Responding faster to customer requests

Specialty retailer with online sales

The retailer, which has 55 employees, received 2,400 requests a month. Order tracking and product questions overwhelmed six advisors, and a contractor charged for part of the handling on demand.

Approach

1. 01

   Frame

   The director wanted to cut first-response time by 25% without lowering satisfaction. The project covered three frequent request types; disputes and refunds stayed with the advisors.

2. 02

   Investigate

   I reviewed 800 requests, the contractor’s invoices and the service rules. I measured the full handling time, including corrections, separating simple requests from sensitive cases.

3. 03

   Explain

   Two causes were compared: too few staff, or scattered information. Repeated searches explained delays more than the number of new requests did.

4. 04

   Build

   We compared an improved FAQ, an assistant that prepares sourced answers and an autonomous agent, with the existing setup as the financial baseline.

5. 05

   Test

   A six-week test split 400 comparable requests between two groups. The thresholds were 95% of answers accepted without major correction and a 25% reduction in full handling time. The test reached 96%, and full handling time dropped from 7 to 4 minutes.

6. 06

   Decide

   The director chose drafts reviewed by the advisors. The pilot was run on a budget of $16,500, including $5,500 for strategy. The drop in subcontracting must be confirmed on the invoices before any expansion.

7. 07

   Steer

   Each week, the manager tracks errors, satisfaction and the requests still billed by the contractor. A request type is paused if major corrections exceed 5% for two weeks.