WISMO Meaning: How to Dramatically Reduce WISMO Calls

“Where is my order?” It’s the question that every customer service rep dreads getting—because it means that either the customer doesn’t have the information they need, or the delivery is already running way behind schedule, or both. It’s even worse if the answer isn’t readily available, or is littered with caveats like “it depends on how long the driver is on site at the next stop.”

Sometimes, these calls won’t even make it to the customer service team. Instead, the customer will go straight to the sales rep that they ordered from—meaning that they’re even less likely to have the information on hand.

The result of a high volume of WISMO calls, ultimately, is that a huge amount of your staff’s time gets eaten up on the phone with customers, and your customer satisfaction drops precipitously because people feel like they have to pick up the phone (increasingly a last resort for just about everyone) just to get the information they need.

So how can delivery organizations turn the situation around and save their team time and their customers frustration?

WISMO Meaning: Where Is My Order?

Let’s back up a step and define our terms. For the uninitiated, WISMO stands for “Where is my order?” WISMO calls are exactly what they sound like, inbound phone calls from customers who want to know where their orders are, more importantly, when they’ll arrive at the delivery site.

Most of the time, a WISMO call is a sign that one of two things have wrong:

1. The customer never received (or never noticed) updated information on when the order was scheduled for.
2. The order’s scheduled delivery window has come and gone and the customer hasn’t received an update.

Even when it’s not one of these two reasons, WISMO calls can be time consuming and frustrating for your team. When you start to scale your orders up, WISMO calls can become even more of a nuisance, and handling them one at a time can get expensive.

5 Steps to Reduce WISMO Calls to Virtually Zero

Luckily, you don’t have to put yourself in a position to manage tons of WISMO calls each day. If you take a few steps, you can cut them down by an eye-popping percentage:

1. Provide frequent, relevant, automated updates to customers: Let’s start with the first cause of WISMO calls—lack of key delivery information. This one seems straightforward to solve, and it basically is. Every time a customer order is scheduled for delivery, they should receive a confirmation email or text with the schedule information. They should receive additional notifications before and after the order is routed, with a prospective ETA and delivery window included in the latter. Then a reminder before the delivery, an alert when the driver starts their route, and a notification when their stop is next—all with updated ETA information. It might seem like overkill—and you can obviously tailor the cadence to your audience—but it’s better to overcommunicate than leave your customers wondering.
2. Enable real-time delivery tracking: Fun fact—the average retail customer, given the ability, will check live location data for their delivery truck 2.5 times. That should give you a sense of the extent to which customers really appreciate the ability to track their deliveries in real-time, and also how much grief live delivery tracking can save you. If a customer can get instant answers to their queries without calling your team, they’re more than happy to do so—all it takes is a little visibility so they can track deliveries from their own devices.
3. Optimize your routes for on-time deliveries: Okay, what about the second reason for WISMO calls, i.e. the delivery failing to materialize at the correct time? For that, your best bet is to improve your delivery route optimization. This means ditching manual processes and legacy solutions, and instead prioritizing AI-powered route optimization capabilities. AI and machine learning are actually pretty crucial here, because they’re the best way to analyze huge quantities of delivery information and translate them into accurate delivery ETAs. When your ETAs are 98% accurate or better, customers don’t need to call in wondering why the truck hasn’t shown up yet.
4. Leverage two-way communications: Part of the issue with WISMO calls is the lack of customer visibility and/or delivery predictability, but part of the problem is the phone calls themselves. Phone calls don’t scale. That means that your best bet is to find an alternative means by which your customers can reach out to you. Two-way chat functionality is your best bet here. By giving customers the ability to contact your team just by replying to system-generated text messages, you can put your customer support staff in a position to answer questions quickly and easily via chat, without having to spend time on the phone.
5. Enable self-scheduling (if applicable): This one won’t apply to everyone, but for businesses where customers are given options for scheduling their own deliveries, it’s a best practice to automate this. Here, you might send out a text with a link to a widget where the customer can choose from a few different delivery scheduling options—all dynamically generated based on your capacity. This saves you phone time on the scheduling end, and it also makes it less likely that the customer will be out of the loop when it comes to their delivery schedule.

Taken together, these five steps can help you significantly reduce WISMO calls, reducing the burden on your teams and ultimately saving money—to say nothing of improving customer satisfaction.

Can You Use AI for WISMO?

In the last section, we mentioned two-way communication as a big part of staying connected with your customers without significant phone time. But advances in technology can actually take the value of that functionality even further via the use of AI.

For a long time it may have seemed like the use cases for AI in last mile logistics were overhyped—after all, autonomous vehicles still can’t deliver and install dishwashers. But now we’ve reached the point where generative AI (the kind you see in ChatGPT and other large language models) can reliably respond to simple customer inquiries.

This means that modern delivery businesses can implement an AI-powered agent within their two-way communications flow to provide customers with a 24/7, always-on customer support line. Even a relatively straightforward deployment will be able to:

• Let customers know when their deliveries are scheduled for
• Provide customer order details (e.g. quantities and delivery addresses)
• Offer updated delivery ETAs
• Escalate to a human customer service agent if needed.

Even before we start to think about other use cases—think letting customers reschedule deliveries or update their orders—this has the potential to be a huge time and cost saver for your teams. Reducing phone time via the use of two-way messaging is a great first step, but this takes that even further, requiring no manual effort at all for the front line of customer inquiries.

This isn’t the end of the story for AI in customer experience by any means. In addition to powering smarter route optimization and increased on-time delivery performance, AI also has the ability to empower drivers to provide better service—and there will certainly be more developments down the road.

Conclusion: Managing WISMO Calls More Efficiently

The key to taking advantage of technological improvements like the ones we sketched out above (and the ones that are still coming down the pike) is to future-proof your technology stack. What does that look like in practice? It looks like adopting and integrating last mile delivery software that’s built to scale and evolve while giving you the capabilities you need for the full journey.

This can help you reduce WISMO calls to virtually zero right off the bat—and you can even start to leverage AI for WISMO—but the impacts will be even greater than that over time. Ultimately, the right software (and the right software partner) can set you up for continuous improvement when it comes to managing customer experience in an efficient way.