach to their customers.
With a perfect Lost and Found process in place, you are dealing with lost property in an effective and cost-saving way while not losing the personal approach. This leads to a last customer touchpoint where people will have a positive experience instead of a frustrating situation.
A Professional Lost And Found Service
Be proactive
When dealing with found items on your premise, it could be that the item has some information about the owner. Unfortunately, most of the time, the owner can’t be identified just by looking at it.
But when you have information, like an email address or a mobile phone number, you can notify them about their lost item right away. Or you could even ask Siri to “Call mam”.
You will get “bonus” points from customers that are informed like that. Won’t you recommend a business that helped you out locating your lost iPhone?
Building your brand
Like mentioned before, many organisations are not busy building personal relationships with their customers. A Lost and Found department is not very common at most companies.
If your company focuses on a perfect Lost and Found process, it can outperform your competition which is not paying attention to this part of the customer journey.
Compensate previous negative experiences
Organisations always try to keep their customers happy, but sometimes things go wrong. Broken products, bad services, delivery or transactional problems are issues customers face now and then.
When you can compensate for what happened before by returning their lost property, it would make the customer feel like you care about them during the last customer touchpoint.
Setting up a effective Lost and Found process
Having a box, room or even a warehouse full of found items, returning them to the owner once identified isn’t enough. Even with an excel sheet as found item database, it can be hard to optimise the process. Your organisation gets requests by mail or phone but the information in that sheet is not shared internally for instance.
This can be frustrating for your employees and for your customers.
Taking the first step by recognising Lost and Found as a serious process within your organisation, will lead to more engagement from different departments, but even more importantly: it will create responsibility among those employees doing the job.
The second step is the one where you choose a Lost and Found management software. This way reporting found items is as easy as taking a photo of the item and uploading it to the system after which it will publish the item online. The owner can easily identify their lost possession 24/7 online and claim it directly. Your employee(s) can simply verify the rightful owner after which the owner can use a self-service return process. The one thing left is for your employee to pack the item and hand it over to a courier or directly to the owner in case of a self-collect.
Lost and Found management tool
The Software-as-a-Service that iLost provides will only require an employee to upload a photo and a description of an item that someone has lost. iLost will then register the item and publish it on the website of your organisation. Your customers can easily check all found items and identify their lost possession. Next, they will need to fill in an online form to do their claim. They will be notified about the claim outcome and when identified as owner they can get their item delivered back home.
This will end up in a win-win situation for both businesses and their customers, while it also improves the relationship between the two parties.