Ajith SrinivasanThis post-purchase phase, where customers are awaiting their parcels, holds more importance than you think.
While most e-commerce businesses assume to just “hope no things go wrong until the customer gets their hands at their order“, the truth is far.
From the moment the order gets shipped, till it gets delivered, there is a window of opportunity to boost customer loyalty by ensuring hassle-free order delivery experiences that reward your brand with repeat sales in the future.
The catch? Customers love to stay in the know and receive updates on their delivery status and expect you to proactively do so. And when you fail to do so, your support teams are flooded with tickets from anxious customers, all with the same question – WISMO?
What Are WISMO Inquiries?
Customers tend to get anxious during the post-purchase phase, especially when they have limited visibility into the exact whereabouts of their order and often have to depend on opaque carrier tracking pages for clarity about their order’s ETA.
That’s where they typically come in the form of emails, phone calls, or chat messages asking, “Where IS My Order?” WISMO roughly translates to the customer wanting to track their shipment or at least know the status of their order.
The problem here is that carrier tracking pages don’t really disclose the depth of the situation when it comes to delayed packages. This lack of communication for a customer’s simple need for reassurance not only adds to customer service workloads but also signals a potential gap in the post-purchase experience.
Why WISMO Inquiries Are a Major Concern for E-Commerce Businesses
When anxious customers are unable to determine the status of their package, they tend to get frustrated. Of course, there’s the option of them reaching out to you and you can send them to the carrier’s tracking page. However, by that time, the damage was already done. To add fuel to the fire, when they don’t get what they want (even after reaching out), the post-purchase experience takes a huge hit, leading to negative reviews and ultimately loss of repeat business, both of which can harm your growth.
Cutting straight to the point, WISMO calls take up about 40% of your customer support queries, and according to a study by Gorgias – a customer service agent spends an average of 10-minutes per ‘where is my order?’ request. Do the math, if your business receives 1000 WISMO queries a week – at 10-minutes per ticket, that’s about 160 hours of your customer support’s time. Now that’s an alarming number!
That’s not all. High volumes of WISMO inquiries stretch your support team thin, leading to longer response times and higher operational costs. Also, addressing repeated WISMO issues can be costly, as it pulls resources away from other essential business functions.
So, what is it you can do as a business to reduce the number of WISMO calls to optimize the customer experience and save those big bucks in operating costs?
How to Reduce WISMO Inquiries
By now you would’ve already figured out the crux. Dealing with WISMO requires you taking a proactive approach to cut them down, even before your customers get the thought about asking the question.
Here are the different ways through which you can get proactive with your efforts to curb WISMO.
1) Be transparent about your delivery dates :
Unrealistic expectations are one of the foremost reasons for WISMO inquiries. This can be an even more serious issue during times like the peak season when unexpected delays are higher than usual.
As a start, you can include an estimated order delivery date on your product page to give the customer a realistic delivery timeline. For instance, you can categorize these dates based on the customer’s location and chosen shipping method.
There’s still a concern in the form of consistent delays that happen seasonally or due to uncommon reasons such as weather or road closures. In such cases, you can explicitly let your customer know that there might be delays with their order – on your website and checkout page.
2) Over-communicate delivery information :
Despite estimated delivery dates and warnings, WISMO inquiries can still be frequent at the hands of customers whose packages are particularly facing issues. These stem from the lack of communication regarding order status information.
In this case, you can make use of a delivery experience management software that takes all possible delays and discrepancies. You can proactively share this information to keep your customers informed at all times and avoid giving them unpleasant surprises.
Here’s how you can make this work. Send email or SMS notifications as the order progressively updates — from “shipped” to “out for delivery” and “delivered” or delivery exceptions. Remember, it’s always better if any kind of updates (be it good or bad) come from your end rather than customers reaching out to them.
This way, there’s a possibility that the customer’s anxiety and resulting frustration will be mitigated by your efforts to resolve their issues.
Apart from shipping notifications, you can also share order information with customers via self-serve, ‘branded’ tracking pages.
3) Provide self-serve, real-time order tracking :
Offering a branded tracking page that allows customers to track their orders whenever they want from your website rather than the carrier’s tracking page (that is dull and off-brand).
By redirecting your customers to tracking pages that are hosted in your domain, you have an opportunity to reinforce your brand identity and stay on the top of customers’ minds while keeping them engaged with order tracking information.
Additionally, they provide opportunities to offer additional promotions or product recommendations, thereby serving both as a convenience for your customers and a marketing opportunity for your brand.
Also, these branded tracking experiences can be extended to shipping notifications as a way to capitalize their high open rates to double your chances at driving repeat sales.
4) Optimize Your FAQ section and chatbots to deal with WISMO inquiries
Alongside estimated delivery dates and alerts on website/app floaters, many WISMO inquiries can be preemptively resolved by offering a comprehensive FAQ section and help center.
The section can include questions related to order tracking, delivery times, and what to do if a package is delayed. This way, customers can find the answers themselves and are less likely to reach out to your support team. You just have to ensure that this content is easy to find on your website.
You can also extend your efforts at offering proactive customer support by offering multiple support channels like chatbots. This AI-powered chatbot can instantly answer common questions like WISMO and provide tracking information. This reduces the workload on your customer service team without the need for human intervention.
If the inquiry is more complex or if the customer requires additional information, you can also include the provision to easily escalate the conversation to a live agent.
5) WISMO done, WISMR next
Returns often lead to a second wave of inquiries under WISMR or Where is my return, with customers asking about the status of their return, exchange, or refund.
You don’t have to do anything particular here, simply replicate the order tracking initiatives with a seamless returns process.
For instance, include easy-to-follow return instructions with the shipment and on your website. Provide real-time updates on the return status just as you would for the initial shipment. Then, follow up with proactive return notifications to notify customers once their return has been initiated, processed, or their refund issued.
Handling WISMO questions proactively makes things easy. To make things even easier, you can make use of a post-purchase tool like LateShipment.com.
How top brands leverage LateShipment.com to reduce/avoid WISMO calls and cut down on operational costs
In the context of WISMO, LateShipment.com provides your customers with a self-serve order tracking system and sends out regular delivery notifications apart from giving them a real-time delivery estimate but they still choose to reach out to your customer support regarding the whereabouts of their order.
With LateShipment.com’s Delivery Experience Management (DEM) platform, you can effortlessly :
- Receive Predictive Delay Alerts – Pay attention to daily deliveries with predictive delay alerts and more on a purpose-built dashboard for support reps.
- Resolve Issues Proactively – Proactively communicate with customers to prevent them from having bad experiences due to delivery failures.
- Send out Delivery Status Notifications – Send custom or automated delivery status notifications to your customers for traditional events such as “shipped”, “attempted”, “delivered” and exceptions such as “in transit with delays”, “failed deliveries”, etc.
- Provide Branded Order Tracking – Build fully-customizable order tracking pages for your customers to improve brand recall and sales.
And so much more…
With DEM, you can resolve WISMO as a pain point for both customers yourself. By implementing proactive communication, offering branded tracking, and optimizing customer support, merchants can significantly reduce these inquiries, enhance the customer experience, and improve operational efficiency (and profits).
In short, resolving WISMO is not only a smart operational move but a marketing strategy that builds trust, increases customer retention, and acts as a competitive differentiator for your brand.
