Tool
One order by message, end to end
How many orders come in a month, how many minutes each one takes to get confirmed, what an hour of the person entering them costs, what share goes wrong and what that error costs. Below, the same order with an agent: where it goes, what it does at each step and what stays with a person.
One order by message, end to end
- the agent does it
- a person does it
- always a person
the steps of the order
- Read the order and understand itWhatsApp
Reads the message with its abbreviations, missing units and the usual inside it, and turns it into product lines and quantities.
- Identify the accountCustomers
Resolves which account the number writing belongs to, which is not always the contact stored in the system.
- Resolve the price for that accountPricing
Finds the applicable list, applies volume discounts across the whole order and uses the rate in force, not last year's.
- Check stock and dateStock
Queries real availability and answers when it can ship, instead of promising and telling them later.
- Check available creditERP
Looks at the balance and the account's status before confirming, which is the control that gets skipped today when things are busy.
- Write the order into the systemERP
Enters the order through the same path as every other order, with the same validations, and returns the confirmation to the chat.
- Authorize a price exceptionPricing
When the price the rule produces is not the one worth offering, a person decides. The agent arrives with everything else resolved.
Today that is 70 hours a month and 12 orders going out with an error. Between the time and the corrections, USD 1,320 a month.
With the agent holding 6 of the 6 steps, 4 hours and USD 66 are left.
The difference is USD 1,254 a month, USD 15,048 a year.
And 36% of that difference is not time: it is the credit notes, the wrongly loaded trucks and the sales to overdue accounts that stop happening.
Of what a person still does, the heaviest step is: Authorize a price exception.
You set all five numbers. How the minutes split across steps is ours, taken from how it gets done by hand. The modelling assumption: an error born of copying a figure from one screen to another falls in the same proportion as that copying stops being manual.
This object is the interactive half of an article: A WhatsApp order touches five systems before it can be confirmed