Pull This Report Before You Hire Holiday Helpdesk Temps

Run the audit in an afternoon

The four steps below turn last peak's ticket history into a number you can plan around. The first two tell you how many WISMO tickets you had and what they cost. The last two show which of those tickets a tool like Narvar Notify can prevent, and how to handle the ones that still come in.

1. Pull last November and December from your helpdesk

Filter Zendesk, Kustomer, or Gorgias to last year's peak and pull every ticket tagged order status, shipping, or delivery. If tagging differs across teams, search subject lines and first messages for "where is," "hasn't arrived," "tracking," and "says delivered."

Running several brands or regions? Split the pull by each one, because the split tells you which brand or market to fix first. Record three figures: total WISMO tickets, their share of all peak tickets, and your busiest week.

2. Put a dollar figure on it

Each call-center contact can cost from $3 to $12. Multiply your team's contact cost by your WISMO count and you have last peak's handling cost for a single question.

Then take your busiest week and divide it by what one temp agent clears in a week. That’s how many of this year's temps you are hiring to read tracking pages back to shoppers.

3. Match each cause to its fix

The tickets in your pull trace back to moments your current emails skip. Shopify and most commerce platforms send two messages, shipped and delivered, and neither one arrives when a shopper starts to worry.

Start with the biggest bucket: late parcels and moved dates. A Notify predictive delay alert covers both, telling the shopper the new date before they notice the old one has slipped.

Next, pull out missed and stuck deliveries. An attempted delivery or exception email explains what happened and what comes next, so the shopper doesn't have to ask.

The last bucket is the one you might overlook: orders where nothing went wrong, but the shopper heard nothing between "shipped" and "delivered." A delivery-anticipation email, sent about 24 hours before arrival, fills that gap.

Shoppers open these messages because each one answers the question they were about to send you. Predictive delay emails average 38% click-through and attempted delivery emails 34%. A delivered email averages 8%. The one message your platform already sends is the one shoppers are most likely to skip.

4. Answer the rest inside the ticket

Some tickets will still arrive, including the "it says delivered, but it isn't here" contact. On Zendesk, the Narvar Connect + Care app gives agents the order, its shipping status, and notification history, inside the ticket. Agents resend an email from the same screen, without switching to another tool.

How many temps are you hiring to read tracking pages back to shoppers?

What this looks like across 80+ brands

An audit tells you where your tickets come from. These retailers show what happens once you start answering shoppers first, from a portfolio of more than 80 brands to a single-brand UK retailer.

• Newell Brands runs Notify across more than 80 brands and averages a 20% reduction in WISMO.
• Fortnum & Mason, the London gifting retailer, cut WISMO queries by 50% with Narvar order data inside its Zendesk workflow.
• Hibbett Sports brought contacts per order down by more than 20%.

Fewer tickets, more repeat buyers

44% of shoppers say order and delivery notifications would make them buy from a retailer again. 
‍-Delivering the 2026 Holiday Shopping Season

A shopper who hears about a delay from you, before checking a tracking page, has no reason to open a ticket. They also have a reason to trust you with the next order. For example, since Clarins started using Notify, its customers are 3x more likely to repurchase.

That turns your WISMO count into a loyalty metric. The same message that keeps a ticket out of your December queue brings the shopper back in January.