Where does your order desk lose time?

11/06/2026 • The Choco Team

The holidays mean 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 3pm on a Thursday in December. The order cut-off is an hour away.

There are 14 voicemails from this morning. Forty emails, some with a PDF attached, some with a photo of a handwritten list. A chef has sent three texts, the last one saying "ignore the first two." And your reps are in their cars, trying to key in orders on a patchy signal.

Someone has to read every one of those, work out what the customer actually wants and get it into your ERP. Before the trucks roll 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 distributors, the list looks something like this:

Phone calls and voicemails, often after hours
Emails, with orders typed out, pasted in or attached as PDFs
Text messages and WhatsApp
Photos of handwritten notes or order sheets
Your DSRs, passing on orders from customer visits
Your online store 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 credits, 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 recognize
A text 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, 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 store. 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 leaves a voicemail 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 Long Island produce supplier processes orders in 13 seconds

Krystal Produce is a produce supplier based in Long Island, New York. Facing labor shortages, they needed a way to keep up with orders without adding headcount or letting service slip.

With OrderAgent, orders now go straight into their system, 24/7. For one of their largest clients alone:

13 seconds to process each order
Around 15 hours saved every week
Over $23,000 saved a year

And across the business, "one person can now handle what would have previously required five," says Mike Longo, Co-owner.

"The automation ensures that orders go directly into our system without errors that could arise from language barriers or miscommunication."

Read the full Krystal Produce story

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.

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 December 31, 2026 and we'll include an Apple iPad for your business as part of onboarding.

See the Big Plans 2027 offer → · Request a demo

Offer available to new Choco business customers. Terms and conditions apply.