20 hours a week back on a customer support inbox

The problem

A busy support inbox takes 120 emails a day. Order questions, wholesale enquiries, delivery chasers, receipts, newsletters, and about 45 that the store can answer straight out of its own policy: returns, repairs, warranty, and what the rules actually are.

They all land in the same list, and they all look the same. Before anyone can answer one, somebody has to open all 120 to find out which is which.

Before

Open an email. Read it. Decide whether it is a returns question, a repair, a warranty claim, or something nobody here can settle. Close it. Open the next one. 120 times a day.

That is an hour gone before a single reply is written.

Then the 45 that can be answered. Look up the order. Check the purchase date against the warranty window. Work out what the policy says about a 40 day old return, or find the person who knows. Then write it. About 5 minutes each when nothing is unusual, which is nearly 4 hours.

And the policy lives in people's heads rather than in the replies. Two people answer the same warranty question two different ways, and neither of them is wrong on purpose.

Every day. 120 emails. An hour of sorting before a single reply goes out.

Before

1. Open each of 120 emails
2. Work out which are returns, repairs, warranty or policy
3. Look up the order and the purchase date
4. Check the policy, or find the person who knows it
5. Write the reply from scratch
6. Repeat, 45 times

About 5 hours a day

Now

1. Open the drafts folder
2. Read the reply and send it

About 35 minutes a day

Now

The inbox is checked every 15 minutes.

Receipts, notifications and no-reply mail are dropped first, before anything else looks at them. What is left gets read and put in one of two piles: a question the store's own policy can answer, or a question it cannot.

The first pile gets a draft. Not a generic paragraph about returns in general, but this store's answer, written out of this store's policy document: the real return window, what the warranty actually covers, what happens to a repair, how long a refund takes.

The second pile is labelled Needs Human and left alone. No draft, no guess.

Then it checks itself a second time, and that is the part that matters. If a draft gets written but the policy did not really cover the question, that email is labelled Needs Human too and the draft is held back. It would rather hand a question over than answer it confidently and wrongly.

And nothing is sent. Every draft sits in the drafts folder waiting for a person to read it and press send. The job is to have the reply already written, not to decide it is right.

What changed

About 4 hours a day that would go somewhere else. The daily pass over the inbox would be roughly 35 minutes of reading drafts and sending them.

Valued at a $10 an hour cost of staff time, 20 hours a week is roughly $10,000 a year, or about 130 working days.

45 of the 120 would already be answered before anyone opens the inbox, and answered the same way every time, because every one of those replies comes out of the same policy document.

And one quieter change. An email nobody can answer from policy, and an email nobody has got to yet, would stop looking the same in the list. Today they are identical, which is why the awkward ones sit longest.