A customer's return email: who looks up the order?

Tuesday morning, ten past nine. There is an email in the webshop inbox: "My parcel is not what I expected, I want to send it back." No order number, no name you recognise right away, just a sender with a private address. You know what comes next. Search by email address, hope the customer ordered with the same address, pull up the shipment, check whether the return period is still running.

This is not a rare case. Anyone who runs a webshop knows it: every return starts with a puzzle that has nothing to do with customer service.

What actually happens in a return

Take the email apart and you are left with four actions.

1. Find the order that belongs to the customer.
2. Work out when it was delivered, and so whether the return period is still running.
3. Write a reply with the return instructions, or with a question if the order cannot be found.
4. Decide whether the money goes back, and when.

The first three are looking things up and writing them down. They take time, but there is nothing to decide. The fourth is a decision about money, and that belongs to a person. So most of the work sits in the part that needs no judgement.

What an agent takes over

The Customer Service role from the catalogue reads the incoming email, determines what kind of request it is and drafts a reply. If you sell through bol, the connection can look up your orders, shipments and returns. That way the agent finds the order that belongs to the email address, sees the delivery date and knows whether the period is still running. For a connection you need the Client ID and the secret of your Retailer API credentials.

What the agent does not do: refund money, reject a return, or send anything without you having seen it. That stays with you.

Why you approve an outcome and not an intention

With a lot of automation you see an intention in advance: "I am going to handle return requests." There is little you can do with that. You only find out what happened once the customer has already received a reply.

At Stilops, a test run on a real email comes first. You then see which order the agent chose, on what grounds, and which reply the customer would receive. If there is a mistake, for example an order from the same customer from last month instead of the one from last week, you see it at that moment, while nothing has been sent yet. Only when the outcome is right do you approve.

This is what an approval card looks like in practice. Return request order 48213: order and shipment looked up, reply to the customer prepared, refund waiting for your approval. Three lines, and you decide on the last one.

What it saves

A worked example, not a measurement. Suppose your webshop gets twenty return requests a week and each request takes five minutes of searching, checking and typing a reply. That is a hundred minutes a week, well over an hour and a half. If an agent takes over the searching and the drafting and you still spend a minute checking each request, you keep about an hour a week. Over a year that is more than fifty hours that now disappear into your inbox.

If in a busy period, around Black Friday or after the holidays, you get fifty returns a week, the calculation scales with it. The refunds themselves remain manual work: that is deliberate, because it is your money at stake.

The Customer Service role costs 229 euros per month excluding VAT, with 100 tasks included. An extra task costs 2.50 euros. For each task you can see in Stilops what it cost, so you can check for yourself whether the numbers work for your shop.

What you do yourself

Not much, and that is the idea. Start by running along for a week in test run. The agent reads the return emails as they arrive and prepares, for each one, what it would do. Nothing is sent and nothing is refunded. At the end of the week you compare its proposals with what you would have done yourself.

If you see that it almost always finds the right order and writes a reply you would have sent yourself, you switch on approval for the standard cases. If it keeps making the same mistake, for example with customers who ordered with a different email address than the one they use now, you know it before a customer is affected.

Tuesday morning, ten past nine. The same email, still without an order number. Only now there is a card ready with the order, the shipment and a reply. You read three lines and press approve, or not.