VICO FOOD BOX: the delivery experience that wins foreign markets

The initial challenges in after-sales

Before adopting Qapla', Vico Food Box was using a software dedicated to shipment management that was a valid tool purely from a functional standpoint. However, it represented a serious problem on the economic side: the costs were structured in a way that was unsustainable for the company's volumes, which had grown very significantly over time, making the cost/benefit ratio no longer justifiable.

After-sales communication was extremely fragmented: every single platform and every sales channel required completely separate management. This generated processes that continually overlapped in daily operations, increasing the risk of operational errors. Furthermore, the team did not have a single centralized control point, limiting visibility over the entire shipment fleet and forcing operators to perform repetitive manual tasks.

Where the need for change arose

The main difficulties encountered before the system change touched three distinct areas:

• Team efficiency Manual management absorbed disproportionate resources. Checking the status of each shipment individually, responding to tracking requests and handling exceptions required a time investment incompatible with the brand's growth ambitions.
• Resolving anomalies Promptly identifying a problematic shipment within a large daily volume was difficult and slow, because there was no system capable of proactively highlighting critical issues.
• Multilingual localization Operating steadily in more than 25 European countries, managing communication in a personalized way for each market was impossible without a dedicated tool. The previous manual setup often forced generic communications, risking that German, French or Polish customers received emails in Italian or English, driving them away from a premium eCommerce experience.

Negative reviews linked to shipping are a complex reality for the cross-border food sector. Since the emotional experience of receiving Italian products at home is at the heart of Vico Food Box's value proposition, poor after-sales management risked undermining the quality of the product. WISMO requests ("Where is my order?") represented a critical share of the total volume of customer care tickets, an unacceptable rate for questions customers should have been able to answer on their own.

The criteria for choosing the new partner

The awareness that the previous management was no longer sustainable matured on two parallel levels. The first was economic in nature: the cost per shipment of the old software, multiplied by the growing volumes, had reached a critical threshold. The second level was operational: the team realized that manual control was not scalable on large volumes and was nonetheless too costly on smaller ones. To maintain accurate monitoring of every shipment, tools capable of making the process efficient and streamlined were needed.

The three axes of evaluation

The evaluation of the alternatives involved three company functions (Marketing, Logistics and Finance) based on three fundamental axes, on which Qapla' emerged as the clear winner:

A decisive element was API support: the integration flexibility allowed Vico Food Box to build automations on WhatsApp for tracking and to connect AI solutions for the automated handling of WISMO requests. In order of impact, the key features were: the unified multi-site dashboard, multilingual tracking consistent with the premium positioning, address verification to reduce returns directly from the platform, and the immediate visual highlighting of anomalies.

A non-negotiable criterion was the quality of support. Qapla' fully passed the evaluation tests, offering chat and email support that proved practical, fast and effective in daily dynamics.

Platform integration and activation

The implementation was smooth, despite the broad integration scope required. Qapla' proved simple to install and configure, reducing the time needed to train the team's staff. This advantage translated into a direct impact on operational productivity from the very first days of use.

The connections with the eCommerce platforms, carriers and third-party tools were completed without blocking issues. The connection with AI systems for chat management and with WhatsApp automations required API development greatly facilitated by well-structured technical documentation. In the natural moments of technical discussion, the Qapla' support team proved responsive and competent, consolidating the kind of solid partnership the company seeks in its IT suppliers.

Operational workflow and daily management

In Vico Food Box's daily workflow, the unified dashboard is the first screen consulted by warehouse and customer care operators. The status of all active shipments across the various channels emerges in a centralized way, displaying delays or delivery problems at a glance, without having to analyze the data row by row.

In the warehouse, label generation has become much faster, optimizing productivity at scale. In parallel, basic WISMO requests are entirely delegated to the combination of Qapla' data and AI chat tools, allowing the team to focus on higher value-added practices.

Personalization and retention strategies

Vico Food Box has configured dedicated transactional email templates and tracking pages for the main foreign markets. The customer thus receives every update in their own language and with a tone of voice consistent with the brand. Within the tracking emails, promotional content, coupons and purchase suggestions are also inserted, monitored with UTM links to precisely measure the conversions generated.

Updating the templates requires limited effort thanks to the platform's intuitive editor. The main challenge remains the progressive extension of the system's native language coverage to comprehensively cover all the new, fast-growing markets.

Concrete results and business impact

The impact of shipping on a brand's overall reputation, according to company data, stands at around 60-70%. A customer uncertain about the status of their order experiences a level of dissatisfaction that risks compromising repurchase, especially if it is the first order.

The introduction of proactive notifications and dedicated tracking pages transformed the feedback received: customers positively highlight the transparency and timeliness of the information, critical elements in the food sector for planning the pickup of goods. The 70% drop in WISMO tickets, achieved by combining Qapla's automatic notifications with AI automations, optimized internal workflows, fully justifying the investment.

Beyond shipping: the vision for the future of eCommerce

Scaling a brand beyond national borders is not just a matter of logistics or volumes, but of attention to detail. When an eCommerce decides to open up to the world, manual processes become an invisible brake: they steal precious time that should be invested in building the brand, in strategy and in human relationships.

For those aiming at a positioning of excellence, making customers feel close by speaking their language at every moment of after-sales is not a simple plus, but the key to being chosen again. Breaking down distances means transforming a technical moment like delivery into a fundamental building block of trust and emotion.

The real secret behind solid growth lies in the choice of your technology partners. Debora Celentano reminds us that the right ally is not just someone who writes excellent code, but someone who puts people and listening at the center of their work, reflecting exactly the same love and dedication that Vico Food Box devotes, every day, to its community.