Parcelwise delivers parcels for more than 1,900 online merchants across 38 US metro areas and most of England. Its vans make roughly 900,000 stops a week. Every one of those stops can become a question: where is it, why hasn't it arrived, can you leave it with a neighbor, where did you leave it?
In 2024, those questions added up to about 4 million conversations a year. Parcelwise answered them with a 140-person contact center split between Columbus, Ohio and Leeds. By the end of the year, the math no longer worked.
The challenge
"Where is my order" (WISMO) is the least glamorous contact in logistics, and the most expensive in aggregate. At Parcelwise it was 71% of all inbound volume. Most of it was simple. A lot of it was not.
The first problem was that Parcelwise serves two very different audiences. Consignees, the people waiting at home, want to know when the parcel arrives and how to change it. Shippers, the merchants who pay Parcelwise, want bulk status, exception reports and proof of delivery for their own customer disputes. Both arrived in the same queue, on the same phone line, with the same eight-minute average hold time at peak.
The second problem was data. The answer to almost every WISMO question lived in Parcelwise's routing system and in driver scan events: out for delivery, attempted, delivered to safe place, returned to depot. Agents had to open three tools to read a single parcel's history. A missed-delivery card with a smudged tracking number could take twelve minutes to resolve.
The third problem was the calendar. Volume doubles between Black Friday and the week before Christmas. In 2024, Parcelwise hired 60 seasonal agents on both sides of the Atlantic. Average speed of answer still passed 20 minutes on the worst days.
"We had a chatbot. It could read a tracking page back to you. It could not move a delivery, and customers knew it within two messages." — Ravi Menon, Director of Customer Operations
Why Pazau
Parcelwise evaluated four vendors in early 2025. The shortlist test was simple: take 2,000 real transcripts from the previous December and see how many each platform could resolve end-to-end, with actions, not links.
Pazau won on three things.
Actions against the routing system. Pazau Agent could call Parcelwise's routing API directly. That meant it could reschedule a redelivery, add safe-place instructions, redirect to a pickup point, or place a hold at the depot, within rules the operations team set. In the bake-off, Pazau resolved 79% of the December sample end-to-end. The next-best vendor resolved 41%.
One platform for every channel. Consignees reach Parcelwise mostly on WhatsApp in the UK and SMS in the US. Merchants use email and a web portal. A meaningful share still call. Pazau Inbox, Pazau Agent and Pazau Voice share one data model, so a conversation that starts as a missed-delivery SMS and escalates to a phone call keeps its history.
Controls the merchants would accept. Parcelwise's largest shippers asked hard questions about what an AI would say to their customers. Pazau's traces showed every step: the scan events it read, the Procedure it followed, the Action it took. Parcelwise could also give each merchant a copy of Pazau's commitment that it never trains foundation models on customer data.
The rollout
The team went live in phases between April and September 2025.
April: consignee WISMO on chat and WhatsApp. The first Procedure, Where is my parcel, read the latest driver scan events through get_scan_history and explained them in plain language. Parcelwise wrote it in an afternoon, then simulated it against 5,000 past conversations before switching it on. Within two weeks it resolved 68% of the traffic it saw.
May: redelivery and safe place. The Missed delivery Procedure added three Actions: schedule_redelivery, set_safe_place and redirect_to_pickup_point. Customers can photograph a missed-delivery card and send it over WhatsApp. Pazau reads the tracking number from the image, confirms the address, and books the new slot. Safe-place instructions are capped by merchant rules. High-value parcels or parcels that require a signature can't be left on a porch, and the Procedure says so.
June: proof of delivery. "It says delivered but I don't have it" is the hardest WISMO contact. The Delivered, not received Procedure retrieves the proof-of-delivery photo and GPS point with get_pod, shares the photo with the consignee, and asks them to check the location. If the parcel is still missing, it opens an investigation with the shipper and hands off to a human with a full summary. It never promises a refund; only the merchant can do that.
July: shippers. Merchant contacts moved into Pazau Inbox with their own queues and SLAs. Pazau Agent now answers bulk status requests by generating an exception report from the routing system with export_exceptions.
September: voice. Pazau Voice replaced the old IVR on both phone lines, running on Twilio. Callers say their tracking number or postcode. The voice agent uses the same Procedures and Actions as chat, and warm-transfers to a human with the transcript attached when it can't finish the job.
"The first time I saw a caller rebook a redelivery by voice in under a minute, with no one on our side touching it, I knew peak season was going to look different." — Hollie Garside, Head of Contact Centre, UK
The results
Parcelwise measured results over the twelve months to August 2026.
- 84% of WISMO contacts are resolved by Pazau Agent end-to-end, with no human touch. Across all contact types, the AI resolution rate is 74%.
- Cost per WISMO contact is down 52%, including Pazau's per-resolution fees.
- Average speed of answer at peak fell from 20 minutes to under 30 seconds. During the 2025 holiday season, Parcelwise hired 12 seasonal agents instead of 60.
- Redelivery bookings moved to self-service. 91% of missed-delivery contacts now end with a booked slot, a safe place or a pickup-point redirect, and no call.
- Merchant escalations fell 37%. Shippers now get exception reports on request instead of waiting for an account manager.
The contact center did not shrink by layoffs. Parcelwise redeployed 30 agents into a new claims and investigations team that handles lost-parcel cases for merchants. Those cases used to take nine days. They now take four.
"Our agents spend their time on the parcels that are really lost, not the ones that are on the van two streets away. That is a better job, and our retention shows it." — Ravi Menon, Director of Customer Operations
What's next
Parcelwise now uses contact-driver reporting in Pazau Inbox to find problems upstream. One finding: a single depot in North London generated four times the "delivered, not received" contacts of any other site. The cause was a driver app setting that let drivers mark safe-place deliveries without a photo. Parcelwise fixed it in a week.
Next on the list is proactive messaging. When a scan event shows a van running late, Pazau Agent will message the consignee first, offer a new window, and book it, before the customer ever asks where their parcel is.