Spare parts, from phone-only to self-serve

The situation

If you owned a Springfree trampoline and needed a spare part, you called us. That was the whole system, in all four markets. The care team would figure out which model you had, find the right part and place the order for you. They were genuinely good at it, and customers were well looked after. It still meant a part could only be bought while the phones were open, every order took a person on each end, and a lot of skilled support time went to taking down orders. Trampolines live outside for years, so demand for parts never really stops, and the phone queue didn’t either.

What I did

I gave spare parts the same treatment as anything else we sell online. The hard problem was findability. A part only makes sense once it’s matched to the right trampoline, and to most customers the parts themselves look alike, so the buying flow starts from what you own and narrows from there. I leaned on the care team the whole way through. They’d spent years hearing exactly where people get stuck, and we worked their answers into the pages themselves. Then we brought self-serve ordering to all four markets, so a customer in any of them could find their part and check out without waiting for business hours.

What changed

Parts-related support calls dropped by more than 70%. Buying a part became a normal online purchase, at whatever hour suits the customer, in every market we serve. The humans didn’t go away, the waiting did.

It’s still one of my favourite projects, exactly because it’s unglamorous. Nothing about it demos well. But the measurement is clean, customers felt the difference right away, and the care team got to spend their skill on conversations that actually need a person instead of reading part numbers back over the phone. Projects like this are why I treat e-commerce as an operations discipline as much as a design one.