It's been over 3 years since we've started working on the Gorgias helpdesk. The engineering team started with just me (Alex) and then gradually grew to a team of 5 people. We're a small team, but we've accomplished a lot during this period. Here are some stats from 0 code/customers/revenue in Oct 2015 to this:

• Handled over 16 million tickets.
• 2000 daily active sessions with an average length of ~4h each.
• 600 paying customers (companies).
• 17% MoM revenue growth.

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Modest numbers to be sure, but we're very proud that people use our product in a big part of their workday and hopefully are becoming more productive while doing so. The whole idea behind our product is to scale customer support with as little resources as possible. Given this, perhaps it's only natural to build our product with a small team as well?

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We've been suffering chronically from "not having enough people" - we still do. That forced us to adopt a certain engineering culture that I want to talk about in this post.

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When we first started building Gorgias, having just a few people on the team allowed us to progress at a pace where we could collect real feedback from our customers with things that really mattered to them rather than building every feature they ask for. A lot of their asks seemed legitimate, but because we didn't have a lot of people it forced us to prioritize the critical, high impact things first.

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Having a small team can act like a barrier that blocks you from building a bloated product.

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I want to make more of a case for the above statement, but first I'd like to get a bit more into what we did during the 3 year period.

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Once we've build an initial version of the app and got our first customers we quickly realized that building a "second Gmail" is super-hard:

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• Communication protocols (email/facebook/etc..) are complicated - we knew that before we even started, but it's difficult to describe the amount of work that needs to get done to make them work correctly. The amount of corner cases and weird protocol quirks is just staggering. In fact I would even go ahead and say that if you're integrating with any kind of external systems (webhooks, REST apis, etc..) then you're going to have a very hard time making them work correctly.
• Having a highly-available and fast app is very hard when you don't have a team of full-time SREs. Scalability was not our big concern when we first started because we didn't have customers, but having an app that was always on was very important, remember the ~4h average session length? It meant that we had to make some architecture and infrastructure decisions that allowed for a high uptime.
• Customer support software space has a very high barrier for entry these days. You need to have certain features before people start to even consider you as a platform. The switching costs are high as well because now you have to train your people on a new app and changing people's routine is hard.

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It takes a lot of effort to get to a point where you can compete with the likes of Gmail or Zendesk - both amazing products btw. This was definitely the case for us, for close to 2 years we had only a couple of customers and our product wasn't that good if we're being honest.

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So what changed a year ago? To put it simply: our product didn't suck anymore. Or sucked less. It had that minimum set of features and stability that made it attractive enough to our main customer base (Shopify merchants) that were passionate about productivity in the customer support space. That, and the tenacity of our CEO Romain who was convincing everyone that they should use us.

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So we started having our second wave of early adopters and all our hard work was finally starting to pay-off!

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Now that we had more and bigger customers we were starting to have performance issues, our app was slow, suddenly we were starting to get bombarded by viral facebook posts events or promotional events via an email campaigns, we didn't have enough monitoring in place, our app was pretty inefficient, the main database was a frequent source of congestion. So we started fixing those issues while still receiving numerous feature requests.

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Thankfully we didn't actually optimize our code that much before (no customers!) and there were a lot of low hanging fruits at first, but it still put a lot of stress on the team which was becoming tired and overworked and requested to hire more people to build those features and help with the performance issues.

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We all agreed that it would be for the best to have more people on the team, but hiring is hard. Competent coders are not just randomly looking for the next gig. SF is also a very expensive city and for a startup that raised $1.5M and a 2 years of money burned we couldn't really compete with other players in town. We've started working with some great devs in Europe, we worked with a few talented interns as well and we tried to get by until we could have more customers and hopefully raise some more money to hire more people.

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I could speak more about hiring in the Bay Area and there are a lot of things we did wrong and still have a lot of things to learn, but that's probably an even longer post than this one. But yeah, it's hard to find someone good, it's expensive, etc...

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So what is the situation right now? Well, it's not much better. We've raise d a seed extension round from SaaStr with Jason Lemkin and hired a few people in the Growth team, but we still have a hard time hiring in SF or remote. In the meantime we have a small team and want to talk about that.

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On the importance of saying NO

I think it's important to realize the advantages of having a smaller team and the single most important super-powers that you're forced to acquire is saying NO more often that you would with a bigger team. If you have a bigger team and say no to a feature, new platform, integration, etc.. it's harder to justify the decision. There are arguments like:

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... we have enough devs! They are paid to make features, so what's the problem!?

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... the data shows that 50% of our customers are saying that they want this or that feature, we must build it!

But do we absolutely need to build that feature? Are the customers going to be a lot less effective with your product otherwise? Is it going to be a big boost for them or just a nice improvement? Once a feature is there you have to maintain it, fix bugs, improve it, etc.. The thing with data driven decisions is that sometimes it can be biased towards some historical practice that might not have a place in your current world.

Now, I'm not saying that you shouldn't listen to your customers, you absolutely have to, but be sure you understand well what they want before taking action and understanding takes time. Having an artificial brake on your enthusiasm might be a good thing.

Engineers build things, the natural tendency is to accept any technical challenge because of ego, curiosity, fun, etc... It takes discipline to say no and stick by it. A small team is making it easier to do it.

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Automation

When you have a small team you're forced to automate a lot more often some of your workflows. You don't have the luxury to do repetitive stuff so:

• You start writing more tests because you don't have people hired in QA and you don't want to repeat the same tests all the time.
• You add optional static typing, linting and other code quality tools because you don't have time to deal with random type errors or have debates about tabs vs spaces.
• You resolve repetitive bugs by doing some refactoring because you can't deal with the constant flow of tech support tickets.
• You make a lot of tasks retry-able so if a HTTP request to facebook failed you don't have to manually retry them.
• Cronjobs, cronjobs everywhere.

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Building the right culture is a long process

People that work at Gorgias come from different backgrounds and sometimes it can be challenging to be on the same page. In some cases our work processes are similar to many other companies:

• Github for our code and issues.
• Code-reviews on Reviewable - it's awesome!
• Jenkins to build our docker images and upload them to google cloud.
• Kubernetes to run everything on GKE.
• Sentry to collect production errors.
• Datadog to monitor everything.

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But there is so much more than just the above processes to engineering:

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• The way we all come together and decide how certain things will be built or fixed.
• The way we talk about a certain API decisions and refactoring.
• The way we deal with an outage and a bad bug that affects our biggest customers.

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These things need time to happen to be embedded in your engineering consciousness and if you're the first-time founder (like myself) you also need the time to understand how to operate in this environment.

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Management overhead

Never managed a big team so I can't really speak about it's dynamics, but I would expect that because there are more people there is a lot more bandwidth you have to manage, a lot more people have to agree, a lot more politics have to be settled. I don't look forward to that to be honest, the more time I can get away with hiring as little as possible without a big sacrifice of our growth as a company the more I'll try to delay it.

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I conclusion I would say that it's totally fine to have a small team, in fact, I'm considering it a competitive advantage that you should try to keep as long as you can.

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The irony

I made a point in this post that having a small team is a competitive advantage, but I also think that we are ready to grow our team a bit. Yep, we're hiring!

Facebook Messenger is becoming a new marketing channels for brands. They use it as a way to build personal relationships with customers and to drive higher conversion than traditional email marketing.

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Today, we're excited to announce our newest integration: Octane AI.

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The challenge with Messenger marketing

When a brand launches a marketing campaigns on Messenger, it typically leads to insane conversion rates. That's why the trend is on the rise.

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Another consequence is that a lot of customers respond to promotional Messenger communication. This generates a spike of support requests, that your support team has to deal with.

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Our integration with Octane AI lets you handle this support spike directly in Gorgias. Your agents have context about the customer: they see the conversation history before the Messenger conversation (did the customer email you last night?), and allow you to take action, like editing or refunding an order

What you can do with the integration

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• Respond to requests from customers, to make sure none of them falls through the cracks
• See the order data from Shopify next to your Messenger conversations
• Automatically respond to common questions, such as "where is my order"

Customers are already using Octane AI and Gorgias. Here's what Live Love Polish has to say about the Octane AI and Gorgias integration:

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“We’re really thrilled that Gorgias and Octane AI came together to make the customer service experience over Messenger even better for our customers. Accessible customer service is central to what we do at Live Love Polish. Answering customer questions via Messenger has made our customers happier.”

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Do you want to give this a shot? If you use both tools, just connect your Facebook page to your Gorgias account and see the magic happen. If not, create a Gorgias account, or sign up for Octane AI.

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Do you have questions? Just hit the chat bubble, our team would love to tell you more about the integration!

Loyalty programs are widely used amongst e-commerce merchants to grow and maintain market share by improving the number of repeat customers and attracting new ones. These programs come in different formats - from loyalty points to surprise gifts depending on the level of loyalty of each customer - and have proven efficient to help brands build a community of consumers based on the emotional attachment to their identity and values.

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As a customer support helpdesk, Gorgias is focused on providing the best experience for both end-consumers and support agents. Consequently, giving access to the most accurate information about your customers’ loyalty status enables your support team to adapt their answers to customer requests.

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Thus, it seemed only natural that we partner with Smile.io, a rewards platform that has helped over 20,000 merchants reward their most loyal customers for performing profitable actions.

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With Smile, you can create and manage reward programs such as loyalty points, referrals and VIP programs, to build a fruitful relationship with your customers.

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Because Gorgias is appreciated for its ease of use and automation tools, we have decided to build a strong integration with Smile: not only can your support team have easy access to all the necessary data about your customers, but they can also use Smile variables in canned responses (or “macros”) and automation rules.

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• Display your customers’ Smile profiles next to tickets

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• ‍Use Smile variables (loyalty status, points balance, VIP program, referral url) in both your macros and your rules

By integrating your Smile account to Gorgias, you’ll be able to improve yet again not only your customer support but also your customers’ engagement to your brand. Our early adopters of the integration are already thrilled by it!

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"We're loving the Smile integration so far! Having access to the variables in the automation features of Gorgias (macros and rules) is a game-changer, especially now that we're focusing on improving our loyalty program. It would be great if the integration went a little further in the future to enable editing loyalty points!"

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Chris Storey, Founder and CEO at Dinkydoo

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If you're already a Gorgias customer, you can connect Smile directly from your Gorgias account, in the Integrations section. If not, you can create an account here and get started in a few minutes.

Here at Gorgias, our aim is to provide the best customer support tools to our clients, whatever their specific needs. The more you grow, the more we work to develop our offer so that you can benefit from a tailor-made spectrum of integrations. As your business becomes more successful, you need to adapt your website to a fast-growing community of consumers, especially regarding the quality of your reviews and how they appear.

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This is why today we are proud to announce our new partnership with Okendo, a customer-marketing platform perfectly suited for high-performance Shopify businesses.

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Okendo helps Shopify’s fastest growing companies like oVertone, Paul Evans and Dormify build vibrant customer communities through product ratings & reviews, customer photos/videos and Q&A.

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Along with this, Okendo gives you the tools to leverage customer generated content across other marketing channels such as Google Search, Google Shopping, Facebook and Instagram.

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Since one of the key advantages of using Gorgias is to manage all your customer support in one dashboard, we decided to design a straight-to-the-point integration:

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If a customer leaves low rating review such as < 3 stars and/or with negative sentiment, Okendo can automatically create a ticket in Gorgias. This way, your staff can quickly engage in a conversation with them to understand what went wrong, and address the issue immediately.

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We believe this integration will take your customer support teams to the next level, as Okendo has already convinced some of our key clients.

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"One of our biggest assets is our unique customer community, so being able to maintain it as active and engaged as possible is key for our business. And making sure that we address any negative experience efficiently and in no time is just as important: this is exactly what the Okendo integration within Gorgias has enabled us to do, by automatically creating a ticket for these cases with the review displayed right next to it."

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Dan Appelstein, Founder & CEO at BeGummy

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"Aside from being excellent at building shopper trust, reviews enable us to identify customers who, for whatever reason, have had a less than stellar experience. The Okendo + Gorgias integration enables us to flag these instances and automatically assign a Gorgias ticket to a member of our Client Services Team, so that we can follow up and do our best to assist them with whatever issues they're encountering. This integration, along with Okendo’s consistent availability and unwavering support, have made the integration between these two platforms seamless and successful!"

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Jae Sutherland, Director of Client Service at oVertone

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If you're already a Gorgias customer, we can introduce you to Okendo to implement the integration directly from your Okendo account. If not, you can create an account here and get started in a few minutes.

The supplement industry is not often the first thing that comes to mind when looking to start a new business. It’s crowded, the barriers to entry are low, the margins are thin, and there are some established and well-known brands with large budgets to outspend competitors.

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And yet, Campus Protein, a provider of supplement to college students that started in a dorm room in 2010, has managed to carve itself a highly profitable niche and power its way to millions of dollars in revenue.

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No, there’s no magic sauce or secret weapon that helped them do it. They have the same access to resources as everyone else. In fact, they have a smaller team than older brands in the space.

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The only difference is they focused on one thing that others in the industry weren’t, the customer experience. This is the story of how they did that and dominated behemoths like GNC in colleges across the US.

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Identifying The Problem

Before coming up with the idea, founder Russell Saks was just another sophomore at Indiana University. After joining a fraternity, his new friends convinced him to start hitting the gym.

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As Russell started getting into fitness, he noticed that every month his friends would head to the local supplements store to purchase $200 to $300 worth of protein and workout drinks. These were the same people who always complained that they didn’t have beer money on the weekends. Yet here they were, spending hundreds of dollars on supplements without batting an eyelid.

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In any industry as crowded as the supplement industry, there are always cheaper options. You can go online and buy your supplements at a much lower price than at the local store. However, the drawback is that you have to wait for it. And, as Russell found out, college students never planned ahead and always needed their next tub of protein powder instantly.

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Ever the entrepreneur, Russell figured there was an opportunity here. If he could combine the affordability of online prices with the same-day delivery of the local store, he had a business. All he had to do was bulk order product from a low-cost site in advance, store it locally, and then redistribute it to students when they needed it.

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As with any business, those initial days were rough. Yes, there was demand and Russell would often sell out each batch soon after they came in, but the margins were razor thin. To maintain cost-effectiveness, Russell sometimes had to take a loss on certain products.

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On top of that, Russell found that his life was getting consumed by the fledgling business. To scale it up, he needed help. His friend and first business partner (now Chief Sales Officer), Mike Yewdell, was a fellow student at Indiana University with lots of connections. With his network, they quickly became the go-to source for supplements on campus.

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Russell’s next stop was his high school friend (now business partner and CMO), Tarun Singh, who was studying in Boston University at the time. Tarun noticed the same problems at his school and quickly expanded Campus Protein to his school and then the entire Boston area.

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The final piece fell into place when they entered into a business competition and won $100,000 to scale up. With the up-front money, they could negotiate deals with supplement makers to improve their margins, and expand to more college to increase sales.

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Today, Campus Protein is in over 300 colleges across the US and shows no signs of slowing down. But none of that would have happened if Russell hadn’t been hyper-focused on a certain type of customer and their needs.

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Customer Experience As A Growth Channel

One thing Russell learned early on was that college students had very specific needs. Thus, they craved a personalized experience. They needed help with what supplements to buy based on their goals and budget.

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At the local supplement stores, Russell noticed that they couldn’t get any of that. Firstly, they sold to everyone so they didn’t have any expertise specific to the college student market. Secondly, they were trained to sell as much product as possible, so they’d often push supplements that weren’t right for the students.

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Russell realized that Campus Protein needed to really understand the needs of a college student to own the market. That meant the company needed to hire students who were into fitness. And so the Campus Rep program was born.

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A Campus Rep's main job is sales and marketing. They grow awareness for the brand and encourage help other students achieve their fitness goals.

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By recruiting Reps in each college, Campus Protein could keep their core team lean while maintaining a large salesforce on the ground.

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This has been the real key to their growth. These Reps are their ideal customers, and they hang out with other prospective customers. Thus, they provide a customer experience that’s far better than anything other brands can offer.

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Imagine you’re a college student. Before Campus Protein came along, you had to figure out which products to buy, got pressured into buying unnecessary stuff, and ended up with very little money left over.

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Today, you probably have a Campus Protein rep in your gym, wearing a branded tank. He’s giving out free tasters, providing you with workout tips and nutrition advice, listens to your goals, and hands you a card with a link where you can buy exactly what you need for much less. How’s that for customer experience?

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Extending The Experience Online

Campus Protein may be marketing offline with their campus reps but all their sales come from their Shopify website. That’s the best way for them to scale.

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Here’s how it works - they have warehouses across the country where they stock product. Because of their deep customer understanding, they know exactly what to stock and what not to stock. The campus reps then go around building awareness, and students head to the website to make their purchase. Because of the warehouse network, they get their products pretty quickly.

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Because the actual sale is made online, the website becomes a crucial part of their strategy. If they don’t provide the same level of customer support and care their reps do, they’ll drop the ball and lose the sale. More importantly, they’ll lose trust. One bad experience could hurt their reputation across an entire college.

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To replicate the one-on-one support of their reps, they used website chat. In the early days, they started with Zopim Chat. But as they grew, they found that it was too basic for their needs. They couldn’t tell if someone they were chatting with was an existing customer or a new one. They couldn’t tell if it was a new conversation or a continuation of one that happened in a different channel. It was a poor experience for the customer and the company.

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Remember, they have a small core team, so they needed a customer support tool that could do the heavy lifting for them. That’s when they came across Gorgias and it allowed them to create an online experience that increased conversions and revenues.

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For starters, Gorgias combines all their customer support channels (chat, email, phone, social media) into one unified view, and builds a profile of each customer. When a student chats with them, Campus Protein know if they are a previous customer, can see all past conversations and sales in their dashboard, and can provide relevant support.

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Compare that to the typical support you get when you’re forced to repeat your previous conversations each time you chat with someone.

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To speed things up, Gorgias also has macros and templated responses based on the question. For example, if a customer wants to know where their order is, Gorgias presents the support agent with a templated response that pulls in the customer’s order details from Shopify. With just a click, the support agent can answer the question in near real-time.

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Automations like this also frees up time for support agents to provide more detailed answers to complicated questions, like when a student asks for nutrition advice. Again, they can provide the same level of caring support that reps do and this helps increase sales.

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Another way they increase sales is by detecting if customers are spending a lot of time on a certain page and initiating a chat with them. For example, if someone is on the checkout for too long, Gorgias automatically pops a chat and ask them if they need help. This directly increases conversions.

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Perhaps the most important way Campus Protein uses customer support to increase revenues is by converting feedback into website and product changes. For every question that comes in, they try to understand why it wasn’t obvious on the website, and make the appropriate change. This leads to fewer tickets of the same type and higher conversions.

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Widening The Moat

At the end of the day, Campus Protein is just another retailer. In an industry like supplements, anyone can replicate their model, or existing brands like GNC can enter the market. So why hasn’t that happened yet?

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Like Warren Buffett says, every business needs to have a moat, something that defends them against competition. In Campus Protein’s case, it’s their deep customer knowledge and the personal level of support they provide.

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A college student is introduced to Campus Protein via the local rep. They’re nice, helpful, and remember the student’s name each time. When the student goes online, they have the same experience. Their previous conversations are remembered and even their most complicated questions are answered with care.

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Now, you may not be able to create a rep army like Campus Protein for your eCommerce business, but you sure can create an online customer experience that sets you apart from others in your industry.

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With Gorgias, whenever a customer creates a ticket on any channel, you have all their information like previous conversations and sales, right there. Instead of asking the customer if they’ve written in before or what their order numbers are, you can get straight to the important stuff. And with all the templates, macros, and automations available, you can do it in minutes.

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When a customer has to decide between purchasing at a store where they forget about you after the sale, versus one where they treat you like a friend and remember you a year later, which do you think they’ll choose?

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Give your customers a great experience and, like Campus Protein, you’ll have a business that keeps going up.

Curious about how Gorgias can optimize customer service? Click here to learn more.

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Aircall is a cloud-based call center software made for support teams. With Aircall, support agents can track everything from A-Z, on any device, with zero hardware to manage. The right tool to increase agent efficiency and customer satisfaction!

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Aircall Makes the Gorgias Helpdesk Complete

After listening to early customer feedback, we quickly realized we needed to find a phone integration that empowered users to manage voice calls as easily as emails or chats.

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Traditional helpdesk integrations simply log calls as tickets. We wanted to go one step further and associate the phone call with the right customer. This way, agents can see the full conversation history between the brand and the customer.

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By building Aircall’s cloud-based phone into the Gorgias platform, agents can also quickly edit orders while on the phone based on the case history they see. After a call has ended, all notes will be added to the correct customer’s profile along with a link to the full call recording.

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Why Aircall was the Right Choice

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

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Aircall has a well-documented API that our dev team could easily use. We were able to build a working and robust phone integration with Aircall in just a few hours. Four days later, after QA testing, the new solutions were fully functional and ready to use.

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Since Gorgias and Aircall both seek to provide the best customer experience possible, cross-company visibility has become a valuable source of new leads and sales. Furthermore, we conduct regular catch-up meetings and share a Slack channel to make sure both teams work hand-in-hand to create the best integration and the best results. The partnership with Aircall is super valuable for both our customers and our respective companies and we strongly recommend each others.

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If you're already a Gorgias customer, head to your account and go to Integrations to connect Aircall. If not, you can create an account here and get started in a few minutes.

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Last thursday, we organized our first event at Gorgias. It was the perfect opportunity to celebrate our new round of funding and recent moving to a new office in SOMA, while discussing brand culture and customer experience.

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Special thanks to our speakers Renee L. Halvorsen from Marine Layer, Alicia Levine from Sunski, Dorian Greenow from Keto-Mojo and Anthony Benedettini from Dry Farm Wines.

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Here are the key takeaways you should remember:

• As an e-commerce brand, you cannot compete on price with Amazon and powerful dropshippers. That’s why brand experience is your key differentiation factor.

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• Building a strong brand experience requires to be present on each distribution channel. Don’t let your resellers do the job for you! Sunski for example prepares “environment kits” for their resellers and marketplaces. This way, customers can experience Sunski’s spirit beyond its website.

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• When building brand experience, your community is your key success factor. Create a pool of ambassadors who will promote your brand, and reward them with presents, promo codes, and dedicated attention.

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• Bet on your own team! Building a great mindset within your team will help you create a strong and consistent brand image. At Keto-Mojo, each member of the team does customer service, so that everyone focus on what customers really need. Besides, the founder should inspire a culture of passion and dedication to the product.

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You missed our event? Don’t worry, it was the very first of many!

Curious about how Gorgias can optimize customer service? Create an account here and get started in a few minutes!

At Gorgias we've been very fortunate to work with some amazing people who did their internship with us:

Amit Poonia
Astrid Parmentier
Emilie Drouin
Hadrien de Lamotte
Ram Goli

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Thank you all for your work!

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Their contributions big and small make an indispensable part of what Gorgias is today and what it will be in the future. We are very grateful for their hard work, and we want to continue working with them after they finish their studies. To make returning more attractive for them, we've decided to take into account their stock option vesting period if they ever decide to return as full-time employees.

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What exactly does this mean?

Interns that decide to return to Gorgias within a limited amount of time and choose to take our stock options offer upon the start of their full-time employment will have an accelerated schedule of their stock option vesting period. The offer will be judged case by case with our board's approval.

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Let's take the example from our friends at Cockroach Labs (which this decision was inspired from):

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For example, our standard option vesting schedule is that 25% of the stock options vests after 12 months of service from an employee’s start date (the “cliff”), and the remaining option vests in equal installments over the following 36 months of continuous service. However, if an intern spent four months with us, on their hire date, they would only have eight months until they hit their one-year cliff date and vest 25%.

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We hope that by doing so, we're showing that we're taking their time seriously and we show our intention to work with them beyond their internship.