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Customer Support Metrics

25 Customer Service Metrics & KPIs + How to Track Them

Blog
Customer Support Metrics

25 Customer Service Metrics & KPIs + How to Track Them

The overall best customer support metrics to track:

  • First contact resolution (FCR) signifies how efficient and knowledgeable your team is at solving inquiries within one interaction.
  • Customer satisfaction score (CSAT) shows how happy customers are with your brand and customer service.
  • Self-service resolution rate highlights how well you make the most of self-service resources.
  • The tickets closed per agent metric suggests agent efficiency and serves as a benchmark for your support team's average performance.
  • Revenue churn rate lets you see the financial impact of losing customers, allowing you to create a more informed strategy.
  • Converted tickets indicate how effectively your support agents promote and upsell your product.

Most brands keep a close eye on sales numbers, marketing performance, and other parts of the business that generate revenue. But they don’t do a great job measuring customer support performance, usually because they don’t understand the link between customer experience and revenue.

Your customer support team might already measure how quickly you respond to support tickets, which is a great start. The list of metrics we share below paint a fuller picture of the larger impact customer support has on business growth. And once you can demonstrate your impact on business growth, you can start making the case for better tools and more staff.

Track these customer support metrics, improve them, and watch your customer loyalty, repeat purchases, and revenue rise.

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25 key customer service metrics for ecommerce 

Below, we describe 25 of the most essential customer service metrics, organized into six categories. Some metrics have to do with your team's performance — like how quickly and well you respond to tickets. Other metrics look deeper at your team's impact on larger company goals, like customer retention and revenue generation. 

We’ll also share how to calculate each of these metrics. For some, a simple formula will suffice. For others, a dedicated tool like a helpdesk or survey automation tool will save tons of time.

That said, here are the top customer support metrics to track:

Response time metrics

  1. First response time (FRT)
  2. Average resolution time (ART)
  3. Average reply time
  4. First call resolution (FCR) or single-reply resolution
  5. Average ticket handle time (AHT)

Customer satisfaction metrics

  1. Customer satisfaction (CSAT)
  2. Support performance score
  3. Customer effort score (CES)
  4. Customer contact rate
  5. Net promoter score (NPS)

Conversation metrics

  1. Abandoned conversation rate
  2. Unresolved ticket rate
  3. Self-service resolution rate
  4. Social media support tickets
  5. Social media brand mentions

Agent performance metrics

  1. Tickets closed per agent
  2. Ticket quality
  3. Template utilization

Churn & retention metrics

  1. Repeat customer rate (RCR)
  2. Customer retention rate (CRR)
  3. Net retention rate (NRR)
  4. Customer churn rate (CRR)
  5. Revenue churn rate

Revenue-related metrics

  1. Converted tickets
  2. Revenue backlog

Response time metrics

1) First response time (FRT)

First reply time

         

First response time (FRT) is a metric that tracks how long it takes for you to reply to the first message in a conversation with a customer.

Top performing companies using Gorgias have an average first response time of .54 hours. However, the benchmark varies per channel: aim to respond to email tickets within 24 hours and live chat messages within 90 seconds, according to Klipfolio

How to calculate average first response time

Calculating your average first response time is relatively simple — most helpdesks will report this number for you. If you don’t have a helpdesk, you can find first response times for tickets by comparing the time stamp when you first received the customer request with the timestamp of the first response. If you received the message at 8 AM on Monday and respond at 8 AM on Tuesday, your first response time is one day. 

Add up all of your first response times from the period of time you’re looking to analyze — for example, one month — and then divide that number by the total number of resolved tickets during that same time frame:

Total first response times during chosen time period / total # of resolved tickets during chosen time period = Average first response time 

Using real numbers, here’s an example of what this calculation looks like:

74,000 seconds / 800 resolved tickets = 92.5 seconds (average first response time)

2) Average reply time

Your average reply time (or average response time) refers to how long it takes for you to respond to any customer support message, not just the first message of a ticket. Your average response time should be similar to the first response time. You don’t want to keep customers waiting, even in prolonged conversations.

How to calculate average response time

To find your average response time, add up the total time your team has taken to respond to requests during a specific time period. Then, divide that number by the total number of responses your team sent during that time period:

Total time taken to respond during chosen time period / number of sent responses = Average response time

average response time formula

         

3) Average resolution time (ART)

image

         

Average resolution time (ART) refers to the amount of time it takes for your customer support team to fully solve the customer’s problem and close the ticket. We analyzed data across about 6,000 ecommerce companies using Gorgias to provide customer support and we found that the top-performing companies have an average resolution time of 1.67 hours. 

Inside Gorgias, your average resolution time is automatically tracked. In your account, you’ll get visual reports showing your average resolution time in a given time period.

How to calculate average resolution time

To calculate average resolution time, also sometimes referred to as “mean time,” begin by choosing a specific time period to analyze. Then, total up the length of all of your resolved conversations with customers during that time period. Once you have that number, divide it by the number of conversations had during the time period you’ve chosen to analyze:

Total duration of resolved conversations / # of customer conversations = Average resolution time

See our guide to resolution time to learn good-fit strategies to improve this metric.
4) First contact resolution (FCR) or single-reply resolution rate

You know what customers absolutely love? When they can get their issues resolved with a single interaction. Single-reply resolution rate calculates what percentage of your tickets are handled with the first reply. It’s also known as the first contact resolution rate or FCR. 

Single-reply resolution rate = Total number of requests resolved with one interaction in a single time period divided by the total number of requests in the same time period.

How to calculate this first contact resolution

To find your single-reply resolution rate, you can simply divide the number of support issues that were resolved on the first reply by the total number of tickets that are FCR-eligible (FCR-eligible means only including tickets that are possible to give a resolution in one response). As a formula, it would look like this:

Number of support issues resolved on first contact / total number of FCR-eligible support tickets = FCR rate

5) Average ticket handle time

The average handle time (AHT) is an important metric to track if you offer customer service via phone. In today’s online world, most ecommerce companies handle tickets only with chat and email. However, very large ecommerce brands may choose to provide phone call support as well. 

The average ticket handline time includes the total talk time and total hold time for that caller. You can calculate the average for larger periods of time to get better insights, such as per week or per month. 

Not using voice support? Learn about 4 benefits of adding voice support to your ecommerce store.

How to calculate average handle time

To find your average ticket handling time, add up the total time spent on all voice tickets within the time period you’re analyzing, including talk time, hold time, and follow-up time. Then, divide that number by the number of tickets a customer support agent handled on all channels within that same period of time:

Total voice ticket time / # of total tickets touched = Average handle time 

Customer satisfaction metrics

6) Customer satisfaction (CSAT)

Customer satisfaction (CSAT)

         

Customer satisfaction (CSAT) is a metric to measure your customer base’s level of satisfaction with their experience. CSAT is one of the most important measurements because satisfied customers return to your store, refer friends, leave reviews, and unlock reliable revenue for your brand.

CSAT compiles responses to a very simple question: “How would you rate the help [Agent] gave you?” You can use a survey or a website feedback widget to ask customers to rate on a scale of 1 to 5 how satisfied they are with a support experience. 

CSAT aims to get an overall benchmark for your team’s performance, plus information about the service experience each agent provides. If this score suddenly drops or peaks, you should act fast to see what happened. For example, you may be sending delayed or unhelpful responses after launching a new product, getting a spike in ticket volume, or changing a policy like refunds and returns.

Read our in-depth guide to CSAT score for more tips on improving your CSAT score and CSAT survey response rates.

How to calculate CSAT

Calculate your customer satisfaction score by asking a question like, “How would you rate your satisfaction with the goods/services you received?” Then, you would give the customer the option to respond on a scale of 1-5. The scale would look something like this:

  1. Very unsatisfied
  2. Unsatisfied
  3. Neutral
  4. Satisfied
  5. Very satisfied

With Gorgias, you can automatically send one of these surveys after each interaction with customer support:

Customer satisfaction surveys in Gorgias

         

Once your customers respond, you’ll need to use the responses in this formula if you don’t have a helpdesk that does it automatically:

(Total number of 4 and 5 responses, or “satisfied customers” / number of total responses) x 100 = CSAT

An example of this could look like this:

(126 4 and 5 responses) / (300 total responses) x 100 = 42% CSAT, which indicates you aren’t doing a great job of satisfying customers.

If you use Gorgias, you can automatically send customer satisfaction surveys and track your scores over time. Learn more about our satisfaction survey and dashboard:

Customer satisfaction analytics

         

7) Support performance score

Support performance score

         

Support performance score is a metric Gorgias created that combines average first response time, average resolution time, and CSAT for a single score out of five that concisely represents your customer service performance. If you could only track one customer service metric — which we do not recommend — it would be this one.

Support performance score balances these three metrics to represent three of the most important elements of quality support:

  • Speed, with first response time
  • Helpfulness, with average resolution time
  • Customer satisfaction, with CSAT score
Support performance score

         

How to calculate support performance score

Support performance score is calculated with a series of thresholds for CSAT, FRT, and resolution time. You have to meet the threshold in each category to reach the next level. Here are the thresholds for FRT, for example:

  • Level 1 (poor): 13+ hours
  • Level 2 (lagging): 12 hours
  • Level 3 (fair): 6 hours
  • Level 4 (strong): 1 hour
  • Level 5 (exceptional) 10 minutes

If you use Gorgias, you’ll see your support performance score over time, plus a breakdown of each metric that makes up your score. 

8) Customer effort score (CES)

According to The Effortless Experience, 96% of high-effort customer experiences drive customer disloyalty. In other words, the amount of effort across your entire customer journey has a huge bearing on the success of your customer experience and, by extension, your brand’s revenue.

High-effort customer experiences drive disloyalty.

         

By measuring CES, you and your team members can work towards reducing customer effort, which in turn will increase the lifetime customer value and the likelihood of word-of-mouth referrals.

You may be wondering what exactly is considered “high effort.” This could include long wait times when a customer calls in or reaches out via email, or not getting a concise response — which leads to time-consuming back-and-forth. Of course, “effort” is subjective and highly dependent on the individual customer and their expectations. 

How to calculate customer effort score

To measure CES, you’ll need to utilize another survey. The questionnaire should ask the customer how much effort they had to exert in order to get their question answered. 

For example, “[insert company name] made it easy for me to handle my issue.” Then, you’d provide a scale of 1 to 10. A score of 1 would be “strongly disagree,” while 10 would be “strongly agree.” 

Once you’ve collected the data, you can calculate your average customer effort score:

Total sum of all responses / total number of responses = CES

9) Customer contact rate

Contact rate

         

Customer contact rate measures the percentage of active customers who contact support each day, month, or year.

A high customer contact rate is an indicator that your customer experience is confusing and unclear. It also means your agents will be swamped with tickets and may not have enough time to provide quality responses. 

A high contact rate might also drive down revenue: a customer support interaction is 4x more likely to drive disloyalty than it is to drive loyalty, according to The Effortless Experience. While you want to make your interactions as helpful as possible, you’re better off giving customers a clear, effortless experience without having to reach out to support in the first place.

Customer service interactions drive loyalty

         

You can drive down customer contact rate with clearer self-service resources, like an FAQ page and shipping and returns policies.

How to measure customer contact rate

Divide the number of customers who contact your customer service team for help over the course of a month by the number of total customers. Then, multiply that number by 100. 

Contact rate = (Number of customers who contact you in a month / Total number of customers) x 100

10) Net promoter score (NPS)

Net promoter score (NPS)

         

Similar to the CSAT, the NPS is a common metric for measuring customer satisfaction. Customers will rate on a scale from 1 to 10 how likely they are to recommend your business to a friend. It’s best to measure this regularly, so you can determine your company’s benchmark and look for any drops or spikes in the average rating. 

You can use a feedback widget on your website to collect this data, or include the quick survey at the bottom of emails for transaction or shipping updates.

How to calculate net promoter score

To calculate net promoter score, you first need to gather data using a customer survey. Send a survey to customers after they make a purchase that asks them, “On a scale of 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend [products or service] to a friend or colleague?” On this scale, 0 would be not at all likely, and 10 would be extremely likely. 

Customers fall into three categories based on their responses to these surveys: promoters (scores 9 or 10), passives (scores 7 or 8), and detractors (scores 0 to 6). Once you have all the data collected, you can apply the numbers to this formula:

Total % of promoters - total % of detractors = Net promoter score 

Net promoter score (NPS) formula

         

See our best practices for getting the best NPS response rate.

Conversation metrics

11) Conversation abandonment rate

Conversation abandonment rate is a metric to understand how frequently your customers abruptly end interactions with customer support before reaching a clear resolution. 

Whether the conversation is happening via email, chat, or phone call, conversation abandonment signals something larger is wrong. Most conversation abandonment happens after customers wait too long or become frustrated by poor service. 

How to calculate conversation abandonment rate

To calculate this metric, all you need to track is the number of abandoned incidents and the total number of incidents. In this context, “incidents” refers to either calls, emails, or live chat sessions. Once you have those two numbers, you can plug them into the following formula:

Conversation abandonment rate = (Number of abandoned incidents / Total number of incidents) x 100

conversations abandonment rate formula

         

12) Unresolved ticket rate

Your average number of unresolved tickets is a very important metric to track because unresolved tickets are a leading indicator of unhappy customers. You don’t want too many unresolved tickets piling up. Set a company-wide goal for the maximum number of unresolved tickets per day, week, and month.

Your unresolved ticket rate includes all abandoned conversations, which you read about in the above section. They also include any tickets where the support team couldn’t provide a real solution, plus tickets that your support team forgot to follow up on.

How to calculate unsolved ticket rate

Similarly to ticket volume, you don’t need a specific formula to calculate your number of unresolved tickets. Rather, all you need is a reliable system (whether it’s a helpdesk or a process) for keeping track of how many tickets are left unresolved after a certain length of time. 

13) Self-service resolution rate

Want to know how well your self-service strategy — whether that’s automated chat conversations, self-service chat flows, a blog, or any other self-service resource — lowers customer and agent effort? 

You can separate out tickets that did not have a customer support representative work on them, and that were resolved only with automation. You can also track the amount of views your self-service resources get to understand how many tickets they deflect entirely. 

Customer self-service

         

How to calculate self-service resolution rate

Finding your total self-service resolution rate is a bit difficult because you don’t have a ticket to open or close. You can track views on your self-service resources to understand whether they’re being adopted, and track changes to your contact rate to see if they reduce the number of tickets coming in.

Automated support resolution rate is a little easier to calculate:

Automated support resolution rate = Total number of requests resolved with only automation in a single time period divided by the total number of requests resolved with automation, manual support, and a combination of both (in the same time period).

(Solved tickets with automation / total tickets received) x 100 = Resolution rate 

14) Social media support tickets 

Customers’ issues do not only exist in your desired support channels like email and chat. Do you get support tickets on social media? Rather than fight against this trend and attempt to ask customers to submit a ticket via chat, you should respond and help them. Just don’t share sensitive data, of course. 

Measure the number of social media support tickets that you get every day, week, month, and quarter. When that number grows, it’s not necessarily a bad thing. It could mean that more of your customers are interacting with your social media profiles. However, it’s still important to pay attention to the benchmark metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs). Sudden changes could represent an issue with your product or shipping speeds.

With Gorgias, you can track and respond to every support ticket that comes through social media — or any channel — from within the helpdesk:

Social media customer support tickets.

         

Learn more about Gorgias’ social media customer service features.

How to calculate this metric

Unfortunately, there isn’t a clear-cut way to measure and analyze social media support tickets, so we encourage you to use a social listening tool that allows you to do a number of things. For instance, tracking brand mentions on social media, as well as how many tickets are coming in through your social platforms during various periods of time. Having all of your social metrics in one place will make them much easier to analyze than pulling them one-by-one out of several different spreadsheets. 

15) Social media brand mentions

How frequently your brand is mentioned on social media is a critical metric to track if you want to provide incredible support and get on top of PR disasters. You should have a good benchmark for how often your brand is mentioned per day and per week. If the number spikes, then one of your products might have gone viral, or you’ve got a PR nightmare happening. 

You can pay attention to brand mentions with a social listening and brand monitoring software. It’s also smart to use a helpdesk built to manage social comments.

How to calculate this metric

To keep an eye on your social media brand mentions, you’ll need to tap into a social listening tool, as mentioned above. You can certainly try to do this manually and track it all in a spreadsheet, but similar to tracking the volume of tickets, digital software will make this process easier and more efficient. 

Agent performance metrics

16) Tickets closed per agent

You might also want to measure the number of tickets closed per agent for a certain time period. For example, you could look at the number of tickets each agent is closing per day to spot differences in productivity. You could look at a longer period of time, such as per month, to find which agents are consistently closing more tickets, assuming they each work the same number of hours. 

This will help you discover the agents who deserve praise and bonuses, and which ones might need training. If you find an agent that is always closing too few tickets, it may be time to let them go, unfortunately. 

With Gorgias, this metric is automatically tracked in your account:

Live agent metrics in Gorgias

         

Plus, you can zoom out to understand trends among agents over time, to compare performance or plan your weekly coverage schedules:

Agent performance analytics in Gorgias

         

How to calculate this metric

To calculate the number of tickets closed per agent, take the total number of tickets closed during a certain time period and then divide it by the number of agents working during that same time period:

Total # tickets closed / # of agents = Tickets closed per agent

17) Ticket quality

Ticket quality isn’t a metric on its own, but it’s a metric you can create to score your agents’ tickets and work toward a consistent quality of response. 

We recommend all customer support teams develop a sort of rubric that defines, in objective terms, what a “good” response looks like. The rubric can include things like:

  • Response time
  • Level of empathy
  • Adherence to brand voice
  • Correctness (or adherence to company policies)

Your agents will appreciate having concrete goals for their tickets. Plus, you will have an easier time holding agents accountable to standards if they’re written down. You can, and should, regularly update your rubric as you dig into data to understand what ticket qualities actually produce the best results. 

How to measure ticket quality

As we said, this isn’t exactly a metric to measure. So instead, we’ll recommend that you spot check each agent’s tickets against this rubric. This doesn’t have to be an intimidating process. Some support companies have weekly ticket breakdowns where the entire team — or team leadership, for larger companies — discuss and score tickets against the rubric to get on the same page about ticket quality.

18) Template utilization

Templated responses save your agents a lot of time and, by extension, mean customers get answers faster. If you don’t have a customer support platform, you can create templated responses in Gmail to answer common questions like, “Where is my order?” (WISMO). If you use helpdesk software, you can also likely add pre-written responses agents can use for each channel. At Gorgias, we call these Macros.

Macros (otherwise known as templates) in Gorgias

         

You can get statistics on the utilization of your Macros in any given time period. You can then compare this to the use of tags. For example, if the tag “Cancel Order” was used 100 times in one week, but the Macro was only used 50 times, then that means that your reps only used the Macro half the time. 

Talk with your reps about why they’re underutilizing certain Macros. You might need to improve the copy of the Macros or add more variables to make it more useful. Or, you might simply need to remind new reps about the Macros feature.

How to calculate this metric

If you don’t use a helpdesk, you’ll likely have to manually review tickets to see when the template was and wasn’t used. Helpdesk software will automatically report on template utilization.

Churn & retention metrics

19) Repeat customer rate (RCR)

Your company will always have two types of customers: new customers and repeat customers. Tracking both is important, but tracking repeat customers specifically will help you determine if your retention efforts are working. Repeat customers also have a larger impact on overall revenue: Repeat customers generate 300% more revenue than first-time customers, according to data from Gorgias merchants.

Repeat customers generate 300% more revenue than first-time shoppers.

         

The value of repeat customers is compounded by the fact that retaining a current customer is five times less expensive for a business than finding a brand new customer. 

How to calculate repeat customer rate

To calculate your repeat customer rate (RCR), you can divide your number of repeat customers by your total number of customers, then multiply that by 100. This means that in order to calculate the RCR properly, you need to already be tracking repeat customers versus new customers. The formula for RCR is as follows:

(Total repeat customers / total paying customers) x 100 = RCR

Using real numbers, here’s an example of what the RCR calculation looks like:

(80 repeat customers / 230 paying customers) x 100 = 34.78%

20) Customer retention rate (CRR)

Ecommerce retention rate.

         

As mentioned previously, retaining customers is always less expensive than finding new customers. That’s why customer retention rate (CRR) is a vital metric. Ecommerce companies in particular have an average CRR of about 30%, according to Omniconvert, so if your company’s CRR is lower than that, it could be a sign that your customer support isn’t as effective as it could be. 

How to calculate customer retention rate

To calculate CRR, you will need the following information: number of customers at the end of a given time period (E), number of customers gained within that time period (N), number of customers at the beginning of the time period (S). 

Then, plug those numbers into this formula:

CRR = [(E-N)/S] x 100

Tools like Mixpanel, Qualtrics, and Optimove can also help you automatically track this metric.

21) Net retention rate (NRR)

Net retention rate, sometimes called net dollar retention (NDR) or net revenue rate, measures the percentage of recurring revenue retained from your existing customers over a month, quarter, or year. Klipfolio reports that a good NRR is anywhere between 90% and 125%, depending on your brand’s niche, product, and total addressable market (TAM). 

This metric is most common among SaaS companies and subscription-based ecommerce companies, but it can absolutely apply to all types of ecommerce brands and even other industries.

How to measure net retention rate

Net revenue retention depends on your business model — it’s easier to calculate for subscription companies than companies that sell standalone products. That said, here’s the formula for net retention rate: 

NRR = [(Monthly recurring revenue (MRR) at the start of a month + expansions + upsells - churn - contractions) / MRR at the start of the month] x 100

22) Customer churn rate (CRR)

Ecommerce churn rate

         

Customer churn rate measures the amount of customers your business loses over a given time period.

Customer churn is a more common metric for SaaS businesses and other subscription-based business models because those business models can easily spot the moment when an active customer cancels their subscription, or churns. 

However, all businesses, including ecommerce businesses without subscription-based products can track churn rate. But ecommerce businesses might find revenue churn rate, which we discuss below, easier to track.

How to measure customer churn rate

To calculate customer churn rate calculation, gather the total number of customers who were with your business at the beginning of a time frame and the number of active customers at the end of the time you’re analyzing. Then, use this formula:

[(Customers at the beginning of the time period - customers at the end of the time period) / Customers at the beginning of the time period] x 100 = Customer churn rate (%)

23) Revenue churn rate

Revenue churn measures changes in your store’s incoming revenue from existing customers. Businesses that sell standalone products might find this more simple to track than customer churn rate, which is better geared toward subscription-based businesses.

Revenue churn rate is easier to conceptualize and measure because you’re measuring changes in revenue from existing customers, which is a clear-cut number for every type of store, not changes in existing customers themselves.

Formula for calculating revenue churn rate

First, find your monthly recurring revenue (MRR) — or the incoming revenue you got from existing customers — at the beginning of the month and subtract that from your MRR at the end of the month. Divide that amount by the total MRR at the beginning of the month. Here’s the formula:

[(Revenue from at the beginning of the time period - revenue from customers at the end of the time period) / Customers at the beginning of the time period] x 100 = Churn rate (%)

Revenue-related metrics

24) Converted tickets

The number of support tickets your customer support team converts into a purchase shows the value of your customer support team in cold, hard cash. We count a ticket as converted whenever a customer places an order within five days of contacting customer support. 

 Customer support agents can provide helpful pre-sales answers to new customers asking about things like product sizing or your returns policy. Likewise, a helpful interaction after a purchase could make a customer feel confident and loyal enough to place a repeat purchase.

With Gorgias, you can measure your converted tickets and other revenue statistics in a convenient dashboard. Converted tickets can be from self-service, or automated, and manual responses.

Measure revenue generated by customer service in Gorgias

         

How to calculate converted tickets

Before you start calculating, make sure that both numbers are from the same time period. Then use this simple formula to calculate your converted tickets:

Total number of sales within five days of a customer support interaction / total number of tickets = Ticket conversion rate

Read more about how to optimize your conversion rate (CRO).

25) Revenue backlog

Revenue backlog helps you measure how much revenue your business will see in a coming period. This metric is especially for ecommerce brands with a subscription-based model. 

Keeping tabs on your revenue is vital to ensuring your brand's growth and continued success. By tracking your revenue backlog, you’ll be able to see if revenue is going to drop before it actually does. 

If you’re interested in tracking revenue, check out our list of KPIs for your ecommerce brand, which includes more than just customer service metrics.

How to measure revenue backlog

To determine your revenue backlog, you’ll just need the sum of the values of your customers’ subscriptions. If you don’t exclusively sell subscription packages, you’ll need to use tools like Dataweave or Y42 to measure upcoming revenue.

Why should ecommerce businesses track customer service metrics?

Happy customers are the best fuel for growth. In other words, the performance of your customer support team (and overall customer experience) directly impacts your bottom line. Customer service metrics help you understand — and improve — the value that customer service brings to your business.

Benefits of tracking customer support metrics.

         

Understand customer support’s impact on revenue

90% of American consumers say that customer service is a deciding factor in whether or not they will do business with a company. Potential customers might ask a question about delivery or the product before making a purchase. And shoppers depend on quality support experiences after the purchase for a great end-to-end experience. If you flub that chance, they may never come back.

Existing customers are also your biggest spenders, and they rely on quality customer support to stay loyal. According to Gorgias research, repeat customers generate 300% more revenue than first-time customers of ecommerce brands. We estimate that by increasing your repeat customer base by 20%, you could increase your revenue up to 6%.

Measure the quality of your customer experience

Customer experience is mission-critical — see above for its impact on your revenue — but it isn’t easy to measure. That’s because it encapsulates your on-site shopping experience, customer support interactions across many channels, post-purchase interactions like shipping and returns, and so much more. 

Customer support metrics help you evaluate your support program and the customer experience across all those touchpoints so you can benchmark your team’s performance, communicate your performance with company leaders, and find opportunities for improvement.

Find actionable opportunities for improvement

As we just mentioned, tracking a full suite of customer support metrics can also help you find specific areas of improvement. If you don’t keep track of many customer support metrics, you’ll only have extremely high-level impressions and small samples of customer feedback to paint a picture of your strengths and weaknesses.

But if you have real-time tracking for a wide range of metrics, you can better diagnose the problem and find a strategic solution. For example: 

Make a case for additional training, staffing, and tools

Concrete metrics are great ammunition for your customer service team when making the case to business leaders for more budget to hire additional agents, purchase additional tools, and ramp up training

To argue for more investment, you can communicate which projects have produced early improvements. For example, if you set up an FAQ page and see lower contact rates, you can expand the page to a fully-fledged help center. 

You can also quantify challenges to make a case for more tools. For example, say your agents often ask customers to repeat information or lose time copy/pasting order information from your ecommerce platform to customer support conversations. You could make the case a helpdesk that unifies all your customer support channels and store data in one platform.

Likewise, metrics can help you forecast your customer service staffing needs and proactively hire customer service agents before it’s too late. 

Track and improve your customer service metrics with Gorgias

Now that you have all the important customer service metrics and formulas to support your customer success program, you may be ready to explore a product to help make tracking it all easier. A centralized customer service software like Gorgias can help save you and your team hours upon hours of time. That time you can spend getting back to what you do best: great customer support. 

Improved agent dashboard in Gorgias

         

The Gorgias platform connects all of your integrations and allows for robust analytics tracking, so you can:

If you’re on a mission to measure how your customer service team performs (and stacks up against the rest of your industry), check out our benchmark report

If you want to improve your metrics with the ecommerce platform custom-built for ecommerce customer service teams, book a demo with us or try Gorgias for free today.‍

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FAQ’s

What are customer service metrics?

Customer service metrics are units that measure your customer’s satisfaction levels, as well as your customer service team’s performance. Some examples of customer service metrics include customer satisfaction (CSAT), first response time (FRT), net promoter score (NPS), and customer churn rate (CCR).

What are the most important customer service metrics to track?

Some of the most important customer service metrics to track are customer satisfaction (CSAT) to gauge customer happiness, first contact resolution (FCR) to monitor how efficient your support team is, and revenue churn rate to gain insight into how customer churn directly impacts revenue.

How do you make a CSAT survey?

To make a CSAT survey, you will need to create a list of questions about your customer’s satisfaction with your service or product. You will need to decide on a time period to send your survey. You can send CSAT surveys manually or with a customer service tool like Gorgias to automatically send CSAT surveys to customers within a specified time.

How long should it take to respond to a ticket?

Email tickets are best responded to within 24 hours and live chat tickets within 90 seconds. The time it takes to respond to the first ticket from a customer is called first response time or FRT. Using automated messages and macros, like those found in the helpdesk tool Gorgias, can cut down your FRT.‍

How do you track social media customer service metrics?

Social media customer service metrics can be tracked with social media listening tools to track brand mentions and omnichannel helpdesk tools like Gorgias to gather all social media direct messages, comments, and ad replies in one inbox.

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Jordan Miller
Product Marketing Manager - Automate at Gorgias
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Jordan Miller
Product Marketing Manager - Automate at Gorgias
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Recommended Articles

7 Ways to Improve Your Customer Service Response Times

0 min read . By Astaeka Pramuditya
By Astaeka Pramuditya

Modern customers have high expectations when it comes to customer service. One survey showed that nearly half of customers expected an email response from businesses in less than four hours. If your average response time is much higher than this, you could be losing out on a lot of business. 

Of course, meeting customer expectations regarding response time is often easier said than done. If your customer support team is struggling to keep up, the good news is that there are some effective ways to shorten your response times without having to hire a team of new employees.

In this blog, we'll discuss why a fast response time is such a vital component of great customer service and go over seven proven methods you can use to achieve a faster response to customer service emails and messages. 

What is a good customer service response time?

When a customer reaches out to you, you should aim for a first response time of one hour for emails, 15 minutes for social media messages, 40 seconds for SMS messages, and even less than that for live chat messages.

Why response times are important for customer service teams 

No matter what product or service you happen to be selling, creating a positive customer experience is an essential ingredient in the recipe for long-term success. While there is a lot that goes into creating a great experience for your customers, prompt customer service goes a long way. 

Here are a few of the reasons why achieving fast response times is such an important goal for your customer service department: 

1) Customers continue to demand faster responses 

More and more customers have come to expect near real-time access to companies across multiple channels. One Hubspot survey showed that 90% of customers rate an “immediate” response as important or very important when they have a customer service question. 

Furthermore, 60% of people who needed support defined "immediate" as 10 minutes or less. If your company isn’t responding to customer queries at least this fast, you risk falling short of expectations your competitors may be meeting. 

2) Poor response times reflect negatively on your company 

Fair or not, poor response times can hurt your brand image. Encouraging brand loyalty and return customers is a vital goal for any business, and poor response times can make this goal all the more difficult to reach. 

Keep in mind that customers expect fast response times since so many companies today can meet those expectations. If your company isn't keeping up with the customer service offered by the competition, it could damage your brand reputation among existing customers. 

3) Faster responses that lead to quicker resolutions can increase revenue

There are plenty of scenarios where responding to a customer query within a short time frame can lead to your business making more money. If a customer has a question about your product, for example, responding quickly before they move on to another product could lead to a sale you might not otherwise make. 

If a customer needs to return a product, prompt customer service could encourage them to exchange the product for another product or store credit rather than becoming frustrated and demanding a cash return. In instances such as these, fast response times that lead to quick resolutions can directly translate to more or retained revenue. 

4) Quick responses can boost customer satisfaction

Good customer service doesn't mean that you always have to solve a customer's issue on the first response. In many cases, simply acknowledging their email and letting them know that you’re working on a solution is enough to keep customers temporarily satisfied and buy your customer service team some time. 

Unless the issue is immediately resolvable, your goal in an initial response should be to acknowledge the customer's problem, let them know that you’ve assigned their ticket to a representative, and provide them with a time frame for when they can expect a resolution. 

Sending out an initial response that covers these bases can keep customers satisfied and patient while your team members work on their follow-up. 

Related: How To Measure Net Promoter Score (NPS)

5) Slow response times might increase your workload

Achieving fast response times may seem like a lot of work. Many times, though, slow responses can end up increasing the workload of your customer support team. If you don't respond quickly enough to a customer that needs assistance, they may end up contacting your company multiple times through multiple channels. 

This can lead to numerous support tickets being created for a single issue, bogging down your team and creating unnecessary confusion that could have otherwise been avoided if you had responded to the customer's initial query promptly. This is another reason it’s helpful to keep your average first response time as low as possible. 

How to reduce customer service response times

For all of the reasons listed above, responding to customer service emails in the shortest amount of time possible is ideal. Thankfully, there are many different methods you can use to speed up your response times across all your support channels that don't require huge investments or shifts.

1) Make sure you're measuring first response times 

Before you can test out solutions, determine what your average response time currently is (if you don’t already know). First response time is a crucial customer service metric to evaluate your team's impact because it affects revenue-related metrics like churn and retention rates.

To calculate the average first response time, all you have to do is add up all of your first response times for a given period then divide that number by the number of resolved tickets during that time.

Once you've determined what your average first response time is, you can then set goals for improvement and continue to measure your progress. Gorgias provides you with many analytic tools that allow you to track key customer service metrics, including average response time. By leveraging tools such as these, you can easily analyze your customer support team's efforts and set achievable benchmarks for more improvement.

Related: Customer Service ROI: How to Measure and Improve

2) Take advantage of customer service software

Responding to every customer email manually is a monumental task. If you’re still solely relying on traditional methods of responding to customer queries, achieving fast response times is going to be nearly impossible. Fortunately, there’s a wide variety of customer service software on the market today that can take a lot of the heavy lifting out of your workflows.

For example, help desk software allows your team members to see and reply to customer queries from any channel — like social media, ecommerce stores, WhatsApp, and SMS — from a single centralized dashboard. You can organize them based on factors such as the date and time received, priority, subject matter, and some other categories.

Customer service software also automates time-consuming tasks, like sending initial responses to customer emails. This is just a snapshot of the ways these platforms can help your team reduce your response times. We highly recommend leveraging software to optimize your customer support process. 

Related: Learn how Gorgias' support performance and live agent performance dashboards can help you measure

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3) Utilize customer service automation for 24/7 service 

We touched on it briefly, but customer service automation can free up your customer support team significantly during business hours. It provides customers with immediate, automated responses that you can personalize to make sound as friendly as a manual response. These small measures free up your team to focus on more complicated and pressing tasks.

That’s not all. Setting up an auto-responder allows you to send customers an all-important first response any time you like. There’s no need for a live representative, and a quick response could prevent another ticket or message from piling up to deal with in the morning. Most software lets you automate responses and send them via email, chatbot, app notification, text and more. 

Recommended reading: Ecommerce Customer Support Best Practices

4) Use scripts and email templates 

Having your customer service team type out a custom response to every new email they receive from a customer is inefficient. In addition to using an auto-responder to send out an automated first response, one simple way to speed up your reply time is to make use of scripts and email templates

To build your scripts, start by identifying common questions and issues that your support team encounters most frequently. You can then create helpful boilerplate answers with blank spots to plug in customer details using your software or other tools. 

One pro tip is to look back at positive customer feedback or five-star interactions to get ideas. See which answers made customers feel heard and satisfied while also solving their issues quickly. For live customer support channels such as phone calls or live chat, you can create scripts for each FAQ that representatives can follow. 

Leveraging scripts and email templates ensures that your team members aren't having to type out the same response over and over again to commonly asked questions, enabling them to provide service in a more efficient and timely manner. 

5) Create a system to categorize and segment priority tickets 

Some customer support tickets should take higher priority than others. A customer that’s reporting a fraudulent purchase with their debit card needs a quicker response than someone who’s asking if there are any discounts they can use.

  • Start by prioritizing tickets that have been open the longest. These are the customers who may be growing impatient, or even angry enough not to shop or work with your business again.
  • From there, you’ll want to prioritize the most complicated or resource-intensive tickets. This helps your team get a head start on the tickets that could end up taking a lot of time to resolve. 

Beyond prioritizing tickets, it’s also helpful to categorize them if they share similarities. Grouping similar tickets together boost efficiency. For example, your team can come up with one main solution (create a new discount code because the previous one is buggy) and easily resolve the entire group of tickets in a single pass. 

If you’re making use of email templates, a single rep may be able to clear an entire batch of tickets in seconds or minutes.  

6) Offer multichannel customer support options 

Every channel where you communicate with customers — from your main phone line and website to messaging platforms like social media and live chat support — should include customer support options. Having multichannel customer support options offers a couple of advantages.  

For one, it makes it easy for customers to reach out and engage with your company wherever they are. You may be serving customers across demographics, from Generation Z to baby boomers, all of whom have different communication preferences. The customer’s initial outreach is their first interaction with your customer service experience, and it’s great to start on a note of convenience and ease no matter who the customer is. 

Setting up multichannel customer support options can also give your response teams quicker access to the requests that they receive, allowing them to organize by priority no matter where the request originates.

Recommended reading: Customer Support Metrics

7) Leverage self-service to reduce tickets 

Any time a customer can resolve their issue on their own is a success for your business. Customer self-service support keeps your team’s hands-free and prevents one more support ticket from entering the queue. Here are some useful resources you can provide customers: 

  • Company blog
  • Product instructions, how-tos, and video tutorials
  • FAQ page
  • Community forum 
  • Dictionaries or glossaries 
  • Case studies 
  • Knowledge base or help center

Equipped with this information, many customers will be able to answer their questions — and perhaps discover or try something new with your product. As you’re putting these resources together, think about how tech-savvy your audience is and how long they want to spend reading about their issue. 

With Gorgias Automate, you can improve your live chat widget with a self-service flows that let your customers track and manage their orders without any agent interaction. You can also enable a chatbot. Customers can type in their question or comments and the chatbot will pull up your content that matches those keywords. 

All of these tools combine to reduce the number of tickets your support team receives in the first place, which can ultimately result in faster response times for the tickets that do appear. 

Recommended reading on live chat:

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Gorgias helps support teams reduce response times

We’ve covered a variety of ways to roll back your response times, but that’s not all these best practices accomplish. They also optimize your customer service workflow overall, ensuring your customer service interactions are positive and helpful and your team isn’t overloaded or losing time to repetitive, manual tasks. 

At Gorgias, we’re proud to offer a number of different customer service software solutions, from live-chat solutions to chatbot solutions, to email auto-responders. To learn more about how Gorgias can help you speed up your response times in a way that is affordable and hassle-free, book a demo today.

Customer Service Messaging: Tips and Templates for SMS + Conversational Channels

0 min read . By Ryan Baum
By Ryan Baum

Customer service messaging (also known as conversational customer service) is a powerful way to elevate the customer experience and delight customers beyond their expectations. For customers, texting with a support agent feels much more convenient and casual than slower channels like email. And, SMS is a much better channel for “on-the-go” communication, since most people always have their mobile phones and can usually reply to text messages quickly.

That’s why customer service messaging is one of many recent customer service trends shaking up how ecommerce and D2C businesses offer support.

In this guide, we’ll discuss how your business can implement or improve this type of customer support and other conversational channels in your customer service strategy. 

Let’s get started with why it’s important for businesses to offer SMS customer service.

What is SMS customer service?

SMS customer service is when support teams resolve customer questions and issues via text message.

Why SMS text messaging improves the customer service experience

Customers love these one-to-one messaging channels for customer service because they’re so quick and convenient. When implemented well, conversational messaging allows customers to reach your CS team and get answers quickly — within 42 seconds, most of the time. Especially considering that 42% of customers prefer communicating with customer service on messaging apps over any other channel, introducing a conversational channel may do wonders for your brand’s customer satisfaction.

Your customer support team can also use these channels to proactively reach out to customers with important updates and timely discounts.

SMS customer service is especially attractive to your customers because they don’t have to stay glued to your website or check a social media app for new DMs. They can get answers to their questions on a device they already check 96 times per day. Let’s take a closer look at SMS, a channel that’s quickly gaining ground as a standard support option. 

Example of SMS in Gorgias helpdesk

10 tips to successfully incorporate messaging into your customer service strategy

Adding each messaging channel at one time might overwhelm your customer support team. Likewise, a new channel may have low adoption if you don’t announce it to your customers. As you begin offering messaging experiences as a part of your customer care portfolio, use our top 10 techniques to maximize the effectiveness of your workflows on those channels.

1) Funnel all interactions to SMS or messaging channels and then move to email or phone if needed

For issues with easy solutions, there’s no reason for customers to engage with email or phone. Emails are slow and clunky and phone calls can lead to customer frustrations, especially if your wait times are excessive. Texts are far faster than either option and can provide simple, accurate information that leads to speedier solutions — and happier customers.

For that reason, we recommend setting up your contact page and information so that text and other live channels are your first line of communication — well, after self-service support. You can always move to email or phone if the customer requests it or if the problem you’re trying to solve is better suited to one of those channels.

Tip: Speed is an important factor in all customer service interactions, but it’s critical when sending any sort of instant message. First response time (FRT) is a key customer service metric you can measure with Gorgias through the analytics dashboard. Make sure to track the speed of your responses when you start your support messaging program.

Fast reply to an SMS conversation

2) Consistently let your customers know that you’re available on quick messaging channels

To inform your customers they can now text your brand, we recommend adding “Text us,” plus your phone number, in some or all of these places: 

  • The footer of your website
  • The “Contact Us” page of your website
  • Your Gorgias Help Center
  • Transactional emails (order confirmation, return initiated, etc.)
  • The signature of your support agents

You can put your messaging app information in the same spots, and make sure to say you accept support requests via DM in your social media bios so customers know they can shoot you a message.

Tip: Because conversational customer service usually takes place on a user’s phone, you need to keep responses short and friendly. The long, detailed macros and templates you might use for emails won’t work when communicating through short messages — depending on your platform and your customer’s phone, long messages might not send or might get broken into multiple text messages. Plus, depending on your brand’s tone of voice, conversational channels are a great place to use emojis, images, and GIFs to make the conversation even more friendly and casual. 

Berkey Filters chat prompting people to use the messaging chanel
Source: Berkey Filters

3) Use autoresponders for a lightning-fast first response

Start every messaging interaction with an autoresponder. This tactic lets your customer know that you received their request, and it gives your human agents a small buffer of time to finish up their current encounter before starting the new one. You can also include a link to your help center in case they want to look for their answer on their own.

You can use this tactic whether you’re incorporating chatbots for basic query automation, or using your customer service agents for all customer interactions.

See page XX for an example of an autoresponder Rule for messaging.

4) Create a system to categorize and segment priority tickets 

Some customer support tickets should take higher priority than others. A customer that’s reporting a fraudulent purchase with their debit card needs a quicker response than someone who’s asking if there are any discounts they can use. 

You can start by prioritizing:

  • Tickets that have been open the longest. These are the customers who may be growing impatient, or even angry enough not to shop or work with your business again. This can be set up with a View of tickets that have been open for more than X minutes, where X is an amount of time corresponding to your service-level agreement (SLA).
  • Tickets from VIPs and loyal customers. You can tag these customers and make a View based on that tag to surface their questions and concerns.
  • Tickets that fall into certain intents, like “order/damaged,” which Gorgias auto-assigns through our proprietary algorithms. You can auto-assign these tickets with a “priority” tag using a simple automation Rule and set up a View that has all open priority tickets.
Gorgias' Intent detection can be auto-tagged for prioritization and organization
Source: Gorgias

You can even set up dual priority queues for all priority-tagged tickets: One for priority tickets that are about to go past the first response time in your SLA and another for all other priority tickets. Then prioritize the former, followed by the latter, followed by other tickets, to keep your first response time and resolution time down while giving attention to important tickets.

Beyond prioritizing tickets, it’s also helpful to categorize them if they share similarities. Grouping similar tickets together boosts efficiency. For example, your team can come up with one main solution (create a new discount code because the previous one is buggy) and easily resolve the entire group of tickets in a single pass.

5) Use Macro templates to respond faster to repetitive requests…

If you are responding to customer service messages on a platform like Gorgias that supports Macro templates, you need to take advantage of this time-saving feature. But you can’t just take your existing email templates and drop them into these conversations.

You need to create a specific set of Macros for messaging purposes, using the principles we mentioned earlier: short, friendly, personalized, etc. That means you need to use variables like [Customer first name] or [Last order number] to personalize messages. If you set up your Macros strategically for DM and SMS messaging, many can be reused for live chat, as well.

To prioritize building Macros that will have the highest impact, create Macro templates to respond to the most common questions that have come through your helpdesk. You can also ask your team which responses they end up writing out the most and add those templates too. 

Once you create and launch these Macros, you can automatically add Tags to Macros for reporting to see which Macros are being used the most. This will help you understand where you have gaps (or unhelpful Macros) and can make tweaks to improve your agent workflow and customer experience.

6) …Or deflect those repetitive requests altogether with automation Rules

If your customer service platform supports automation, as Gorgias does through our Automation Add-on, you can deflect up to a third of repetitive, tedious tickets instantly, with no human interaction. Much of this automation can be applied to customer service messaging, as well.

When we mention automated answers, some support professionals say something like, “We don’t want to send low-quality automated responses to our customers.” We completely agree: For many tickets, automation doesn’t provide the best customer experience. 

However, as you know, most tickets your support team receives are repetitive and low-impact, like questions about order status (WISMO) or your refund policy. We recommend setting up automatic responses for these tickets, so customers get instant answers and agents have more time to respond to tickets that actually need a human touch.

Look through your reporting dashboards to see the tickets that are taking up the most time on your support team, and prioritize those requests for automation with Rules, where appropriate.

Gorgias automates answers to repetitive questions (like WISMO)

7) Go beyond text-only interactions with multimedia messaging

WhatsApp Business, Facebook Messenger, and SMS support images, and luckily so does Gorgias. This is a more engaging way to interact with customers, and it also allows you to exchange relevant images like broken parts, malfunctioning equipment, and screenshots for more helpful instructions.

If you want to go this route, maintain a catalog of fun, topical images that your support team can use in their customer conversations, and give them the freedom to collect their own images to insert. It’s a great way to make your support feel more personal and human, but use common sense: Frustrated customers don’t want to receive a picture or meme, they want their problem solved as quickly as possible.

Gorgias lets you send multimedia text messages

8) Provide proactive support at scale on platforms that allow it

SMS and other personalized one-to-one support channels can get a little complicated because not everyone wants to interact on the same messaging application. True SMS support goes out over cellular networks and lands in users’ actual text messages, the same way messages from their friends and family do.

But you may need to be ready to handle other support channels that use similar short, text-based communication. These include Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, and your website’s web chat. Certain channels may be a better fit for your unique customer base — for example, Instagram attracts a younger audience than Facebook Messenger, and WhatsApp is more common outside the US. Likewise, you may have other specialized messaging channels or messaging platforms that you need to support.

Gorgias has SMS, Messenger, and live chat functionality

As a rule of thumb, you need to be where most of your customers are, which varies across businesses and industries. But to reach the desired level of customer engagement, most businesses need to be reachable via most, if not all, the major applications and support channels. 

That’s where a unified customer service platform can be really useful. By keeping all of your customer conversations in one feed, you can handle more channels more strategically, through triage and routing to dedicated agents for specific tasks. For example, you could have one agent who just handles messaging and route all messages to that person for a quicker response.

On platforms like WhatsApp Business, you don’t have to wait around to hear from customers. This allows for a wide range of strategic and proactive support interactions. 

For example, you can send out text blasts:

  • When you have an issue affecting all customers (i.e. website downtime) to let them know what’s going on (and avoid getting excessive tickets about the issue)
  • When you have new product launches or add-ons, driving revenue and customer education
  • When you have relevant announcements for customers: limit these to news that actually affects customers (i.e. shutting down your community or a time-sensitive sale), not company news (i.e. your latest fundraising) 

A proactive approach builds trust with your audience — they will see you going above and beyond with these efforts, and know that you’ll be upfront with potential issues.

9) Integrate your SMS support with your marketing efforts

SMS marketing is a useful tool for your ecommerce store, but it becomes even more powerful when you integrate your SMS marketing tool into Gorgias. Send out SMS blasts and have support agents on hand to handle any questions you get in response, to help nudge those customers closer to a sale.

Gorgias and Klaviyo integration
Source: Gorgias

With certain integrations — Klaviyo, for example — you can even use Gorgias attributes to segment and build campaigns. Use this function for win-back campaigns, or to send a special offer to customers who posted low CSAT scores.

10) Conduct surveys using text messages to collect feedback from customers

Text messages are an effective method for collecting feedback from existing customers, too. Once customers opt in to SMS communication, you can use this point of contact to launch quick surveys that provide valuable feedback.

Response rate is always an issue with email surveys, and other channels see higher response rates. Using a multichannel approach will supply you with more responses and help you make more data-driven decisions with the results.

Note: In a customer service tool like Gorgias, you would use one of our integrations with Klaviyo or Attentive to send the survey to entire segmented lists of customers or prospects, all at once.

SMS customer service templates for common response types

Ready to start implementing an SMS customer service strategy but not sure what to say? We get it: Staying concise yet friendly is tough, and so is conveying all the needed information in such a short space.

We’ve put together a collection of proven templates you can start using today. Adapt as many of these as you need to fit the contours of your business, and bring them into your customer service platform of choice. In Gorgias, you could auto-populate these responses through our Macros.

Note: We’re sharing these templates as text messages, but they can easily be adapted to other conversational channels like social media DMs and live chat. 

Ticket received template

As we mentioned earlier, it’s a good idea to set up an autoresponder. This tactic can buy your team time to finish up a previous interaction or send an email, yet it shows you’re on top of the interaction and will be back soon.

Here’s our template for a ticket received autoresponder:

Thanks for texting {Brand Name}. An agent is reviewing your question now. We’ll get back to you shortly :)

Introduction message template

The introduction message is the point where your autoresponder or chatbot passes off the reins to a human agent. It’s the first point of personalization, and you want to make a solid impression. Still, your agents don’t need to be typing these out every single time. Use a template like this one to break the ice (just with a little less repetitive stress injury):

Hello, {Customer First Name} {Customer Last Name}! I’m {Your Name} from {Brand Name}. Thanks for messaging us. What can I help you with today?

Agent introduction template for SMS

Hours of operation template

There are two frequent scenarios where an hours-of-operations text makes sense. One is as an answer for when customers message you on social media or elsewhere just to ask when you’re open. In those cases, use this template:

Hello, {Customer First Name}! I’m {Your Name} from {Brand Name}. Our hours of operation are Monday through Friday, 9 a.m. to 8 p.m. Best, {Your Name}

The other scenario is when a customer reaches out via a messaging channel and there’s no one on the other end. If your helpdesk isn’t open 24 hours a day, use a template like this when the team isn’t live:

Hello, {Customer First Name}! Our live chat helpdesk is open {list hours}. You’ve reached us outside those hours. Leave a short message here and we’ll get back to you tomorrow.

By the way, if around-the-clock coverage is a goal of yours, you might be interested in introducing contact forms into your live chat widget. These forms let you keep your live chat on 24/7 and, when nobody’s available to answer, they ask customers for contact information so you can be sure to follow up. Learn more about Gorgias’ automation add-on and contact forms.

Order status template 

This one’s pretty obvious: You want to let the customer know the status of an order, and there’s no reason to manually type a whole message to do it.

Use this template when a customer asks for their order status. You can create variations of this one for delays or other order status updates, and even customize it further to include tracking information.

Hey {Customer First Name}, great news: Your order has shipped! It will arrive on {delivery date}. Let me know if I can help you with anything else!

SMS template for order status requests

Payment reminder template

Customers with recurring subscriptions sometimes forget the frequency they sign up for or when their next payment will be. Use this template if customers frequently ask your brand when their next payment is:

Hello, {Customer First Name} {Customer Last Name}! I’m {Your Name} from {Brand Name}. Your next payment of {amount} is coming up. Your card on file will be charged {due date}. Questions? Reply here or call {phone number}.

Pro tip: While there’s nothing inherently wrong with soliciting payment via SMS, many consumers will view this with suspicion. Text channels may not be the best avenue for inviting bill payments or collecting credit card information. It could also lead to more cancellations, which makes it a balancing act, though customer clarity is important to have. Always track the impact of changes to your process and be mindful of how new touchpoints could affect it.

Deals or rewards template

If you’re trying to build brand loyalty or win back an upset customer, sometimes a simple discount code can go a long way. At the end of an SMS conversation, there may be times when you can surprise and delight customers by sending over an exclusive deal. Here’s a template (though you’ll certainly need to customize this one further to fit the details of your offer):

{Customer First Name}, thanks for being such a loyal customer. We’d like to give you {details of the offer}! Click to redeem: {short URL}

Refund issued template

Refunds happen, and they don’t always require a massively complicated interaction with your contact center. If you’re able to resolve a ticket and issue a refund with a simpler interaction, this template can finish the one-to-one portion of the encounter. 

Notice the template specifies that the interaction will finish up asynchronously (via email). It’s a great way to tie off the synchronous, real-time interaction and lead the customer right to the next step (check your email.) 

Here’s the template:

Hey {Customer First Name}! We’ve issued a refund for your last order. We’ll send all the details to your email, but feel free to let me know here if you need anything else.

SMS template for refund issued

Pro tip: You can tie discounts and future order credits into this template, but make sure your entire team is aligned on your official policy as you update the Macros to match it. You may also want to have different tiers of intervention (and offerings) depending on the severity of the issue.

Customer check-in template

The customer check-in is another asynchronous message that occurs outside of an active conversation. Perhaps the customer walked away from a previous encounter or seems to be stuck on the customer journey based on other CRM data.

Whatever the reason, a gentle, well-timed message can sometimes get the customer back on track.

Here’s a model:

Hello, {Customer First Name} {Customer Last Name}! I’m {Your Name} from {Brand Name}. Just checking in to make sure everything is working well for you. If you have any issues with our {products/service} or need anything else, let me know!

Templates for SMS marketing and relevant integrations 

Though a customer service platform can handle the above templates, you’ll likely want to expand even further through additional integrations with the platform. If you take that approach, here are some opportunities that open up:

Discount template

If you’re running a sale or trying to drive traffic to your site, a great way to do so is by texting a discount code to customers on your SMS list. Because their phone is probably close by, it’s great way to promote your sale and make sure it gets noticed. Here’s a template you can use (but remember to update with your own promotion!): 

Flash sale, this weekend only! Up to 40% off, including our latest collection. Shop now: {insert URL} 

Discount template for SMS

Appointment reminder template

Medical offices and other organizations that schedule appointments or meetings can bolster attendance and reduce no-shows by providing yet another reminder — one that reaches patients and customers directly via phone.

If your SMS system supports it, you can invite an auto-reply to confirm or cancel an appointment, too. Use this template:

Hello, {Customer First Name} {Customer Last Name}! I’m {Your Name} from {Brand Name}. Your appointment is scheduled for tomorrow at {appointment time}. See you then! Reply Y to confirm, N to cancel.

Order confirmation template

Order confirmation messages simply confirm that your business has received and is processing a customer order. These don’t typically take place during an active one-to-one customer service interaction. Instead, they’re sent automatically and asynchronously, whenever the order confirms.

Still, you can set them up as personalized messages and enable replying so that, if something happens to be wrong, the customer knows how to reach out.

Hello, {Customer First Name} {Customer Last Name}! I’m {Your Name} from {Brand Name}. Your order #{order number} has been received, and we’re working on it now! We’ll message you again when it ships. Questions? Reply here.

Order confirmation template for SMS

Pickup notification template

If you’re in an industry that offers pickup services (whether curbside pickup, custom goods like eyeglasses, or anything else), a text message is a great way to let someone know their order is ready for pickup. SMS reaches customers when they’re on the go in a way that email frequently doesn’t.

Here’s an example:

Hello, {Customer First Name} {Customer Last Name}! I’m {Your Name} from {Brand Name}. Your recent order #{order number} is now available for pickup at {location}. Stop by to grab it anytime today before {closing time}!

Survey or poll template

This message asks your customers to respond to a survey or poll. It’s a data-gathering tool that can pull in responses from people who ignore your emails or the messages at the bottom of store receipts. Try a script like this:

Hello, {Customer First Name} {Customer Last Name}! I’m {Your Name} from {Brand Name}. We value your opinion as a customer and we’d love specific feedback on {topic}. Here’s a 5-minute survey: {short URL}

Membership renewals template

Membership renewals, like payments, ought to be set up as automatic occurrences. Still, it’s helpful to remind a customer that a charge will hit their bank account soon — you don’t want to track down non-payments, and you don’t want angry customers who weren’t prepared for a bill.

Here’s an example:

Hi, {Customer First Name} {Customer Last Name}! I’m {Your Name} from {Brand Name}. Your annual membership renewal is coming up on {date}. Your card on file will be charged on that day.

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Is conversational and SMS customer service right for your business?

At Gorgias, we believe any industry can find value in conversational support, though some industries and brands will get more bang for their buck with these channels. 

For ecommerce brands that deliver physical products, conversational support is a no-brainer. Imagine your customers get shipping updates via SMS and can just respond to the message if the package isn’t delivered correctly to get immediate help. No need to open up a laptop and log into a support portal or compose an email.

If you’re on the fence about offering conversational customer support, consider whether any of these points are relevant for your business:

First, consider your primary audience. If you sell to millennials and Gen Z, conversational customer service deserves serious consideration. These groups value speed and convenience more than anything: Millennials prefer live chat over every other channel, and 71% of people between 16 and 24 agree that faster customer service would drastically improve the shopping experience.

These two generations grew up texting. It’s a very natural communication style for them, so they’ll feel right at home texting and DMing your brand. They’re also absolutely massive groups — combined, they make up a staggering 42.3% of the U.S. population.

If you’re targeting an older generation, texting may not feel as natural. They have a higher tendency to prefer email or phone, although that’s changing by the day.

Is your marketing team already sending SMS campaigns?

One of the biggest hurdles to implementing conversational support is getting the systems, hardware, and staff in place to respond to SMS texts and messaging app requests at scale. If you’re already sending SMS marketing campaigns, then you already have some of that infrastructure in place.

So, if you’ve already made the investment in SMS for marketing purposes, then integrating messaging with your customer service platform and team requires minimal additional investment.

Fortunately, your helpdesk and SMS marketing software may integrate to give you a centralized way to spark conversations if customers reach out via text or respond to SMS campaigns. With Gorgias and Klaviyo, for example, customer responses to SMS marketing campaigns get assigned directly to an agent for fast response times.

Klaviyo Gorgias integration example

Are customers abandoning conversations on other channels? 

One of the benefits of messaging is that customers don’t have to stay on the phone or by their computer — they can easily continue talking even if they have to take the dog out, go to work, or even fall asleep and respond in the morning. Plus, while email conversations often span multiple days which is frustrating for customers with simple requests, requests on messaging channels usually get resolved before customers lose interest or patience. 

If you notice that your brand currently sees lots of unresolved email threads or phone calls, you might need to offer customers a more convenient and flexible channel to talk to your team. This is a perfect use case for SMS and other messaging channels.

Are you already active on related channels?

It’s important to show up where your customers are. That’s why most brands post and engage with customers on social media pages. But if you’re posting on social media and not providing support to customers who reach out via DM, you’re missing a big opportunity. 

By adding conversational support via Facebook Messenger and Instagram and Twitter DMs, you can maximize your presence on those platforms and provide an omnichannel customer experience for both existing and prospective customers.

Are you struggling to gather customer feedback?

We often discuss the importance of customer feedback to monitor brand perception and constantly improve the product and customer experience. But as most brands know, getting feedback via email can be a challenge because of low survey open rates and lack of follow-up from customers. 

Business texting lets you ask your customer base for feedback on a channel they are less likely to ignore. Text messages have a whopping 98% open rate. Consider sending CSAT, NPS surveys, and other requests for customer feedback on this channel to raise your response rate for more accurate customer support metrics. Of course, with great power comes great responsibility: Spamming customers will quickly damage customer relationships, so don’t send too many messages to their personal devices.

What to look for in text messaging tools

SMS customer service is an avenue that customers are growing to expect. But managing yet another communication channel — much less one that demands real-time responses — takes careful planning.

Implementing a messaging strategy requires using tools built for that purpose. Some customer service messaging platforms offer SMS support natively, while others integrate a third-party SMS integration tool to add this functionality. 

As you consider the available options, make sure the one you choose offers the features you need. Some tools are full-fledged SMS marketing solutions. Others focus specifically on SMS as a support channel.

It’s easier for most businesses to use an all-in-one customer service platform like Gorgias to support an omnichannel approach. With this kind of helpdesk platform, SMS tickets can be handled in the same feed as your other tickets and benefit from the same workflows and automation.

Customer service helpdesk with SMS

Here are some other features your customer service tool needs to have to handle SMS ticket effectively:

  • Conversation history (for SMS and other text-based channels like Facebook Messenger or webchat) so your agents know what this client has asked about or needed support for in the past
  • Ability to create and customize macros as replies to SMS questions
  • Ability to send and receive images or videos (this is great if your support teams need to see the damaged item to issue a refund, for example)
  • Routing or triaging capabilities to make sure SMS conversations don’t get lost in a queue of tickets
  • Integration with other ecommerce tools so your agents have all the context they need to reply in a single space (e.g., surfacing Shopify customer data or CRM data during a support interaction)
Logos of Shopify, Recharge, ShipBob, and others to power up your messaging and customer service

Ecommerce SMS marketing tools to complement your customer experience

As we mentioned earlier, SMS marketing lets brands connect with consumers in a personalized and measurable way, just like with customer service. According to Attentive, average read rates of 97% within 15 minutes make SMS a prime channel for connecting with prospects and customers.

If you’re looking for the right SMS marketing tool to work in tandem with your new SMS customer service channel, consider these four leading tools. Each one integrates with Gorgias, along with most of the rest of your tech stack.

Gorgias, Klaviyo, Attentive, Postscript, and Yotpo SMSBump

Each tool offers a slightly different feature set. Revisit the list of features we compiled earlier in this article to help determine which are the most important to you, then vet these four tools against your customized list.

  • Klaviyo, a Gorgias preferred partner, is a leading customer data and marketing automation platform that leans heavily on SMS communications. Automatically create tickets in Gorgias if customers reply to Klaviyo SMS messages, and send Gorgias events into Klaviyo to create targeted audience lists based on support experiences. 
  • Attentive, also a Gorgias preferred partner, sends automatic text messages to your subscribers at each step of the customer lifecycle. It collects real-time behavioral data on customers as well, and the Gorgias integration allows you to see that customer data within the Gorgias sidebar. If a customer replies to an Attentive SMS, it’ll automatically create a ticket in Gorgias for agents to reply to. 
  • Postscript is an SMS messaging tool that drives revenue growth and improves the customer experience over SMS. If a customer replies to a Postscript SMS, it’ll automatically create a ticket in Gorgias for agents to reply to.
  • SMSBump is a D2C focused SMS customer journey automation tool by Yotpo that boasts powerful results: 45% conversion rate and 25x ROI for D2C brands. By connecting SMSBump with Gorgias, tickets will automatically be created if customers reply to SMSBump campaigns. 

Integrate your SMS tool with your helpdesk for a seamless customer experience

Integrating any of these SMS marketing tools with Gorgias is a great way to unify your marketing and support efforts to improve the overall customer experience.

For example, if customers respond to an SMS marketing blast from a tool integrated with Gorgias, the response gets brought into the helpdesk. The agent can see the initial marketing message and the customers response, so they can answer any follow-up questions. It's like an alley-oop from your marketing to your support team.

Also, these integrations help your marketing team be more aware of active support conversations to avoid tone deaf marketing. For example, by integrating Gorgias and your SMS marketing tool, you can pause marketing campaigns on customers awaiting a response from support. (Nobody wants to get marketing messages if they're waiting on a delayed order, or troubleshooting their last purchase).

Message your customers in real time with Gorgias

Customer service messaging across a wide range of message-based platforms can be a powerful addition to your customer service channels. Of these, the SMS channel is one of the most powerful options for businesses that want to reach customers directly where they are.

The scripts and tools provided in this guide should put you well on your way toward a successful SMS support rollout. But make sure that at the core of your customer service operation, you have a platform robust enough to handle everything you need to do — and whatever functionality you might add in the future. For more examples and tactics to launch a successful rollout of SMS support, check out our playbook of Berkey Filters, an online store that released SMS support to great adoption.

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Gorgias is the customer support and helpdesk platform built for ecommerce businesses like yours. Our live chat tools and 150+ integrations equip you to reach your customers — whenever and however you choose.

See how Gorgias supercharges customer support and helpdesk via SMS. Alternatively, check out more information about our integrations with:

Chatbot vs. Live Chat Software: What's the Right Solution?

0 min read . By Lauren Strapagiel
By Lauren Strapagiel

Imagine leaving your angriest customers to spar with an automated script in your website’s chat window. Now picture your support team reading “Where is my order?” for the hundredth time and glancing at the clock, only to find six hours left in the workday. 

Who do you think is more frustrated?

Luckily, you won’t have to answer that, because these are completely avoidable problems. Once you learn the important distinctions between chatbot software and live chat software, you’ll understand how to use them both more effectively and lower blood pressures across the board.

Chatbots rely completely on automation and artificial intelligence (AI) while live chat software connects customers with human agents via a real-time chatbox. A third option, self-service chat, is an appealing alternative.

To determine which solution(s) is best for your business, let’s compare chatbots and live chat software and go through the top use cases for each.

What is live chat software?

Live chat support connects customers with human support agents who can answer their questions and assist them with any issues. When a customer opens the chat box on a live chat support solution, they are connected with a real person from the company's customer support department. 

Support agents then use live chat messaging to address customer inquiries and walk customers through the solution to their problem. 

Interested in getting live chat software? Check out one of these lists for tailored recommendations:

Pros and cons of live chat

Pros:

  • Live agents have the knowledge base to answer complex queries and customer issues 
  • 73% of customers state that live chat is the most satisfactory form of customer communication with a company
  • Enables multitasking for support agents so they can assist multiple customers at the same time
  • The personalized touch of a real human can go a long way toward improving your customer satisfaction
  • Support agents can find opportunities to convert visitors or turn support interactions into additional sales 

Cons:

  • Not available after-hours when your customer team is off the clock
  • More expensive to employ agents to respond to chats
  • Responses will be slowed down by high volume which impacts resolution times
  • Much of your agents’ time will be spent answering the same simple questions over and over

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What is the difference between chatbots vs. live chat?

Unlike live chat software, chatbot software doesn’t connect customers with human agents. Instead, chatbot software connects customers with a chatbot that utilizes AI and machine learning to provide natural language answers to common questions. 

Automation assists customers with less complex issues and provides quick answers. Chatbot technology enables companies to reduce their average response time, and frees up support agents to focus on more complex queries.  

Pros and cons of chat bots

Pros:

  • The ability to answer questions 24/7 without paying for agents to work around the clock. According to a survey by Drift, 64% of customers say that 24/7 service is the best feature of chatbots. 
  • Chatbots offer instant responses to common questions like pricing inquiries, improving customer experience with quick resolutions to common issues
  • Chatbot solutions are a highly cost-effective option, as they allow companies to resolve more customer issues without having to hire new customer support reps
  • By answering commonly asked questions and resolving simple issues, chatbot solutions can free up support agents to focus on more complex questions

Cons:

  • Chatbots can’t handle complex inquiries requiring human intervention
  • Automated responses are a colder, less human form of communication, which can impact customer satisfaction
  • No opportunity for agents to elevate an inquiry into an exemplary customer experience, such as offering personalized live chat offers
  • Customers will become frustrated if the chatbot can’t properly answer their questions or solve an issue

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Live chat vs. chatbots: Evaluating their strengths to help you choose the right one (or both)

When comparing chatbots with live chat solutions, it's important to recognize that each category offers its own unique advantages. Many companies choose to employ both live chat and chatbot apps on their ecommerce websites. 

With that in mind, let's explore the strengths of each solution.

Response times and customer expectations 

One of the biggest advantages of chatbot solutions is the fact that they allow for immediate responses to customer inquiries. Live chat solutions can also help companies reduce their wait times, though not to the same degree. 

Chatbot advantage: Answers are immediate

According to data from HubSpot, 90% of customers rate an "immediate" response as important or very important when contacting customer service, with 60% of customers defining "immediate" as 10 minutes or less. 

With a chatbot app, offering immediate response times to customer queries is a much more attainable goal. Best of all, these immediate response times are a 24/7 offering for customers, whereas live chat agents may not always be on the clock. 

Live chat advantage: Solve complex issues

The problem with relying solely on chatbots to reduce customer wait times is the fact that even the best and most intelligent chatbots are often unable to resolve complex issues. Chatbots are excellent at pulling information from internal databases to answer common questions, such as providing the status of a customer's order or editing it.

But for uncommon questions or complex issues, a chatbot alone may not be sufficient. Because they can only handle one thing at a time, it can take forever before you get all of your questions resolved.

Solution: Use both chatbots and live chat

Many companies use chatbots alongside live chat support. This allows businesses to offer both immediate responses, as well as more in-depth support for complex issues. 

For example, a customer may first be connected with a chatbot that provides instant responses to their query and assists with gathering initial information. If the chatbot determines the customer's question or issue is too complex to resolve, the customer is then connected to a support agent via live chat. 

This combination is an ideal solution for many companies, allowing them to quickly resolve common issues without the need for a live chat agent. At the same time, customers have the option to speak with a real person in cases where assistance from a chatbot alone isn’t sufficient. 

Human touch and personalization needs 

While chatbot apps can help reduce customer service wait times and the number of customer service reps needed, many customers prefer speaking with a person. 

Live chat advantage: The human touch

A CGS study found that 86% of customers would rather interact with a human agent than a chatbot. Further, 71% of customers say that they would be less likely to purchase from a brand that did not have real customer service representatives available. 

Chatbot advantage: AI learning

Chatbots have come a long way toward replicating natural language and determining customer intent for better customer engagement. Today, the best chatbot applications can come quite close to sounding like actual human beings. 

Chatbots leverage AI and machine learning to deliver personalized responses, as opposed to only “canned” responses, and can better serve your customers. 

Solution: Use both chatbots and live chat

Even the most advanced chatbots still fall short of a live representative when it comes to delivering a personalized, human touch. They’re also lacking when it comes to handling more complex questions or customer issues. 

Once again, a combination of automation and live chat support is typically the best approach. 

Live chat conversion and sales.

       

Consistency and accuracy

Chatbots and live chat applications have unique advantages when it comes to delivering consistent and accurate responses to customer queries. 

Chatbot advantage: Consistency

Chatbots are excellent at delivering consistent, on-brand messaging. They can be programmed to systematically follow templates or scripts to provide a consistent customer service experience. 

When working with human customer support agents, this high degree of consistency can be a little more difficult to achieve. 

Live chat advantage: Accuracy

While live chat support may not offer the same consistency as chatbots, human support agents do tend to be more accurate when determining the intent of the customer they are assisting. 

For example, a simple spelling error can sometimes confuse chatbots, whereas a human customer support agent would be much more likely to look past the error and correctly figure out what the customer needs. 

A human agent is also much more likely than a chatbot to accurately interpret questions that are worded strangely. 

Solution: Use both chatbots and live chat

For companies that are choosing between chatbots and live chat support, it’s a question of whether they’d like to prioritize consistency or accuracy. This is yet another reason why a combination of chatbots and live chat support is often the best solution.

More chat features to provide self-service support without the bots

Many of the issues your website visitors have with bad chatbots involve their mimicry of support from real people. It’s easy to tell when you’re chatting with a robot, but it’s not always made clear to you by the chat widget.

But there’s a third chat option that you should consider in addition to live chat and chatbot software.

Self-service chat options make it clear to your customers that they are receiving automated help. By presenting menus instead of imitating a human conversation, self-service customer support empowers customers to find the answers they need on their own.

It’s a win-win, because the customers get the answers they need in real time, at any hour. And your team can focus on support tickets that are more important to the business.

Here are a few ways self-service chat options can work.

Self-service order management

Up to 30% of incoming customer service tickets are shipping status requests. With self-service order management in the chat widget, customers are empowered to make these queries on their own — providing fast answers and reducing your support tickets.

These automated options are easy to add with Gorgias. This self-service adds buttons to the chat widget to automatically:

  • Track an order
  • Return an order
  • Cancel an order

Quick service with chat automation provides quick, responsive customer service, which means better customer experience and a positive impact on revenue.

Barcelona-based shoe brand ALOHAS added self-service order management flows with Gorgias after experiencing a high chat volume. This allowed customers to find information on their own without a human needing to respond.

Here’s how a “track order” request looks in action:

Order management in live chat.
ALOHAS
         

Quick answer flows

When using a chat widget, you’ll notice the same questions come up again and again. You can satisfy those FAQs by adding quick answer flows into the chat widget.

These automations can be set up in the widget for questions like:

  • What is your shipping policy?
  • Are there any discounts available?
  • Do you have any new products?
  • What materials do you use?

These automations can be customized for whatever FAQs are most relevant to your ecommerce store.

Here’s how it looks, for example, when an ALOHAS customer wants to find out more about the brand’s shipping policy.

Quick Response Flows in chat widget.

         

Luxury jewelry brand Jaxxon has used these self-service quick responses with great success. The customer service team found themselves overwhelmed with customer questions and unable to respond as quickly as desired.

Jaxxon upgraded their live chat widget with Gorgias Automate with Quick Responses for customers. The result, combined with using Gorgias’ helpdesk, reduced live chat volume by 17% and lifted the on-site conversion rate by 6%.

Self-service in chat.
Jaxxon
         

Autoresponders

Even when a customer chooses to type out a question, automation can be used to provide quick, customized service through the chat widget.

Gorgias can detect questions that come in through chat and provide automatic answers using Rules and Macros.

Here’s how the flow works:

  1. Intact detection scans the incoming message.
  2. Rules is triggered when a relevant message is found (such as some asking about where their order us) is responds to the customer.
  3. Macros is where you create the templated response sent to the customer. The Macro can be set up to pull in a customer’s unique information like order number, their name, and their tracking code.

The best part is this can not only be used for chat, but for responses to tickets coming in through other communication channels like email, social media, and SMS.

Keep customer service running 24/7

With Gorgias, you can make sure your chat widget isn’t missing a single ticket, even if your customer support team is offline.

First, you can set up your business hours to correspond with when you have live chat available. This will show up on your site’s chat widget by either showing the current status as online or offline.

From there, you can create automated responses for whether you’re offline or online. During business hours, this message can tell customers you’ve received their request and give a time by which they can expect a response.

After business hours, the responder can tell customers that although you’re offline, they can expect a response during the next day’s business hours via email.

Offline mode in live chat for follow-ups.
Absolute Collagen
         

You can also use a contact form which turns a chat into an emailed ticket. This is great to use after-hours and to make sure chat requests don’t get lost overnight. 

Combine automation and human interaction for the strongest customer experience

The use of automation within customer service is multifaceted. As we discussed earlier, a human touch is critical for many customers, and speaking with an automated chatbot can be a turn-off. However, automation certainly has its place in the customer service process.

On the customer’s side, starting with self-service chat helps them receive quicker customer support at scale — a more satisfying experience. On your team’s side, automation allows for sorting, segmenting, and prioritizing tickets.

When self-service chat can’t solve an issue, someone from your support team can easily step into the conversation. You can use Macros — scripts that automatically bring in the customer’s information — to scale the human touch on your support team.

So in reality, it’s not automation vs human support. These are two complementary tools that work better together. And the result is a stronger and faster customer experience for your website visitors, which can increase your conversion rate by as much as 12%.

Still not convinced? In 2021, brands using the Gorgias chat widget generated an average of $38,702 from conversations involving chat. We have a whole post on live chat statistics that can help illustrate the impact our chat widget can have on your business.

Gorgias brings intuitive live chat to your ecommerce business, alongside your other channels

If you’re an ecommerce business looking for an all-in-one customer support solution that includes live chat support and AI-powered chatbots, Gorgias is your one-stop shop. 

Our algorithms are trained on hundreds of millions of ecommerce tickets, so you can be sure your customers are getting the right responses every time. 

Plus, you can manage both live chat and chatbot conversations in the same dashboard that you use for all your other channels, including phone, email and major social media platforms. Bring in chat from other channels, including Facebook Messenger. We’ll even be supporting Whatsapp in early 2023.

Our customer support platform is available for Magento, Shopify, and BigCommerce users.

Read more about our chat offerings by clicking here.

30+ Customer Service Email Templates & 5 Best Practices

0 min read . By Alexa Hertel
By Alexa Hertel

For any business, email plays a crucial role in providing great customer service. But helpful customer support emails take time and effort from your customer service agents. 

Templated responses save time for your customer service team and help customers get the resolution they need faster. With templates, reps can answer questions and resolve customer issues much faster than writing each email from scratch. And data from over 10,000 ecommerce brands shows that by lowering resolution time to under 6 hours, you can raise overall revenue by 2%

Templates also ensure high-quality support. They provide a consistent baseline that busy agents can lean on, especially during high-volume times. This is mission-critical for keeping happy customers around: 92% of customers say they’re more likely to return for a second purchase after a positive customer support experience. And repeat purchases (plus reviews, referrals, and higher average order values) mean repeat customers generate 300% more than first-time shoppers.  

First time shoppers vs. loyal customers

‎Below, you’ll find 30+ effective customer service email templates to help you get started. Here are the top five email categories that you might find most helpful:

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5 tactics for writing better support emails 

Before you jump into writing any customer support emails, here are some best practices to keep in mind:

  1. Fully evaluate what each customer is asking for
  2. Convey empathy with the words you choose
  3. Provide all of the answers and resources they need  
  4. Practice forward resolution
  5. Personalize the response to show that you’re listening

1. Fully evaluate what each customer is asking for

You need context and a deep understanding of a customer's situation to resolve their issue. But, going back and forth with customers to get there creates a high-effort experience for them, which often results in negative feelings toward the support experience. 

Using a platform that displays past customer information – between past conversations, recent orders, and the initial message, you have the best chance of fully understanding what went wrong and what the customer needs without making them repeat information. 

Gorgias includes all customer information in one handy sidebar.

‎In your message, be sure to state what you understand to be the problem so they can correct you if you got something wrong.

2. Convey empathy with the words you choose

Putting yourself in the customer’s shoes can be challenging sometimes, but it’s vital if you want to leave them with a positive experience. Convey that you appreciate where they’re coming from by rephrasing their request, question, or concern. 

It’s especially tempting to shut down empathy when customers seem unreasonable or mean. Even if a customer is inflamed or incorrect, try not to call them out or prove them wrong. Instead, focus on what future solutions you can provide. Stick with the conversation and find out what’s beneath each message or customer complaint. 

Empathy and understanding why a customer is frustrated (and acknowledging any effort they’ve already put into solving the issue themselves) can go a long way towards finding a resolution that makes them happy. 

3. Provide all of the answers and resources they need  

Customer service email templates help save time and increase professionalism. But, keeping them up-to-date at all times is key. Make sure templates reflect your most up-to-date processes and policies and are robust enough to fully answer customer questions. 

You can always edit a template to suit the context of each conversation but the most effective templates will be complete with the best version of the answer possible. That might mean encouraging customers to reference return policies and shipping times, an FAQ section, or help center articles to ensure templates are as detailed and accurate as possible.

Here’s a great example of clear help resources from Bobbie, an organic baby formula brand, organized with a Gorgias help center:

Bobbie
Bobbie

Templates should always reflect the voice and tone of your company. What your brand voice is — formal, casual, friendly, professional — determines the exact words your templates will use. 

4. Practice forward resolution

Forward resolution is where agents anticipate and answer customer questions before they even happen. Take a look through past conversations where you went back-and-forth many times with a customer to see if there are any patterns in the types of questions that came up. 

For example, imagine customers often write in asking whether you ship to Canada. If you just respond, "Yes, we ship to Canada," then they may respond "What are the shipping rates and estimated shipping times for Canada?" That would be a good sign to include that information in your original email, avoiding the need for a follow-up.

This way you save the customer the frustration of wondering where their order is, the time to reach out to your support team, and you save your agents the time it would take to answer their question.

📚 Learn more: Customer Delight Is A Losing Strategy in Ecommerce: Here’s What’s Better

5. Personalize the response to show that you’re listening 

Also keep in mind that templates are customizable tools, not complete solutions. Personalize your customer service emails to give them as much human touch and personality as your brand allows. This way, the customer knows they’re interacting with a real human and are also being treated like one as well. One risk of using templates comes when they aren’t personalized. Templates are amazing starting points, but they should always be personalized to the customer you’re chatting with. 

Some quick ideas for how to do this:

  • Use your name and the customer’s name within the body text
  • Repeat customer feedback so they know you’re actively listening
  • Tweak boilerplate language to fit the actual customer issue
  • Say, in your own words, how the situation will affect their workflow or day-to-day life (positive or negative) 
  • If your customer is in a certain time zone, you could personalize your greeting with the time of day it is for them

30+ helpful customer service email templates 

Relying on well-built customer service templates for chats or emails can help you increase customer satisfaction and improve the customer experience. If customer support agents spend less time responding to the same repetitive questions, they'll have more time to support your pre-sales support strategy and have conversations that drive revenue. 

Below, we offer 30+ customer service email templates, categorized by the types of support conversations brands often have with customers. Feel free to read the templates in order or skip around to whichever is most relevant to your needs.

Email templates that provide proactive support

Proactive customer service starts before a new customer writes into your support team. Rather than waiting for customers to experience a problem before starting a conversation, you can set the tone for a positive customer relationship by reaching out and saying hello. 

Similarly, if you anticipate a problem for customers (like outages or pricing increases), it’s best to let them know with a proactive message.

You can also complement your proactive email templates with self-service resources, including FAQ pages and Help Centers

Below are some of the most helpful proactive support email templates you can start using today. While you can use the templates as they are, we suggest tweaking them to meet your individual voice and tone guidelines. 

1) Welcome new customers

Sending a welcome email makes customers feel like part of a community and can offer them key resources that allow them to self-serve answers to common questions, like return policies or shipping costs. 

Hey there {{Customer First Name}},

Thanks for {{Customer action: First purchase, sign-up, subscription}} with {{Company name}}. We’re thrilled that you’ve joined us, and we’re excited to help awesome customers like you in any way we can.

I know you’ve just joined us, so I want to send over {{Resource/offer links}} so you can get the most out of your experience with us.

If you haven’t yet, make sure to check out {{Blog link}} for ongoing tutorials, tips, and stories, and give us a follow on social media

I hope you’re already enjoying {{Product name}}, but if not, I’m happy to help. Or you can check out our {{FAQs or knowledge base links}} to troubleshoot on your own.

If there’s anything you need, please respond to this email. We’re here for you!

Best,

{{Current agent first name}}

2) Announce a new support channel or a new product/service 

Email is a great place to announce that you just launched a new support channel. It’s also a good channel if you’d like to involve your support team as a resource for new product launches or service offerings. 

Hi {{Customer name}}, 

Good news! We now offer {{Action or item}}. 

Questions? Reach out to us at {{Phone number, website URL, etc}} and we’ll get back to you within {{SLA}}. 

Looking forward to hearing from you! 

{{Company name}}

3) Announce a new self-service resource

Similar to the announcement above, let customers know when you launch a Help Center or self-service resource

Hi {{Customer name}}, 

Good news! In order to better support you, we’ve created a {{Self service resource with link}}. Here you’ll find answers to frequently asked questions and step-by-step instructions to set up and troubleshoot our products. We hope making this information more accessible provides a better experience — but always feel free to reach out to us directly for additional help! 

{{Company name}}

📚 Recommended reading: 29 Customer Service Scripts Inspired by Top Ecommerce Brands.

Email templates are even more powerful when combined with equally powerful customer service scripts, keeping your brand messaging consistent and on-target across channels. 

4) Provide renewal reminders to avoid passive churn

If your business includes a subscription-based product, you’ll want to provide reminders to customers that their subscription is about to renew.

Remember: Letting customers easily opt in and out is always the best decision for customer experience. While an easy opt-out process may sound scary for retention rate, you’ll actually do more harm by making customers jump through hoops to cancel their subscription. They’ll likely speak about the poor experience with friends and avoid coming back. 

💡 Tip: If you can let customers self-serve any subscription changes or updates, you eliminate the need for them to reach out to support to do so. Providing links within a subscription reminder email to unsubscribe, skip, or delay a delivery gives customers the ability to do it easily on their end, eliminating a touch point with support and reducing effort for the customer.

Hello {{Customer first name}},

This is a reminder that your subscription for {{Product name}} will renew automatically on {{Renewal date}}. We’ll continue charging the credit card ending in {{Last four digits of credit card number}}. No action needed from you, we’ll process and ship the order in 3-5 business days.

If you want to skip this shipment, click here: {{Link to skip shipment}}

If you want to unsubscribe, click here: {{Link to unsubscribe}}

Thanks,

{{Current agent first name}}

📚 Recommended reading: Learn how to retain 20% of customers you lose to passive churn and raise overall revenue by up to 0.5%.

5) Announce website or product outages

If you have a planned outage coming up, a quick email goes a long way to stop panicked questions from rolling in. It also allows customers to plan for an outage, especially if your website is one they rely on or visit often. 

Hi {{Customer first name}},

We’re currently experiencing a service outage for {{Website / Product / Service}}. We’re actively working on resolving the issue, which we believe is due to {{Reason for outage}}. We apologize for the inconvenience and assure you we’ll have everything up and running as quickly as possible.

Stay tuned at {{Website / Social media page}} for the latest updates.

Thanks, 

{{Current agent first name}}

6) Announce a pricing increase

Raising prices, especially for a subscription service that’s automatically billed monthly? Loyal customers likely want a heads up and an explanation. If you give customers enough notice, it keeps them from feeling swindled.  

Hi {{Customer first name}},

Starting on {{Date}} we are increasing the pricing for {{Product or service}} to {{New pricing information}}. 

We don’t take pricing increases lightly, and we know it’s not the news our customers want to hear! Given {{Reason for pricing increase}}, we feel that this is the right move for our business and the best way to continue offering the best product possible. 

We are grateful to have you as a customer! 

{{Company name}} 

Order status update (before an order ships) emails

Pre-ship

‎"Where is my order" is the main repetitive question that businesses get — up to 40% of all tickets, for some brands using Gorgias. Automating shipping confirmation emails and including a tracking number will provide a better shipping experience that doesn’t require shoppers to contact you whenever they want an update.

A helpdesk or customer service platform like Gorgias can help. Gorgias’s Macros automatically pull important personalized variables like the most recent order number or tracking information into the template. This is possible because Gorgias has a direct connection to your Shopify, BigCommerce, or Magento store, and can save your team hours each week. 

No more typing or copy-pasting, just send a Macro.

‎Regardless of whether you use Macros or another solution, here are a few plug-and-play email templates to get you started:

7) Change shipping address

Customers might be in the process of moving, planned a last minute trip, or realized they used an outdated shipping address for an order, which can cause panic. A quick email resolution will put them at ease and ensure their order goes to the right location. 

Hi {{Customer first name}},

I’ve updated your shipping address for order {{Number of last order}} and you should be all set now. You will receive a confirmation email when your package ships. 

Let me know if there’s anything else I can help with! 

{{Current agent first name}}

8) Order/shipping status (Where is my order?): Not shipped, preorder

When a customer inquires about an order that hasn’t shipped yet or an order that includes a pre-order item, make sure agents know your own internal policy and warehouse process. If something looks stuck for a long period of time (and it’s outside the warehouse’s SLA (Service level agreement), agents might have to open an internal investigation. 

Hi {{Customer first name}}, 

Thanks for getting in touch. 

It looks like your last order (order {{Number of last order}} from {{Date of last order}} includes a pre-order item. These take a bit longer to ship! 

If you haven’t received a tracking number in the next five days, please respond back to me and I’ll look into it. 

Thanks for your patience! 

{{Current agent first name}}

9) Order/shipping status (Where is my order?): Not shipped

Sometimes items take longer to ship than usual, or a customer isn’t familiar with your company’s estimated dispatch times. This is a common question, and its response can quell fears of an order being lost or out of stock. 

Hello {{Customer first name}}, 

Thank you for reaching out! Your order {{Number of last order}} has been received and we are working on getting it shipped out. Our processing time to ship an order is 3-5 business days, excluding weekends. 

We will email you a confirmation once it ships, which will include your tracking information as well. 

If you have any questions in the meantime, please don’t hesitate to reach out. 

Thanks, 

{{Current agent first name}}

10) Order Is out of stock

This template proactively informs shoppers of a delay and lets them know when they can expect their order to ship. 

Hi {{Customer first name}},

We wanted to let you know that your most recent order {{Number of last order}} is currently out of stock. We’re doing everything we can to get more in stock soon and we apologize for the delay!

The good news is that our next shipment should arrive by {{Date of availability}}, and you should receive your order within {{Number of business days}} once the item(s) gets to our warehouse.

Thanks for your patience! We’ll get you taken care of as soon as possible.

{{Current agent first name}}

11) Order change/cancel: Cancel and refund last order 

Sometimes customers change their minds about an order, and want to cancel before it gets shipped out so they don’t have to deal with returning it. This template provides a speedy response and solution. 

Hi {{Customer first name}}, 

I’ve canceled your last order (order {{Number of last order}}) and issued a refund. As a reminder, this was for {{Product name}} purchased on a credit card ending in {{Last four digits of credit card number}}.

The refund itself can take 3 to 5 days to process and will refund the original amount to the same card. Please let me know if you don’t see this reflected in your account after that time. 

Here if you need us, 

{{Current agent first name}}

12) Order change/cancel: Customer changed mind 

Simple automations can help catch requests like this before it’s too late. With Gorgias, you can swap out items (like switching a blue bike for a black one) without leaving the helpdesk, thanks to its deep integration with your ecommerce platform. 

Hi {{Customer First Name}}, 

Absolutely! I’ve swapped out {{Item name}} for the {{Item name}} you originally selected for order {{Number of last order}}. 

If you need anything else, just say the word. 

Best, 

{{Current agent first name}}

📚Recommended reading: Check out or post on how to prioritize customer requests so urgent questions like these don't get lost

Update on order status (after an order ships) email templates

Shipped

‎Shipping comes with its own challenges: issues with carriers, delays due to weather or staffing, orders getting lost, or increased volume during busy seasons slows packages down. As a company, first align on your policy for shipping-related issues. Then, you can incorporate templated work flows that include features like a snooze button. This can come in handy when you need the customer to take action before you can help, like looking out for a package that was supposedly delivered.  

Gorgias Macros have a snooze functionality that reminds support agents to follow up in a given amount of time. For example, a Macro might snooze the ticket for two days to remind an agent to check back in about an order status. 

13) Order/shipping status (Where is my order?): Shipped

An extremely common question, customers like to be able to follow along with tracking information to see exactly when their order will arrive, whether they’re excited or need it by a certain date. 

Hello {{Customer first name}}, 

Thank you for reaching out! Your order has shipped and I’ve included the information below so that you can track it right to your doorstep. 

Order: {{Number of last order}}

Shipping date: {{Shipping date of last order}}

Tracking number: {{Tracking url of last order}}

Get back in touch if you need any more help. 

Thanks, 

{{Current agent first name}}

📚Related reading: Learn more about where is my order (WISMO) requests and how to reduce them with convenient self-service.

14) Order change/cancel: Already shipped

Sometimes shoppers change their mind when it’s too late, so having a template that lets them know how they can get a refund or an exchange quickly gives them a resolution, even if it’s not exactly what they want. 

Hi {{Customer first name}}, 

Thank you for reaching out to us! 

Unfortunately, it looks like your order {{Number of last order}} has already been shipped from our warehouse. Therefore, I’m unable to make any changes to it at this time. 

If possible, refuse the package at delivery. If that’s not possible, please let me know and I will send you a prepaid shipping label so that you can send the order back to us. Once we receive the order back at our warehouse, I will send a {{Replacement or refund}} to you right away. 

{{Current agent first name}}

15) Order is lost 

A lost order can be frustrating, especially because it means that it’s been delayed. This template offers a solution to get a shopper a new item or get them their money back.  

Hi {{Customer First Name}},

Thank you for reaching out! I’m so sorry to hear that you were unable to locate the missing package. Rest assured we will remedy this situation for you. 

I have two options to offer: we can ship a replacement to you or issue a full refund for the order instead. If you prefer a replacement order, we kindly ask that you confirm the shipping address of where you would like the replacement order sent. We look forward to receiving your reply.

{{Current agent first name}}

📚 Recommended reading: Learn how to deal with lost ecommerce packages.

Update on order status (order has arrived) email templates

Delivered

‎Once an order arrives, customers might need help locating a missing package, initiating a return or exchange, or getting a replacement for a damaged item. 

16) Order/shipping status (Where is my order?): Delivered, not received 

Similar to a lost order, one that shows as being delivered but that hasn’t been received can cause anxiety for customers. This template offers up a solution and shares the internal policy for these types of packages. 

Hi {{Customer first name}}, 

I'm sorry to hear that you haven't received your order yet. It does appear to be in a delivered status. Sometimes this can be due to an incorrect scan by the carrier. If the package doesn't show up in the next {{Insert the number of days according to your policy}} please reach back out and we will {{insert internal policy}}. 

In the meantime, I've contacted the carrier and will be investigating on my end. 

Please reach out if I can help with anything else and I will keep an eye out for your email regarding the package.

{{Current agent first name}}

17) Item arrived damaged 

Items that shipped damaged or were damaged in transit can break trust between customer and company or spike quality concerns, especially for first-time purchases. This template asks for an image of the item so that the agent can offer a quick solution. 

Hi {{Customer First Name}}, 

Thanks for reaching out about your recent order {{Number of last order}}. I’m sorry to hear about your experience. As we try our best to provide exceptional service, some factors like shipping and handling are out of our control and issues like this can happen.  

Please send us a photo of the broken/damaged item(s) you received and we’ll do our best to resolve this as soon as possible. 

{{Current agent first name}} 

18) Item arrived damaged – follow up

A follow up email for items that arrived damaged. 

Hi {{Customer First Name}}, 

Thanks for sending over the photo of your damaged item. I've ordered a replacement to go out {{Insert policy: free of charge, just pay the cost of shipping, etc}}. Once the item ships we will send you an email confirmation. 

For your damaged item you can go ahead and {{Insert policy: donate, discard, send back to us, give to a friend, etc}}. 

{{Current agent first name}} 

📚 Recommended reading: Check out our list of essential ecommerce best practices.

Help with product exchanges, returns, and cancellations

According to the National Retail Federation, online purchases have a return rate of 20.8%. That means that many shoppers are writing into support teams to ask for an exchange or return if the online store doesn’t offer a self-serve return portal. 

Having a clear return policy minimizes questions, sets clear expectations before a customer makes an order, and can protect the business from losing too much revenue through returns or exchanges. Your policy should be where shoppers can find it easily: in your FAQ section, in your confirmation emails, and within your order flow. When a shopper requests an exchange or return, these templates can provide you with an effective email support script. 

19) Exchange request after order arrives

There’s a reason returns for online businesses average at 20% versus 9% for retail businesses: customers can’t experience what an item actually looks like, get a sense of its size, or try it on in person. The following two templates help with exchange and return requests. 

Hey there {{Customer first name}}, 

Thanks for reaching out about your recent order {{Number of last order}}. I see that you are interested in a product exchange. We do allow exchanges, and I’m happy to help you with this right away. 

{{Exchange policy and instructions}}

Once you have {{Required action(s)}}, I can process your exchange and get a new {{Product name}} shipped out to you right away. 

Thanks again, 

{{Current agent first name}}

📚Recommended reading: 

20) Request for return/refund (item eligible)

Hi {{Customer first name}}, 

Thanks for reaching out! For your order that was delivered on {{Shipping date of last order}}, we’d be happy to process a refund for you. 

To get the return process started, please go to our {{Link to returns portal}} and follow the steps. 

If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to reach out. 

{{Current agent first name}}

🤔 Getting too many refund requests? Check out our guide to reducing returns in ecommerce.

21) Request for return/refund (item not eligible) 

Items aren’t always eligible for returns, which can cause tension between a customer and business. Here’s a template for how to handle it. 

Hi {{Customer First Name}},

Thank you for contacting us. Unfortunately, your order {{Number of last order}} is unable to be returned because it is outside of the time window (30 days) outlined in our return policy.

I apologize for any inconvenience that you’ve experienced because of this. 

If there is anything else I can help you with, feel free to reply to this email or visit {{Link to help center}} at any time. 

Thank you again,

{{Current agent first name}}

Angry customer response email templates

The Effortless Experience notes that interactions with support teams are 4x more likely to cause disloyalty in customers rather than loyalty. So, unhappy customers who have had a bad experience expect a quick and kind email response. The following sample emails should help set your team up to support these customers with empathy.

‎22) General frustration with product or experience

This template provides a response for customers who complain about their overall experience with a brand. 

Hi {{Customer first name}},

Thank you for reaching out and letting us know about your experience with us. This is not up to our standard and I've passed this along to our team to ensure this doesn't happen again. 

In addition, I've {{Insert policy: refund, added a credit, send a replacement, etc.}} to make this right. 

We truly value you as a customer and apologize for the inconvenience this caused.

Please let me know if I can help with anything else.

{{Current agent first name}}

💡Tip: Build an escalation process internally to handle extremely frustrated customers who post publicly about a negative experience. This allows agents to refer these customers to a lead or manager for assistance. For very angry customers, using a template is usually not the right move, because their situations tend to vary on a case-by-case basis and require someone with experience to provide the best resolution. 

23) Escalate angry customers to more technical support

Occasionally, one rep might not have the information they need to figure out what went wrong or how to fix it. In that case, you might need to pass a customer onto an agent who has the resources to help. 

Hi {{Customer first name}},

Thank you for reaching out and letting us know about your experience with us. This is not up to our standard and I've passed this along to our team to ensure this doesn't happen again.

I have CC’d {{Technical agent first name}} on this email. They will be able to figure out what happened here and ensure that we resolve this for you. 

{{Current agent first name}} 

Make sales

While customer support emails are not marketing emails, you do have an opportunity to drive sales when having a conversation with a customer. A personal note at the end of a positive customer service experience may be more impactful than a mass email marketing campaign because it’s direct, builds upon any context from the full conversation, and can be adapted for the customer’s exact needs.

While you should never sacrifice quality of support to push a sale, here are some templates you can consider using to gently push customers back to your site for repeat purchases and upsells. 

24) Soft launch a product to a small group of customers 

Drum up hype, test out reception to a new item, establish product market fit, or get valuable feedback from a smaller group of customers before launching a new product to everyone. 

Hey {{Customer first name}}! 

We have been developing {{New product type}} for a long time now, and we can’t wait to release it to the world. Because you’re {{An email subscriber, SMS subscriber, made 5+ purchases, or other criteria}}, we’d like to give you the opportunity to buy this before everyone else can. 

{{Link to purchase page}}

Cheers, 

{{Company name}}

25) Promote sales and time-sensitive deals 

These types of targeted sales can help increase subscribers to different platforms (like social media, email, or SMS). They also create exclusivity and urgency for shoppers, who might jump on an item they’ve been waiting on to get a deal. 

Hey {{Customer first name}}!

Here at {{Company name}} we’re always looking for more and better ways to reach even more people with our exciting lineup of {{Products/services}}.

I’m excited to let you know about a deal that’s only available for {{Email subscribers, SMS subscribers, Instagram followers, etc.}}. 

For the next {{Length of time}}, we’re offering {{Offer details}} on {{Products/services}}.

We stand behind our quality {{Products/services}}, and sales like this don’t come often. That makes now the perfect time to {{Desired action -buy/expand/upgrade/sign up}}!

For starters, check out our {{Popular Sale Item/Service}}, it’s already selling fast!

Best,

{{Current agent first name}}

📚 Recommended reading: Email isn't the only channel to offer discounts and timely deals. Check out our guide to omnichannel customer service to see how you can expand your support and revenue-driving conversations.

26) Convert abandoned carts

With 70% of ecommerce shoppers abandoning their carts, reducing the number of customers who leave items unpurchased can increase your revenue. 

Hey there {{Customer first name}}!

We couldn’t help but notice you stopped by today, and you were this close to making {{Product name}} yours.

In case you were interrupted or pulled away, it’s not too late to buy!

{{Abandoned Cart Link}}

I can even offer you a {{Coupon/special offer}} if you’re ready to buy right now. This link will give you {{Describe the offer or discount}} if you purchase within {{Timeframe}}.

Thanks again for checking out our store! Let me know if I can answer any questions for you.

Best,

{{Current agent first name}}

27) Upsell customers 

Upselling existing customers is less expensive than going out and obtaining new customers for your business. The more purchases returning customers make, the less business have to spend on acquisition costs. 

Hi {{Customer first name}},

Thanks for your recent purchase of {{Product name}} — all of us here at {{Company name}} truly appreciate your business.

I’m reaching out today because I want to make sure you’re getting the most out of that purchase. {{Product name}} is fantastic as a standalone, but it shines when you use it alongside some of our other offerings.

For example, {{Strong explanation of how product/service enhances product they bought}}.

Does this sound like something you’d be interested in? If so, check out {{Product link}} or simply reply to this email.

Best,

{{Current agent first name}}

Collect feedback with these email templates

Customer feedback is powerful data for your business, helping you shape the future direction of your products or services and improve your email open rates. Customers enjoy feeling valued and knowing that you're working to make the product and service experience better and better for them can increase happiness and loyalty.

28) Request customer feedback

This gives customers an open invitation to share how their experience went, so you know what aspects went well and where you can improve. 

{{Customer First Name}},

Thanks so much for your recent purchase. By now, your item should have arrived, and you likely have a good idea of what you think about your purchase.

I’d love to get some feedback from you about your experience so far with us. You can just reply to this email and share your thoughts if you’d like. Even more helpful is if you wouldn’t mind filling out this {{Survey link}}. It shouldn’t take more than {{Estimated completion time}}, and it will help us keep improving as our business grows.

Of course, if you’re having trouble of any kind (or your purchase hasn’t arrived yet), please let me know. I’ll do everything I can to help.

Thanks again for your time!

{{Current agent first name}}

29) Thank customers for their feedback (positive)

Reviews go a long way to build trust in your business. Aside from thanking someone for taking the time to provide positive feedback, it’s a good idea to ask them to write a public review about their experience. 

{{Customer first name}},

Thanks so much for taking the time to give us feedback. We’re always working to improve our products and services, and we’re thrilled when we hear that we’re doing something right. Constructive criticism is great, too, since it helps us improve!

If you’re still feeling the love from your recent purchase, would you mind writing a quick review of your positive experience with us on {{Review site}}? It may not seem like much, but these reviews go a long way.

Thanks again,

{{Current agent first name}}

30) Request feedback from customers who left a negative review

Understanding why someone left a negative review is where, as a support team, you’re going to learn the most. Doing some outreach for customers who left a bad CSAT, NPS score, Yelp or Google review, etc. to see if they are willing to share a bit more information will help you improve the overall experience. 

{{Customer First Name}},

Thanks so much for your feedback on {{Customer survey, review site, etc.}}.

I wanted to check in and get a little more information from you about your experience. This will help our team improve future experiences for you and other shoppers. If you’re open to it, you can just reply to this email and share your thoughts.

Thanks for your time, 

{{Current agent first name}}

📚 Recommended reading: How to Collect Customer Feedback From Support Tickets (+ 8 Other Methods)

Emails that tell customers that they’re chatting with a bot 

31) Tell customers they’re getting an automated email response 

Automated responses can feel impersonal, especially if a shopper is upset. Letting someone know they’re getting an automated response and exactly how to reach a human if they need one can save time for busy teams and get customers a near immediate response. 

{{Customer first name}},

This is an automated response. We are a growing business and, in our best effort to deliver the information you’re looking for as quickly as possible, we do use some automation. 

We think you’re asking about the status of your order and have included information for it below. If you still need support or this didn't answer your question, just respond to this email and a live agent will jump in to help. 

{{Company name}}

Why use email templates for customer support?

Using response templates for your most frequently sent emails means a lower resolution time for customers and higher efficiency for your agents who no longer need to type out each response. For example, the brand Bagallery found that Macros (Gorgias’s version of templates) increased delivery by 3x. 

And templates (for chats and emails alike) don’t have to feel impersonal. While reps might start out with a template, they can personalize templated emails by filling in customer information (like the customer’s name) and important order details (like order tracking numbers). Scroll down to our section on Macros to learn how you can automatically include this kind of personalized information.

Overall, templates create a better, faster experience for everyone. They can:

  • Decrease first response time
  • Decrease resolution time
  • Save time for your customer service team
  • Provide an overall better customer experience

Decrease first response time

When customers write in for support, they expect a quick response no matter if they’re giving positive feedback or have an urgent issue they need resolved. By starting first with a pre-written email template, you can fast-track your team’s first-response time, which can lower anxiety in your customers, give them the answers they need, and allow your team to provide a personalized and high-quality experience at scale. 

A pre-written template might provide a response that lets a customer know the team will be with them shortly — but asks the customer several detailed questions upfront so that the agent can get them an answer faster. 

For example, Jetson, an ecommerce company that sells gut-healing probiotics and prebiotics, saw a 60% decrease in first response time by using Macro email templates.

Decrease resolution time 

Your email templates will also be detailed and quality-assured, helping fully resolve customer issues as quickly as possible. For example, templates might include links to a knowledge base or FAQ center that answers lingering questions. Or, you might be able to drop in detailed tracking information if your system allows for dynamic fields. 

Jetson also saw a 30% decrease in resolution time by using templated responses, improving the customer experience and giving the customer service team more time for their highest-value conversations. 

When implementing templates, make sure you’re including all the information the customer needs for a one-touch resolution. Ideally, customers won’t need to respond with follow-up questions. 

📚 Recommended reading: Our Director of Support’s complete guide to measuring and lowering resolution time.

Save time for your customer service team 

If reps start emails from scratch every time, they’ll spend hours each week typing up the same information, lowering efficiency and taking them away from more important projects. Templates raise the number of chats, emails, and SMS tickets agents can handle in a given day. Increasing efficiency without decreasing quality also means you won’t always have to hire new agents to handle more tickets.

In addition, if your team is not able to pull in customer data within the email platform, they’ll have to toggle back and forth to find it. Or worse, they’ll need to go back and forth with the customer to get simple info like their order number or tracking information.

Templates are especially helpful to help agents during customer service training, or to quickly onboard any temporary help you bring on to help during busy periods like Black Friday Cyber Monday (BFCM).

📚 Recommended reading: Learn how Princess Polly saw a 40% increase in agent productivity after switching to Gorgias and implementing templates and other time-saving features.

Provide an overall better customer experience

The quicker and easier you make the full support experience, you decrease the chance of the customer putting in a high level of effort. The Effortless Experience shows that 96% of customers who have to work hard to get support feel disloyal to the brand after.

🤔 Not convinced yet? Read our post on the importance of customer service to learn why customer service is more closely linked to revenue than you think. 

Why Macros are superior to regular templates

While regular email templates can be helpful in saving time for your support team, setting up automation takes your support one step further. This is possible with a tool like Gorgias, which offers Macros, or specialized templates that pull in data from a Shopify, Magento, or BigCommerce store.

Macro preview

‎Here’s how Macros upgrade your customer support templates:

They help you automatically personalize messages

Macros allow you to pop in variables like customer name, order number, tracking info, or delivery date, and what they ordered, which makes the entire experience feel more personal — even with templates.

Because Gorgias integrates with your ecommerce store, you don’t have to search or ask for customer data (like past order information, reviews left on your site, and so much more). 

‎You can automate follow-up actions

Macros can also be combined with Rules to automatically fire based on certain customer questions and trigger actions, like canceling an order. They can also snooze certain messages that might require a follow-up email so that support agents never leave a conversation without a full resolution. 

Choose from Rule templates to automatically trigger actions on tickets.

‎They include visual product links

When you link a product in a standard template, the customer only sees a URL or hyper-linked text. Plus, agents still have to copy the URL from your store and paste it in the email. But Gorgias’s Shopify product picker lets you search from your product library, select products, and include a visual link that entices customers to click back to your store.  

Visuals in chat

‎They work across channels

Macros can be used for any channel, not just email, since Gorgias is a centralized helpdesk. You can create shorter variations of your email templates to use for live chat, social media, SMS, and more.

They come with a supported Macros Library 

When you sign up for Gorgias, you’ll get access to a Macros Library, which has pre-made and dynamic templates to help get you started. 

These emails are a starting point for agents to save time and ensure consistency and correctness. Then, agents can further tweak templates based on each customer’s needs.  

You can easily measure template utilization

Gorgias comes with a number of Statistics dashboards that measure important customer support metrics like first-response time, revenue generated from customer support, and much more. The Statistics section includes a Macros tab, which shows you how frequently your agents use each Macro:

‎Customer support leaders can use this tab to understand the effectiveness of each Macro and identify when new Macros are needed.

📚 Recommended reading: Evaluating Customer Service: Why, Challenges, and KPIs That Matter

Create loyal and happy customers from day one with Gorgias

Loyal customers come out of great service experiences. Email templates help create a solid baseline so that teams are more equipped to provide high quality support. By removing the need to type out tedious responses to the same questions, email templates give teams the headstart they need so they can provide fast, personalized responses to repetitive questions and spend more time on higher-value conversations.

Gorgias is a customer service platform built for ecommerce merchants. Features like Macros help you provide personalized, self-service responses to repetitive questions and spend more.

Check out our video below to learn more or read our CX Growth Playbook to learn how to generate consistent revenue from your customer support team. 

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