WISMO inquiries are a serious challenge for e-commerce businesses. Each WISMO call can cost your business anything from $2.50 to $6.25. This doesn’t just frustrate customers but can weigh down your customer service teams who are already struggling to keep up with call volumes, particularly during peak seasons. 

But with the right strategies and tools, businesses can dramatically reduce the problems WISMO inquiries pose. Our customer SNOCKS, for instance, managed to bring their WISMO inquiries down from 15% to just 1%. Read on to learn how your business can transform the post-checkout experience to  increase customer satisfaction and reduce workloads for your customer service teams.  

1# Get full visibility on your deliveries with data-driven solutions 

One key driver of WISMO tickets is unreliable and incomplete EDD (Estimated Delivery Dates) information from the carrier. This, coupled with the large estimated delivery windows they usually provide (with variations ranging from 5-10 days), can cause great frustration for customers. They  want to know with certainty when their packages will arrive so they can make the necessary arrangements to ensure successful deliveries. 

Giving your customers accurate EDDs is a simple and effective way to reduce WISMO inquiries, boost customer confidence during delivery, and even help drive conversion rates.    

Leveraging solutions powered by machine learning algorithms, which have up to 98% accuracy, is an excellent way to achieve accurate EDDs and overcome the poor quality of carrier information. These solutions take into account not only delivery time from carrier pick-up but also potential warehouse sorting times and delays that could affect delivery times. It can also be intelligent enough to account for the carriers’ past performance to continuously improve predictions.  

Many things can go wrong in the shipping process, from delays in warehouse pick-ups to global supply chain issues. To ensure that customers receive parcels by the EDDs provided to them, keep an eye on parcels that may be facing delays or those that are not meeting SLAs before they become an issue. With data-driven solutions, this could be as simple as setting filters in your platform to raise alerts when potential problems are detected. Getting in contact with carriers and raising these issues early can help get packages to customers on time or help you notify them before they start to become impatient.

2# Give your customers self-service tracking options

Branded tracking pages are a great way for customers to keep track of deliveries at any time on their own. With self-service tracking, they are less likely to feel anxious during the delivery journey. That’s because they want to know where their parcels are at any time–often before carriers are even ready to provide updates. This capability can help keep WISMO rates low and keep them coming back to your e-commerce store. 

With branded tracking pages, you can keep all the important information in one place. You can reduce anxiety by reassuring customers that their orders have been confirmed, reminding them of their EDDs, and displaying comprehensive tracking information. This can all be done in your own tone and branding. You can even add recommended purchase sections, making it an excellent channel to generate brand loyalty and encourage repeat sales. When all of this is accessible at a click of a button, your customers can quickly resolve their own queries through your site, without needing to contact your teams. 

3# Develop excellent notification strategies

By the time customers contact customer service, they are already upset. Prevent this situation by developing timely and comprehensive notification strategies to address concerns before they arise. 

Here are just a few notifications you should send during the post-purchase journey: 

1. Order confirmations

Assure your customers that their purchases have been received and be sure to provide them with important information like links to tracking pages, EDDs, and reminders about return policies.

2. Delivery issues

Be proactive about delays by reaching out first to build confidence in your brand. This approach can help them know that even if something goes wrong they’ll be kept in the loop. Personalized messages in your branding and the customers’ native languages will help let them know that you care.

3. Delivery & collection reminders

Work with your customers to ensure successful deliveries by reminding them to be available when parcels are being delivered, or are ready for collection from parcel lockers.

4. Successful deliveries

Take these exciting moments to celebrate with your customers. By timing your feedback requests to align with successful deliveries, you can increase NPS scores by up to 20% and increase customer retention.

4# Streamline customer service operations with customer management portals 

WISMO inquiries are frustrating for all parties involved. Not only do they make up a significant portion of customer inquiries, but they can also be very time-consuming and stressful to resolve. 

As brands rely on ever more complicated logistics and multiple carriers to manage their deliveries, particularly as they expand, teams’ operations also become increasingly complex. 

Dealing with WISMO inquiries often requires customer service teams to navigate multiple carrier platforms and pages while keeping track of 10-12 digit long order and delivery tracking identification numbers just to provide customers with the information they want. 

After navigating this difficult system, service teams often only retrieve information that carriers have already given to customers–resulting in frustration for both customers and representatives.

Accessible information is therefore key to tackling your WISMO challenges. Provide your customer service teams with comprehensive and intuitive shipment overviews that make it easy to locate customer, order, and delivery information on a single page

A suitable platform will allow you to filter your shipment by date range, issue type, and any issues to enable quick responses to customer queries. With better visibility into where parcels are in the delivery journey, your business  becomes better positioned to resolve queries faster and more effectively. 

You could even automate customer notifications to significantly reduce workloads for internal teams. This would free them up to handle unique customer problems that require additional attention.  

Conclusion

Set your business up for success by creating effective workflows to handle WISMO inquiries, one of e-commerce's biggest challenges. To successfully tackle these, you’ll need a solution that is data-centric and provides in-depth logistics information that is standardized and actionable for your customer service teams. This will help to streamline their operations and reduce the time taken to resolve inquiries. 

At the same time, ensuring that customers can easily keep track of their orders with timely notifications is a key strategy to reduce WISMO inquiries and increase customer satisfaction and retention. 

Learn more about how Parcel Perform can help your brand streamline the post-purchase journey for your customers and teams here.