THE FIRST THIRTY DAYS

The order of work is the same whoever you are. Find out which promises you’re breaking. Stop making the ones you can’t keep. Send each contact back to its cause. Then make recovery consistent.

1. Week one: measurePull last month’s orders with the date shown at checkout and the carrier delivery scan, and compute on time against the date shown, by region (chapter 4). Count last month’s failures by type and run the index (chapter 3). Replace the help desk’s tags with twelve to fifteen primary reasons (chapter 7).
2. Week two: promiseRun the date tool for each region and change the checkout promise to what the data supports. Build the five delay triggers and the notice (chapter 5). Send your backorder, preorder and delay flows to counsel with the FTC rule summary. Add the delivery check question and fix the tracking page’s worst gaps (chapter 6).
3. Week three: routeName an owner for each of the top ten contact reasons (chapter 8). Hold the first monthly contact review. Add repeat contact rate and transfers to the support report (chapter 9). Start the 10% holdout on delay notices.
4. Week four: make it rightPublish the recovery grid and the agent budget (chapter 11). Rewrite apology templates and add a failure count to the customer record (chapter 12). Run the failure cohort for customers from a year ago (chapter 2) and put the scorecard in front of the team (chapter 14).

At day thirty you won’t yet know what the changes did to repeat orders; that takes a quarter. You’ll have a store that knows which promises it breaks, tells customers first, and knows who owns each reason they write in.

Measure before you promise. Promise before you apologize.

Do this

• Put the four weeks on the calendar today, with an owner for each line. If the same person owns the checkout date, the warehouse and the help desk, give them this guide.