CX Design
What to Do After Black Friday: A Guide to Post-BFCM Planning
TL;DR:
- Reflect quickly: Analyze customer service metrics like CSAT, FRT, and ticket volume immediately after BFCM to identify what worked and what didn’t.
- Optimize self-service: Update FAQs and help centers to address gaps revealed in BFCM support inquiries.
- Streamline operations: Audit staffing, inventory, and fulfillment to avoid bottlenecks in future peak seasons.
- Turn insights into action: Use BFCM data to set measurable goals and implement quick wins for success next year.
Nailing customer support during BFCM is all about staying ahead of the game and making smart moves—fast.
But the real key to success lies in what you do when the rush is over. Treating BFCM as a learning opportunity allows you to refine your customer experience (CX) and set yourself up for an even better performance next year.
Without a plan for what to do after Black Friday, it’s easy to repeat mistakes or overlook key trends that could make all the difference next year.
In this article, we’ll share a simple framework to help you evaluate your BFCM performance and turn insights into actionable steps for long-term CX improvement.
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Key areas to review post-BFCM
It’s best to reflect on key areas like customer service, tech performance, customer behavior, and operations right after BFCM versus waiting until late next year.
By taking a closer look now, you can spot what worked, fix what didn’t, and start applying those insights to other big sales events throughout the year—not just BFCM.
A little effort now = a lot of payoff later!
1. Customer service metrics: Where did your team shine (or struggle)?
By analyzing key metrics, you can identify what worked, where your team excelled, and what areas need improvement to better prepare for future busy seasons. Key metrics include:
- Customer Satisfaction (CSAT): Gauge how happy customers were with their interactions. Look for trends in both positive and negative feedback to pinpoint what delighted or frustrated customers.
- First Response Time (FRT): Assess if your team met expectations for quick responses during peak periods.
- Average Resolution Time (ART): Evaluate how efficiently issues were resolved and whether there were any bottlenecks.
- Contact Rate: Examine whether there was a surge in inquiries, and uncover why.
- Net Promoter Score (NPS): Determine how likely customers are to recommend your brand post-BFCM.
- Ticket Volume: Review peak times and common customer issues. This insight can help forecast future support needs and ensure your team is adequately prepared for high-demand events.
Tools like Gorgias’s Ticket Insights can reveal which issues—like discounts, shipping policies, or damaged orders—dominated your support tickets.
For a more comprehensive view, Gorgias’s Support Performance dashboard shows how customer service influenced sales, including tickets converted, conversion ratios, and total revenue. These insights are invaluable for understanding the connection between support efficiency and revenue growth.
Brands like Obvi, a leading supplement company, have leveraged Gorgias to enhance their support strategies.
Obvi serves a large number of shoppers seeking pre-sales guidance to choose the right supplements. By using Gorgias’s Flows and Article Recommendations, they provide instant, automated answers to frequently asked questions directly within Chat.
Here’s how it works:
- Flows offer shoppers a menu of common queries about products and shipping, providing fast answers to top concerns.
- For more specific questions, Article Recommendations scan Obvi’s Help Center articles and share the most relevant answer. For example:some text
- How do I mix Obvi collagen?
- Is Obvi vegan?
- Can I take collagen while pregnant?
To fine-tune their approach, Obvi uses data from their tickets to identify recurring customer questions. By analyzing the gaps between their initial FAQs and real customer inquiries, they adjusted their automated responses to better meet customer needs.
“We thought we knew what our FAQs were, but data from Gorgias was incredibly insightful to understand which FAQs to automate. That's one reason it's really valuable to have our Helpdesk tickets and automation features in one tool.”
— Ron Shah, CEO and Co-founder at Obvi
2. Technical performance: Did your tools hold up under pressure?
While marketing efforts often steal the spotlight, savvy brands know that backend systems are the unsung heroes of Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
Start by auditing critical areas such as platform downtime, checkout errors, or slow response times. These issues not only frustrate shoppers but can also lead to lost revenue and customer loyalty during your busiest shopping days of the year.
Next, evaluate how well your tools were able to manage peak volumes. Did your helpdesk, CRM, and ecommerce platforms work seamlessly together, or were there gaps in your integrations?
If switching between platforms slowed your team down or caused data silos, consider streamlining your tech stack with an all-in-one CX solution.
For example, platforms like Gorgias enable CX teams to consolidate support, sales, and automation into a single tool. Gorgias combines Helpdesk and Automate to resolve customer issues efficiently, while Convert supports upselling and increasing customer lifetime value.
A streamlined, integrated platform not only boosts efficiency but also helps your CX team focus on what matters most: delivering exceptional customer experiences.
3. Customer trends and behavior: What did your shoppers really want?
Start by reviewing product demand, buying patterns, and cart-building behaviors. Were there any unexpected customer needs or shifts in preferences? Identifying these trends can help you refine your inventory planning, marketing strategies, and product offerings.
For example, here’s a detailed breakdown of what to look for:
Product demand shifts
Use these insights to adjust inventory planning for future campaigns. Ensure you have sufficient stock of trending products and create promotional bundles for underperforming items.
- Which products outperformed expectations? Were they planned bestsellers or surprise hits?
- Did slow-moving products unexpectedly gain traction, or did top-sellers underperform?
Cart-building behaviors
Tailor future cart-building promotions to encourage higher Average Order Value (AOV). For instance, highlight complementary products or offer discounts on bundles.
- Did customers prefer individual purchases, or did bundling promotions drive higher AOV?
- Were there abandoned cart trends tied to specific products or price thresholds?
Unexpected customer needs
Incorporate these suggestions into your product development or cross-sell strategies. Highlight related products in future campaigns to meet these emerging needs.
- Did reviews or support tickets indicate demand for features, colors, or sizes you didn’t offer?
- Were there inquiries about add-on products or product pairing ideas?
Self-serve helpfulness
If you have an FAQ page or Help Center, evaluate how well it performed. Did customers find the information they needed, or did they still open tickets for common questions?
Metrics like Article Views, Number of Searches, and Click-Through Rates can show how effectively your self-service resources meet customer needs.
If customers contact support for information already in your Help Center, it may indicate unclear articles or poor visibility of resources. This means you should rewrite unclear articles, optimize search terms, and ensure Help Center links are prominently displayed across your website and emails.
4. Operational challenges: Where did the stress show up most?
BFCM is a stress test for your operations, and reflecting on how well your systems handled the surge can help you uncover critical areas for improvement.
Staffing
Start by reviewing your staffing during peak periods. Did your customer service and warehouse teams feel overwhelmed, or were they adequately supported?
Questions to Ask:
- Were there enough team members to handle the workload?
- Did customer service or warehouse teams experience burnout or delays?
Next Steps:
- Plan staffing schedules around peak demand forecasts.
- Cross-train employees to cover high-pressure roles, such as fulfillment or customer support.
- Offer incentives, like performance bonuses, to encourage seasonal staff retention.
Preparing your team with a more flexible schedule and extra resources for high-demand areas can make all the difference.
Order fulfillment
If order fulfillment workflows slowed down or became error-prone, it may be time to optimize your processes.
Questions to Ask:
- Were there delays in shipping or errors in packaging?
- Did order accuracy or speed decline as volumes increased?
Next Steps:
- Audit fulfillment workflows to identify slow or repetitive steps.
- Invest in automation for picking, packing, and shipping processes.
- Partner with a third-party logistics (3PL) provider if in-house capacity was overwhelmed.
Inventory management
Stockouts or overstock situations during BFCM can directly impact both sales and customer satisfaction.
Questions to Ask:
- Did stockouts or overstock situations impact your Black Friday sales?
- Was inventory tracking accurate during the busiest days?
Next Steps:
- Implement real-time inventory tracking to reduce discrepancies.
- Use demand planning software to improve forecasting for top-selling products.
- Bundle slow-moving inventory with bestsellers in future holiday deals to avoid overstock.
Operational challenges often have a ripple effect on customer experience. By reflecting on these areas—staffing, fulfillment, and inventory—you can identify actionable improvements that streamline operations and create a smoother experience for both your team and your customers.
Building a CX improvement plan post-BFCM
Once you've reviewed the key areas of your BFCM performance, the next step is turning those insights into actionable strategies. Here’s how to build a CX improvement plan that sets you up for long-term success.
Step 1: Document lessons learned before they’re forgotten
Start by centralizing everything you’ve uncovered from your retro.
Use collaborative tools like Notion, Google Docs, or Trello to organize insights across customer service, tech performance, and operations.
And don’t just focus on observations—highlight actionable takeaways. For example, instead of noting “high contact rates,” document the underlying causes, like gaps in FAQs or unclear return policies.
If you’re feeling overwhelmed by the volume of data, let AI do the heavy lifting. Use prompts like these to quickly spot patterns:
- “Analyze the common themes in this ticket data and summarize the top three trends.”
- “Identify recurring customer complaints and suggest improvements to address them.”
- “Provide recommendations to optimize self-service options based on this dataset.”
AI tools can save you time and ensure nothing slips through the cracks as you plan your next steps.
Step 2: Tackle your biggest support pain points
Analyzing challenges in your CX processes can reveal quick wins and long-term improvements. Here are a few common support pain points and how to address them:
High Contact Rates
A surge in customer inquiries often signals that self-service options aren’t meeting expectations.
Solution: Add or update tools like chat widgets, Help Centers, and post-purchase emails to proactively answer common questions.
Inconsistent Response Times
This usually points to workflow inefficiencies or a lack of team bandwidth.
Solution: Use automation to prioritize urgent tickets, deflect repetitive inquiries, and ensure smoother workflows.
Low CSAT Scores
Frustration with slow resolutions or insufficient empathy often leads to poor satisfaction ratings.
Solution: Invest in empathy training and implement faster resolution strategies, like automating FAQs or integrating sentiment detection tools to flag unhappy customers.
AI Escalation Issues
While tools like Gorgias’s AI Agent can streamline support, improper setup can lead to automation loops that frustrate customers.
Solution: Define rules for when AI should escalate to a human, feed it more comprehensive data (like updated Help Center articles), and set boundaries for topics it shouldn’t handle.
For example, even with the efficiency provided by their Helpdesk, Obvi found Black Friday and Cyber Monday to be a hectic and stressful period for their small customer support team—just one full-time agent and half of another team member’s time.
The influx of customer inquiries made it difficult to focus on more complex tickets that could save sales from unhappy customers or convert inquiries into purchases. Instead, their team was bogged down by thousands of repetitive questions, like “Where is my order?”
Automating answers to repetitive questions gave the Obvi team the room to focus on personalized and revenue-driving customer interactions, like engaging with their community of 75,000 women.
“Instantly, our CX team had time to prioritize important matters, like being active in our community of 75,000 women instead of sitting answering emails.”
—Ron Shah, CEO and Co-founder at Obvi
The extra bandwidth helped Obvi drive over 3x the purchases from support conversations compared to previous years. Automate also enabled their team to reach inbox zero by 6 pm—during Black Friday week!
By automating 27% of their inquiries, they not only improved their response times but also handled over 150 tickets daily with just 1.5 agents, driving 10x more sales during BFCM.
Step 3: Focus on quick wins that deliver big impact
Even the smallest changes can deliver a big impact.
For example, update FAQs based on ticket trends or refine chat flows to reduce repetitive questions. Consolidating your CX tools into an omnichannel helpdesk like Gorgias can also reduce agent workload while delivering consistent customer experiences.
Repetitive inquiries—like shipping updates, return questions, or product FAQs—don’t need to consume your team’s time. Automating these workflows can significantly lighten your team’s load while keeping response times quick.
Gorgias users, for example, can automate up to 60% of support tickets with tools like AI Agent, enabling teams to focus on higher-value interactions.
Quick wins aren’t just about streamlining support—they can also drive measurable results.
For instance, Pajar, a footwear brand, leverages AI Agent to handle common inquiries in English and French. While this is a feature they use year-round, it’s handy during holiday shopping seasons when support teams are under pressure to respond quickly.
AI Agent is a conversational support assistant that can answer and resolve customer inquiries.
This freed up their small team of five agents to focus on complex tickets, achieving impressive results:
- Resolved 45% of queries with automation, surpassing their 30% goal.
- Reduced first response times to just 12 minutes.
- Maintained high satisfaction scores by delivering timely, accurate responses.
With tools like AI Agent and Sentiment Detection, you can automate prioritization for tickets—such as flagging urgent issues or unhappy customers—while still maintaining a personal touch.
Step 4: Level up training and leverage your team’s tools
Peak season often highlights gaps in both team training and CX tools. Addressing these areas not only improves your team’s ability to handle high-pressure situations but also fosters a stronger customer-first mindset across your organization.
Start by leveraging the feedback you’ve collected. Your team has so much data they can review between channels like email, SMS, chat, and social media—both compliments and complaints. You need to be willing to listen to every customer’s needs.
At Love Wellness, customer feedback is treated as a daily priority.
The team has a dedicated Slack channel for feedback, where team members regularly drop insights from all touchpoints. This collaborative approach helps them get familiar with recurring themes, dissect customer needs, and work together on solutions.
The Love Wellness team recommends scheduling recurring feedback share sessions with Product or Website teams—or even inviting those teams into Gorgias to create dedicated views for feedback categories like product improvements or website issues.
Beyond tools and processes, training is crucial. Their team also emphasizes the importance of fostering a customer-first mindset at all levels:
Customer service is one of the main ways they build trust with customers, especially in the personal care and women’s health niche. That’s why the Love Wellness team created an immersive customer experience training program that involves everyone—from the company's president to its office manager.
This holistic approach ensures that every team member, regardless of their role, understands the company’s purpose and how their actions contribute to a seamless customer experience.
Step 5: Prove the ROI of CX to get more resources
Your customer support team isn’t just there to clear tickets—it’s a key driver of revenue, retention, and customer lifetime value (CLV). Yet, too many teams measure success based solely on metrics like response and resolution times. While these are important, they’re only part of the story.
As Zoe Kahn, Manager of Customer Experience and Retention at Chomps, explains:
“Aiming for overly broad goals of ‘surprising and delighting’ customers without a real understanding of how support impacts the whole customer journey or business ROI is a common pitfall. Customer experience, largely driven by the support team, touches every stage of the journey—from pre-sales to post-sales—and directly influences more sales and loyalty.”
To demonstrate CX’s value, it’s crucial to track metrics that reflect your team’s true impact on the business. For example:
- Customer Retention Rate (CRR): How well does your team retain customers over time?
- CSAT Scores: Are your customers satisfied enough to return or recommend your brand?
- Revenue From Support Conversations: How many sales are driven by proactive or reactive support interactions?
By focusing on these KPIs, you’ll incentivize your support team to go beyond answering questions and actively contribute to business goals. This could include suggesting products during conversations, encouraging happy customers to leave reviews, or proactively addressing issues that lead to churn.
Teams using Gorgias have even greater opportunities to prove ROI through tools like the Revenue Statistics dashboard, which tracks metrics like tickets converted into sales, conversion rates, and total revenue driven by support interactions.
“Without knowing how much money your customer experience (CX) drives, you’ll never fully understand your impact on the business or have the data needed to advocate for more resources from leadership.”
— Zoe Kahn, Chomps
Set smarter goals next year
The best way to close out your post-BFCM retro is by setting clear, measurable goals for next year. Use this year’s insights to create actionable targets that enhance your customer support and CX strategy:
- Reduce ticket volume: Implement or improve self-service options like FAQs, chatbots, and Help Centers.
- Decrease response and resolution times: Optimize workflows, invest in automation, or plan for better staffing during peak periods.
- Boost CSAT: Address recurring customer pain points, streamline support processes, and train your team to deliver more empathetic, effective service.
Tools like Gorgias make it easier to turn these goals into reality. With powerful automation, integrated insights, and scalable support solutions, you can transform this year’s lessons into meaningful, lasting improvements.
Start planning now to make next year’s BFCM your smoothest—and most successful—yet!
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TL;DR:
- Manual QA is time-consuming and inconsistent. Reviewing conversations manually makes it difficult to ensure uniform quality across agents and touchpoints.
- Automating QA saves time and improves accuracy. Automation ensures all tickets are reviewed with the same quality, freeing up agent time to create stronger customer connections.
- QA helps teams continuously improve. It enables better agent training and brings forth actionable feedback to exceed customer expectations.
- Implement QA one step at a time. Begin by setting KPIs, introducing small changes, and investing in automation tools to streamline and measure success effectively.
Forrester’s 2024 Customer Experience Index reports that 39% of brands’ customer experience (CX) quality has declined over the past year.
It can be challenging to get a full understanding of how your team –– and AI, if you use it –– are truly performing.
This is true even with metrics like CSAT.
“A 5-point scale only tells you and your agents so much, and relying on consumers providing feedback further limits what you’re able to look at and learn from,” says Kayla Oberlin, Senior Manager of Customer Experience at amika.
Quality Assurance (QA) is becoming a more crucial component of a customer experience strategy, especially one that prioritizes customer happiness.
We’ll cover the importance of customer service QA, best practices, tools, and tips to implement QA effectively.
🗺️ This article at-a-glance
- What is QA (Quality Assurance) in CX?
- Why QA is critical for customer experience
- Best practices for implementing QA in CX
- Challenges
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What is QA (Quality Assurance) in CX?
In the CX context, QA (Quality Assurance) refers to reviewing customer conversations to improve your support team’s performance and enhance customer satisfaction. QA ensures a consistent and satisfying customer journey across touchpoints, including your website, support channels, and social media.
Common QA pain points for CX teams
Aside from accuracy issues, a manual quality assurance process is:
- Time-consuming: Manual conversation reviews are slow and labor-intensive.
- Limited visibility: It’s difficult to get a clear, scalable view of team and AI performance.
- Inconsistent: Maintaining uniform quality across customer service teams can be tough.
- Resource allocation: Difficulty in ensuring the right skills, training, and resources are in place.
- CSAT limitations: Negative scores often reflect policies, not agent performance.
The solution isn’t for CX teams to skip the QA process altogether but to automate it.
According to research from McKinsey, “A largely automated QA process could achieve more than 90 percent accuracy — compared to 70 to 80 percent accuracy through manual scoring — and savings of more than 50 percent in QA costs.”
With an automated QA process, brands can:
- Save time: Automated quality checks help support agents to focus on the most critical tickets.
- Ensure consistency: Both human agents and AI agents are evaluated with a unified, comprehensive QA score.
- Boost performance: Agents receive targeted coaching to provide more consistent customer experiences.
- Meet customer expectations: Customers benefit from higher-quality support with quicker resolutions and accurate responses.
Why QA is critical for customer experience
According to Statista, 94% of customers are more likely to purchase again after receiving top-notch support. Quality assurance ensures that every customer gets the same experience, and provides agents with the feedback to learn and stay on-brand with each resolution.
At its core, QA:
- Prevents errors
- Ensures consistency
- Builds trust with customers
- Helps with personalization
- Aids in better coaching and training
- Offers opportunities for continuous improvement
Prevent errors
Addressing errors early is important, as even small mistakes can harm customer trust and create lasting negative impressions. QA tools can prevent mistakes because of better coaching and training. This can stop misinformation in its tracks –– and from escalating into bigger problems down the line.
Ensure consistency
QA makes sure that all customer touchpoints, like calls, emails, live chat, and even AI responses, are handled with the same level of care. This is especially helpful when training new team members, introducing new products or policies, or during high-traffic periods.
Build trust
Consistent and reliable experiences build customer trust and loyalty. If you were to reach out to a brand and have an amazing experience the first time but a bad experience the next, you’d probably question which experience was the norm.
Top-notch experiences that happen time and time again tell your customers that you’ll always be there to help. This can boost repeat sales and even referrals: According to Statista, 82% of customers recommend a brand after a great experience.
Personalize experiences
Aside from increasing happiness and making customers feel heard and appreciated, personalized support also affects your bottom line. Statista notes that 80% of businesses found that providing personalized customer experiences led to increased spending for consumers.
Aids in better coaching and training
With QA, teams are able to rate and review all tickets instead of spot-checking. This provides them with a:
- Quicker turnaround on coaching opportunities
- Wider volume of tickets they can review, learn from, and use for training
- Better understanding of when a Macro or a process is leading to incomplete or unhelpful conversations
- Bigger opportunity for constructive feedback and flow improvements that are based on real responses and not frustrations with brand policies
Continuously improve
Whether it’s lowering resolution times, introducing a knowledge base, or adding an AI agent to your team, making continuous improvements will help you stay ahead of the competition.
Implementing a QA program (especially if you can automate it) is one of those additions that provides you with the refinements you need on a resolution-to-resolution level.
Best practices for implementing QA in CX
QA best practices include:
- Establish a baseline for metrics and KPIs
- Monitor and evaluate regularly
- Implement automation tools
- Collect customer feedback
Establish a baseline for metrics and KPIs
As you set out to integrate a Quality Assurance process into your CX program, first establish benchmarks for various metrics and KPIs. These benchmarks help track and evaluate the performance of QA as you implement it.
If you don’t already track customer support metrics, CSAT, first response time (FRT), resolution time, and net promoter score (NPS) are great ones to start with.
💡Tip: If you use Gorgias, you’ll find your current support performance statistics in the Statistics menu. Make sure that you can see back at least six months. Then, compare an equal time frame for post-QA implementation.
Monitor and evaluate regularly
While it might sound a bit “meta” to monitor your quality assurance (which is already monitoring your support responses), it’s still worth noting.
Ensure that your QA process works smoothly, helps your metrics rather than hurts them, and provides actual helpful feedback to your agents.
Implement automation tools
The simplest way to maintain your support quality standards is to use an automated QA tool. Automating the QA process lets CX teams get deeper insights into agent strengths and areas for improvement, and captures deeper insights than a CSAT score could.
Collect customer feedback
Understanding how customers feel will allow you to fine-tune your processes and ensure you’re delivering a consistent and high-quality experience. Here are a few ways to collect feedback:
- Surveys and reviews - Post-interaction surveys or direct reviews provide real-time feedback on what customers think of their experience.
- Social listening and real-time feedback - Monitoring online reviews, social media mentions, and customer comments offers insight into how your customers are feeling that might not be captured through formal surveys.
Challenges of adding QA
Lack of resources, ineffective training, poor communication between team members, not having the right tools, and doing everything manually are some of the challenges you can encounter when adding a QA process.
Here are a couple of solutions we recommend:
- Start with phased rollouts. Rather than rolling out a QA process across your whole team, let more seasoned agents experiment with it first to give you feedback and make tweaks.
- Make incremental improvements. Changing an entire CX process at once to include QA can be overwhelming. We recommend making small changes (like starting to send CSAT surveys if you don’t already) one at a time. These changes will allow you to better measure what’s really working.
- Invest in better technology. A manual QA process can be more time-consuming than helpful. Look for an automated QA tool that’s already integrated into your helpdesk. It will allow you to measure AI and agent responses equally, while also measuring results from a handy dashboard.
Ensure customer experience meets quality standards
By prioritizing QA, your team can identify potential problems early, reduce errors, and improve overall performance, leading to a smoother, more reliable experience for customers –– and your CX team.
In the long run, brands that focus on QA can gain a competitive edge, building stronger relationships with customers and driving sustainable growth. Book a demo now.
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TL;DR:
- High talent density means a team where every member is highly skilled and performs at their peak. This creates a positive ripple effect, where talented individuals enhance each other's effectiveness and drive overall success.
- Gorgias maintains high talent density by following three pillars: hire great talent, part ways with non-performers, and nurture your talent pool.
- Train managers to share 100% honest feedback with direct reports. Honest feedback, performance improvement plans, and fair severance ensure a respectful and constructive approach to managing team dynamics.
- Measure talent density with key metrics. These include performance scores over time, cross-evaluation reviews, regrettable attrition rates, and transparent promotions to ensure fairness and improvement.
At Gorgias, we’ve embraced the concept of high talent density, introduced by Netflix co-founder and CEO Reed Hastings in No Rules Rules, as a foundation of how we operate. The idea is simple: a team is at its best when every member is highly skilled and performing at their peak.
I’ll walk you through exactly how we’ve built a workplace that prioritizes talent density by breaking down what the concept means, how it shapes our hiring process, and how we keep Gorgias a rewarding environment to grow in.
What is high talent density?
High talent density refers to having a team where each member is highly skilled and performs at their best. When a group consists of top performers, their collective effectiveness increases. Hastings notes, "Talented people make one another more effective."
For example, in a team of five exceptional employees, each individual's high performance elevates the group's overall success. If there is even one underperformer, a team's effectiveness decreases by 30 to 40 percent.
The three pillars of high talent density
We follow three pillars to maintain and grow high talent density. These pillars guide how we build and sustain a team of exceptional performers at Gorgias.
- Hire Great Talent: We look for people who excel in their roles today and show the potential to grow with the company in the future.
- Part Ways with Non-Performers: We prioritize honest feedback and offer support for improvement, but we’re not afraid to make changes when necessary.
- Nurture Your Talent Pool: We invest in our team’s development, ensuring everyone has the tools and opportunities to succeed as the company grows.
To bring this to life, we’ll use an analogy of colors to represent different types of performers in our talent pool:
Let’s take a closer look at how we practice each of these pillars below.
Pillar #1: Hire great talents
Every manager wants to hire someone exceptional, but even with the best intentions, it doesn’t always work out.
To clarify, we’re looking for someone great to do the job now but has the potential to grow and stay strong as the company evolves.
Here’s how we approach it.
Pay well (i.e. transparently and competitively)
Let’s be upfront: great talent often comes with a higher price tag.
The first step in building high talent density is offering competitive pay. Exceptional people expect to be compensated for their contributions, and rightly so.
A single outstanding hire, even if paid 50% more than two average employees, often delivers far greater results.
This is especially true in creative roles, where the impact of a single talent can be worth that of several others. It’s certainly not easy to prioritize compensation when resources are tight, but talented people are an investment — and talent is usually expensive.
Related: How we built an international SAAS salary calculator for our distributed team
Focus on sourcing, not just applicants
Great candidates don’t always come knocking on your door. The best talent is often already employed, not actively looking for a new role.
To hire the best, we go beyond applications and invest heavily in proactive sourcing.
Use a structured recruiting playbook
At Gorgias, we rely on scorecards and standardized feedback forms to assess every applicant fairly and thoroughly. We also include role-specific assessments or assignments as part of the process.
While some argue that take-home tasks are no longer standard, we’ve found them invaluable. A strong interview doesn’t always translate into strong performance, and these assignments often reveal critical insights into a candidate’s true capabilities.
Referrals are another piece of the puzzle. A-players tend to know and recommend other A-players. While leveraging referrals, we also keep a close eye on maintaining diversity to make sure everyone gets the same chance.
Pillar #2: Part ways with non-performers
Regularly assess your talent pool
Performance isn’t static. Someone who was a top performer last year might not meet expectations today, especially as the company grows and their role evolves.
To stay objective, we pair performance reviews with bi-yearly cross-evaluation talent reviews. Cross-evaluations provide a broader perspective, helping managers see beyond potential biases and assess whether a top talent has changed in performance quality.
These regular evaluations ensure we’re always aware of who is meeting expectations and who may need support or a more difficult conversation.
Enforce honest feedback with your managers
While Netflix's philosophy is to immediately separate with employees when they underperform, we believe in a more empathetic approach that follows our company’s core value of being 100% honest.
At Gorgias, we train managers to deliver clear, actionable feedback so team members always know where they stand and how they can improve. To us, honesty means being thoughtful, encouraging, and focused on helping people grow.
We also use Performance Improvement Plans (PIPs) as a tool for growth. We don’t simply view them as compliance tools, but as opportunities for employees to get back on their feet. In fact, 50% of our PIPs result in team members regaining performance.
Provide fair and generous severance packages
Sometimes, despite feedback and coaching, parting ways becomes the best option for both the employee and company. When that happens, we believe in making the transition as respectful and fair as possible.
Offering a strong severance package not only supports employees during their transition but also empowers managers to make tough decisions confidently. It reflects our shared responsibility and ensures we treat people with dignity, even when their time with us comes to an end.
Pillar #3: Nurture your talent pool
Help talent grow alongside the company
When a company grows, employees need to match that pace to keep delivering at a high level. This requires consistent learning and development to meet the challenges of each new stage.
Growth doesn’t happen by accident. As Daniel Coyle explains in The Talent Code, greatness isn’t born; it’s grown through “deep practice.”
To encourage growth, Gorgias managers hold career conversations every six weeks, focusing on the “3Es”: education, exposure, and experience. These discussions identify growth areas, leverage networks, and clarify the steps team members can take to excel.
We also reward our top performers with opportunities beyond financial incentives. From double learning stipends to travel experiences and executive mentorships, these rewards keep our “dark green” talents motivated and engaged.
Read more: Why we don’t increase salaries based on performance
Cultivate a positive and collaborative environment
In the pursuit of high talent density, results are important, but so is maintaining a positive, team-oriented environment.
A top performer with a toxic attitude can harm the environment you’re working hard to build. For that reason, we hire and nurture people who align with our values, show respect for others, and contribute to a collaborative culture. Both the what (talented employees) and the how (exemplary behavior) matter.
Implement pressure management programs
I believe this is one of the toughest topics when it comes to talent management.
Top performers are eager to work hard and prove their worth. Oftentimes, they approach work intensely and passionately. However, too much intensity can lead to exhaustion. And, of course, tired employees can’t deliver well.
That’s why managing pressure is crucial to maintaining high talent density. Introducing programs and initiatives that support the well-being of your employees helps prevent stress and burnout.
We take a tailored approach to prevent burnout, recognizing that one size doesn’t fit all. Having strong management training and great HRBPs (HR Business Partners) are the most impactful pieces. They help uncover the underlying issues of burnout: lack of vacation time, heavy workload, personal challenges, or misalignment.
Once the issues are clear, we provide the right tools to help. This could include coaching, training, enhanced benefits, or adjusted workloads.
How we measure, refine, and design our talent pool
We use specific metrics to gain insights into the effectiveness of our talent management strategies and refine our approach as needed.
Here are the metrics we track to evaluate talent density:
- Performance scores over time: We track average performance scores across the company (excluding new hires) to monitor overall talent density.
- Cross-evaluation reviews: Our biannual talent reviews include cross-evaluations, introducing variables like leadership, learning agility, and drive to ensure a holistic assessment.
- Regrettable attrition rate: We analyze turnover rates to identify potential issues and address them proactively.
- Transparent promotions: We’ve developed a promotion process that prioritizes fairness and merit. Managers must document and justify promotions, holding them accountable for consistency and equity.
By regularly tracking these metrics, we can see where we may be falling short — whether that’s being slow to part ways with low performers, struggling to attract great talent, or losing top performers unnecessarily.
Building strong organizational design
The ultimate goal of having strong talent density is to build a well-performing organization.
After each talent review, HRBPs will work hand in hand with managers to refine the organizational chart. They identify opportunities for improvement, such as promoting top talent, adjusting scopes of responsibility, or making changes to strengthen the team.
Ultimately, you should always make sure that your top performers are leading the most critical and top-priority initiatives.
A personal note on the journey to high talent density
In my role as VP of People at Gorgias, I’ve seen how fast growth fuels the resources and opportunities needed to attract and develop exceptional talent. High performers thrive in environments with big goals and fast results, but it’s up to us to create the right conditions for them to succeed.
Sustaining high talent density takes dedication and humility. It means holding ourselves to high standards while being transparent. While we’ve made great strides, there’s always more to learn and refine.
As we continue this journey, let us remain humble, acknowledging that there is always room for growth and improvement.
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5 Holiday Onsite Campaigns to Maximize Year-End Sales
Not sure where to go once the Black Friday and Cyber Monday excitement settles down? Don't worry—you're not alone. Many ecommerce brands will celebrate the uplift in sales from the four-day shopping frenzy without realizing there's a huge opportunity to keep the momentum going.
The holiday shopping season is your final chance to drive sales, delight customers, and end the year strong. These five proven campaigns will help you capture last-minute shoppers, increase repeat purchases, and maximize results.
1. Gift finder campaign: make gifting easy 🎁
Help shoppers find the perfect gift or gift bundle by linking existing resources in the campaign or offering pre-sales assistance through a conversational campaign (recommended).
Shoppers love personalized recommendations. A gift finder campaign highlights curated suggestions that simplify their decision-making.
- How it works: Trigger a message when shoppers spend over 15 seconds on a product page.
- Example message: “Looking for the perfect gift? This [product] is a fan favorite and pairs perfectly with [accessory]. Complete your gift with just one click!” OR;
- Example message #2: “Not sure what to get? We can help! Click here to chat with us about finding the perfect gift.”
- Why it works: Gift bundles increase average order value (AOV) by 20%.
Pro tip: Highlight top-rated products or seasonal bestsellers to build trust.
2. Last-minute shopper campaign: create urgency ⏰
Encourage quick action as deadlines approach.
Last-minute shoppers are in a rush, so combining urgency with a discount is the perfect motivator.
- How it works: Use an exit-intent popup during the final shopping days.
- Example message: “Still need gifts? Use code HOLIDAY10 for 10% off and get delivery by [date]. Hurry—time is running out!”
- Why it works: Exit-intent campaigns double engagement and reduce bounce rates by 37%.
Pro tip: ”You can also set a cart value threshold, ensuring that tailored offers are only provided to shoppers once they’ve added the minimum to their cart. You can also use a unique discount code rather than a generic code to drive a higher CTR.
3. Post-BFCM re-engagement campaign: boost loyalty 🔄
Turn Black Friday shoppers into repeat customers.
Reconnect with returning buyers by rewarding them for their loyalty.
- How it works: Display a personalized offer when previous shoppers return to your site.
- Example message: “Thanks for shopping with us on Black Friday! Here’s an exclusive 15% loyalty discount for your next holiday purchase.”
- Why it works: Repeat customers typically spend more, with a 10% boost in gross merchandise value (GMV).
Pro tip: Use the customer’s previous purchase to recommend complementary products.
4. AI-powered product recommendation: upsell effortlessly 🤖
Suggest relevant items to increase cart value.
Use AI to offer personalized product recommendations based on what shoppers are browsing or have in their cart.
- How it works: Show a message at checkout or when shoppers add an item to their cart, utilizing our tagging conditions to create highly targeted audience segments.
- Example message:“Love [product]? Add [related item] to complete the set! Customers who bought this also loved [product 2].”
- Why it works: Personalized upsell recommendations increase AOV by up to 15%.
Pro tip: Highlight frequently bought together items or exclusive bundles for the holidays.
You can easily set up product recommendations shown on your cart page with Gorgias Convert:
5. Holiday new arrivals campaign: spotlight seasonal exclusives ✨
Build excitement with fresh, holiday-themed products.
Shoppers love discovering new arrivals, especially during the holiday season.
- How it works: Target homepage visitors or holiday collection browsers.
- Example message: “Just in time for the holidays! Explore our exclusive [product line] and find the perfect gift.”
- Why it works: Announcements for new products increase conversions by 6%.
Pro tip: Use festive visuals and emphasize limited availability to drive urgency.
Don’t forget to A/B test your campaigns 🧪
Testing helps you discover what works best for your audience. Experiment with different offers, visuals, or CTAs to optimize results.
- Example: Test two versions of a free shipping upsell campaign.
- Version A: “Spend $15 more to get free shipping!”
- Version B: “You’re $15 away from free shipping. Add [product] to your cart now!”
- Result: Version B may outperform because it includes a clear product recommendation, reducing customer effort.
Pro tip: Track key metrics like click-through rate (CTR) and AOV to measure success.
These holiday campaigns are proven to boost sales and customer engagement during the busiest time of year. Use tools like Gorgias Convert to launch, personalize, and optimize your strategies seamlessly.
Don’t wait—end the year strong with campaigns that deliver results!
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Top Customer Service Training Strategies for 2025
TL;DR:
- Effective customer service hinges on excellent hiring, the right tools, clear processes, and an efficient training program.
- The ideal support agent should demonstrate patience, communication, adaptability in ambiguous situations, active listening, and empathy.
- Key indicators your customer service team needs training: negative feedback, disjointed communication, outdated information, compliance violations, inconsistent brand voice, and new tool adoption.
Your brand’s customer service team has a direct impact on the success of your business:
- 94% of consumers are more likely to make another purchase after a positive experience, according to Statista.
- 73% of customers will leave your brand for a competitor after fewer than just three poor service experiences, according to Retail Dive.
Great customer service hinges on a few things: excellent hiring, the right tools, clear processes, strong leadership, and an effective customer service training program. How you prepare your support agents, from onboarding to ongoing coaching, will come to fruition in your brand’s growth (or lack thereof).
In this guide, we’ll cover the basics of customer service training, including the types of customer service training that directly impact revenue. We'll also give you 15 effective training activities to try.
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What is customer service training?
Customer service training is everything you, as a customer support leader, do to help customer service team members be as effective as possible. This includes onboarding agents, creating training resources, providing ongoing coaching, and more.
Customer service training is important because it’s one of the greatest levers you have to improve your team’s impact on the business. If customer service representatives are continuously building up their repertoire of customer service techniques and skills, they can handle customer service requests faster and with more accuracy, boost customer satisfaction, upsell customers get more reviews and referrals, and find new ways to provide an excellent customer service experience.
7 areas to cover in your customer service training
Core customer service training curriculum should include modules on:
- Product and service knowledge
- Policy and process knowledge
- Customer service tools
- Technical skills
- How to differentiate between repetitive and complex tickets
- Brand voice and tone
- Essential soft skills
1) Product and service knowledge
Everyone on your customer support team should be an expert regarding your products and service offerings. Otherwise, start a team discussion to evaluate where your team is in terms of product and service knowledge. Then, focus on a particular area to equip them with the right information.
For example, make sure everyone knows how your referral program or exchange process works.
2) Policy and process knowledge
Agents should know each of your policies and processes inside and out. In order to get new team members up to speed, train them on essential policies. Teach them how to handle things like:
- Shipping questions
- Returns
- Exchanges
- Order cancellation requests
- Damaged items
Once they have a solid understanding of policy, move on to processes like:
- Handling complex tickets
- Upset customer escalation
- Order cancellation
3) Customer service tools
You’ll want to include any effective customer service tools currently used by the customer service team in training sessions. This could include a helpdesk, customer relationship management tool, Help Center, or other automation tools you use.
If you’re still shopping for a customer support platform, consider seeking one with built-in agent training. This will help you train agents on your new system (and onboard new agents) much faster than creating your own training.
At Gorgias, we offer a series of courses and customer service certifications called Gorgias Academy to help agents of all levels get more comfortable with the tool.
💡 Tip: It’s more important to hire agents with great soft skills and dedication to customer success than someone with helpdesk experience. So, be sure to cover the basics in your onboarding training, including where to find open tickets, how ticket assignment works, how to use templates, etc.
4) Technical skills
Solid technical and problem-solving skills are extremely important for members of your customer service team — these skills will help make the entire customer service department run more smoothly and help support a great customer experience.
Things like knowledge of the hardware your company uses, as well as processes within the company, can ensure customer issues are addressed quickly and correctly the first time. The most common example is following an internal escalation process to talk to the right person, be it the engineering team or the product developers This will help resolve issues quicker, which keeps customers happy.
5) How to differentiate between complex and repetitive tickets
Agents should be able to recognize repetitive tickets like WISMO (where is my order) inquiries and more complex tickets like questions from VIP customers.
If you use Gorgias, you can set rules within Automate to recognize ticket intents and answer them accordingly. You can also set rules for which tickets it should always hand over to an agent.
6) Brand voice and tone
The way your reps respond to customers should always reflect your brand values and tone of voice.
To scale these efforts, create voice and tone guidelines that explain your brand’s level of formality, certain phrases you like to use (and avoid), and anything else you’d like to standardize across the team.
If you use Gorgias, it’s as simple as customizing AI Agent with your brand’s unique tone of voice, whether that’s friendly, empathetic, snarky, bro-y –– you name it!
7) Essential soft skills
The most effective agents exhibit exceptional soft skills like patience, effective communication, adaptability in ambiguous situations, active listening, and empathy, all of which contribute to building positive customer relationships.
📚 Recommended reading: Key customer service phrases and terms
15 customer service training activities for your team to try
Once you have the outline of your customer service training, you’ll want to plan certain activities to support each module. Here are some customer support training ideas, broken up by theme, that will boost quality customer service and serve as team building.
🔗 Jump to a section:
- Boost product knowledge
- Increase process knowledge
- Enhance communication skills
- Level-up listening skills
- Boost technical knowledge
🙋 Boost product knowledge
Support associates must be experts on the products customers are buying. Ensure your customer service reps are product experts using these training exercises.
1) Review customer interactions
Reviewing real customer interactions can help your agents get the most relevant training for your customer base. If you can, anonymize the customer interactions you share in the training.
2) Analyze product demos from the sales team
Conduct a deep dive into product demos to ensure your customer service team is well acquainted with what customers are experiencing on the sales side of the process. This can help you anticipate customer questions about the product.
3) Dedicate time to reading about your product
Have your reps set aside time each week to stay current on product knowledge. This could mean reading updated website information, briefs from other departments, and even blog posts published on your brand’s website.
If you don’t already have a help center or knowledge base, consider creating one — both for customers to self-serve solutions and for agents to have access to up-to-date product and process knowledge.
4) Test out your company’s product or service
If you’re a software company or provide a digital service, testing your product is the simplest way to put yourself in your customer's shoes. Run through typical use cases for your product from your customer's perspective and assess how it stacks up to common pain points.
5) Create a screen recording for new product updates
Each time you launch a new product, your agents are on the hook for understanding it and communicating clearly with new customers and repeat buyers.
As a way to provide real-time training for any updates, create a screen recording that walks customer service agents through everything they need to know to meet customer needs. Depending on the product, this could be information about the product’s sizing, materials, pricing, or compatibility with other products.
🪜 Increase process knowledge
Boosting process knowledge is key when it comes to ongoing training methods.
6) Try to stump your agents
Give your customer service agents a challenging situation relating to shipping, returns, or exchanges to see whether they know how the business’s policy applies.
7) "Explain it like I’m five"
Good customer service is clear and jargon-free. Ask your agents to explain aspects of complicated company processes in the simplest way possible — like you're a five-year-old. While your ecommerce store should clearly state the policies, agents should be able to share need-to-know information in ways that everyone can understand.
💬 Enhance communication skills
Use these exercises to enhance your customer service reps’ communication skills.
8) Study standout tickets
Share and analyze tickets where agents navigated tricky questions or provided helpful answers.
If you review and discuss difficult or complex situations, your service reps will have a reference point when they encounter tickets with similar complexity. In addition to regular reviews as a group, encourage agents to poke through your helpdesk and see how other agents handle interactions with customers.
Gorgias connects to email, voice, SMS, Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp, and more.
9) Build third-party online training courses into your program
Providing access to third-party training can be a helpful way for customer service reps to work on skills in between formal training sessions. Udemy and Coursera offer hundreds of courses, many of which are offered at a low cost, covering communication and soft skills in customer service.
Here are a few examples:
- Improve Communication: Speak Smoothly, Clearly & Confidently
- Communication Fundamentals: How To Communicate Better
- The Power of Deep Listening
- Listening Skills - The Ultimate Workplace Soft Skills
10) Roleplay as customers
Roleplaying is a tried and true exercise that can be extremely helpful in customer service training. Try leading a relevant simulated digital customer service interaction on social media, live chat, or SMS.
👂 Level-up listening skills
Active listening is an imperative skill for your CX team to leverage in each conversation. Try out these active listening games with your team.
11) Do the “draw that” activity
To help hone listening skills, play a game where one person has a photo of a design and describes to another person how to draw the design on a whiteboard without looking at it. The game requires both parties to be engaged and overly communicative to get the desired end result.
12) Play a game of Hot or Cold
Even as an adult, a game of hot or cold can be a simple way to exercise communication and listening skills. One person closes their eyes while the rest of the team directs them to an object — but the catch is they can only say “hot” or “cold.” All players need to be alert and engaged with each other to keep the game going and ultimately help the blindfolded player find the object.
🧑💻 Boost technical skills
In-depth knowledge of the product and the ability to quickly manage technical troubleshooting will elevate a good customer experience to a great customer experience. Here are some ways to help customer service staff boost their technical skills.
14) Host a TypeRacer challenge for your team
The faster someone can type without mistakes, the faster they can answer customer inquiries. As a fun way to boost your team’s typing speed (and encourage some healthy competition), run a TypeRacer challenge to see who can get the best score.
15) Attend product meetings
Attending meetings with your product team is another way to ensure your team is up-to-date on product knowledge. If a cross-functional team is hosting an online or in-person meeting, encourage the team to attend to get product insights and ask questions.
Signs your customer service team needs training
Beyond onboarding new employees, you should conduct customer service training regularly. There may also be times when you need to mitigate an issue with specific team-wide training.
Keep the following flags in mind to help you address potential customer experience issues before they get out of hand:
- Your brand is getting negative customer feedback
- Customer communication is disjointed
- Agents are giving outdated product and process information
- You’ve violated HIPAA or other compliance regulations
- You’ve recently updated your customer service tech stack
📚 Recommended reading: 9 ways to improve your CSAT score and response rate
Your brand is getting negative customer feedback
There will always be some customer complaints, but your customer service team will want to address these complaints internally in a reasonable amount of time. This is especially true when your team hears the same negative customer feedback repeatedly.
Some leading indicators of this issue include low NPS scores, negative CSAT survey responses, and negative reviews of the company on public websites. If you notice any of these, look over your recent interactions with customers.
If you’re not already sending CSAT surveys, a helpdesk like Gorgias can help you automatically send them after interactions and see trends in responses over time.
Customer communication is disjointed
If you’re noticing that the entire team runs into a lot of issues in their day-to-day ticket handling, you probably need to bolster your training program and create an internal knowledge base with helpful resources that detail customer communication guidelines.
For example, if you don’t have clear tone of voice guidelines, you may run into responses that vary in quality or that aren’t on-brand.
This is where a quality assurance process can come in handy. Gorgias offers automated QA, which supports teams in QAing ticket responses at scale.
Additionally, using Macros can help speed up agents and reduce confusion by giving them a clear start for common issues. A Macro that automatically inserts a link to a customer's tracking URL, for example, could reduce inaccurate answers and time spent on WISMO requests.
💡 Tip: With Gorgias, you can see all of your agents’ metrics — like online time, tickets closed, and open tickets — at a glance. Use this view to see if any agents are lagging in terms of tickets closed for their number of hours worked.
Agents are giving outdated product and process information
The way your brand talks about products or services will inevitably change over time. But to achieve the highest customer satisfaction, your CX team needs to provide the most updated information to customers. If there’s a gap in the information that team members provide, it's time to set up internal training.
One leading indicator of this issue is a high repeat contact rate.
You’ve violated HIPAA or other compliance regulations
A clear indicator that your team may need additional training is if you’ve been notified of a HIPAA or other compliance regulation breach. Violations are more common for healthcare and legal providers and usually include sharing private identifying information in public channels or leaving devices and documents unattended.
Depending on the type of regulation, there are specific training courses to take as refreshers. For example, if your company must meet HIPAA guidelines, then HIPAA compliance officer training may be beneficial for your customer service team leaders. From there, they can monitor the agents on the team and provide feedback and additional training as needed.
You’ve recently upgraded your customer service tech stack
If you’ve recently added a tool to your customer service team’s tech stack, it's important to get your agents up to speed as fast and efficiently as possible. This will help limit the number of mistakes made, increase the speed at which your agents can use the tool, and improve customer satisfaction.
5 Gorgias customer service training courses
If you’ve recently started using Gorgias within your customer service team or are thinking of adopting the platform, here are five courses to include in your training materials to help your team get up to speed.
- Basic Agent Training: This training is a perfect place to start for support agents who are new to Gorgias. After the training, your support team will be able to easily navigate Gorgias and be ready to answer support tickets.
- Lead Agent Training: If your company uses Shopify and Gorgias, this training is for your customer support agents who are already familiar with the platform but want to take their customer service skills to the next level.
- Working with Rules: Setting up and working with rules in Gorgias is a major aspect of the platform, so this training is ideal for customer service reps who want to learn more about rules on an intermediate level. This course will help agents create new rules, manage rules in your brand’s account, and troubleshoot basic issues.
- Admin Power User Course: For administrative customer support staff who want to take their Gorgias use to the next level, this course will walk them through how to answer questions to be awarded a “power user” certificate. The course also offers productivity tips and advanced insight into Gorgias’ customizations.
- Support Agent Power User Course: Similar to the admin power user course, this course will super-charge customer support agents with the knowledge to pass the power user certification and teach tips and hidden gems to make their work as support agents even more impactful.
The importance of ongoing customer service training
Addressing ongoing training needs within your customer service department helps your team keep up with customer expectations, especially as your brand and tech stack evolve.
They should also have an opportunity to reflect on performance, ask questions, and get their work reviewed on a regular basis. You may even consider lining up ongoing training sessions with quarterly reviews, which can be a good way to make use of time already dedicated to reflecting on performance.
To help develop your customer service training program, you can evaluate your current program using these best practices or get more practical support tips from the Gorgias customer support team.
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Customer Service Outsourcing: Why, When, and How
TL;DR:
- Customer service outsourcing is hiring external agents to help you manage tickets across channels like email, live chat, social media, SMS, phone calls, and more.
- The three main types of outsourced customer service are agencies, individual freelance agents, and pay-per-ticket services.
- Consider outsourcing your customer service if you notice these three signals: increasing response times, decreasing customer satisfaction, or inconsistent tickets per agent.
- Best practices for customer service outsourcing include preparing your internal infrastructure, vetting agencies carefully, and effectively onboarding and training your external service providers.
- Choose a top customer service agency like HelpFlow, Fluency Firm, Happiliver, In Social Incorporated, or ModSquad.
As your brand grows, maintaining quality customer service is tough. Eventually, you can’t obsess over every customer’s experience yourself — even small businesses have to delegate.
Outsourcing customer service is one way to scale up. But that might raise concerns of losing control and disappointing your customer base with poor service. That’s obviously not ideal, especially since 48% of customers will switch to competitors for better service. Any successful brand should be picky about who can access their customers.
But outsourcing customer service can work — with a particular approach. The trick is an in-house/outsourced hybrid model. One that uses outsourced knowledge and resources without losing sight of your brand’s needs, voice, and processes.
That’s the model we use at HelpFlow. For nearly a decade, we've hired and managed customer service teams for over 100 brands as a Gorgias Elite and Services Certified Partner. Our clients have reached chat response times of 10s, email response times of < 4 hours, and CSAT scores of 90+.
Drawing from first-hand experience, I’ll share common challenges brands typically encounter when outsourcing customer support. And how to choose an outsourcing solution to help your brand grow. Last, I’ll tell you what customer service outsourcing companies — like the one I run — need from you to be successful.
What is customer service outsourcing?
Customer service outsourcing is the process of hiring external agents to help you handle customer service tickets.
Outsourced call centers were once the main option for customer support, but most modern services are now omnichannel. That means they can help you keep up with customer interactions on email, live chat support, social media, SMS, WhatsApp, and phone calls.
Outsourced agents can be individual freelancers hired directly (through platforms like Fiverr) or employees of customer service outsourcing companies. These customer service outsourcing companies are a type of business process outsourcing (or BPO).
Let’s dive more into these differences (and why they matter):
Types of customer service outsourcing
There are three main models of outsourced customer support, each with a unique way of supporting your team. Within each model, you’ll still find a wide range of pricing and quality. But before looking for solutions, you’ll want to decide which general model would work best for your team.
Agencies: Partner with a customer service company that hires agents for you
Customer service agencies are businesses that help you recruit, hire, train, and manage agents.
Great agencies have proven hiring and training methods, strong teams of skilled agents, and a client roster to guide your decision.
However, that’s definitely not always the case. Some agencies — especially the ones with too-good-to-be-true pricing — hire the cheapest agents available, don’t provide training and will degrade the quality of your support. As with all things, you get what you pay for.
Agencies are the best solution for brands that want an outsourcing solution that’s flexible, long-term, and quick to ramp up.
Individual agents: Hire, train, and manage support agents directly
You can also hire your own external customer service agents individually as contractors.
Like an agency, this saves costs compared to hiring a full-time employee. Since you manage the hiring process directly, contracting individual agents gives you more control over the quality of service. However, you’ll have to hire, train, and manage the agent(s) entirely on your own. Plus, guaranteeing 24/7 coverage and scaling up and down throughout the year will be more challenging than with an agency.
Individual agents are the best solution for small businesses needing only one or two more part-time agents. They must also be willing to invest significant time in hiring and training those customer support agents.
“Pay-per-ticket” customer service options
In recent years, there has been an influx of pay-per-ticket services for customer service. These providers offer scalable plans based on your ticket volume. You only pay for the number of tickets in your inbox instead of contracting agents for a set number of hours.
While the pay-per-ticket model may sound attractive, hidden fees and steep minimums make these less cost-effective than advertised.
Generally, hiring contract agents directly or using a higher-quality agency is best.
Pros and cons of customer service outsourcing
Customer service outsourcing isn’t the right customer care solution for every company. Sometimes, hiring full-time agents or using customer service automation is the right choice.
Here’s a snapshot of the pros and cons of outsourcing:
Pros of outsourcing
The most significant benefit of customer service outsourcing is that it provides your company with additional help. Some other benefits of bringing on an external customer service provider include:
- Increasing and decreasing agent headcount as volume changes (like for Black Friday—Cyber Monday) without having to hire and let go of full-time agents
- Covering your agent availability outside business hours, by working with a customer service provider that offers 24/7 staffing
- Cost savings from lower-cost domestic agents, overseas agents, and avoiding expenses like health insurance and full-time benefits
- Knowledge about customer service tools and best practices to level up your support
Cons of outsourcing
- Less control of agent workflow and processes than a full-time, in-house agent
- Less integration of agents into your brand’s unique voice and culture
- High agent turnover
Why outsourcing typically fails
Before getting into customer support outsourcing success tips, let’s dig into the typical traps that cause outsourcing failures.
Brands choose cheap services that sacrifice quality
When hiring directly, brand operators get enamored with the cost savings of outsourcing. They often try to put together a cheap solution that optimizes cost — and then the quality is lacking.
“Pay per ticket” volume machine models incentivize the wrong thing
Startups in the space pitch a “just pay $ for each ticket we handle” model, which is a variation of the issue above. Per ticket sounds nice until you realize it means the agents handle 10-20+ brands with little to no training. Sometimes this even means churning ticket volume to drive up the cost.
Pay-per-ticket models become a way more expensive solution than managing CS in-house.
The outsourced team doesn’t work closely enough with your support team
Often, customer service managers can’t manage the external team closely enough — think integration into the team, coaching, etc. This leads to agents operating a bit like customer service robots, which may eventually lead to turnover.
In-house/outsourced hybrids are the right solution
A hybrid structure for your customer service operation offers the best of both worlds. You maintain quality with internal alignment while scaling impact with the human power of an outsourcing partner.
Before you start, your in-house Customer Service Manager builds an effective customer service process. While an excellent outsourcing agency should improve your process, it can’t build a customer support program from scratch. Always start in-house, then bring on outsourced help to scale.
After setup, a customer service outsourcing partner provides additional agents and helps optimize your operations. They can handle tickets, recommend process improvements, create robust reporting, and support special projects like capacity planning and forecasting.
The key is to hire agents who work exclusively for your brand, either directly or through an agency, and work closely with them. That’s the only way to balance quantity, scale, and flexibility.
We use this model at HelpFlow with a wide range of brands. Here’s what Sam Menleshon at Sivana Spirit said about the process:
"I have hired a lot of agencies and service providers over the past 10 years. Some great, some decent, and a lot terrible. Helpflow has been the best experience I have ever had with an outside service provider. Their team analyzed our communication with customers, streamlined it, and built processes for it. After 2-4 weeks of training, 3 agents went live. It was like having in-house employees just appear out of thin air."
— Sam Menleshon, Owner, Sivana Spirit
How to tell if you should outsource your customer service
One of our clients — an ecommerce brand in the apparel industry — came to us after a growth boom. They had a 4-day response time and a 9-day resolution time, a serious threat to any brand’s customer retention.
After working with our team, they reduced response time to 6 hours and resolution time to 30 hours.
Three key metrics indicate when your customer support team may need extra help.
Increasing response times
If your first response time and average handle time start to increase, it could be a sign that your agents are hitting their capacity with the ticket volume they can handle.
- Industry averages for first response time are 90 seconds for chat support and 24 hours for email support
- Average response time of 48 seconds for live chat and 12 hours for email
These metrics can be helpful to benchmark, but you should track your own metrics over time and watch for changes in the wrong direction.
Consistent resolution times but low satisfaction
Another warning signal is if resolution time is consistent, but customer satisfaction is down. This could be a sign that your agents are not giving each ticket the same amount of thought and attention, potentially from overwork.
Tickets/day varies between agents
Take note if response times and customer satisfaction are steady, but some agents handle far more tickets than others. This could mean a few agents are taking on extra work that might overwhelm the team eventually.
Note: Be sure to filter out social media comment-related tickets if you are routing them all into the same helpdesk. Combining these with normal tickets can massively skew your insights since they usually require a like or simple response.
Best practices to make sure your outsourcing is successful
Prepare your customer service process for outsourcing
Scaling customer service is easier when your infrastructure, workflow, and management routine are well-organized. It doesn’t need to be perfect, but here are the main areas to solidify with your in-house team before outsourcing.
Configure your helpdesk for success
Set up your helpdesk to properly intake and route inbound calls and tickets. For example, in Gorgias, you can set up specific views to organize certain types of tickets in real-time.
This allows your team to divide and conquer based on ticket type and prioritize certain types of tickets to drive more revenue (or save customer risk situations).
Setup proper customer service KPI tracking
You should have basic KPI tracking in place before outsourcing. The most important customer service metrics are first response time, resolution time, customer satisfaction, and ticket volume per agent.
Most helpdesks track these by default but make sure the data is clean as soon as possible.
Establish a weekly cadence to review these, (re)set targets for each one, and notice when the numbers start to get out of whack.
Prepare knowledge base and templates for agents
A robust knowledge base and templates may not be necessary for your initial team. However, they’re the best method of proactive quality assurance for external support reps. Gorgias has Macros, or dynamic templates so that you can build a library of on-brand and in-policy responses.
Vet customer service outsourcing companies carefully
At HelpFlow, we’ve offered outsourced support for nearly a decade. We’ve seen competitors come and go because agencies are very easy to start but difficult to sustain long-term. They can handle a few clients easily but start cutting corners once they grow past about 15.
Here are the key ways to dodge many agencies that can’t back up what they’re selling.
Vet the agency’s process for hiring agents
Many agencies hire any agent they can find at the cheapest rates possible to juice their margins. To make sure you’re getting A Player agents, ask the following:
- What level of ecommerce and customer service experience do you require?
- How do they screen new hires for experience, skills, and culture fit?
- What’s the entry-level pay for new agents?
For context, we collaborated with the team at Gorgias on an in-depth post about hiring customer service agents. It goes deep into the recruitment and screening process. Most agencies you encounter won’t have this intense of a process refined over a decade. But it’s a good example of how methodical a hiring process should be.
Evaluate their agent retention rate
Customer service agencies often face management issues, causing poor agent retention and 20-30% annual turnover among front-line agents.
This can be challenging for your brand, as you'll spend more time training new agents instead of benefiting from long-term outsourcing.
- Ask for the turnover rate of front-line agents and the average tenure of management
- Ask if the agency provides employee benefits like sick pay, health insurance, etc.
Great agencies often poach top agents from competitors who offer low pay, poor benefits, and long hours. Choosing a cheap agency risks losing high-quality agents to agencies that treat them better.
Be wary of US managers of overseas agents
It’s common to have customer service teams operate in The Philippines or other countries overseas. However, if managers are in a different country from the support reps, it can cause disconnects and poor quality.
If you’re talking to a sales executive in California who brings in a team leader from New Jersey who mentions their great Filipino team (whom you haven’t met), that’s a major red flag.
Ask how often the team meets in person for get-togethers. Remote support teams are great, but if they’re not getting together in person, the culture is usually pretty weak.
At HelpFlow, our entire team is in the Philippines, including Client Success Manager, Sales, and all other team members. This enables us to hire middle to senior-level people for all roles while keeping costs to our clients low even as we scale.
Competitors with US-based management or sales experience communication and management breakdown as the company grows. This leads to clients paying more than they should for agents who are cheaper and less experienced, which shows up as agent and client retention problems.
Does the agency bring value up front?
The “sales process” you go through with the right agency should feel like a powerful customer service strategy consultation. For example, the agency should review your helpdesk, ask about processes, and analyze your customer experience to suggest solutions.
For example, they could look at your tagging to suggest auto-tags that would make your helpdesk more organized.
Or, if your team already uses Gorgias, the agency should be suggesting ways to improve your team’s speed and create a great customer experience with self-service.
If the agency doesn’t drive the sales process and show expertise from past experience, it’s another red flag.
Spend time on the training and onboarding process
Once you’ve found an excellent customer support service to work with, the real work begins. On both ends! The training and onboarding process is the most critical part of the process. It’s when things either fall off the rails or start to accelerate and make you realize the power of the team you just hired.
There are a few key things that should happen during onboarding:
Kickoff the onboarding process smoothly
The sales team you worked with should have a smooth handoff process with the account management team.
The agency should ask about the project’s details, timeline, tools, and accountable team members. This process should give the account management team everything they need to know before you actually start working with agents.
Intake key information efficiently for training
The agency should have an efficient intake process to access your systems and understand your customer service process. Before the kick-off call, expect a well-designed questionnaire, an analysis of your tickets, and then a call to discuss their findings.
Conduct robust training for agents
The agency should be able to create a robust training process for their agents, regardless of your current process.
Even if you have little to no documentation, the agency should be able to use the accesses provided and intake information to create a robust knowledge base for the agents to use.
Commit to ongoing management for your hybrid team
Once training is complete and agents are up and running, it’s crucial to maintain a management cadence of the team. This should include monitoring the key metrics we shared above to gauge the quality and capacity of the operation.
Set up regular meetings with the agency to discuss customer service challenges and initiatives to improve the process.
Many brands tend to operate day to day, without intentionally flagging and pursuing longer-term opportunities within teams (especially outsourced teams).
Ongoing management and a hybrid structure help your agency improve your team further, like expanding multichannel operations or exploring outbound calls and messages.
Top customer service outsourcing options
Looking for a customer service outsourcing provider that can meet your needs? Start with these recommendations as you explore your options:
- HelpFlow: HelpFlow can manage your entire customer service operation or simply provide additional agents. It’s an Elite Partner and Certified Services Partner of Gorgias.
- Fluency Firm: Fluency Firm is a full-stack digital and growth marketing agency with a customer service offering. The Gorgias Partner can also do Gorgias implementation and optimization.
- Happiliver: Gorgias Partner Happiliver specializes in supporting ecommerce brands with a focus on quality, efficiency, customer experience, and customer loyalty.
- In Social Incorporated: Hire In Social Incorporated for help with customer service or anything digital marketing-related. It’s a Premier Partner with Gorgias and can offer Gorgias onboarding, implementation, and optimization.
- ModSquad: The Gorgias Certified Services Partner can offer everything from configuration through expansion. Work with them on Gorgias implementation, onboarding, and optimization.
The next step: Let’s audit your process
Scaling past your initial core team is challenging, and outsourcing can be scary. If you get it wrong, it can bring down the brand you built by building an army of angry customers in the market.
But if you get outsourcing right, you can continue to scale up revenue while keeping customer service great. And you can keep improving it significantly over time.
HelpFlow is a Gorgias Elite and Services Certified Partner with experience with customer service teams for 100+ brands over a decade. At the start of any project, we get deep in the weeds with the brand’s team to audit the customer service process. We share a roadmap that calls out issues and suggests resolutions, along with initiatives to improve the customer service operation.
Get in touch with us today to audit your process.
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Further reading
5 Holiday Onsite Campaigns to Maximize Year-End Sales
Not sure where to go once the Black Friday and Cyber Monday excitement settles down? Don't worry—you're not alone. Many ecommerce brands will celebrate the uplift in sales from the four-day shopping frenzy without realizing there's a huge opportunity to keep the momentum going.
The holiday shopping season is your final chance to drive sales, delight customers, and end the year strong. These five proven campaigns will help you capture last-minute shoppers, increase repeat purchases, and maximize results.
1. Gift finder campaign: make gifting easy 🎁
Help shoppers find the perfect gift or gift bundle by linking existing resources in the campaign or offering pre-sales assistance through a conversational campaign (recommended).
Shoppers love personalized recommendations. A gift finder campaign highlights curated suggestions that simplify their decision-making.
- How it works: Trigger a message when shoppers spend over 15 seconds on a product page.
- Example message: “Looking for the perfect gift? This [product] is a fan favorite and pairs perfectly with [accessory]. Complete your gift with just one click!” OR;
- Example message #2: “Not sure what to get? We can help! Click here to chat with us about finding the perfect gift.”
- Why it works: Gift bundles increase average order value (AOV) by 20%.
Pro tip: Highlight top-rated products or seasonal bestsellers to build trust.
2. Last-minute shopper campaign: create urgency ⏰
Encourage quick action as deadlines approach.
Last-minute shoppers are in a rush, so combining urgency with a discount is the perfect motivator.
- How it works: Use an exit-intent popup during the final shopping days.
- Example message: “Still need gifts? Use code HOLIDAY10 for 10% off and get delivery by [date]. Hurry—time is running out!”
- Why it works: Exit-intent campaigns double engagement and reduce bounce rates by 37%.
Pro tip: ”You can also set a cart value threshold, ensuring that tailored offers are only provided to shoppers once they’ve added the minimum to their cart. You can also use a unique discount code rather than a generic code to drive a higher CTR.
3. Post-BFCM re-engagement campaign: boost loyalty 🔄
Turn Black Friday shoppers into repeat customers.
Reconnect with returning buyers by rewarding them for their loyalty.
- How it works: Display a personalized offer when previous shoppers return to your site.
- Example message: “Thanks for shopping with us on Black Friday! Here’s an exclusive 15% loyalty discount for your next holiday purchase.”
- Why it works: Repeat customers typically spend more, with a 10% boost in gross merchandise value (GMV).
Pro tip: Use the customer’s previous purchase to recommend complementary products.
4. AI-powered product recommendation: upsell effortlessly 🤖
Suggest relevant items to increase cart value.
Use AI to offer personalized product recommendations based on what shoppers are browsing or have in their cart.
- How it works: Show a message at checkout or when shoppers add an item to their cart, utilizing our tagging conditions to create highly targeted audience segments.
- Example message:“Love [product]? Add [related item] to complete the set! Customers who bought this also loved [product 2].”
- Why it works: Personalized upsell recommendations increase AOV by up to 15%.
Pro tip: Highlight frequently bought together items or exclusive bundles for the holidays.
You can easily set up product recommendations shown on your cart page with Gorgias Convert:
5. Holiday new arrivals campaign: spotlight seasonal exclusives ✨
Build excitement with fresh, holiday-themed products.
Shoppers love discovering new arrivals, especially during the holiday season.
- How it works: Target homepage visitors or holiday collection browsers.
- Example message: “Just in time for the holidays! Explore our exclusive [product line] and find the perfect gift.”
- Why it works: Announcements for new products increase conversions by 6%.
Pro tip: Use festive visuals and emphasize limited availability to drive urgency.
Don’t forget to A/B test your campaigns 🧪
Testing helps you discover what works best for your audience. Experiment with different offers, visuals, or CTAs to optimize results.
- Example: Test two versions of a free shipping upsell campaign.
- Version A: “Spend $15 more to get free shipping!”
- Version B: “You’re $15 away from free shipping. Add [product] to your cart now!”
- Result: Version B may outperform because it includes a clear product recommendation, reducing customer effort.
Pro tip: Track key metrics like click-through rate (CTR) and AOV to measure success.
These holiday campaigns are proven to boost sales and customer engagement during the busiest time of year. Use tools like Gorgias Convert to launch, personalize, and optimize your strategies seamlessly.
Don’t wait—end the year strong with campaigns that deliver results!
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How to Leverage Tools to Manage a High Volume of Sales on TikTok Shop
TikTok Shop generated 68.1% of gross market value sales across all social media platforms in 2024 and $3.8 billion in sales in 2023. Clearly, it’s becoming a massive channel with abundant opportunities for sellers.
To effectively harness TikTok Shop, however, brands with high-volume sales need to understand the specific challenges they will face when launching on the social platform.
Many of these are operational, like maintaining an accurate inventory list between platforms, supporting customers efficiently, and fulfilling a large number of orders.
When used together, AfterShip Feed and Gorgias can help you overcome these operational hurdles and start selling on TikTok Shop sooner.
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Streamline order management & customer support on TikTok Shop
TikTok Shop is the commerce-enabled side of TikTok, where brands and creators can list their products for sale. Shoppers then make a purchase through shoppable (in-feed) videos, live shopping, or product showcases. The app aims to provide a “frictionless checkout experience,” enabling shoppers to engage with their favorite accounts and add-to-cart in a flash.
While setting up a TikTok Shop is relatively simple, if you already run an ecommerce store that does a high volume of sales, adding TikTok Shop as an additional channel will be a little more complex. Thankfully, tools like AfterShip Feed and Gorgias can help you solve many operational issues and provide the same best-in-class customer experience on TikTok Shop as you do on your other channels..
Here’s a highlight reel on how you can implement both tools to improve efficiency and customer satisfaction, tackling issues like fulfillment or customer support inquiries from the same customers on different channels.
Centralize customer support with Gorgias
800+ Gorgias customers currently use the TikTok Shop integration. It’s quick and easy to connect. With it, you can:
Manage all customer interactions in one place
Coordinating customer support across different channels can be a pain. With Gorgias, however, you’ll be able to manage inquiries more efficiently and handle all shoppers’ messages by responding to TikTok Shop inquiries directly from Gorgias using text, images, and videos.
Additionally, you can address order-related issues and manage cancellations, returns, and refunds from TikTok Shop in the same Gorgias dashboard you use for your existing channels.
Automate ticket creation
Leverage Gorgias’s automated ticket creation to reduce First Response Time (FRT) and ensure that you don’t miss a single customer inquiry from TikTok Shop. Save time by handling repetitive tasks (like order status updates) with automation.
Enhance customers’ experience
Enabling the Gorgias TikTok Shop integration will allow you to maintain better control over communication and provide a consistent customer experience. Customers shopping via TikTok Shop will benefit from quicker responses, improving overall satisfaction and boosting brand loyalty.
Simplify operations with AfterShip Feed
AfterShip Feed is a reliable TikTok Shop management tool with 1,800 customers. It auto-syncs products, inventory, and orders between TikTok Shop and ecommerce platforms.
Partner AfterShip Feed with TikTok Shop to:
List on TikTok Shop more efficiently
AfterShip Feed makes listing high volumes of products on TikTok Shop easier through bulk uploads and editing, enabling you to update up to 10,000 SKUs at once.
It uses AI to add key product details and keep your product listings accurate and consistent. Tools like category templates and product ID generation make it even easier to list your full catalog.
Safeguard your revenue
AfterShip Feed has several features that will help you avoid lost revenue, especially during busy times like BFCM.
Inventory threshold
Inventory threshold helps you determine the minimum amount of inventory you need to have on hand to avoid selling out or buying too much. You can also set a fixed amount of inventory aside for TikTok Shop.
Price rules
Price rules help you set the ideal prices for each item you sell to protect your profit margins.
Fulfillment hold
A fulfillment hold stops an order at the fulfillment stage to ensure sufficient funds on the customer side, sufficient stock on yours—or to solve another issue behind the scenes. TikTok Shop has a standard 1-hour fulfillment hold, which can cause issues with inventory syncing on your main ecommerce platform.
Streamline order management
AfterShip Feed supports multiple fulfillment methods and integrates with many returns solutions. Sync orders from TikTok Shop with your existing fulfillment systems, ensuring timely and accurate deliveries. You can sync up to 24,000 orders to Shopify per hour.
Other features include order ID, shipping method, and product-SKU mapping.
Which are the top-grossing TikTok Shop industries?
Two industries in particular see massive sales from TikTok Shop: beauty and personal care, and womenswear and underwear. According to a 2024 report from Statista, the beauty category saw over 370 million sales and women’s fashion 284 million sales in 2023.
The beauty category alone has generated almost $2.5 billion in GMV, while the womenswear category has seen $1.39 billion.
If your brand belongs to one of these categories, including Gorgias and AfterShip Feed in your TikTok Shop toolkit could be a great fit for you.
Gorgias and AfterShip create better experiences
Pairing Gorgias and AfterShip Feed will help you deliver a fantastic customer experience and grow your business on TikTok Shop.
How to Pitch AI Agent to Your Boss
TL;DR:
- AI Agent reduces workload and prevents burnout for CX teams. It handles routine queries and allows your human agents to focus on providing a higher level of service where it's needed most.
- AI Agent is secure and compliant with industry standards. Gorgias uses a zero data retention policy and follows strict security regulations, including SOC 2 Type II certification.
- AI Agent delivers personalized, on-brand responses. Custom Guidance and data from sources like Shopify allow AI Agent to maintain brand consistency while providing tailored customer interactions.
- Real-world success stories show tangible results with AI Agent. Brands like Psycho Bunny and Baby Gold have seen significant improvements in response times and resolution rates by implementing AI Agent.
AI changes the way CX teams operate. But we firmly believe that it’s a good thing.
It will help you improve your team’s workload, say goodbye to burnout, and create a more consistent and speedy experience for your customers.
Here’s the process we recommend for pitching Gorgias’s AI Agent to your boss, complete with an FAQ section for quick answers.
Jump to a section:
- Start with the benefits
- Outline the data & security safeguards in place
- Highlight its brand accuracy and personalization
- Share success stories
- Set expectations
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Start with the benefits
Gorgias views AI as an extension of CX teams, and that’s how many of our customers see AI Agent as well. Baby Gold calls theirs Michelle, Psycho Bunny calls theirs Lisa.
These autonomous agents allow your human agents to focus on more complex and nuanced issues, providing a higher level of service where your customers need it most.
Here are some other things that make AI Agent a great addition to your team:
- ⏰ 24/7 availability: AI Agent operates around the clock, ensuring that customer inquiries are addressed promptly at any time, including weekends and holidays.
- 🏔️ Scalability: AI Agent can handle a high volume of inquiries simultaneously without any decrease in performance. This scalability is particularly valuable during peak times like BFCM.
- 🚀 Efficiency and speed: AI Agent can process and respond to queries much faster than human agents, leading to quicker resolutions and improved customer satisfaction.
- 🦎Adaptability: AI Agent can quickly adapt to new information, products, or changes in policies immediately – all you have to do is add them to your knowledge docs and to the Guidance you set.
- 🦾 Full control: You stay in full control of how AI Agent behaves in specific scenarios. Give AI Agent custom Guidance to ensure that each interaction with your customers reflects your brand’s values, policies and tone.
📚 Further reading: Our AI Approach: Onboard, Automate, Observe, and Coach
Outline the data & security safeguards in place
Rest assured that AI Agent and Gorgias operate under a zero data retention (ZDR) policy. Once data is used, it isn’t stored.
We’re SOC 2 Type II Certified and follow strict regulations in regards to data security.
You can view the terms that cover the data we collect and how we use Artificial Intelligence by reading Our Master Service Agreement (MSA) and Data Processing Agreement (DPA).
🎯 Resource: How AI Agent works & gathers data
Highlight its brand accuracy and personalization
AI Agent provides consistent, accurate, and on-brand responses based on the information in your Help Center, Shopify order data, Macros, handover instructions, and the actual custom Guidance you set for it.
It might just surprise you with just how specialized it can get.
“Sometimes agents forget personal details to call out when communicating with our customers, like birthdays or weddings,” says Sindi Melgar, the Customer Service Manager at Baby Gold.
“But I noticed on a few different occasions where AI Agent (ours is named Michelle) is highlighting these things and is saying, ‘Congratulations on your wedding!’ Just the tone of voice that Michelle is able to adopt is definitely on brand for us.”
Ensure certain topics are handed over or excluded
When you set up AI Agent, you’ll also let it know the types of topics you’d like it not to answer.
AI Agent automatically hands over tickets to your team whenever it lacks confidence in an answer or detects an angry customer.
But you can also use handover rules to choose how AI Agent behaves when it passes tickets to your human team, and add specific topics that it should always hand over to your team.
🎯 Resource: Customize how AI Agent behaves
Provide feedback on responses
Don’t like something AI Agent said? Or, did you love an answer it gave?
It’s easy to let AI Agent know by telling it you liked the response, saying it should have pulled from a different resource, or reporting an issue.
🎯 Resource: How to coach AI Agent and give feedback
Prioritize your team’s docs
AI Agent uses your Shopify order data, Macros, your brand’s webpages, as well as your Help Center to give your customers accurate and on-brand responses. It also prioritizes any Guidance that you set.
🎯 Resource: Why having a quality knowledge base is essential to using AI for CX
Share success stories
We wouldn’t expect you to onboard a new tool without some actual statistics and reviews. Below, browse three success stories and the fantastic metrics that AI Agent helped their teams achieve.
After just one month of implementing AI Agent, the team at VESSEL not only increased the number of emails automated via AI Agent by 20%, but reduced first response time to 58 seconds and saw their resolution time decrease to one minute and six seconds.
When Baby Gold implemented AI Agent, they achieved a 49-second first response time, a one-minute and four-second resolution time, and answered 1,361 tickets. They also quadrupled their email automation rate.
Psycho Bunny saw a 99.8% faster first response time, 99.4% faster resolution time, and 26% of tickets resolved by AI Agent.
“Our customer support KPIs are already fantastic: we're already leading in the industry,” said Tosha Moyer, Senior Customer Experience Manager at Psycho Bunny.
“To improve on that, we need AI — it’s not physically or financially possible with human agents alone.”
Set expectations
AI Agent isn’t going to find lost packages, pick up the phone, or fix damaged products. While this might seem obvious, it’s important to understand AI Agent’s core capabilities, as we want this to be an exciting and useful addition to your team.
“AI Agent does a great job of efficiently handling returns and exchanges, and split shipment tracking info,” shares Tosha Moyer. “The overall tone is good and some of its responses are really excellent.”
Below, find the top use cases for AI Agent, as well as the specific actions you can configure for it within Gorgias.
AI Agent use cases
These are the top AI Agent use cases that we recommend:
- Where is my order? (WISMO) inquiries
- Product-related questions
- Returns
- Order issues
- Cancellations
- Discounts (including BFCM)
- Customer feedback
- Account management
- Collaboration requests
The specific actions you currently can configure for AI Agent include:
- Cancel an order in Shopify
- Edit a shipping address in Shopify
- Send Loop Returns portal deep link
- Send return shipping status from Loop Returns
- Cancel a subscription in Recharge
With more to come! And to quiet any worries, it’s worth mentioning that AI Agent will not perform any actions without you configuring or activating them first.
Enhance your brand reputation and build trust
Offering fast, accurate, and 24/7 support can significantly enhance your brand reputation and build customer trust, which can translate into higher customer loyalty and increased revenue.
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10 Must-Know AI Agent Use Cases for Instant Resolutions
TL;DR:
- AI Agent handles a variety of customer inquiries. These include order tracking, returns, cancellations, discounts, account management, feedback, collaboration requests, and complex topics.
- Use Guidance to train AI Agent to handle each type of inquiry. Guidance acts like a built-in training manual, helping AI Agent follow your brand’s guidelines in every interaction.
- Test and refine Guidance to keep responses accurate. Use Test Mode to ensure AI Agent follows instructions, reflects your brand’s tone, and escalates when needed.
- AI Agent can provide 24/7 support. Even when your agents are offline, AI Agent can respond to customers, reducing response times and keeping customers satisfied.
For support teams, sending the right answer at the right time, every time, is the ultimate goal. But with limited resources and operating hours, how can you be there for your customers 24/7? We’ve got an answer.
Designed specifically for ecommerce brands, AI Agent is an autonomous support assistant that steps in where human agents are stretched thin: handling repetitive tickets. AI Agent is trained on your brand’s policies, voice, and instructions, helping you resolve customer inquiries like your agents — but faster.
We’ll cover 10 types of inquiries AI Agent can resolve instantly, complete with template instructions (Guidance) and real-life examples. Plus, keep in mind five best practices to get the most out of your new AI teammate.
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10 AI Agent use cases, templates, and examples
Each use case comes with a template for Guidance instructions that acts like a built-in training manual for AI Agent. Then, see how AI Agent uses those templates to respond to real customer tickets.
Note: Guidance are special instructions that tell Gorgias’s AI Agent exactly how to handle customer questions, including when to hand them off to your human agents. This gives you control over AI Agent, so every AI interaction is always aligned with your brand’s protocols.
1. Where is my order? (WISMO) inquiries
90% of shoppers want to be able to track their orders, according to DispatchTrack. Easily fulfill those neverending WISMO requests with one comprehensive Guidance that detects a customer’s current order status to give them the best answer.
Include these key elements in your where is my order? Guidance instructions:
- Detect if a tracking number is available: If the order has a tracking number, provide the link to the tracking page.
- Provide delivery time: Automatically calculate and share the expected delivery date based on the shipping method.
- Check order status: Inform the customer whether the order is processing, shipped, or delivered.
- Handle delivery delays: If the system detects a delay, apologize and offer an updated delivery estimate.
- Escalate complex issues: If the order is missing or has incorrect tracking info, escalate the ticket to a human agent for further review.
Here’s an example of a where is my order? Guidance setup, available as a template in Gorgias:
Here’s how AI Agent uses that Guidance to assist a customer with their order inquiry:
💡 Pro Tip: Can’t find AI Agent? Double-check that you have an active Gorgias Automate subscription and connect Shopify to Gorgias. To do this, go to Settings > My Apps > Shopify > Update app permissions. You must be an Admin to complete this task.
2. Product-related questions
Shoppers ask product questions to get the clarity they need before buying. These pre-sales questions can make or break their decision to buy your product. Close the gap from browsing to checkout by using AI Agent to deliver quick, accurate answers that help them make confident decisions.
Here’s an example of a product-focused Guidance setup:
Here’s how AI Agent uses that Guidance to assist a customer with their product inquiry:
💡 Pro Tip: AI Agent can also learn information from your web pages. Go to Automate > AI Agent > Public URL sources to sync key web pages like sizing guides, blog posts, and more.
3. Returns
Answering ecommerce return requests can be time-consuming. Requests can range from a simple what is your return policy? question to customers wanting to go through the return process. Regardless, return inquiries can easily be handled by AI and handed off to a human agent if necessary.
Include these key elements in your returns Guidance instructions:
- Determine return eligibility: Check if the order is within the return window based on your policy.
- Identify non-returnable items: Inform customers if their item is non-returnable due to your specific policies.
- Guide through the return process: Provide instructions on how to initiate a return, including steps like entering an order number or using a return portal link.
- Inform about processing times: Share estimated times for processing returns and refunds.
- Escalate complex cases: If the return involves exceptions, like damaged goods or international returns, escalate the ticket to a human agent.
Here’s an example of a returns inquiry Guidance setup, available as a template in Gorgias:
Now, look at how AI Agent uses this Guidance to assist a customer with their return request:
💡 Pro Tip: If you’re using Loop Returns, set up AI Agent to automatically send a returns portal link to customers. This Action fully resolves returns inquiries by directing shoppers straight to their orders.
4. Order issues
Order issue tickets often require back-and-forth. The customer states their problem, you ask for photo verification and check if the customer has tried all the different solutions — the list goes on. Let AI Agent cover the bases for you every time, and if needed, escalate the ticket to your team.
Include these key elements in your order issues Guidance instructions:
- Express empathy for any inconvenience caused: Show that your customer’s happiness and experience are priorities.
- Handle damaged products: Provide instructions for customers to submit photos of damaged goods, then process a replacement or refund based on your policy.
- Correct incorrect shipments: If the wrong item was sent, guide the customer through returning the incorrect item and arrange for the correct product to be shipped.
- Escalate the issue: Route the ticket to a human agent for further handling.
Here’s an example of a Guidance setup for handling order issues, available as a template in Gorgias:
Here’s how AI Agent follows this Guidance to resolve a customer’s order issue:
5. Cancellations
Canceling orders is pretty much a race against order fulfillment and your third-party logistics. The key is to catch these inquiries as soon they hit your inbox. The problem? Tickets can come late at night or outside of your business hours. However, when you let AI Agent handle them, customers can rest assured that their request will be dealt with.
Include these key elements in your cancellation Guidance instructions:
- Check order status: Determine if the order is eligible for cancellation based on its shipping status.
- Process cancellation: If eligible, guide the customer through the cancellation process and confirm the order has been canceled.
- Handle shipped orders: If the order has already shipped, instruct the customer on how to return the item once received, or escalate the case to a human agent.
- Escalate exceptions: For complex or time-sensitive cancellations, escalate the ticket to a human agent.
Here’s an example of a cancellation Guidance setup, available as a template in Gorgias:
Here’s how AI Agent follows this Guidance to handle a customer’s cancellation request:
💡 Did you know? You can let AI Agent cancel an order when the customer and order meet certain conditions. For example, the Action will only be performed if the fulfillment status is still empty. Go to Automate > AI Agent > Actions > Browse All Actions > Cancel Order in Shopify.
6. Discounts (including BFCM)
Come holiday season, including Black Friday, you’ll be swamped with loads of discount inquiries. Whether it’s customers asking about discount codes not working or if you have any codes available, these repetitive inquiries are best resolved by AI.
Include these key elements in your discount Guidance instructions:
- Provide active discount codes: Provide customers with a list of current discount codes and their eligibility criteria.
- Assist with missed discount codes: Help customers who forgot to add a discount code by offering guidance on how to apply it retroactively or escalate to an agent.
- Troubleshoot code issues: Guide customers through common reasons why a discount code might not be working, like expiry dates, minimum purchase requirements, or product exclusions.
- Upsell by offering alternatives to discounts: If no active code is provided, offer alternative available promotions or direct them to sign up for the latest offers.
Here’s an example of a discount inquiry Guidance setup, available as a template in Gorgias:
Here’s how AI Agent follows this Guidance to handle a customer asking for coupons:
7. Customer feedback
Acknowledging feedback, good and bad, can make customers more willing to keep doing business with you. Maintain an honest rapport with customers by letting them know you’re always listening.
Include these key elements in your feedback Guidance instructions:
- Acknowledge positive feedback: Respond with a thoughtful, genuine thank-you message, reinforcing customer appreciation.
- Request a public-facing review: Encourage customers who leave positive feedback to share their experience further, such as writing a product review or sharing their thoughts on social media.
- Escalate negative feedback: For negative feedback, escalate the ticket to a human agent.
Here’s an example of a customer feedback Guidance setup:
Here’s how AI Agent uses this Guidance to respond to positive feedback:
💡 Pro Tip: Let AI Agent automatically tag feedback tickets for you by going to Automate > AI Agent > AI ticket tagging. This way, your agents can find all customer feedback organized in one place.
8. Account management
Account management tasks like updating details or managing subscriptions are tedious, time-consuming, and often things customers can do themselves. Let AI Agent handle these tasks to speed up resolutions.
Include these key elements in your account management Guidance instructions:
- Provide instructions: Provide clear instructions for updating account details like email, shipping address, or payment methods.
- Verify identity for security: Include steps to verify customer identity before making sensitive changes, like account or subscription modifications.
- Escalate complex issues: For issues like account access problems or billing disputes, escalate to a human agent.
Here’s an example of a Guidance setup for account management, available as a template in Gorgias:
Take a look at how AI Agent uses this Guidance to help a customer with managing their rewards:
💡 Pro Tip: Use Recharge Actions to automate subscription cancellations or skip shipments with AI Agent. Go to Automate > Automate > Actions > Browse All Actions > Cancel subscription in Recharge or Skip next subscription shipment in Recharge.
9. Collaboration requests
Influencer marketing is on the rise as customers look to social proof when deciding what products to buy. With the right Guidance, your AI Agent can easily manage collaboration and marketing partnership inquiries.
Include these key elements in your collaboration requests Guidance instructions:
- Gather social media profiles: Prompt customers to share their social media profiles and relevant platforms for review if they haven’t.
- Request collaboration details: Ask for specifics about the type of collaboration or partnership they’re interested in (e.g., influencer campaigns, sponsorships).
- Provide next steps: Let the customer know their request will be reviewed and what they can expect in terms of timing.
- Escalate complex or high-value inquiries: For more significant partnerships, escalate the request to your marketing or partnerships team.
Here’s an example of a collaboration request Guidance setup:
See how AI Agent uses this Guidance to respond to a collaboration request from a content creator:
10. Complex and sensitive topics
AI Agent isn’t designed to handle all tickets. For highly complex and sensitive topics, instruct AI Agent to reroute them to your human agents who are equipped to handle certain subjects with more caution and context than AI.
For example, a makeup brand would disable AI Agent from taking on tickets about allergic reactions or health concerns so customers receive safe advice.
Here are other messages you should prevent AI Agent from answering:
- Messages that mention legal actions
- Messages that mention allergic reactions or health issues
- Messages where customers report negative reactions to products
- Messages that mention unsubscribing, stop messages, stop emails or stop texts
Take a look at how AI Agent escalates a ticket about a damaged product:
Note: AI Agent automatically escalates messages with angry language and sentiment to your support team — no Guidance needed.
Keep these 5 Guidance best practices in mind
While AI Agent answers most customer inquiries, you’ll still need to be there to provide it with the barriers to keep its answers on-brand and accurate.
Here are five best practices to keep in mind when creating Guidance instructions.
1. Include Guidance for your top 5 most FAQs
Prime AI Agent with essential brand information by creating Guidance for the top five most common customer questions:
- Order status and tracking
- Returns, exchanges, and refunds
- Order cancellations and edits
- Discounts and promos
- Subscription/account management
You can automate a significant portion of customer support and save time for your team just by letting AI Agent answer these tickets.
2. Use a descriptive Guidance name
Always use clear and descriptive names for your Guidance. AI Agent relies on this information to identify whether the Guidance is relevant to the customer’s question.
For example, instead of naming it “Shipping,” use something like “Shipping policy – domestic & international” to help AI Agent choose the right response.
3. Include examples in your instructions
It’s important to include detailed examples to help AI Agent detect the intent behind your incoming tickets. Clear examples let AI Agent match customer inquiries with the correct response more reliably.
For instance, instead of just saying, “Answer shipping questions,” give it an example: “For domestic orders, say: ‘Shipping takes 5-7 days. For international orders, it takes 10-15 days.’” This helps AI Agent detect when a question is about shipping timelines and respond appropriately.
4. Review and update your Guidance
Customer needs and products change over time, so it’s important to check back on your Guidance to make sure it’s relevant. AI Agent’s responses should reflect any changes to your policies, products, or processes to provide customers with up-to-date information.
5. Test new and updated Guidance in Test Mode
Before going live with new or updated Guidance, use Test Mode to make sure AI Agent is responding as expected.
Here are key things to check in Test Mode:
- Help Center articles: Verify that AI Agent is pulling from the correct Help Center resources.
- Guidance instructions: Test your updated Guidance to make sure AI Agent follows the protocols you have laid out.
- Excluded topics: Ask AI Agent questions about excluded topics to make sure it escalates the inquiry as needed.
- Tone of voice: Check that AI Agent’s responses are in your brand’s tone.
Lead conversations to faster resolutions with AI Agent
Right out of the box, Gorgias includes Guidance templates to help AI Agent manage your FAQs, like returns inquiries, shipping questions, and more.
Equip your AI Agent with Guidance and watch your support team thrive with more time to nurture your customer relationships and handle complex tasks.
See how AI Agent can transform your support team within minutes by booking a demo today.
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Guide To Creating and Managing A Customer Knowledge Base
Let’s be clear: a customer knowledge base is not a landing page full of frequently asked questions.
Sure, FAQs can live in your knowledge base, but they can do so much more than simple Q&A.
A well-crafted Help Center is a strategic asset, propelling your conversion goals by easily guiding customers through the sales funnel.
We’ll walk you through what a knowledge base is, how it can support your bottom line, and everything you need to know to create yours successfully.
What is a customer knowledge base?
Customers love having the power to solve problems independently and on their schedule. That's precisely what a knowledge base delivers.
Your knowledge base isn’t just a static library of articles — it's an interactive portal connecting your customers to sales and customer service. That means making it easy for them to find answers before purchasing and helping them troubleshoot any possible issues afterward.
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How a knowledge base can transform your customer service (and customer experience)
Now that we've introduced the concept of a knowledge base, let's dive deeper into how these helpful landing pages can drive revenue by leveling up your customer service game.
Zero-touch resolutions
90% of consumers worldwide consider issue resolution as their top priority for customer service. And with a knowledge base, you can make their dreams come true with 24/7 self-service support.
Think of a customer knowledge base as your company's information powerhouse that includes helpful articles, FAQs, contact methods, and more ––– all readily available 24/7 for your customers to tap into whenever they need help.
And the magic word that describes why a knowledge base is so powerful? Self-service.
Nail this experience, and your knowledge base will serve as a revenue-driving machine for acquisition- and retention-based goals.
No more waiting in line, playing phone tag, or being told the customer support team is “offline until tomorrow.” As long as customers can easily locate the information they’re after (more on this later), they get an immediate response to their questions.
Reduce support burden (and response time as a result)
Your support team deals with a mountain of questions every day:
- "Where's my order?"
- "What's your refund policy?"
- "How long does shipping take?"
…These are the classics.
Imagine dramatically cutting down the number of repetitive inquiries your team handles or eliminating them entirely. Your knowledge base can make this happen. By leveraging data to pinpoint the most frequently asked questions, you can create help articles that address these issues and showcase them at the top of your knowledge base.
But how do you identify the most common questions? Two straightforward solutions are already at your fingertips in the Gorgias Helpdesk.
1. Monitor commonly used tags: Tags are labels for categorizing tickets by topic or customer intent. Regularly reviewing tags helps identify common customer inquiries. Generally, the more a tag is used, the greater the need for clarity on that topic.
On Gorgias, navigate to Statistics > Ticket Insights > Tags to see the frequency of tag usage. This view gives you an overview of popular tags. You can adjust the view by filtering by app integration, channel, and date range.
2. Review your intent statistics: Intent Statistics provide valuable insights into why customers contact support. You can understand the primary reasons behind customer queries by analyzing these statistics.
On Gorgias, go to Statistics > Ticket Insights > Intents to review the usage frequency of different customer intents.
This feature provides a clear bar graph view of customer concerns frequently mentioned in messages. You can also change the view using channel and date range filters.
The result: Customers don’t have to search through your articles, and your support team frees up time to focus on providing better customer experiences.
Questions answered, problems solved.
Final tip: To streamline the creation of your Help Center, we created 50+ ready-to-use article templates on key topics like shipping, tracking, account setup, and product details. See the templates here.
Turn inquiries into sales
Customers browsing your store often need help deciding between options or understanding how your product works. Don’t let them leave with uncertainty.
A knowledge base isn't just for answering questions about shipping or order tracking — it can also function as a personal shopper, guiding customers toward the perfect fit or style.
With Gorgias Convert, you can engage customers at key moments with personalized, persuasive messaging. Offer exactly what they need while they’re viewing a product, such as a helpful guide from your knowledge base that:
- Clarifies product details
- Increases brand awareness
- Encourages them to explore more of your catalog
Take TUSHY, which highlights an article on their toilet compatibility page when customers show a 30-second delay on their bidet product page.
As another example, if a customer asks, "I have wide feet. Will your shoes fit me?" don’t just respond with a simple "yes." Take it further by sharing helpful links to articles about your shoe size and fit. This approach answers their question and boosts their confidence in purchasing.
Reinforce your brand
Delivering information in a consistent tone across all customer interactions builds trust and leaves a lasting impression. You can easily do this in your knowledge base by staying in line with your brand's tone and style and communicating your company’s values.
Let’s run through an example: Let's say you sell organic skincare products, and you want to use your knowledge base to establish your expertise and the brand values you share with like-minded people.
Health-conscious consumers often have specific concerns about product safety, ingredients, and potential side effects. Your knowledge base is the ideal platform to address these concerns transparently. How?
Explain the benefits of organic ingredients, the absence of harmful chemicals, and how your products contribute to healthier skin.
Proactively addressing these concerns promotes a lifestyle choice centered around happy skin and well-being. Doing so will set you up to be seen as a trustworthy source of information about safe beauty.
Everything you need to know about creating & managing a customer knowledge base
Next, we’ll walk you through creating and managing your customer-facing knowledge base.
How to set up a knowledge base
These initial steps are the foundation of a successful knowledge base, ensuring long-term success.
1) Identify your customer’s frequently asked questions
To lay the groundwork for your knowledge base, you need to know your customers like the back of your hand. A few ways you can kick off this research:
Review key questions and phrases from your previous conversations with customers: Dive into your customer support history, whether it’s through email, live chat, or social media.
Look for recurring questions, common issues, or patterns. For example, those should be high-priority topics if you're constantly fielding inquiries about sizing or return policies.
You can learn these by looking into the reasons for contact with Gorgias. This AI-powered feature identifies a ticket's contact reason from its message content. Reasons could range from cancellations and refunds to shipment issues and feedback. The Contact Reason is conveniently located at the top of each ticket, as shown in the image below.
Use customer satisfaction surveys to discover what burning questions are on your shoppers’ minds: To view satisfaction scores on Gorgias, navigate to Statistics > Support Performance > Satisfaction.
This section provides details on surveys sent, response rates, average ratings, and response distribution over three months. Filter for scores of 3 stars or below. Analyzing lower ratings and their accompanying comments will help you pinpoint the topics your Help Center articles should address.
Any customer data you have available becomes your roadmap to creating valuable knowledge base content.
The research step is crucial, and here’s why: In 2022, Deloitte Digital conducted research with Twilio about the business value of trust. The results showed that when companies make it easy to do business with them, 96% of consumers trust the brand more.
When asked how companies can make it easier to do business with them, customers said the following factors are the most important:
- Making sure issues are resolved quickly
- Being able to easily get in touch with a real person for help (and not getting bounced around from person to person when trying to solve a problem)
- Being able to simply find answers and get information as needed on their own.
Your knowledge base can help with all three factors. As a result, Deloitte’s research found that customers are more likely to reward that trust by making more frequent and higher-value purchases.
2) Use templates to streamline page creation
Starting a Help Center can be daunting, especially when you're strapped for time already.
Creating a Help Center involves research, brand consistency, copywriting, and page structure. Luckily, platforms like Gorgias provide templates that eliminate the guesswork and lighten the load.
These ready-to-use templates are crafted from successful Help Centers across various industries, giving you a proven framework to structure your own content confidently.
3) Customize the look of your knowledge base
Your knowledge base isn't just a sidekick. It's a key part of your brand's identity. No matter if a new customer lands on your knowledge base through your main site or via a Google search, it should feel like they're interacting with the same business as they jump between the knowledge base and your main site pages.
That’s why you need to ensure your knowledge base’s branding seamlessly matches your website, creating a cohesive experience for your customers.
A few elements to consider:
- Add your logo to the header
- Match the header design to your main website
- Edit fonts and use your preferred typeface
- Use similar iconography and images as you would on your other website pages
Princess Polly’s customer knowledge base ties in all of these elements well. Even though the knowledge base is on a separate subdomain, it doesn’t feel any different from the brand’s main domain from a user’s perspective.
Princess Polly's knowledge base design matches its main homepage, keeping the user experience cohesive.
Platforms like Gorgias allow you to edit fonts, logos, and headers for your Help Center without any coding required. If you're craving more customization, you can dip into HTML and CSS to tailor specific elements.
4) Make your pages categorizable and searchable
Remember, the goal here is to make things effortless for your customers. If your knowledge base is a maze of articles without clear categorization, it's not user-friendly — it's a Q&A jungle that nobody wants to venture through.
Organize all your articles with crystal-clear categorization — think "Shipping," "Returns," "Loyalty Program," and "Sizing." Don't forget to add a smart search bar that understands keywords and common phrases to recommend relevant articles.
"We have a great Help Center that attracts tens of thousands of monthly visitors who are then redirected back to the main site and in this circular motion where we don't want those customers to drop off. Two critical aspects drive this success: ensuring accessibility so customers can easily find the answers they need, and providing direct contact options for our team. We don't want you to have to go searching for your answer to the point where you're frustrated and you stop that purchasing experience." —Colin Waters, Leading at The Feed & former Associate Director of Customer Experience at BrüMate
Turn your knowledge base into an interactive Help Center
Once you’ve gone through the foundational steps, you can work on taking your knowledge base to the next level. This will enhance customer satisfaction and engagement.
5) Create automated and interactive FAQs
In a world where 65% of customers expect companies to adapt to their changing needs and preferences, proactive customer service is essential. One way you can satisfy this expectation is to use automated and interactive FAQs via chatbot that adjust to customer needs.
For example, with Gorgias Automate, you can use Article Recommendations in Chat to help customers out without live agent help. When they type in the Chat, they'll automatically receive a relevant Help Center article suggestion.
The goal is to answer the customer’s question without having to pull in a support agent.
What if automation doesn’t answer a customers’ question? Glad you asked! At the end of the flow, if the customer still requires help then a ticket is then created for an agent to follow up.
6) Offer self-serve order tracking
Order tracking is a hot topic for customers, so don't be shy about it. Add more than one CTA that customers can click to track their order without having to get in touch with your team.
Feature an order tracking CTA prominently in your knowledge base's header, via chat, and as a main option on the Help Center page.
See the screenshot from Parade below, for example: This may seem overkill, but we promise it’s not. The data to prove it: merchants who use Gorgias’s automation tools reduce support tickets in their helpdesk by 60%.
7) Go multimedia
When it comes to crafting a comprehensive knowledge base solution, text alone might not always suffice. Customers often prefer visual cues, and research has shown that visual content can significantly improve understanding and retention of information.
Think about any time you’ve built a piece of furniture that you bought online. Those manuals are confusing enough as is — even with the images added to every step. Imagine how much head-scratching you’d be doing if you didn’t have the images to accompany you.
That’s why images, videos, and other iconography are useful to include in your knowledge base, so you can eliminate confusion and boost user confidence.
Check out how Loop uses videos along with written instructions for tutorials:
8) Make contact forms easily accessible
Yes, one of the key objectives of a knowledge base is to empower customers to find answers and solutions independently. However, there will always be situations where customers require personalized support — like when an order arrives damaged, for example.
Integrating contact forms directly into your knowledge base provides a straightforward channel for customers to reach out for assistance. But these inquiries can be difficult to keep up with when you have multiple forms living on various parts of your site.
💡 Tip: Add a “contact us” CTA in your knowledge base. If a customer clicks it, they’re redirected to the main contact page on your website. You can also create a knowledge base form that’s separate to track traffic from the Help Center page alone.
Here’s an example from BrüMate, which features its “contact us” form directly on the Knowledge Base domain:
9) Add flexible communication options
It’d be nice if you could promptly answer every customer’s question, but sometimes, a self-service knowledge base isn't enough. Unique situations will arise, and that's where the human touch comes in.
A staggering 83% of customers agree that they feel more loyal to brands that respond to and resolve their complaints. So, be prepared to chat live when the need arises.
Concerned about managing live chat support? A few ways to make it easier for strapped CX teams:
- Only implement live chat on specific web pages, so it’s not featured on all pages on your site.
- Set realistic SLAs for when your customer support team is online, so if it’s outside working hours the customer shouldn’t expect an answer until the following day.
- Highlight your most prominent FAQ articles as soon as someone opens the live chat window, so they can find certain answers without contacting your team.
Here’s another knowledge base example from Princess Polly, which features a live chat widget on its knowledge base page and highlights key FAQs.
⚡ Key Takeaway: Every customer has a different preference for how they want to be communicated with. It’s important that you offer various methods to satisfy those preferences.
Keep your knowledge base updated
Your knowledge base is an ongoing initiative. As you expand your product line and discover new information, you’re going to want to adapt your knowledge base to continue meeting the needs of your buyers.
So lastly, let’s talk about maintaining and evolving your knowledge base to ensure you continue providing a high-quality and effective experience.
10) Track knowledge base analytics
Your knowledge base is an evolving entity. Using analytics to your advantage will help you continue to improve it over time.
Here are a few questions to consider:
- Are some queries or questions more popular than others? Use this to improve your content hierarchy by placing the most relevant information upfront.
- Is one method of communication preferred? Customers naturally scan left to right and top to bottom. Line up your most popular contact options with that in mind. For example, if you’re placing email, live chat, and phone number options left to right, feature email first if you know that’s the most popular contact option.
- What time of day do you see an uptick in engagement on your knowledge base? Trigger a customer service email workflow that shares FAQ pages to send during these times.
- What common questions can you place on other areas of your website? If customers are asking how your products are sustainable, it might be worth just adding that information directly to your homepage, product description pages, or on social media. Plus, you can pass this feedback to other teams like marketing, which can delve deeper to solve these problems at the root.
Gorgias's cloud-based integration with Google Analytics makes tracking engagement a cinch, helping you uncover the most-viewed questions, peak activity times, and top-clicked links.
11) Get feedback from customers
Metrics from your analytics tools is helpful but becomes even stronger when you combine it with qualitative data. This type of information has to be collected directly from customers, which you can do via feedback forms.
After each support interaction, simply ask customers how you can improve. Some questions you can ask are:
- Did they know your Help Center existed?
- Was it easy to find?
- Did they have trouble finding the answer they needed?
12) Optimize your knowledge base for search
Did you know your knowledge base can be used as an acquisition tool by driving organic traffic to your website? Optimize it for search engines by framing questions as main headings.
For example, article titles can be formatted like, "What is your return policy?" This way, when potential customers search Google for answers, your article will appear.
When building your knowledge base in Gorgias, you can even customize your meta title and description for an extra SEO boost. Check out ALOHAS’ knowledge base as an example. For customers who search “What is Alohas’ return policy?” in Google, this article will show:
The ALOHAS Help Center is the highlighted result on Google thanks to search engine optimization.
13) Regularly audit articles
We all know things won’t stay the same forever. Products change, ingredients shift, and branding gets a makeover.
When information changes, It's essential to shift the information in your knowledge base too.
What if you decide to change your shipping policy, so it’s only free after a customer spends $50 versus $25? The last thing you want is an irate customer pointing to an old article that mentions the $25 rule.
This is why you must regularly audit and quality check your articles to ensure they're as recent as possible. Failing to do so can impact customer loyalty.
Examples of a full-fledged interactive knowledge base
Now that you have the full scoop on building a successful customer knowledge base, looking at specific examples may help.
Here are a few businesses that have integrated automation, clear categorization, and user-friendly interfaces to empower customers to find answers and solutions efficiently.
BrüMate
BrüMate's Help Center stands out for its customer-centric approach. Here's what makes it effective:
Directly addresses key questions
Right at the top of the page, BrüMate addresses two of the most common customer queries: the returns policy and compatibility with their products. This ensures that customers can find answers without scrolling.
Directing customers to the right product
BrüMate goes a step further by offering a personalized product finder quiz. This interactive element helps customers discover the perfect BrüMate product that suits their needs without the hassle of extensive research.
“We’ve started pushing people towards resources that are in our Help Center. We're trying to help our customers self-solve.”
—Colin Waters, leading at The Feed & former Associate Director of Customer Experience at BrüMate
Accessible support
The Help Center features easily accessible header links, including options to track packages and return to the main site. The chat bubble is readily available, and if the customer service team is offline, customers can access helpful articles.
ALOHAS
ALOHAS’s Help Center excels in providing quick and convenient access to information. Here's what sets it apart:
Top questions featured
Just like BrüMate, ALOHAS prioritizes customer needs by featuring top questions prominently at the top of the page. This means customers don't have to scroll to find answers.
ALOHAS puts its most frequently asked questions about refunds and shipping at the top of its knowledge base.
Effective use of iconography
ALOHAS uses icons effectively for Call to Action (CTA) buttons related to orders, including tracking, returns, cancellations, and reporting issues.
ALOHAS makes it easier to navigate their knowledge base with icons and emojis.
User friendly categorization
The Help Center is well-organized with clear categorization of articles, making it easy for users to navigate and find relevant information.
Powerful search function
ALOHAS' search function is highly effective, pulling relevant information based on key phrases, further enhancing the user experience.
ALOHAS includes a search bar to allow customers to find their specific questions quickly.
LUNO
LUNO takes a minimalist approach that proves simplicity can be highly effective:
Simplicity
LUNO demonstrates that sometimes less is more. The Help Center is clean and uncluttered, ensuring customers can find what they need without distractions.
LUNO's knowledge base is simple without extra decorative elements like images or icons.
Dedicated product information
Many articles are dedicated to specific product questions, such as compatibility, user manuals, and repair guides. It serves as a virtual manual for customers.
Turn your customer service knowledge base into a conversion machine
88% of customers already search your website for some kind of knowledge base or FAQ. It's your chance to transform those searches into conversions.
All of the knowledge base tools mentioned today are available with Gorgias, which you can try for free for 7 days.
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How AI Agent Works & Gathers Data
TL;DR:
- No data is stored. AI Agent follows a zero data retention policy and complies with regulations like GDPR and CPRA.
- Learns from your store’s data to provide personalized support. AI Agent pulls from sources like Shopify, your Help Center, and internal documents to respond with relevant, on-brand answers. The use of internal knowledge rather than public databases helps to avoid generic answers.
- Constructs sentences using a mix of different large language models (LLMs). AI Agent uses OpenAI, Anthropic, and other models to form natural-sounding responses.
- Feedback helps improve AI Agent’s performance. Support teams can review AI Agent’s responses, while Gorgias also monitors feedback from thousands of brands to optimize back-end prompts.
AI Agent is an autonomous AI support assistant designed specifically for ecommerce brands. Trained on your store’s Shopify data, policies, and brand guidelines, AI Agent responds to customer interactions with personalized, high-quality answers.
But is it the good type of AI?
As AI emerges more and more as a necessity for CX teams, there are a few common concerns among leaders. Worries that it will steal customer data, use data to enhance OpenAI’s LLM, or leverage shopper data for things outside of its scope are just a few.
To quell those concerns, we’ll go into the specifics of how AI Agent actually collects and uses data.
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Jump to an answer:
- How does AI Agent collect data?
- Does AI Agent store data?
- Is AI Agent trustworthy?
- How accurate are the support responses?
- Do you have to legally disclose that you’re using AI?
How does AI Agent collect data?
Gorgias’s AI Agent uses merchants’ unique data, including orders, ticket information, product catalogs, and store content, and then uses a blend of state-of-the-art LLMs, including OpenAI and Anthropic, to help it construct natural, human-like responses.
AI Agent uses the following as data sources:
- Custom Guidance
- Shopify order data
- Your Help Center
- Public webpages
- Macros
- Handover instructions and excluded topics
How AI Agent handles Shopify order data
The information AI Agent has access to is approximately the same data as the one presented in the Shopify widget in the Gorgias helpdesk. We push this same information to AI Agent to compute the next step for the customer.
Some of the data permissions that AI Agent has when integrated with Shopify include access to all orders, all draft orders, order edits, fulfilments, products, customers, themes, discounts, scripts, and content.
How AI Agent chooses data between different data sources
AI Agent processes the information from the ticket to understand where to pull the relevant data from, such as correlating information from the account associated with the interaction as well as the intent of the message. Here’s how it works.
🎟️ Ticket analysis
AI Agent first analyzes the content of the ticket to identify the key information and intent behind the customer's inquiry.
📊 Data correlation
It correlates this information with the available data sources, such as Guidance your team sets up (which takes precedence over other knowledge sources), Help Center articles, Macros, and any other integrated knowledge bases.
🤔 Context understanding
AI Agent understands the context of the message and retrieves relevant data. If there are multiple sources of information, it determines which source is most pertinent to the query.
💬 Clarifying questions
If the ticket has vague or insufficient information, AI Agent will ask clarifying questions to ensure it pulls the correct information.
✅ Internal QA process
Before sending the response, AI Agent undergoes an internal QA process where it verifies the information and creates an internal note for the merchant. This note includes information on what knowledge and Shopify data was used, and shows "reasoning" for the event if the QA failed.
🗣️ Feedback loop
Merchants or admins can provide feedback on whether the resolution was good or bad, and AI Agent uses this feedback to improve future responses.
Does AI Agent store data?
Gorgias and AI Agent do not store shopper or customer data.
AI Agent operates under a zero data retention (ZDR) policy, meaning that once the request is processed, the data is not stored.
📚 Further reading: Our Master Service Agreement (MSA) and Data Processing Agreement (DPA) govern the use of all Gorgias services, including AI Agent. If you’d like to learn more, these terms detail the data we collect and how we use Artificial Intelligence.
AI Agent prioritizes data security
Data privacy and security are top priorities for us, and our systems are designed to handle data in a secure manner without retaining personal or sensitive information.
AI Agent uses language models developed by OpenAI. OpenAI does not use customer data to train their models, and there is a zero data retention policy. Any data sent through the API is not stored beyond the duration needed to serve the request pulled.
Gorgias is SOC 2 Type II compliant and adheres to strict regulations and standards to ensure the privacy, security, and proper handling of sensitive data.
AI Agent does not use shopper data to enhance its LLM
AI Agent and Gorgias comply with stringent data privacy regulations, such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and California Privacy Rights Act (CPRA), ensuring that shopper data is handled securely and responsibly without being used for model enhancement.
This approach ensures that shopper data remains private and is not utilized beyond the scope of providing immediate customer support.
“We were initially nervous about using AI, but it has quickly proven its worth. Our community members have even mistaken the AI Agent for a real person, which speaks volumes about how well it aligns with our brand voice.”
—Zoe Cranney, Community Experience Expert, LSKD
Is AI Agent trustworthy?
Yes! AI Agent was built not only to provide instant and accurate responses, but also with transparency in mind. For every interaction that AI Agent has, it provides you with an internal note that covers:
- The Guidance/Articles/Macros it used
- The source of the account information it pulled
- A prompt for your feedback to improve future responses
How accurate are the support responses?
While no AI tool is capable of perfect accuracy 100% of the time, we put several safeguards in place to keep AI Agent from sending inaccurate information.
Trained on your knowledge — not generic information
When AI Agent responds to a customer, it pulls from your team’s specific documents. Aside from the Guidance you set, which it prioritizes, AI Agent uses your Shopify order data, Macros, your brand’s webpages, as well as your Help Center.
Using AI Agent is unlike only relying on ChatGPT for answers, which uses broad information. AI Agent draws from your data only, making its responses highly accurate and personalized to your brand.
We use multiple LLMs for natural language processing
LLMs like OpenAI and Anthropic’s main role in AI Agent is to recognize and form natural-flowing responses. It can speak in different languages and tones to align with your brand voice. This, combined with your own internal knowledge sources, helps add that human touch that sets it apart from automated emails and bots.
Topics can be excluded or handed over
As another layer of control, we let you define topics that AI Agent should completely ignore and hand over to your team.
For example, some topics — such as medical questions or legal threats — are too sensitive to handle with AI. You can add these to your Exclusion or Handover topics to ensure AI Agent does not respond to them.
Teams can provide feedback on resolutions
You can improve AI Agent’s responses by providing feedback on how it handled tickets. You can either approve of its behavior or suggest adjustments to improve future interactions.
For example, when an influencer reached out to hip toddler carrier brand Wildride and said, “I really love you guys,” AI Agent replied, “Love you too ❤️❤️”.
Amber van den Berg, Head of Customer Experience, found this really funny, as it was exactly the type of response the team would have given. But if that response wasn’t quite right, or wasn’t on brand, they could have given AI Agent that feedback.
Do you have to legally disclose that you’re using AI?
You have the choice of whether or not to disclose your use of AI in response generated by AI Agent.
However, for maximum legal protection, we recommend using your email signature to indicate that the message your customers receive has been created with AI.
- In email: Use the Email Signature setting to disclose your use of AI.
- In chat: Use the Privacy Policy feature to disclose your use of AI.
Note: Some laws, such as the California Bolstering Online Transparency Act, prohibit misleading consumers about the use of automated artificial identities.
Give better support to your CX team & your customers
"I saw how well AI Agent was replying to customers and really started to think about how we could optimize it to work for us even more,” said Amber van den Berg, Head of Customer Experience at Wildride.
“Within one month, AI Agent was answering 33% of emails, which is quite impressive." This was essential for Wildride’s CX team after viral social media content bumped 1000 tickets per month to 1000 tickets per week.
Now, the team is freed up to focus on more complex issues, and AI Agent can fill in the rest.
Book a demo to see how AI Agent can work for you.
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Reducing Customer Effort with AI: A Smarter Approach Than Surprise and Delight
TL;DR:
- Loyalty comes from ease, not delight. Simplifying customer support drives more loyalty than going above and beyond to surprise customers.
- High-effort interactions hurt loyalty. Long, complicated support experiences can push even satisfied customers to competitors.
- AI reduces customer effort. AI can automate simple tasks like FAQs, personalizing support, and order modifications, so your team can handle more complex tasks.
- AI enhances human support. AI works best when it complements your team by handling repetitive tasks.
For years, businesses have chased the idea that delighting customers is how to earn loyalty. The belief is simple: go above and beyond, exceed expectations, and customers will come back.
However, research from The Effortless Experience, a best-selling customer service book by Matthew Dixon, shows that this approach might be wrong. Focusing on customer delight often makes the experience more complicated and less efficient.
Most businesses aim to wow customers, but trying too hard leads to longer customer support interactions and higher costs. The real key to customer loyalty is making things easy.
Below, find out how AI is another string to your customer support bow, allowing you to increase speed and reduce effort while maintaining your brand's empathetic voice.
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Why doesn’t customer delight drive loyalty?
When customers reach out with a problem they want a prompt solution –– 90% of customers say an “immediate” response is important.
Delight is a problem when it adds additional steps and doesn’t solve the problem upfront.
Customers don’t want a solution with all the bells and whistles. They simply want to solve the problem ASAP.
There’s a disconnect between satisfaction and loyalty
It’s a common misconception that satisfied customers are loyal customers. But the numbers tell a different story. Research shows that satisfaction doesn’t always lead to loyalty.
In fact, 20% of customers who say they’re satisfied with a service still plan to switch to a competitor. Satisfaction alone isn’t enough to keep customers from exploring other options.
High-effort experiences put customers off
High-effort experiences are a major driver of customer disloyalty. Studies show that 96% of customers who encounter high effort interactions become disloyal.
When customers feel like they have to jump through hoops to get help, they’re more likely to take their business elsewhere.
Read more: Why you need to monitor customer effort score (& how to do it)
It’s easier to trigger disloyalty than loyalty
Negative experiences are much more likely to leave a lasting impression. Even when customers feel satisfied with the products, high-effort experiences can negatively impact loyalty.
For example, a customer may contact customer service due to a minor issue, such as a shipping delay. However, they may have to wait a long time to get a response or repeat their issue to multiple agents. Even if the issue is eventually resolved, they will leave frustrated and less likely to return.
If you need to put in extra effort, even positive interactions will fall short.
Bonus track: High-effort experiences are expensive
Trying to delight customers might sound like a winning strategy, but it often comes with a hefty price tag. Offering freebies, bending rules, and making special exceptions can increase your operational costs significantly. When these additional costs don’t contribute to customer satisfaction or loyalty, it’s important to evaluate if they’re worthwhile.
Read more: The hidden power and ROI of automated customer support
Simplify, don’t surprise: How can AI help reduce customer effort?
Several common issues make customer support a hassle. Some of the biggest culprits are multiple contacts to resolve a single issue, having to repeat information, and being transferred from one agent to another.
You can solve these common customer complaints with AI.
But won’t AI make my brand sound robotic and devoid of human touch?
Our hot take is that AI actually frees up your team to focus on more valuable tasks.
For example, RiG’d Supply, a brand specializing in off-road vehicle accessories, is letting AI handle some of the repetitive work so they can do better customer service. As a small team, even the CEO occasionally jumps in to keep up with the repetitive daily requests.
“This isn’t a matter of eliminating jobs, but giving our employees their primary jobs back. We get more bandwidth back to be able to take phone calls and hear how we can help you have the best possible experience on your next ramble,” says Luke Wronski, CEO of RiG’d Supply. “Our hope is to have AI give us the time back to have a conversation with you about the stuff that keeps us stoked to do what we do.”
Read more: Our AI approach: Onboard, automate, observe, and coach
5 AI strategies to minimize customer effort
Don’t get us wrong, AI can’t handle every moving piece of your customer support. So don’t assume you can replace your whole support team with AI. You still need high-quality human support for more complex tasks.
But if you have a solid support team that provides top-quality customer experience, you already have the right foundation to benefit from AI.
1. Automate frequently asked questions
AI tools are excellent at resolving simple customer queries, such as “Where is my order?” or “How much is delivery?” on the first contact.
Quick, accurate responses lead to a smooth experience and less effort from both sides. Customers no longer need to follow up multiple times for the same issue. Plus, you’ll save time that your support team can use for more complex issues.
Consider using an automated customer experience platform with an AI assistant. For example, Gorgias's AI Agent automatically responds to FAQs like “How much is shipping?” or “When will my order arrive?” in your brand’s voice. For more technical requests, it assigns them to the right agents.
Read more: What's the secret to reducing WISMO requests?
2. Personalize support
AI can analyze customer data to deliver personalized suggestions. For example, if a customer frequently orders the same product, AI might recommend a subscription service to save them time and effort. Or if a customer has ordered several cooking utensils from the same product line, AI might suggest matching pans to complete their set.
💡Pro Tip: Find a CX platform with AI that offers custom, human-like responses. You can program your AI Agent to respond in different tones — friendly, professional, playful, or empathetic — so it feels more like your brand and less like a robot.
Gorgias’s AI Agent can speak in different tones to match your brand voice.
3. Provide guidance for next issue-avoidance
Imagine solving your customers' problems before they even know they have them — that’s next-issue avoidance. With AI, you can recall past interactions and customer habits to anticipate their needs.
If a customer has had issues with a product before, AI could suggest a protection plan upfront, saving them from future headaches. Your AI solution should help you stay one step ahead so customer support remains smooth and customers are happy.
Some AI assistants can even learn specific instructions or “Guidance” for handling certain topics. For example, you could create a Guidance instructing the AI to request photos if a customer reports a damaged product. If the AI detects that photos are already included, it automatically escalates the ticket to a human agent.
4. Automate order edits
AI’s capabilities shouldn’t end at answering FAQs. AI can also handle routine tasks like address changes or order modifications so your team can focus on issues that need more technical problem-solving.
Speedy resolutions keep customers happy, and as long as the issue is resolved efficiently, they care more about the result than who handled it.
For example, brands using Shopify can use Gorgias’s AI Agent to cancel orders and update shipping addresses without manual intervention from agents — so agents can dive into more complex requests that need their expertise, like upselling or resolving negative customer feedback.
Gorgias’s AI Agent can automatically change a Shopify customer’s shipping address.
5. Answer customer concerns with AI recommendations
Let’s face it — nobody wants to jump through hoops to get help. AI-powered helpdesks dig into customer interactions to find out where things get sticky and offer smart suggestions to improve the process.
For instance, AI might notice that customers are often confused about how to download and print the shipping label to return items. With this insight, you could make it easier and faster for customers to find and print the correct label.
Gorgias Automate goes a step further by detecting your customers' top concerns and allowing you to create knowledge base articles about them automatically. Brands can use this data to update their Help Center and FAQs, make key webpages more visible, and enhance product pages, ensuring customers find the answers they need quickly and easily.
Embrace effortless customer experience with AI
Customer loyalty isn’t won with flashy gestures. Instead, brands earn it by making things easy. AI is your best friend here, helping you streamline interactions, solve issues before they even arise, and keep customers in the loop without them having to chase down information. Remember, AI is there to enhance an already solid customer experience foundation and to help your team.
It’s time to rethink how you approach customer support. With AI, you can craft a seamless, low-effort experience that satisfies customers and turns them into loyal fans.
Book a demo to see how Gorgias can eliminate customer effort.
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