Customer hasn't been told — shipment, delay or tracking update due
Something happened to your customer's order — it shipped, it slipped, a tracking number was issued — and nobody has told them. This Watch closes that gap. In Settings → Workspace → Watches it sits under Follow-ups as FO-2.
What it watches for
- A shipment event on a customer's order — usually a tracking number being issued — with no message from you to the customer inside the update window.
- A delay, a partial shipment or a revised date with no message to the customer.
- An in-hands date that has passed with no delivery confirmation and nothing sent to the customer.
- An inbound "where is my order?" that has not been answered.
Each point arrives with the customer update already drafted from your workspace's templates.
Why it matters
"Where is my order?" is the most common message a promo shop receives and the easiest one to prevent. Every one of those emails costs a reply, a look-up, and a small amount of the customer's confidence. Telling them first costs one message, and it is the message that makes a distributor feel organized. That is why this Watch exists, and why it books as Avoided on the Found ledger — the conversation that never had to happen.
What it needs connected
- Required: a mailbox — that is how Scout knows whether anyone has written to the customer.
- Helpful: a supplier feed, a CRM. The supplier feed is where the shipment and delay events come from; without it Scout works from the shipping notices in your mail.
What the point looks like
A point is one item Scout raises with the proof behind it. This one arrives in the Inbox as a recommendation:
Happy Hound Hotel hasn't been told their order shipped — Happy Hound Hotel · tracking issued yesterday 4:10 PM
Alpha Apparel issued tracking for the Happy Hound order yesterday afternoon. Nothing has gone out to Ray Delgado since the order confirmation two weeks ago, and the update window for this workspace is same day.
Evidence: the shipment notice with its tracking number and time · the last outbound message to Ray in Gmail, with its date · the update-window calculation.
Prepared by Scout: the customer update with the tracking number, written from your workspace template.
The settings that tune it
Update window: 4 hours, Same day or 24 hours. The default is Same day. This is how soon after an event Scout will flag that the customer has not heard from you.
Quiet hours: tick the box, set From and Until, and select Save; the two times must differ. Quiet hours hold the prepared update until the next window opens, so a tracking number issued at 11 at night does not turn into a point that looks urgent at midnight.
Automatic sending: a checkbox that is fixed off and cannot be turned on. The note beside it reads Available when customer updates launch. A person sends every draft today. This is deliberate, and it is not a setting that has been forgotten — Scout does not send to your customers.
When it arrives
This is one of the launch-wave Watches. It is not raising points today — its row in Settings reads Coming soon. You can turn it on and set the update window and quiet hours now, and the panel confirms that your choices are saved for when the Watch launches. We do not publish a date for it.
Good to know
- Scout prepares the customer update; a person sends it. Nothing in Scout mails your customer, and the automatic-sending switch is refused rather than merely unchecked.
- The draft is written from your workspace's templates, so it sounds like your shop rather than like software.
- Quiet hours delay the point, they do not cancel it. Nothing gets dropped because it happened at an inconvenient hour.
- The event side of a delay — the ship date moving, the stall, the short shipment — belongs to SI-3, production delay. This Watch is only about whether the customer knows.
- A request that has already arrived from the customer is handled by SU-1, support requests; this Watch is what stops most of them being sent at all.