When silence isn’t golden: 6 tips for reducing WISMO Surely you’ve heard about WISMO? This acronym maybe hasn’t quite made its way into every retailer’s vocabulary yet, but it is something that all online shops have to deal with on a daily basis, and it’s becoming more and more popular in the world of ecommerce due to a rapid increase in customer expectations.
Contributor: Katharine Biggs, Content & Marketing Manager at parcelLab
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WISMO (where is my order?) enquiries are one of the biggest pain points for retailers who sell online and the most frequently received query for most. It’s a term most retailers never want their customers to think of. Sadly, order queries are a serious issue in ecommerce. Not only do they cost the retailer between £2 to £5 per call, but WISMO can also cause customers to avoid shopping from a retailer again. These calls are a particular problem during peak periods such as Black Friday and Christmas, and the current pandemic has spurred on another spike. They can account for between 70-80% of all customer service calls during these times due to disruption to usual services. This influx is especially problematic when a vast majority of agents are working from home and therefore phones are offline. Reduced work forces and relying on email or social media to answer WISMO queries can leave many unhappy customers with unanswered questions. Shopping online can be an emotional journey for the customer. Whether it’s a new dress for the weekend, a summer wardrobe update now that the sun has come out, a gift for a loved one or medicine that needs replenishing on time; buyers want to know exactly where their order is and when it will arrive. They want to be informed proactively about any delays or deviations from the original promised delivery date.
Unfortunately, 93% of retailers stop communicating with their customers after the dispatch confirmation (Source: parcelLab, UK E-Commerce Shipping Study 2020: Fashion Edition). The remainder instead rely on either the carrier to communicate with the customer during delivery or worse still, the customer receives no updates at all. Carriers often barely communicate with customers during delivery, leaving them in the dark about the status of their order. In addition, as found in our shipping study, some carrier communication even fails to show who the order is from. And for those buyers who have made multiple orders from different retailers at a time, this can cause major problems and is the source of many WISMO enquiries. Retailers can avoid this happening by proactively communicating with their customers during delivery, rather than relying on the carrier to do so. WISMO calls can be very frustrating for both the customer service agent and the customer themselves. So instead of customers constantly asking ‘where is my order?’ and clogging up customer service lines – which should be freed up for other customer service agents to answer more critical issues – retailers should instead be investing in providing an excellent customer experience by answering WISMO updates before they even have to ask.
