Many distributors believe being customer focused means having real people answer the phone. That belief comes from the right place. Relationships matter in distribution, and customers value speaking with someone who understands their business.
But there is a growing gap between intention and reality. When customers are placed on hold for 3 to 7 minutes, sent to voicemail, or hang up because no one answers, that experience is not customer first. Even when teams care deeply about service, capacity limits quietly work against them.
Being customer focused is not just about who answers the phone. It is about whether the phone gets answered at all, and whether customers are allowed to order in the way that works best for them.
In B2B customer service environments, average inbound call wait times typically range from 2 to 5 minutes during normal business hours. In wholesale distribution, wait times often skew higher due to call clustering around mornings, Mondays, and delivery cutoffs.
During peak ordering windows, 5 to 10+ minute wait times are common. For a retailer trying to place an order, confirm availability, or make a last-minute adjustment before a cutoff, those minutes matter.
A realistic and conservative statement for wholesale is this: retailers calling distributors routinely wait 3 to 7 minutes to place or confirm orders during busy periods.
Wait time is only part of the problem. Call abandonment tells the rest of the story.
Industry benchmarks show:
In wholesale distribution, unanswered calls frequently roll to voicemail. Those voicemails may be returned hours later or missed entirely.
A conservative and defensible statement is this: 10% to 20% of inbound calls to distributors go unanswered or are abandoned during peak ordering windows.
Missed calls are not just missed conversations. They are missed revenue.
Consider a conservative example of a mid-sized distributor.
Assume:
That equals 12,500 inbound calls annually.
If 15% of those calls go unanswered or are abandoned, that is:
Now assume a very conservative average order value of:
That results in:
This calculation assumes:
In reality, those assumptions rarely hold true.
When this math is scaled across the U.S. wholesale and distribution industry, the impact becomes systemic.
With approximately 40,000 mid-sized wholesalers and distributors nationwide, even a conservative estimate of:
adds up to:
in lost or delayed revenue due to missed calls and long hold times.
This aligns closely with broader industry data around manual inefficiencies and lost demand. The cost of unanswered calls is not theoretical. It is structural.
Many distributors respond to service pressure by encouraging customers to place orders online. New portals, mobile apps, and digital tools are rolled out with good intentions. These tools are often well designed and genuinely useful.
But here is the disconnect.
Many customers still build their orders offline. They walk their store. They check inventory. They write quantities on a piece of paper, a clipboard, or a printed order guide. Once that work is done, they are then asked to sit down at a computer and re-enter the same information into an online system.
From the distributor’s perspective, this is efficient. From the customer’s perspective, it is extra work.
If a customer already knows what they want to order and has written it down, forcing them to transcribe that order into a digital interface is not customer first. It simply shifts effort from the distributor to the retailer.
True customer focus means letting customers order in the way that is most natural for them, not the way that is most convenient for internal systems.
Being customer first means allowing customers to place orders:
and still receiving those orders internally in a clean, structured format inside the ERP system.
Customers get flexibility. Distributors get consistency. Everyone wins.
This is where AI fundamentally changes the equation.
AI-powered agents ensure that 100% of inbound calls are answered. There are no hold queues and no voicemail backlogs. Customers receive an immediate response every time, even during peak periods and seasonal surges.
AI can also ingest orders from emails, faxes, texts, and voice calls, and convert them into structured ERP-ready orders without manual re-entry. Customers place orders in the way that works for them. Distributors receive orders exactly the way they need them.
AI does not replace relationships. It protects them by removing friction, delays, and frustration from the ordering experience.
When AI handles volume spikes and repetitive intake, internal teams are no longer reacting to ringing phones, inbox backlogs, or transcription errors. Stress drops. Error rates decline. Employees spend more time helping customers and less time apologizing for delays.
Customers feel heard. Employees feel effective. Revenue that once leaked out through missed calls and forced workflows is captured instead.
Being customer obsessed does not mean forcing every interaction through a limited human bottleneck or pushing every customer into the same digital workflow. It means designing operations so customers are never left waiting, frustrated, or doing extra work just to make the system function.
AI makes that possible. Not by replacing people, but by ensuring that:
In a market where service is often the strongest differentiator, enabling customers to order how they want, while ensuring every order is captured cleanly, may be the most customer-first decision a distributor can make.
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October 7, 2025
October 8, 2025
