Customer service professionals (and the customer service skills they possess) are at the frontline of creating great brand experiences. 

All too often, customer service workers aren’t valued as truly skilled or strategic members of the business. It’s a shame (and a missed opportunity), given how big a role customer service agents play in the success of a business. 

According to 2022 McKinsey research, three out of five customer service leaders view attracting, training, and retaining skilled customer service workers as a top business priority.

My name is Deja Jefferson, and I’m the CX and Consumer Insights Manager at Topicals. We’ve upskilled our customer experience associates with both soft and hard skills to give our customers complete support and unwavering confidence when making a purchase.

Here are 16 of the most important hard and soft skills for customer support that we train for at Topicals, and that you should build your support team to possess. 

Top customer service soft skills to manage any situation

Customer service soft skills are the non-technical, interpersonal traits agents use while supporting shoppers. Ultimately, soft skills help to problem solve through good communication and clear thinking. 

These aren’t technical skills, nor are they easily quantifiable, but they are vitally important to improve customer communications.

1) Positive language

Your support agents need to have a firm understanding of how their tone of voice and word choice affect customer satisfaction. 

Using positive language is a valuable customer service technique that steers conversations toward positive emotions, which generate positive outcomes for customers and your business. 

Examples of positive language used in customer service

Here are some examples of how your team can use positive language in customer service situations.

• “Absolutely! We will definitely get this sorted out for you.“
• “Good idea! I will do everything I can to make it right.”
• “Oh, that certainly sounds like something I can help you with.”
• “I’m confident it will work out and we’ll get your product to you as soon as possible.”
• “Thanks! I hope you have a fantastic day. Please reach out again if I can assist you with anything else.”

For further clarification, here are a few examples of what these same interactions might look like using negative language instead:

• “Oh no! I’ll see if I can fix your problem.”
• “That sounds awful; I wish that didn’t happen.”
• “Ah, I’m not sure if I can fix it, but I’ll try.”
• “Don’t be upset; this is why I’m here.”
• “There you go. Let me know if anything else goes wrong.”

Tips to use positive language in your customer service communications 

You can get a sense of a person’s positive language skills early on, even during an interview when hiring for customer service roles. 

If your support agents need help using positive language for any scenario, write customer service scripts or Macros that incorporate positive language. This helps all your agents stay positive, whether they're brand-new employees or established team members.

“I ensure that customer service provided by Topicals not only exhibits empathy when issues arise but should be seamlessly integrated throughout the entire transaction process. Our priority is to ensure that our customers feel fully supported at every step.”

—Deja Jefferson, CX and Consumer Insights Manager at Topicals

2) Showing empathy

It's a key customer service skill to show empathy for a shopper, especially when a difficult situation comes up. 

When customers share their challenges and frustrations, it's essential for them to feel assured that their concerns are being understood by empathetic listeners. In the realm of targeted skincare for specific skin conditions, we must consider the vulnerability of consumers as they seek out new skincare solutions. Let's be honest — they've received recommendations from friends, witnessed numerous skin influencers endorse their preferred "featured" products for various skin types, and might be following advice from various dermatologists, (if they're lucky). I ensure that customer service provided by Topicals not only exhibits empathy when issues arise but should be seamlessly integrated throughout the entire transaction process. Our priority is to ensure that our customers feel fully supported at every step.

Examples of empathy in customer service

Take a look at this hypothetical customer issue with an angry customer:

• Hypothetical issue: “When my order arrived, it was three days late and broken. This was supposed to be a birthday gift for my daughter, and now I’m not going to have this in time to give it to her on that day. I’m angry, and I demand a refund.”
• Empathetic Response: “Wow. That does sound frustrating, and it’s not the experience you were hoping for when you chose to shop with us. I totally see why you’re angry. Let me find out what I can do for you.”

Tips to foster empathy among your customer service team 

Empathy is hard to teach. At Topicals, I train my team to get inside the customer’s mind. 

Our customers are real people facing challenging (and highly personal) skin issues, from Hyperpigmentation, Atrophic/Acne Scarring, Keratosis Pilaris, and so much more.

Sure, some customers lose their patience when they feel defeated — that’s unavoidable. But most of them are feeling frustrated and hopeless. And my team has an opportunity to give them hope that we can work together to help fix the customer’s issue. 

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3) Active listening skills

Whether in a physical retail setting or digital, active listening is a key step to adapting to nuanced questions or navigating tense situations with customers.

Active listening is listening with the intent to obtain information and understand it, rather than simply listening with the intent to reply. 

Examples of active listening in customer service

Active listening requires the agent to acknowledge that they understand our customers during a conversation, and provide feedback or ask follow-up questions when appropriate.

First, let’s look at a hypothetical customer issue:

• “Hey, I ordered the Post-Acne Kit several weeks ago and still haven’t received my package. I haven’t gotten an email with tracking updates. Can you tell me whether or not my order was shipped?”

Here’s what a generic, canned response looks like:

• “Thank you for contacting us. Did you receive a confirmation email with your order number?”

But when you use active listening skills, the reply becomes more like this:

• "Hi there, we apologize for the delay in your order. Rest assured, we're actively resolving the issue with our shipping partners to determine its status. If it's considered lost, we'll promptly send a replacement. It may take 24-48 hrs for us to hear back but we will provide and update to you tomorrow. We appreciate your patience and apologize for any inconvenience.”

The second example response showcases that the support agent has heard the problem and is actively looking for a solution.

Tips to incorporate active listening in your customer service strategy 

Use active listening alongside a helpdesk like Gorgias, which helps your customer service representatives “remember” past interactions. It’s like active listening but at scale.  

Gorgias displays customer information like past conversations and orders, current orders, and data from your other apps (like loyalty points or product review scores). 

Your agents can use this information to avoid asking for information the customer already gave, and automatically pull it into their responses with variables like [Last Order #] or [Shipping Address]. 

Related reading: Our full guide on personalized customer service

4) Time management

Time management is the ability to get the most important things done, with a limited number of hours in a day. 

As a customer service skill, it's make-or-break: The better an agent's time management, the quicker their first response time and the more tickets they can resolve.

Customer service response times tremendously impact your store’s bottom line. If a response to a query takes too long, customer satisfaction plummets. 

Examples of time management in customer service

In a customer support environment, managing time effectively allows an agent to handle a larger volume of tickets (without breaking their back).

Effective time management is a team sport. You need to make sure: 

• Your automations (like Rules) are saving your team from repetitive tasks
• Your team is using resources (like Macros) to avoid typing messages from scratch
• Your team is prioritizing customer service requests to handle the most important tickets first

Tips to improve time management with your customer service team 

Your agents have better things to do than copy/paste order statuses all day. We use Gorgias’s Automate at Topicals to handle repetitive questions (like “Where is my order?” or “Where do you ship?”) so that my team can spend their time on issues that need human attention. 

Plus, Automate helps customers, even when my team isn’t online. 

5) Patience and awareness of tense situations

Support services is an industry that is stressful by nature, largely because most shoppers’ problems are a little tense. 

Your agents need to understand when a situation is tense and what to do to defuse the emotional heat:

• Recognize the situation as emotionally tense
• Detach from taking anything said personally
• Maintain control over internal negative emotions
• Employ empathetic responses to the customer

Examples of patience and awareness of tense situations in customer service

We know we can’t make everyone happy, but we can always make sure people feel heard. In this example, a shopper shared on Instagram that the product we were featuring didn’t work for them. 

Instagram comments are public-facing and we always want to be sure we address feedback from disappointed customers in this kind of arena. 

So, we apologized and recognized what the commentator said. Then, we suggested carrying the conversation to a private DM so we could find a solution. 

Tips to boost patience and handle awareness of tense situations 

In addition, support agents need to care for themselves, drink plenty of water, and get enough rest. 

"People underestimate the emotional and mental resilience that working in CX requires. It’s hard not to take things personally sometimes."

—Grace Choi, Customer Experience Team Lead at TUSHY

When an agent takes time for self-care, they are prepared to be resilient to the job's stresses and approach customer problems with understanding. It’ll improve both a customer's patience with your rep as well as their ultimate satisfaction.

6) Reflecting

Reflecting is the act of repeating a concern to the person speaking — and it’s a crucial customer service skill your agents must master. 

It will make your shoppers feel heard, which is the foundation of a great experience.

Reflecting accomplishes three things:

1. Enables the speaker to hear their own thoughts spoken back to them so that they can focus on what they have to say and what they feel.
2. Displays empathy to the speaker, letting them know that you are trying to understand the concern at hand.
3. Encourages the speaker to continue expressing themselves.

Example of reflecting in customer service

Let’s see what reflecting looks like in action in a customer support context.

• Hypothetical issue: “I’ve been having trouble getting my Scar Primer to work properly. I’ve written in three times for help with the same problem, and it keeps happening. Does this product even work?”
• Reflective response: “Hi, I’m happy to help. Sounds like the Scar Primer is giving you trouble. Are you not seeing results, or is it causing a breakout? I’ve got some solutions to try for either.”

Tips to improve reflection in your customer service strategy 

Sometimes, the most challenging part of solving a problem is understanding what the problem actually is.

Here are a couple of clarifying phrases to keep in your back pocket. 

• “It sounds like ..., is this correct?” 
• “Did I miss anything?” 
• “Is there anything else you want to make sure I understand?” 

7) Maintaining brand voice

A strong brand voice is crucial for any brand, but keeping the brand tone consistent in customer comms is a challenge — especially for technical tickets.

Example of maintaining brand voice in customer service

Skilled customer service reps know that maintaining brand voice in customer communications goes a long way toward improving customer experiences. 

Personalized Macros help brands plug in automated responses for commonly asked questions. You can build pre-made responses that are infused with your brand voice, so you can maintain fast and effective response times without sacrificing your core messaging.  

At Topicals, we use Macros to help maintain brand voice while handling a high volume of customer service tickets. We’ve built a library of templated responses based on our audience persona of skincare-obsessed Gen Z-ers and millennials.  

As a result, 69% of tickets at Topicals are now dealt with using automations.

Tips to encourage customer service reps to maintain brand voice 

In addition to Macros, consider following up with customers using SMS messaging. 

At Topicals, we tested out SMS so customer service reps could follow up with customers. The less formal format made it easy to keep up with our brand persona of Gen-Z and millennials who prefer quick messaging over emails or phone support.  

We were blown away by the positive response. Customers were willing to open up about their experiences and were happy to chat about how much they loved our products. 

Important hard skills for any customer service rep

Beyond the soft skills we’ve discussed above, there are hard skills every customer service representative needs to master.  

Customer service techniques or hard skills are defined as the hands-on, technical requirements of the job. This entails understanding the company's products and the tools and technology that your customer service team uses. 

8) Product knowledge 

The most obvious customer service skill your agents (and your virtual assistants) must possess is the ability to answer questions and communicate information about the products you sell. 

An essential part of customer service training is making sure your agents really understand the product, so they can answer in-depth questions and questions about how to use the product:

• “Can I use Faded with my retinol at night?”
• “How long will it take for me to see results?”
• “Will this work on my melasma?

If hiring, you may occasionally come across an applicant who has existing knowledge of your products, which is a bonus. Still, you should maintain a knowledge base that gives your support team (and your customers, if you chose to make your knowledge base public) easy access to the information they need.

Product knowledge includes product ingredients, uses, compatibility, troubleshooting, and more. Your training should also include process and policy information, like shipping times, packaging, returns and exchanges, and other common questions in ecommerce.

Tips to expand your product knowledge 

• Create a comprehensive knowledge base or FAQ page so support agents can easily access the product information they need.
• Have your product development team brief support agents on new products and product updates.
• Identify frequently asked product questions and ensure that your agents have canned responses to these questions.

↗️ Check out our Director of Support’s guide to customer service training for more guidance.

9) Language and grammar

Your support staff doesn’t need to illustrate beautiful images with their wordplay — actually, that risks confusing the customer. However, they do need a sharp understanding of the language they’re using and know how to use proper grammar and spelling.

Test your prospective agents on the following:

• Spelling
• Punctuation
• Word use

Tips for improving your language and grammar

If your agents are having trouble with spelling or grammar, consider giving them access to tools they can incorporate into their day-to-day work. 

A few great language and grammar tools to consider include:

• Gorgias, which includes spell check
• Grammarly
• ProWritingAid
• Hemingway App

10) Typing speed

Typing speed may not sound like the most crucial skill on this list, but when you break it down faster typing speed = faster response times. 

90% of customers rate an immediate response as "important" or "very important" when they have a support request. So, the faster you can move through tickets, the more satisfied your customers are likely to be.  

Tips to optimize typing speed

Take a typing speed test to know exactly how your typing ability stacks up. 

Generally speaking, here’s a ranking of words per minute (WPM): 

• Below average: 20 WPM or less 
• Average: Between 20 - 40 WPM
• Above average: 40 - 60 WPM 

If you’re a professional typist, you’re likely typing at a whopping 60 - 90 WPM (or more!) 

11) Email

A bulk of communication with your customers will take place via email. 

Make sure your support staff has excellent email communication skills in place and that they understand how to leverage your email platform’s features.        

One great way to make email customer support more streamlined and convenient for your team is to utilize a single platform for all of your customer support channels. 

With Gorgias, agents can respond to emails, SMS messages, and social media messages from a single, easy-to-use dashboard rather than having to master each channel individually. 

Tips for better emails

• Include the recipient’s name in the body of the email, and use a professional signature at the end of the message.
• Speed up your email response time with automated responses to common customer questions.
• Create an efficient system for responding to email inquiries so that nothing slips through the cracks.
• Limit back-and-forth responses and reduce your resolution times by requesting all necessary information in your initial email to the customer.

↗️ Check out our email templates for a way to scale quality email customer service.‍

‍12) Indirect channels (like social media)

Considering 59% of the world's population uses some form of social media, it makes sense to arm your support staff to field questions and concerns that come through your social media comments. 

Build a clear protocol to handle public tickets. Will you move the conversation to another communication platform or handle it where it starts? Your support agent should know what you expect as well as how to use the social media platforms you promote your brand on.

If you don’t have a helpdesk, you’re missing out on opportunities to provide great experiences and turn more casual browsers into loyal buyers:

“Gorgias has so much integration between Shopify, Instagram, and Facebook. The Facebook ad comment has been very interesting. People have been converting right there, thanks to simple social interaction.” —Cody Szymanski, Customer Experience Manager, Shinesty

↗️ Learn more about how Shinesty earns more sales and answers questions faster with Gorgias.

Tips for social media customer service teams

• Move public negative customer interactions to a private channel (like DMs) so that they don't damage your brand image.
• Don’t worry about being on every social media channel, only use the ones where your customers are the most active. 
• Monitor social conversations that are relevant to your brand with social listening tools.

↗️ Read our complete guide on social media and customer service for more tips.

13) Omnichannel customer service

Most customer relationships span multiple channels. As your brand grows, make sure your customer service agents are comfortable switching from one channel to the next. 

If you don’t have a helpdesk, this will require a bit of tab-shuffling throughout the day to respond to comments and messages from all these different platforms. 

That said, a helpdesk will save your agents hours every week by unifying your omnichannel approach to one platform, where agents can see every past interaction — be it an hour-long phone call or a 5-star review — and respond to customers without leaving the platform.

Tips for omnichannel customer support

Offering customer support via multiple channels such as live chat, email, call centers, and social media provides customers with more touchpoints for contacting your company. 

A helpdesk that can unify customer support interactions across channels in one view is helpful for agents because it reduces the amount of app swapping they have to do. It also gives every customer's entire interaction history with your brand across all channels. 

Here are a few effective tips to optimize your omnichannel support approach:

• Use a centralized customer support dashboard so support reps can access messages from multiple channels in a single location.
• Offer mobile-friendly customer support options.
• Create a system for efficiently transferring customer interactions between support channels.

↗️ Check out our complete guide to omnichannel customer service for more tips.

Ecommerce-specific customer service skills

The skills we’ve covered so far can apply to agents that work to manage customer issues for in-person or online experiences. 

For those agents who solely work in ecommerce, there are four more valuable skills to help improve customer satisfaction with your brand. 

14) Live chat

Nearly 80% of customers told PwC that a speedy, helpful answer is the most important aspect of good customer service. So, brands are turning to messaging-based customer support channels (like live chat support, WhatsApp, and SMS texting) to meet these customer expectations. 

If your support team isn’t trained on these fast-moving channels, you could miss out on opportunities for sales. 

Example to incorporate live chat in your customer service communications 

In addition to the technical skill required to maneuver these channels within your helpdesk, your staff should refine their skillset to drive sales with live chat. Live chat can boost your conversion rate by 12%, and it’s made a huge difference in raising our purchase rate and lowering our return rate here at Topicals:

Tips for enhancing live chat skills

• Use templated Macros to help your live chat agents address customer questions more efficiently.
• Use automated responses to filter out repetitive questions for your agents.
• Ensure clear communication by prioritizing proper spelling and grammar.

Check out our detailed guide to live chat support for more tips and tricks. 

15) Decision making 

When talking directly with customers you need to be able to solve their issues quickly — and that involves fast decision-making. 

It’s the responsibility of the customer service rep to take care of the customer by providing the best possible solution to their problem right away.  

Example of decision-making in customer service

Sometimes what the customer wants isn’t beneficial to your business’s bottom line. If that happens, your agents need to be able to weigh this one issue with the customers’ entire lifetime value. 

Let’s look at a hypothetical example. 

• “Hey, I ordered the Faded serum in the mail. When it was delivered, the box was damaged. The serum works just fine, but considering the way it was delivered, I’d like my money back. 

While the delivery person didn't take great care to keep the packaging intact, the customer was clear that the serum works as advertised. It might not be realistic for your brand’s bottom line to offer a replacement in this case. 

Instead of giving the customer something that could hurt your bottom line, a strong customer service agent might make a quick decision:

• “Wow, I’m so sorry to hear the package was damaged — our packaging is really cute and we’re proud of the design work. Luckily, it sounds like our Faded serum is living up to its expectations, which we are so happy to hear. We are happy to offer you 30% off your next order with this special discount code.”  

Sometimes, bending your rules to keep a customer happy (even if it’s not the most cost-effective) can pay you back with repeat purchases, positive reviews, recommendations, and more. 

Tips to empower your customer service team to make informed decisions

In your customer service policies and training, be extremely clear about what kinds of situations are black-and-white, where the agent must follow company policy. 

But also be very clear where there's some gray area, where the agent can deviate from the stated policy to delight a customer or make sure an interaction ends positively. 

Make sure your customer service reps know what they are allowed to do on their own, and when they need a manager's review.

16) Pre-sales support 

In a physical retail setting, employees can welcome customers, ask if they need any help, and give customers the information (and encouragement) they need to make a purchase. 

Pre-sale support means you are able to communicate with a shopper during their browsing experience — helping the shopper make a confident purchasing decision before they click “checkout.” 

It's tricky to pull this off in an ecommerce setting, but it can have a huge impact on the ROI of your support team. That’s why it's important to think critically about how your brand offers pre-sale support and give agents the skills to pull it off.

Examples of pre-sales support in ecommerce customer service 

Empower your customer service reps to speak with shoppers during their browsing experience. 

At Topicals, we offer a lot of education about our products, so we can arm agents with the knowledge they need to talk about Topicals with customers. 

Here are a few examples of common pre-sale questions your agents might see: 

• Product questions: How does this product work? 
• Inventory questions: When will this product be back in stock? 
• Shipping questions: Do you ship to my location? 
• Technical questions: How do I use this product? 
• Sourcing or ethical questions: Do you use sustainably sourced materials? 
• Pricing questions: When will this item go on sale?  

Tips to establish pre-sale support in your customer service communications

For brands that use Gorgias, Convert lets you proactively reach out to customers based on their browsing behavior. 

This way, you can ask if the customer has questions, remind them of a timely promotion or free shipping offer, point them to a product recommendation quiz, or even offer a discount to nudge them toward a purchase. 

Level up your customer service skills with training 

When you’re looking for a new agent, it’s a great idea to hire for the skills in this list right out the gate. Then, continue to offer training opportunities for your customer service reps to master their craft. 

Training for the skills listed in this article has a great impact on your company’s reputation and revenue.

• If you’re trying to level up your agents, take a look at our Support Leader's Guide to Better Customer Service Training. 
• If you’re trying to level up your own skills, we’ve compiled a list of excellent resources to gain customer service certifications. 

Once you’re ready to put those skills to use, sign up for Gorgias to turn your customer support team into a revenue-generating machine.

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Customers who use chat support are 2.8 times more likely to convert than those who don’t. Despite its proven impact, misconceptions around chat’s limited scope — reducing it to only live interactions — persist, creating a missed opportunity for the online stores that could benefit from it the most. 

The reality is chat is a versatile tool that can adjust to company needs, whether it’s a self-service tool that runs on its own, a channel for providing live support, or both.

For ecommerce businesses on the fence about incorporating chat into their customer service operations, we're here to clear up five of the most common myths about chat’s functions, costs, and benefits. After that, we’ll lay out a five-step guide to efficiently set up chat so you can start delighting customers now. 

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What’s the difference between Live Chat and Chat?

Live chat is real-time communication that allows customers to interact with a customer service representative instantly. It's the digital equivalent of walking into a store and speaking directly with an employee.

On the other hand, chat is more than just live interactions; it includes automated responses that ensure customers receive support, even without agents. This hybrid approach allows businesses to deliver 24/7 customer support.

Chat solutions, like Gorgias Chat, blend live chat's on-demand nature with automation and AI. Chat allows businesses to provide support regardless of time zone and staff availability.

‎Five chat myths debunked

Confusion about what chat can do often discourages businesses from leveraging the powerful customer service tool. Below, we’ll be myth-busting five common misconceptions about chat to reveal its true potential.

Myth 1: Chat is expensive

Contrary to popular belief, chat can be a cost-effective solution to operate customer service. Brands can earn 10x more revenue by implementing chat and, in turn, operate a smaller support team. Support agents can be costly, so using chat to deflect tickets can be a quick way to optimize both time and budget.

Myth 2: Chat is only for big companies

Chat's usefulness transcends business size and breaks down silos in customer service by allowing customers to get answers on their own time. As a customer service tool, any business engaging with customers can benefit greatly from it to tackle pre-sales questions and resolve issues efficiently.

Myth 3: Chat requires staff to operate

As previously mentioned, chat can handle both live and automated interactions, which means no agents are required to manage it. Online stores can set up chat on their websites, allowing it to run 24/7. Businesses can decide whether to enable live chat or keep it fully automated.

Related: Customer service outsourcing: why, when, and how

Myth 4: Chat increases your tickets

Due to automation-based conversations in chat, ticket volume does not necessarily increase when customers use chat. A ticket is only created when a customer converses with a live agent. Unlike using social media as a support channel, chat empowers customers to self-serve and resolve issues on their own.

Myth 5: Chat decreases customer satisfaction

Contrary to popular belief, chat has a positive impact on customer satisfaction. Based on Gorgias data, brands experienced a 1% increase in CSAT when using automation, including chat. The improved satisfaction can be attributed to the efficiency of automated answers and the absence of wait times.

Myth 6: Email is just as good as chat

While email remains a staple, chat offers immediate engagement in the shopping flow that can create opportunities for upselling. For example, an on-site campaign toolkit like Gorgias Convert becomes a seamless extension of your sales and support strategy with the ability to recommend products within chat. 

Since chat simplifies the process of reaching out, it is also easier for companies to build trust with their customers. The fewer hurdles customers have to jump over to get an answer, the more readily they will trust your brand.

Read more: You’re doing it wrong: better ways to use email as a customer service channel

The best Chat setup in 4 easy steps

Now that you know chat isn’t expensive and can give you a great return on investment, you can start making the most of it. Here’s the optimal way to set up chat in four, simple steps.

1. Customize your chatbot avatar

A study from the University of Göttingen found that customers value clarity on whether they're conversing with a bot or a human agent. Their satisfaction did not dwindle when issues went unresolved, knowing they were interacting with a chatbot.

You can add “Bot” to your chat name on Gorgias whenever automated messages are sent. Enabling this improves the customer experience by letting them know exactly who they are talking to.

In addition, customizing your chatbot avatar to your company logo instead of leaving it as the default robot avatar adds a personal touch. If live chat is enabled, uploading individual profile photos for your agents will help customers feel more comfortable since they’re able to associate a face with the agent they’re talking to.

2. Set up Quick Responses to answer frequently asked questions

Frequently asked questions can quickly dominate your inbox, but with Quick Responses, you can offer fully automated answers. This allows you to provide customer service on an international scale without worrying about increasing agent workload.

Gorgias Automate upgrades your customer experience with an entire automation toolkit that includes Quick Responses in Chat. You can display up to six Quick Responses at a time, providing customers with immediate answers to their questions.

3. Set live chat hours

While many assume live chat needs to be available for extended hours, the truth is that live chat hours can be tailored to what suits your brand best, even if that's just one hour a day. The key is to clearly communicate when an agent will respond to customers outside of these hours. 

Customers prefer live chat because of the lack of wait times, so if you’re offering live chat, be sure your agents meet customer expectations by answering chat conversations in 30 seconds. Strengthening customer relationships is crucial to building trust and, therefore, increasing your ecommerce retention rate. On Gorgias, setting your business hours will directly update how Chat appears to customers.

4. Build a Help Center to provide Article Recommendations in Chat

A help center is a database of articles that range from frequently asked questions and guides to video tutorials and policies. On Gorgias, Chat can use your Help Center articles to enrich automated answers with detailed information. For instance, fashion and apparel stores can create a sizing guide article, which Chat can then reference, guiding customers directly to the information they need. 

Accomplish the work of 3 agents with Gorgias Automate

Gorgias Automate enabled luxury luggage company July to handle the equivalent workload of three extra agents. With tools like Chat, July went from handling repetitive queries to focusing on more significant customer issues. This significant change enhanced their support efficiency and customer satisfaction. 

Want to become a success story? Discover how Gorgias Automate can streamline your support workflow and elevate customer experience. Book a demo today.

Your customer service is the lifeblood of your business. And, live chat is a central communication channel for your online shoppers. Live chat can make or break your business. When leveraged properly, Shopify live chat can have a tremendous positive impact on sales. You just need to make sure you’re not turning prospects away. 

This article covers a few points.

1. Why live chat is crucial for your online revenue
2. Shopify live chat support mistakes you need to avoid at all costs
3. Actionable advice to solve these common issues  

Now, learn why your growth depends on your live chat processes. 

Why is using live chat on your Shopify store important?

If you don’t yet have live chat or you haven’t experienced the potential of optimizing your communication processes on this channel, you may wonder what the big deal is. Yeah, your customers want to talk to you at all hours, but is it really that important? 

Let’s look at a few facts about live chat so you can think about it.   

• 38% of online consumers are more likely to make a purchase if a retailer offers live chat support (Crazy Egg). 
• Site visitors who engage with your live chat are worth 4.5X more than those who do not (ICMI). 
• Live chat has the highest satisfaction level of any other customer support communication channel at 92% (Inc). 

Now, here’s what might happen if you leave your shoppers dissatisfied. 

• It can take 12 satisfying customer experiences to make up for a single dissatisfying one (Invesp).
• 95% of customers tell others about their poor experiences with a brand and 87% share positive experiences (Customer Thermometer). 

Are you convinced? If so, it’s time to make sure you get it right. Avoid these live chat mistakes and ensure that you’re getting the most out of one of the most powerful communication channels for online stores. 

Avoid these live chat mistakes on your Shopify store

Now it’s time to get into the nitty-gritty. Here are the mistakes you need to avoid when implementing live chat on your Shopify store. And, below each problem is a simple and actionable fix. 

1. No automation  

When you don’t implement automation, you’re forced to have multiple support agents online at all times or miss the point of live chat altogether. Your customers prefer this communication channel because they want the convenience of self-service. And, without some level of automation, customers might as well send an email because it will take just as long to receive a response. 

The quick fix: Learn your chat platform’s macros or automation processes

Live chat platforms are designed to enhance the workload of your support team. So, naturally, the brand you work with will have a knowledge base with detailed instructions about platform use. Make sure your support agents learn how to implement macros or automations.

2. Too much automation

Before you get too excited and try to automate your entire live chat workflow, stop and think for a moment. It is possible to fully-automate your live chat communications. However, with automation, you can’t always get the answers right. Irrelevant responses to customer queries can trigger immediate dissatisfaction.

The quick fix: Refer to the Pareto principle

In marketing, sales, writing, and even customer service, the Pareto principle, better known as the 80/20 rule can come in handy. This principle states that 80% of the effects for many actions come from 20% of the effort. Spin this just a bit for an easy solution. 

Find out where most of your effort is being spent (maybe 20% of the customer support workload) and use live chat macros to answer the most common customer questions first. Then, the rest of your support agents’ work time to reply to the unique and personal queries (perhaps about 80% of the customer support workload).   

See Also: Love Your Melon Has Automated 25% of Shopify Support Tickets

3. Excessive wait times

While it may not always be possible, especially from the perspective of a brand, up to 79% of consumers want immediate responses and expect answers within 10 minutes. If you’re making your shoppers wait longer than this, you may be losing sales.

One of the biggest benefits of live chat for customer support is its speed .You need to find a solution to accelerate your responses.  

The quick fix: Enlist assistance from other departments

Much of the time, excessive wait times are due to the fact that customer support staff must reach out to external departments and wait for answers before replying to the customer. Try what Nomad did to decrease first-response time by 78% and implement an all-hands support strategy. 

Require each department to directly respond to a number of tickets every day. And, there’s no need to go overboard -- just a few tickets a day from sales, marketing, and/or product teams can have a dramatic positive impact on response and resolution times. 

4. Ineffective language use

Do your agents sound like robots? Are your chat communications overly-formal? If so, you run the risk of turning people away. Consumers appreciate AI, but if they can have better conversations with Siri or Alexa that they do your customer support team, your conversations could use some work. 

The quick fix: Parrot your customers 

Compile some data from your chat sessions and look for patterns. Do you see any recurring words or phrases in your customer communications? If so, add them to your macros and your agents’ vocabulary. When you speak the same language with shoppers, they’re more likely to trust you. 

5. Unskilled or untrained support agents

Customer service agents never get as much credit as they deserve. Without a small army of satisfaction soldiers, you will lose the eCommerce war. So, the work needs to be taken seriously. If you hire low-skilled agents who can’t answer your shoppers’ questions, you will end up with low-quality support operations. Eventually, this mistake can kill your business. 

The quick fix: hire and train well 

Unfortunately, for this problem, there isn’t a “quick” fix. However, if you put in significant energy in the beginning, you may be able to kick up your heels later. Onboard well. 

Fist of all, learn the core skills that your support agents need like active listening and product knowledge. Then, hire like you know what you’re doing. Make sure to ask the right interview questions. And, when onboarding, create stellar customer service training materials. The resources you invest when you bring on new agents will pay for themselves fast. 

6. Emoji overload

Once in a while, if you throw an emoji out there in a live chat conversation with a customer, it can be fun. Emojis can help adjust the mood and keep a message lighthearted. Forbes says that emojis can be worth 1,000 words. But, don’t go overboard. Too many smiley faces and penguins will come across annoying and unprofessional. 

The quick fix: Just stop 🛑 

If it seems like your agents may be on emoji overdrive, just ask them to stop. Remove the use of smileys and strong arms from your operations entirely. It’s better to have no emojis at all than to have too many. Now, if this hasn’t become a problem internally, then don’t worry about it. Skilled agents typically know what’s appropriate and what’s not. 

7. Extreme focus on quantity

In eCommerce and business in general, decision-makers spend end a lot of time looking at numbers. In customer service, you strive for the fastest first-response and resolution times. While this is best practice, don’t let quantity overshadow quality. Some teams become so focused on their numbers that they lose sight of their actual customer satisfaction. Don’t let this be your team. 

The quick fix: Audit your operations 

Instead of playing a numbers game and obsessing about the clock, focus on quality. Customer satisfaction should be the number one goal of every support team and every business, for that matter. Periodically, run an audit on your operations and make sure your satisfaction levels are balanced with your speed. 

8. No data collection

A few weeks ago, I called out to online store owners on Twitter to ask for their experience using live chat to increase sales. I wanted to level the playing field and reach beyond our internal data to find others who had the same experience. And, while each respondent knew that live chat had a positive impact on their Shopify sales, they couldn’t provide real numbers. Instead, they shared anecdotes and vague descriptions and stories. There are two key problems with no data collection for live chat. 

1. When you have no performance data and statistics, you can’t determine the exact areas where you need to improve your processes.
2. A lack of customer data leads to a decrease in customer satisfaction. 

90% of consumers value when an agent knows their account history and current activity within a company. 

The quick fix: Use a full-featured live chat plaform 

If your live chat platform is designed to collect data from your agents and your customers, you can get all of the information you need to collect helpful internal statistics.

Keep track of tickets created, replied, closed, messages, time to resolution. Sort your data by agent or event. Use real numbers from your internal processes to power your customer support strategy. 

With the right reporting system, you can inform your future decisions about hiring, automation, processes, and more. 

9. Missing optimal chat times

Do you know when your website traffic spends most of their time on your website? And, are you making certain that your agents are online during peak times? If not, you will naturally see low response and resolution times. Plus, the people who reach out when nobody is online may never return to your site. 

The quick fix: discover your peak times & make sure you’re staffed 

Use a tool like Google Analytics to generate hour of day and day of week reports. When you have determined the most active times for your website visitors, check to make sure you’re staffed during these times. And, if you see that there are active traffic times that you don’t have anyone available, make adjustments to your staff schedules. 

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10. Ignoring sales opportunities 

Customer support is an avenue for your team to keep shoppers happy. And, happy shoppers evolve into satisfied, long-term customers. But, you may be missing opportunities to upsell your website traffic on current promotions and increase sales even more.  

The quick fix: Share your current promotions with shoppers

When you’re running a promotion, contest, or sale, make sure your support agents are aware. At the beginning or end of every live chat conversation (you’ll have to test to see what works best for your audience), give customers a link to a page with the information or briefly tell them about the promotion. 

11. Disconnected processes

A major problem for many support agents that can kill satisfaction is processes that are disconnected. Your staff can be forced to open multiple tabs to keep a conversation going -- email, social media, live chat, web store. This can take up precious time and also give customers the feeling that your company doesn’t know who they are or what their status is. 

The quick fix: Make sure your live chat is integrated with Shopify and your other communication channels

Gorgias's live chat platform connects with your Shopify data so that you can streamline the resolution on orders, shipping, tracking, and return tickets. Furthermore, it integrates with your email, phone, and social media messaging platforms so that you have access to all customer data, no matter which channel they reach out on. 

Final thoughts

Now you know exactly what not to do and how to fix what you’re doing wrong with live chat on your Shopify store. Apply this advice today and watch your support team nurture more satisfaction with shoppers. If you need a Shopify full-featured live chat platform that provides the data you need to scale your customer support operations and the integrations that can streamline your operations, find out what we have to offer. 

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As ecommerce grew this year, we continued to work toward a decentralized vision of commerce — a model where merchants take back their customer relationships from colossal marketplaces and connect one-to-one with the people who buy their products.

Our merchants had a record-breaking number of these personal interactions in 2021 and that’s worth celebrating. So we’ve collected all the firsts, upgrades and proudest moments to share with you.

Since January 2021 feels like 10 years ago (and also 10 minutes ago, somehow), let’s take a walk down memory lane.

1. 8,000 brands with one thing in common
2. 75 million chances to improve customer experience
3. Our merchants met shoppers wherever they were
4. Assembling the ecommerce A-Team
5. Customer feedback drove our product roadmap
6. Gorgias grew alongside our merchants
7. Looking ahead to 2022

8,000 brands with one thing in common

This year, we helped 8,000 brands support over 290 million shoppers, bringing in customers like Bidabo, Biketart, Lillie's Q and Livinguard.

All together, our customers generated $1.1 billion from their customer support functions in 2021.

Those companies varied in size, from single entrepreneurs still proving their products to enterprise companies scaling beyond their wildest dreams. Differences aside, they united in prioritizing customer experience to grow their businesses.

Some industries came up again and again on our roster, including: 

• Fashion and apparel (like Marine Layer)
• Health and wellness (like Kettlebell Kings)
• Food and beverage (like Olipop)
• Cosmetics (like Ellana)

And because Gorgias powered growth across 110 industries, our customers’ customers were purchasing everything from medical supplies to maritime essentials.

75 million chances to improve customer experience

Every minute of 2021, Gorgias customers closed out an average of 179 tickets. In more relatable terms, they helped more than 10,000 shoppers in the time it took to watch a new episode of Shark Tank.

At the peak of support volume — the five-day period from Thanksgiving and Black Friday through Cyber Monday (BFCM) — our merchants answered 2.5 million tickets. Their support teams drove $25.6 million in sales during that time.

With tools made for that moment, they were able to stay on top of the ticket pile and turn the holiday rush into a gold rush.

The impact didn’t stop there. On average, our merchants received a 4/5 satisfaction rating from their customers in 2021. The 75 million tickets they answered reinforced their brands, one loyal customer at a time.

After all, when your team has a million fires to extinguish, the only flames in customer support should be the emoji reactions to your five-star ratings.

And that’s exactly what you’ll be chasing as your performance metrics approach those from our top quartile of merchants. The top-performing teams clocked first-response times under two hours and resolution times under 8 hours, on average.

Our merchants met shoppers wherever they were

As ecommerce becomes more decentralized, so do the channels that provide your customer feedback.

Still, it’s no surprise that email remains the most popular support channel, used by 92% of our brands. Together, they answered 64 million emails in 2021 (85% of all tickets). 

This next stat may be more of a revelation: 78% of our brands have brought Facebook, Instagram, and/or Twitter interactions into their Gorgias workspace. They answered 3.7 million comments across those three channels, with almost two-thirds coming from Facebook.

These social channels were used even more than our live chat, phone, and SMS integrations. And Gorgias helped merchants meet their customers in all of the above, without ever leaving their dashboard.

Assembling the ecommerce A-Team

2021 also saw the launch of our long-awaited Gorgias App Store. This hub features 75 apps to extend the power of our helpdesk and centralize the information support agents rely on. 

‍62% of our merchants are using at least one of our partner apps, and we’re exploring new partnerships all the time to continue streamlining the customer support process. 

This allows us, and all of our partners, to stay focused on being the absolute best at what we do.

Some of our merchants’ favorite integrations include: 

• Klaviyo: An email and SMS marketing automation platform
• Recharge: For subscriptions and recurring payments
• Attentive: A comprehensive text message marketing solution 
• Postscript: SMS marketing for growing ecommerce stores
• Yotpo: For customer reviews, loyalty, referrals, and more

So go ahead and close those 20 tabs out — you won’t need them where we’re headed.

Customer feedback drove our product roadmap

We released 91 features this year, 42 of which were led by your requests on our public roadmap. 

Our most requested features (that are all available today!) were: 

• Receiving and replying to Instagram DMs from within Gorgias
• Creating a Help Center, or FAQ hub, on your website
• Adding a self-service portal to your chat widget to handle order-status inquiries
• Receiving and replying to Twitter posts, mentions, and DMs from your helpdesk 
• Managing phone calls in Gorgias, with both new and existing phone numbers

The quick adoption of our 2021 social media updates made it clear these channels were critical to our merchants’ success this year. We expect that to continue into 2022. (TikTok, anyone? Give it an upvote here!) 

And while voice support didn’t see the same volume of requests as the social channels, we knew it was essential for certain brands. To better serve these merchants, we built a native phone integration that’s easily set up for new and existing numbers.

Merchants responded by taking more than 4,000 calls from shoppers this year. As a result, resolution times were up to 34% faster than others who left phone service out of their strategies.

And while we want to give our merchants a variety of tools to provide help, sometimes it's best to empower shoppers to help themselves. 

Our new Help Center feature provides FAQ hubs on merchant websites, to work toward this goal. The first 100 Help Centers that went live attracted over 100,000 views, answering inquiries before they could turn into tickets.

Another contribution is perhaps our most exciting release: Our Automate product allows for customization of self-service flows and deflects even more tickets to boost team efficiency. 

Hundreds of merchants used the add-on in 2021 to automate their tickets, increasing efficiency across their support teams.

Our self-service portal alone deflected up to another 33% of tickets specific to shoppers (like order status). This freed up agent time to provide a more personal touch to important conversations. 

Gorgias grew alongside our merchants

We tripled the size of our team in 2021 to continue building the best possible helpdesk for the specific needs of ecommerce brands. There are now 185 employees who work in 16 countries around the globe and speak 18 different languages.

That means there’s more Gorgians building out integrations, furthering the product roadmap, and contributing to our merchants’ success.

And our customers have let us know how much these improvements impacted their businesses. We currently hold top marks among the helpdesk categories on G2, Capterra and the Shopify app store.

Looking ahead to 2022 

2021 was a year to remember for the Gorgias team and our customers, but 2022 is shaping up to be even better. It might even be the year people learn to pronounce our name. (470 people asked how during this year’s demos; think “gorgeous.”) 

Fingers crossed.

Either way, we have some key new features on the roadmap and several surprises up our sleeves. We’ll continue building and optimizing channels so you can meet your customers where they are (including a much-requested Whatsapp integration). We’re also going to renew our focus on automation tools to increase efficiency across your team. 

Make sure you subscribe to our newsletter, below, to beam all of our updates directly to your inbox.

As for the rest of the ecommerce industry, we have high hopes for 2022 (and plenty of predictions). We’re expecting continued shift of support tickets to social channels, a bigger emphasis on self-service options and a sharper focus on app integrations across the ecommerce ecosystem. 

Until then, thanks for a great year!

‍By Ross Beyeler, Founder and CEO of Growth Spark

Often, a support team answers the same questions over and over…

Or issues returns repeatedly for reasons that could be addressed internally…

Maybe the sizing isn’t well represented, the fulfillment house has mixed up SKUs, or your product images aren’t clear or detailed enough.

If you can lighten the load for your customer support team, you can save significant time and costs, while at the same time improving the buying experience for your customers.

The goals here are to:

• Reduce repeat inquiries
• Shorten first response times
• Speed up problem resolution time
• Lower overall customer care costs

The key is to address your customers questions and issues before they ask your support team. Here's how you do that:

A Better FAQ Page

91% of shoppers would gladly try to answer their own questions first using an online knowledge base or FAQ page before reaching out to a customer service team, according to a survey by Coleman Parkes for Amdocs.

This means that your FAQ page is a huge opportunity to answer your customers’ most common questions and issues so they don’t need to reach out to customer support.

FAQ information typically falls into one of two distinct buckets: product-specific and buying process.

Product Specific: Common questions about individual products may be better off addressed on the product pages rather than in a broad FAQ page. You may need to provide clearer or more comprehensive product descriptions, or consider more or better photography to clear up common product questions.

Buying Process: Questions about shipping, returns, policies, and other operational topics are best addressed in a single easy-to-find page like an FAQ.

When is the last time you cross-checked the content of your FAQ page with the data from your customer support team?

There are many customer support tools like Gorgias that will make it easy for you to track the reasons behind why users submit a ticket.

Once you begin tracking the topic, or tag, of your questions, you can easily identify the questions that top the list, and permanently add the responses to the FAQ.

Bonus points: Prioritize the FAQ page based on the frequency of each customer service inquiry so that the most relevant answers are closer to the top.

Your next step is to set up a monthly meeting with your head of customer service to review the feedback coming in from your customers and ask yourself:

• What are the most frequent topics of support inquiries?
• What issues take up the majority of your support team’s time and resources?
• What issues are emerging or could emerge do to seasonality or new initiatives within our company?

Remember, an FAQ page is:

• Easy to find
• If shoppers can’t find it quickly and easily, they won’t use it and all your work answering all of their questions will go to waste. If you have an answer on your FAQ page, yet people are still inquiring, they might be having trouble finding the page.

• Searchable
• Include a search bar so that shoppers can easily find the answers for their specific problem without having to read through everything else.

• Easy to read
• Use simple, conversational language. Technical slang gives most of us a headache, and leaves most people reaching for the closest live human to explain it in terms they understand.

For more on FAQ pages, check out this Shopify article.

Now that you have your FAQ page squared away, be sure to track visitors to the page and note any changes in volume, and look for changes in your support ticket volume around those related questions.

Remember: You should never answer a support ticket only by referencing your FAQ page. Always include the information they are asking for directly within your response. After that, let the customer know that there is an FAQ page for more information, to avoid future tickets.

See Where Your Customers Get Tripped Up

Have you watched actual customers explore your online store to see where they stumble?

Customer behavior tools like Hotjar make it easy to review how customers navigate your website. One way that customer behavior analysis tools can help you understand exactly how your customers are using your site is with heat maps.

A heat map is a visual representation of the most popular (hot) and unpopular (cold) elements of a website page. They can give you an at-a-glance understanding of how people interact with individual website pages. Elements that get the most views and interaction are shown in red, so you can immediately spot what your users are clicking on. Those that most people tend to ignore appear in blue.

Once you know which parts of your website are most (and least) useful to shoppers, you can tweak those elements to make the on-site experience easier to use.

Customer behavior data can inform on-site improvements, such as:

• Identifying any “dead” pages so you can remove them
• Recognizing “deep” content that requires too many clicks for customers to reach, and making it more visible or accessible
• Ensuring that customers can easily see and access main links, buttons, and CTAs
• Making sure that important elements are getting the attention they deserve
• Checking whether any static elements are getting clicked too often, and adjusting them to clarify that they aren’t a linked object

It may require some A/B testing to ensure your changes deliver results.

Learn from Returns

According to a recent Shopify post, during the holiday season, Ecommerce returns surge to 30 percent (or as high as 50 percent for “expensive” products).

Return deliveries are estimated to exceed $550 billion by 2020 in the U.S. alone.

Many of those returns are probably associated with a customer support ticket - whether customers are asking questions about the product they received, or need help processing their return.

Anything you can do to reduce the number of returns - and the number of customer support requests associated with them - can mean a huge boost for your bottom line.

So, what causes returns?

Returns can often be traced back to a disconnect between customer expectations and the reality of the product once they receive it. It may be that:

• It doesn’t fit the way they expected
• It doesn’t look or feel like they thought it would
• Delivery came later than they expected (or not at all)

All of these problems (and more) can be prevented in advance with improvements to your website content.

Sizing Issues

While fit can be a difficult factor to get right online, including detailed dimensions is a big step in the right direction. Some apparel merchants are taking sizing one step further with interactive fit guides, like the one above Nudie Jeans, which uses an app integration called Virtusize:.

Appearance Issues

Poor quality or not enough product images can make it difficult for customers to accurately understand what your product will look like when it arrives at their home.

You can easily reduce your return rate by making sure your product photography is clear and high-quality, and illustrates all of the primary parts of each product. More complicated or detailed products can also benefit from a video or 360-view.

Detailed product descriptions can also help address confusion about product appearance and feel. Sol de Janeiro does this with a multi-tab product content area that defaults to a brief product highlight, with additional tabs to provide more details.

Fulfillment Issues

Are orders not being fulfilled to the right customers?

Are deliveries taking longer than they should?

Analyzing your fulfillment data and using that information to make adjustments to your website content - such as average delivery times - can help eliminate a source of customer support calls.

For example, maybe you want to be able to deliver every order within two days, but your current fulfillment resources simply can’t make that happen consistently. Being up-front and clear about realistic delivery times (like The Black Dog does in their Shipping FAQ page, above) will help set customers’ expectations appropriately.

Bonus: To get setup on two day shipping, consider our partners at ShipBob.

Final Thoughts

Continue to study your on-site data using Google Analytics or Shopify’s native analytics and look for high exit % pages. These may be pages where prospects or customers are running into a dead end and being forced to turn to support.

You can also create a goal in Google Analytics that corresponds to contacting support, then reverse the user path to determine which pages lead to them submitting a ticket / hitting that “contact” or “support” button.

Chances are, there are a few areas of “low hanging fruit” that can make significant improvements to your customer support load once you find them and address the root concerns. And with those small fixes, you could see a big impact on your bottom line, and a better on-site experience for your customers.

Read more about customer support on our trusted partner’s site, Growth Spark:

• Shopify Store Customer Services: Turning Setbacks Into Opportunities

Best Practices for Shopify E-Commerce Customer Service

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!

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Why Aircall was the Right Choice

Looking back, the partnership has been mutually beneficial and seamlessly implemented.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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You spoke and we listened. We’re excited to tell you that, we are ready to launch out of beta. Now, you can connect your Magento 2 store with your Gorgias account. Access your Gorgias and Magento data from one dashboard. 

The simplistic interface will enable you to display customers, orders, shipments, and credit memo data from your Magento eCommerce store next to your Gorgias support tickets. Learn more about the features you can take advantage of. 

Magento 2 users can leverage the benefits of Gorgias

Magento users now have access to the fundamental and performance-boosting advantages of the Gorgias help desk platform. 

• Display Magento customer profiles next to your support tickets. 

• View orders, shipments, and credit memos for each customer. 

• Centralize all customer communications like email, live chat, and social messaging and comments in one place.  
• Connect to Magento store and other third-party extensions to empower your support agents to reply to tickets quickly and within context. 
• Leverage key automation features like phrase prediction or intent detection to create productive and revenue-generating conversations. 
• Save up to 50% of your time spent managing support requests across all support communication channels. 

• Insert Magento 2 variables like the last order’s tracking URL, into macros.

• Use Magento 2 data as a filter for rules. For example, to add conditions on the price of the last order of a customer.

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Soon, we will add actions like ‘refund’ or ‘cancel order’ to the dashboard as well.

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Note: The Gorgias Extension is Compatible with Magento 2.3

Our extension was created for compatibility with the updated Magento 2 platform. So, Magento 2.2 users may need to upgrade to version 2.3 to properly access all of Gorgias’ help desk features.

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How to Install the Extension to Your Magento 2 Store

By integrating with Magento 2, we are excited to serve a new rank of online sellers. We hope to recreate the satisfaction we’ve given our existing users. Here’s what you can do now. 

1. Check out the Gorgias extension in the Magento Marketplace. 
2. Learn how to connect your Magento 2 store to your Gorgias account. 
3. Tell us how you like the new integration and what we can do to improve. 

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Cheers!

Gorgias connects to over 70 leading ecommerce applications, giving you the power to centralize customer data in your helpdesk, perform support actions from a single place, and streamline your store’s toolkit. 

This month, we launched 7 new integrations: 

1. LoyaltyLion
2. Twitter (No longer supported in 2023)
3. Call Hippo
4. Shipup
5. Tolstoy
6. Autopilot
7. Sentisum
8. Yotpo (updates to our existing integration) 
   

Read on to learn how you can use these tools to help manage your store, and visit the Gorgias App Store to activate them today!

1. LoyaltyLion

LoyaltyLion is a digital loyalty framework that gives ecommerce stores innovative ways to engage and retain customers. If you're using LoyaltyLion for your loyalty program, you can connect it to Gorgias to display information next to support tickets, and reward loyalty points using Macros. 

2. Twitter

Note: Gorgias no longer supports Twitter. You can still use Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp in Gorgias.

Give your support team the power to provide customer service to shoppers on Twitter, without having to log into another platform or share credentials with your social media manager. View past Twitter conversations, gain cross-channel message context, and customize your replies to provide exceptional customer support.

Note: This integration is currently only available for Enterprise plans. View pricing here.

3. Call Hippo

CallHippo allows startups and businesses to buy instant local support numbers from over 50+ countries around the world. With this integration, you can create tickets in Gorgias for phone calls and SMS conversations via Call Hippo. 

4. ShipUp

Shipup follows your packages in real-time to create a seamless, transparent, and branded delivery experience. With the Gorgias integration, you can easily share shipping information with your support team, immediately notify them with a ticket in Gorgias when an incident occurs, and find customer information right next to conversations. 

5. Tolstoy

Tolstoy is an interactive video platform, helping users create meaningful and personal conversations at scale. With this integration, Gorgias users can sync their Tolstoy videos and monitor every viewer interaction as a ticket, empowering support agents to engage without ever leaving the help desk. 

6. Autopilot

Autopilot is a data and customer journey marketing platform designed for businesses who sell online. With this integration, you can now combine your Shopify and Gorgias data together seamlessly in Autopilot. You’ll not only have a single view of your customer, but you’ll be able to deliver a more personalized marketing experience and get glowing reviews from satisfied customers.

7. SentiSum

SentiSum is an automated ticket tagging engine powered by natural language processing technology. With this integration, SentiSum tags can auto-fill form fields directly in Gorgias. From there, you can implement additional automation that saves agent time and improves customer outcomes.

8. Yotpo

You can now receive Yotpo product reviews right in Gorgias and reply to them as tickets! This gives your agents visibility into how shoppers feel about your product and allows them to address concerns without ever leaving the helpdesk. Each ticket will include the review details (like score and product) and allow you to either reply publicly or privately, so you can customize the support experience. 

To add these integrations and discover more, go to the Gorgias App Store.