Four months ago, our analysts were dealing with a barrage of questions. "What's our ARR by segment?" "Build me a dashboard for this quarter's pipeline." Quick asks piled up behind complex deep dives. Stakeholders waited for answers that should have taken seconds, and analysts spent their time fielding requests instead of doing the strategic work that creates the most value.
Today, anyone at Gorgias can ask a question in plain language and get an accurate, contextualized response in seconds. Not from a colleague or dashboard, nor from a generic answer from the internet. But a response built on our business context. We call it Cortex, our flagship internal AI agent.
In two months, Cortex went from an idea to fielding thousands of questions every week, recommending actions across the business, and deprecating the need for manual dashboard creation. While most companies right now are treating AI as an initiative — at Gorgias, AI is already part of how we work. 72% of Gorgias employees use Cortex each week, and that number is only growing.
We didn’t achieve this by simply plugging a large language model into our stack. LLMs are a critical part of the equation, but they aren't the driving force — it’s everything else under the hood: the infrastructure, context, platform architecture, and the team that brings it all together.
The framing problem most companies get wrong
The instinct across many companies today is to start with the model, pick a provider to solve a specific challenge, or invest heavily in getting the data right. All reasonable starting points, but most of them solve for one use case. Underneath that approach is a framing problem: seeing AI as an initiative — something you assign and measure. Seeing AI as another tool your company uses versus how your company operates.
We started somewhere different. Every company is built on four pillars: customers, people, product, and decisions. AI investments tend to place heavy emphasis on the first three. We started with the fourth. Our bet was that if we built everything around the need to make effective decisions first, asking what Gorgias needed to know to operate well, then our AI would become dramatically more powerful.
Cortex is that philosophy in practice
Cortex is our flagship internal AI agent, and the product where we established the tenets that now run through everything else we build: composable and modular infrastructure, governed context, and accessible from wherever decisions happen. Cortex lives in Slack, as well as across LLM vendors, in its own browser extension, and even on its own dedicated internal site.
Cortex doesn’t stop at answering questions. It can read and write to Notion, file Linear tasks, create HTML apps, automate signal delivery, and more. It operates across every layer of our stack, from dashboards to data pipelines, because we designed it as one integrated system. It is this connection that adds remarkable depth to what people can ask, and what they get in return.
A Sales Lead is pitching and asks Cortex for the full picture of the merchant. In a customized PDF, Cortex lists coverage gaps, pre-sale intent signals, and product fit options. Everything the sales lead needs to walk in with confidence.
A Senior Product leader asks, "How are we performing against OKR #1, and what can my team do to help accelerate it?" Cortex returns a full ARR breakdown, projected end-of-month attainment, segment-level findings, and connects it all back to company-level strategies. A suite of recommendations customized to the leader, the performance, and the signals that bridge how they can support our goals. The kind of answer that used to take someone a week to put together.
These aren't simple lookup queries. They require deep business context spanning multiple areas. Cortex handles these because its Decision Engine gives it the information to reason against governed data, metric definitions, and business context, turning a generic answer into a credible one.
Overnight, teams have built Cortex into how they work. They’re spending less time searching and more time finding answers, not because they were told to, but because Cortex reduced the distance between question and decision.
Flexibility as the foundation
Cortex’s modular infrastructure allows us to experiment and add new capabilities freely. We’ve already built two more internal AI agents made for entirely different use cases, but using the same Decision Engine as Cortex.
GAIA, our internal experimentation AI Agent, helps our customers identify opportunities in their AI Agent Guidance design. It takes institutional knowledge across our teams and turns it into a scalable system that drives automation and value to our customers. Our CEO, Romain Lapeyre, has been its most vocal advocate since day one.
When we needed a platform for investor readiness and board preparation, we built Oracle. Our board decks and talk tracks are informed and built with the same AI, and our numbers are validated every step of the way.
We’re continuing to expand new AI agents internally, exploring how they can create value for customers and our own teams.
AI has transformed how data teams create value, and we’ve already shifted to account for it
When AI handles thousands of analytical questions each week, the highest-value work for a data team shifts permanently. Late 2025, we repositioned from a Data Analytics function into a Decision Intelligence function — a structural change in what we own and how we operate.
Today, our analysts focus on the most sensitive, complex, and forward-looking decisions and analyses. They partner more deeply with stakeholders by driving next steps from signals. They're even building entirely new capabilities that didn't exist in their role descriptions months ago. Things like AI skills for Cortex, context curation, and insight and recommendation delivery. The role of the analyst hasn't diminished. It's expanded to encompass the most meaningful work an analyst can do: driving outcomes and ensuring those decisions can achieve them.
Our business support model has changed, too. Instead of embedding analysts and dedicated engineers within functional teams, we align capacity to the highest-impact company objectives and move fluidly across them. This model works even better because Decision Intelligence brings together both analytics and engineering teams under one roof.
Elliot Trabac leads our Data, Context and AI Engineering teams. The Decision Engine, Cortex, GAIA, and the platforms I've described exist because of the infrastructure his team innovated and built from the ground up. Noemie Happi Nono leads our Decision Strategy and Operations team, driving decision outcomes with stakeholders, advancing the development of Cortex skills and capabilities, and pushing into new areas of analysis every day.
Together, they're shaping what a modern data function looks like when AI becomes a standard building block for how a company operates.
What’s next for the Decision Intelligence team
The question of ROI is long gone. AI has opened the floodgates to more trusted and meaningful signals than ever. The natural next evolution is Proactive Intelligence, signals surfaced toward what you need to know, before you ask. And we're already building this because our architecture is designed to support it.
In the coming weeks, members of the Decision Intelligence team will go deeper into themes I've touched on here. Yochan Khoi, a Senior Analytics Engineer on our team, recently published a technical walkthrough of our context layer and will go further into building context strategies that scale. Others will cover infrastructure, analytical partnerships, evolving data assets into decision assets, and the cost and efficiency gains that make sustained AI investment viable.
AI hasn't changed the most important element of data and analytics functions — delivering outcomes — but it has raised the bar for what it looks like and how far we can take it. We’re just getting started.
Newsletter Signup
The best in CX and ecommerce, right to your inbox
Featured articles
Conversations Are Becoming a Revenue Channel: The Data Proves It
TL;DR:
- Customer journeys are collapsing to a single conversation. The traditional browse-and-buy journey is giving way to AI-guided shopping that moves from discovery to purchase in a single exchange.
- 79% of brands say AI-driven conversational commerce has increased their sales and purchase rates.
- AI-only influenced orders grew 63% in a single year, from 2.7 million in Q1 to 4.4 million in Q4.
- Brands treating conversation as a revenue channel. They’re not just a support function, generating higher AOV, shorter buying cycles, and stronger retention.
The page-based shopping experience dominated for decades. Customers would search, browse, compare, abandon, get retargeted, return, and eventually buy (sometimes).
That journey is no longer the only option.
Shoppers are turning to chat, messaging, and AI-powered tools to find what they need. Instead of clicking through product pages or reading static FAQs, they ask questions, have back-and-forth conversations, and get answers that move them closer to a purchase in real time. The path to checkout has changed, and the brands that recognize this are pulling ahead.
Read our 2026 State of Conversational Commerce Report to learn more about conversation commerce trends from 400 ecommerce decision-makers and 16,000+ ecommerce brands using Gorgias.
{{lead-magnet-1}}
The shopping journey has collapsed into a single thread
The traditional shopping journey was a solo experience. A shopper had a need, searched for options, browsed across sessions, and eventually made a decision — often days later, after being retargeted multiple times. Support only entered the picture after the purchase.
The conversation-led journey collapses that timeline:
- A shopper recognizes a need and starts a conversation via chat, messaging, or a search-triggered prompt
- An AI agent asks clarifying questions about preferences, budget, and constraints
- The AI provides personalized product recommendations in real time
- The shopper validates concerns about fit, compatibility, delivery, and returns, all inside the conversation
- The shopper completes the purchase directly within or immediately after that exchange
- The AI picks up the conversation post-purchase for order tracking and proactive support
- A human agent steps in only when the situation calls for it
What used to take days now takes minutes. Discovery, evaluation, and purchase happen in a single thread.
Conversation is a revenue strategy, not a support upgrade
79% of brands agree that AI-driven conversational commerce has increased sales and purchase rates in their business. When brands were asked to rank the highest-return areas:
- 38% cited improved customer support efficiency
- 23% pointed to higher customer retention and loyalty
- 20% saw improved purchase rates
Those numbers reflect something important: the value of conversation compounds. Faster support reduces friction. Better retention raises lifetime value. More confident shoppers buy more often and spend more per order.
The brands seeing the biggest returns aren't just using AI to deflect tickets. They're using it to create one-to-one shopping experiences at scale.
What the data shows about AI-influenced orders
Looking at AI-only influenced orders across key verticals like Apparel and Accessories, Food and Beverages, Health and Beauty, Home and Garden, and Sporting Goods, the growth across a single year was significant.
Across industries, ecommerce brands saw AI step into conversations, reduce shopper hesitation, and drive higher QoQ conversion rates.
Learn more about AI-powered revenue generation in the full 2026 Conversational Commerce Report.
Why brands are making this a strategic priority
84% of brands say the strategic importance of conversational commerce is higher than it was a year ago. 82% agree it will be mainstream in their sector within two years.
That shift is registering at the leadership level because of what conversational commerce does to the buying experience. Creating one-to-one touchpoints earlier in the journey drives higher AOV, shorter buying cycles, and stronger purchase rates. Shoppers who get real-time answers to their questions are more confident.
What this looks like in practice: TUSHY
TUSHY, known for eco-friendly bidets and bathroom essentials, is a useful example of what happens when you take conversational commerce seriously.
Bidets aren't an impulse purchase. Shoppers have real questions about fit, compatibility, and installation. Those questions used to go unanswered until the CX team could respond, often after the customer had abandoned the cart.
TUSHY used Gorgias's AI Agent and shopping assistant capabilities to automate pre-sales support. AI Agent engaged shoppers in real-time conversations, addressed their concerns directly, and built confidence at the moment of highest intent.
This resulted in a 190% increase in chat-based purchases, a 13x return on investment, and twice the purchase rate of human agents.
How to apply this to your strategy
You don't need to overhaul your entire operation to start seeing results. The most effective approach is to start where the impact is clearest and expand from there.
A few places to begin:
- Pre-sales chat. Identify your most common pre-purchase questions (sizing, compatibility, shipping timelines) and ensure your AI can answer them confidently and promptly.
- Product page engagement. Use proactive chat prompts triggered by page behavior to start conversations before shoppers leave.
- Post-purchase follow-up. Let AI pick up the conversation after checkout with order updates and proactive support, reducing inbound volume and building trust.
- Human escalation. Define clearly which situations require a human agent – complex issues, emotional exchanges, high-stakes decisions.
Want to see the full picture of where conversational commerce is headed in 2026? Read the full report to explore the data, trends, and strategies shaping the next era of ecommerce.
{{lead-magnet-1}}
AI Is Table Stakes for Ecommerce: What the Data Tells Us About 2026
TL;DR:
- AI adoption is rapidly accelerating. 96% of ecommerce professionals now use AI in their roles, up from 69% in 2024.
- AI has moved beyond support automation. Use cases have evolved into revenue generation, personalization, and logistics.
- Brands are tying AI success to profit-and-loss outcomes. 60% of brands consider AOV a top indicator of AI effectiveness.
A year ago, ecommerce brands were still debating whether AI was worth the investment. That debate is over. Today, nearly every ecommerce professional uses AI to do their job.
The shift isn't just about adoption. It's about what AI is used for and how brands measure its impact. Support automation was the entry point. Now, AI is embedded across the full operation, from product recommendations to inventory control to real-time shopping conversations.
In our 2026 State of Conversational Commerce Report, we break down trends on AI usage among 400 ecommerce decision-makers and 16,000+ ecommerce brands using Gorgias.
{{lead-magnet-1}}
AI adoption has reached a tipping point
If we rewind 12 months ago, the industry was still split on AI. Some ecommerce professionals were excited, but most were still hesitant. In 2024, 69% of ecommerce professionals used AI in their roles. By 2025, that number reached 77%. In 2026, it hit 96%.
The confidence numbers back it up. 71% of brands say they are confident using AI for ecommerce, and 73% are satisfied with its business impact.
In early 2025, only 30% of ecommerce professionals rated their excitement for AI at 10/10. Today, zero percent of respondents describe themselves as hesitant about AI.
AI use cases now span the full ecommerce stack
Using AI in ecommerce is not new. In fact, it dates back to the 1980s with the invention of algorithms and expert systems. And if you’ve ever leveraged similar product recommendations or chatbots, you’ve already integrated AI into your ecommerce stack.
Modern AI is far more sophisticated.
With the rise of agentic commerce and conversational AI, brands began leveraging AI agents to automate the processing of repetitive support tickets. That’s still happening today, but the scope has expanded beyond the support queue.
Ecommerce brands are deploying AI across every layer of their operation:
- Customer support automation: 96%
- Product recommendations: 88%
- Automated tracking and status updates: 69%
- Personalization: 64%
- Inventory control: 51%
- Dynamic pricing and discounting: 36%
- Order fulfillment: 18%
When brands were asked which channels contribute most to their AI success, conversational channels dominated. Social media messaging led at 78%, followed by SMS at 70%, and website live chat at 51%. Shoppers want fast, personal conversations, and AI is the best way to deliver that at scale.
Learn more about AI adoption, perception, and use case trends in the full 2026 Conversational Commerce Report.
How AI is changing CX success metrics
For decades, customer support success meant fast response times and high satisfaction scores. Those are still important indicators of success, but leading brands are adding revenue-focused metrics to their dashboards.
91% of brands still track CSAT as a measure of AI's impact. But 60% now include AOV as a top indicator, and higher-revenue brands earning $20M+ are focusing on metrics like total operating expenses, cost per resolution, incremental revenue, and one-touch ticket rate.
AI can now start a conversation, ease customer doubts, sell, upsell, and recover abandoned carts in a single conversation. When you’re only measuring CSAT, you’re ignoring the real ROI of conversational AI investment.
AI makes every conversational channel a storefront
Virtual shopping assistants now proactively engage shoppers, adapt to their needs in real time, and offer contextual product recommendations and upsells. When the moment calls for it, they can close the deal with a targeted discount.
Gorgias brands using AI Agent's shopping assistant capabilities nearly doubled their purchase rates and converted 20–50% better than those using AI Agent for support only.
Orthofeet, the largest provider of orthopedic footwear in the US, is a concrete example of this in practice. Using Gorgias, they achieved:
- 56% of support tickets automated in 2 months
- Email response times down from 24 hours to 35 seconds
- Double-digit revenue growth without adding headcount.
What this means for your AI strategy
The data tells a clear story: AI has evolved beyond a tool for handling tier 1 support tickets. It’s a core part of your revenue generation strategy.
57% of brands are already using AI for 26–50% of all customer interactions, and 37% expect that share to rise to 51–75% within the next two years. The brands building toward that range now are the ones who will have the operational advantage when it matters most.
The practical question isn't whether to invest in AI. It's where to focus first. Based on where brands are seeing the most impact, three priorities stand out:
- Start with high-volume, low-complexity tickets. WISMO (where is my order) inquiries, return policy questions, and order status updates are where AI delivers the fastest return. Automate these first.
- Expand into conversational channels. Social messaging and SMS are where AI is driving the most success right now.
- Connect AI performance to revenue metrics. If you're only measuring CSAT and response time, you're missing half the story. Add AOV, conversion rate, and incremental revenue to your reporting.
Want to go deeper on the full 2026 conversational commerce trends? Read the complete report for data across every major AI use case in ecommerce.
{{lead-magnet-1}}
The State of Conversational Commerce: 5 Trends Reshaping Ecommerce in 2026
TL;DR:
- AI is resolving tickets, not just replying. AI now handles 31% of customer interactions for ecommerce brands, and that number is expected to nearly double within two years.
- Every channel is becoming a storefront. Conversations are replacing the traditional browse-and-buy journey, with 79% of brands reporting sales from AI-driven interactions.
- AI is shortening the buying cycle. 93% of AI-influenced purchases happen within the first 48 hours of the conversation.
- CX teams are changing, not shrinking. Ecommerce brands are actively hiring for more technical roles to implement, coach, and maintain AI.
- The winning model is hybrid. AI handles volume and speed, while humans handle complexity and judgment.
The way shoppers buy online has shifted and customers are at the center.
They no longer want to scroll through product pages, dig through FAQs, or wait 24 hours for an email reply. They open a conversation, ask a specific question, and expect a useful answer in seconds. Brands that can’t deliver these experiences at scale are seeing customer hesitation turn into abandoned carts and lost revenue.
This shift has a name: conversational commerce. It's the practice of using real-time, two-way conversations as your primary sales channel, through chat, AI agents, messaging apps, and voice.
What started as an experiment for early adopters has become a key growth lever, with 84% of ecommerce brands treating conversational commerce as a strategic pillar this year vs. last year.
We surveyed 400 ecommerce decision-makers across North America, the U.K., and Europe to understand how conversational commerce and AI are reshaping the ecommerce landscape. These findings are complemented by aggregated and anonymized internal Gorgias platform data from 16,000+ ecommerce brands.
The State of Conversational Commerce in 2026 trends report breaks down all of the findings, including five key trends shaping the ecommerce landscape.
{{lead-magnet-1}}
Trend 1: AI is table stakes for ecommerce and it’s no longer just about efficiency
A few years ago, adding an AI chatbot to your site that could provide tracking links and Help Center article recommendations was a differentiator. Today, it's table stakes. McKinsey found that 71% of shoppers expect personalized experiences, and 76% get frustrated when they don't get them.
Right now, most ecommerce professionals use AI, with 93% having used it for at least 1 year. Enthusiasm is accelerating quickly, with only 30% of ecommerce professionals rating their excitement for AI at 10/10 in April 2025. Similarly, while AI adoption rose steadily year over year, it reached a clear peak in 2026.
The use cases driving this adoption are practical and high-volume:
- Order tracking and status updates
- Returns, exchanges, and refund requests
- Shipping FAQs and delivery estimates
These are the tickets that flood brands’ inboxes every day. AI agents resolve them instantly, without pulling teams away from conversations that actually require human judgment.
Explore AI adoption and use case data in more depth in the full report.
Trend 2: Conversations are the new path to checkout
The traditional ecommerce funnel, visit site, browse products, add to cart, check out, is losing ground. Shoppers now discover products on Instagram, ask questions via direct message, and complete purchases without ever visiting a website.
Conversational AI is actively increasing revenue, with 79% of brands reporting that AI-driven interactions have increased sales and conversion in their business.
The practical implication is that every channel is becoming a storefront. Creating personalized touchpoints with customers earlier in the journey, through proactive engagement, is impacting the bottom line.
Read the full report to explore how AI conversions have increased QoQ by industry.
Trend 3: AI is accelerating the purchase cycle
Pre-purchase hesitation is one of the biggest conversion killers in ecommerce. A shopper lands on your product page, has a question about sizing or compatibility, can't find the answer quickly, and leaves. That's a lost sale that had nothing to do with your product.
Conversational AI changes that dynamic. When a shopper can ask a question and get an accurate, personalized answer in real time, the friction disappears.
Brands using Gorgias saw this play out at scale in 2025. When AI Agent recommended a product, 80% of the resulting purchases happened the same day, and 13% happened the next day.
Brands are further accelerating the buying cycle through proactive engagement. On-site features such as suggested product questions, recommendations triggered by search results, and “Ask Anything” input bars drove 50% of conversation-driven purchases during BFCM 2025.
Explore how AI is collapsing the purchase cycle in Trend 3 of the report.
Trend 4: AI is making CX teams more technical
There's a persistent narrative that AI is making CX teams redundant. The data tells a different story. 62% of ecommerce brands are planning to grow their teams, not cut them. But the scope of those teams is changing.
New roles are emerging around AI configuration and quality assurance. Teams are investing in technical members to write AI Guidance instructions, develop tone-of-voice instructions, and continuously QA results.
CX teams are also bridging the gap between support goals and revenue goals, as the two functions increasingly overlap.
The result is CX teams that are more technical than they were before. Agents who once spent their days answering repetitive tickets are now spending that time on higher-value work: complex escalations, VIP customer relationships, and improving the AI systems and knowledge bases that handle the volume.
Learn more about the evolution of CX roles in Trend #4.
Trend 5: The future is hybrid: AI-first, humans when it counts
Despite increasing AI adoption, data shows that ecommerce brands shouldn’t strive for 100% automation. Winning brands are building systems in which AI handles repetitive tier-1 tickets, and humans handle complex, sensitive cases.
AI handles speed and scale. It resolves order-tracking requests at 2 a.m., processes return-eligibility checks in seconds, and answers the same shipping question for the thousandth time without compromising quality.
Human agents handle conversations that require context, empathy, or decisions that fall outside the standard playbook. There are several topics where shoppers still prefer human support.
Successful hybrid systems require continuous iteration, meaning reviewing handover topics, Guidance, and reviewing AI tickets on a weekly basis.
Discover how leading brands are balancing human and AI systems in Trend #5.
Where conversational commerce is heading by 2030
The 2026 trends are about expansion and standardization. The 2030 predictions are about what comes next.
Voice-based purchasing is the biggest bet on the horizon. Only 7% of brands currently use voice assistants for commerce, but 89% expect it to be standard by 2030. The vision is a customer who can reorder a product, check their subscription status, or manage a return entirely over the phone.
Proactive AI is the other major shift. Rather than waiting for a customer to reach out, AI will anticipate needs based on browsing behavior, purchase history, and where someone is in their relationship with your brand. Think of it as the digital equivalent of a sales associate who remembers what you bought last time and knows what you're likely to need next.
Explore where ecommerce brands are allocating their AI budgets in the full report.
Start building your conversational commerce strategy today
The brands winning in 2026 are creating smart, scalable systems where AIhandles volume and humans handle nuance. They’re treating every conversational channel as an opportunity to serve and sell.
The data is clear: AI adoption is accelerating, customer expectations are rising, and the revenue impact of getting this right is measurable.
{{lead-magnet-1}}
Further reading
Integrate your Smile.io account to Gorgias!
Loyalty programs are widely used amongst e-commerce merchants to grow and maintain market share by improving the number of repeat customers and attracting new ones. These programs come in different formats - from loyalty points to surprise gifts depending on the level of loyalty of each customer - and have proven efficient to help brands build a community of consumers based on the emotional attachment to their identity and values.
As a customer support helpdesk, Gorgias is focused on providing the best experience for both end-consumers and support agents. Consequently, giving access to the most accurate information about your customers’ loyalty status enables your support team to adapt their answers to customer requests.
Thus, it seemed only natural that we partner with Smile.io, a rewards platform that has helped over 20,000 merchants reward their most loyal customers for performing profitable actions.
With Smile, you can create and manage reward programs such as loyalty points, referrals and VIP programs, to build a fruitful relationship with your customers.
Because Gorgias is appreciated for its ease of use and automation tools, we have decided to build a strong integration with Smile: not only can your support team have easy access to all the necessary data about your customers, but they can also use Smile variables in canned responses (or “macros”) and automation rules.
- Display your customers’ Smile profiles next to tickets
- Use Smile variables (loyalty status, points balance, VIP program, referral url) in both your macros and your rules
By integrating your Smile account to Gorgias, you’ll be able to improve yet again not only your customer support but also your customers’ engagement to your brand. Our early adopters of the integration are already thrilled by it!
"We're loving the Smile integration so far! Having access to the variables in the automation features of Gorgias (macros and rules) is a game-changer, especially now that we're focusing on improving our loyalty program. It would be great if the integration went a little further in the future to enable editing loyalty points!"
Chris Storey, Founder and CEO at Dinkydoo
If you're already a Gorgias customer, you can connect Smile directly from your Gorgias account, in the Integrations section. If not, you can create an account here and get started in a few minutes.
Announcing the Okendo integration
Here at Gorgias, our aim is to provide the best customer support tools to our clients, whatever their specific needs. The more you grow, the more we work to develop our offer so that you can benefit from a tailor-made spectrum of integrations. As your business becomes more successful, you need to adapt your website to a fast-growing community of consumers, especially regarding the quality of your reviews and how they appear.
This is why today we are proud to announce our new partnership with Okendo, a customer-marketing platform perfectly suited for high-performance Shopify businesses.
Okendo helps Shopify’s fastest growing companies like oVertone, Paul Evans and Dormify build vibrant customer communities through product ratings & reviews, customer photos/videos and Q&A.
Along with this, Okendo gives you the tools to leverage customer generated content across other marketing channels such as Google Search, Google Shopping, Facebook and Instagram.
Since one of the key advantages of using Gorgias is to manage all your customer support in one dashboard, we decided to design a straight-to-the-point integration:
If a customer leaves low rating review such as < 3 stars and/or with negative sentiment, Okendo can automatically create a ticket in Gorgias. This way, your staff can quickly engage in a conversation with them to understand what went wrong, and address the issue immediately.
We believe this integration will take your customer support teams to the next level, as Okendo has already convinced some of our key clients.
"One of our biggest assets is our unique customer community, so being able to maintain it as active and engaged as possible is key for our business. And making sure that we address any negative experience efficiently and in no time is just as important: this is exactly what the Okendo integration within Gorgias has enabled us to do, by automatically creating a ticket for these cases with the review displayed right next to it."
Dan Appelstein, Founder & CEO at BeGummy
"Aside from being excellent at building shopper trust, reviews enable us to identify customers who, for whatever reason, have had a less than stellar experience. The Okendo + Gorgias integration enables us to flag these instances and automatically assign a Gorgias ticket to a member of our Client Services Team, so that we can follow up and do our best to assist them with whatever issues they're encountering. This integration, along with Okendo’s consistent availability and unwavering support, have made the integration between these two platforms seamless and successful!"
Jae Sutherland, Director of Client Service at oVertone
If you're already a Gorgias customer, we can introduce you to Okendo to implement the integration directly from your Okendo account. If not, you can create an account here and get started in a few minutes.
How Campus Protein built a multi-million dollar business
The supplement industry is not often the first thing that comes to mind when looking to start a new business. It’s crowded, the barriers to entry are low, the margins are thin, and there are some established and well-known brands with large budgets to outspend competitors.
And yet, Campus Protein, a provider of supplement to college students that started in a dorm room in 2010, has managed to carve itself a highly profitable niche and power its way to millions of dollars in revenue.
No, there’s no magic sauce or secret weapon that helped them do it. They have the same access to resources as everyone else. In fact, they have a smaller team than older brands in the space.
The only difference is they focused on one thing that others in the industry weren’t, the customer experience. This is the story of how they did that and dominated behemoths like GNC in colleges across the US.
Identifying The Problem
Before coming up with the idea, founder Russell Saks was just another sophomore at Indiana University. After joining a fraternity, his new friends convinced him to start hitting the gym.
As Russell started getting into fitness, he noticed that every month his friends would head to the local supplements store to purchase $200 to $300 worth of protein and workout drinks. These were the same people who always complained that they didn’t have beer money on the weekends. Yet here they were, spending hundreds of dollars on supplements without batting an eyelid.
In any industry as crowded as the supplement industry, there are always cheaper options. You can go online and buy your supplements at a much lower price than at the local store. However, the drawback is that you have to wait for it. And, as Russell found out, college students never planned ahead and always needed their next tub of protein powder instantly.
Ever the entrepreneur, Russell figured there was an opportunity here. If he could combine the affordability of online prices with the same-day delivery of the local store, he had a business. All he had to do was bulk order product from a low-cost site in advance, store it locally, and then redistribute it to students when they needed it.
As with any business, those initial days were rough. Yes, there was demand and Russell would often sell out each batch soon after they came in, but the margins were razor thin. To maintain cost-effectiveness, Russell sometimes had to take a loss on certain products.
On top of that, Russell found that his life was getting consumed by the fledgling business. To scale it up, he needed help. His friend and first business partner (now Chief Sales Officer), Mike Yewdell, was a fellow student at Indiana University with lots of connections. With his network, they quickly became the go-to source for supplements on campus.
Russell’s next stop was his high school friend (now business partner and CMO), Tarun Singh, who was studying in Boston University at the time. Tarun noticed the same problems at his school and quickly expanded Campus Protein to his school and then the entire Boston area.
The final piece fell into place when they entered into a business competition and won $100,000 to scale up. With the up-front money, they could negotiate deals with supplement makers to improve their margins, and expand to more college to increase sales.
Today, Campus Protein is in over 300 colleges across the US and shows no signs of slowing down. But none of that would have happened if Russell hadn’t been hyper-focused on a certain type of customer and their needs.
Customer Experience As A Growth Channel
One thing Russell learned early on was that college students had very specific needs. Thus, they craved a personalized experience. They needed help with what supplements to buy based on their goals and budget.
At the local supplement stores, Russell noticed that they couldn’t get any of that. Firstly, they sold to everyone so they didn’t have any expertise specific to the college student market. Secondly, they were trained to sell as much product as possible, so they’d often push supplements that weren’t right for the students.
Russell realized that Campus Protein needed to really understand the needs of a college student to own the market. That meant the company needed to hire students who were into fitness. And so the Campus Rep program was born.
A Campus Rep's main job is sales and marketing. They grow awareness for the brand and encourage help other students achieve their fitness goals.
By recruiting Reps in each college, Campus Protein could keep their core team lean while maintaining a large salesforce on the ground.
This has been the real key to their growth. These Reps are their ideal customers, and they hang out with other prospective customers. Thus, they provide a customer experience that’s far better than anything other brands can offer.
Imagine you’re a college student. Before Campus Protein came along, you had to figure out which products to buy, got pressured into buying unnecessary stuff, and ended up with very little money left over.
Today, you probably have a Campus Protein rep in your gym, wearing a branded tank. He’s giving out free tasters, providing you with workout tips and nutrition advice, listens to your goals, and hands you a card with a link where you can buy exactly what you need for much less. How’s that for customer experience?
Extending The Experience Online
Campus Protein may be marketing offline with their campus reps but all their sales come from their Shopify website. That’s the best way for them to scale.
Here’s how it works - they have warehouses across the country where they stock product. Because of their deep customer understanding, they know exactly what to stock and what not to stock. The campus reps then go around building awareness, and students head to the website to make their purchase. Because of the warehouse network, they get their products pretty quickly.
Because the actual sale is made online, the website becomes a crucial part of their strategy. If they don’t provide the same level of customer support and care their reps do, they’ll drop the ball and lose the sale. More importantly, they’ll lose trust. One bad experience could hurt their reputation across an entire college.
To replicate the one-on-one support of their reps, they used website chat. In the early days, they started with Zopim Chat. But as they grew, they found that it was too basic for their needs. They couldn’t tell if someone they were chatting with was an existing customer or a new one. They couldn’t tell if it was a new conversation or a continuation of one that happened in a different channel. It was a poor experience for the customer and the company.
Remember, they have a small core team, so they needed a customer support tool that could do the heavy lifting for them. That’s when they came across Gorgias and it allowed them to create an online experience that increased conversions and revenues.
For starters, Gorgias combines all their customer support channels (chat, email, phone, social media) into one unified view, and builds a profile of each customer. When a student chats with them, Campus Protein know if they are a previous customer, can see all past conversations and sales in their dashboard, and can provide relevant support.
Compare that to the typical support you get when you’re forced to repeat your previous conversations each time you chat with someone.
To speed things up, Gorgias also has macros and templated responses based on the question. For example, if a customer wants to know where their order is, Gorgias presents the support agent with a templated response that pulls in the customer’s order details from Shopify. With just a click, the support agent can answer the question in near real-time.
Automations like this also frees up time for support agents to provide more detailed answers to complicated questions, like when a student asks for nutrition advice. Again, they can provide the same level of caring support that reps do and this helps increase sales.
Another way they increase sales is by detecting if customers are spending a lot of time on a certain page and initiating a chat with them. For example, if someone is on the checkout for too long, Gorgias automatically pops a chat and ask them if they need help. This directly increases conversions.
Perhaps the most important way Campus Protein uses customer support to increase revenues is by converting feedback into website and product changes. For every question that comes in, they try to understand why it wasn’t obvious on the website, and make the appropriate change. This leads to fewer tickets of the same type and higher conversions.
Widening The Moat
At the end of the day, Campus Protein is just another retailer. In an industry like supplements, anyone can replicate their model, or existing brands like GNC can enter the market. So why hasn’t that happened yet?
Like Warren Buffett says, every business needs to have a moat, something that defends them against competition. In Campus Protein’s case, it’s their deep customer knowledge and the personal level of support they provide.
A college student is introduced to Campus Protein via the local rep. They’re nice, helpful, and remember the student’s name each time. When the student goes online, they have the same experience. Their previous conversations are remembered and even their most complicated questions are answered with care.
Now, you may not be able to create a rep army like Campus Protein for your eCommerce business, but you sure can create an online customer experience that sets you apart from others in your industry.
With Gorgias, whenever a customer creates a ticket on any channel, you have all their information like previous conversations and sales, right there. Instead of asking the customer if they’ve written in before or what their order numbers are, you can get straight to the important stuff. And with all the templates, macros, and automations available, you can do it in minutes.
When a customer has to decide between purchasing at a store where they forget about you after the sale, versus one where they treat you like a friend and remember you a year later, which do you think they’ll choose?
Give your customers a great experience and, like Campus Protein, you’ll have a business that keeps going up.
Curious about how Gorgias can optimize customer service? Click here to learn more.
Gorgias Builds Strong Relationships With Aircall
Aircall is a cloud-based call center software made for support teams. With Aircall, support agents can track everything from A-Z, on any device, with zero hardware to manage. The right tool to increase agent efficiency and customer satisfaction!
Aircall Makes the Gorgias Helpdesk Complete
After listening to early customer feedback, we quickly realized we needed to find a phone integration that empowered users to manage voice calls as easily as emails or chats.
Traditional helpdesk integrations simply log calls as tickets. We wanted to go one step further and associate the phone call with the right customer. This way, agents can see the full conversation history between the brand and the customer.
By building Aircall’s cloud-based phone into the Gorgias platform, agents can also quickly edit orders while on the phone based on the case history they see. After a call has ended, all notes will be added to the correct customer’s profile along with a link to the full call recording.
Why Aircall was the Right Choice
Looking back, the partnership has been mutually beneficial and seamlessly implemented.
Aircall has a well-documented API that our dev team could easily use. We were able to build a working and robust phone integration with Aircall in just a few hours. Four days later, after QA testing, the new solutions were fully functional and ready to use.
Since Gorgias and Aircall both seek to provide the best customer experience possible, cross-company visibility has become a valuable source of new leads and sales. Furthermore, we conduct regular catch-up meetings and share a Slack channel to make sure both teams work hand-in-hand to create the best integration and the best results. The partnership with Aircall is super valuable for both our customers and our respective companies and we strongly recommend each others.
If you're already a Gorgias customer, head to your account and go to Integrations to connect Aircall. If not, you can create an account here and get started in a few minutes.
Event #1: Optimizing Brand Experience To Drive Revenue
Last thursday, we organized our first event at Gorgias. It was the perfect opportunity to celebrate our new round of funding and recent moving to a new office in SOMA, while discussing brand culture and customer experience.
Special thanks to our speakers Renee L. Halvorsen from Marine Layer, Alicia Levine from Sunski, Dorian Greenow from Keto-Mojo and Anthony Benedettini from Dry Farm Wines.
 |
Here are the key takeaways you should remember:
- As an e-commerce brand, you cannot compete on price with Amazon and powerful dropshippers. That’s why brand experience is your key differentiation factor.
- Building a strong brand experience requires to be present on each distribution channel. Don’t let your resellers do the job for you! Sunski for example prepares “environment kits” for their resellers and marketplaces. This way, customers can experience Sunski’s spirit beyond its website.
- When building brand experience, your community is your key success factor. Create a pool of ambassadors who will promote your brand, and reward them with presents, promo codes, and dedicated attention.
- Bet on your own team! Building a great mindset within your team will help you create a strong and consistent brand image. At Keto-Mojo, each member of the team does customer service, so that everyone focus on what customers really need. Besides, the founder should inspire a culture of passion and dedication to the product.
You missed our event? Don’t worry, it was the very first of many!
Curious about how Gorgias can optimize customer service? Create an account here and get started in a few minutes!
Thank you, interns!
Announcing the ReCharge integration
Recharge is the most popular subscription app in the Shopify app store and is the preferred solution for Shopify Plus stores. Over 10,000 Shopify merchants chose ReCharge to help sell products on a recurring basis, including stores like Dr. Axe, Hubble Contacts, and 5 Hour Energy.
The challenge is, when a customer has an issue with their subscription, the support team needs to jump between their helpdesk, Shopify and the ReCharge platform to fix the problem. This negatively impacts response time. Agents end up wasting hours per week going to ReCharge to skip a box for a customer, edit a subscription, etc. One of the key advantages of using Gorgias is to manage all your customer support in one place. A few months ago, our customer Darn Good Yarn asked us to build an integration with ReCharge. They no longer wanted to switch between ReCharge, Shopify and their helpdesk. This was completely aligned with our vision, so we decided to build it.
Today, we're excited to announce we've partnered with ReCharge to launch this integration.
Here are the key benefits:
- Display ReCharge subscriptions next to support tickets.
- Edit ReCharge subscriptions in one click from your helpdesk: refund charges, skip monthly payments or cancel subscriptions from Gorgias
- When a customer ask to edit their subscription, you can send them an auto-response with the link to manage the subscription.
“Gorgias gives us a holistic view of our customers. This way we can provide them with fast and personalized help”
Nicole Snow, DarnGoodYarn
Let’s take the example of Averill John. She wants to cancel her subscription to the Yummy Box and has just sent an email to your support.
Here is how your helpdesk looks like:
You can see that Astrid has been assigned to this ticket and that this ticket is tagged “Ambassador”. It means that Averill is one of your super loyal customers.
On the right, you can see the ReCharge account data of Averill. Here, Averill has a monthly subscription to the Yummy Box and will be charged on the 15th of October.
Astrid can skip the October charge in one-click on the “Skip charge on subscription” button. It will immediately set the action within ReCharge. Response time? Less than 1 minute!
If you're already a Gorgias customer, head to your account and go to Integrations to connect ReCharge. If not, you can create an account here and get started in a few minutes.
Announcing the Aircall integration
One of the key advantages of using Gorgias is to provide a unified support experience to your customers across all channels. A few months ago, some of our customers asked us to build a phone integration. Traditional helpdesk integrations simply log calls as tickets. We wanted to go one step further and associate the phone call with the right customer.
Today, we're excited to announce we've partnered with Aircall to build this integration.
Aircall arms small-to-medium sized business (SMBs) with a phone system built for modern business. With zero hardware to manage, dozens of integration options to explore, and the ability to add local numbers in more than 40 countries, support teams can easily provide phone support in minutes.
Here are the benefits of this new integration:
- When a customer calls your company in Aircall, it creates a ticket in Gorgias and automatically matches it with the corresponding Shopify customer. This way, your staff can edit orders while they are on the phone with the customer.
- Your team sees all previous interactions they had with each customer, under their timeline.
- Get omni-channel statistics. Gorgias stats include Aircall phone data. For instance, you can monitor if you're getting more return requests over the phone or through Facebook Messenger.
If you're already a Gorgias customer, head to your account and go to Integrations to connect Aircall. If not, you can create an account here and get started in a few minutes.
Building delightful customer interactions starts in your inbox
