Why 80% of your support tickets are the same 5 questions

Ran the numbers on a few e-commerce support inboxes recently (mine included, back when I was doing support ops before building ReplyStack). Across almost every store, ticket volume breaks down roughly like this:

1. "Where's my order?" (~35%)

2. "Can I return/exchange this?" (~20%)

3. "This is delayed, what's going on?" (~15%)

4. "Does this fit / which size?" (~10%)

5. Everything else (~20%)

That means 4 out of 5 tickets hitting your inbox are questions you've already answered a hundred times. The fix isn't hiring more people — it's isolating those 4 categories and killing the "blank page" problem for your team.

Two things that actually moved the needle for me:

• Macros over memory. Don't rely on agents remembering the "right" tone/policy for shipping delays at 11pm on a Friday. Write it once, make it editable (fill in order # / date), and let people paste + tweak instead of typing from scratch.

• *Chatbots for the pattern, not the conversation.* You don't need a chatbot that can talk about anything. You need one that recognizes "where's my order" and "what's your return policy" and gets those off your plate — then hands off to a human for anything with nuance (refund disputes, angry customers, edge cases). Trying to make it handle everything is where most chatbot setups go wrong and end up feeling robotic.

If you're drowning in tickets, start by pulling your last 100 conversations and bucketing them. You'll almost certainly find the same 80/20 split — and once you see it, the fix becomes obvious.

(This exact breakdown is what I built ReplyStack around — reply macros + chatbot flows scoped to the actual repeat questions, not a generic "AI support agent." Happy to share the macro list if anyone wants a starting point.)