Job · Order status
Answer “where is my order?” with the order in front of you.
The most repeated question in commerce has one correct answer and it lives in your order system. Scout reads it, replies with the courier, the tracking number and the delivery window, and shows you which order it read.
Illustrative demo with fictional data.
What it looks like
A question in, a lookup, an answer that cites the order.
No template, no approval queue, no agent. The facts come from your system and the citation makes them checkable.
The question arrives
The conversation opens with the customer's order history already attached, so there is no “what is your order number?” round trip when only one order is open.
Scout reads the order
A read-only order lookup — a native integration or your own HTTPS endpoint — runs, and the call appears in the trace with what it returned.
The reply is built from what came back
Status, courier, tracking number, delivery window. Nothing is estimated: if a field is missing from the response, it is missing from the reply.
It cites what it read
The answer carries the order number it was built from, so an agent can check it in one click and the customer gets a number rather than an adjective.
The problem
The same question, all day, answered from a second browser tab.
Order status is the question your team answers most and the one that teaches an agent least.
- Copied out of the admin
- An agent switches to the store admin, finds the order, retypes three facts, switches back. A couple of minutes a conversation, several hundred times a week.
- Vague answers create the next ticket
- “It's on the way” gets a follow-up tomorrow. A courier name, a tracking number and a delivery window does not.
- Asked at 23:00
- Customers ask when they think of it. Your order system is awake even when the team is not.
- Asked on four channels
- The same customer asks on WhatsApp, then Instagram, then email. Without one thread they get three different answers.
How it works
The mechanism, step by step.
An order-status answer is a lookup with a sentence wrapped around it. The lookup is deterministic; only the sentence is the model's.
- Order lookup
- Read-only by design. Scout can see order state; it cannot change it without an approval step you configure.
- Identity
- The thread is matched to a contact by phone, handle or email, and the contact to its orders. An ambiguous case asks one question instead of guessing.
- The scenario
- “Order status” is a scenario you can read: which fields are quoted, what is said when the order is late, and when a person is pulled in.
- Guardrails
- No delivery promise beyond what the courier returned. No refund, cancellation or address change without a human approval.
- Proactive updates
- Shipped, out for delivery, delivery failed. Each is a utility template sent once, carrying the same facts as the reply would.
- Handoff
- Anything outside the scenario goes to a person with the lookup result already sitting in the thread.
What it costs to send
Answers are service messages. Updates are utility templates.
“Where is my order?” is customer-initiated, which makes the answer a service message inside the 24-hour window. A proactive update is the opposite: you start the conversation, so it needs an approved template.
- Reply to a customer's question
- Service message
- A message from the customer opens a 24-hour window. Meta began charging for service messages on 1 October 2026, with the first 1,000 per business phone number per month free.
- Proactive shipping update (Egypt)
- $0.0036
- Utility template — shipped, out for delivery, delivery failed — sent when you start the conversation.
- The same update sent as marketing (Egypt)
- $0.0644
- About eighteen times the utility rate, for a message that is not marketing. Category routing is the whole lever.
Source: Meta WhatsApp per-message rate card, Egypt, retrieved 2 November 2026; category, window and service-message rules from Meta developer documentation.
Meta bills these fees, not us, and we never mark them up. BlendDesk charges for seats and AI resolutions.
Control
Read-only, cited, and happy to fetch a person.
An order-status agent that invents a delivery date is worse than no agent at all.
- Lookups are read-only
- Changing an order is a separate, gated action. The status scenario cannot reach it.
- Every answer cites its order
- The order number travels with the reply, so the answer can be verified instead of trusted.
- Nothing invented
- If the lookup returns nothing, Scout says so and fetches a person. It does not estimate a date to fill the silence.
- A human path, always
- Any thread can be taken over mid-flow. Meta's policy requires an escalation path out of automation, and the handoff carries the full history.
Source: WhatsApp Business Messaging Policy, updated 23 September 2026.
What you need
A channel and a way to read an order. That is most of it.
- A connected channel — WhatsApp, Instagram, Messenger, email or web chat.
- An order source: a native integration, or a read-only HTTPS endpoint.
- The fields you want quoted: status, courier, tracking number, delivery window.
- A rule for who gets the thread when the answer is not in the order.
Questions buyers actually ask.
What happens when the order is late?
The scenario decides, and the usual configuration is: state the facts the lookup returned, apologise once, and assign the thread to a person rather than invent a new date.
Does Scout need access to all my order data?
No. It needs the fields you expose. A read-only endpoint returning status, courier, tracking number and delivery window is enough to run this job.
Can the customer change the delivery address in the same conversation?
They can ask. That is a state change, so it waits for an approval — or runs automatically only if you decide to turn that on for your team.
Does this work on email and Instagram?
Same scenario, same lookup, different channel. On email, answers are drafted for an agent to send unless you enable automatic sending.
What resolution rate should I expect?
We do not publish one. Every vendor number you have seen is a vendor's number about a vendor's product. What we give you instead is the apparatus: replay your own past conversations in an evaluation and read the score before you ship anything.
Point it at your order system.
Book a demo and we will wire a read-only lookup to a test store, then let you ask it anything.