The Problem
If you’ve worked in retail (or have just been alive, generally) you’ll know that nobody likes being blindsided—especially customers.
You’ll also know that one of the quickest ways to create frustration, gain negative reviews, or lose business in an ordering process is to stay silent while an order quietly hits a roadblock behind the scenes. We’ve all been there:
The customer submits an order and assumes everything is moving forward. Something on the back end says “nope—not today,” and alerts your team that the order is, in fact, not moving forward.
And somewhere, between those two realities, sits a communication gap waiting to become a problem.
For a recent client in the B2B flavor manufacturing business, that scenario would occur when one or more products on an order required additional review before they could move forward.
Flavoring swaps or product ingredient updates could trigger this; other orders requiring validation, regulatory review, or additional internal approvals before production could begin could trigger this, too.
From an operational standpoint, this made perfect sense; from a customer perspective, however, silence can feel a lot like inactivity or unreliable business operations.
The Challenge
The challenge wasn't that our client lacked a process—in fact, they had one of the most structured and well thought-out processes for manufacturing. The challenge at hand was that the process depended on people remembering to communicate every time an exception occurred and then finding the time to always communicate consistently and precisely, over all their customer accounts, in all scenarios.
When customer service teams are balancing hundreds of orders, customer requests, schedule changes, and production updates, it's easy for exception-based communications to become reactive instead of proactive. Suddenly, you’re faced with a growing pile of order updates that make take a week or more to finally send to the customer, leading to lost business, frustrated calls to customer service, low morale, and higher turnover. People are busy. So how can we solve these challenges to allow service teams to focus on better customer experience and seamless order fulfillment?
The Results
Through conversations, workshopping, and process mapping, we worked with our client to build an automated communication process that identified these exception-based communications situations the moment they occurred:
When an order entered the system containing products that weren't in an approved status, NetSuite automatically generated a notification to the customer explaining that one or more items were currently under review—not to generate concern, but to keep them up to date, and provide clarity around timeline expectations.
Rather than wondering why an order hadn't progressed, customers received immediate visibility into what was happening and why.
Of course, identifying the scenario turned out to be more complex than sending the email.
The system needed to evaluate every product on every qualifying order.
It needed to distinguish between approved and non-approved statuses.
It needed to avoid duplicate communications.
It needed to exclude sample orders, which followed their own communication workflows.
And because this client serves customers across both the United States and Canada, language requirements also needed to be considered.
The automation had to be accurate every single time.
Working closely with the client’s project team, Anchor Group mapped the business rules, documented edge cases, and thoroughly tested every possible scenario before deployment.
The result was a communication process that proactively addressed issues before customers had to ask about them.
After launch, customer visibility improved immediately: Customers no longer needed to wonder why an order hadn't advanced; customer service teams spent less time responding to status inquiries; and internal teams could rest easy knowing communications were occurring consistently and automatically.
Most importantly, the automation reinforced trust—both from the internal teams in the new automations, but also from the customer in the client’s organization, as customers weren't discovering delays after the fact, but being informed in real time.
And in customer service, this kind of transparency often matters just as much as speed. Because most customers can handle bad news, but what they struggle with not knowing what's happening.
This automation ensured no one ever had to guess.
Thank you for reading Case Study #5: Automated Exception-Based Notifications
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