Ecommerce customer service is every mail that arrives because somebody bought a thing off you online, or is standing there thinking about buying one, and the lot of it lands in the same inbox with nothing on the outside to tell the two sorts apart until a person opens each one and reads it. Most of it is dull. A fair share of it never needed to be sent at all, and that is the bit worth getting at, on account of the dull mail eating the hours you would want for the mail that decides a sale. Which is the whole of it, plainly said. Nobody sits down and plans the shape of it. It arrives in the order it arrives, and the ordering of it goes and decides your month for you.
Gráinne counted hers in the middle of January at the kitchen table, with a mug going cold beside her, because she was trying to work out whether she could afford to take somebody on. She sells sea swimming gear out of a unit outside Clonakilty, changing robes and tow floats and neoprene socks and the like. There are two of them at it full time, with her sister in for the busy weeks. December had very nearly finished the pair of them. So she went and counted the month’s mail properly, with a biro and a page ruled into columns, and it came to a bit over nine hundred. She had not expected the half of it.
Seven hundred of the nine hundred were asking where an order was.
She sat with that for a while, and then went looking through the same December for the ones that were not. That was how she came on a mail sent at ten on the Friday night of the Black Friday weekend, from a woman asking whether the long robe came in anything above an XL. And was the navy the same as the photograph. It got answered on the Tuesday. The reply opened with an apology for the delay and it was a good reply, mind you, thorough and warm and it answered both questions. The woman never wrote back. A robe and two pairs of socks by the sound of what she was after, which is the guts of two hundred euro, gone.
Nobody had ignored her. Not one of them, mind you. The mail came in at ten on a Friday night in the busiest weekend of the year, sitting behind about four hundred others, and there was no order number in it on account of there being no order. That is the whole of the trouble in one line. Every other mail in the pile that weekend belonged to somebody who had already paid.
Most of what lands in an online shop’s inbox is the one question asked over again
Where is my order. It goes by a few names in the trade and none of them matter, and if you sell anything online at all you will know it before you have finished this sentence. Seven hundred out of nine hundred is high, though it is not as far off the usual as Gráinne assumed when she first saw her own page of columns.
The reasons behind it are all reasonable, which is the part that surprised her. The dispatch mail goes out the minute a label gets printed, and a good number of those go and land in promotions or in spam, particularly the ones sent through a shop platform that a customer has never once had mail from before. Nobody sees them at all. Then the courier does not scan the parcel at collection, they scan it when it reaches the depot that night or the next morning, so for the guts of a day the tracking number a customer was given shows nothing at all. She went and looked one up her own self to see what they were seeing. It said no information available for this consignment, which reads, to a woman who paid ninety euro two hours ago, like the thing is gone astray somewhere between Cork and her front door.
And the delivery promise does its bit as well. The banner across the top of her site said fast Irish delivery, which was true enough. The checkout said three to five working days, in grey text under the payment box, and that was true as well. People buy off the banner and start counting off the banner. Nobody had told a lie. So the mail arrives on day two of a five day promise, from somebody who is not being the least bit unreasonable, and now it wants answering the very same as anything else.
How the queue goes and sorts its self in exactly the wrong order
Here is the awkward bit, and Gráinne worked it out her own self before anybody told her. The mail gets answered in the order it comes in, near enough, since that is what a person does with a list. That much is plain enough. And the mails from people who have already paid are the ones that arrive in the daytime, on weekdays, with an order number in them, so they can be searched for and looked up and dealt with in ninety seconds flat.
The other sort behaves differently. A person deciding whether to spend two hundred euro on a robe does that thinking on a Friday night, or on a Sunday afternoon with the phone in their hand, and they write a short casual line about sizing that has no order number in it and no urgency in the tone of it. It reads like something that can wait. Beside a mail from a woman in Leitrim wondering has her parcel been lost, it looks like the smaller of the two jobs. Half the time it gets answered later for that reason on its own.
So the queue empties from the top, and the mails that might still turn into money sink down under the ones that have already been paid for. Nobody decided any of that. It is what a list does to you when there is nothing on the mails to say which is which, and it goes on quietly through the whole of the busy season, on account of the pile being deep enough that the sinking never gets noticed.
Why answering faster did less for her than getting rid of the mail did
Her first go at fixing it was the obvious one and she does not regret it, though it did not do much. They got the average answer down to something like four hours across December, from a day and a half. The count never budged an inch. Nine hundred mails is nine hundred mails, and two people answering faster only means two people typing more, at the end of the busiest six weeks of their year, and there is a floor under that which they hit in the second week. Funnily enough, the faster they got the crosser they were.
What actually shifted it was three changes she made in the following autumn, none of them clever. The dispatch mail got rewritten to say what the courier actually does, that the tracking will show nothing until the following morning and there is no need to worry about that, which is the plainest sentence in the whole of her business. It took twenty minutes and no more. Sizing went onto its own page with the measurements laid out and a photograph of the navy in daylight, so the Friday night question had somewhere to be answered without a person. And the returns wording came off the terms page and went into the dispatch mail as well, in the same breath as the tracking line, since a fair number of the mails she was getting were people checking they could send a thing back before they let themselves want it.
November came round again and the count came to five hundred and forty, with the where-is-my-order share down under half of it. Three hundred mails that never came. None of them were answered quickly, mind you, on account of none of them existing in the first place, and the same trading went on underneath the whole of it. The lesson she took out of it is the one that gets written up as best practice and is nearly always described the wrong way round. Speed is the thing you reach for when you take the mail as a given, which is fair enough, since it is about the only lever there is to pull in the middle of a December. The mail is not a given though, or not the whole of it, and a fair share of what a shop answers in December was caused by the shop itself back in October, in a dispatch mail nobody had gone and read in two years.
The six weeks that pay for the year, and who is allowed into the queue
People are the other side of this, and a small shop gets punished here for its own shape. Gráinne needs three or four pairs of hands on the mail from the middle of November to the start of January, and one and a half pairs for the rest of the year. That is retail, no two ways about it. Her sister comes in. A neighbour’s girl came in the last two years and was worth twice what she was paid, since she knew the products from swimming in the things herself.
Neither of them is a support agent and neither of them is there in March. That six week shape is the ordinary condition of retail and it is the shape that per person pricing handles worst, on account of the bill being built for companies that hire twelve people in January and keep them. What a shop does instead is one of a few things and not one of them is any good. Gráinne shared a login for two seasons, which went along grand until the January she needed to know which of them had promised a woman in Ennis a refund, and there was no name attached to any of it. Paying for a seat you use for a fortnight is the tidier answer and it is the one that gets resented by March, when the invoice comes in and the person is long gone. And a fair number of shops leave the extra hands out of the queue altogether and have them shouting questions across the unit instead, which is the commonest of the lot and the worst of them by a distance.
The other thing that six weeks teaches you is that the returns wave lands in January when the helpers have gone home. Gráinne keeps one person on returns now for the whole of that month, the same person every time, since a return is a conversation with somebody who is already a bit disappointed, and passing them between three people tends to be what turns a refund into a bad review a fortnight later. That is nearly all of what keeping the customers you already have comes down to in this trade. She has had people come back and buy again in the spring off the back of a return that went smoothly, and she would not have believed that a few years ago.
Ecommerce customer service software, and the call centre question
The phrase ecommerce customer service software covers a fair spread of things and the price spread is wider again, so it is worth knowing what the small end of it has to do before anybody demos anything at you. The mail wants to land in one place that all of them can see, with the history stuck to the customer rather than to whoever answered last time. After that it comes down to saved replies, which matter more in this trade than in any other, since the same eleven answers cover the most of a December between them. And if the search will not take an order number then half these conversations have no handle on them at all, since that number is the one thing the customer and the shop are both holding.
A call centre is a different animal and the phrase turns up in this search for a reason, so here is the honest version. Outsourced phone support is priced by the seat or by the hour and it starts making sense at a volume most shops never reach, somewhere well past what Gráinne does in her best year. Below that you are paying a stranger to read a script about a robe they have never held, at a per hour rate that outruns your margin on the product. The answers get worse rather than better. It does not scale down at all. Big retail runs call centres for good reasons, fair is fair, and not one of those reasons applies to a unit with three people in it.
What she looked at instead was closer to the ground. She had been running the business off a shop inbox on ordinary Gmail for years, so the thing she put to every one of them first was how much of a week it would take to move that across without the old mail going astray in the process. Adding a person for six weeks and taking them off again came next, and what she wanted to hear was that she could do it her own self without ringing a salesperson to ask permission. Ownership she left until last. She only thought to ask it at all because a friend of hers in Kinsale had learned that one the hard way, with a platform that held onto her history when she went to leave it.
Where we come into it, and where we plainly do not
We come into it here, once, and the honest half comes in along with us. The thing we sell over here at Maxdesk is the queue its self, a shared inbox sitting on top of a ticketing system, so the December pile lands in one place with whatever was said to that customer before sitting on the same thread, and a mail can be handed to a person by name rather than left in a heap for whoever reaches it. There is no per agent charge on any plan of ours. The free one costs $0 and takes as many people as you care to put into it, which is the part that suits a shop. Your sister and the neighbour’s girl can be in the queue for the six weeks that need them and out of it again in January, and not one line of the bill changes shape on you. A knowledge base will hold the sizing and the returns wording, and once that page exists you can link it out of the dispatch mail, which is how the count comes down.
Now the limits, and they are real ones for a shop in particular. Email is the only channel we run. Live chat is not in the product at all, and chat is genuinely useful on a product page at ten on a Friday night, which is the very moment this article has been going on about, so if pre-purchase chat is what you are after then we are not it and you should go and get a chat widget. We do not pull order status out of your shop either. That part is not ours. Somebody still has to go and open the platform and look the order up, so what we do is make the queue orderly, and we do not make the where-is-my-order answer write its self.
And the history window wants saying plainly on a page about returns. The free workspace holds ticket and report history for three rolling months, counted off the last thing that happened on a ticket rather than the day it opened. Pro comes to $20 a month for the workspace and stretches that to a year. Elite at $99 doubles it again. A December order coming back under a warranty claim the following autumn sits inside the twelve and outside the three. So if you sell things that come back a year later, free is not the plan to run your returns on, and we would far rather say that here than have you find it out in the middle of a claim.
Whatever you land on, the first thing to do costs nothing and takes an evening with a biro. Take last month’s mail and rule a page into columns. One for where is my order, one for the people asking before they buy, one for returns and one for whatever is left over, and then go and count them honestly. If half or more of it lands in that first column, then no amount of answering faster is going to hand you your evenings back. The work is in the dispatch mail and the sizing page instead. If the second column is thin, that is not good news either, it usually means those people are writing to somebody else. Read the last ten replies in the second column while you are at it, out loud if you can bear it, since what good and bad answers look like is easier to judge in your own words than in anybody else’s.
Gráinne did her count again this January, at the same table with the very same cold mug. Five hundred and forty for the month, three hundred and ten of them where is my order, and the Friday night sizing questions get answered on the Friday night now, mostly by whoever has the phone in their hand at the time. The woman who wanted the navy in a bigger size never did come back. There is no fixing that one, and Gráinne brings her up herself whenever anybody in the unit says the mail can wait until Tuesday.