If you’re in e-commerce support, there’s no doubt you’ve answered this question at some point – “Where is my order?”.
More likely than not, you’ve probably already solved this for your shoppers by emailing them a tracking link, creating a “Track My Order” page and, possibly, also adding a button on your chat widget where shoppers can self serve and find the status of their order. However, statistics show that out of all the tickets raised, WISMO or “where is my order” queries makeup around 21% of total queries and during peak periods, cross 60% of queries.
During peak seasons, some brands have a particularly hard time with WISMO queries, rising from 17.8% to 61.3% of total queries
Research conducted by Digital Genius
Of course, there is a portion of queries coming in, which needs a support representatives expertise; however, we find, there is a significant portion of queries that don’t require any kind of human intervention and can be completely self served by shoppers themselves.
In my opinion, this is where AI is primed to make a major impact.
Order Tracking with AI
UNDERSTANDING USER CONTEXT
When we first started building workflows, we wondered – “What value can AI add to order tracking?”. Beyond understanding when a shopper wants to know the status of their order via a chat widget, and providing them the status, is there anything else? I didn’t think too much of it at the time and continued to build the feature where AI can understand when a shopper is asking for their order details.
I shipped out the feature to our clients and started tracking how it fared. I was glad to see that the feature started adding value from the get go. Shoppers would either click on the “Track my order” button or type it out in natural language, and our AI would instantly provide the accurate response.
While this was definitely a step in the right direction, with a few of our clients, I still saw that 55% of customers would want to talk to human support after getting their order tracking details from the AI.
This was something which was alarming and I started having discussions with our clients to understand the conversations support teams have with shoppers around WISMO.
DIVING DEEPER INTO THE PROBLEM
Sitting down with our customers, I tried to understand what support teams were doing once a WISMO query fell through the cracks. A few responses we got went as follows –
- “Our team told shoppers the same thing which was on the tracking details”
- “Shoppers wanted to know how long ‘order processing’ usually takes”
- “Some orders in fact took longer than usual, so our team had to look into it further”
Digging deeper into these responses, led us to infer the following
- Sometimes, shoppers want a re-iteration that their order is on the way
- Shoppers don’t understand what “processing” or “fulfilled” means
After our conversations we understood that shoppers want more information than just the status of their order. They also want to understand what the status means.
How we improved WISMO resolutions
Every customer just wants more information about their order.
While support teams might not have extra information about where a particular shoppers order is, they do have knowledge about what the status means for the particular shopper.
Explaining to a shopper the meaning of their order status leads to higher resolutions
Simply put, that’s how we approached improving the number of self serve resolutions. Macha allows its customers to add information about what their shipping policies, in particular, provide an explanation of the different order status.
In addition to showing the order details to the shopper, Macha’s AI understands the brands policies and then explains to the shopper what their order status means.
This had a significant impact in terms of improving the number of resolutions related to order tracking, and we saw that this new implementation reduced the number of queries to human support from 55% to only 30%.
How we’re moving forward
If AI can understand workflows and work with support teams to provide their customers with accurate information at the right time, customer support can in fact, benefit greatly from implementing AI.
We’re also convinced, that building out use-case specific workflows for e-commerce is going to have a major impact in actually being able to tackle support volumes.
WISMO is one of the first workflows we’ve built out for Shopify, and we’re in the midst of adding more Shopify flows allowing shoppers to self serve, which in turn provides them with a great customer experience.