Operations
When a buyer complains, who owns it?
Buyer queries, supplier issues and internal requests get lost in WhatsApp and email. How tickets give every issue an owner, a status and a history.
Contents
- Most issues in an export business are small. They become expensive when nobody owns them.
- WhatsApp and email are good for talking. They are poor at making sure something gets done.
- A ticket gives every issue one owner, a status and a full history, linked to the order.
How a small request becomes a big problem
A buyer writes on WhatsApp asking for a corrected packing list. It reaches your sales manager, who forwards it to documentation. Documentation is busy with three shipments and means to do it later. Two days pass. The buyer writes again, this time to you.
Nobody was careless. The request simply had no owner. It lived in a chat, between people, and chats do not remind anyone.
Now multiply this by every buyer, every supplier and every team in your business.
Three kinds of issues
From buyers. Corrected documents, shipment status, quality questions, claims for short or damaged goods, payment queries.
With suppliers. Late deliveries, wrong specifications, missing test certificates, price disputes.
Between your own teams. Sales needs a date from production. Documentation needs a weight from dispatch. Accounts needs a document to match a payment.
Each kind gets handled differently today. Some by phone, some on WhatsApp, some by email, some by walking across the office. None of it is recorded in one place.
What a ticket gives you
A ticket is simply a record of one issue. It has:
- one owner, so everyone knows who is responsible
- a clock, so everyone can see how long it has been waiting
- the full conversation and files, so nobody has to forward chats
- a link to the order or shipment, so the issue is seen in context
- a status, so anyone can see whether it is open, waiting or closed
When the owner is on leave, the ticket can be moved to someone else, with its history. When the buyer asks again, anyone can see what has been done.
Why the history matters
Six months later, the same buyer raises a claim on a different shipment. Was there a similar claim before? How was it settled? With tickets, the answer is on the buyer's record. Without them, it is in the memory of whoever handled it, if they are still with you.
The same applies to suppliers. A list of every issue with a supplier, with dates, is far stronger in a negotiation than a general feeling that they are unreliable.
Starting simply
You do not need a complex process. Agree on three rules:
- Any request that cannot be answered within a day becomes a ticket.
- Every ticket has one owner, and the owner replies within one working day.
- Nobody closes a ticket until the person who raised it is satisfied.
Then look at the open tickets once a week.
How Expodite helps. Expodite has tickets for buyers, suppliers and internal teams. Each ticket has an owner, a status, the full conversation and files, and internal notes the buyer never sees. It is linked to the order, shipment or invoice it concerns. You can see every open issue, and how long it has been waiting, in one place.
See tickets in ExpoditeQuestions to ask your team
- How many open buyer issues do we have today?
- Who owns each one, and how old is the oldest?
- When a supplier delivers late, where is that recorded?
- If our sales manager were away for two weeks, who would know what each buyer is waiting for?
- What was the last complaint I heard about directly from a buyer, and why did it reach me?
Quick answers
- What is a ticketing system in an export business?
- A way to record each buyer, supplier or internal issue with one owner, a status and its full history, linked to the order or shipment it concerns.
- Why not just use WhatsApp groups?
- WhatsApp is good for quick conversation, but it has no owners or status. Issues get lost as messages scroll, and the history stays on personal phones.
