Never ship an order that was never real.
A cash-on-delivery order is a promise, not a payment. We call while the purchase is still in the buyer's head to find out which promises are real, and the answer reaches your warehouse before the pick.
The cheapest return is the one that never gets packed.
Once a parcel leaves your warehouse, every outcome costs money. If the address is wrong, or the buyer has changed their mind, you pay freight out, freight back, the packaging and three weeks of working capital to find that out.
Contact rates halve after the first half hour. A message sent into that window sits unread beside forty others. A phone call, about an order placed twenty minutes ago, gets answered, because the buyer still remembers placing it.
The calls that do not verify are worth as much as the ones that do. An order nobody will take responsibility for on the phone is an order you should not be shipping.
“Hello, this is Apriori. I wanted to confirm order #5108, ₹1,299 cash on delivery. … The address is Andheri East, third floor. Could you tell me the building's landmark? … Understood. Will anyone be home tomorrow during the day to take delivery?”
Illustrative call. A real example of what the agent does before dispatch, not a recording of a customer.
Four things the call establishes.
Not a yes or no. Four separate facts, each of which can independently turn a shipment into a return.
Address verified
Landmark, floor and pin code, said aloud.
Intent verified
A real buyer who still wants the parcel.
Time slot verified
When someone will actually be there.
Ordered by mistake
Flagged Do Not Dispatch before it leaves.
What you decide, and what we never decide for you.
Every one of these is a setting you change yourself, not a support ticket.
Which orders get called
By payment method, order value, pin code, product, or how many times the buyer has ordered before. Most brands start with the riskiest cohort and widen it once they have heard the recordings.
When calls go out
The delay after checkout, the hours calls are allowed, and how many re-attempts a buyer who does not pick up is worth. Re-attempts are timed to the pickup windows when Indian mobiles actually connect.
What happens when nobody answers
We don't guess. Your rule decides: hold the order, cancel it, or ship it at risk. We execute the rule you wrote, on every order, and record which one fired.
What the agent never does
The list of things the agent must hand to a human instead of attempting. You write it, and it holds. A live handoff is one of the options.
The verification reaches the pick, not a report.
A verified address that lives in a dashboard changes nothing. Every outcome of this call lands back in the system that decides what gets packed.
- Verified orders released to fulfilment, with the corrected address attached
- Corrected landmark, floor and pin code written back to the order
- Preferred delivery window recorded against the shipment
- Ordered by mistake flagged Do Not Dispatch before the pick
- Unreachable orders routed by your rule: hold, cancel, or ship at risk
- Prepaid conversions, where the buyer accepted a payment link on the call
You get the recordings and the numbers, including the bad ones.
Every call on this window is measured from its own audio and lands in a signed report, alongside the holdout cohort it is being compared against. That is why this page can be specific.
- How long the buyer waited for the agent to reply, measured from the recording
- How often the agent talked over the buyer, and how often the buyer talked over it
- How the agent handled sentences that mix Hindi and English in one breath
- Whether the audio on each call was good enough to measure at all
- Every call it got wrong, listed, with the recording attached
- The RTO rate of the called cohort against the untouched holdout
Before you ask us.
Does calling every COD order annoy buyers?
One short call about an order placed minutes ago is not a marketing call and does not read as one. You control the volume anyway: most brands start by calling only orders above a value threshold, and widen it once they have listened to the recordings.
What if the buyer wants to change the address on the call?
The agent takes the corrected address, reads it back to confirm, and writes it to the order before the pick. You can switch that off if you would rather addresses only change through support.
How fast does the call go out?
Within twenty minutes of the order. Your store fires an order-created event, it reaches us in seconds, and the only delay is the one you configured. There is no nightly batch.
Is this the same thing as the NDR window?
No, and the economics are different. This window calls every qualifying order to catch the few that should never ship. The NDR window calls far fewer, but each of those is already close to lost, which makes each recovered call worth several times more. We run both and price each on the outcome it produces.
What about TRAI and DND rules?
These are transactional calls about an order the buyer placed with you, and the calling window, retry limits and suppression lists are all under your control. Our current position is written up on the calling policy page, including the parts still under legal review.