What is fundamentally changing at gecleant right now

Over the past six months, we’ve had to rebuild several core systems at the same time:

• Our email communication was migrated to Microsoft Exchange.
• At the same time, our shipping software moved from an old SOAP interface to a new REST API. That meant shipping labels, postage-account integration and parts of the order-processing workflow had to be rebuilt technically.
• On top of that came new customs requirements for international shipments.
• We also ran into problems with legacy systems and the new PHP version on our server –>  and extensions that were no longer compatible with it.

These changes affected exactly the areas that have to work reliably day to day: orders, shipping, returns and customer communication. Major changes were happening while normal operations continued. The result was clear: Our responsiveness suffered, some enquiries were handled too late and individual cases were not consistently brought to a proper conclusion.

That wasn’t good enough.

So instead of fixing isolated errors, we rebuilt the technical foundation.

 

Since 1 August,

the gecleant backend has been running on a new, in-house customer-service system. Emails, orders, returns, replacement shipments and refunds will now be handled as connected cases. The system is designed to recognise how often someone has contacted us, what happened most recently and the current status of the order.

1. Standard cases should be answered faster. Critical cases are made more visible. Old messages and unresolved cases are being worked through systematically and closed properly.
2. We’re also improving phone availability. A call agent is in development so customers won’t need to call repeatedly in future.

With more than 40,000 customers, even an error rate of just 0.5% means around 200 unhappy people. A 0% error rate may never be realistic, but the situation recently was still unacceptable. Sorry for that!

Now the priority is to clean things up, resolve open cases and make communication reliable again.

 

 

If you’re still waiting for a reply, refund, replacement shipment or any other resolution, please write to:

support@gecleant.de

Ideally include your order number. We’re going through the existing emails systematically and closing open cases step by step.

One thing up front: the transition may still be a little bumpy at first. But the most important foundations are now in place. Now we’re working through the backlog.

 

Shown in the image: 

Faster return intake: the new WooCommerce OCR Package Mobile Scanner made by GECLEANT.de

With the OCR scanner, a returned parcel can be captured directly using a smartphone camera. The system reads visible information such as name, address and other shipping details from the photo and uses that data to search for the matching order.

It doesn’t search for just one value. Name, address and other recognisable data are combined to identify the most likely order and the existing customer case.

That turns an anonymous parcel into a clearly assigned case much faster:

Take photo → recognise data → find order → open return case → process next step

The function saves manual searching, reduces matching errors and directly connects the physical return with the order and communication history.

If the match isn’t unambiguous, the system doesn’t make a blind decision. The case remains open for review and shows the most likely matches.

This means returns will no longer be handled in isolation, but as part of the complete case: order, emails, return, replacement shipment or refund remain visible in one shared history.

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