Why the answer is harder than the question #
"Have you got any?" looks like a yes or no. In a wholesaler it is at least four questions stacked together.
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Which product do they mean?
Customers describe goods by brand, by colour, by the old code, by what was on the last invoice, or by what their own customer called it.
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How much is actually free?
Physical stock minus what is allocated to picked or promised orders is a different number from what the shelf shows.
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What is coming?
A booked inbound delivery changes the answer, and so does the supplier who has been promising Thursday for a fortnight.
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Is this customer allowed it?
Allocation, minimum order quantity, pack size and account status all shape what you can promise.
Because of that, two people in the same depot can give the same customer different answers on the same afternoon, both honestly.
The interruption cost #
Availability questions are short and frequent, which is the worst combination. They arrive on the phone, in the depot mailbox, by text to a rep and at the trade counter, and they nearly always reach the same small group of people: the ones who know the range. Those are the same people keying orders, handling exceptions and dealing with the customers who matter most.
Most wholesale businesses are small enough that this concentration is severe.
101,000
UK wholesale businesses registered for VAT or PAYE
ONS, March 2025
400,000+
Retail and catering businesses supplied by FWD members
Federation of Wholesale Distributors
The ratio tells you what a day looks like at the supplier end.
Which parts run on rules #
Runs on rules
- Matching a loose description to a product code
- Looking up free stock rather than physical stock
- Reporting the next expected inbound delivery
- Applying pack size and minimum order rules to the answer
- Giving the same answer in the same format every time
Everything factual is rule driven.
Needs a person
- Deciding to hold the last four cases for a good customer
- Offering a substitute you know they will accept
- Telling a customer honestly that a supplier has let you down
Favouring one customer over another, or promising a date you do not control, should stay with a person.
The question that comes with it #
Availability rarely travels alone. The same message usually asks what it costs, which pulls in customer specific pricing and turns a lookup into two lookups. That combination is covered in trade prices and quotes. Where a customer asks the same availability question every week about the same lines, it is really a repeat order in disguise.
What to measure #
For one week, tally availability questions by channel and by who answered them. Then take the top twenty products by question volume and check how many of those questions were about lines that are almost always in stock. In most depots a large share of the traffic concerns a small set of lines, and a large share of the answers are the same answer.
Second, and more revealing: pick ten questions and ask two members of staff to answer them independently. If the answers differ, you do not have an answering problem, you have a definition problem, and that is worth knowing before anybody buys anything.
The free tools will turn the tally into hours, and the plain explainers cover what automation can and cannot do with work of this shape.