How an Office Chair Seller Cut Returns From 18% to 8%

About this case: The client is an office furniture exporter that sells into North America and Europe. We haven’t named it.

Key Takeaways

• The seller’s return rate fell from 18% to 8% after one year, a drop of 10 percentage points.
• Buyers assemble chairs on weekends and weekday evenings. The seller’s support team was offline during those hours, and customers waited more than 12 hours for a reply.
• We put human agents on the phone during those hours, wrote the sick-leave cover rules before anyone needed them, and had supervisors join live calls that were going badly.
• The share of invalid return requests resolved without a return rose from 15% to 45%.

A buyer in Los Angeles is one step from finishing a US$400 ergonomic chair. The gas lift won’t seat in the base. It’s Saturday afternoon and the seller’s after-sales team is offline.

That buyer has two options: wait, or send the chair back. A returned chair costs the seller more than US$100 in oversize return freight, and a chair that has been taken apart can’t be resold as new.

The seller’s support hours didn’t match its customers’ hours

The client trades household and office furniture, including ergonomic chairs, to distributors, marketplace sellers and consumers. Because of the time difference, its after-sales team was offline when most of its customers needed it.

Chair buyers work on a different schedule. They assemble on Saturdays, Sundays and weekday evenings in North American time. A customer who got stuck on a Saturday afternoon waited more than 12 hours for a first reply. Some of them had filed a return by then.

Assembly instructions were in the box. That doesn’t settle much. In a Harvard Business Review study of more than 75,000 customers (Customer Contact Council, published 2010), 57% of inbound calls came from customers who had gone to the company’s website first. The answer was available and the customer still needed a person.

The account had two more weak points. There was no cover plan for a human agent taking unplanned leave, so one absence on a weekend could leave the phones unanswered. And a reply that only checks the shipping status, or suggests a return to a customer who is stuck on assembly, turns a fixable problem into a return.

What we changed

A seller can check its own schedule the same way: pull a month of support contacts, sort them by the customer’s local day and hour, and compare that with the hours the team is online.

One call, start to finish

Our account team describes how the Los Angeles buyer’s call went, in three stages.

The human agent calmed him down first, then walked through the standard checks. Was the red protective cap still on the gas lift? Was the base slot facing the right way?

He still couldn’t follow the instructions, and he was getting angrier. The supervisor listening to the call judged that the explanation wasn’t clear enough for this chair model and that the call was heading for a return request.

The supervisor opened a three-way call and explained the fit in plainer words while the customer worked. The gas lift seated. The customer kept the chair and left a five-star review.

We wrote about the same handoff from the queue’s point of view in our guide to ticket triage.

Results after one year

The first and last rows are not the same measurement taken twice. “12+ hours” is how long customers waited for a reply when nobody was online. “Within 45 seconds” is phone pickup time once the weekend and evening shifts existed.

Invalid returns intercepted counts return requests for non-defective products that were resolved without a return.

The client’s account lead wrote to us about one of the human agents on the team:

I am particularly impressed with how she handles challenging situations with patience and empathy, always putting the customer's needs first. Her ability to resolve issues effectively and efficiently is commendable and sets a high standard for customer service.

Kaycee, client account lead, in a letter about a Callnovo.ai human agent

When this setup is more than you need

Weekend phone cover with live supervisor monitoring costs more than email support. It pays for itself when a single return is expensive, as it is with bulky furniture that ships oversize and can’t be resold after assembly.

If you sell a product that costs less than the return freight would, a clear assembly video and a parts-reship policy will do most of this work. If your returns are caused by defects or by products that don’t match the listing, support hours won’t fix them.

Three questions to ask before you outsource assembly support

1. On which days and hours do your customers actually assemble the product, and is anyone online then?
2. If a human agent on your account is out sick this Saturday, who takes the calls, and is that written down?
3. When a call starts going wrong, can a supervisor join it, or does the customer get a callback?

Callnovo.ai staffed this account as a managed support team. Supervisor listening and three-way calls run on HeroDash, our support platform. We also offer call review as a separate quality assurance service.

Sources

• Dixon, Freeman and Toman, “Stop Trying to Delight Your Customers,” Harvard Business Review, July–August 2010
• Callnovo, office furniture after-sales case (WeChat, in Chinese), September 23, 2026

Performance metrics reflect results from a Callnovo.ai partnership. Client identity withheld. The client letter is quoted with first names only.