Support answers the contact. The team that caused it has to remove it. Put a name, a target and a date next to every reason code.
Most contact reasons are decisions made somewhere else: the date by ecommerce, the packaging by operations, the discount rule by marketing. Support meets the consequences and has no power to change them. So each reason gets an owner in the team that causes it, measured on that reason’s contacts per order.
| Reason | Usual cause | Owner | First fix |
|---|---|---|---|
| Where is my order | Silence after checkout; a vague date | Ecommerce, with operations | A dated promise, an owned tracking page |
| Late against the date shown | A promise the lane can’t keep | Operations | Promise by region; delay notice |
| Damaged | Packaging and handling | Operations and packaging | Drop-test the top five products |
| Wrong or missing item | Picking errors | Fulfillment or the 3PL | Scan-to-verify at pack |
| Change or cancel an order | No self-serve edit window | Ecommerce | An edit window on the order page |
| Discount or code didn’t work | Unclear rules | Marketing | One rule per offer, printed with the code |
| Product question before buying | The page doesn’t answer it | Merchandising | Add the top three questions to the page |
| How to use the product | Missing instructions | Product | An insert and a first-use email |
| Unexpected charge | Descriptor, split charges, renewals | Finance or retention | A clear descriptor; renewal reminders |
| Return or exchange | Fit, expectations | Merchandising and ops | See the returns guide |
Subscription contacts belong to whoever runs the program (The Standing Order); product-page questions overlap with The Honest Test; first-use questions with the first-use guide.
Support should own the answer. The team that caused the question should own the number.
Once a month, for forty-five minutes, each owner brings one slide: their reasons’ contacts per order for three months, one fix shipped with its date and expected drop, and one planned. Support reads ten verbatim contacts from the top reason aloud. The next review checks whether each fix moved its number. A fix that didn’t isn’t a fix.
Owners move faster when a contact has a cost in their own budget. Put a notional price on each contact reason: the agent time from the tool in chapter 7, plus, for failures, the repeat contribution from chapter 2. Say the damaged reason runs 150 contacts a month; at $4 of agent time and $3.75 of lost repeat contribution each, that’s about $1,160 a month charged to packaging. A sturdier box at $0.15 more on 10,000 orders costs $1,500. Now the owner has a real decision to make, with both sides priced.
This is one chapter of The Kept Promise, which is free and readable in full on a single page with no form in front of it.