According to DispatchTrack’s research, 90% of customers want the ability to track their orders. It’s one of the biggest factors that go into a great customer experience, and customer experience is one of the strongest factors in driving repeat business and a high NPS. Customers are much less likely to order from the same business multiple times if they don’t have their customer experience dialed in.
The value of keeping customers looped in over the course of the delivery journey is serious—but there are costs to think about as well. An enterprise-sized delivery organization can expend a huge number of resources answering the same question over and over: Where is my order (WISMO)?
But the continued march of technology in the logistics world has a lot of operators asking an important question—can you use AI for WISMO?
The simple answer is: yes, you can use AI for WISMO, and you probably should. Customers want instant answers to their questions, and your team wants to focus on higher-value tasks than answering the same repetitive questions over and over again—which makes automating the answer to “where’s to my order” inquiries a huge win-win. It saves time for your team and it keeps your customers informed around the clock.
That’s not to say that there are absolutely no pitfalls to be wary of. Studies have shown that AI agents still fail at a high rate, and the level of service you offer to customers is something that’s too sensitive to leave up to chance. You need to implement your AI agent in such a way that you can feel confident in the results.
In other words, you want to be sure that your AI agent isn’t going to provide incorrect information or take on the task of answering questions that it’s not capable of. That means you need to properly scope your agent, seamlessly embed it into your two-way customer communications flow, and clearly codify the handoff from the AI to a human for instances where the customer is asking a more complex question or needs dedicated help.
If you can get this right, you can significantly reduce the volume of inbound calls and messages that your team has to respond to on a daily basis. You’ll save time and money while getting customers faster answers to questions about their orders.
Here, partnering with the right technology vendor goes a long way.
Earlier this year, we launched DT Agent, our AI-powered customer engagement agent for smarter delivery management. It sits atop your two-way customer messaging capabilities to act as a first line of defense for simple customer inquiries. It’s AI for WISMO and so much more.
Here’s what DT Agent enables delivery organization to do:
Unlike some AI solutions in logistics, these benefits aren’t hypothetical. We’ve deployed this as part of our larger delivery management platform for numerous logistics operators at this point, and they’ve all seen serious decreases in inbound customer calls and average response time to customers.
Jetson TV & Appliance was able to integrate DT Agent in a matter of days. Customers began receiving accurate ETAs and live updates from day 1, and the company was able to eliminate a huge number of manual status calls—instantly making life easier for their support teams.
Cesar Bermudez, owner of CBC Transport, had this to say about DT Agent: “The courtesy and tone is great, the responses are clear, and it even adds notes directly to the driver. That eliminates miscommunication and keeps everyone aligned,” noting that it had enabled the team to handle 70% of customer inquiries automatically.
1915 South saw similar results: “People don’t just expect fast answers—they expect them on their phones, in real time, without friction. That’s what DT Agent gives us.”said Heather Smith, Director of Customer Care
The key to the success of DT Agent (or any other AI-powered customer support agent) comes down to successfully integrating it into your larger logistics operations. Customer experience is intimately tied up with route execution, driver management, and delivery tracking. Sure, you can use AI for WISMO calls, but some of the major drivers of WISMO calls are things like late deliveries and poor communication before the delivery—all of which you can tackle head on.
That’s why one of the most important things you can do when you’re adopting AI for WISMO is to take a step back and look at the holistic delivery management context you’re integrating it into. Are your drivers running on time 98% of the time? Do customers get proactive communications about their deliveries over the course of the journey? Do you and your customers have visibility into deliveries in real time?
The more you’re able to do to ensure that the answers to those questions are an emphatic yes, the more effective your AI agent will be. That means leveraging a last mile logistics platform that can bring together route planning and execution, provide wraparound customer delivery experience, and power visibility that goes well beyond the last mile.
This kind of platform deployment gives you more options for using AI beyond WISMO calls as well. For instance, you can leverage AI to improve the quality of your delivery routes (by analyzing huge caches of data from previous deliveries), resulting in better ETAs and increased route efficiency.
At the same time, you can also incorporate AI into your driver management toolkit. This might take the form of an AI-powered location briefing read out to the driver before each stop on a route to help them navigate parking, access, and customer requests. As it happens, DispatchTrack offers just that in the form of our industry-first Driver AI product.
In a perfect world, your capabilities would ensure visibility with the first and middle mile as well—not only for the sake of smoothing out your planning, but of setting customer expectations more effectively across the board. Combine what we’re talking about here with leveraging AI for WISMO, and you can significantly boost efficiency across your teams while increasing customer satisfaction.
AI for WISMO isn’t a hypothetical anymore. It’s a technology that’s already having a tangible impact on delivery organizations, helping them to speed up responses to customers, improve visibility, and ultimately save time and effort for their teams. Taken together with a larger suite of intelligent logistics capabilities, this technology can be transformative.
Interested in learning more about AI for WISMO (or, for that matter, AI for any part of the delivery management journey)? Get in touch with us today—we’d love to find some time to walk you through the ways that our AI-powered tools can save you time and money.