What’s Your WISMO Rate and Why is it a Problem for Retailers?
WISMO is a useful shorthand for one of the most commonly occurring customer service questions, “Where Is My Order?” Your WISMO rate will tell you what percent of inbound calls to your customer care center or service team fall into the WISMO category. Though WISMO rates are typically high — it’s not uncommon for WISMO calls to make up 50% of customer service queries — lowering them is in your best interest for several reasons.
First and foremost, WISMO calls can be a drag on your business’s bottom line. Besides impacting customer loyalty and long-term value, a high WISMO rate can have a serious financial cost for retailers — on average, each WISMO call costs a company $5 to resolve.
During the pandemic, customer shipping expectations — including their views on package tracking and delivery estimates — have shifted in an understandable way. With many companies experiencing delivery delays and supply chain issues, WISMO calls have increased.
While for the most part consumers have been understanding of delays, they do expect a higher level of real-time communication. Research shows that if any package is delayed and the consumer isn’t informed of the exception, 69.7% of shoppers would be less likely to shop with that retailer again.
Channels Customers May Use To Ask, “WISMO?”
Accessibility is an important value for retailers. You want your customers to be able to contact you when they have queries about their order status, but that can also mean dealing with an overwhelming number of WISMO requests. Your service team might encounter WISMO requests through:
- Calls
- SMS
- Chatbots
- Social media
- Live chats
Since dealing with a WISMO request if often labor intensive, receiving a high volume of requests through several different channels on a daily basis can easily bog down your service team.
7 Tactics Companies Can Use To Reduce WISMO Calls
Fortunately, there are a number of things companies can do to smooth out a customer’s post-purchase experience, with the ultimate goal of reducing WISMO calls. Provide accurate estimated delivery dates. Keeping track of shipping speeds and effectively communicating them to your customers is a simple way of pre-empting WISMO calls.
Tracking pages. An intuitive, clear, and accurate tracking page that’s easy for customers to find and that offers the most recent order tracking information is a must for companies looking to curtail WISMO calls. It’s also a good idea in general, as data shows 47% of customers will avoid ordering from a retailer altogether if they sense a lack of visibility during the delivery process.
Make tracking services accessible on mobile. Meeting customers where they are is key, so ensuring your tracking page and other services function fluidly on mobile is a great way to cut down on user friction and make the tracking experience self-service.
Send SMS and email alerts. Notifying customers via email or text of their order status — when an order is confirmed, when it ships, and when it’s out for delivery — can eliminate many of the pressure points that lead to WISMO calls.
Offer a shipping FAQ. A detailed but accessible shipping FAQ that covers standard logistics like package tracking, as well as troubleshooting suggestions, can help meet the informational needs of your customers. After all, for most consumers, calling a customer service rep remains a last resort.
Using Delivery Experience Management to pre-empt WISMO. On average, roughly 1 in 10 shipments experiences a delivery exception. Ideally, you’ll know about these exceptions before your customer, either through prescriptive analytics or careful monitoring, and will already have addressed the issue before they’ve had time to contact you.
Spring for next day shipping. Overperforming is always a pleasant surprise for customers, and while it may cost a few extra dollars to expedite shipping, you’ll also save money on WISMO-related customer service costs and improve customer retention and brand loyalty.
Ultimately, reducing WISMO calls is all about anticipating a customer’s needs, which is why a technological solution like Delivery Experience Management is often at the heart of successful WISMO optimization campaigns.
How Delivery Experience Management Stops WISMO Calls In Their Tracks
Delivery Experience Management offers retailers the ability see, analyze, and act on delivery issues as they arise, while communicating with both customer and carrier to quickly determine the best solution. In other words, it provides the ability to proactively respond to issues instead of reactively.
Bodybuilding.com, an online retailer with a highly engaged fan base specializing in dietary, sports and bodybuilding supplements, optimized its last mile delivery with in-transit delivery alerts, branded tracking pages, and automated shipping confirmation emails. As a result of the brand’s proactive efforts, it reduced “where is my order” (WISMO) calls by 27%.
With the increased visibility afforded by DEM, Grove Collaborative were able to pinpoint their most frequent delivery issues and develop workflows that proactively combatted them. Ultimately, they saved money and saw a 3 point NPS increase from customers who’d experienced delivery exceptions but whose shipments had been proactively fixed.
Convey has made an effort to establish a partner ecosystem designed to help retail companies weather the next wave of innovation by providing integrated access to services like:
- Kustomer, to better handle shipment status data.
- Zendesk, to centralize customer data.
- Zembula, to create dynamic email content.
- Salesforce, to manage the customer experience.
The Future Of eCommerce: A Seamless And Satisfying Customer Journey
As eCommerce has exploded over the past year, it’s also opened up new avenues for innovation. As retail continues to head into the digital future, we expect to see an emphasis on creating personalized experiences and streamlining the shipping process, with an emphasis on fine tuning the last mile.