If you’ve ever picked up free swag from a trade show booth, there’s a good chance it was provided by SunJoy Group, a Morton Grove, Illinois-based supplier of branded promotional products. Founded in 2007, the company designs and manufactures an array of custom-branded items—everything from wireless earbuds, Bluetooth speakers, flash drives, and charging cables to keychains, insulated water bottles and tumblers, and tote bags.
The company, which calls itself a one-stop solution for custom gifts, says it has seen “remarkable growth” during the e-commerce boom of recent years. But that growth has also come with some challenges. For example, as volumes grew, SunJoy began to experience problems with missed deliveries and lost packages—and the associated headaches of managing carrier claims for those botched deliveries. Disputes over lost orders bogged down its claims department, consuming valuable time, costing it money, and threatening its reputation for stellar service.
That led SunJoy to seek a solution to protect its growing business and minimize potential shipping mishaps—and to keep customers coming back for more.
EASING CLAIMS AND DELIVERY HEADACHES
That search led SunJoy to UPS Capital, the financial services and insurance arm of parcel delivery giant UPS. Launched in the 1990s to give businesses access to financing, UPS Capital has since expanded its offerings to include insurance and other services that help companies protect their in-transit goods. The UPS division says it now offers coverage for shipments of all sizes—from single parcel and freight shipments to entire supply chains—through its “InsureShield” program. It counts 690,000 shippers as its customers and paid out 280,000 insurance claims last year.
By working with UPS Capital, SunJoy was able to obtain multicarrier, transactional shipping insurance through “InsureShield Connect,” a technology platform that extracts shipment information directly from clients’ IT systems via an application programming interface (API), thus minimizing human error and accelerating the claims resolution process. The two companies say the integration has not only provided SunJoy with seamless insurance protection but has also cut its claims resolution time by 40%, to an average of 2.5 days from 5.1 days.
But the partnership did not stop there. SunJoy also signed on to use UPS Capital’s DeliveryDefense Address Confidence product, a tool that helps clients improve their delivery success rates. Introduced last year, DeliveryDefense uses enriched delivery data from a database of over 130 million U.S. addresses to help businesses predict delivery outcomes before a shipping label is even created. Essentially, the tool lets clients assess the risk of a delivery mishap by vetting their “ship-to” addresses, flagging the ones with a higher likelihood of problems, and suggesting precautions like adding mandatory delivery signatures or redirecting shipments to secure UPS Access Point locations.
Onboarding was a snap. According to a case study on UPS Capital’s website, the two companies were able to integrate the DeliveryDefense API into SunJoy’s order management system (between the order fulfillment and order intake processes) in just one day. In the first three months following the installation, SunJoy conducted 34,325 address searches. Of those addresses, the system flagged over 1,400 as having a 16 times higher-than-average likelihood of loss (including 260 addresses that presented a whopping 21 times higher-than-average risk of an unsuccessful delivery), prompting the company to implement new internal processes to prevent potential post-shipment mishaps.
Overall, leveraging the DeliveryDefense tool has helped SunJoy reduce up to 35% of its parcel losses by alerting the company to high-risk deliveries so it can take preventive measures. And if, in spite of its best efforts, a parcel is lost, UPS Capital says SunJoy still has peace of mind knowing it has insurance coverage through InsureShield Connect, putting it in a position where it can continue to provide the kind of service it wants to while protecting its bottom line.
Gartner, Inc.