Streamlining Ecommerce Operations: A Case Study on Resolving Stuck Orders with Automation

In the fast-paced world of ecommerce, efficiency is everything. The Global Operations Center (GOC) TOO team constantly battles with ecommerce store orders that get stuck, causing delays and resulting in customer dissatisfaction. Here's a look at how one retail organization transformed their order troubleshooting process using automation.

The Challenge: Manual Troubleshooting

When an order got stuck, a local store colleague would contact the Store Support Service Desk, who then created a Zendesk ticket assigned to the TOO team. A TOO team engineer would then pick up the ticket and start troubleshooting by logging into a management server and accessing various tools, performing database queries and updates to resolve the issue. This often required further communication with the store or the customer before the issue could be fixed.

Before automation, the TOO team was handling over 100 tickets weekly, each requiring a minimum of 15 minutes to troubleshoot, though actual resolution times often exceeded an hour due to the reactive nature of the process.

The Goal: Automation for Efficiency

To improve efficiency, the TOO team aimed to reduce the reactive troubleshooting time, instantly resolve order issues, and provide immediate feedback to the stores. They also wanted to automatically update Zendesk tickets with all actions completed and offer next steps or escalate issues that couldn't be resolved automatically.

The Solution: An Automated Workflow

Replacing the old process, which required a store colleague to contact the StoreSupport Service Desk about a stuck order and the service desk would then have to create a Zendesk ticket, the new automated workflow began with a Zendesk incident triggered by systems like GNOC or Splunk. Resolve's automated workflow would then execute a specific runbook.

The incoming Zendesk ticket would then be automatically parsed to obtain the store and order numbers, connect to the relevant local Store Server SQL database, and execute a series of SQL queries to validate and troubleshoot possible scenarios. Results were instantly updated in the Zendesk ticket, and the issue was either resolved automatically or instructions were provided for the next steps.

For issues related to card or product/price exceptions, Resolve updated the Zendesk ticket with further information and instructions for the store. If the store couldn't re-process the order, the platform provided a guided procedure to unlock the exception.

For other scenarios, the automation performed additional SQL queries to identify and correct missing information, such as barcodes, prices, or product IDs, and updated the specific order line. All actions were recorded in the Zendesk ticket, which Resolve then closed.

The Impact: Dramatic Efficiency Gains

Before automation, manual response to incoming tickets resulted in hour-plus resolution times. With automation, real-time ticket handling and proactive resolution occurred in under a minute.

Thanks to automation:

• Most tickets are now automatically investigated, and potentially closed, by Resolve.
• Resolution times are reduced by over 99%, with tickets closed in under a minute.
• Over 100 hours of weekly capacity gained (based on problem identification to resolution time).

The development and implementation of this solution involved two one-hour workshops to understand the use case and scenarios, building the Proof of Concept (PoC) use case in under a day, and testing the runbook in a one-hour workshop. Notably, the runbook utilized off-the-shelf content, with no custom tasks required.

This case study showcases the power of automation in transforming retail operational efficiency, dramatically reducing resolution times, and freeing up valuable human resources to focus on more strategic tasks.

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