The Covid-19 pandemic has dramatically accelerated the move from offline to online in retail. This got us busier than ever supporting our merchants, new and old, to ensure we help them work towards providing exceptional customer service.
The latest example of this is Black Friday and Cyber Monday, where Shopify saw an uptick of 75% GMV when compared to last year.
As a result of this huge ecommerce spike, 2020 has been a massive year for Gorgias.
At the beginning of the year, we had just 30 people on our team and now, we’re sitting at over 100 incredible people working each and every day to help serve 5,000+ merchants.
The reason our team grew so much this year is to support the growth of our merchants.
Throughout the year, order volume has massively increased and therefore, lots of customers have been contacting businesses through customer service. We went from having 2 million support requests a month on Gorgias to 6 million during the holiday season.
So today, we’re announcing a $25m series B lead by Rajeev Dham at Sapphire Ventures, with participation of Jason Lemkin (SaaStr), François Meteyer (Alven) and other historic investors.
What’s our goal with this round?
We want to accelerate our progress towards our mission to transform support from painful to exceptional for merchants.
We asked our merchants and learned that they have the following needs: first they want their support to be fast and high quality, then they want to optimize their cost, and once they’ve done that, they are willing to shift the way they think about support to make it a profit center.
In 2021, we want to focus on the top questions our merchants are getting, which account for 60% of the support volume. By empowering support agents to respond faster to these frequent questions, we’re aiming at reducing first response time for our merchants and at increasing the quality of their support. This will free up agents time so that they can focus more on the more complex questions their customers are asking.
How are we going to do this?
- We’re building a help center so customers can self serve and find immediate answers to their most common questions
- We’re going to work on becoming a platform so that third party developers can integrate with Gorgias and provide more value to agents
- We’re improving our macro suggestions so that agents spend less time typing repetitive text and more time on custom responses
- We’re also adding new channels, including Instagram DMs, Whatsapp, phone and others
You can learn more about our next quarter roadmap here.
Looking further ahead into the future, our goal is to change the role of support from responding to customers’ issues to helping the business grow.
2021 is going to be a new chapter for us. With this round, we’re going to double our team to 200 people across all our hubs, in San Francisco, Belgrade, Paris, Charlotte, Toronto and Sydney.
If you’d like to join the adventure and help us improve the daily lives of 3 million support agents in the US (and more worldwide), we’re hiring aggressively in all these locations.
I want to thank our amazing team for helping build a company that has an impact on 60 million customers yearly, and the 5000 merchants who’ve decided to use our product every day.
The adventure continues, we’re more excited than ever!
Alex & Romain
