Four in five emails at Igelkind land in the right folder without anyone touching them.

Problem

Igelkind and Pusteblümchen are two online shops. Two inboxes, and every day the same mix: where is my parcel, will the item come back in stock, and in between supplier invoices, order confirmations and the real one-off cases.

At the first look into the inbox, three thousand emails were sitting there, almost all of them about parcel tracking. Every one was looked up by hand at GLS and answered individually. One to two hours a day, by the owner’s own estimate, before the actual work began. And not the work on the difficult cases, but the sorting before it, which starts over every morning.

Solution

An agent reads every incoming email and sends it down one of five paths.

1. ArchiveOrder confirmations, shipping notices, payment receipts, system mail. Filed in the right folder without anyone seeing them. That is four in five.
2. Parcel statusThe agent reads the order number from the email, checks the status at GLS and drafts the reply with the real delivery date.
3. Standard replySizes, restocking, returns. The answer comes from a knowledge table built from the old inbox.
4. InvoiceSupplier invoices are recognised and get a scannable QR code for the banking app.
5. ManualAnything the agent cannot classify with confidence goes to the cockpit without a draft. Better one question too many than one invented answer.

The most important rebuild came from one sentence in a call: “People usually don’t know a tracking number, otherwise they could look it up themselves.” Almost all parcel requests arrive with an order or receipt number. The parcel path was therefore built to find the shipment from the order number, not the other way round.

Whatever needs an answer sits in the cockpit behind a PIN, with the finished draft underneath. The cockpit exists because the mailbox runs over IMAP, where neither folders nor drafts can be set from outside. Instead of rebuilding the mailbox, it got a page next to it. If a detail is missing, the spot is marked instead of invented.

The mailbox itself stays untouched. No moved emails, no foreign drafts, no changed rules. Nothing is sent until someone hits send.

Result

Of 54 reply drafts, 49 could be sent without a single change. Between receipt and the finished entry in the cockpit lies a median of four seconds.

That was measured over six weeks of real operation on the real inboxes, not in a test run.

That the system is in use shows in the requests that came after two weeks: delivery notes should not reach the cockpit at all, next to “Done” a button should forward straight to accounting, and for the manual cases the agent should suggest two tones, friendly and factual. All three have been in since then.

The line is drawn deliberately where it is. The system decides what needs attention and prepares the answer. The decision whether it goes out stays with a human.