You’ve done all the hard work – attracting netizens to take a look at your website, encouraging them to add products to their cart by providing value, getting them to take a step further to make a purchase decision, and hit the checkout button.
This person who entered your eCommerce store as a stranger is now a valued customer who’s amped up to try your product.
Another day, another satisfied customer?
Well, it’s not that simple.
The customer journey consists of two major stages – namely, the pre-purchase stage that we just talked about and the all-important post-purchase stage.
The post-purchase stage begins when an order has been placed, all the way to when the order is delivered at your customer’s doorstep.
Once an order has been shipped, retailers tend to hand over the reins of their customers’ journey to a third-party shipping company who may not share the same level of commitment as you do – which could prove to be fatal to your customer’s overall experience.
This stage is crucial to boost customer loyalty by ensuring a hassle-free order delivery experience with your brand and reward you with more future sales. Customers love to stay in the know and receive updates on their delivery status and expect you to proactively do so.
And when you fail to do so, your customer service teams are flooded with tickets from anxious customers, all with the same question – WISMO?
So, what is WISMO?
This acronym reads out to “Where IS My Order?” – a phrase that is much too common to those in a customer-facing role, namely customer service teams.
Your customers tend to get anxious, and that’s understandable. Especially when they have limited visibility into the exact whereabouts of their order and have to often depend on poorly built carrier tracking pages for clarity about their order’s ETA.
But the problem here is that carrier tracking pages don’t really disclose the depth of the situation when it comes to delayed packages.
What do WISMO calls mean for your business?
To the layperson, WISMO stands for “Where Is My Order?” and that’s about it.
However, WISMO calls take up about 40% of your customer support queries and according to a study by Gorgias – a customer service agent spends an average of 10-minutes per ‘where is my order?’ request.
Do the math, if your business receives 1000 WISMO queries a week – at 10-minutes per ticket, that’s about 160 hours of your customer support’s time. Multiply that by the average hourly wage you pay your customer service agents and that’s how much you could be saving per 1000 WISMO calls.
Now that’s an alarming number!
What is it you can do as a business to reduce the number of WISMO calls and save those big bucks in operating costs?
How to reduce/avoid WISMO calls and save money in the process?
1) Be transparent about your delivery dates :
Always provide your customers with realistic delivery estimates – taking into account all possible delays and discrepancies. Make use of delivery experience management software to predict delays, if any, and keep your customers informed.
As an outcome of the pandemic, logistics has taken a hit as well – causing more unexpected delays than usual. Keep your customers informed that there’s a possibility of a delay in their package being delivered to avoid giving them unpleasant surprises.
During peak shopping season like the Holidays, make sure you explicitly let your customer know that there might be delays with their order – on your website and your checkout page.
2) Over-communicate delivery information :
You send out an order confirmation email once the order is placed but do you keep your customer informed at every checkpoint after that?
Once their order is packed and shipped – send out a notification with an estimated delivery date and an order tracking link. But don’t stop at that, keep sending out regular order status updates (even if there is a delay) to keep your customers informed and help them avoid any anxiety. In case of delays, you can reward your customers for being so patient and understanding – to encourage brand loyalty.
3) Provide self-serve, real-time order tracking :
Send a self-serve order tracking link out to your customers once their order has been shipped. Make sure that your website boasts an order tracking page that is easily navigable as well.
In addition to this, if you employ a chatbot on your eCommerce store, you configure automated responses that include a tracking page link to hot-key triggers such as “WISMO” or “where is my order?”
Since a tracking page is self-serve, its benefits are two-fold as it can significantly reduce the number of WISMO calls coming at you and also reduce the wait time for customers trying to find out more about their order.
4) Build a branded order tracking experience :
You can go one step further and provide a branded order-tracking experience to your customers on your website to improve their overall customer experience.
This also enables you to leverage post-purchase touchpoints as a means to drive sales. Utilize real-estate on your order tracking page to run relevant promotions and campaigns.
5) Include a ‘where is my order?’ section on your customer service/FAQ page
Some customers might not be aware of the self-serve order tracking feature you offer and may try to reach out to you through your customer service page.
It’s a good idea to include delivery-related FAQs on your website to make sure that your customers are aware of how to track their orders. If you don’t have a tracking feature, you can reiterate your typical delivery times.
6) Make sure your customer support teams are equipped with the right information to handle WISMO calls with ease :
You provide your customers with a self-serve order tracking system and send out regular delivery notifications apart from giving them a real-time delivery estimate but they still choose to reach out to your customer support regarding the whereabouts of their order.
What do you do?
Integrate your help desk with your order tracking system to ensure that your customer service agents can pull-up order tracking information with ease and save time on such queries.
How top brands leverage LateShipment.com to reduce/avoid WISMO calls and cut down on operational costs :
A high-volume in WISMO calls from your customers is a cry for more communication throughout the post-purchase stage.
At LateShipment.com, we’ve built the world’s only logistics cloud tool that helps businesses of all sizes reduce shipping costs by up to 20% and provide stellar post-post purchase experiences to customers at scale – focussing steadfastly on the last mile, typically the most opaque part of the logistics chain.
With our Delivery Experience Management (DEM) Platform, you can effortlessly :
> Track Parcels in Real-Time – Monitor your outbound & inbound shipments across multiple shipping carriers on a centralized window, in real-time
> Receive Predictive Delay Alerts – Pay attention to daily deliveries with predictive delay alerts and more on a purpose-built dashboard for support reps.
> Resolve Issues Proactively– Proactively communicate with customers to prevent them from having bad experiences due to delivery failures.
> Send out Delivery Status Notifications – Send custom or automated delivery status notifications to your customers for events like “shipped,” “attempted,” & “delivered.”
> Provide Branded Order Tracking – Build fully-customizable order tracking pages for your customers to improve brand recall and sales.
> Receive Delivery Experience Feedback – Gather feedback from customers about their delivery experience. Measure and optimize shipping operations.
The best part is, it takes less than 2 minutes to see LateShipment.com in action.
The value we add to businesses is most evident when experienced first-hand. Try LateShipment.com now.
