Case Study: The Custom App That Increased the Efficiency of Shopify Phone Orders for daysoft®

Leading daily disposable contact lens brand daysoft® has been utilising Swanky’s services for over three years. During this time we‘ve undertaken a transformative digital project that has leveraged our team’s migration expertise to move the brand’s UK, EU and US stores from a custom platform to Shopify Plus.

In 2023, daysoft® and Swanky won Subscription Website of the Year at the UK Ecommerce Awards for this work. Since then, daysoft® has continued to utilise our full suite of services, from email marketing and full-funnel PPC management, to data and analytics support and branding and UX design.

Most recently, Swanky’s Growth Accelerator team has developed a custom app to increase the efficiency of daysoft®’s phone order process. This case study will explore this bespoke solution and the problems it solves in more detail.

Read our previous case study to learn how our Shopify Plus expertise supported a successful ecommerce digital transformation for this scaling brand.

The challenge of Shopify phone orders

Thousands of customers prefer to call a company, speak directly to a customer service manager and process their order over the phone. For this reason, processing phone orders on Shopify is commonplace for many ecommerce brands. It offers both an important revenue channel and the opportunity to provide excellent customer service.

Processing a phone order on Shopify requires some manual input, however the procedure undertaken by daysoft®’s customer support team was long and inefficient.

Before going any further, let’s look at what this involved prior to implementing our custom app solution.

daysoft®’s previous phone order process

A large quantity of information is required to complete an order and this must be collected accurately. In daysoft®’s case, this included aligning lens prescriptions with left and right eyes and combining them into one set, ready for shipment.

Inputting this information into a standard draft order in Shopify wasn’t possible, due to complexities around the custom line properties. Therefore, the customer support team utilised the store’s frontend customer journey to execute this.

Placing an order over the phone with daysoft® followed these steps:

1. A support team member followed the order process on the website’s frontend to log all the required information.
2. The support member would cancel this order just before reaching checkout. This would create a draft order in the backend.
3. This draft order was then located and completed by taking payment over the phone.

Screenshot showing first step of the order flow on daysoft®’s site. 

The advantages of this system included the ability to provide high-quality customer service and ensure the accurate recording of customer data. However, this was a time-consuming process that the daysoft® team wanted to improve.

Additionally, with the introduction of Checkout Extensibility, the workflow efficiency was further disrupted because draft orders didn’t appear immediately in the backend.

What did the solution require?

Whilst Checkout Extensibility may have initially hindered daysoft®’s phone order process, our in-house development team identified the opportunity that this new Shopify functionality presented. We could now create a bespoke solution that harnesses Shopify’s technical capabilities to better support daysoft®’s processing of phone orders and thus deliver high-quality customer support.

Before explaining our implementation and its results, it’s important to first understand the specific requirements for this solution:

1. Product variants (lens types) must be correctly combined into a set and linked to the customer’s account.
2. The workflow must be intuitive, accurate and efficient, reducing the time it takes to complete a phone order.

How did we solve this problem?

Our solution leveraged Admin UI extensions, a recent addition to Shopify, to create a phone order assistant app. This offers the necessary functionality without a time-intensive process.

An order placed over the phone now follows these steps:

1. Once a customer is ready to make the order, a support team member locates their existing customer profile, or creates a new customer profile in the Shopify Admin.
2. Having located the customer profile, they then activate the phone order assistant app.
3. The phone order assistant app creates and pre-fills an order form, using any customer information already available. If contact lens prescription information is available from a previous order, this will also be pulled through to the order form.
4. The customer support member completes the remaining order information, including the required contact lenses. Warning messages and input controls ensure that no order can be completed without the necessary information in place.
5. Finally, payment is taken over the phone.

Admin extensions, including this bespoke app, found under ‘More actions’ on the Shopify customer page.

Example of new draft order created with the phone order assistant app. 

The results

With the introduction of this custom Shopify admin app, daysoft®’s customer support team now spends around 32 hours less per month taking phone orders. This saving allows time to be invested elsewhere, increasing growth in other areas of the business.

Margaret Macneil, Director of Customer Services at daysoft®, shared this about the results of this app:

“The newly developed phone order assistant app has greatly improved our ability to assist our customers by taking their order as quickly as possible… the time saving equates to nearly one full team member per week.

“Our customers see a greatly improved service by having to spend less time on a call to place their order, and the Customer Care team are also freed up to assist customers on calls or via email to help maintain our overall service standards.

“The team finds the app easy to use and are delighted with how much simpler the telephone ordering process is.”

Leverage our Shopify expertise to increase business efficiency

By leveraging Swanky’s technical ability and deep knowledge of Shopify, daysoft® was able to increase process efficiency and reduce costs associated with phone orders. Ultimately, this efficiency allows the customer service team to invest more time into improving user experience and other areas of the business.

If you’re looking to increase business efficiency through bespoke Shopify solutions, start a conversation with our team today.