Order support, part of DispatchThread
“Where is my order?”, answered on WhatsApp
Customers message your WhatsApp number. An assistant reads the order, the shipment, the tracking and any refund, checks it is talking to the right person first, and answers in your voice from your written policies. When a person is needed, it says so and a person takes over.
Shown on a demonstration shop with invented customers, orders and stock.
What it answers
- Orders
- Status, what was in it, when it was despatched and the tracking, from BigCommerce and Royal Mail Click and Drop. Refunds, including the partial ones. A returning customer gets the current position, not a copy from earlier.
- Returns
- A return number leads to its order, and the reply uses the returns portal’s own wording, so the customer hears the same thing on both.
- Your shop
- Opening hours, delivery prices, what you stock for whom, size guides, the returns policy. All of it from a knowledge base you can read and change, with the replies written by an AI model that has been told what it may and may not say.
What it will not do
- Talk about an order to a stranger
- Before anything is said about an order, the customer proves it is theirs with the postcode or the email on it. Two wrong answers and that order is locked for an hour.
- Pretend to be a person
- It says what it is. When somebody asks for a human, or is upset, or the question is one it should not answer, it hands over and goes quiet.
- Wander
- An unrelated question gets a polite no. A message from someone who bought from a different company is told so, plainly, and sent to that company.
For your staff
- An inbox
- Open chats with the ones needing attention first, a summary of the long ones, the photographs and PDFs people send, and search across everything including the archive.
- Taking over
- Reply yourself and the assistant stays quiet for a day. Pause it on a chat for as long as you like. A template message re-opens a chat after WhatsApp’s own window has closed.
- A desktop app
- One window with the support inbox, the returns dashboard and the packing bench as tabs, with unread counts on the tray icon.
- Tidied up
- Chats are archived after a week’s silence and deleted three months later, attachments included.
What setting it up involves
The honest part. It answers from what you have written down, so most of the work is writing it down.
Through Twilio, which is where the messages arrive and leave. We set it up with you.
Delivery, returns, cancellations, what to say about a late parcel. The assistant is only as right as this is, and every reply it gets wrong becomes a line in it.
It takes a third of the load, not all of it. The inbox needs a person in it during the hours you promise.
Register your interest
Tell us which modules you are waiting for and we will write to you when they open, and before that if we want to show you something. Nothing is stored on this website: it goes to our inbox, and we reply as people.
- Today
- Despatch is live and free for fifty orders a month. Start free.
- Soon
- Stock control, delivery dates, returns and order support are running in our own shops and being made ready for yours.
- First
- The people on this list hear first, and some of them get to try things before anyone else.