Reduced ETA-related support tickets by 90% by adding delivery dates to ordering flow.

Background

Firstbase supplies companies with workplace equipment (e.g., laptops, ergonomic chairs and desks, etc.) for employees and offers a web platform for company admins to manage their fleet of equipment as well as for employees to order from.

At the time, admins would pre-select items that their employees had the ability to choose for their remote-work set up.

Challenge

COVID-19 caused production and shipping delays for workplace equipment that impacted customer orders.

We saw explosive demand and bottlenecks in the supply chain for items we didn’t have in our warehouses. The majority of equipment we housed were laptops but this shifted as we added customers with different needs. The delays impacted our newest and biggest customer at the time, Spotify.

Data from Zendesk and order records indicated that the delayed items were ergonomic furniture from a particular vendor. Our team was struggling to keep up with support tickets, which was leading to a poor customer experience.

Our team was working with the vendor for a long-term solution, but in the meantime, we needed to manage customer expectations and communicate backordered items.

Empowering employees to make informed decisions.

In my stakeholder interview with our Ops team, I saw that they were tracking average lead times to respond to customers with estimates. So our team had an idea of how long it typically takes these items to ship to employees. Knowing we had this data, I proposed leveraging these estimates in the product when employees are making their selections.

I thought this would proactively handle the issue and would allow employees to weigh delivery times for items when they’re making a decision.

Managing edge-cases in existing flow.

One hiccup we identified was that lead times depended on the shipping location. A chair shipped to the EU was arriving about a week before those shipped to North America. Spotify has a global workforce so we needed to display dynamic shipping data depending on the employee’s location.

Typically, employee information is pre-set in the system. This was by design so the employee experience had as little friction as possible. There were rare instances where that wasn’t the case.  For those cases, I adjusted the flow to have the employee add their address as a mini-onboarding step before showing the order flow with the correct delivery estimates.

Leveraged customer feedback to balance customer needs and team constraints.

I wanted to provide an estimated delivery date but our operations team didn’t want to over promise. They had more certainty around shipping dates than delivery dates. I proposed testing the concept with customers to assess clarity and expectations.

Customers unanimously wanted to know when they would receive the item and didn’t want to have to do the math themselves. I shared this feedback with the team and offered a compromise to provide a date range to offer some flexibility, which is what we landed on.