Research question and scope
Published September 4, 2026.
This study asks where customers seek help during a device trade-in and which event gaps accompany repeat contact or delayed credit. It proposes a reproducible local method and does not publish a vendor benchmark.
The journey begins at trade-in creation and ends at credit, return of device, or a defined unresolved cutoff. Join shipment, receiving, inspection, valuation, customer decision, support contact, and credit events. Preserve both event time and ingestion time.
Measurement plan
Define each state in operational terms: label issued, carrier accepted, delivered, facility received, inspection started, valuation sent, accepted or disputed, and credit posted. Measure time in each state, contacts before the next state, reopened cases, and records that cannot be linked.
Validate tracking events against a sample of source records. Annotate carrier incidents, facility closures, policy changes, and system migrations. Apply the FTC data security principles when deciding what device and customer data the study actually needs.
Analysis and limitations
Publish a journey flow before averages. Show medians and tail durations with counts by stage, carrier, facility, device class, and outcome. A structured case review can test whether the last customer update named the correct stage and checkpoint.
Item condition, shipping distance, demand, fraud review, customer response time, and valuation disputes can affect both delay and contact. Unlinked parcels are not missing at random. The design supports association and workflow diagnosis, not causal claims or employee ranking.
Pilot a status message at one handoff and monitor contacts, time to next event, inaccurate notifications, privacy exceptions, and workload shifted to another team.