Let’s talk about AI Precision to Minimize Returns ??

If you're part of the e-commerce galaxy, you know the black hole of Returns to Origin (RTO) all too well.? Every RTO is like a meteor strike on your profitability and customer satisfaction. But what if you could have a shield that predicts and prevents these strikes? RTO stands for "Return to Origin," which occurs when a shipped item is undeliverable and must be sent back to the seller. Naturally, RTOs can be costly and erode business margins. Direct losses incurred can include -??

• Merchandise mishandling leading to damaged products that cannot be resold
• Warehousing and processing costs
• Shipping charges incurred to bring back the merchandise to warehouse

Indirect losses can be -?

• Marketing costs incurred to acquire the customers
• Lost Sales Opportunity for a new customer interested in the product?

These losses can lead to cash flow disruptions for businesses and hamper planning efforts. RTOs can create chaos. In response, we turned to our customers to learn how they have been finding any success.

Our Journey to Innovation ???

We listened to countless stories from sellers facing high RTO rates and used those insights to fuel our AI algorithms. ????? Our customers, the SMBs of Bharat, sought clear information, actionable data intelligence, and efficient solutions (not just workflows) to tackle these issues.

• Our first few calls revealed that sellers had been calling each customer to re-verify the details of their order and to confirm their interest in the product.
• A lot of calls revealed that the sellers were calling their Cash on delivery customers aggressively asking them to prepay their shipment by offering discounts.
• Some had even selected different couriers for Cash on delivery orders.

Sounds like a lot of organic innovation right? There were some downsides too? -

• Dedicated efforts and teams required to run these operations day in day out.
• Multiple attempts to reach customers led to a poor customer experience, and a 100% success rate was far from achievable.
• Re-skilling a lot of the customer facing teams required significant effort.

We realised early on?

• That our customers had naturally taken the route of actionizing their COD orders.
• Data suggested that order confirmation journeys did proved pivotal for some customers.
• The sellers were able to get a lot of address corrections from their calls.

How could we help our customers?

• Easy to digest data intelligence could benefit our users, like a Score?
• Address issues needed special attention as they led to a lot of bad CX and costs?
• Giving focus to our customers on which orders to target could benefit in time and $$ saving
• Sellers needed a sight into the future but based on an understandable insight or reason(a strong why)
• We could even add calling scripts to guide the users while talking to users to reduce skill efforts

Presenting RTO Score ??

1. Enhanced Predictive Algorithms: We trained our algorithms on over 1.8 billion data points and also added machine insights so that our users could focus on what orders and also understand why it was called out separately.
2. Address Quality Score: Say goodbye to returns due to bad addresses. Our system evaluates and scores address quality and allows sellers to quickly update Address quality.
3. Multilingual scripts & Customer connect workflows : Understand the deep reasons on why an order may be at risk and call them directly from the seller account, when connected sellers get multi-lingual scripts (Hinglish and Hindi) to keep the conversations short and useful.?
4. Revised billing : We charge only on COD orders and the fee is nominal.?

Are you interested in utilising this intelligence via workflows or API’s?

Let’s talk - [email protected]

Kudos to the team of curious engineers - Yash G. Adit Mishra Ajit Verma Praful Poddar Vignesh Ravi Prabhat Singh Shiprocket

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