--- title: Where does your order desk lose time? date: 2026-11-06T19:11:00+01:00 author: Laura Kedney canonical_url: "https://choco.com/uk/stories/order-desk-audit" section: Story --- # Where does your order desk lose time? *Published: 2026-11-06 | Author: The Choco Team* *Christmas means more orders, more channels and less time to process them. Here's a quick four-step check to find where your order desk loses hours, and what to fix before the rush.* It's 6am on a Monday in December. There are 14 voicemails from the weekend. Forty emails, some with a PDF attached, some with a photo of a handwritten list. A chef has sent three WhatsApp messages, the last one saying "ignore the first two." And the phone's already ringing. Someone on your order desk has to read every one of those, work out what the customer actually wants and type it into your ERP. Before the vans go out. Most of the time, they get it right. But every order keyed in by hand takes time. And in peak season, time is the one thing your order desk doesn't have. The good news? You don't need a big project to find out where those hours go. You need about an hour, a notepad and your order desk team. ### Step 1. List every way orders come in. Start by writing down every channel your customers use to place an order. Not the ones you'd like them to use. The ones they actually use. For most food wholesalers, the list looks something like this: - Phone calls and voicemails, often after hours - Emails, with orders typed out, pasted in or attached as PDFs - WhatsApp and text messages - Photos of handwritten notes or order sheets - Your reps, passing on orders from customer visits - Your online shop or ordering app Ask your order desk team to add anything you've missed. They'll know about the customer who always orders by text at 11pm. ### Step 2. Count the orders and the minutes. Pick one normal week. For each channel, note two things: how many orders came in, and roughly how long each one took to get into your ERP. You don't need a stopwatch. A rough estimate from the person who does the work is enough. Multiply the orders by the minutes and you'll see your hours per week. Often, one or two channels take up most of the time. That's where to look first. ### Step 3. Spot where mistakes creep in. Time is only half the story. The other half is what goes wrong. Look back over the last month of credit notes, returns and customer complaints. For each one, ask: which channel did that order come in through? You'll probably find the same patterns: - A voicemail where the product name was hard to make out - An email with a product code your system doesn't recognise - A WhatsApp message that changed the order after it was keyed in - A late-night order that wasn't picked up until the morning Every one of those is a cost. A credit note, a wasted delivery, or a customer who starts wondering whether to try someone else. ### Step 4. Decide what to fix first. Now put the two together. The channel that takes the most hours *and* causes the most mistakes is your biggest win. Some fixes are simple. Ask your top email customers to use a standard order format. Move a regular phone customer onto your online shop. Set a clear cut-off time for next-day orders. But some channels won't go away. Your customers order the way that suits them. The chef who sends a voice note at midnight isn't going to start filling in a form. For those orders, the answer isn't changing the customer. It's changing what happens after the order arrives. ### How a Yorkshire butcher went from 2 minutes to 8 seconds per order Swaledale Butchers supplies some of the UK's top chefs. Every order is different, with bespoke cuts, trims, weights and notes. And 70% of those orders arrived by WhatsApp. Each one took around 2 minutes to key into their butchery software, and the team had to remember every chef's specification. As one of the team put it: *"I'm good but I still make mistakes, I didn't realise how many I was making until we started with Choco."* With OrderAgent, orders from WhatsApp and procurement platforms are now captured and processed automatically. After a short learning period: - **8 seconds** per order, down from around 2 minutes - **97% accuracy**, even on complex specifications - **Less than six weeks** from ERP integration to go-live *"It's like having a new job,"* says Joe Lodge, Operations & Sales Manager. *"I've got time to talk to chefs now."* [Read the full Swaledale Butchers story](https://choco.com/uk/stories/case-studies/swaledale-butchers-ai-order-processing) ### The bottom line: Let orders come in any way. Process them in one place. Choco OrderAgent captures orders from voicemail, email, text, WhatsApp and even photos of handwritten notes. It reads them, matches them to your products and customers, and sends them straight to your ERP. Your order desk stays in control. You decide which customers and orders go through automatically, and OrderAgent flags anything unusual for a quick check. The results speak for themselves: > "Within just 3 weeks, Choco's AI delivered 96% order accuracy and reduced 40 hours of manual work to just 4." Carl Cecil, Director of Operations, Reach Food Group > "Choco's AI helped us double our order volume without increasing headcount." Kerim Suavi, Managing Director, Crowbond Foodservice Most teams save 3 to 5 hours per rep, per week. And onboarding can take as little as two weeks, so there's still time before the rush. ## Got big plans for 2027? Do the audit this week. Then see what your order desk could look like with OrderAgent. Sign with Choco by 31 December 2026 and we'll include an Apple iPad for your business as part of onboarding. [**See the Big Plans 2027 offer**](https://choco.com/uk/big-plans-2027) ยท [Request a demo](https://choco.com/uk/request-demo) *Offer available to new Choco business customers. Terms and conditions apply.* --- *Article URL: https://choco.com/uk/stories/order-desk-audit*