“Where is my order” questions are one of the most common customer requests. Learn how to manage them efficiently to save time and maintain high customer satisfaction.
As an ecommerce business owner, you may be familiar with WISMO requests from customers.
When this happens starts the race against time. You or your support agent has to look for the order number on your ecommerce backend platform (Shopify, Magento, BigCommerce, etc), find the tracking number, paste that number into a tracking site, and finally type a reply to the customer. This process repeats over and over and over again.
The best practice to solve this problem is to develop a strategic plan to manage WISMO requests. Otherwise, you might face the consequences like a longer first response time, reduced customer satisfaction and ACV, and even more.
Read more: 15 Customer Support Metrics for Ecom Companies (& How to Improve Them)
In this post, we’ll walk you through everything you need to know about WISMO, why you should care, and what you should do to automate answers.
WISMO stands for “Where is my order?” It’s a common question a customer often asks after making a purchase.
A WISMO request can also be like these:
A customer may reach out to you with a WISMO inquiry via phone, email, SMS, live chat, or social media message (direct message and even sometimes through post comments!). They’ll do that if:
The moment a new customer clicks “Submit” on a checkout page, they’ll start thinking (a lot) about their order. They’ll look forward to receiving the package every day.
That’s why if the customer doesn’t hear anything about their order from you or has to wait too long for it, they’ll be anxious and send you a WISMO request.
At Gorgias, we’ve observed that WISMO is the #1 question asked to our ecommerce users. It accounts for 15% of the customer requests on average.
Apart from that, there are additional reasons you should pay attention to WISMO calls:
Most ecommerce merchants are aware of WISMO, but not all of them understand the true cost of this problem as it slowly sways out of their control.
Fact: the associated cost is too big to ignore. Let us prove it to you:
Let’s say you’ve created an automated response for WISMO in Gorgias. When a customer asks, “where is my order?,” they’ll receive this automatic answer with details about their order status.
In this case, what WISMO request costs you is the price of one billable ticket in your Gorgias helpdesk, i.e., between $0.10 and $0.14, depending on the plan you’re using.
When you don’t have an automated response for a WISMO request, you need to search for the answer and type the answer manually. In this case, you’ll have to pay for the price of one ticket and customer support agent labor.
Specifically:
Imagine you have 1000 orders per month and receive 150 WISMO requests, then you have to pay every month:
WISMO requests aren’t avoidable. Given the cost of each request, knowing how to handle WISMO should be one of your top priorities.
As said earlier, a customer sends you a WISMO inquiry because they’re concerned about their order. Hence, the key to control WISMO is to be proactive.
Consider the following tips:
A clear shipping policy helps you proactively set the right customer expectations around shipping times and costs. It’s also useful to reduce support tickets because customers can find the answers to their shipping questions themselves.
When you maintain an open dialogue with customers, you give them more confidence to buy from you. They’ll trust you, talk about you on social media, and keep coming back to your store.
Your shipping policy should include information about order processing time, estimated delivery time, potential service interruptions, and disclaimer. You can display this policy on product detail pages, cart pages, FAQs page, or help center, for example:
Since the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, many ecommerce businesses have set up a dedicated page for showing how they’re handling shipping. They also inform shoppers by displaying the information on website announcement bar or popup. Here’s an excellent example from Go-To Skincare:
Just showing delivery estimates on your website isn’t enough. You should also keep customers posted with their orders at each post-purchase stage.
Start with these:
Customers want to know where their order is right away. They expect a quick response from you. To fulfill their expectation, you can accelerate your responsiveness by automating your answer.
In Gorgias, you can create automated responses for WISMO requests no matter if order tracking is available or not. Here’s how:
Step 1: Go to Settings > Rules > click Create a new rule that will send an automated response to your customer.
Step 2: Do the following:
Step 3:
Hey {{customer first name}},
Get excited! Your order {{number of last order}} is on its way to
.Here is the latest: {{ Tracking URL of last order }}
{{ Tracking number of last order }}
Let us know if you have any other questions.
Step 4: Click Save rule and activate the rule.
Sometimes, the delivery status for orders on the order status page hasn’t been updated. Reasons can be you haven’t shipped the order yet, or your courier doesn’t support real-time tracking.
In this case, you can create the following rule to send an automated answer to your customer’s WISMO request.
Step 1: Go to Settings > Rules > click Create a new rule that will send an automated response to your customer.
Step 2: Do the following:
Step 3:
Your answer can be like this:
Hey [customer first name],
Working hard to fulfill your order, please check here for now:
Here’s your order number
Keep an eye on a tracking email soon!
Step 4: Click Save rule and activate the rule.
In Gorgias, you can enable the self-service portal feature on your chat widget to quickly resolve WISMO requests. This feature allows your customers to check their order status, tracking number, and shipping details on their own. In other words, you don’t need to chat with customers to give them the information they need.
Gorgias’ self-service chat portal can help you deflect and automate up to 30% of your chat tickets. Check out this tutorial to learn how to install this feature for your helpdesk.
Knowing how to solve WISMO effectively can help you reduce customer service costs, increase customer satisfaction, and improve your support agents’ performance.
As you’ve seen through this post, you can apply the following tips to keep WISMO requests under control:
Head over to your Gorgias helpdesk and start implementing these tips. In case you haven’t had a Gorgias account, click here to sign up for free.
