How We Helped a WordPress Online Store Process Orders 100 Times Faster

WooCommerce / Contact Form 7 + Notify.Events

About the Client

Medalniza.ru is an eCommerce store selling sports-oriented metal and wooden crafts: medal holders, cup shelves, medals with an individual design. 70% of incoming applications come from the store website powered by WordPress. Additionally, the website has the WooCommerce plugin installed, as well as several contact forms, working through the Contact Form 7 plugin. Both plugins by default send notifications about new actions and events - submitted forms, new orders - by email.

During the pandemic, the company's income fell, the project had to be temporarily transferred only to the incoming clients flow. The manager responsible for outbound sales, processing of incoming applications and all types of communication with clients was forced to switch to another place of work as the main one, and to deal with Medalniza.ru in the free time.

Challenges

Nevertheless, the incoming flow of applications remained, albeit in a smaller volume. But now, due to being busy at her main job, the manager could not check the company email, where all messages from WordPress came, several times a day. And, accordingly, promptly track notifications of all new orders on the site, requests for creating a medal holder design and for a callback.

The main problem was that requests from the site stayed ignored for a long time. As a result, often the customer was contacted after half a day, or even the next day - when the application might no longer be relevant. During this time, the customer could place an order with competitors who turned out to be faster. As a result, slow order processing led to the loss of customers and drop in profits.

In addition, the inconvenience of email notifications was that some messages simply were automatically marked as spam. And how often do you check this folder? Such applications, as a rule, were discovered weeks later, again being irrelevant by this time.

To visually describe the essence, we get the following chain of problems and the unpleasant consequences ensuing from it:

Objectives

In order to optimize the work with applications from the site and not lose clients, the CEO of Medalniza.ru, Sergey, began to think about finding a solution that could help the manager to notice applications as soon as they arrive and process them promptly.

Finding a convenient way to track applications in real time turned out to be not so easy. One of the main criteria for Sergey was the possibility of using the service for free, since the pandemic affected the business anyway. Having monitored several notification services, Sergey could not stop at something specific. And then word of mouth turned on: some fellow developers, who had already used Notify.Events themselves to manage their project, told him about our service.

Solution

At this point, we have just implemented the WordPress plugin. In addition, the free Basic subscription plan allowed saving money, since, given a drop in applications due to the coronavirus, the company could meet the stipulated limit of 300 messages.

Using the plugin, Sergey set up the collection of notifications from the website, and chose Telegram as the recipient. This instant messenger app was already used by the Medalniza.ru team for internal communication. At first, Sergey set up sending notifications only to himself - in order to test the service and evaluate the usability.

However, during the testing process, it turned out that the out-of-the-box WordPress integration did not fully meet all the needs of Sergey and his team. For example, it was impossible to immediately understand from which plugin the notification came. Also, the integration did not provide the ability to format messages. And what is most important, there was no ability to filter notifications by priority, message type and time.

Then Sergey turned to us with a question whether it is possible to customize messages specifically from the WooCommerce and Contact Form 7 plugins that are installed on his website, as well as configure their distribution among team members depending on the time.

After examining the issue, we decided to add additional support for the Contact Form 7 plugin, plus WPForms along with Ninja Forms, as part of the integration with WordPress, and a little later - support for WooCommerce. This update made it possible to format messages for each plugin separately.

Also, after the update, Sergey could set up sending notifications to different recipients, depending on the time of day and day of the week. For example, the manager could definitely process applications quickly after 5 PM on weekdays and throughout the day on weekends. Therefore, during this time, notifications were configured in such a way as to be sent only to her. And in the morning and in the afternoon on weekdays, messages also came to Sergey - for safety net, if suddenly the manager was unavailable.

Since Notify.Events has a feature for connecting additional subscribers without registering them in the system, Sergey could send a direct link to his manager. And she, in turn, connected to the channel through a messenger convenient to her, also choosing Telegram.

In addition to WordPress, Sergey also added the company email as a source to the channel - in case customers decide to write there directly.

Results

If earlier - when requests were received only by email - the time from the client leaving the request to the manager's callback could exceed 24 hours, now - when all requests from the website arrive in Telegram - the client's waiting period has been reduced to 10-20 minutes. That is, the manager's response rate to customer requests has increased more than 100 times!

For 1 month of using Notify.Events, 31 applications from the site were sent to Telegram. 20 of those leads turned into sales.

The Notify.Events service turned out to be very useful for our company. First, it helped us take control of the flow of incoming applications. Secondly, thanks to the service, the speed of processing applications has increased several times. Now notifications instantly come to the manager and the head in the messenger, which allows us to quickly respond to all requests. In general, this has a positive effect on the conversion of leads to paid orders.

Sergey, CEO | Medalniza.ru

If, like Sergey, you are missing some functionality or integration with the required service, just contact us at support@notify.events and we'll try to find a solution. And by the way, if you don't know yet, we give up to 10,000 bonus points for comments and reviews of Notify. Events in social networks, forums and other platforms.