Meta-track assists customer service order status enquiries

In November 2008, Andrew Selby and Luke Townsend founded Seriouslystores.com and identified six niche areas of the marketplace to target. They then launched six transactional websites; Seriouslysonic.com, Seriouslyphones.com, Seriouslygroomed.com, Seriouslydriven.com, Seriouslywired.com and Seriouslynuts.com. Each site has its own dedicated customer service teams, through which consumers are able to experience the most intuitive, innovative and helpful purchasing experience possible. Seriouslystores.com is rapidly establishing itself as the UK’s preferred destination for online shopping.

The Challenge

Seriouslystores.com was using an order management system provided by ChannelAdvisor (an eCommerce platform provider). Each order was printed and split between national and international deliveries. Delivery services and carriers were decided manually with the information being input into each carrier management system separately. Along with the usual disadvantages; impact on time and resources, laborious and being open to error, one of the main issues that arose was tracking. In order for Seriouslystores.com to resolve tracking enquiries they would go into each individual order to check the consignment details which they would pass on to the customer, who would then have to check the carrier’s site themselves. Not only does this method put additional pressure on resources their customer service promise suffered as a result.

The Solution

With ChannelAdvisor in place Seriouslystores.com wanted to introduce a system that would also manage the delivery aspect of their operation. As MetaPack are fully integrated with ChannelAdvisor, Seriouslystores.com decided to implement the solution seeing the automation it would provide and how much time and resource it would save rather than realising the immediate cost benefits. With MetaPack in place information is now passed automatically and seamlessly between the two systems allocating goods to a carrier based on pre-specified criteria. Just from correct carrier allocation alone, Seriouslystores.com have seen a cost saving of 40%. Director, Andrew Selby says “We’re now enjoying the benefits of a fully automated despatch process, and as a result we’ve been able to increase our output by 97% and have saved at least two hours a day since implementing MetaPack. It’s a massively scalable solution where we no longer have to worry about cut off times”. In the final step of the process the manifest is sent directly to the carriers and orders are updated in ChannelAdvisor with an email and order number sent to the consumer. Seriouslystores.com has also introduced one of MetaPack’s latest functionalities, Meta-Track. This new service allows MetaPack customers to use a ‘skin’ on their website branded with their own details, which is linked MetaPack’s tracking and historical data. This allows Seriouslystores.com customers to track their consignments, with their order numbers irrelevant of which carrier despatched. The introduction of Meta-Track has reduced the ‘WISMO’ (where is my order calls) by 52% and has allowed Seriouslystores.com to provide a consistently high and professional level of customer service. Andrew adds “we’ve received positive feedback on the overall shopping experience from purchase to delivery and we believe that MetaPack have been instrumental in that.”

"We're very pleased with the advancements that MetaPack are making, particularly Meta-Track. It has been a huge advantage to our business and has enabled us to provide a professional and consistently high level of customer service. "

Andrew Selby, Director