Two missing bolts, answered in under a minute

I run support at Porchlight, which means I also answer the support questions our customers’ customers send when something goes wrong with ours. A lot of those, it turns out, are about bolts.

Parts requests are about 6% of a furniture brand’s inbox. They are small (a bolt, a cam lock, a glide for a chair leg) and they are urgent in a way that is easy to underestimate. When a bed frame arrives missing two bolts, someone is sleeping on a mattress on the floor tonight.

The old way

At most brands we work with, a parts request went like this. The customer writes. An agent asks which product and which part. The customer guesses. The agent sends the assembly diagram and asks them to circle it. A day later the customer replies with a photo. The agent looks up the part number, asks the warehouse, and ships it. Four messages and three days for a part that costs eleven cents.

What we changed

Three things, all of them boring, which is how you know they work.

1. We load the hardware list for every product. Brands already have it: it is the bag of parts in the box. Porchlight reads it from the order system, with the letter or number printed on the assembly sheet.
2. We ask with the diagram, not about it. When a customer says something is missing, Porchlight replies with the parts list for the exact product they bought and asks them to pick. Most do on the first try.
3. We set a limit and let it ship. Each brand writes down what Porchlight may send without a person. A common rule: any hardware for an order under 90 days old, up to $40, once per order.

What it looks like now

A customer writes at 10:41 PM: “Bed frame arrived missing two of the long bolts.” Porchlight finds the order, shows the four bolt types that come with that frame, the customer taps Bolt C, 80 mm, and a replacement order is created with two-day shipping. Elapsed time: 52 seconds. No person was awake.

The next morning, the brand’s operations lead sees a one-line note in the daily summary, and if the same bolt has been missing from five orders this month, a second line that says so. That second line has caught two packing errors at the warehouse since June.

When it still comes to us

Anything past the limit goes to a person, with the order and the parts already identified. So does anything that sounds like a safety problem: a crib, a bunk bed, a chair that “wobbles a lot.” Those are never answered by software, and we would not want them to be.

The numbers, three months in

Across the nine brands that turned on hardware rules this summer, 1,184 parts requests came in between June and August. Porchlight shipped 931 of them without a person, a median of 58 seconds after the first message. The rest went to a teammate: 171 over a limit, 49 that sounded like a safety issue, and 33 where the customer could not tell which part was missing and asked to talk to someone. We count that last group as a success, too.

If you have never written down your parts rules, start there. Even without Porchlight, a one-page rule your whole team follows will save you more than any tool.