Question handling
Where is my order, and the answer that is not a lookup
This is the highest volume question in retail support and the clearest example of a limit worth being honest about. An assistant answering from your documents cannot see an order, a warehouse or a courier scan. What it can do is answer the question underneath, which is usually whether the order is late, and get the ones that are into the right hands with the reference already attached.
What they are really asking
Is my order late, and if it is, is anybody going to do something about it.
- where is my order
- has my order shipped yet
- when will it arrive
- my tracking hasnt updated in days
- i havent had a dispatch email
- can you check my order for me
- its been a week and nothing
- what does out for delivery mean
- can i change the delivery address
- my order says delivered but its not here
The material that answers it
An assistant is only as good as the document behind it, and for this question the document usually exists but is written in the wrong shape. What each one has to contain to be answerable:
| Your dispatch timeline, separated from your delivery timeline | How long you take to pick and pack, in working days, and how long the carrier then takes. These are two different numbers and customers add them together wrongly in both directions. State them separately and state which days count. |
|---|---|
| What each tracking status actually means | Label created, accepted, in transit, at the delivery depot, out for delivery, attempted, held. Carriers use these words inconsistently and customers read them literally. A glossary in your own words is one of the most reused documents in this whole cluster. |
| When an order counts as late | The point at which you want to hear about it, stated as a rule. Before that point the honest answer is that it is inside the normal window; after it, the message should reach a person. Without this line the assistant has no way to tell a chase from a genuine problem. |
| Where the customer can look themselves | The tracking page, the account area, the dispatch email and what it is called in an inbox. A meaningful share of these messages are from people who cannot find an email they already have. |
| What the team needs to investigate one | Order reference, the email used at checkout, the delivery postcode. Publishing the list means the handover arrives complete instead of starting with a request for details. |
How to handle it
Say what it cannot see, in the first sentence
The assistant has no access to your order system, and unless you separately connect a data source it never will. It should say so immediately rather than producing a general reply that reads as a checked one.
This is not a weak opening. Somebody who is told plainly that this needs the team, and is then given the fastest route to them, is better served than somebody who receives a friendly paragraph and realises three messages later that nothing was looked up.
Answer the question underneath, which is about lateness
Most people asking where their order is are trying to work out whether waiting is normal. That is answerable from your own timelines: orders placed on these days dispatch by then, delivery takes this long after dispatch, weekends and public holidays do or do not count.
Give them that arithmetic and a large share of these conversations end there, satisfied, without anybody at your business touching them.
Translate the status word they are staring at
In transit for three days, attempted delivery when nobody knocked, delivered when nothing arrived. Each of these has a normal explanation and a real one, and knowing which is which changes what the customer should do next.
This is genuinely useful material and almost nobody publishes it. It is also entirely safe, because it describes what a word means rather than what is happening to one parcel.
Hand over with the reference already collected
When the answer is that somebody has to look, the assistant offers the contact form and takes a name, an email and a message. Prompt for the order reference and the delivery postcode in the same breath.
A handover that arrives with a reference is resolved in one reply. One that arrives as where is my order costs two extra exchanges, which is most of the cost of handling it at all.
When it stops being an answer
Anything past the window you published
Once an order is outside your own stated timeline the assistant should stop explaining timelines. Repeating a delivery estimate to somebody it has already failed reads as being managed, and it converts a patient customer into an angry one.
Marked delivered but not received
This has a claim window attached and often needs the carrier contacted within a set period. It also has a security dimension: parcels left in unsafe places, taken by somebody else, signed for by a neighbour. It needs a person quickly, and the assistant should say so rather than suggesting the customer wait another day.
Any change to an order in flight
Address changes, cancellations, adding an item, redirecting to a pickup point. The assistant does not write into any system and cannot make any of these happen. It should explain whether the change is possible in principle, then hand over immediately, because the window for most of them is short.
How this one goes wrong
The assistant that sounded like it looked something up
The damaging reply here is not a refusal, it is a confident summary. Your order is on its way and should arrive shortly, assembled from a shipping page, reads exactly like a system response. The customer stops chasing, waits, and discovers days later that nobody ever checked.
You have then lost the thing this question actually turns on, which is time. A parcel reported late on day three can still be traced; one reported on day ten often cannot, and by then the customer has escalated to their card issuer instead. Configure this intent to be honest about the limit and fast about the handover, and the volume it removes comes from the timeline questions rather than from pretending.
The same question, trade by trade
The pattern above holds everywhere. The wording, the escalation line and the material behind it do not, so there is a page per trade.
- For a opticianA single vision lens and a complex varifocal come back on different timescales. What to say when nothing can be looked up.
- For a pharmacyA repeat has to be signed by a prescriber and arrive electronically before a pharmacy can start. Explaining the sequence answers most of these.
- For a mortgage brokerThe most asked question on a broker's site is the one with no visible answer. Publish what each stage waits on instead of a status.
- For a recruitment agencyThe most asked question a consultancy gets and the one it cannot answer in a widget. What to say instead so the candidate stops chasing.
- For a marketing agencyThe article, the creative, the report. Usually the answer is that it is sitting with the client, which is the hardest thing to say.
- For a online storeThe one question a hosted assistant cannot answer. How to say so and still move the customer forward instead of stalling them.
- For a fashion retailerClothing orders split by line and by drop. A despatch email covers one garment, and a line can leave an order after the money was taken.
- For a furniture retailerThere is no tracking number for eleven weeks. Status here is a production stage, a container month and a booking call the shop makes.
- For a electronics retailerA release date belongs to the maker. What a status line means when an order is waiting on stock the retailer has not received yet.
- For a garden centreBare root stock is not late, it is not lifted yet. Special orders and made up baskets have no status record to read anywhere.
- For a bike shopA bike arriving is not a bike being ready. Allocation seasons, the workshop build queue, and the lead time that became a promise.
- For a hotelA guest waiting on a tray or a shirt back by six needs the kitchen or housekeeping, not a chat window that can see neither.
- For a online courseThere is nothing to ship, so this is a missing welcome email. The reasons it did not arrive, in the order they turn out to be true.
- For a removals companyA part load shares a vehicle and delivers in a window of days. Goods in store sit in sealed containers. Neither is trackable here.
- For a car dealershipTwo very different waits behind one question: a build slot the dealership does not control, and a used car sitting in the workshop before handover.
Questions
- Can it look up an order if we give it access?
- Not on its own. It answers from documents you index and a crawl of your site. Live order data would require you to separately connect a source that holds it, and until you have, the assistant should be explicit that it cannot check anything.
- Then what is the point of it on a retail site?
- The timeline questions, the status glossary and the where do I look questions are a large part of this volume and none of them need a lookup. The rest arrives at your team as a complete handover rather than as three exchanges collecting an order number.
- How do we stop it implying it checked?
- Raise the caution level so it refuses rather than reaching for a loosely related shipping page, and write the fallback message for this case specifically: it cannot see orders, here is what usually applies, here is how to reach the team. The fallback is your wording, so it says exactly what you want it to.
- What should we index first?
- The dispatch and delivery timelines with the working day rule spelled out, then the status glossary. Those two documents answer the majority of these messages and neither of them exists on most retail sites.
Keep reading
- Handling shipping and deliveryCut-off times, zones, timescales, public holidays and duties on international orders. The material exists on most sites, it is just buried.
- Handling returns and exchangesWindow, condition, who pays postage, exclusions. Faulty and unwanted are two different processes with two different sets of rights.
- Handling lost or damaged goodsThe claim window, the photographs needed, the carrier's role, and why this reaches a person sooner than almost anything else in support.
- Every question typeHandling patterns for the questions every support inbox gets.
Try it on your own material
Upload a document or point it at your site, paste one line of HTML, then ask it something only your business could answer.