The short answer: At most B2B manufacturers, the single largest driver of customer service workload is routine order-status and invoice lookups — customers calling or emailing to ask “where’s my order?” and “can you resend that invoice?” Moving those routine lookups to a self-service portal removes the bulk of inbound contacts without adding staff. In a sample of 13 manufacturers, each eliminated roughly 12,000 order-status calls a year — about $140,000 in recovered customer-service cost per company.

Below is how that workload builds up, a benchmark you can use to size your own savings, and the lowest-effort way to start.

Is it normal for CSRs to spend all day on order-status calls?

It’s common — but it’s not efficient, and it’s not fixed. In a typical B2B manufacturer, a large share of every CSR’s day goes to repetitive, low-value questions: order status, expected ship dates, tracking numbers, copies of invoices, pricing and availability checks. None of these require judgment. They’re lookups — the customer just needs a few lines of data that already live in your ERP.

The reason it feels normal is that the cost is hidden. It’s spread across salaries, not billed as a line item, so “phone and email support” looks free. It isn’t. Every routine lookup a rep handles by hand is time that isn’t spent on the exceptions and relationships that actually need a human.

What’s actually driving your customer service workload?

Three patterns drive most of the avoidable volume:

• “Where’s my order?” (WISMO) calls. The highest-frequency request, and the most automatable — the answer is already in SAP.
• Invoice and document requests. Customers asking reps to look up, resend, or reconcile invoices.
• Order-entry errors and rework. Orders placed by phone, fax, and email get re-keyed by a person — which introduces mistakes that generate more calls to correct them.

The common thread: a person is acting as a lookup service for data the customer could retrieve themselves in seconds.

How much can self-service reduce CS call volume? A benchmark

Start with a simple unit cost. A reasonable industry assumption is $7.50 per customer-service interaction — calculate your own using average CSR salary and time per lookup, but $7.50 is a workable starting point.

Now multiply by the routine lookups you handle each year. To put real numbers on it, here’s what a representative subset of 13 manufacturers (medical/pharma, industrial, CPG, commercial products and more) eliminated by shifting routine lookups to self-service:

Aggregate, across all 13 clients, per year:

Average, per client, per year:

To benchmark your own number: estimate your annual order-status and invoice requests, multiply by your cost per interaction, and that’s the customer-service spend self-service can recover.

How do you cut order-status calls specifically?

Give customers a portal where they can see their own real-time order and invoice data — pulled directly from SAP, not a once-a-day export. The detail matters: if the portal shows stale or wrong data, customers stop trusting it and go back to calling, and you’ve kept the workload while adding a tool. Real-time, SAP-accurate self-service is what makes the calls actually go away.

Critically, this one needs no adoption gimmick. No one wants to call customer service to get order status — it’s a slow way to receive a few lines of data. If customers can get that information themselves in an intuitive portal, they will. The convenience is the incentive.

Start small: the Crawl / Walk / Run path

You don’t have to move customers off phone, fax, and email all at once. The lowest-risk path starts with order tracking and builds from there:

1. Crawl — Launch self-service order tracking. Customers shift routine post-order lookups to the portal. They experience it as a value-add, not a disruption, and they now have a login. With Corevist, order tracking launches in about 30 days.
2. Walk — Add online catalog browsing and ordering. The SAP integration you stood up for tracking is reused for full eCommerce — no duplicate investment — and customers already familiar with the portal adopt ordering as another value-add.
3. Run — Expand the channel. Add self-service bill pay, or stand up additional storefronts for other brands and sales areas on the same scalable SAP integration.

The takeaway

Customer-service workload at most manufacturers isn’t a staffing problem — it’s a self-service gap. Routine order-status and invoice lookups are the biggest, most automatable slice, and shifting them to a real-time, SAP-accurate portal removes the bulk of the load without adding headcount. Start with order tracking, size the savings with the benchmark above, and build from there.