We Interiors. The support line turned out to be the sales line.

Die Herausforderung

We Interiors is a UK interiors retailer and an official Laura Ashley stockist, with 154 pieces in that collection alone. Console tables at £595, drinks cabinets at £895, and a warehouse clearance running as deep as 80% off.

Furniture is one of the last categories where people still pick up the phone. The average attributed order here is $1,168, roughly ten times a typical DTC basket, and nobody commits that much from a product page on their own. They want to hear when it lands, whether the finish is still in stock, and whether the sale price is the real one.

So the phone rang. A team this size cannot put a person on it from nine to nine, and every unanswered call about a £900 cabinet is a customer who dials a competitor that picks up.

Die Lösung

We Interiors split the work across three agents and pointed them in opposite directions. Sophie works outbound. James and Mark answer the phone.

Sophie handles abandoned checkout recovery and order confirmation: 403 completed conversations at 53 seconds each. James and Mark run the answering line and have taken 593 inbound calls, averaging 101 seconds. Nearly twice as long, because somebody who dialled you has an actual question and waits for the actual answer.

What they ask about is not mysterious. Across 594 analysed inbound calls: delivery in 169 of them, stock and availability in 119, the sale terms in 75, order tracking in 32, damage or missing parts in 28, dimensions and assembly in 27, returns in 18.

Six workflows sit behind it, built up over five months rather than switched on at once. Abandoned checkout recovery, order confirmation, delivery and upsell, cancelled order feedback, and two successive generations of missed-call callback that eventually grew into a full answering line.

• 📞593 inbound calls answered at 101 seconds average, no queue and no voicemail
• 🚚Delivery dates and stock, the two questions behind half of every inbound call
• 🏷️Sale terms explained on the call, on a catalogue discounted up to 80%
• 🔁Outbound recovery and order confirmation running alongside, 403 conversations

Die Agenten im Account

James

Inbound, the main answering line

400 calls answered

Mark

Inbound, second line

193 calls answered

Sophie

Outbound recovery and order confirmation

403 conversations

Die Ergebnisse

More than half the attributed revenue, $29,718 of it, came from customers who rang We Interiors themselves. The line most retailers budget as a cost centre brought in more than the outbound campaigns did.

Über die Zahlen hinaus

Der eigentliche Durchbruch kam, als man verstand, warum Kunden überhaupt abbrachen. Die Anruf-Transkripte von Callsy brachten die wiederkehrenden Einwände ans Licht:

Diese Erkenntnisse mündeten in Verbesserungen bei FAQs, Landingpages und E-Mail-Flows. Einwände werden früher ausgeräumt, damit weniger Warenkörbe überhaupt erst abgebrochen werden.

Wie es weitergeht

Recovery converts differently at this price point. 21 of the 115 completed recovery conversations ended in a recovered checkout, around 18%, where a lower-ticket store runs in the low single digits. The more a basket is worth, the more a voice is worth.

Voice is carrying almost all of it. Against 1,019 completed conversations there were only 182 delivered SMS, so this is a phone operation with messaging as a footnote, which is unusual and in this category probably correct.

The answering line did not arrive fully formed. It started as a missed-call callback in May, went through a second version in June, and only became a staffed-by-AI front desk in August. The most valuable thing on the account was the thing that got iterated on.