Every year, businesses lose a total of $75 billion due to poor customer service. To prevent bad experiences with support from limiting your company’s growth, you need to prioritize improving customer satisfaction with a fast, low-effort, and helpful customer experience. 

Most brands would agree that customer satisfaction is important, but few realize just how much interactions with customer support matter for your revenue. In our analysis of over 10,000 online businesses, we found that raising CSAT score by just one point — from 4 to 4.9 — lifts overall revenue by 4%. 

In this article, we’ll dive deep into a metric that tells you a lot about your company’s customer experience and revenue potential: customer satisfaction score (CSAT). We’ll offer nine strategies to help you measure and boost your CSAT score, and share some tips to get more customers to rate their satisfaction so you have the best data to work with.

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The most important ways to improve CSAT scores and response rates

If you're looking for a quick summary, you've found it! Here are the top ways to raise CSAT and response rates:

• Review CSAT scores under four and look for common themes
• Reach out to low-scoring customers and ask them follow up questions
• Automate repetitive tasks to free up time for agents to help with more complex or unique questions
• Look for opportunities to improve the product experience and customer journey beyond the agent level
• Automate CSAT surveys after positive customer service interactions
• Personalize your CSAT email or incentivize longer CSAT responses

What is customer satisfaction (CSAT) score?

Customer satisfaction (CSAT) score is a customer support metric that measures how a customer feels after an interaction with your brand’s customer support. Brands measure CSAT by sending out customer satisfaction surveys as a follow-up to customer service interactions. The survey simply asks customers to rate the interaction on a scale from 1 to 5, 1 being the worst and 5 being the best.

While customers rate the interactions between 1 and 5, many company’s run scores through a formula that will spit out an overall CSAT score somewhere between 0 and 100. However, we at Gorgias keep CSAT simple and just average all CSAT responses for an overall score from 1-5. Our recommended goal for CSAT is 4.8.

On top of the numeric score, CSAT surveys also usually include a field for customers to explain why they chose that rating. This qualitative feedback is a hugely important benefit of measuring CSAT because they help you understand your customer support’s strengths and weaknesses.

CSAT Formula

One way to calculate your overall CSAT score is to divide the number of respondents who rated their interaction as 4/5 or 5/5 by your total number of CSAT survey responses. Then, multiply by 100. The number you are left with is your company's overall CSAT score.

For example, if you have 500 CSAT responses and 400 of those responses are positive (4/5 or 5/5), then your CSAT score is 400/500 x 100 = 80.

However, you can also keep things simple by taking the average of all your CSAT responses and using that as your CSAT score. That’s what we do at Gorgias: If a company’s CSAT responses are 50% 4 and 50% 5, their overall CSAT score is 4.5.

What’s a good benchmark for CSAT score?

The average CSAT score varies from industry to industry, but here’s a general breakdown of CSAT score by industry:

• Consulting: 85
• Healthcare: 79
• Ecommerce: 74
• Digital marketing agencies: 67
• B2B software and SaaS: 65
• Education: 47
• Consumer services: 20
• Communication and media: 16

As mentioned, we at Gorgias simply average all CSAT responses to result in a score from 1-5. We recommend our customers, all of whom are ecommerce merchants, aim for a CSAT score of 4.8.

That said, if your CSAT score doesn’t line up with your industry, don’t be discouraged. Every brand starts somewhere. Rather than focusing on your industry’s benchmarks, focus on the changes you can make to improve your CSAT score one point at a time, month after month. You might even see your CSAT score shoot up when you start collecting more responses or start tweaking your customer service offerings. 

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9 strategies to improve CSAT score fast

The main point in tracking your CSAT score is to look for ways to improve it. If you would like to start creating more satisfied customers, here are nine effective tips to try:

1. Audit CSAT scores under 4/5 and look for common themes
2. Use natural language processing (NLP) to find common themes in CSAT feedback
3. Reach out to low-scoring customers for deeper feedback
4. Create a system to measure ticket quality objectively
5. Bolster your customer service training and resources around problem areas
6. Automate repetitive tickets to free up more time for agents
7. Look for opportunities to improve the product experience and customer journey beyond the agent level
8. Implement customer service best practices like omnichannel, proactive, and self-service support
9. Activate instant messaging channels like live chat, social media DMs, and SMS

1) Audit CSAT scores under 4/5 and look for common themes

Positive CSAT survey responses are great, but negative responses tend to offer the most value. Auditing CSAT responses lower than 4/5 can help you identify common themes and issues harming customer satisfaction.

If you use Gorgias, you can go to Statistics > Satisfaction to see every single ticket in chronological order and investigate tickets four stars and under:

Jot down common themes that pop up and tally up the number of tickets that mention those issues: Wait times, unclear answers, and unresolved product issues are all common offenders. Issues with lots of tallies are likely to be high-impact opportunities for improvement. For instance, if long wait times are a common theme in your negative CSAT responses, then you know what your support team will need to do in order to improve customer satisfaction — find ways to reduce wait times.

2) Use natural language processing (NLP) to find common themes in CSAT feedback

As your brand grows and receives more tickets, analyzing every single low-scoring CSAT response may not be possible. If you don’t have an internal team to help you analyze large amount of data, a thematic analysis tool that uses natural language processing (NLP) can quickly scan all your tickets and look for common themes.

Here’s how the process works:

• Download all your CSAT scores — if you use Gorgias, you’ll find a CSV download button in your Satisfaction dashboard
• Run your downloaded file through a thematic analysis tool like Thematic
• Watch the tool turn a mountain of scattered responses into a list of common keywords, pain points, and themes 
• Study those themes to gain important insight into your customers’ needs

Just like we described above, these themes help you isolate one or two areas to work on at a time, which is the most strategic way to improve your CSAT score.

3) Reach out to low-scoring customers for deeper feedback

CSAT surveys are great for forming a general idea of a customer's satisfaction level, but they don't always tell you everything you need to know. Even with the open-ended field, you may not get much detail about why customers pick a certain rating. In cases where customers give your company a low CSAT score, reaching out to them to get detailed feedback could reveal more about how you can prevent low scores in the future.

4) Create a system to measure ticket quality objectively

One issue that may cause lower CSAT scores is poor or inconsistent responses coming from your team. Creating a detailed rubric that breaks down what a quality ticket response looks like can provide both a valuable template for your agents and a more comprehensive system for objectively measuring ticket quality. By aligning your team’s efforts around this kind of rubric, you’ll be much closer to providing satisfying responses to all customer inquiries. 

In the rubric, you can include aspects like response time, accuracy (with company policy), alignment with brand voice and tone, and anything else you believe contributes to a great customer service interaction for your brand. 

While the purpose of the rubric is to help agents create responses that get high satisfaction scores, that may not always be the case. For example, if your brand voice is very punny and whimsical, a response with lots of puns will score high on the rubric. However, that ticket might not be clear enough to be satisfying for the customers. If you notice that interactions score high on your rubric but low on CSAT, then you may need to update the rubric.

5) Bolster your customer service training and resources around problem areas

Once you use CSAT surveys to identify areas with room for improvement, it's time to put that data into action. Bolstering your customer service training and resources can help you eliminate specific issues harming the customer experience and improve your CSAT score.

Creating an internal knowledge base so that agents have easy access to the information they need to assist customers can be one effective way to bolster the quality of your customer support. Providing your agents with templated responses is another way to ensure that every customer interaction is satisfactory and on brand.

6) Automate repetitive tickets to free up more time for agents

When agents have more time to give each support ticket their undivided attention and A+ effort, customer satisfaction is bound to improve. But chances are that most tickets that your company receives don't actually need an in-depth response from a live agent. And if those repetitive tickets take up too much time, agents won’t be able to take the time to give a high-quality response when it’s needed.

Support tickets such as "where is my order?" inquiries, common product questions, and other repetitive tickets take time and resources away from more complex tickets requiring a more detailed and personalized response. 

By using Gorgias to create automated responses to these repetitive tickets, you can free up time in your support team's daily schedule so that they can put more focus and effort into high-value or complex tickets. Specifically, you can use:

• Variable Macros to create high-quality, personalized templates
• Automated Rules to fire responses and trigger actions like “Refund order”
• Self-Service Flows to let customers find answers and modify orders themselves 

7) Look for opportunities to improve the product experience and customer journey beyond the agent level

Customer satisfaction doesn't begin with customer support, and it doesn't end there, either. Along with boosting customer satisfaction by improving your customer support quality, you can also improve your CSAT score by searching for opportunities to improve the customer experience beyond the agent level.

This can include: 

• Improving the quality of your product
• Creating clearer product descriptions to set expectations
• Improving your product photography
• Improving your shipping speed and reliability
• Offering free shipping to qualifying customers
• Creating a more helpful post-purchase experience
• A wide range of other opportunities to create a more satisfying customer journey

Of course, your support team will need to pass along customer feedback with ideas to improve the product and customer experience. Check out our post on collecting and sharing customer feedback for tips.

8) Implement customer service best practices like omnichannel, proactive, and self-service support

Meeting customer expectations regarding customer support is one crucial key to high CSAT scores. Consider incorporating customer support best practices like the following three suggestions to meet those customer expectations.

Omnichannel support is the strategy of creating and uniting customer touchpoints on many channels: email, social media, SMS texting, and more. An omnichannel approach gives you more chances to meet customers where they’re at. Plus, with a helpdesk that combines all of these channels, you can easily manage incoming messages without having to spend half your day switching between windows.

Customer self-service is any tool or resource that helps customers answer questions without having to reach out to an agent — resources like FAQ pages and knowledge bases, self-service flows, or chatbots. 88% of customers expect self-service resources because they are fast and low-effort. Fortunately, self-service resources also reduce the number of repetitive tickets your agents receive on a day-to-day basis. 

Proactive customer service is a strategy to reach out to customers before they think to reach out to support. Common self-service tactics include live chat campaigns that ask customers if they need help while browsing your site or welcoming customers with a DM when they follow your social media profiles. Proactive customer support gives you more opportunities to answer customer questions, offer discounts that boost your conversion rate, or find new ways to make happy customers.

9) Activate instant messaging channels like live chat, social media DMs, and SMS

Slow response times are another common customer support issue that can harm customer satisfaction. If you notice that long wait times are a recurring complaint in your low-scoring CSAT responses, introducing touchpoints that allow fast, one-to-one interactions can lower your response times (and hopefully, by extension, your CSAT score). 

The most effective of these conversational channels include live chat, social media DMs, and SMS texting. These real-time support channels enable your agents to quickly handle multiple tickets at a time, without hours of delay, which is common in emails. 

If you have the bandwidth to keep up with these channels, they can dramatically improve response times and resolution times. That said, be sure you’ve hired enough agents to respond to requests on these live channels within the first few minutes to keep your customer experience great.

Tips to improve CSAT survey response rate

CSAT survey responses are valuable, and collecting as many of them as possible is important. However, customers aren't always going to jump at the opportunity to fill out a survey. To improve your CSAT survey response rate and start collecting more valuable customer feedback, here are a few effective tips:

1. Automate CSAT surveys after customer service interactions
2. Send CSAT surveys while the interaction is still fresh
3. Keep CSAT surveys simple — at least 90% of the time
4. Make the survey visual
5. Personalize your CSAT survey email
6. Give incentives for CSAT responses

1) Automate CSAT surveys after customer service interactions

You should send out a CSAT survey following every customer interaction. One great way to ensure that every customer is sent a survey without further burdening your support team is to send these surveys out automatically.

With Gorgias, you can create CSAT surveys that send automatically following every customer service interaction, ensuring that every customer gets the opportunity to leave feedback.

2) Send CSAT surveys while the interaction is still fresh

Customers are more likely to respond to a CSAT survey when the interaction is still fresh on their minds. It is typically best to send out CSAT surveys immediately following a customer interaction.

The only exception is if you have a particularly complicated product, like a piece of software that the customer needs to set up. That’s because the customer might still need to configure something before they know whether or not your support team effectively addressed the pain point. But for most products, the sooner the better.

3) Keep CSAT surveys simple — at least 90% of the time

While detailed feedback is great, most of your customers won't be willing to answer dozens of survey questions. It's usually best to keep your CSAT surveys short and simple. A single question that asks customers to rank their satisfaction on a scale of 1 to 5, along with an optional form for providing more detailed feedback, is the tried-and-true best format for CSAT surveys.

With that said, there are certainly times when you will want to reach out to customers for more detailed feedback. We've already mentioned how reaching out to low-scoring customers can be a great way to identify issues and take another stab at satisfying them. However, it's best to use these long-form surveys and feedback requests as a follow-up to low-scoring CSAT survey responses instead of the initial survey.

4) Make the survey visual

Making it fun and interesting for customers to fill out your CSAT surveys can go a long way toward boosting your response rate. One simple way to make your surveys more appealing is to include visually engaging elements such as buttons, images, and stars:

5) Personalize your CSAT survey email

Something as simple as including the customer's name in your CSAT survey email can add a professional touch to these emails and help ensure that customers don't mistake them for spam. Referencing the ticket number in question is another effective practice for personalizing CSAT survey emails.

6) Give incentives for CSAT responses (or long-form feedback)

It might not be sustainable long term, but offering incentives such as discount codes or gift cards for CSAT responses can certainly improve your CSAT response rate. If you can't afford to offer incentives for every CSAT response, offering incentives for customers to complete your more long-form feedback surveys can effectively gather more detailed customer feedback.

Why is keeping track of your CSAT score important?

We recommend all brands measure customer satisfaction and use CSAT scores as a key performance indicator (KPI) for the customer support team. That’s true whether you have a large in-house support crew, outsource to a call center, or are a one-person business. Regardless, keeping tabs on your customer satisfaction will pay off. Here’s why:

It’s a leading indicator of customer loyalty and revenue growth

According to Shopify data, even small ecommerce companies with less than four employees spend between $21 to $533 on average to acquire a new customer, depending on the industry. So if your strategy is too focused on customer acquisition — and not customer retention — you’re building a ship with a hole. In other words, you’ll leak revenue from existing customer churn and sink under ocean-sized acquisition costs.

A high CSAT score indicates you don’t have a hole in your ship: Your customer loyalty is high and you’ll stay afloat at a much lower cost. And the best way to keep customer loyalty high is to deliver a customer experience that satisfies your customers. 

In our CX Growth Playbook, which analyzed data from over 10,000 ecommerce merchants, we also found that raising your CSAT from 4 to 4.9 could raise overall revenue by 4%, thanks to the number of repeat purchases that follow high CSAT responses.

It measures the quality of your customer experience

Customer experience is complex and multi-dimensional. Everything, from the quality of your website’s FAQ page to the email customers receive after a purchase, stacks up into a customer experience that’s either satisfying or frustrating. 

Tracking CSAT scores is one of your best bets to measure the overall quality of your customer support experience. And measuring the quality of your customer support experience is the first step to identifying where you excel and where you have an opportunity to better satisfy customer needs.

It correlates to other customer service KPIs like FRT and AHT

CSAT scores tend to directly correlate with other important customer service KPIs such as first-response time (FRT), average handle time (AHT), average reply times, and resolution times. Tracking all of these KPIs gives you a fuller picture of your customer support experience. 

For example, if your CSAT score and resolution times start to fall but your response times are high, the takeaway is that your support team needs to focus on quality responses, not just fast ones. Low CSAT scores and resolution times indicate that your responses — even if they’re near-instant — aren’t solving customer needs. For example, a cause of this might agents blindly applying canned responses, or Macros, without updating information or making it relevant for the customer.

It helps you identify areas to train your customer service team

Tracking customer satisfaction can help you pinpoint the root cause of issues harming the customer experience, whether that’s slow responses, low-quality responses, or some other aspect of the customer experience that customers find dissatisfying.  For example, while auditing, you might find that many customers are upset about a discount code not applying at checkout. Only once you realize it’s a pattern might you realize that you’ve been communicating the wrong discount code to customers.

By measuring your CSAT and digging into themes across qualitative responses, you may be able to triangulate issues that need customer service training or new resources like a knowledge base. Plus, with the right helpdesk, you may be able to see CSAT broken down by a customer service agent so you can see which agents need additional training or quality assurance.

It surfaces customer feedback you can share with other teams

Above, we explained how you can use the customer feedback from CSAT surveys to improve your customer support service quality. However, you can also use it to improve other areas of your business, too. For example, your team can pass feedback regarding the product itself to your product development team. Similarly, feedback regarding your website can be routed to your marketing or software development team.

Don't use CSAT as your end-all-be-all customer satisfaction metric

CSAT is an insightful metric for customer support teams to track, but it doesn't tell the whole story about customer satisfaction. For example, you could have a high CSAT but never get to 10% of your tickets — those customers would not be satisfied but never get the chance to fill out a survey. Similarly, CSAT may give you a skewed sample population if only your most engaged and happy customers respond to your survey requests.

For that reason, keep an eye on other signals of customer satisfaction, like social media mentions and customer referrals. Other important metrics to track include net promoter score (NPS), first-response time (FRT), average handle time (AHT), and customer effort score (CES).

Gorgias developed a new metric called support performance score, which is our best shot at creating a single north-star metric that measures the overall quality of your support. Support performance score combines CSAT, first-response time, and resolution time to estimate how fast, helpful, and satisfying your support is. If you use Gorgias, you’ll find your support performance score in your Statistics dashboard:

By tracking multiple customer support and customer satisfaction metrics, you can form a comprehensive view of how satisfied customers are with your company and better identify areas where there is room for improvement.

Boost your CSAT score — and revenue — with Gorgias

Improving your ecommerce store's CSAT score can improve customer retention, boost referrals, limit negative reviews, and provide a wide range of other business-boosting benefits. 

From freeing up your team via automated responses to repetitive tickets to speeding up first-response times via SMS and live chat support, Gorgias enables you to move faster, make more happy customers, and grow your store. 

Our platform also offers tools for collecting and analyzing customer feedback automatically so that the valuable information you need to improve your customer experience further is always at your fingertips. See how our customer, Ohh Deer, uses Gorgias' live chat to maintain a 4.95 CSAT score (and generate $50,000 in revenue annually.)

Get started with Gorgias now to see how our industry-leading customer support platform can help you track and improve your CSAT score.

It's tough to point to a single most important metric in customer service. But if we had to, first response time would be a top contender.

First response time (FRT) is the time between a customer asking a question and your team’s initial response. When your FRT is too long, customers are left wondering whether you even received their question, let alone will get them an answer.

"Of course, the best-case scenario is quickly answering the customer's question (or automating the answer). But even if you can't solve the question right away, letting the customer know you received their inquiry — and that it didn't get sent into the void — is great for customer confidence and satisfaction.” —Bri Christiano, Director of Customer Support at Gorgias

Let’s dive into first response time to understand why it’s so make-or-break for your team. Then, we’ll unpack best practices you can use to lower FRT for your team, plus how to use this KPI alongside other metrics to support your overall customer service strategy. 

Why is first response time important in ecommerce?

A quick first response time is a key way to build customer trust, letting customers know right away that you are taking their inquiry seriously and that you will resolve the issue as fast as possible.

Here are a few reasons a strong FRT improves your customer experience and your support team’s impact on the business:

Meet customer expectations 

According to our research, 90% of U.S. customers say an immediate customer service response is “important” or “very important.” Plus, 60% of people who need support want it in 10 minutes or less. 

In other words, near-instant FRTs are important to 90% of shoppers — and after 10 minutes, you’re disappointing over half of your shoppers. 

Drive conversion rate

First-response time is especially important for pre-sales support questions, like "Will this arrive before Christmas?" or "Which size is right for me?". Any customer reaching out about pre-sales support likely needs their questions answered before they commit to click checkout, or before they hop over to Amazon to buy it.  

A speedy response is just the thing to give the shopper the information they need to make a confident purchase decision and boost their trust in your brand — two factors that can contribute to high conversion rates. 

Increase revenue-related KPIs

First response time also impacts other important support metrics, including ones that impact your revenue:

• Resolution time: A fast response time often leads to a quicker resolution — and a customer who’s more likely to cite a positive shopping experience with your brand. 
• Lower return rate: Give a customer a fast response to their questions, especially in pre-sales moments, and they’ll have the information they need to make a confident purchase decision. This lowers the likelihood that they’ll need to return the item later. 
• Higher conversion rate: If a customer has a question about a product, they need a quick response to convince them to click checkout. Otherwise, they’re just going to go to a competitor. 
• Customer satisfaction: Fast response times go a long way to show a customer they are valued. Offer a quick response to increase brand trust, which leads to improved customer satisfaction. 

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How to calculate and track first response time 

Luckily, you don’t have to be a math wiz to find your brand’s first response time.  

Start by simply looking at your tickets. Compare the time the ticket came in with the time a support agent responded. That time difference is your FRT. 

For example, if a ticket comes in at 8 am Monday, and an agent responds at 8 am Tuesday, your response time is 1 day. 

You can also keep track of first response times across a certain period, or from a certain agent, to understand the average response time. Simply collect response times over a certain period, then, divide that number by the total number of resolved tickets during that same time frame. 

The equation looks like this: 

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

Here’s what calculating FRT averages looks like, using real numbers: 85,000 seconds / 900 resolved tickets = 94.4 seconds (average first response time) 

That means that, on average, your agents are able to respond to customer tickets within 94.4 seconds of receiving a request (for that period). 

If math isn’t your thing, don’t sweat it. Most helpdesks these days automatically calculate and report on average first response time for you. 

Gorgias calculates important metrics, like first response time, automatically. Plus, you can slice and dice the information to understand FRT by factors like: 

• Channel (email, SMS, social media, etc.)
• Contact reason (to understand what kind of questions to automate)
• Agent (to inform coaching)
• Time period (to understand if it changed after implementing something)

This way, you’re never left in the dark about how your support strategy is performing.  

First response time benchmarks by support channel 

Customers want the option to get in touch with your customer service team on the channel of their choice. Even more, Salesforce reports that 74% of shoppers want a variety of channels to choose from.   

If you’ve adopted an omnichannel support strategy, keep in mind different channels have varying response times. 

We’ve broken down a few of the most popular channels to give you an idea of what to expect — and what response times Gorgias customers achieve, on average. 

Email 

• Stellar: 1 hour
• Above average: 2 hours
• Average: 1 day
• Unacceptable: More than 24 hours

Gorgias customers see an average email FRT of 7 minutes and 57 seconds.  

Chat

• Stellar: Under 1 minute 
• Above average: Under 5 minutes 
• Average: 10 minutes 
• Unacceptable: Over 1 hour 

Gorgias customers see an average chat FRT of 7 minutes and 54 seconds. 

SMS

• Stellar: Under 1 minute
• Above average: Under 5 minutes 
• Average: 10 minutes 
• Unacceptable: Over 1 hour 

Gorgias customers see an average SMS first response time of 59 seconds.

Social media 

• Stellar: A few minutes
• Above average: Under 2 hours
• Average: 1 day
• Unacceptable: More than 1 day

Gorgias customers see a slightly different average FRT depending on the social media platform. 

• Facebook Messenger: 4 hours and 30 seconds 
• Instagram DM: 7 hours and seven minutes 
• Twitter DM: 7 hours and 58 minutes 

Automation is preferable to offer a quick response to your customers. Either an instant automated answer to their question, or an automation to let them know you’re on the way.  

5 tactics to reduce first response time 

Reducing your FRT is a great way to optimize for customer satisfaction. Luckily, there are a few tactics you can take now to reduce FRT that also reduce the load on your support team. 

1. Automate repetitive questions to reduce ticket volume

Automating responses to repetitive customer questions has a two-fold benefit:

• Automating answers with a helpdesk effectively means achieving one-touch resolutions for your most common customer inquiries.
• It reduces the overall number of tickets reaching your agents, letting them focus on high-impact inquiries that automation can’t handle. 

How this works in Gorgias

Gorgias Automate deflects up to 30% of tickets (meaning 30% of customer issues were resolved without human interaction.) If 30% of your helpdesk is cleared, that means you can get to the leftover tickets faster. 

Two great features in Automate are Flows and Article Recommendations, which provide personalized, automated answers to customer FAQs.

Both features give customers a 0-second first response time, but these interactions don’t impact your measured FRT since no ticket is created.

You can then track how much time and money automation saves your customers in first response time:

Take a look at how skincare brand Topicals implemented Flows to help shoppers navigate their product offerings. So, when a customer asks, “How do I find the right face wash?” Flows will ask a series of questions and offer a personalized recommendation based on the customer’s answers. 

2. Automatically send a message that you’re on your way

Even if you can’t use automation to answer a customer question, it can let customers know their message has been received and that an agent is on their way to help. 

Leaving customers in the dark about when they’ll receive a response is likely to make any customer anxious. An automated response not only lowers your FRT by responding immediately, but it also quells your customers’ fears that their questions will not be answered.

"Offer an automated message to fire almost instantly so customers know their question was received and someone will be looking into it shortly. Fire it off regardless of channel — the only exception being if your human agent happens to be available to respond."

—Bri Christiano, Director of Customer Support at Gorgias

Berkey Filters built a Rule using Gorgias to automatically reply to SMS messages as they came in.  

In their message, Berkey Filters starts by thanking the customer for reaching out. It also sets expectations by sharing customer support’s hours of operation. That way, if a customer messages outside of operating hours, they aren’t left waiting for a response. 

By adding in an "If the message from agent is false" condition, it also protects you from accidentally firing off this response if a live agent has already responded.

This is only one example of how to use Rules, or Gorgias automations, to automatically reply to tickets. With Gorgias, you could set this up for any channel, or set up a Rule so that it only fires outside of your set business hours, on live chat, when your agents are away, and so much more.

3. Assign and prioritize tickets automatically 

Some tickets need a more immediate response than others. Angry or upset customers require ticket escalation to try and salvage the relationship and prevent negative reviews, returns, or customer churn. 

Prioritizing your incoming tickets will help your agents lower FRT on tickets that need the fastest responses. They can respond to high-priority tickets first. Any other tickets that automation can’t cover can wait. 

Instead of manually sorting your tickets day in and day out, Gorgias can automatically prioritize tickets as they come in. 

Gorgias makes use of AI to analyze incoming tickets based on natural language processing (NLP). The platform also lets you create Rules to determine a ticket’s priority level. Then, it processes language on incoming tickets using the Rule you set in order to take an automatic action. 

This is also where Gorgias’s deep integration with Shopify really shines. The integration lets you pull in customer information, like order number and order status, to help prioritize tickets. 

For instance, you can prioritize cancellation requests from customers that placed an order in the last 24 hours, to avoid shipping products with the wrong shipping address. You could also prioritize messages from customers who have spent more than $100 (or any amount) from your store, to make sure your VIP customers are taken care of.

4. Drive support traffic to messaging channels (and away from email)

Email is notoriously one of the slowest customer support channels out there. The good news? This aligns with customer expectations: A customer who sends an email isn’t waiting at the computer for a response, whereas one who sends a live chat message probably is.

With all the faster options out there, don’t rely on email as your most prominent support channel. Deprioritize email by adding a live chat option, or by making your email address a little harder to find on your website. Consider also adding a robust Help Center and guiding shoppers toward self-service channels. 

You can easily use email as a springboard to push customers to other, faster channels. 

Berkey Filters does this by using an automated response to inform customers about faster options to connect with an agent. Plus, they share a link to the Help Center, so customers can see if they can find a solution to their problems themselves, without needing human interaction. 

Customers were informed right away that they were placed in the email queue, but were offered the option of texting or joining a chat with a live agent to resolve their problem even faster. 

5. Give your agents templates and Macros

One of the most time-saving tools you can give yourself and your team is templated responses, which help your agents avoid typing messages from scratch, or copy/pasting customer information. 

At Gorgias, these templates are called Macros. These are canned responses you can use to populate answers to customer questions. You can also personalize these responses by pulling data from your Shopify account. 

If you can't automate an answer, the Macro gives your agents a headstart so they aren't wasting time remembering what the right policy is, typing out a message from scratch, or manually copying/pasting the customer's information (like name or order number). 

First response time works best when it’s combined with other metrics

First response time isn’t a be-all, end-all KPI — it’s just one metric, best used in concert with others to get a broader understanding of how your team is performing. 

Average Resolution time

Average resolution time (ART) is the amount of time it takes your customer support team to fully solve a customer’s problem and close the ticket.

Gorgias customers have an average resolution time of 1.67 hours.

Read our guide on resolution time to learn best practices to improve this metric for your brand.

How Average Resolution Time works alongside FRT

The initial response time is vitally helpful to understand how quickly your agents can spring into action, but it’s your resolution time that speaks to how helpful your responses are. 

If you have a great first response time but have unhelpful answers, or just go back and forth with a customer, your resolution time is going to suffer. Calculating both helps you make sure you're balancing speed (FRT) with quality answers that lead to a full Resolution (RT)

OLIPOP grew quickly and needed help from Gorgias to keep up with their exceptional customer support. 

Gorgias helped them reduce Response Time by 88% and Resolution Time by 91%, which led to a 1,200% increase in revenue from customer support. 

"We wanted to make sure customers can reach out to us via any platform and we'd have the ability to quickly answer it all in one place." —Eli Weiss, Director of CX, OLIPOP

📚 Related reading: How OLIPOP decreased their response time by 88% and resolution time by 91% with 25x ROI

CSAT

Customer satisfaction score, or CSAT is an important metric to measure your customer base’s level of satisfaction with their shopping experience. 

The more satisfied a customer is, the more likely they are to become a repeat shopper, refer friends, or leave a great review. 

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

How CSAT works alongside FRT

First response time is a metric that goes hand-in-hand with your CSAT. 

If you slow response time, you can expect your CSAT to be similarly low. A customer who has to wait days for an email response, or several minutes on hold during a phone call is likely to have an unsatisfactory experience. 

Decreasing your first reply times will inevitably increase customer satisfaction.

Read our Director of Support's guide to improving CSAT scores for more guidance.

Contact rate

Customer contact rate is a metric to measure the percentage of active customers in contact with your support team over a specified period. 

Generally speaking, you want your customer contact rate to be low. A low rate means most customers are satisfied with their shopping experience and don’t require further support. 

One tactic to lower your contact rate is to offer more self-service options, like a knowledge base or FAQ. That way, your customers can help themselves with frequently asked questions like “Where’s my order?” or “Do you accept returns?” Then, higher-priority tickets can be tackled by your reps. 

How Contact Rate works alongside FRT

While you want your first response time to be low, even better is reducing your contact rate. 

That means your customers are running into fewer issues that would lead them to reach out to customer support in the first place. Or, that they turn to self-service resources when they do have an issue. 

Gorgias: your ecommerce helpdesk for cutting first response times

If your support agents have to answer every question by hand, or toggle between a dozen different tabs to respond to different challenges, your first-response time will always suffer.

A helpdesk like Gorgias has an immediate positive impact on your FRT because it collects messages from every channel, automatically responds to basic questions, and gives agents powerful tools to respond to messages as fast as possible.

Before implementing Gorgias, Timbuk2’s customer service team took, on average, 2 days to respond to customer inquiries. They knew they needed to centralize and automate their customer support — that’s where Gorgias came in. 

Making the leap to Gorgias helped Timbuk2 streamline its support strategy, gaining a 96% faster response time and a nice 35% boost in revenue. 

"Increased customer support should go hand in hand with revenue growth. We want to turn customer experience into a profit center and we have more opportunities to grow with Gorgias." —Joseph Piazza, Senior Customer Experience Manager, Timbuk2

Gorgias helps ecommerce companies improve their first response time, along with other key metrics, to build exceptional customer experiences that drive revenue. 

‍Sign up for Gorgias or book a demo to start tracking and improving your first response time today!

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TL;DR:

• Customer service drives loyalty and repeat purchases, directly impacting your bottom line
• Quality support reduces acquisition costs by turning customers into brand advocates
• Ecommerce brands use customer service as a competitive differentiator in crowded markets
• Measuring customer satisfaction score (CSAT), net promoter score (NPS), and first contact resolution (FCR) helps quantify the return on investment (ROI) of your support investments
• AI-powered tools like Gorgias scale personalized service without increasing headcount

Customer service isn't just a support function — it's a revenue driver. For ecommerce brands, every support interaction is an opportunity to build loyalty, increase cart value, and turn one-time buyers into repeat customers. Right now, every small business owner is experiencing the frustrations of rising customer acquisition costs, making retention more critical than ever. But scaling personalized service is hard when your team is stretched thin across email, chat, social media, and phone.

This guide covers the top benefits of customer service and how to measure its impact. We'll also explore how AI-powered tools like Gorgias help ecommerce teams deliver exceptional experiences without adding headcount.

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What is customer service?

Customer service is the support you provide to customers before, during, and after they purchase from your brand. It's about answering questions, solving problems, and creating experiences that build trust and loyalty at every touchpoint.

In ecommerce, customer service spans the entire path a customer takes with your brand. Pre-purchase support helps hesitant shoppers make confident buying decisions. During purchase, it addresses checkout issues and payment problems. Post-purchase, it handles everything from shipping questions to returns and exchanges. The best customer service is omnichannel. It meets customers wherever they prefer to communicate, whether that's email, chat, social media, or SMS.

Great customer service includes both reactive support (responding to customer inquiries) and proactive support (anticipating and addressing issues before customers even ask). The role of customer service goes beyond just solving problems — it's about creating positive experiences that keep customers coming back.

Understanding what customer service is and why it matters is the first step. Let's explore how it directly impacts your bottom line.

Customer service vs customer experience vs customer support

These three terms often get used interchangeably, but they mean different things. Understanding the distinction helps you build a more effective strategy for each area.

While customer support focuses on reactive problem-solving, customer service is broader and more proactive. Customer experience (CX) encompasses everything — it's the sum of all interactions a customer has with your brand. The importance of customer support lies in how it contributes to both service quality and overall experience.

The top benefits of customer service for ecommerce growth

The benefits of excellent customer service extend far beyond just keeping customers happy.

Increases customer retention and loyalty

Retention means customers come back to buy again. Loyalty means they prefer your brand over competitors. When you solve problems quickly and treat customers well, you reduce churn rate and increase repeat purchases.

Reduces customer acquisition costs

Customer acquisition costs (CAC) are rising across ecommerce. Keeping current customers costs much less than attracting new ones. Exceptional service turns satisfied customers into advocates who refer friends and family, reducing your dependence on expensive paid channels.

Builds brand reputation and trust

Brand reputation and trust are built one interaction at a time. Great service creates social proof through positive reviews and testimonials that influence new shoppers.

When potential customers see hundreds of five-star reviews highlighting helpful support teams, their brand perception shifts.

Creates competitive differentiation

Competitive differentiation matters in crowded markets. When you sell products similar to competitors, exceptional service becomes your unique selling proposition. Customers will pay more and stay loyal to brands that treat them well.

Increases average order value and upsell opportunities

Average order value (AOV) is the average amount customers spend per transaction. Support teams can increase AOV through strategic upselling and cross-selling. When agents offer helpful product recommendations, it increases cart value without feeling pushy.

Provides actionable customer insights

Customer insights from support tickets are goldmines for product and marketing teams. Support feedback loops reveal pain points, common questions, and feature requests that drive product development. Your team hears directly from customers about what's working and what's not. This voice of customer data helps you make smarter business decisions — from tweaking product descriptions to fixing checkout issues. For example, if dozens of customers ask the same question about ingredient sourcing, that's valuable insight for your product pages.

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Customer service channels that matter in ecommerce

Modern customers expect to reach you on their preferred channels. Omnichannel support means meeting them where they are, whether that's email, chat, or social media.

• Email for detailed, non-urgent inquiries that require documentation
• Live Chat for real-time answers to quick questions during checkout
• Self-service and Help Centers to let customers find answers instantly
• Social media for public conversations that protect your brand reputation
• SMS and messaging apps for order updates and other brief exchanges
• Phone for complex issues where a human connection builds trust

The key is implementing channels based on your customer preferences and team capacity. Don't spread yourself too thin — it's better to excel on three channels than struggle across six.

Common customer service challenges and how to solve them

Even the best support teams face recurring challenges. Here's how to tackle the most common ones:

• Use AI automation and Self-service to manage rushes during peak seasons like Black Friday, Cyber Monday (BFCM)
• Use an omnichannel helpdesk to centralize conversations from all channels
• Use automated routing and Macros to meet service level agreements (SLAs) for response times
• Handling repetitive inquiries: Answering “Where is my order?” hundreds of times leads to agent burnout. Solution: Build robust self-service order tracking and automated responses for frequently asked questions to free agents for complex issues.
• Providing 24/7 coverage with limited team: Small teams can't staff round-the-clock support. Solution: Implement AI chatbots to handle basic questions outside business hours and set clear expectations about response times for after-hours inquiries.

Customer service best practices for ecommerce teams

Great customer service doesn't happen by accident. Here are proven practices that drive results:

Be proactive, not just reactive: Don't wait for customers to complain. Reach out when you spot potential issues like shipping delays. Proactive support prevents negative experiences and shows customers you're paying attention. Set up automated messages to notify customers of delays before they ask.

Use customer data to make conversations feel human. Reference past purchases, use their name, and tailor recommendations to their preferences to build stronger relationships.

Empower customers with Self-service: Build comprehensive FAQ pages and Help Centers that answer common questions. Self-service deflection reduces ticket volume while giving customers instant answers. Include searchable documentation and video tutorials where helpful.

Use automation for repetitive tasks: Automation handles routine work like order status updates and return confirmations. This frees agents to focus on complex issues requiring human judgment and active listening. Use Rules and Macros strategically.

Measure what matters: Track key metrics like CSAT, response time, and resolution rate. Set clear SLAs for different ticket types. Review metrics regularly to spot trends and improvement opportunities. Data drives better decisions.

Close the feedback loop: Collect customer feedback consistently, then act on it. Share insights with product and marketing teams. Continuous improvement comes from listening and iterating. Create a culture where customer input drives changes.

How to measure the impact of customer service

You can't improve what you don't measure. Tracking the right metrics helps you quantify the ROI of your support investments and identify areas for improvement.

• CSAT (customer satisfaction score) to measure satisfaction with specific support interactions
• NPS (net promoter score) to gauge overall brand loyalty and predict growth
• FRT (first response time) to track how quickly your team responds to new tickets
• FCR (first contact resolution) to measure the percentage of tickets resolved in a single interaction
• CES (customer effort score) to measure how easy it is for customers to get help
• Ticket volume and deflection rate to track efficiency gains from Self-service resources
• Revenue from support to track sales influenced by support conversations and prove return on investment (ROI)

For example, a leading ecommerce group increased revenue and improved profitability by using advanced data analytics to measure and optimize their customer experience. Use these metrics together to get a complete picture of performance rather than focusing on just one.

Turn customer service into a growth engine with Gorgias

Looking back on everything we've covered, great customer service drives retention, reduces costs, and creates competitive advantages that directly impact your bottom line. But delivering exceptional experiences at scale is impossible without the right tools.

That's where Gorgias comes in. Built exclusively for ecommerce, Gorgias equips online stores with powerful tools to enhance customer interactions and drive revenue growth.

With deep Shopify integration, omnichannel support, and the new AI Agent, you can automate inquiries. This lets you scale personalized service without adding headcount.

I encourage you to see how Gorgias can transform your support team into a revenue driver. Book a demo to learn how Love Wellness and thousands of other ecommerce brands use Gorgias to turn customer service into their competitive advantage.

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At my company, every single employee — from office manager  to the CEO — must create a Gorgias account and spend 20+ hours answering customer support tickets. It’s an unusual program, but it’s incredibly impactful.

My name’s Amanda Kwasniewicz, VP of Customer Experience at Love Wellness, a brand dedicated to helping women improve their gut, brain, and vaginal health. 

When everyone interacts with customers and learns how customer support operates, we become a more customer-centric, collaborative company. Below, I’ll share more details about this program so you can build something similar at your company.

Why you should have non-support employees answer support tickets

In my eyes, this program truly adds so much value back to the company. It always generates insights and improvements for the CX team (as well as other departments). Plus, it facilitates ongoing collaboration between support and other departments, long after the program ends. 

Here are some specific benefits, each illustrated by real-life wins, to help you understand why this program is so impactful:

Establish respect for support

Customer support was never disrespected. But this program helped the entire company understand how much we’re responsible for. Plus, it gives everyone a better idea of how our work impacts the rest of the business (and vice versa). 

At many companies, all kinds of decisions are made in silos that impact customer experience, and a handful of people on the CX team are left to clean up the mess. This program helps the rest of the company consider the downstream impact on the customer’s experience for whatever they’re working on — whether that’s updating the website, developing a product, or planning logistics. 

In other words, it helps give CX a seat at the table and encourages everyone to think proactively about how their work will impact customers. 

Find areas to improve support

Getting all kinds of skill sets and perspectives into the helpdesk has sparked many smart improvements to the CX team’s processes. A couple of examples: 

• Someone from our Ops team recognized a high number of DNRs (orders the customer never received). They suggested we turn on an “Order delivered” notification so customers can grab the order the minute it hits their doorstep, or can reach out to our team right away if they can’t find it. 
• Another Ops team member suggested an app that tracks delivery issues (like failed delivery attempts and returns to sender). Now that we track these issues, we can proactively reach out to impacted customers to better manage the issue. (By the way, the app we use is Trackhive, but it’s no longer available — a simple app like TrackingMore should work!)

Find areas of opportunity outside of support

When other departments get into the helpdesk, they discover tons of ways their work impacts the customer. This program always sparks ideas for changes in other parts of the business to improve CX:

• The Product Development Team noticed customer complaints about our packaging and pushed our manufacturers to update the packaging so it’s easier to open. 
• A marketing email was sent out with a broken link and an incorrect promotion, which led to an influx of support tickets. The marketing built a new process to test marketing emails before they go live, preventing countless mistakes going forward.
• Our Retail Team discovered a product issue caused by the way retailers stored one of our products. They jumped on the issue, and are now attuned to these kinds of issues, and quickly help solve issues stemming from retail orders. 
• Our VP of Finance learned we had an effective system to track replacement orders and was able to use that data to improve the company’s operational budgeting. 

Improve cross-functional collaboration

Once non-CX employees understand the value and processes of Support, they’re more likely to rope you into conversations and support your team down the road. 

Here are a couple of examples from my experience:

• When the company evaluated a new 3rd-party logistics (3PL) partner, we were roped into the conversation to ensure we chose an option that let us automate more support tasks, like canceling orders and editing addresses.
• During a particularly busy period, our small team of 5 needed help managing the support inbox. 3 non-CX employees (who had previously gone through this program) stepped in to catch up with our inbox. It’s a great strategy to manage the Black Friday — Cyber Monday surge!

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How I structure this kind of program

Getting non-CXers into the helpdesk and answering tickets requires customer service training and guidance. Especially since we’re pulling employees away from their roles, we need to make sure it’s an efficient and effective program. 

Here’s how my team manages it:

Train a cohort every 4-6 weeks

Training new hires one at a time would be a big timesuck for my team. So instead, we train a group of new hires (or anyone else we missed in the past) once every few months or so. For us, groups of 6-8 work well — but adjust for the size of your team. 

Onboarding is a 2-hour session run by me, where we cover the fundamentals of CX, the tools we use, and the processes they need to know to answer tickets. Here’s a checklist of what I cover:

• Customer Experience fundamentals (including Love Wellness’s CX philosophies)
• Where our information lives (the Help Center for customer-facing content, and Guru for employee-facing content)
• Shopify 101: A tour of the checkout flow and order details
• Gorgias 101: A tour of the helpdesk, including how to respond to tickets
• A tour of Macros (listed in the image below), so they rarely have to draft emails from scratch

Set up a dedicated View in Gorgias

During the last 30 minutes of onboarding, we give each employee their own Gorgias login and set them free to start answering emails. To make the inbox more digestible (and steer trainees away from complex emails), we set up a View with simple inquiries as a sort of training ground, in addition to adding them to a Training Team.

We prefer to manually add tickets to this view when the CX team stumbles across simple questions. But you could easily set up an auto-tag to send simple questions — like subscription renewals or requests to edit orders — to this View.

We also have a simple process for trainees to hand off tickets that become complicated to the CX team. They simply send the handoff Macro, which lets the customer know an answer is coming and automatically assigns the ticket to the CX team. 

Require 20 hours of support work over 4 weeks

Once training is complete, the cohort is set free! The expectation is that everyone who participates in this program spends 20 hours on CX over a month. 

How they choose to spend that 20 hours is choose-your-own-adventure style. They can answer 1-2 emails daily, for 3-4 days a week, to meet the 20-hour requirement. During lighter periods, they can also study past tickets or read FAQ content — anything that helps them better understand CX and how we communicate with customers.

Appoint a CX’er to be available for support

While trainees self-guide their 20 hours, one member of the CX team is available to answer questions or jump in to provide support. We also schedule a 30-minute, 1-on-1 shadowing session so the trainee and the CXer can deep-dive on any topics that come up. 

These 1-on-1 sessions are where we spark a lot of great ideas. Naturally, the trainee and the CXer learn more about one another’s departments and processes and find opportunities to collaborate or support one another. 

The CXer that manages the program has a few additional responsibilities over the 4 weeks:

• Monitoring a Slack channel where trainees can ask for help
• Sending weekly updates on each trainee’s stats
• Running a survey to gather feedback from the trainees

How to get buy-in

This program requires 20 hours from every employee, which is no small ask. If you’re excited about implementing something like this at your company, I recommend preparing a business case to convince your boss that it’s worth the investment.

Here are some tips as you prepare your case:

Find an executive champion

I was lucky that a previous boss had an operational background and understood how CX is deeply interconnected with other parts of the business. She was actually the one who suggested this program, and her executive support was essential to put the plan into action. 

If possible, find someone with leadership status to champion this program. They can help convince whoever has the power to approve the program and get the rest of the company excited to participate. 

Regardless of whether you’re trying to implement this program, I want to encourage you to frequently showcase the work of your CX team to executives and the rest of the company. It’s not often that CX gets a spotlight for their work — unless something is on fire. By showing how complex and impactful the team’s work is, you’ll boost team morale and get buy-in for out-of-the-box initiatives like this. 

Emphasize the cross-functional benefits

This program is great for your CX because you’ll get new ideas to improve processes and a trained staff of agents who can step in during busy periods. But the larger benefits — the ones to emphasize when building your case — are the cross-functional collaboration and improvements.

Be sure to underscore how this program orients the entire company to think about CX and adopt a more customer-centric mindset. Plus, share a few examples about how Marketing, Product, and other teams (like Logistics and Wholesale) could refine processes by understanding how their work overlaps with the CX team’s work. 

Share this article

A testimonial from someone with first-hand experience goes a long way — let this article be that testimonial! My anecdotes about the benefits of this program are 100% real, and I’m confident any company could see similar improvements. 

Plus, you’re welcome to use my structure as a template to get started.

Choose a helpdesk with unlimited seats

Most helpdesks charge per user seat, which makes this kind of program impossibly expensive. You’d have to pay for each account, limiting your ability to get additional help in a pinch or share CX insights from customer conversations with the rest of your team. 

One of the (many!) reasons we chose Gorgias is because it allows you to have unlimited users, so every single person in the company can create an account, interact directly with customers, develop a great understanding of CX, and find ways to refine processes and implement customer feedback throughout the business. 

If you haven’t yet, I strongly recommend chatting with the Gorgias team — it’s a no-brainer for any ecommerce brand looking to make their CX more effective and efficient.

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TL;DR:

• Customer service channels are touchpoints where shoppers interact with support teams — including phone, email, chat, social media, self-service, and AI agents
• Modern brands need multiple channels because customers have different preferences, and issues vary in complexity and urgency
• Choose your channels based on customer demographics, journey stage, cost-to-serve, and team capacity
• An omnichannel approach with unified customer data across all channels delivers the best customer experience and highest agent efficiency
• Measure performance with customer satisfaction (CSAT), average handle time (AHT), first contact resolution (FCR), and service level agreement (SLA) adherence to continuously optimize your support strategy

Customers are everywhere, and they expect you to be right there with them. According to McKinsey, over 80% of customers would likely contact multiple channels, including email, live chat, and phone support, if they needed additional assistance. This means expanding where you offer support to meet customer expectations.

A good customer experience isn’t only about the one-on-one interaction between an agent and customer, it’s also about everything else that happens before — including the freedom to choose how they communicate with you.

This guide covers 9 essential customer service channels and how to choose the right mix for your brand. We’ll also show you how to measure and optimize channel performance for maximum efficiency and customer satisfaction.

‎What are customer service channels?

Customer service channels are the touchpoints where shoppers interact with your support team to get help, ask questions, or resolve issues. These channels range from traditional options like phone and email, to digital channels like social media and AI-powered chatbots.

Channels fall into two main categories: synchronous and asynchronous.

• Synchronous channels like phone and live chat enable real-time conversations where both parties are engaged simultaneously.
• Asynchronous channels like email allow customers to send messages and receive responses at different times. Understanding this distinction helps you match the right channel to the urgency and complexity of customer issues.

Most businesses need multiple channels because shopper preferences vary widely — and most prioritize immediacy. According to Gorgias’s customer expectations survey, 76.5% of customers care about fast answers. Choose your channels based on how your shoppers want to talk to you and the types of issues they typically face.

The top customer service channels (2026)

Most ecommerce brands rely on offering multiple channels to meet varying customer expectations and handle issue complexities. 

Here are the top 10 channels to offer for consistently exceptional customer experiences.

Phone support

Phone support remains one of the most powerful channels for resolving complex issues and building customer trust. Despite the rise of digital channels, reliable phone support provides a human connection that is preferred and appreciated across all generations. Voice conversations allow agents to pick up on emotional cues and demonstrate empathy in ways that text-based channels can’t match.

“I’ve seen that a phone call can actually turn things around,” says Bri Christiano, Senior Director of Customer Success at Gorgias. “Some people just need to be heard on the phone, especially people who are more used to having conversations over the phone. I’ve called angry customers, and if you let them speak and hear them out, and repeat back to them their frustrations, that alone will save that customer in the end.”

How it works in customer service:

Modern phone support uses technologies like interactive voice response (IVR) for call routing, automatic call distribution (ACD) to connect customers with the right agents, and computer telephony integration (CTI) to pull up customer data instantly.

Best for:

• Complex issues requiring detailed explanation or troubleshooting
• Urgent inquiries where customers need immediate resolution
• High-value customers or escalated complaints
• Older demographics who prefer voice communication
• Situations requiring emotional connection

Limitations:

• Most expensive channel to staff and maintain
• Agents can typically only handle one call at a time (low concurrency)
• Requires adequate staffing during business hours
• No written record unless call is transcribed
• Can be stressful for agents handling difficult conversations

Email support

Email serves as the primary channel for asynchronous support. Unlike real-time channels, email lets customers explain their issues in detail at their convenience and gives agents time to research and craft thoughtful responses. This makes email particularly valuable for complex inquiries that benefit from documentation and detailed explanations.

Most customers expect a quick response to their issues — and treating an email like the first step before a shopper leaves a bad review helps prevent escalation. If an agent receives a customer service email from an angry customer, a great first step is to apologize right away and take steps to de-escalate the situation with a thoughtful solution.

How it works in customer service:

Modern email support relies on ticketing systems to organize incoming messages, service level agreements (SLAs) to set response time goals, and macros or templates to speed up responses to common questions. Collision detection prevents multiple agents from responding to the same ticket, while threading keeps conversation history organized.

Best for:

• Non-urgent inquiries that don’t require immediate resolution
• Detailed explanations or step-by-step instructions
• Documentation needs where customers want written records
• Product recommendations requiring research
• Follow-up communication after initial contact

Limitations:

• Slower response times compared to real-time channels
• Can feel impersonal without proper personalization
• High volume can overwhelm teams without automation
• Back-and-forth exchanges take longer to resolve
• Email threads can become confusing with multiple replies

Live chat

Live chat provides real-time support directly on your website or app. This channel has become increasingly popular because it combines the immediacy of phone support with the convenience of digital communication.

Shoppers prefer chat because they can multitask while waiting for responses and get help without interrupting their shopping experience. In fact, a 2019 CGS survey found that 86% would rather interact with a human over a bot. 

The team at CROSSNET made use of live chat to quickly handle support tickets, and their efforts resulted in massive growth, including $450,000 USD in a single sale.

How it works in customer service:

Key features of live chat tailored for customer support teams include agent concurrency (handling multiple chats simultaneously), AI agent compatibility, escalation rules for transferring conversations, and transcript history.

Best for:

• Pre-sales questions from shoppers browsing your site
• Quick answers to simple inquiries
• Tech-savvy customers comfortable with digital communication
• Capturing high-intent visitors before they leave
• Order tracking and status updates

Limitations:

• Requires real-time staffing during business hours
• Can feel rushed if agents handle too many concurrent chats
• Limited for complex issues requiring detailed explanation
• Customers may abandon chat if wait times are too long
• Typing speed can slow down resolution compared to phone

SMS & messaging (WhatsApp, Messenger)

Customer service SMS and messaging apps like WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger are quickly rising in the ranks as preferred ways for shoppers to get in touch with brands. A text message is convenient — most people have mobile devices with them, and they’re more willing to respond to a quick text than find your contact page.

One reason for messaging’s popularity lies in fast response times and high engagement rates. Most customers expect to have a response to their message within 10 minutes. OLIPOP has seen an 88% decrease in response time since implementing SMS messaging — powered by Gorgias — in their customer support strategy.

How it works in customer service:

Top brands that offer SMS support include opt-in compliance (customers must consent to receive messages), session messaging windows (time limits for brands to respond), and two-way communication capabilities. 

WhatsApp Business API and Rich Communication Services (RCS) let brands send messages with media and interactive elements.

Best for:

• Order updates and shipping notifications
• Appointment reminders and confirmations
• Mobile-first customers who prefer texting
• Quick questions that don’t require detailed responses
• Younger demographics comfortable with messaging apps

Limitations:

• Character limits can restrict detailed explanations
• Compliance requirements vary by region and platform
• Platform fragmentation (WhatsApp, Messenger, SMS) requires multiple integrations
• Customers may not check messages as reliably as email
• Limited formatting options compared to email

Social media support

Social media platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and X (formerly Twitter) have become essential customer service channels. In fact, 80% of millennials prefer social media to other channels.

Social media support happens in two ways: public interactions through comments and posts, and private conversations through direct messages (DMs). Both are important because public responses demonstrate your commitment to customer service to potential customers, while DMs allow for personalized support on sensitive issues.

A growing number of younger shoppers — particularly Gen Z-ers — treat social media like a search engine, using these platforms to answer their questions about brands and products by scrolling through content created by real customers.

How it works in customer service:

Effective social media support requires social listening tools to monitor brand mentions, rapid-response SLAs to address complaints promptly, and clear escalation policies to move complex issues to other channels. 

“It’s really important to be monitoring social posts, even if you don’t have a massive following,” says Bri Christiano, Senior Director of Customer Success at Gorgias. “These are public platforms where potential new customers are going to look at your brand and see immediately how you engage with customers.”

Best for:

• Public accountability and demonstrating responsive service
• Brand visibility and turning support into marketing opportunities
• Younger demographics who prefer social platforms
• Quick acknowledgments before moving to private channels
• Community building and customer engagement

Limitations:

• Public complaints can damage brand reputation if not handled quickly
• Resource-intensive monitoring across multiple platforms
• Platform dependency and algorithm changes affect reach
• Limited control over conversation flow and format
• May attract trolls or negative attention

Self-service (knowledge base & portals)

Self-service options let customers solve questions and issues on their own. This channel includes knowledge bases or help centers, FAQ pages, and customer portals where shoppers can manage their accounts and orders.

Self-service benefits both customers and support teams. Customers get instant answers, regardless of timezone, without waiting for agent availability. For support teams, self-service reduces ticket volume by deflecting common questions, freeing agents to focus on complex issues that truly require human expertise.

How it works in customer service:

A help center works great when used with automation features like Flows to create a complete self-service experience. It is also the main data source for AI agents to deliver human-like answers to customers.

If you’re not ready to create a comprehensive Help Center, you can start with a simple FAQ page. Check out our free FAQ template generator to get started.

Best for:

• Common questions with straightforward answers
• After-hours support when agents aren’t available
• Scalability as your customer base grows
• Customers who prefer finding answers independently
• Reducing cost per contact through ticket deflection

Limitations:

• Requires ongoing content maintenance and updates
• Can’t handle all issue types or complex scenarios
• Effectiveness depends on article quality and search functionality
• Some customers will always prefer human interaction
• Initial investment in content creation can be substantial

AI chatbots & agents

Unlike chatbots that follow pre-defined decision trees, AI agents use natural language understanding (NLU) to comprehend questions and provide relevant answers independently.

AI agents work 24/7 to provide instant responses even when your support team is off the clock. They excel at answering frequently asked questions, tracking orders, qualifying leads, and guiding customers through common processes. 

One way to meet rising customer expectations is to consider implementing both live chat and AI agents that work in tandem. This way, you can leverage live agents during working hours, then let the bots take over customer queries when it’s time for your reps to clock out.

How it works in customer service:

AI tools made for customer service use guardrails or guidance instructions to ensure it doesn’t violate customer service policy. It’s important for customer service teams to build a smooth handoff process so customers can talk to live agents when AI can’t resolve their issue. 

Off-limit topics for AI may include:

• Angry messages and complaints
• Emotional situations
• Legal and compliance inquiries
• Medical, financial, or health guidance

Best for:

• High-volume repetitive questions like order status and return policies
• 24/7 coverage without staffing overnight shifts
• Instant responses during peak traffic periods
• Qualifying leads before routing to sales teams
• Initial triage to categorize and route inquiries

Limitations:

• Requires training data and ongoing optimization
• Can’t handle all nuance and complex scenarios
• Needs clear escalation path to human agents
• May frustrate customers if responses feel robotic
• Initial setup investment in configuration and testing

Community forums

Online forums provide a space for customers to help one another through peer-to-peer support. Forums work particularly well for brands with passionate user communities or complex products where experienced customers can share expertise.

The beauty of forums lies in the social proof they generate. When customers see that others have successfully solved similar problems, they gain confidence in your product and brand. Build them using free apps and websites, like Discord, Slack, Reddit, or Facebook groups.

How it works in customer service:

Successful forums require moderation to maintain quality and safety. Features like accepted solutions, upvoting, and superuser programs help surface the best answers and recognize valuable community members. Do your research before building from scratch to see if your brand already has a word-of-mouth presence on a third-party forum.

Best for:

• Product communities with engaged user bases
• Technical troubleshooting where customers can share solutions
• Long-tail questions that don’t fit standard documentation
• Building brand loyalty through community engagement
• Reducing repetitive support inquiries through peer answers

Limitations:

• Requires active moderation to prevent misinformation
• Slower responses compared to direct support channels
• Not suitable for urgent issues or account-specific problems
• Community needs critical mass of active users to be effective
• Risk of negative conversations if not properly managed

Video support

Video support enables face-to-face conversations for complex issues that benefit from visual demonstration or screen sharing. This channel combines the personal connection of phone support with the added dimension of visual communication.

Customers appreciate video support when they need to show a product issue, follow technical instructions, or receive personalized guidance. The visual element helps agents diagnose problems faster and provide more accurate solutions, making it ideal for high-touch support in enterprise sales or premium services.

How it works in customer service:

WebRTC for real-time video streaming, screen sharing for technical support, co-browsing for guiding customers through processes, and sometimes facial recognition for identity verification (know your customer, or KYC). 

Bandwidth requirements and scheduling challenges mean video support works best for specific use cases rather than as a primary channel.

Best for:

• Complex technical issues requiring visual troubleshooting
• High-touch support for premium customers
• Product demonstrations and setup assistance
• Visual verification of product defects or damages
• Building personal relationships with key accounts

Limitations:

• Bandwidth and technical requirements can create access barriers
• Scheduling challenges compared to on-demand channels
• Privacy concerns for customers uncomfortable on camera
• Requires stable internet connection for both parties
• More resource-intensive than other channels

How to choose and resource your channel mix

Building the right channel mix requires balancing customer needs with operational realities. Follow these steps:

1. Understand where your customers are

Analyze customer demographics and communication preferences. Topicals uses SMS to connect with Gen Z skincare shoppers, while Comme Avant handles most support through social media DMs.

2. Map channels to the customer journey

Match channels to shopping stages: social media and live chat for awareness, chat and email for pre-sales questions, and phone or video for complex post-purchase issues.

3. Consider cost-to-serve

Phone and video support cost the most because agents must serve a single customer at a time. Live chat is more efficient since agents handle multiple conversations. Self-service and AI agents offer the lowest cost-per-contact after initial setup.

4. Start with pilot programs

Test one channel at a time, measure performance, and optimize before expanding. This staged approach helps you work out operational challenges and validate value.

5. Resource appropriately

Train teams for channel-specific skills — phone agents need empathy and active listening, while chat agents need quick typing and multitasking abilities. Ensure your technology infrastructure supports your chosen channels.

Measure and optimize channel performance

Measurement drives improvement in customer service. Without clear metrics, you can’t identify which channels deliver the best results, where to invest resources, or how to justify your support budget. 

Tracking the right key performance indicators helps you spot trends, optimize operations, and demonstrate the value your support team delivers to the business.

Key metrics to track by channel:

• CSAT (customer satisfaction score): Measures customer happiness with support interaction
• NPS (net promoter score): Measures customer loyalty and likelihood to recommend
• AHT (average handle time): Measures efficiency of support interactions
• FCR (first contact resolution): Measures percentage of issues resolved in first interaction
• SLA adherence: Measures whether team meets response and resolution time commitments
• Occupancy rate: Measures percentage of time agents spend on active support work

Manage all your channels in one place with Gorgias

When your tools don’t integrate, your team wastes time switching between systems, customer data stays siloed, and the experience feels disjointed.

Gorgias provides a unified helpdesk built specifically for ecommerce brands, bringing email, chat, phone, SMS, social media, and more into one inbox. Deep integrations with Shopify and 100+ apps give agents complete context with order data and purchase history — no tab switching required. Plus, Gorgias AI Agent handles 60%+ of tickets automatically, freeing your team to build deeper customer relationships.

Book a demo and see how Gorgias creates the best ecosystem for all your customer service channels.

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TL;DR:

• Customer service chatbots automate repetitive support tasks like order tracking and returns, freeing your team for complex issues
• Modern AI chatbots use natural language processing to understand context and personalize responses across all channels
• Top platforms like Gorgias integrate directly with Shopify and ecommerce tools to resolve tickets without agent involvement
• Look for features like knowledge grounding, omnichannel support, agent handoff, and deflection analytics
• Implementation takes minutes with no-code builders, pre-built templates, and Help Center integration

Customer service chatbots handle support conversations on autopilot, answering questions on your website, chat, and across channels like Instagram or SMS. They take care of the repetitive stuff (tracking orders, explaining your return policy, answering product questions) so your team doesn't have to.

For ecommerce brands, a good chatbot means fewer "Where's my order?" tickets clogging up your inbox, faster responses, and lower support costs. You need one that plugs into your store, can process returns or exchanges, and pulls answers straight from your policies.

This guide breaks down what customer service chatbots actually do, which platforms work best for online stores in 2025, and how to pick and set one up without the headache.

What is a customer service chatbot?

A customer service chatbot is a digital tool that automates support conversations on your website using artificial intelligence. It interprets customer questions through natural language processing (NLP), pulls answers from your knowledge base, and resolves issues without needing your support team.

There are two main types: rule-based chatbots and AI-powered chatbots. Both respond to customer questions automatically, but rule-based bots follow preset scripts and decision trees, while AI bots use large language models to understand context and generate more flexible responses.

For ecommerce businesses, chatbots deliver 24/7 support at scale. They handle repetitive questions (like "Where's my order?" or "What's your return policy?"), reduce wait times, and cut down on ticket volume. When they can't resolve something, they hand off to your team with full context.

Top customer service chatbot picks (quick overview)

If you're evaluating customer service chatbots for your ecommerce brand, here's a comparison of the top 8 platforms. This shortlist highlights key evaluation criteria to help you narrow down your options before diving into detailed feature comparisons.

Best customer service chatbots (2025)

Choosing the right customer service chatbot requires evaluating platforms based on use-case fit, integration depth, and proven resolution rates. Below, we've ranked eight platforms using a comprehensive evaluation rubric that considers ecommerce-specific features, time-to-value, pricing transparency, and customer satisfaction score (CSAT) impact.

1. Gorgias (for Shopify & ecommerce support automation)

Gorgias is a conversational AI platform built specifically for ecommerce brands, with deep Shopify integration and AI automation designed for online retail. Unlike general-purpose helpdesks, Gorgias combines ticketing, AI Agent, and order management in a single platform optimized for common ecommerce scenarios like WISMO (where is my order), returns, cancellations, and product questions.

The platform's AI Agent is trained on your Help Center articles, saved macros, and real-time Shopify data. This enables it to provide personalized responses that pull order details, tracking information, and customer history.

Self-service Flows let customers handle routine requests independently through your chat widget or Help Center. Meanwhile, Shopify Actions allow the AI to execute tasks like editing orders, processing refunds, or canceling orders directly from the conversation.

Gorgias also provides proactive support capabilities, automatically reaching out to customers about shipping delays or abandoned carts. The platform tracks deflection and resolution metrics so you can measure automation impact and continuously optimize your self-service options. Brands using the platform achieve 30-45% ticket deflection while improving response times and customer satisfaction.

Main features:

• AI Agent trained on your help center, macros, and Shopify data
• Self-service flows for order tracking, returns, and cancellations
• Omnichannel support (email, chat, SMS, social, voice)
• Shopify Actions (edit orders, process refunds, cancel orders from chat)
• Agent handoff with full conversation context
• Deflection and resolution analytics
• No-code automation builder with pre-built templates

Ideal for:

• Shopify and Shopify Plus brands
• Fashion, beauty, home goods, and wellness brands
• Teams handling high WISMO and returns volume
• Brands wanting to automate support and drive sales in one platform

Pricing:

• Starter: $10/month (50 tickets)
• Basic: $60/month (300 tickets)
• Pro: $360/month (2,000 tickets)
• Advanced: $900/month (5,000 tickets)
• AI Agent add-on available on all plans

2. Intercom

Intercom’s Fin is an AI-powered chatbot that uses brand knowledge and policies to  answer customer questions. It's particularly strong for businesses that need both support and sales automation in one place, which is why it's popular with SaaS companies and ecommerce brands looking for a unified messaging platform.

Fin AI uses natural language understanding to provide contextual responses and integrates with Intercom's messenger and ticketing system. The platform includes conversation routing, team collaboration tools, and performance analytics. However, ecommerce-specific actions like order management require custom development or third-party integrations.

Pricing:

• Essential: $29/seat/month
• Advanced: $85/seat/month
• Expert: $132/seat/month
• Fin AI Agent: $0.99/resolution (add-on)

3. Zendesk

Zendesk is an enterprise-grade helpdesk with AI-powered chatbot capabilities built in. The platform's AI bot is pre-trained on billions of support conversations, so it handles common customer service scenarios with strong baseline accuracy. It's built for large-scale operations, especially if you need multilingual support or complex routing across multiple teams.

The platform includes robust reporting, workforce management tools, and extensive integrations with CRM and ecommerce platforms. Zendesk's AI features cover intent detection, sentiment analysis, and automated article recommendations. 

The downside: the complexity and pricing can be steep for smaller brands, and ecommerce-specific automation requires additional configuration or apps.

Pricing:

• Suite Team: $55/user/month
• Suite Growth: $89/user/month
• Suite Professional: $115/user/month
• Advanced AI add-on: $50/agent/month

4. Freshchat

Freshchat is a multichannel messaging platform with an AI assistant called Freddy. Part of the Freshworks suite, it offers strong team collaboration features and omnichannel support across web, mobile, email, and social channels. It's a solid fit for growing support teams that need intelligent routing based on agent availability and customer intent.

Freddy AI answers questions from your knowledge base, suggests articles, and handles basic inquiries. The visual bot builder lets non-technical teams create conversation flows without coding. Freshchat integrates with Freshdesk for ticketing and includes basic analytics to track chatbot performance and customer satisfaction.

Pricing:

• Free Plan: Up to 10 agents
• Growth: $19/agent/month
• Pro: $49/agent/month
• Enterprise: $79/agent/month

5. Tidio

Tidio is an affordable AI chatbot and live chat solution built for small ecommerce stores with basic automation needs. The visual flow builder makes it easy to create chatbot conversations without technical skills, and Lyro AI assistant handles common questions using your knowledge base. It integrates with Shopify, WooCommerce, and BigCommerce.

The platform includes pre-built templates for abandoned cart recovery, order tracking, and lead generation. Pricing is accessible for small businesses, with a free plan that covers basic chatbot functionality. Advanced AI features and higher conversation volumes require paid plans.

Pricing:

• Free Plan: 50 conversations/month
• Starter: $24.17/month
• Growth: $49.17/month
• Plus: $749/month

6. Chatfuel

Chatfuel is a chatbot builder specialized for social media platforms like Facebook Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp. It's ideal for brands focused on social commerce or influencer partnerships, with robust automation for DMs and social customer service. The platform's strength is its deep integration with Meta, letting you automate responses to comments, messages, and story replies.

The visual builder includes templates for order tracking, product recommendations, and promotional campaigns. Chatfuel can connect via API to pull order data or integrate with your ecommerce platform. 

The limitation: it only works on social channels, so it won't cover your website or other support channels.

Pricing:

• Business Plan: $23.99/month (1,000 conversations)
• Enterprise Plan: From $300/month

7. Kommunicate

Kommunicate is a no-code chatbot platform with flexible AI model support, letting you choose between GPT-4, Gemini, Anthropic, and custom models. This flexibility appeals to enterprise teams that need specific AI capabilities or want control over their AI infrastructure. The platform includes a visual bot builder, live chat handoff, and omnichannel support across web, mobile, and messaging apps.

Kommunicate's strength is its customization options and multi-model support. You can build complex conversation flows, integrate with external systems via API, and create custom AI workflows. 

The limitation: Its flexibility adds complexity, and setup may require more technical expertise than simpler platforms.

Pricing:

• Lite Plan: $83.33/month (500 conversations)
• Advanced Plan: $166.66/month (2,000 conversations)

8. Ada

Ada is an AI-powered automation platform built for large enterprises with global support operations. It specializes in multilingual support across over 100 languages and handles complex conversation flows with enterprise system integrations and detailed performance analytics.

The platform is designed for high-volume support teams needing enterprise-grade security, compliance, and scalability. Implementation includes dedicated support, custom AI training, and ongoing optimization. 

The limitation: enterprise focus means custom pricing and longer implementation timelines.

Pricing:

• Custom pricing only (contact for quote)

How to implement a customer service chatbot

Implementing a customer service chatbot doesn't require technical expertise. Today’s platforms provide no-code builders, pre-built templates, and guided setup. 

The key is approaching implementation strategically: identify your highest-volume use cases, prepare your knowledge sources, and establish clear guardrails before going live.

We recommend following these four essential steps to deploy a customer service chatbot.

Define intents and data sources

Identify your top 10-20 customer questions using ticket data from your helpdesk. Look for repetitive inquiries like "Where is my order?" or "What's your return policy?" These repetitive and simple questions are best for automation.

Next, audit your data sources: Help Center articles, macros, FAQ pages, and past conversations. These become your chatbot's brain. Make sure your content is up-to-date and comprehensive enough to answer variations of each question. Many platforms can import help center content automatically, but review it to fill gaps.

Read more: What makes a great knowledge base for AI?

Choose flow vs. AI assistance

Rule-based flows use decision trees with buttons and predefined paths. They work well for straightforward scenarios like “Track my order” or “Start a return" where the process is consistent. Flows are predictable and easy to test.

AI-powered responses use natural language understanding to interpret open-ended questions and generate answers from your knowledge base. AI handles more variation but requires careful testing to ensure accuracy. Many brands use a hybrid approach: flows for transactional tasks, AI for informational questions.

Train on help center and macros

Connect your chatbot to existing knowledge sources by importing help center articles, saved agent responses (macros), and product information. This grounds the AI's responses in on-brand content and reduces hallucination.

Review your training data for gaps, outdated information, and inconsistencies. The better your source content, the better your chatbot's responses. Plan to update this content regularly as products and policies evolve.

Test, guardrails, and handoff

Before launching, test your chatbot in test mode with real team members asking typical questions. Verify that responses are accurate, on-brand, and helpful. Test edge cases and unusual phrasings to identify gaps in your coverage.

Set guardrails to define what the chatbot should and shouldn't handle. Exclude sensitive topics (account security, payment disputes), set confidence thresholds for escalation, and establish clear handoff protocols. Make sure customers can easily reach a human agent, and that agents receive full conversation context when taking over.

Related: Should brands disclose AI in customer interactions? A guide for CX leaders

Must-have customer service chatbot features

Not all customer service chatbots are built for ecommerce. Here's what to look for: the ability to pull real-time order data, maintain conversation and customer context across channels, and execute actions beyond simple Q&A. 

The best platforms combine knowledge, routing, compliance, and analytics to deliver instant replies without sacrificing customer experience.

Omnichannel support

Look for platforms that maintain channel continuity or omnichannel support. This means your chatbot works consistently across email, live chat, SMS, social media, and voice channels. 

Customers should be able to start a conversation on Instagram, continue it via email, and finish in chat without repeating themselves. The idea is to preserve customer context across touchpoints so the customer experience feels seamless.

Knowledge grounding

Knowledge grounding ensures your chatbot pulls answers from verified sources like your help center, macros, product catalog, and order data rather than generating responses from scratch. This improves accuracy and reduces AI hallucination. Look for platforms that show which source was used for each response so you can identify and fix content gaps.

Did you know? Advanced platforms use retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) to find relevant information even when customers phrase questions differently than your help articles, handling variations and context-dependent queries more effectively.

Guardrails and compliance

Guardrails control what your chatbot can discuss, ensuring it stays within approved topics and escalates sensitive issues to human agents. You should be able to exclude certain subjects (account security, complaints), set confidence thresholds, and define clear AI-to-human escalation rules. This protects your brand and prevents incorrect or inappropriate information.

Compliance requirements vary by industry and region, but most ecommerce brands need GDPR compliance for European customers. Enterprise brands may require SOC 2, HIPAA, or specific data residency controls. Verify that your platform offers encryption in transit and at rest, plus role-based access control to limit which team members can access sensitive customer data.

Related: How AI Agent works & gathers data

Agent assist and handoff

Agent assist uses AI to support your human agents during conversations by suggesting relevant help articles, drafting replies, and summarizing long threads. This speeds up resolution times and keeps responses consistent.

Just as important is seamless handoff. This feature allows conversations to be transferred between AI and human agents. Your agents see everything that happened so customers don't have to repeat themselves. The best platforms let agents review and edit chatbot responses before they're sent, so you maintain quality control during hybrid automation.

Analytics and measurement

Measuring chatbot performance means tracking specific metrics: deflection rate (conversations resolved without agents), resolution rate (successfully resolved), containment (conversations that never escalate), and CSAT (customer satisfaction). These metrics show whether your automation is reducing workload while keeping customers happy.

Look for platforms with detailed reporting on conversation topics, failed intents, and customer feedback. This data shows you where to expand automation, which responses need work, and what new content to create. The best solutions offer real-time dashboards and automated alerts when performance drops below your thresholds.

Benefits of customer service chatbots

The real value for ecommerce brands lies in specific outcomes: reducing WISMO tickets, speeding up returns processing, and freeing agents to focus on complex issues that drive customer loyalty and revenue. 

Effective automation improves customer experience by providing instant answers to routine questions while ensuring complex issues get the human attention they deserve. 

Below are examples of brands who've experienced these benefits firsthand.

24/7 coverage and lower wait times

24/7 availability means customers get instant responses outside business hours, across time zones, and during peak shopping periods. Chatbots handle routine questions immediately, reducing wait times and queue depth so customers with complex issues get faster access to human agents.

Success story: Orthofeet automated 56% of tickets in under 2 months and improved chat first response time by 92%, maintaining service levels without expanding headcount.

Deflection and cost-to-serve reduction

Deflection measures the percentage of inquiries resolved through self-service without agent involvement. High deflection rates directly reduce cost-to-serve, and for brands processing thousands of WISMO and return requests monthly, even 30% deflection represents significant labor savings.

Success story: Arc'teryx achieved a 23x ROI on their AI Agent while freeing agents from repetitive work to focus on meaningful customer relationships that drive loyalty.

Personalization and faster resolution

Personalization means pulling customer-specific data like order history and preferences to provide contextual responses. Rather than generic answers, chatbots can say "Your order #12345 shipped yesterday and will arrive Thursday."

Success story: Caitlyn Minimalist saw an 11.3% uplift in average order value and a 50% sales lift from AI-assisted chats by delivering instant, tailored product recommendations that turn single purchases into collections.

Customer service chatbot trends

AI advancements are driving practical improvements in how chatbots understand context, take actions, and integrate across channels. Here are the key trends shaping the space.

Agentic AI and grounding

Agentic AI shifts chatbots from answering questions to taking actions like initiating returns, processing refunds, or modifying orders autonomously. Grounding ensures AI agents pull information from verified sources before acting, using retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) to combine language model flexibility with knowledge base accuracy, dramatically reducing hallucination.

Low-code orchestration

Low-code and no-code platforms let support teams build and modify automation using visual drag-and-drop interfaces. Pre-built templates for common scenarios like order tracking and returns let brands launch automation quickly, accelerating iteration and letting support teams expand automation coverage without waiting for engineering resources.

Proactive support and triggers

Proactive support initiates conversations based on customer behavior or events like shipping delays, abandoned carts, or back-in-stock notifications. Effective implementations use customer data to personalize outreach, catching issues before they become complaints and creating opportunities to drive purchases.

Omnichannel continuity

Modern chatbots extend beyond web chat to phone support and SMS, with AI voices handling phone inquiries in natural, conversational language. Customers can switch seamlessly between channels—starting a conversation via SMS, continuing on the phone with an AI voice agent, then escalating to a human—without repeating information or losing context.

Customer service chatbot examples

Below are practical examples of how chatbots handle common scenarios across different verticals.

• Ecommerce (returns, WISMO): Chatbots instantly pull real-time tracking data for "Where Is My Order" inquiries and automate return requests by verifying eligibility, processing prepaid labels, and creating returns in your platform — resolving most requests in under a minute.
• SaaS (billing, account): Chatbots handle subscription management by connecting to billing systems like Stripe, letting customers view plans, upgrade or downgrade, troubleshoot failed payments, and manage account access without contacting support.
• Travel (itinerary, rebooking): Chatbots pull real-time booking information like confirmation numbers and gate changes, then handle simple rebooking requests by checking policies, calculating refunds, and processing changes autonomously.
• Telecom (troubleshooting): Chatbots guide customers through diagnostic flows with step-by-step instructions, check network status for outages, and deflect phone calls by handling account inquiries and basic technical issues through voice commands.

How to choose a customer service chatbot

Now that you know what customer service chatbots are and which platforms lead the market, it's time to evaluate which one fits your specific needs. 

The right choice balances capability, ease of implementation, and long-term scalability for your business. 

Use this checklist to systematically assess platforms based on your highest-volume ticket types, required integrations, compliance requirements, and team capabilities.

Core functionality and fit

• Can it handle your top ticket types (order tracking, returns, cancellations, product questions, policy inquiries)?
• Does it support both rule-based flows and AI responses?
• Can it execute actions (process refunds, cancel orders) or just provide information?

Chatbots vs. conversational AI

• Do you need basic information delivery (FAQ answers, policy explanations) or action-taking capabilities (processing returns, issuing refunds)?
• Would a hybrid approach work best — flows for structured tasks, AI agents for complex questions, human handoff for sensitive issues?
• Does the platform offer both options so you can scale from chatbot to AI agent as your needs grow?

Integration and data needs

• Does it offer native integrations with your helpdesk, ecommerce platform, CRM, and marketing automation tools?
• Can it access real-time order status, customer profiles, product inventory, and loyalty data (not just daily batch syncing)?
• Does it integrate deeply with your ecommerce platform (Shopify, BigCommerce, Magento, WooCommerce) to pull real-time order data?

Security and compliance

• Does it meet your compliance requirements (GDPR, HIPAA, PCI DSS, SOC 2)?
• Does it provide encryption in transit and at rest, plus role-based access control?
• Can you control where customer data is stored and processed (data residency)?

Pricing and scale

• What's the pricing model: per-seat, per-conversation, per-resolution, or tiered based on volume?
• What's your total cost of ownership including implementation, ongoing maintenance, and projected conversation volume?
• Can it handle seasonal spikes without performance issues or surprise overage charges?

Get started with customer service chatbots

Implementing a customer service chatbot starts with evaluating your needs. Focus on platforms that go live quickly and deliver measurable deflection within the first week while balancing self-service efficiency with human connection.

Ready to see how Gorgias automates ecommerce support while keeping the personalized experience your customers expect? Book a demo to learn how top brands achieve 30-60% ticket deflection.

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With a decade of experience in customer service roles, I’ve recognized that ecommerce customer service goes beyond answering questions. 

The best experience you can give customers is proactively providing them with what they need so they don't have to contact support at all. In instances where customers do need to talk to someone on the team, interactions that surprise and delight help keep them coming back. 

Ecommerce customer service may feel less personal than it would in person, but there are a multitude of ways you can make it special.

Whether you’re building an online store from scratch or need extra hands to handle your growing customer base, I’ve rounded up the top 15 best practices for ecommerce customer service that you can start using to improve your support team.

The top 15 ecommerce customer service best practices to implement

1. Use a customer service helpdesk specifically built for ecommerce stores

‎If I could only recommend one tool, it would be a helpdesk. A helpdesk is a customer service software that allows support agents and teams to manage customer data, inquiries, and orders in one platform.

If you run an online store, Gorgias is the perfect helpdesk specifically designed for ecommerce tasks. It smoothly combines order management, order fulfillment, and customer service in one tool, so that you can speak to customers and resolve their issues while being able to pull up their order data in one window. 

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2. Combine all your support channels on one platform

‎When customers can receive help the way they want — whether that’s a phone call or Facebook messages — they feel more comfortable initiating a relationship with your brand. Establishing a positive first impression can be the fuel you need to turn them into returning customers.

💡 Tip: Phone support can be the key to keeping customers. Throughout the years, I’ve seen first-hand how a simple 10-minute phone call can turn a sour interaction around. Most customers may prefer written communication, but being able to hash out an issue over a voice call can be the difference between losing a customer and keeping them.

The top support channels you should offer: 

• Email: Provides customers a channel to voice in-depth and detailed inquiries.
• Chat: Useful for quick questions that can be answered within one interaction.
• Social media: The best channel for new customers who want quick answers.
• Voice/phone: A valuable channel to explain and resolve complicated issues. 

3. Automate responses with reusable Macros 

‎To cut down first response times, use Macros or customer service scripts. On Gorgias, Macros are pre-written responses that can be applied to the most common customer interactions.

The best way to use Macros is by applying them to what I refer to as empty-calorie tickets. Empty-calorie tickets are repetitive inquiries that people ask over and over again, such as “Where is my order?” Automating the responses to these low-effort tickets is the easiest way to incorporate Macros into your workflow. 

When to use Macros:

• Welcome emails
• Order status emails (transaction completed, order shipped, order delivered)
• Refund processed emails
• Customer loyalty emails

4. Trigger shopping cart abandonment notifications

Customers who abandon their carts are inevitable, but you don’t have to leave it there. Sending an email to a customer who still has items in their shopping cart can be the final push to trigger a purchase. You can even pair the notification with a discount to make the purchase more appealing.

Acquiring new customers is expensive, so it’s extremely important to recapture customer attention when you have the chance. 

5. Respond to social media comments quickly

Pay attention to your social media presence because 26% of people learn about a product through social media, according to a 2023 study by Statista. Public social media comments have the power to either bring in new customers or completely turn them off from your brand. For this reason, it’s important to actively engage with social media users who mention your brand. 

Having an active social media presence is an easy way to show you care about what your customers have to say. When you address comments publicly, prospective customers will trust you more for your ability to be transparent and authentic.

📚 Related reading: 5 tips to leverage social media for your store

6. Send order status and shipment update emails

Customers like to know when an action they’ve taken was successful. When it comes to ecommerce, you can easily check this best practice off your list by making it a routine to send order status emails, like when an order has been shipped.

On Gorgias, we take the manual work out of sending routine emails with Macros. If you’re a Shopify store, Gorgias automatically populates your emails with important customer information pulled from Shopify such as customer name, order number, tracking number, and more.

7. Offer self-service options

88% of customers like to find answers on their own and expect a brand to have a self-service portal, according to Statista. You can help make the search easier by filling your website with self-service options. 

Self-service options are resources for customers to get the answers they need without contacting an agent. These include FAQ pages, help centers, chat widgets, and interactive quizzes.

Here’s how each self-service option can benefit you:

• FAQ page: Centralizes customers’ most commonly asked questions on one page to prevent your inbox from being filled with the same questions.
• Help Center: Larger in scope than an FAQ page, a Help Center is a database of detailed resources like articles and how-to videos to help customers learn more about your brand and product.
• Chat widget: Chat widgets can turn into a self-service option with the implementation of Quick Response Flows, or preset conversations that can answer customers without a live agent.
• Interactive quiz: A fun self-service addition to online stores that carry highly specialized products, like skincare, health supplements, and apparel.

📚 Related reading: A guide to building an FAQ page

8. Collect email addresses

Data collection makes up a large chunk of customer service, and it doesn’t have to be complicated. The easiest way to gather customer data is by collecting email addresses via newsletter signups and contact forms on your online store.

Customer service is important and shouldn't stop when your agents are off the clock. On Gorgias, you can add a contact form to your chat widget when your store is offline, so you have the opportunity to turn first-time customers into loyal followers.

‎Benefits of collecting customer emails: 

• Allows you to entice new customers with promotional offers and discount codes
• Boosts customer data with requests for feedback
• Personalizes customer interactions

9. Optimize your website for mobile

Three-quarters of Americans are shopping with their smartphone. It’s time to shift your focus. To take advantage of this customer behavior, match a convenient tool like the smartphone with an equally convenient and optimized website.

A website optimized for mobile includes:

• A responsive layout that adapts to all device sizes
• An easy-to-use menu
• Limited popups and distractions
• Legible fonts and text sizes

10. Create a customer returns and exchanges portal

If your store accepts returns and exchanges, it’s a good idea to automate the process with a portal. Returning an item is essentially just one step: getting an item out of a customer’s hands. It shouldn’t require a live agent. So, when your customers can return an item on their own, it becomes a huge time-saver for both them and your agents.

For example, when I worked at Stitch Fix, every time a customer needed an exchange, they'd have to reach out to support. It was a huge friction point. Eventually, we decided to build an exchange tool that became part of our checkout flow. From then on, our customers didn’t even need to think about contacting support because it was just an automatic part of the process.

💡 Tip: The easiest way to make a returns portal is by connecting Loop Returns with Gorgias. Loop Returns simplifies the return and exchange process by routing customers to a link, not an agent. By automating this part of the customer journey, your support team can deal with more urgent tickets.

11. Feature customer reviews to amplify your brand

Showcasing personal experiences can be the magic ingredient that adds credibility to your product. When potential customers read about real-life encounters with your product, they gain trust in your brand. Customer reviews can even nudge hesitant buyers toward making a purchase.

For example, PuffCuff does an amazing job at making their product shine. Not only do they feature reviews, but they also include a customer review video. Being able to add a visual element that shows how conveniently your product solves a problem can convince customers who are on the fence.

Where to feature customer reviews:

• Homepage
• Product pages
• Social media posts
• Welcome emails

12. Create a loyalty or rewards program

Attracting new customers requires extra marketing that you may not have the budget for. Here’s a different approach: increase the value you get from your current customers with a loyalty program.

With a loyalty program, customers who already love your brand are incentivized to buy more while earning exclusive perks. An easy way to set up a program is by integrating LoyaltyLion with Gorgias. You instantly get customer retention features like shopping cart rewards, in-site notifications, and loyalty emails. 

13. Use high-quality product photos

Without a physical storefront, your product photos will be doing all the talking. Customers want to get as close to the product as they possibly can to make an informed purchase. In short, gaining customer trust depends on the appearance of your products.

Here’s how to build trust through product photos:

• Standardize product photos across your website. Using the same high-quality camera, lighting, and background will show customers your brand pays attention to details, allowing them to trust your products more.
• Display multiple angles of your product. Allow customers to envision how your product will fit into their lives with accurate photos.
• Implement zoomable photos. Letting customers zoom in on your products can show them the exact qualities of your product, such as color, texture, and build quality.

📚 Learn more: Improve your product photography with these 3 tips

14. Improve your checkout experience 

When customers get to checkout, they’re inches away from the finish line. Don't risk hampering their journey by subjecting them to a bad checkout experience. In fact, a staggering 17% of US online shoppers abandoned their orders in 2022 because of a "too long/complicated checkout process," according to Baymard. 

Here's how to improve the checkout experience:

• Offer guest checkout. Customers want fast service and that means letting them skip the tedious account creation process.
• Present all extra fees and costs. Surprise fees can turn customers off from buying a product. Be transparent by including any extra fees at the checkout page to avoid losing their trust.
• Accept a variety of payment options, including Buy Now, Pay Later. A brand that caters to all wallet sizes is likely to bring in more customers.
• Include a checkout progress bar. Visually guiding your customer through the buying journey allows them to feel at ease with manageable steps and provides them with a sense of achievement once they reach the end.

15. Track trends by using customer service metrics

‎You’ve got pages of customer emails, buying behavior data, and feedback — now what? The next step is to use this data to track customer buying trends and your support team’s performance. With Gorgias, you can track how well your customer service operates with Support Performance Statistics. 

Track these support performance metrics to improve your processes:

• First response times: The faster you answer tickets, the more satisfied customers will be.
• Average resolution times: How effectively is your team resolving tickets? You can track this number to pinpoint gaps and inefficient steps in your process.
• Average number of tickets: A high number of tickets may indicate that you need more self-service options.

💡 Tip: Great customer service should have clear KPIs that are aligned with company goals such as customer retention and revenue generation that clearly demonstrate how your customer service creates value for the company and enable you to evaluate the effectiveness of your support program.

The bottom line: Delight your customers at every stage  

Making every customer interaction delightful goes a long way. Customers are more motivated to keep interacting with your brand and can even inspire new customers to join in. When you show customers that you care, you give way to loyalty. 

At Gorgias, we quickly get support teams the customer trust they need with an all-in-one helpdesk. Our helpdesk streamlines the customer experience with omnichannel communication, ecommerce platform integration to Shopify and BigCommerce, Revenue Statistics, and automation in one convenient platform. 

Ready to put these best practices into practice? Book a demo now.

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

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

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

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

What is SMS customer service?

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

Why SMS text messaging improves the customer service experience

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

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

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

10 tips to successfully incorporate messaging into your customer service strategy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

3) Use autoresponders for a lightning-fast first response

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

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

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

4) Create a system to categorize and segment priority tickets 

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

You can start by prioritizing:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

7) Go beyond text-only interactions with multimedia messaging

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For example, you can send out text blasts:

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

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

9) Integrate your SMS support with your marketing efforts

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

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

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

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

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

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

SMS customer service templates for common response types

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

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

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

Ticket received template

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

Here’s our template for a ticket received autoresponder:

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

Introduction message template

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

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

Hours of operation template

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

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

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

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

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

Order status template 

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

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

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

Payment reminder template

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

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

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

Deals or rewards template

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

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

Refund issued template

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

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

Here’s the template:

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

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

Customer check-in template

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

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

Here’s a model:

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

Templates for SMS marketing and relevant integrations 

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

Discount template

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

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

Appointment reminder template

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

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

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

Order confirmation template

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

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

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

Pickup notification template

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

Here’s an example:

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

Survey or poll template

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

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

Membership renewals template

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

Here’s an example:

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

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Is conversational and SMS customer service right for your business?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Is your marketing team already sending SMS campaigns?

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

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

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

Are customers abandoning conversations on other channels? 

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

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

Are you already active on related channels?

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

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

Are you struggling to gather customer feedback?

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

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

What to look for in text messaging tools

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ecommerce SMS marketing tools to complement your customer experience

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Message your customers in real time with Gorgias

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

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

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

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

• Instagram messages
• Facebook messenger‍
• WhatsApp messaging