TL;DR:

• Customer service response time measures how quickly your team replies to inquiries. First response time (FRT) tracks the initial reply, and next response time (NRT) tracks subsequent messages.
• Most customers expect a response within 10 minutes, but the median FRT across industries is 12+ hours for email, under 2 minutes for live chat, and 1–5 hours for social media
• Fast response times directly impact customer satisfaction, loyalty, and revenue while reducing ticket volume from multi-channel follow-ups
• Calculate FRT by dividing total time to first reply by number of tickets, excluding autoresponders and counting only business hours
• Improve response time by setting SLAs, prioritizing tickets, using templates and AI, deflecting with self-service, offering real-time channels, and monitoring analytics

When a customer reaches out with a question or problem, the clock starts ticking. Customer service response time measures how quickly your team acknowledges and replies to that inquiry.

It's one of the clearest signals of whether you prioritize customer experience or leave shoppers waiting.

Today, most customers expect a reply within minutes, not hours. Slow responses erode trust, increase support workload, and drive customers to competitors.

This guide covers what response time is, how to calculate it, industry benchmarks by channel, and six practical ways to improve it with Gorgias.

What is customer service response time?

Customer service response time is the time between when a customer sends an inquiry and when your team sends a meaningful reply. This metric tracks how long customers wait for acknowledgment and help, making it a core indicator of your support team's efficiency and your brand's commitment to customer experience.

Two related metrics matter most: first response time (FRT) and next response time (NRT). Understanding the difference helps you measure and optimize the right parts of your support workflow.

FRT is the time to the first meaningful reply after a customer inquiry. NRT is the time to subsequent replies in the same conversation.

A meaningful first reply addresses the customer's specific question or problem. Autoresponders don't count toward FRT because they don't provide actual help. Only human or AI-generated responses that acknowledge the issue and move toward resolution count as a first response.

The response time clock follows business hours, not wall-clock time. If a customer emails at 10 PM and you reply at 8:05 AM the next morning, your FRT is five minutes, not 10 hours. This business-hours approach gives a realistic picture of your team's performance during operating hours.

Response time fits into the broader ticket lifecycle and SLA clock. From the moment a ticket enters your queue, the SLA clock runs until your team sends that first meaningful reply. This measurement helps you track whether you're meeting customer expectations and your own service commitments.

Why response time matters for support outcomes

Fast response times directly influence customer satisfaction (CSAT) scores and long-term loyalty. When customers receive quick replies, they feel valued and prioritized. When they wait hours or days, frustration builds and trust erodes.

Slow responses create a cascading workload problem through multi-channel escalation. A customer who doesn't hear back via email will often follow up on other channels, creating new tickets for the same issue. This multiplies your team's work, but fast initial responses prevent this problem.

Ticket deflection and SLA adherence both depend on response speed. Quick replies give you the chance to deflect simple questions to self-service resources before frustration sets in.

Meeting SLA commitments becomes easier when your average response time is low. This gives you a buffer for complex or high-priority tickets.

Response time affects time-to-resolution and ticket backlog. The faster you respond initially, the faster conversations progress toward resolution. Backlogs shrink when tickets move through your queue efficiently rather than piling up while customers wait.

Revenue suffers when response times lag. Customers with pre-purchase questions abandon carts, and post-purchase issues can drive them to competitors. In contrast, fast and helpful first replies improve First Contact Resolution (FCR) rates.

Benchmarks by channel and how to calculate FRT

Response time expectations vary dramatically by channel. Customers expect near-instant replies on live chat but tolerate longer waits for email. Understanding these benchmarks helps you set realistic goals and allocate resources appropriately.

First response time benchmarks by channel

Industry data shows clear patterns in what customers consider acceptable average response time across different support channels:

Best-in-class represents what top-performing support teams achieve, while Baseline reflects typical industry performance.

These benchmarks vary by industry, customer tier, and product complexity. For example, VIP customers expect faster responses than general shoppers.

How to calculate first response time (FRT)

Calculating FRT requires tracking time from inquiry receipt to first meaningful reply, then averaging across all tickets. You can use a straightforward formula:

FRT = Total time to first reply ÷ Number of tickets

Follow these steps for accurate calculation:

1. Track time from inquiry receipt to first meaningful reply (exclude autoresponders)
2. Sum total time for all tickets in a given period
3. Divide by the number of tickets
4. Use the median instead of the average for more stable results

For example, if your team sent three replies at two hours, four hours, and six hours, total time is 12 hours. Divide by three tickets equals a four-hour average FRT.

The difference between median and average matters for accuracy. Average FRT can be skewed by outliers, while median FRT shows the typical customer experience.

Always count only business hours to get realistic performance data.

Modern helpdesk software like Gorgias tracks this automatically, pulling data from your ticket system and calculating FRT across channels, agents, and time periods. Manual calculation works for small teams, but automated analytics become essential as ticket volume grows.

Six ways to improve response time with Gorgias

Improving response time requires the right combination of process, automation, and tools. These six tactics work together to reduce FRT while maintaining quality and giving your team breathing room to handle complex issues.

1. Set and enforce SLAs with alerts

A service level agreement (SLA) is a formal commitment to specific response and resolution times. SLAs create accountability by establishing clear expectations for your team and your customers. When everyone knows the target, prioritization becomes clearer and performance becomes measurable.

SLAs should vary by ticket priority. Urgent issues from VIP customers deserve faster responses than standard inquiries. Setting tiered targets lets you allocate resources appropriately without promising unrealistic response times across all ticket types.

Gorgias's SLA feature lets you set FRT targets by channel and priority, then sends alerts when tickets approach breach thresholds. These proactive notifications prevent SLA violations by giving agents time to respond before the deadline passes. You can also track SLA adherence in reports to identify trends and adjust staffing or processes.

• Set FRT targets by channel and priority
• Receive alerts before SLA breach
• Track SLA adherence in reports
• Adjust targets based on team capacity and customer expectations
• Create escalation rules for at-risk tickets

2. Prioritize and auto-route high-impact tickets

Not all tickets carry equal urgency. A customer reporting a fraudulent charge needs a faster response than someone asking about product sizing.

Auto-triage uses signals like keywords, customer tier, and sentiment. This helps identify high-priority tickets and route them to the right agents.

Gorgias Rules automate this prioritization. You can create rules that detect urgency indicators like "urgent," "broken," or "refund" and automatically assign those tickets to senior agents or priority queues. You can route VIP customers to specialized teams or assign billing questions to agents with financial expertise.

This intelligent routing prevents critical issues from sitting in a general queue while agents work through lower-priority tickets. It also ensures customers with complex needs reach agents who can actually solve their problems on the first try.

• Auto-detect urgency using keywords like "urgent," "broken," "refund"
• Route VIP customers to senior agents
• Assign by channel or topic (billing to billing team, technical to technical team)
• Use sentiment analysis to flag frustrated customers
• Create priority queues for time-sensitive issues

3. Use templates and AI for faster, on-brand replies

Templates (also called canned responses or macros) save enormous time on repetitive questions. Instead of typing the same answer about shipping policies or return windows dozens of times per day, agents select a template and personalize it with customer-specific details. This approach maintains consistency, reduces errors, and frees agents to focus on complex issues.

Gorgias AI Agent takes this further by drafting replies automatically. It analyzes the customer's question, pulls relevant information, and generates an on-brand response in seconds.

Agents can review and edit the draft, which maintains your brand voice while reducing time per ticket.

The key to effective templates is personalization. Generic, robotic responses frustrate customers. Good templates include merge fields for customer names, order numbers, and specific details. They read like personal messages, not form letters.

• Create customer service response templates for FAQs (shipping, returns, product questions)
• Use AI Assist to draft replies in seconds
• Personalize templates with customer data (name, order number, purchase history)
• Maintain consistent brand voice across all replies
• Update templates regularly based on customer feedback

4. Deflect with knowledge base and chat automation

Self-service deflection means customers find answers without agent help. This is the fastest possible response time: instant. When customers can resolve common questions through a searchable knowledge base or automated chat flow, they get immediate satisfaction and your team avoids another ticket.

Gorgias comes with a Help Center builder that lets you create a comprehensive, searchable knowledge base with FAQs, how-to guides, and troubleshooting articles. AI Agent can then step in to use these resources to inform its responses when customers ask questions.

Self-service isn't just about reducing ticket volume. It actually improves customer satisfaction for straightforward questions. Customers who want quick answers prefer finding them instantly over waiting for an agent to tell them the same information. Reserve your agents for questions that genuinely require human judgment and expertise.

• Build a searchable Help Center with FAQs
• Use an AI agent to surface answers automatically
• Offer order tracking and return portals for self-service
• Create video tutorials for visual learners
• Monitor which articles customers use most to identify gaps

5. Offer real-time channels (live chat, SMS, social) in one inbox

Customers increasingly expect real-time support through channels like Live Chat, SMS, and social media. These channels have the fastest FRT benchmarks (under one to two minutes for chat) because customers assume someone is available to respond immediately.

Gorgias's omnichannel inbox consolidates all these channels into a single view. Agents see messages from live chat, SMS, Instagram, Facebook, and email in one unified dashboard. They can respond in real-time without switching tools or losing context.

This unified approach prevents missed messages and duplicate replies. When a customer messages you on Instagram and then emails an hour later, agents see both messages attached to the same customer profile. They understand the full history and can provide consistent, informed responses across every channel.

• Manage live chat, SMS, Instagram, Facebook, and email in one inbox
• See full customer history across channels
• Respond in real-time without switching tools
• Set up chat automation for 24/7 coverage
• Route real-time channels to agents with fastest response patterns

6. Monitor analytics to remove bottlenecks

Analytics reveal where delays actually occur. You might assume slow response times come from understaffing, but data could show the real issue is ticket misrouting or agents spending too long on low-priority tickets. Without measurement, you're guessing.

Gorgias's reporting dashboard tracks FRT, NRT, SLA adherence, and agent performance across channels, time periods, and ticket types. You can see which channels have the slowest response times and which hours create bottlenecks. The data also shows which agents may need coaching or additional training.

These data-driven insights let you adjust staffing to match demand, redistribute workload during peak hours, and identify process improvements. Continuous monitoring creates a feedback loop where you measure, adjust, and measure again. Response times improve steadily rather than staying stuck at whatever your current processes produce.

• Track FRT and NRT by channel, agent, and time period
• Identify peak hours and adjust staffing accordingly
• Monitor SLA adherence and escalation rates
• Compare agent performance to identify coaching opportunities
• Use trend data to forecast staffing needs

Balance speed and quality (FCR, CSAT) + next steps

Speed alone doesn't guarantee great customer service. Rushing through tickets with incomplete or unhelpful replies damages customer satisfaction (CSAT) just as much as slow responses do. The goal is to optimize both speed and quality.

First contact resolution (FCR) measures how often you solve a customer's issue in the first reply. High FCR means customers don't need to follow up, which saves time for everyone and creates a better experience. Tracking FCR alongside FRT shows whether your fast responses are actually helpful or just fast.

The tradeoff is real. Agents who rush to hit response time targets might send partial answers that create more back-and-forth. Agents who take too long crafting perfect replies miss SLA targets and frustrate waiting customers. The ideal balance is a fast reply that contains a complete, accurate solution.

Gorgias helps you balance speed and quality. It combines automation tools with full customer context like order data and past conversations.

Quality assurance (QA) processes ensure consistency as you scale. Review a sample of tickets regularly to verify that fast responses maintain your standards. Track metrics like average handle time (AHT) alongside resolution time to understand the full picture.

Your next steps are to:

• Audit your current FRT across all channels
• Set realistic SLA goals based on industry benchmarks and your resources
• Implement the six tactics above, starting with the highest-impact changes
• Monitor analytics weekly to track progress

See how Gorgias helps you balance speed and quality. Book a demo today.

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As rising inflation, higher-than-ever customer acquisition costs, and the looming possibility of a global recession continue to weigh heavy on the minds of many brands, driving revenue via great customer service is now more important than ever before. In these turbulent times, many online businesses are doubling down on customer experience to retain and grow business through upsells, repeat purchases, and referrals — all of which offer higher ROI than pursuing new customers.

It’s clear that happy customers are a great path to growth. But how can you create a customer service strategy that leads to happy customers? We’ll suggest 16 tactics below to improve customer service in 2024, including new ways to incentivize your customer support team and self-service resources you can use to reduce customer effort. 

What’s the link between customer service and revenue?

Business leaders often view customer service as a necessary expense rather than an opportunity for business growth. However, every customer interaction along the entire customer journey presents a chance to create revenue for your business. Your customer service team’s exceptional customer service can generate revenue by:

• Answering pre-sales questions to improve your conversion rate
• Encourages happy customers to refer others to your brand
• Create loyal customers through helpful customer support
• Drive upsells and customer retention

According to data from Emplify, one in six customers will leave a company after just one negative customer care experience, while 86% of customers will leave a company after two negative customer service interactions. And 73% of customers will leave a brand after just a few poor interactions, according to a 2022 Coveo report. These negative interactions catch like wildfire and are an early warning of a sinking ship.

It’s not all doom and gloom, though — better customer service can be a huge differentiator for your brand, especially when you consider the value of loyal customers. According to data from 10,000 Gorgias, returning customers make up only 21% of a brand’s customers but generate 41% of orders and 44% of overall revenue.

‎16 tips to improve your customer service and drive more revenue

Let’s take a look at our top 16 tips to get your team on the way to creating a better customer experience — and generating more revenue in the process.

1) Incentivize your customer service agents to meet business goals

We already discussed the impact your customer service representatives can have on business outcomes. To get serious about providing the best customer service possible, align your customer service team’s KPIs around demonstrated business goals.

Here are a few business-related KPIs that your team can focus on improving:

• Customer satisfaction (CSAT)
• Conversion rate
• Total sales from support

Consider going a step beyond setting KPIs and offering bonuses, gift cards, and other incentives for individual agents or teams that reach their goals as part of your customer support team management strategy. It’s common for sales — why not customer support, if they’re also driving revenue through customer interactions?

2) Build a user-friendly customer help center

When customers encounter a problem, they won’t reach out to you immediately. In fact, 88% of customers say that they expect companies to provide self-service support tools so that they can resolve issues on their own.

How can you help your customers help themselves? You need to build a good FAQ page or knowledge base, also called a help center, to help your customers answer their questions without having to contact an agent. Important considerations to keep in mind as you go about designing your help center include:

• Have a clearly visible search bar at the top of every page
• Include a prominent CTA to contact a human agent
• Organize your help center in categories like Product, Shipping, and Returns

For an example of an excellent ecommerce help center that accomplishes all of these objectives, check out our post on FAQ pages and help centers.

‎3) Use technology to remember 100% of customer details

Every customer has a unique conversation history, order history, and sentiment toward your brand. Whenever you talk to those customers, you should make an effort to personalize the conversation by using their names, acknowledging past interactions, using past order information instead of asking them to repeat it, and so on. Thankfully, technology makes offering this sort of personalized customer service much easier than it used to be.

Tools such as Gorgias’ Customer Sidebar can provide your customer support team with the data that they need to offer each customer a personalized customer service experience:

‎4) Prioritize complaints and pre-sale actions

Customer complaints and pre-sale actions are high-priority customer service tickets since they can directly impact your company's revenue. Addressing customer complaints prevents customer churn and encourages repeat purchases. Pre-sale actions such as questions about product sizing or your shipping policy present the opportunity to drive a sale home — if your agents answer in time.

You can develop your customer service team to prioritize these tickets manually, or you can prioritize them automatically within your helpdesk. If you use Gorgias, a combination of automated Rules and Intents can automatically identify certain ticket types — like customer complaints, pre-sales questions, or tickets from VIP customers — and flag them as high priority.

Check out our Director of Support’s post on how to prioritize customer service requests for guidance.

5) Only use positive/professional language

Sometimes, it’s not about what you say — it’s about how you say it. This rings especially true for customer service. You must make sure you sound level-headed, calm, and collected whenever you contact a customer.

If you’re delivering bad news, there’s no way to sugarcoat it. You need to be direct and professional about it. At the same time, you should also try to find a way to solve the problem.

For instance, if a customer has ordered something that was out of stock, an automated email telling them that you don’t have the product right now won’t cut it. You should tell the customer when you expect it to be available or perhaps offer some other products instead.

It's best to have a written procedure ready to respond to frustrated customers so your customer support agents know how to deal with them without having to worry too much. Of course, active listening is important to hear the customer’s response and settle on next steps.

See our post on customer support tips for more suggestions like this.

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6) Introduce proactive customer support to your strategy

‎The classic image of customer support is reactive. When your customers encounter a problem, they come to your customer service reps for a solution. However, that doesn’t mean that you can’t approach certain problems proactively.

Case in point: shipping delays. In the past couple of months, ecommerce shipments have increased drastically. Recent reports indicate that there have been 47% more shipments since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. With such an increase, shipment delays are bound to happen.

To keep your customers in the loop, you can send out proactive communication about shipping setbacks. This will set customer expectations right and prepare them for any possible delays.

Another great example of proactive customer service is Gorgias' live chat campaigns, a tool that lets your team automatically reach out proactively to visitors browsing your website to ask if they need help, offer product recommendations or discounts, and guide them through the buying process. 

‎Creating clear product descriptions and convenient self-help resources is another great way to be proactive about customer service and can help reduce ticket volume while also improving the customer experience.

7) Be as clear as possible about your policies

More often than not, customers are worried about the fine print. As a matter of fact, 67% of online shoppers will check a company's return policy before making a purchase. Sloppily-written policies will turn off a lot of customers. Every policy on your website needs to be clearly articulated so users can easily find what they’re looking for.

Creating or updating your refund and return policies? Our policy generator can help you get started. We’re a big fan of the detail and organization of Steve Madden’s return policy:

8) Use automation strategically to dedicate your attention to high-impact tickets

Many tickets that a customer service rep handles throughout the day are repetitive, straightforward questions. Many of your agents are likely spending hours each day simply telling customers where their order is. Answering these common customer questions is a key part of good customer service, but these tickets are not high-impact tickets for revenue generation.

Fortunately, a customer service platform like Gorgias can help you completely automate these tickets so that your team can focus on more impactful tickets (such as escalated complaints and pre-sale discussions).

‎By creating Macros with answers to common questions and automated Rules to trigger with zero agent effort, you can free up your support agents to go the extra mile and provide a more personalized touch to the tickets that matter most.

9) Nurture customer relationships with community engagement

For some, a community engagement strategy consists of asking customers to like their page on Facebook, follow their business on Twitter, and not much else. Having thousands of followers and likes is a good look for your business, sure. But you can’t let those followers go to waste.

Engage your followers and get them talking about the experience with your brand. Then, ask them for some feedback about your business, operations, and employees. You can then use that information to tweak your business.

Here are a few questions you should ask yourself before building a community:

• What do you plan on doing with the community?
• Are you doing everything you can to engage the members?
• What type of information can you get from the members?

10) Use post-interaction surveys to collect customer feedback in real-time

If you’re looking to improve your customer service, you should send a customer satisfaction (CSAT) survey after every interaction. These short, simple surveys give you a snapshot of the quality of customer support you currently offer, which is a great first step toward improving customer support. 

Gorgias’ CSAT survey feature can be automatically sent out every time a customer interacts with one of your service reps. After every interaction, customers will get the following simple survey asking them to rate the interaction and, if they want, explain their answer:

‎Read our full guide to improving CSAT scores.

11) Train your employees in the areas where your customer service is weak

Many companies don’t place as much emphasis as they should on hiring and training talented customer service reps. Instead, they view the position as an entry-level, outsourceable role that doesn't justify a comprehensive onboarding process. However, if you want your customer service agents to perform like sales associates and drive revenue, then it’s essential to teach them the right customer service skills.

Your customer service reps are the front lines of your company and some of the only employees your customers will directly interact with. When you train customer service reps with an emphasis on revenue generation, you can turn your customer service team into a source of revenue that more than justifies its investment. Rather than simply instructing your agents to put out fires, train them on how to convert customer interactions into sales and promote customer loyalty. 

‎Read our complete guide to customer service training for more guidance. 

12) Follow up with the customer after they've had a chance to use your product or service

Following up with customers who have purchased your product/service (even if they don't contact you first) has many benefits: For one, it shows that you are committed to their satisfaction, even with their post-purchase experience.

It also provides you with the opportunity to collect valuable customer feedback. This feedback can be used to improve your product and overall customer experience and is something that many successful companies go to great lengths to collect.

Lastly, following up with customers can be a direct source of revenue generation. Recommending additional products to customers based on their experience with a previous purchase is an example of how following up with customers can lead to sales.

The most effective way to follow up with your customers is by setting up an automated email campaign that sends them an email after their purchase. What these emails include will depend on your specific goals (i.e., survey forms if you are trying to collect customer feedback or personalized product recommendations if you are trying to generate repeat sales).

13) Create a customer loyalty program

The more incentives you create for your customers to remain loyal to your brand, the better. While many considerations go into generating high ecommerce retention rates, creating a customer loyalty program is one proven effective option.

Customer loyalty programs give customers a financial incentive to remain loyal to your brand. They also turn the shopping experience into somewhat of a game, where reward points are the goal and making repeat purchases is how you score them. The more creative and fun you can make your customer loyalty program, the more effective it stands to be.

Along with repeat purchases, you can use customer loyalty programs to encourage other customer actions such as referrals, reviews, and survey responses by rewarding these actions with reward points as well.

Software solutions such as Smile.io and LoyaltyLion make it incredibly easy to create and manage customer loyalty programs – and they integrate with Gorgias to pull loyalty data into your helpdesk. These tools allow you to automatically track customer actions and reward loyalty-building actions with points and discounts.

14) Consider offering free shipping to qualifying customers

According to Small Business Trends, 66% of U.S. customers expect free shipping on every online purchase, while 80% expect free shipping if their purchase total exceeds a certain amount. 

Even if you have to raise your product pricing by a small percentage to maintain profitable margins, it’s still likely to positively impact both customer satisfaction and your conversion rates. Logical or not, a $50 subtotal plus free shipping is more appealing than a $45 plus $5 shipping.

If you can't afford to offer free shipping on every purchase, offering free shipping on purchases that exceed a certain amount can help you meet customer expectations and increase your average order value. For example, offering free shipping on orders over $100 will encourage many customers who have purchased just under that total to add an extra product or two to their cart.

Here’s what qualified free shipping looks like on apparel brand Woxer’s website:

15) Provide a solution for items that are out of stock

Create a policy for handling customer support tickets regarding out-of-stock products. Just a few ways to head off customer complaints regarding out-of-stock products include:

• Offering customers alternative products
• Placing an emergency order from your supplier
• Purchasing from an alternative supplier
• Offering customers discounts for their inconvenience

Along with offering one or more of these remedies, it’s also important to communicate effectively with customers trying to purchase an out-of-stock product. Follow up with them frequently to let them know the status of their order and when they can expect it to arrive.

Solutions for out-of-stock products can also be proactive and don't always require a customer to contact support. Giving customers the option to sign up for automated email alerts when a product is back in stock is one passive way to generate sales while improving customer satisfaction.

16) Add more customer touchpoints to shift to an omnichannel approach

According to a Salesforce report, 78% of customers prefer to choose between a variety of channels to reach a brand’s customer support. Depending on the issue, their mood, or the company, a customer may want to send a DM on social media, have a phone call, send a text message, or ask you their question on your website’s live chat. 

One of the biggest challenges support teams face when managing multiple channels is keeping up with messages spread across platforms. That’s why a helpdesk that unifies all these channels is so valuable: Your team can spend less time looking for messages and copy/pasting information, and more time providing quality care across all channels.

‎Examples of excellent customer service

Good customer service entails much more than being willing and able to help solve a customer's problems. If you want to transform your customer service team into a powerful source of revenue, here are some elements of great customer service to strive for:

• Your first-response time is below two minutes and your average-handle time is below one hour: Customers expect quick responses, making first-response/average-handle times two of the most important customer support metrics to track and lower.
• You have clear and lenient return and refund policies: Use Gorgias' refund policy generator to easily create a clear and well-thought-out return/refund policy for your store. (By the way, Gorgias data shows that offering free returns is actually cost-neutral because of the boost in revenue from customer loyalty it provides.)
• You reduce customer effort with self-service options like an FAQ page, a help center, self-service flows, and/or chatbots: Providing customers with self-service options can reduce the workload for your team members and improve customer satisfaction.
• You can clearly present the impact customer service has on revenue: Customer service teams often have to prove their ROI to earn the budget they need for additional agents and new tools, making it important to connect the dots between customer service and revenue growth.

Examples of bad customer service

Bad customer experience comes in many shapes and sizes. But some recurring elements leave customers feeling completely frustrated. Research from Hotjar reveals the top issues that have the most damaging effect on customer experience:

• Long waits and slow response times: If your customers are left waiting for your response for too long, they’ll probably go to your competitor.
• Failing to understand customer needs: Answering customer questions before truly understanding them will result in a frustrating customer experience.
• Unresolved issues and unanswered questions: Leaving tickets unanswered won’t leave a good impression and will leave your customer dissatisfied
• Lack of customer service personalization: Sending out generic responses to customer inquiries only shows that you don’t really care about your customers

Learn more about why customer service matters and how to measure it in this post from our Head of Success & Support: Evaluating Your Customer Service Program: Why, Challenges, and KPIs That Matter

Build a customer service engine that generates revenue

So far, the past few years have presented plenty of challenges for online retailers and 2024 will likely be no different. Moving forward, the ecommerce stores that can leverage customer service to their full revenue-generating potential will be the ones that succeed.

Want to learn more about how you can build a customer service operation designed to maximize your company's bottom line? Check out our CX growth playbook, a free resource that dives into 18 tactics to boost revenue by 44% by improving customer experience, based on 25+ interviews with top ecommerce brands and analysis of 10,000+ Gorgias customers.

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TL;DR:

• A help desk is a centralized platform that manages customer support requests through ticketing, automation, and self-service tools
• Modern help desks use AI to resolve repetitive inquiries instantly while routing complex issues to human agents
• Core features include omnichannel support, knowledge bases, SLA tracking, and reporting analytics
• Help desks improve customer satisfaction, reduce agent workload, and enable businesses to scale support without hiring proportionally
• Ecommerce brands benefit most from help desks built for Shopify integration and conversational commerce

When customers have questions, they expect fast answers. A help desk gives your support team a centralized system to manage every conversation and automate repetitive tasks.

For ecommerce brands, the right help desk turns support into revenue. It connects customer data, order information, and product recommendations in one place. This guide explains what a help desk is, how it works, and which features matter most for online stores.

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What is a help desk?

A help desk is a centralized support platform that manages customer service requests with a ticketing system, automation, and self-service tools. In ecommerce, brands use helpdesk software to help their customers with issues and questions surrounding products and orders.

At its core, a help desk transforms incoming customer requests from multiple channels into organized tickets or conversations. It allows teams to collaborate on managing, organizing, responding to, and reporting on customer requests. Today, the latest help desks combine human support with AI-powered automation to accelerate resolutions without losing the human touch.

Most importantly, helpdesk software enables teams to track key metrics related to customer tickets, like first response time (FRT), average resolution time, unresolved tickets, and customer satisfaction. These metrics help you better understand how well your team is serving customers and gives you solid data — versus relying solely on customer feedback.

What does a help desk do?

Help desks handle both reactive incident management (responding to customer issues) and proactive requests (order updates, account changes). The platform organizes these interactions into a structured workflow that ensures nothing falls through the cracks.

Common help desk tasks include:

• Answering product and shipping questions
• Tracking order status
• Managing returns and refunds
• Troubleshooting connectivity and login issues
• Processing password resets and account access
• Escalating complex issues to specialized teams

Help desk vs. service desk

Service desk and help desk are often used interchangeably to describe a tool used to centralize service management and improve the end user's support experience. Very few companies have both.

Technically, a service desk is a bit broader than a help desk. A help desk's core feature is reactive, break/fix support. It helps you quickly collect and respond to customer issues. A service desk is broader and includes end-to-end IT service management (ITSM), change management, and proactive service delivery. However, with today's help desks, you can also achieve many of those same goals.

Why a help desk matters

Above all else, helpdesk software helps you improve customer satisfaction and leads to more happy customers for your brand. The benefits span three key stakeholder groups: customers who get faster resolutions, agents who work more efficiently, and businesses that scale support without proportional hiring.

Customer satisfaction

54% of customers expect an immediate response whenever they reach out to a business. Help desks improve satisfaction by:

• Speeding up resolutions. organized ticket queues help agents prioritize and respond before frustration escalates
• Meeting customers on their preferred channel. omnichannel support consolidates email, SMS, social media, and live chat into one view, so agents have full context and customers never repeat themselves
• Providing 24/7 self-service. knowledge bases, FAQ pages, and AI chat widgets give customers instant answers outside business hours, which is especially valuable for ecommerce brands serving global audiences

Employee productivity

Help desks remove the busywork that slows agents down. Productivity gains include:

• Automation deflects low-impact tickets — Gorgias data shows a mix of automation and self-service can deflect up to a third of incoming volume
• Smart routing sends tickets to the right agent based on expertise, availability, and complexity, cutting back-and-forth and speeding up resolution
• Macros and knowledge bases turn your best responses into reusable templates, bringing consistency to every interaction and helping new agents ramp up faster

Scalability

Help desks let you grow ticket volume without growing your team at the same rate. The business impact is huge:

• Proven ROI — customer experience solutions have been shown to produce a 633% ROI increase over three years
• Revenue lift — the average Gorgias merchant sees around 5% higher revenue after adopting the platform
• Ticket surge resilience — AI and automation absorb volume spikes during Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and product launches without sacrificing service quality
• Real results — Princess Polly increased efficiency by 40%, cut resolution time by 80%, and reduced first response time by 95%

Core features of modern help desk software

It's important to note that not all helpdesks are created equal. Modern help desks combine core ticketing functionality with AI agents, workflow automation, and deep customer data integration. These features work together to deliver faster, more personalized support at scale.

Ticketing system

Ticketing is the foundation of help desk operations. When a customer reaches out via any channel, the help desk creates a ticket that tracks the entire conversation from first contact to resolution. This ensures nothing slips through the cracks and keeps your team accountable to SLAs. As ticket volume grows, a centralized ticketing system is what keeps support manageable. An efficient ticket system has the following:

• Flexible routing: Assign tickets manually, round-robin across available agents, or by skill-based rules that match complexity to expertise
• Full lifecycle tracking: Monitor tickets across every stage (new, open, pending, resolved, closed) with prioritization rules built in
• SLA compliance: Set response and resolution targets, with alerts before deadlines are missed
• Live reporting: See open queues, tickets closed per shift, and agent workload at a glance

Support team benefit: A structured queue replaces inbox chaos. Agents always know what to work on next and how urgently.

Customer benefit: Every interaction is tracked and accountable. Nothing gets lost or forgotten mid-conversation.

Customer and order data

Not all help desks offer this, but having customer information directly inside your help desk is a significant advantage for teams trying to deliver fast, personalized support. The best help desks surface full order history, past conversations, and transaction data in one place so agents have all the context they need before they type a single word. Make sure you can view:

• Full order history: See every purchase, return, and transaction a customer has made with your brand
• Complete conversation history: Access every prior interaction across email, chat, and social media in one view
• Customer context at a glance: Understand past experiences, whether positive or negative, before responding
• No repeated information: Agents already know the backstory, so customers never have to start from scratch

Support team benefit: Agents enter every conversation informed. No digging through separate tools or asking customers to repeat themselves.

Customer benefit: Interactions feel personal and efficient. Customers are treated like returning customers, not strangers.

Omnichannel support

Customers want to reach you on their preferred channel, and they expect a seamless experience when they do. A true omnichannel help desk consolidates every conversation into one unified inbox, so agents aren't jumping between platforms or losing context. Basic omnichannel features include:

• Unified inbox: Email, live chat, SMS, social media, voice, and WhatsApp all in one place
• Full conversation history: Agents see every prior interaction regardless of channel, so customers never have to repeat themselves
• Cross-channel context: A conversation that starts on Instagram and continues over email stays connected in a single ticket view

Support team benefit: One inbox replaces five tabs. No more copy-pasting context between platforms or losing time switching tools.

Customer benefit: They can reach out however is most convenient. The conversation picks up wherever they left off, regardless of channel.

Knowledge base & self-service

A knowledge base lets customers find answers on their own, without waiting for an agent. 88% of customers expect businesses to offer self-service support portals, and a well-built one reduces inbound volume significantly while improving customer experience outside business hours. To give customers full independece, make sure you have these:

• Help center articles: FAQ pages, how-to guides, and policy explanations customers can browse anytime
• Order tracking tools: Let customers check status without contacting support
• AI-powered article suggestions: Surfaces relevant content based on what the customer is asking in real time
• Chat widget integration: Deflects common questions before they become tickets

Support team benefit: Fewer repetitive tickets means more time for complex, high-value conversations.

Customer benefit: Instant answers at any hour, without the wait time.

Automation & AI

Automation eliminates the repetitive, low-value tasks that slow agents down, and AI handles entire conversations that don't need a human at all. In customer support, these features are vital for streamlined and scalable operations:

• Conversational AI: Resolve common requests like order status, return questions, and shipping updates instantly. They can give personalized responses and take action based on the request, like updating addresses or canceling orders.
• Intelligent routing: Assigns tickets based on topic, sentiment, and agent capacity. Urgent queries are flagged automatically.
• Auto-tagging: Categorizes tickets by content and channel without manual input
• Macros and canned responses: Templated replies with dynamic variables for fast, consistent messaging
• SLA escalations: Automatically surfaces overdue tickets before they breach targets

Support team benefit: Repetitive tickets get handled automatically. The team can focus on conversations that actually require a human touch.

Customer benefit: Common questions get resolved instantly, 24/7, without waiting in a queue.

Reporting functionalities

A help desk should also give you the data to improve your support operations. Reporting dashboards bring performance metrics into one place so you can make real decisions, spot problems early, and demonstrate the business impact of your team. Basic features include:

• Ticket metrics: Track tickets created, replied, closed, resolution time, and first response time
• Agent performance: Monitor individual output, workload, and efficiency across your team
• Customer satisfaction: Measure survey response rates, average ratings, and rating distribution
• Tag and intent reporting: Identify which ticket types make up the bulk of your volume
• Product issue tracking: Surface recurring customer complaints to inform improvements beyond support

Support team benefit: Managers can spot bottlenecks, balance workloads, and coach agents based on real data rather than gut feel.

Customer benefit: Teams that track and act on performance data resolve issues faster and deliver more consistent experiences over time.

Types of help desks

Help desks vary by organizational structure and deployment model. A customer support team needs a very different type of helpdesk than an IT department. Understanding these distinctions helps you choose the right solution for your business needs.

Digital or cloud-based helpdesks

A cloud-based helpdesk is hosted by the provider and billed on a monthly or annual subscription. You skip the cost and complexity of building or maintaining software yourself. This is the most common choice for small and mid-sized businesses without an in-house IT team.

On-site helpdesks

With an on-site helpdesk, your company purchases the software license and hosts it on your own servers. You get full control over data and security. Most cloud-based solutions are actually safer, though, thanks to advanced built-in security features. On-site helpdesks are increasingly rare, mostly used by government offices and law firms with strict data requirements.

Enterprise helpdesks

Enterprise helpdesks are built for large organizations with complex needs. They can be cloud-based or on-site, but come with deeper customization and dedicated support. Higher pricing reflects that. Unless you know you need enterprise-grade software, this probably isn't the right fit.

Open-source helpdesks

Open-source helpdesks give developers free access to the source code. There's no licensing fee, but you'll need an IT team to build and maintain it. They're also more vulnerable to data breaches and outages, and don't come with dedicated support.

Internal IT helpdesks

Some larger organizations, like hospitals and universities, run internal helpdesks for employee tech support. Instead of managing requests over email, IT teams use a portal with self-service guides and a structured way to submit tickets. It works the same way as customer support, just facing inward.

What are help desk tiers?

Help desks organize teams into tiers based on complexity and expertise. Tiered models ensure customers reach the right expertise level for their issue. Each tier handles progressively more complex requests, with clear escalation paths when an issue exceeds the current tier's scope.

What are escalations in a help desk?

Escalation happens when an issue exceeds the current tier's scope or expertise. Your customer service team members can create an escalation plan so that urgent queries are given to the right teams. Clear escalation criteria prevent bottlenecks and ensure complex issues get resolved by the most qualified person.

For example, a customer reporting a missing $500 order may start with a frontline agent who can confirm shipment details, but needs a senior agent with refund authority to resolve it. Or a customer who mentions they plan to post about a defective product on social media gets flagged and routed to a manager to handle with extra care.

Best practices and key metrics

Effective help desks combine process discipline with continuous measurement. Following established best practices ensures consistency, while tracking the right metrics helps you identify opportunities for improvement.

Best practices:

• Set clear SLAs for response and resolution times
• Invest in agent training and knowledge documentation
• Monitor ticket trends to identify recurring issues
• Use automation to handle repetitive inquiries
• Collect customer feedback after resolutions
• Review and update knowledge base regularly

Key metrics to track:

• First response time (FRT)
• Average handle time (AHT)
• First contact resolution (FCR)
• Customer satisfaction score (CSAT)
• Ticket volume and backlog
• Self-service deflection rate

A help desk brings all your customer support metrics into one system for better reporting. A central dashboard makes it easy to track customer issues. You can use this data to inform business decisions and optimize your support process. You're also better able to meet your service level agreements (SLAs) thanks to the accountability of clear reporting dashboards.

Read more: 25 customer service metrics & KPIs + how to track them

How to choose the right help desk solution

The right help desk balances ease of use, feature depth, and long-term value. Each company's needs are slightly different, so we encourage signing up for a few demos and trials while shopping for a helpdesk.

Ease of use & UX

Is it easy to learn and navigate? Complex help desks slow down adoption and frustrate agents. If your team spends more time navigating the software than helping customers, you've chosen the wrong tool. The best help desks feel intuitive from day one.

Does the interface feel clean and organized? Look for clear navigation and minimal training requirements. Agents should find what they need within seconds. The ticket view should surface relevant customer information without overwhelming the screen.

Can you try it before you commit? Give a few agents access during the trial period and gather their feedback. They use the tool every day, so their input matters more than any feature checklist.

Scalability & ROI

Can it handle volume spikes without slowing down? Black Friday, product launches, and viral moments can triple your normal ticket volume overnight. Your help desk needs to maintain speed and reliability when it matters most, not buckle under pressure.

Is the pricing model the right fit for your business? Some help desks charge per agent, others by ticket volume or features unlocked. Look beyond the seat cost and consider the total cost of ownership, including setup, training, integrations, and ongoing support.

How do you measure whether it's worth the investment? Track reduced handle times, higher CSAT scores, and deflection rates. The best help desks pay for themselves through efficiency gains. If you want to dig deeper, check out our guide to customer service ROI.

What should you check before making a decision? Use this as a quick checklist when reviewing your options:

• Pricing: Does it fit your budget and offer flexible plans?
• Ticket organization: Is there a clear, visual way to see which tickets need attention and who owns them?
• Automation: Does it save time for both your team and your customers?
• Omnichannel support: Does it work across all the channels you use?
• Integrations: Does it connect to the tools you already use or plan to use?

How do I start using a help desk for customer support?

Successful help desk implementations follow a structured approach. Rushing through setup leads to gaps in configuration and frustrated teams.

Step 1: Research and plan

1. Review the past 90 days of customer conversations. Identify your most common questions, preferred channels, and where agents spend the most time.
2. Gather input from agents, managers, and customers. Agents know what's broken. Managers understand business constraints. Customers can tell you what frustrates them most.
3. Evaluate vendors based on features, integrations, and support quality. Ask how each feature works in practice and request references from brands similar to yours.

Step 2: Set up and configure

1. Configure ticket routing, SLAs, and escalation rules first. These foundational settings determine how work flows through your team.
2. Build your knowledge base and self-service portal next. Start with your top 20 most common questions and expand as patterns emerge.
3. Train agents on core functionality before rolling out fully. Launch, gather feedback, and refine workflows as you learn what works.

Step 3: Complete your configuration checklist

Before going live, make sure you have:

• Integrations connected to your ecommerce platform and key tools
• Macros created for your most common responses
• User roles and permissions defined
• Automation rules configured for tagging, routing, and responses
• Reporting dashboards set up for key metrics

Is a help desk the same as a CRM?

No, a helpdesk isn't the same as a CRM.

CRM stands for customer relationship management and is a system for managing relationships with customers. It's one central place that helps organize all the details about your leads and customers. Using this system, you can get a full picture of every customer and understand the status of every customer relationship.

A CRM typically doesn't have functionalities for ticket management because its primary focus is on data from sales and accounts. But ticket management is a fundamental component of a helpdesk — hence the difference between both software solutions. Platforms such as Salesforce are sometimes confused as helpdesk tools, but their focus is primarily CRM, not helpdesk management.

Strong helpdesk platforms like Gorgias do have some features of CRMs, like aggregating all interactions with a given customer in one location alongside loyalty data, marketing campaign responses, etc.

Is a help desk the same as a live chat?

No, but some helpdesks also include live chat software.

Live chat tools are typically hosted on websites and allow website visitors to communicate with a brand in real time. Helpdesk software pulls customer requests from multiple places such as email, phone, and social media. Live chat is a component of more robust helpdesk software, but not vice versa.

Here's an example: Gorgias is a helpdesk that includes live chat functionality, meaning all Gorgias users can install a live chat widget to their website in just a few clicks. Once installed, live chat becomes another channel in your help desk. You can answer chats, emails, and social media DMs without leaving the platform.

Related: Best live chat apps for customer support

High-quality customer experiences start in the help desk

The right help desk doesn't just resolve tickets faster. It turns support conversations into revenue opportunities by connecting customer data, product recommendations, and order management in one platform. Gorgias is built for ecommerce brands, with deep Shopify integration, AI automation, and conversational commerce tools that help your support team drive measurable business impact. Book a demo to see how Gorgias can transform your customer support.

Shopping for a helpdesk? Check out these articles to guide your shopping:

• The best Shopify helpdesk apps
• The best helpdesk ecommerce brands
• The best software for customer service

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Excellent customer service experiences depend on giving customers convenient paths to contact support agents on whichever channel best suits them. This is possible with an omnichannel customer service strategy,  where businesses seamlessly manage customer interactions on multiple communication channels: email, social media, SMS, voice, and so on. 

According to Shopify’s 2022 Future of Commerce report, 58% of customers say that being able to get customer support on their preferred channel influenced their purchase decision. An omnichannel approach satisfied this need and more by retaining customer data across channels and using it to personalize every interaction, even if a customer has never used that channel before.

Below, learn why an omnichannel approach to customer engagement can produce more revenue for your business, increase loyalty, and provide an overall better experience.

What is omnichannel customer service?

Omnichannel customer service is when a business offers multiple options for customer support that seamlessly connect across different channels.

For example, providing unified customer support via messaging channels like SMS or live chat, phone calls, and social media apps is an omnichannel approach to customer service. In addition to providing your customers with multiple touchpoints for contacting customer service agents, self-service support resources such as a knowledge base, an FAQ page, and automated chatbots can also serve as valuable elements of an omnichannel customer service strategy.

Why you should offer an omnichannel customer experience

Thanks to the benefits listed below, the popularity of omnichannel customer service is rapidly increasing. Customer expectations regarding omnichannel customer service have been on the rise lately as well, with 78% of customers reporting that they prefer to choose from a variety of engagement channels for support, according to data from Salesforce. 

The same Salesforce report also shows that 40% of customers won't do business with a company if they can’t use their preferred channels. Meeting customer expectations and creating a customer-centric experience can lead to better growth, which in turn creates more revenue for your business. 

That’s true for the team at messenger bag shop Timbuk2. "Increased customer support should go hand in hand with revenue growth,” says Joseph Piazza, Senior Customer Experience Manager. “We want to turn customer experience into a profit center."

Below, explore some of the main benefits of of incorporating an omnichannel approach into your customer service strategy.

Support your customers where they are

Omnichannel customer service allows customers to contact your support team using the channels that they are already most comfortable with. This encourages better customer relationships since shoppers won’t have to compromise on how they like to communicate. 

Take a look at how Berkey Filters, a leading water filtration brand, lets customers know about their fastest support channels at the top of their contact-us page:

Requiring customers to contact your company via email or phone may not seem like too big of an ask, but remember that for every customer who contacts your brand for support, there are likely several others who will decide that those options are too much of a hassle. They might prefer Instagram or Twitter or would rather send in a quick text message. That creates a leaky bucket for your team — you might miss out on answering the question that makes the sale, or resolving a frustration that keeps someone from making another purchase. 

Implementing an omnichannel customer service strategy makes getting support more convenient and accessible for your customers. And, it increases the chance that they’ll actually reach out so that you can turn around their experience.  

📚Recommended reading: Learn how to incorporate social media into your customer service strategy.

Resolve your customers' needs faster

According to data from HubSpot, 90% of customers rate immediate responses as “important” or “very important” when they have a customer service question. 

When you make it more convenient for customers to find the answers that they need, you reduce wait times and resolve your customers' needs much faster. Resolving customer issues as quickly as possible is a vital objective for any company that hopes to optimize customer satisfaction. 

If you hope to meet these customer expectations, your entire customer service process needs to be an efficient and streamlined experience. Offering support across multiple communication channels — complemented by automation and templates — is an effective step toward accomplishing this goal.

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

Increase customer loyalty

Customers take time to contact a brand's contact center when they are experiencing an issue, either before or after a purchase. If their issue is not resolved in a timely and effective manner, customers could decide not to purchase from you again. 

Making it as simple and convenient as possible for customers to contact your company allows you to resolve customer issues much faster, and increases the likelihood that customers with issues will contact you in the first place. 

Stationery shop Ohh Deer tracks the revenue it generates from positive customer experiences using Gorgias. The brand boasts a 4.95 CSAT score and tracks $12,500 of revenue generated from chat each quarter.  "When you make sales thanks to your good service, customers will come back and recommend you,” says Alex Turner, the brand’s Customer Experience Manager. “That's revenue-generating." 

Good service can go a long way towards boosting customer satisfaction and ultimately customer loyalty because customers know that if they have a problem, you will be able to quickly resolve it. 

📚Recommended reading: Want to get a gauge of your brand’s customer loyalty? Learn how to calculate (and improve) net promoter score (NPS) and customer satisfaction (CSAT).

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Reduce customer churn rates

Boosting customer loyalty also means reducing customer churn rates. When you can provide a streamlined and satisfactory experience to customers who are having issues with your products or services, it’s less likely that those issues will cost you the customer. 

According to The Effortless Experience, 96% of customers who have high-effort experiences feel disloyal to those companies afterward. Having to navigate away from social media and compose an email, only to be told that you actually have to pick up the phone and repeat your issue is the definition of a high-effort experience.

If the support process is seamless for the customer, their experience will be positive — and positive customer experience reduces churn. For subscription-based businesses, this means canceling their subscription. For non-subscription-based businesses, this means not returning to place additional purchases. 

An omnichannel customer service strategy can be an exceptional tool for helping you turn customer issues into satisfactory outcomes, boosting customer retention in the process.

📚Recommended reading: Dealing with angry or frustrated customers? Check out our guide to dealing with angry customers over email.

Differentiate your brand from the competition

There's no denying the fact that ecommerce store owners are currently experiencing more than their fair share of challenges — and customer retention, not acquisition, is the best way to stand out. 

Between stiff competition from ecommerce giants like Walmart and Amazon, and mounting global supply chain challenges, drawing in enough customers to pay the bills has never been harder. 

The price of paid advertising has also skyrocketed recently, leaving many ecommerce brands at a disadvantage when it comes to bringing in new customers through paid channels. For example, Meta’s cost per click for paid ads increased by 61% from the previous year. 

Many brands still operate in silos, where a support conversation via email and purchase history don’t show up in a customer’s lifetime profile. This makes omnichannel customer support a great way to step up the overall experience, where new shoppers feel comfortable making a purchase and returning shoppers are excited to come back for more.  

And remember: While the cost of ads and customer acquisition skyrockets, happy customers generate 300% more revenue than first-time shoppers. So, while other brands are overspending on new customers they struggle to retain, you’ll come out on top by focusing on providing an excellent customer experience that keeps customers coming back.

Create a smoother customer journey 

Customers want the ability to get the support they need where and when they want it, at any stage of the relationship they have with a company. 

This creates a better user experience, one that is more focused on the benefits to the customer than on the benefits to the business. That’s the main difference between omnichannel and multichannel support. Multichannel support focuses on using multiple channels for marketing or support. Omnichannel seeks to meet customers where they are, provide a positive, seamless customer journey, and support people at all stages of the customer lifecycle.   

How to leverage the unique benefits for each channel

Each customer service channel has benefits of its own. Providing multiple channels — and a seamless experience switching from one channel to the next — lets customers choose what best works for them. 

Self-service

‍88% of customers want a self-service portal so that they can answer their own questions. Self-service resources like FAQ pages or knowledge centers are great for customer convenience, as they provide immediate answers to common questions. 

Email

There’s a reason that 95% of customer service teams rely on email for support. A preferred channel for many, its versatile features, ticketing system, and the ability to integrate with simple automation makes it a tool that works for small and large teams.

Phone

Some people still prefer to talk on the phone to get support. Phone conversations help to fully resolve an issue in a way that text or email support can’t. Plus, having a phone line for people to call builds trust in your business, even if customers choose a different channel.

Live chat

Using live chat support can increase customer conversions by 12%. It’s as much of a conversion tool as it is a support tool. Live chat encourages shoppers to ask any questions they have that are preventing them from making a purchase. For support, it offers immediate assistance for a quick resolution time. 

SMS text messages

‍46% of Americans spend 5-6 hours on their mobile devices each day. Offering SMS or text support meets customers where they already are, which creates an easier experience for them.   

Social media

‍Time spent on social media is at an all-time high. Worldwide, the average person spends 147 minutes on social media each day. Because people already spend so much time on social, allowing them to get support there creates a much easier, streamlined experience. Shoppers can respond to a story to ask questions about products, comment a question on a post, tweet at a brand, or reach out via DM, a space that’s usually monitored by brands daily. 

Mobile app

‍If your business has a mobile app, in-app support reduces the need for customers to switch back and forth between platforms

In-person

In-store support is great for personal connection, makes exchanges much easier, and allows customers to get an instant refund rather than waiting for an item to ship back. It also eliminates return shipping costs and can increase store revenue by bringing people back to take a look at what’s currently in stock. 

5 tips for building world-class omnichannel customer service

The benefits of omnichannel customer service make it a stand-out customer support best practice. To help you get started, here are five tips for building world-class omnichannel customer service.

1) Use customer data to know your target audience(s) inside and out

Customer data is the fuel that powers better customer service. When you know your target audience inside and out, you can fine-tune messaging across different digital channels to provide support. 

To offer a consistent experience across multiple channels, you must keep customer data front and center for whichever agent responds to the question. Customer data includes everything from each customer’s name, shipping address, past orders, past conversations, loyalty points, reviews, and more. With the right tool, this data will carry from one channel to the next, ensuring your customers never have to repeat themselves:

This customer data gives your agents the insights they need to provide a more personalized experience to the customers that they assist. Plus, you can set up automation workflows — like chatbots and automatic responses — that use this data to provide instant, personalized support. We’ll discuss this more in step four below.

✅ Next steps: Get familiar with the customer data that you have and make it as easy as possible for your agents to access. Ideally, it’s part of a helpdesk so your agents don’t have to switch tabs while answering tickets. But a customer relationship management (CRM) tool or even a spreadsheet could work — anything to avoid asking customers to repeat themselves. 

📚 Recommended reading: Want to measure key customer support metrics? Read our guides on measuring NPS, CSAT, and customer service ROI. Or, check out our list of customer support metrics every brand should track.

2) Understand the strengths of each customer support channel

Before you can begin offering efficient customer service across multiple digital channels, you first need to get familiar with how each one of those channels works, how they can work together, and the best way to utilize each channel. 

For instance, you may decide that routing customers with more complex issues from live chat to a call center is the best way to use these two channels in tandem. Whatever system you decide to implement, a thorough understanding of how to use the various channels in your omnichannel customer service strategy — both individually and as part of your overall support network — is key to creating effective omnichannel support.

Keep in mind that forcing customers to switch channels isn’t ideal. However, in certain circumstances, your best bet at finding a quick resolution is asking customers to jump on the phone or send an email with more details and images.

✅ Next steps: Check out our Director of Support’s guide to prioritizing customer support requests based on channel, urgency, and customer status. This is a great first step to developing a strategic approach to a multi-channel support operation.

3) Centralize all your conversations using a unified customer support platform 

One of the only drawbacks of omnichannel customer service is the fact that requiring support agents to bounce between multiple apps (email, Facebook, Instagram, and so on) to respond to notifications on each channel. Thankfully, customer support software solutions (also called helpdesks) such as Gorgias can help. A customer service platform like Gorgias has functionality that can:

Centralize customer support conversations. Centralize conversations across numerous platforms and social media messaging apps into a single, user-friendly dashboard. Centralizing your customer interactions into one dashboard makes it easy for your customer service agents to switch between messaging platforms. This can boost agent productivity and ultimately improve the quality of your omnichannel customer support services.

Reduce tab-shuffling. Pick a helpdesk that pulls customer data from your ecommerce platform (like Shopify, BigCommerce, or Magento) so you can see customer data, modify orders, and suggest products without leaving the helpdesk. For you or your customer service agents, this means that they don’t have to pull up multiple tabs to help out one customer, which would involve shuffling between sites like Gmail, Instagram, and Shopify, for example. 

Unify customer data across channels. Customers want to be able to start a live chat conversation with support and have the agent be able to see their past conversation history, purchases, and even chats they’ve had on other channels, like email or via text. Gorgias includes a customer sidebar, which shows customer data and metrics across integrated channels like SMS, email, and social media, and tools like Klaviyo and Yotpo. 

Use automation to streamline processes. Built-in automation can help you deflect and prioritize tickets, offer immediate responses to frequently asked questions, or pop up to share proactive support or find upselling opportunities. 

✅ Next steps: Check out the best customer service software on the market, or sign up for a free trial of Gorgias.  

Note: Gorgias no longer supports Twitter interactions, but you can still use Gorgias for Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp.

4) Leverage automation to improve response time and lighten the workload for your team

Tools designed to automate tedious customer service tasks are a huge help. Automated customer support workflow builders enable you to create canned responses to common questions such as, "where is my order?" and "do you ship internationally?" 

Leveraging artificial intelligence can help you determine customer intent and provide accurate, personalized responses. The benefits of these automation tools are two-fold. They allow you to speed up your response and resolution times, and also help to reduce the burden on your support team by automatically resolving a large percentage of customer issues — which would have otherwise required a manual response. 

✅ Next steps: If you don’t have one already, sign up for a helpdesk that comes with automation. Automated workflow builders such as the one offered by Gorgias can connect with a wide range of messaging platforms, letting you create canned responses across numerous customer support channels.

5) Offer self-service options 

Self-service resources such as FAQ pages, automated chatbots, and knowledge base pages can allow customers to quickly find the answer to common questions without having to create a support ticket. While some might not consider these support channels, because they don’t involve conversations with support report reps, they are extremely important elements of the customer experience.

According to data from Microsoft, 66% of customers try self-service options before they decide to contact a brand's customer service team. Further, the same report finds that 88% of customers expect brands to have an online self-service portal.

While it is certainly important to provide customers with plenty of different channels for getting in touch with your customer service agents, self-service channels can be a valuable element of omnichannel customer service as well. Self-support resources make it easy for customers to find answers to common issues — even when all your reps are offline — while also reducing your team's support ticket volume.

Self-service is a wide-ranging umbrella, including resources like the following.

1) Self-service menus where customers can track, return, and cancel orders, as well as get answers to common questions without having to contact an agent and wait for a response:

2) Knowledge bases, also known as Help Centers, where customers can access an organized library of support articles and manage their order without contacting an agent:

3) Customer communities where customers can see conversations with other customers and read informative blog posts related to their products and issues

✅ Next steps: Using the data you have from past customer questions, pain points, and conversations, identify your frequently asked questions and create an FAQ page to answer them. You should also link your shipping, return, and exchange policies, as well as links to the additional channels where you offer support.

Once you have your FAQ page, monitor usage and consider upgrading to more robust self-service options like those described above.

Gorgias makes omnichannel customer service possible with a few clicks

As the customer service platform built specifically for ecommerce stores, Gorgias offers everything you need to implement omnichannel customer service with just a few clicks, including:

• Centralized customer support dashboard for connecting multiple customer service channels under a single, easy-to-use platform
• Powerful integrations with a wide range of messaging platforms, including fast-loading live chat widgets for offering real-time live chat support directly from your website
• AI-powered automated workflow builder for creating canned responses to common customer service questions

Take a look at how Gorgias helps you offer omnichannel customer service in the video below:

If you would like to see for yourself how Gorgias empowers ecommerce brands to offer exceptional omnichannel customer service, sign up for Gorgias today.

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Ecommerce brands like yours usually turn to live chat for customer support. Your team is ready to answer, lightning fast, when a customer asks where their order is or how to request an exchange. This is great practice: Most customers expect some type of live chat and fast responses.

But that’s just the tip of the iceberg — live chat is a great sales tool, too. Check out these live chat sales statistics:

• 79% of businesses say that implementing live chat positively impacted their revenue and customer loyalty
• Live chat can boost your conversion rate by 12%
• 38% of customers are more likely to buy if your site has live chat

Live chat boosts sales because it connects shoppers to your team while they’re browsing your site, exactly when they’re on the fence about a purchase. It lets potential customers get answers to pre-sales questions and make a confident purchase. It also lets you highlight promotions and free shipping, offer discounts, collect customer email addresses, and upsell shoppers. 

Let’s dive into each of those reasons (and more) to help you understand why live chat is your new sales machine.

How live chat helps drive revenue

At its most basic, live chat drives revenue by allowing your customers to reach out to your brand with very little effort. From there, you can answer pre-sales questions and highlight incentives that unblock purchases.

Here’s what that looks like with some specific examples:

1) Gives shoppers the information they need to make a purchase

Imagine you’re trying to buy a new toy for your child from an international store. You’ve found information about domestic shipping but can’t find out whether they ship outside the country (and whether it’ll arrive by your child’s birthday). You look for the answer on the product page, the checkout page, an FAQ page — nothing. 

While we recommend putting detailed shipping information in multiple locations on your site, live chat is that crucial last line of defense for these kinds of pre-sales questions before customers decide to just open up Amazon, where they know they’ll get it within two days.

Shipping information is just the beginning. Customers turn to live chat to answer pre-sales questions of all kinds. Questions will vary depending on your industry, but could include:

• When should I expect to get my order if I buy it today?
• What size leggings should I get?
• Are your snack bars safe for peanut allergies?
• Is your deodorant 100% vegan?
• Do you have any special deals if I buy more than one item?
• Is your return window longer during the holidays?
• Can you make this item in a custom color?

Jewelry brand Jaxxon does a great job of answering many of these kinds of questions in their chat widget with self-service features we’ll describe in more detail below).

Once you answer pre-sales questions, you can use live chat conversations to: 

• Offer discounts to shoppers
• Highlight that you offer free shipping for orders over $100 to boost average order value (AOV)
• Recommend better or superior products for the customer’s needs
• Much, much more.

📚 Recommended reading: Learn how Jaxxon boosted overall revenue by 46% with self-service in live chat. 

2) Engages customers during the shopping process

When customers are on your website, they’re one short step away from placing an order. If they need to get ahold of you and their only option is to leave your website and compose a new email, you’re disrupting the flow of shopping, adding devastating effort to your sales process.

Having live chat on your site for quick questions and customer support makes shopping on your site easier, faster, and less effortful — all elements of a great customer experience, right on the page. 

You give customers the fast, personalized help they need without letting them wander away from your site and abandoning their cart. They don’t even need to hunt down your contact page or dig for your email address. The live chat button is right there, on the page.

Engaging a shopper at the right time can be make-or-break for your business. Learn how CROSSNET closed a $450,000 sale using Gorgias live chat.

3) Captures emails for future marketing campaigns

With live chat tools such as Gorgias, you can give customers a contact form so they can still send a message when no agents are online.

This accomplishes two things: 

1. It helps your customer service team follow up and answer the question (via email) as soon as they get back online. The faster you can provide a helpful answer, the more likely they are to check out rather than abandoning their cart. 
2. It gives you customer contact information which you can add to your email marketing list, so you can send them new sale announcements, discounts, and other marketing and promotional materials. 

The email capture feature on Gorgias live chat allows us to collect new email addresses on a daily basis! This is highly convenient and helps us drive sales.

— Danny Taing, Founder & CEO

📚 Recommended reading: Learn how Topicals boosted sales by 78% through pre-sales customer conversations.

4) Offers self-service features for shoppers

Inviting a slew of new questions and messages may turn you off — especially if you’re a smaller brand trying to minimize the size and cost of your support team. That’s why some live chat software like Gorgias offers self-service functionality: to answer a bulk of shopper questions without any agent interaction. 

Most live chat tools use chatbots to automate live chat interactions. But speaking to a robot that’s pretending to be human is a deceiving (and often frustrating):

Instead, we find that most ecommerce brands (and shoppers) prefer interactive self-service, where you can pre-load frequently asked questions that shoppers click for an instant answer:

This way, key pre-sales information is available for shoppers without a torrent of tickets flooding your inbox. That said, we’ve observed that these Quick Response Flows filter out tons of repetitive questions and lead to more complex questions that require a human agent. More on that in the following section. 

5) Boosts brand affinity

Not all interactions should be automated. Live chat conversations — even those that begin with self-service — open the door to more genuine, delightful conversations where your support agent can offer personalized support and show off your brand’s most appealing benefits (even if the customer didn’t explicitly ask).

ALOHAS, a sustainable fashion brand, is a great example of this. Their unique on-demand model prompts many questions about shipping time, so they created a Quick Response Flow about their shipping policy. When customers click, they get a soft sell on the program:

If the customer is still confused, needs more information about the program, or wants advice from the sales associate, they just have to click “No, I need more help” to connect with a human agent.

Since launching Automate (which includes Quick Response Flows) three months ago, we have doubled the revenue from customer support and we’re on our way to triple the revenue we get from chat.

— Annalisa Micalizzi, Manager of Global Customer Service at ALOHAS

6) Allows you to reach out to customers proactively

With certain live chat tools, you can create automatic chat campaigns to proactively reach out to customers shopping on your site. This kind of customer engagement is like a friendly member of your sales team asking if shoppers in a brick-and-mortar store need help. But it is much less intrusive than a pop-up. 

You can use chat campaigns to: 

• Welcome customers to your store
• Ask customers if they need help
• Remind them about free shipping
• Share a new product launch
• Direct shoppers to your best sellers
• Much more

With Gorgias, you can even link these proactive chat campaigns to specific pages and customer browsing behavior.n This way, you’re sending the right message to the right person at the right time to increase positive interactions and conversion rate. 

For example, pet food brand Franklin set up a chat campaign on each of their products for sensitive animals to ask shoppers if they have any questions about their pets’ unique needs:

This is a great example of how proactive outreach can transform your brand into a trusted, helpful shopping partner. Conversations that educate shoppers and help them find the perfect product are great for building shopper confidence on their first purchase as well as long-term loyalty. 

7 best practices for using live chat for sales

Now that we understand some of the big-picture ways live chat can boost online sales, let’s look at some tips to keep in mind while implementing live chat for sales:

1) Be available when your customers need it

Availability is where live chat shines. Customers can type their problems into the chat box and get answers from your team in seconds. Spend time understanding when your customers shop and staff your live chat accordingly.

Most online shopping occurs between 8 p.m. and 9 p.m., with another peak on Wednesdays and Thursdays from 10 a.m. to 11 a.m. However, that might not be true for your store and these shopping windows don't account for time zones. 

Use tools like Lucky Orange and DeepMine to study your site’s unique traffic and sales patterns and base your staffing around your unique customer behavior. 

If you can't staff your live chat 24/7, Gorgias live chat offers a variety of tools — including autoresponders, contact forms, self-service flows, and more — to keep servicing your customers, even when you’re offline for the night.

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2) Collect customer insights with live chat

Live chat is great to solve individual customer issues, but you can take note of patterns and pain points in customer feedback to make larger-impact improvements to your product and customer experience (CX).

For example, if customers regularly reach out with questions about shipping, you might want to create clearer and more visible shipping policies or FAQs. Consider creating Macros that agents can use to ask follow-up questions to understand what confused or frustrated customers. 

📚 Recommended reading: Learn how Chomps, a better-for-you snack brand, uses Gorgias to analyze tickets and improve their product and CX.

3) Set up automatic greetings to reduce first-response time

You may not be able to immediately answer every single live chat ticket, even when you’re online. If that’s the case, give your agents some buffer time by creating an automated initial prompt that boosts your first-response times.

This way, shoppers that message your brand will know their message was received, and hopefully wait a few extra moments before giving up on the hope of contacting you. This buys your team members a few seconds to pull up the chat request and respond.

Here’s what a rule to automatically send this kind of message could look like:

4) Streamline the checkout page, including scaling back on proactive chat

We all know a streamlined checkout process is key to driving purchases and reducing cart abandonment. It’s worth paying attention to when 70% of customers abandon their carts before completing the checkout process.

While live chat might seem like a great way to push customers over the finish line, we recommend holding off on any proactive chats at this point in the shopping journey. If customers have made it this far, it's best to eliminate distractions. 

At the very least, set your chat campaign to wait for at least 60 seconds. That way, you’re not barraging them with too many distractions the moment they land on the checkout page.

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5) Continue chat conversations after the live chat ends

We've already covered that live chat is an excellent lead generation and qualification tool. With that in mind, don’t waste the opportunity to do some follow-up after a live chat session ends — the real value of your customers comes from repeat purchases, after all, and this is what makes customer service so important for growth.

Here are some ideas and tips to keep the conversation going: 

1. Send a customer satisfaction (CSAT) survey, which you can do automatically with Gorgias. This shows customers you value their feedback and lets you collect key insights right after each interaction. 
2. Add customers to automated mailing lists if you collected their email with a contact form (but make it easy for them to opt-out). 
3. In any future conversations (that they or you start), refer back to your conversation in live chat, especially if the issue is related. A CRM-like helpdesk like Gorgias that displays a customer's order and interaction history makes this very easy.

6) Make personalized product suggestions

One of the best ways to use live chat to boost sales is to offer customers personalized product recommendations during live chat sessions. 

When you instruct your customer support agents to function as sales reps and seek out upsell and cross-sell opportunities during live chat conversations, you can boost metrics like your conversion rate and average order value (AOV).

You can even include links to products in your store that display visually in the live chat conversation:

7) Use dashboards to learn what's working and optimize

One of the biggest benefits of Gorgias' live chat solution is that it comes with detailed dashboards that include a wide range of insights and analytics, from the performance and speed of your support team to the revenue you’re earning. 

Track sales-related metrics — like revenue growth and the type of tickets that converted the most — and for helpful insights at scale. You can also see how much time and money live chat is saving your team by monitoring key CS performance metrics like first response time, resolution time, and closed tickets by day or agent. 

All seven of the strategies we've covered to drive sales with live chat can be optimized and prioritized based on how they perform. To do this, you need to be able to measure your key live chat metrics and adjust accordingly. 

Optimizing your live chat support strategy for maximum sales is much easier with a dashboard that provides real-time insights at both the macro and micro levels.

📚 Recommended reading: Our VP of Success and Support’s guide to customer support return-on-investment (ROI).

Common live chat mishaps to avoid

Live chat offers a wealth of benefits when employed correctly, but there are a few common mistakes to avoid:

Implementing the wrong live chat tool

Not all live chat apps are created equal. If you want to leverage live chat to its full potential, choosing a tool that offers the right features and functionality for your specific business is important. 

For example, some tools may have a chatbot that’s too simplistic or requires a heavy amount of coding or additional fee to set up custom chat messages, triggers, or automatic replies. Others may require you to choose between a chatbot and live chat (we think they work best together — here’s why.) 

With Gorgias, ecommerce stores can: 

• Create fast-loading live chat widgets.
• Offer live chat support across various messaging platforms, including SMS and Facebook Messenger.
• Create automated responses to common customer questions.
• Automatically collect and organize customer insights.

Learn more about how many ecommerce stores use Gorgias to increase their sales through live chat.

Failing to transfer to a live agent

Canned responses are great for reducing your team's workload and striking while the iron is hot but it’s important to know when to provide more personalized (human) responses. This might be for VIP customers, for customers with a very specific question that isn't fully answered by your templated response, and more.

With Gorgias, you can utilize advanced intent and sentiment detection features to pinpoint what a customer is asking so that you never mishandle their request. Gorgias also makes it easy to transfer live chat tickets to other agents so customers can always get the help they need.

Losing support tickets, responding late, or providing incorrect information

If you want to offer your customers live chat support, developing a well-organized system for prioritizing live chat tickets is essential. Without the right system in place, issues such as lost tickets, late responses, and inaccurate information are bound to occur.

Thankfully, Gorgias makes it easy to organize and manage live chat support tickets and enables you to create a comprehensive knowledge base. 

Use intent and sentiment analysis and rules to automatically label, prioritize, and assign tickets to the right agent. Gorgias' views let you see all open tickets at once, so nothing falls through the cracks. Plus, since Rules helps you skip manual ticket triaging and routing, fewer tickets will get lost or delayed.

Interrupting the purchase journey with intrusive live chat

We've already discussed how ecommerce businesses can use live chat to reduce cart abandonment — and how it's vital not to interrupt the purchasing process. You can keep an eye on this by tracking your conversion rates on pages where you implement live chat. If your conversion rates go down, you might be overdoing live chat and turning customers away. 

While live chat is powerful, more isn't always better. Prioritize a smooth, pleasant shopping experience over the opportunity for a few more sales. You don't want to appear spam-happy.

Ensuring that your live chat strategy actually benefits your checkout process is also key: If installing a live chat widget on your checkout page leads to fewer conversions, it may be necessary to rethink your approach to pre-sale customer support.

Turn your live chat into a sales machine with Gorgias

Live chat is a fantastic tool that will greatly impact your revenue. It can help you close the gap in the buyer journey, converting more people from window shoppers to new (and repeat) customers.

Gorgias is the best live chat and help desk ticketing system for ecommerce stores, and is just the tool you need to start boosting sales and growing your revenue. 

Sign up for a Gorgias account or book your demo to start boosting your CX and sales with live chat.

Business leaders often view customer service as a cost center. But the reality is that delivering a prompt and helpful customer experience is crucial to your brand’s growth.

A whopping 93% of customers are likely to return to your store and 90% are likely to purchase again after a great customer service experience, according to Hubspot. Plus, loyal customers are likely to have higher average order values (AOV), share your brand with friends via word of mouth, and leave positive reviews. That’s why repeat customers generate approximately 300% more than first-time shoppers, according to Gorgias data.

In this article, we break down seven ways customer-centric small businesses can move toward offering a great customer service experience and generate revenue as a result.

Why is delivering great customer service important?

Great customer service is important because happy customers drive revenue for your brand. Happy customers come back to your store, buy more with every purchase, refer friends to your brand, and leave public reviews. While repeat customers only make up 21% of the average brand’s customer base, they generate 44% of that brand’s revenue, according to Gorgias data.

Also, customer expectations about your service have changed over the past few years, and some businesses are having a hard time keeping up. Millennials and Gen Z are particularly opinionated about companies that don’t measure up to their customer experience expectations. 64% of customers under the age of 40 believe that customer service feels like an afterthought for most of the businesses they buy from, and people in this age group are quick to shift allegiance to other brands they believe will better serve them (see our complete guide on customer support statistics for more data on consumer expectations). 

Customer service isn’t only important when customers email in with a problem, either. A truly great customer service program nurtures customer relationships throughout the entire customer journey. For example, your customer service program can:

• Bring customers to your website
• Answers pre-sales questions to help drive sales
• Create self-service resources to help customers help themselves
• Supports customers with post-purchase issues to avoid unhappy customers
• Sends follow-ups to loyal customers to secure testimonials and repeat purchases
• Collects and shares customer feedback with the rest of the team to continually improve the product and customer experience

7 ways to deliver great customer service

In the following sections, we offer broad customer service strategies to improve your customer experience. Of course, we can only scratch the surface for each strategy in a single blog post, so we linked out to further reading on the topics and explain how a helpdesk like Gorgias can help you execute the strategy we describe.

1) Respond to tickets as quickly as possible

Slow response times lead to frustrated customers and lost business. And slow response times are a big issue: The average response time of customer support teams at most companies is 12 hours and 10 minutes.

Customers want swift responses to their queries, so making your ticket response time as short as possible is crucial. We recommend striving for a response time below two minutes and an average handling time below an hour.

How Gorgias can help

Gorgias is chock-full of features to help you reduce your response times. A major feature is Macros — templated responses with variables to give quick, personalized service. For example, your Macro can include variables like [Customer first name] or [Last order number] that automatically populate when you send the message to speed up your agents’ responses without sacrificing helpfulness.

And if you combine Macros with Rules, you can send instant responses to questions your customers frequently ask. For instance, when customers ask, “Where’s my order?” 

Gorgias also has rules you can use to: 

• Identify priority tickets so agents can see them quickly
• Tag and assign tickets so you can sort them quickly
• Automatically close spam tickets in your helpdesk

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2) Provide proactive support and self-service resources

Proactive customer service means giving customers solutions to common problems before contacting your brand. You can do this in two ways:

• A customer support agent sends a message to customers
• Your brand provides self-service resources such as a FAQ page or knowledge base

Proactive customer service doesn’t completely replace your traditional problem-solving customer service: Customers will always have questions, and you should be ready to provide prompt solutions. However, reaching out to customers — especially pre-sales customers — can give you an opportunity to provide information or discounts customers need to make a purchase. 

Similarly, self-service resources give customers instant answers to frequently asked questions without having to wait for an agent to respond. This is a lower-effort experience for customers and frees agents up agents to spend their time on more complex questions that require real people to help. 

The key is balance: A good customer service program provides many communication channels for customers to find the help they need.

How Gorgias can help

You can also use our live chat feature to execute chat campaigns. With chat campaigns, you can start a live chat conversation automatically when customers display pre-sales behavior, like lingering on the checkout page or adding items to their cart. You can ask customers whether they have questions, offer a discount if they reach a certain order value, or whatever your customers need to make a confident purchase.

Gorgias also includes Help Center, a knowledge base you can use to expand an FAQ page into a more detailed and searchable collection of information. You can also upgrade your Help Center (and live chat widget) to include a self-service menu where customers can track orders and make changes to recent purchases without having to contact an agent.

3) Deliver a personalized customer service experience

Companies that offer a personalized service experience take the time to get to know who their customers are, what they need, and what they expect: something that 66% of customers anticipate. The data needed to provide a personalized experience comes from all possible interactions the brand has with the customer, including purchases and customer support tickets. Without personalization, customers may feel like your brand doesn’t care about them; like they’re nothing more than a number.

How Gorgias can help

Within Gorgias, a centralized sidebar allows you to see a customer’s entire order history and interaction history on every channel. You’ll easily see past conversations, past successes, past products purchased, and more.

This is all information that your team can use to provide personalized service and improve the customer experience. For example, you’ll never need to ask a customer to repeat information and can provide better recommendations and solutions based on past behavior.

4) Have additional resources (like a help center) for self-service

Providing customers with the resources they need to solve problems on their own is a good strategy for improving your bottom line, with 89% of consumers willing to spend more with a company that allows them to find answers online without having to contact anyone. Create a help center, FAQ page, knowledge base, and any additional resources that can help customers solve their problems.

ConvertKit does this really well with a knowledge base fully equipped with guides and articles that take customers through common questions people ask about using the platform, step-by-step. Your Shopify or Magento store may not need such a detailed knowledge base, but having a help center and FAQ page that helps customers immediately solve issues is crucial for making self-service work.

How Gorgias can help

Gorgias has a self-service chat portal you can add to your live chat widget that makes it possible to automate up to 30% of your chat tickets. Our portal automates the process of checking order status, tracking numbers, and shipping information which makes it easier for customers to find the answers they need without speaking directly with a support agent:

5) Give customers many touchpoints to contact you

Omnichannel customer support is no longer optional — it’s what customers expect, with 93% of consumers willing to spend more with companies that offer their preferred contact option for reaching customer service. This type of support allows you to meet customers where they are and go the extra mile to fulfill their needs.

How Gorgias can help

As previously mentioned, Gorgias allows you to centralize all 1:1 interactions with customers across email, social media, live chat, voice, and SMS. Seeing all communication in one place makes it easier to reduce your response time and deal with customer issues promptly.

6) Implement systems to measure your team’s performance and impact

Remember, great customer service impacts your bottom line. This is why you should keep track of the right metrics to determine how much of an impact your customer service initiatives have on revenue. Some key metrics you should pay attention to include:

• Customer satisfaction score (CSAT): How likely is it that a customer will return to buy more?
• Revenue statistics: How much revenue is your customer support driving?
• Net promoter score (NPS): How likely is it that a customer will recommend your company to someone else?

How Gorgias can help

Gorgias provides a wealth of customer service data, including support performance, satisfaction surveys, real-time insights about agent activity and ticket volume, and revenue statistics:

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You can extract what you need from this data to calculate the key customer support metrics listed above to truly measure your customer service team's impact on revenue.

Read our guide to evaluating customer service for more tips to understand your team’s impact on the company’s bottom line.

7) Use tools to make customer service more efficient

Customer service tools like Gorgias allow you to meet your customer’s needs without hiring an army of customer service representatives. It’s easier to streamline all elements of customer service using Gorgias, thus keeping customer satisfaction high and ecommerce churn rate low. With Gorgias, you can help your team develop the customer service skills they need to provide excellent service that leads to loyal customers.

How Gorgias can help

Gorgias empowers your sales team with tools that help your agents prioritize customer tickets, assign customer questions to the right team members, manage orders and recommend products without leaving the helpdesk, and talk to your customers across channels and stores.

Gorgias also offers cutting-edge automation features to improve your customer service agents’ workflow, reduce customer wait time, and improve your brand’s self-service offerings. A few of Gorgias’ top automation features include:

• Automated Rules to organize tickets and declutter your workspace by automatically closing spam tickets
• Self-service menus that give customers an easier way to track orders, make changes to recent orders, and find answers
• Automatic responses to simple inquiries that pull up-to-date customer information like [Last order number] or [Customer first name]

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Examples of brands going above and beyond with their customer service

When you search for examples of great customer service online, you’ll get results like Amazon, Zappos, and Microsoft. These brands all offer great customer service but small businesses can’t replicate the scale of Amazon, Zappos, and Microsoft. So, for this article, we’ll share some smaller businesses that offer great customer service with the help of Gorgias.

Gorgias helps over 10,000 Shopify, BigCommerce, and Magento stores use technology to provide exceptional customer service. Below, we discuss four small business customer service examples that demonstrate how Gorgias not only helps brands solve customers’ problems but also increases their revenue.

Loop Earplugs: Great self-service to reduce frontline agent workload

Loop Earplugs offers a stylish, unobtrusive alternative to noise reduction. Their comfortable, low-profile earplugs help protect your ears from high sound intensity, thus improving your focus and helping you enjoy what’s happening around you without deafening sounds.

The earplugs are so popular that the team receives at least 1,500 customer queries per week, many of which are about locating orders. As you might imagine, solving those queries quickly to keep customers happy is a top priority for the team — but it’s also quite repetitive. 

With Gorgias, the team easily provides their customers with quick answers in a self-service menu. Their customers can find the answers they need with just a few clicks, and if they still can’t find what they’re looking for, they can still speak with a real person right there in the chat box.

“Having the most frequent customer service questions in one menu helps not only the customer but also our champions. It means these frequent simple questions are solved instantly by self-service, allowing our champions to invest even more time in other customers that need it and provide even more qualitative solutions.”
– Milan Vanmarcke, Customer Service Manager

Learn more about how Gorgias' self-service features and automations helped Loop Earplugs increase revenue from customer service by 43% and reduced queries about finding orders by 17%.

Ohh Deer: Generated additional revenue through agent efficiency

Ohh Deer has a wide mixture of B2C and B2B customers who are excited about crafts, stationery, and gifts. A big part of their business is based on a subscription model, resulting in a high volume of subscription-related questions from customers. The Ohh Deer team needed a customer service tool to help them respond more efficiently to the influx of customer queries. The tool needed to:

• Separate these high-priority subscription queries from other queries
• Integrate with other Shopify apps the sales team used to find information about customer orders
• Pull information from multiple platforms
• Provide information on key customer success metrics so that their team could effectively measure the impact of customer experience

That’s what Ohh Deer found in Gorgias. Providing these four benefits to Ohh Deer’s customer service team not only made them more organized and efficient but also helped them generate $12,500 in revenue per quarter. An efficient customer service team definitely improves customer retention and loyalty.

BrüMate: Generated $9 million in revenue through customer loyalty

BrüMate is a classy drinkware and cooler brand that has experienced rapid growth since its inception in 2016. Innovation, listening to customers, and creating a sense of community are top priorities for BrüMate’s customer success team. For the brand, customer experience is at the heart of what they do, and every move they make impacts customers.

Gorgias has helped BrüMate respond quickly to customer queries. Their first response time to tickets was 5 hours and 30 minutes in 2018, but Gorgias' live chat feature has helped them reduce this time to one minute and 30 seconds. This live chat feature significantly contributed to the customer success team bringing in over $9 million in revenue. Having a customer service tool with the features they needed to put their customers first made a huge difference in their bottom line.

Lillie’s Q: Improved new customer sales by 166%

Lillie’s Q is a barbeque restaurant that provides great southern cuisine and sells an array of barbeque sauces and rubs. Their customer service team received customer queries mainly via email and phone, and tracking those queries (and their responses) was a tedious, manual process. Some customer queries also came in via social media, and team members had to copy and paste all the questions and comments to one another (manually) in order for the right person to respond.

The team was getting 700 to 800 queries per month, and they were drowning. If they continued on that path, they would start losing customers — something no business ever wants to happen. 

This is why they started using Gorgias to help them organize all customer interactions in one place. It became easier to track each aspect of the customer’s support journey, ultimately leading to a 166% increase in sales from customer support. Having a centralized hub for interacting with customers and tracking those interactions moved Lillie’s Q’s team from overwhelmed to efficient and gave them exactly what they needed to provide exceptional customer service. 

"Gorgias' chat allows us to respond to our customers in real time. We can answer customers' questions about a product and how to place an order without them leaving the site or abandoning their cart. We have seen a 75% increase in direct sales as a result of this quick communication."
- Nicole Mann, Marketing Director

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Check out these resources for more customer service tips and templates

Customer expectations are higher than they’ve ever been. One bad customer service experience can turn a customer away forever. And if that customer shares their negative experience with others (via word-of-mouth reviews or public online platforms), it'll be harder for your brand to attract new business. 

Our blog is full of content for customer support professionals. Whether you’re a team of one or twenty, we’re confident you’ll learn something by exploring our resources. For smaller businesses, we recommend starting with:

• Our list of the best customer support software on the market
• Our list of 20 ecommerce customer service best practices
• Our list of 14 shopping cart best practices to reduce abandoned carts

And if you’re looking for a new helpdesk, Gorgias is here to help your Shopify, BigCommerce, or Magneto store provide excellent customer support that retains customers and consistently generates revenue. Get started today in less than a minute and join over 10,000 ecommerce brands that use Gorgias every day to turn their customer support teams into profit centers.

If you get ample traffic to your online store but don’t convert that traffic into sales, you will never reach your revenue goals. And for many online stores — even stores with a great product and brand — low ecommerce conversion rates eventually lead to store closures.

To optimize your ecommerce conversion rate, you need to know how to guide potential customers through your conversion funnel. Conversion rate isn’t something you “do,” per se. Consistently converting shoppers requires a marathon of research, experiments, and tweaks.  

Fortunately, there are some low-lift tactics that might make a huge impact on your website’s conversion rate. 

What is ecommerce conversion rate? 

Ecommerce conversion rate is the percentage of visitors to your online store who make a purchase in a specified time period. 

In the digital world, a conversion rate is the percentage of visitors who perform a particular desired action (such as signing up for a newsletter) on your website or page within a specified time period.

For example, let’s say you wanted to measure your rate for the month of November. If you had 13,021 unique website visitors, 201 of whom made a purchase from your store, you would divide the number of visitors who made a sale (201) by the total number of visitors (13,021). The ecommerce conversion rate for these numbers would be 1.5%. 

Now, let’s learn more about the rates your ecommerce business should aim for. 

How to calculate your conversion rate (CRO)

Your website’s real conversion rate can be calculated as follows:

Take the number of visitors who converted to customers, divide it by the overall number of store visitors you had during a certain period, and finally, multiply that number by 100. This will give you your conversion rate at that particular point in the funnel.

‎No matter what rate you aim for, you’d probably agree that there’s always room for improvement. No website is ever perfect, and what’s more, customer behavior changes over time. CRO is an ongoing process of learning and improving. 

What is the average ecommerce conversion rate? 

Ecommerce conversion rate benchmarks are important to understand how you stack up against other online retailers — and more specifically, your competitors. 

Bottom line: the latest data, which comes from Kibo Commerce in Q1 of 2022, shows that ecommerce conversion rates in the US average out at 2.3%. The report goes into considerable detail about variances in conversion rate: for example, conversion rates vary between mobile (2%), tablet (3%), and desktop (3%). 

Take that number with a grain of salt. A “good” ecommerce conversion rate depends on your business’s maturity, product category, audience, digital marketing maturity, and so much more.

What’s a really good ecommerce conversion rate?

Most ecommerce experts say that a rate of 1-3% is normal, whereas 4% is fantastic. But, we have another take on the matter. At Gorgias, we’ve learned that the best definition of a good conversion rate comes from your internal data and individual business goals. Focus more on increasing the number of conversions in your store month-over-month than how that number compares to anyone else.

As a rule, your conversion rate optimization (CRO) plan should involve ways to continually improve your own rates, rather than just comparing yourself to everyone around you. There will always be a new tool, strategy, or update that your competitors will use to top you. You can’t afford to become complacent. 

So, even if your rate is above the industry average, continually learn about new ways to increase conversions and continue to optimize the user experience and website functionality for your shoppers. And, if it’s on the lower end of the scale, start implementing the following advice right away. 

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How to improve your conversion rates with marketing assets

Here we are. Now we’ll see what you need to do to ensure visitors buy something from you, instead of usual virtual window shopping. You’ll be glad to hear that you don’t need to do a complete rehaul of your website. You just need to make use of the tools and assets available to you.

1. Offer limited coupon codes

Not only do your customers want discounts (who’d object to that, really?) they fully expect them. Just five years ago, more than 560 million people around the globe used discount coupons. Since then, the number has grown to over 1 billion. 

What types of coupons can you offer? There are plenty of coupon types in ecommerce:

• Free shipping coupons, which lessen the overall costs
• Fixed-amount coupons, which only last for a certain amount of time
• Total cart value coupons, which can help you improve the average cart size

For conversions, the best ones are time-limited coupons. Offering time-limited coupons might be the perfect way to engage your customers and improve conversions. By giving them a deadline, you’ll be able to persuade them to finish the purchase process instead of abandoning a full cart. 

2. Use effective pop-ups on your site

Admittedly, pop-up ads sound a bit dated. They’ve been around for more than a quarter of a century at this point. The phrase conjures up images of pop-up-filled screens for more seasoned users. But you’d be wrong thinking like that.

When used right, pop-ups can be effective in 2020. According to Sumo, certain pop-ups can improve your conversions by more than 9%. That’s something worth investing in. 

Here’s how you can use pop-ups:

• Make your customers an offer they can’t refuse
• Create a 30-sec delay timer not to annoy people
• Make the “X” button clearly visible to the user

Also, you should try not to annoy your visitors too much. So make sure that your popups appear once per customer. Also, make the “close” button visible on both desktop and mobile screens. Nothing frustrates a person more than a pop-up that won’t go away. 

Finally, you get one pop up. Maybe it’s a contest, maybe it’s Facebook Messenger, maybe it’s push notifications, either way, you only get one.

3. Create detailed product descriptions

Product images are a big selling point for many consumers. However, product descriptions also play a large role in the purchase process. They give the shopper important information about the product itself and contain keywords that improve your Search Engine Optimization efforts and serve as proactive customer support.

That’s why you can’t afford to have lazily-written product descriptions. Sloppy writing and spelling mistakes will turn a lot of people away. Furthermore, if you’re selling products manufactured by a third party, never use their descriptions. Try to be unique and descriptive as possible at all costs.

Looking for inspiration? Use Gorgias to create a macro asking your customers how they use your products.

4. Add reviews and testimonials  

Nobody wants to be a guinea pig. If there’s a product with 3 reviews or a product with 375 reviews which one are you going to choose? Probably not the one with 3 reviews, and you don’t even know the price. 

That’s where product reviews and testimonials can help you. You simply need to gather feedback from previous customers, compile it, and put it in a prominent spot on the website. 

Product reviews not only create more social proof, but they also help bust specific objections and sell to different ICPs. If you’re buying a BBQ are you looking for hamburgers and hot dogs, or competition brisket? The same product will be reviewed differently.

Tactically placed testimonials and reviews on product pages can improve your sales immensely. Just ask Angie Schottmuller of Conversion XL. According to her, testimonials can make conversions go up by 400% in some cases. 

With purchases going up, so are the review requests. When better to ask a customer for a review than after a great interaction with your support team?

5. Remove unnecessary form fields 

Let’s talk about cart abandonment. You may know that 9 out of 10 people abandoned their shopping carts before completing their purchase. You have to do everything in your power to prevent this from happening.

One thing that drives many shoppers away is the number of fields in delivery forms. 

Your sales team doesn’t need to know every single detail about your customer’s life before processing purchases and sending products out. Keep the form fields to a minimum and ask the customer only for essential information that concerns payment and shipment.

Don’t sell to businesses? Remove the business name. Don’t need a phone number for delivery? Remove it. You get the idea.

6. Consider offering free shipping

No one likes to be attracted by a seemingly low-priced item, only to discover that the shipping costs are astronomical. Consumers hate hidden costs. They make them feel bamboozled and as an online merchant, that’s the last thing you want. 

More often than not, people abandon their shopping carts due to hidden costs. According to research, 28% of consumers do so because of hidden shipping costs specifically. 

For all of the reasons mentioned above, you should consider having free shipping. It could potentially double your revenue in a short amount of time. Just look at the NuFace case study. By introducing free shipping, the organization managed to increase orders by 90%. 

Between Amazon, Wayfair, and all the other big players, customers expect free shipping. It can also be a great upsell mechanism if you have a low average order value.

7. Add a live chat option to your pages

Live chat is great for customer support, but it doesn't end there. Most online store visitors want to buy something but many of them are on the fence. Since there’s nothing on a web page to persuade them to finalize the purchase, they often leave the store without buying anything. 

That’s where your sales agents can help. By placing a live chat option on every single page, you can encourage the shoppers to finish what they started. Research shows that people who use live chat are 3X more likely to complete their purchase before leaving a website. 

Learn more about how Gorgias' live chat can improve support and boost sales.

8. Increase urgency with a countdown timer

When time’s running out, most people become anxious. They start making decisions without overthinking them. Overthinking is your enemy. One of the most dangerous ones you have. If you limit the thinking time for your visitors, you might remove overthinking. 

How can you do this? By adding a countdown timer to your pages. 

This simple addition to your site will give the visitors a sense of urgency and motivate them to purchase before it’s too late. One brand even managed to increase sales by more than 330% with a limited-offer timer.

This doesn’t mean lying to your customers. Here are some easy ways to naturally create urgency:

• Countdown to a holiday, e.g. only 4 days left to order to guarantee your order arrives before Festivus
• Order by 3 PM to get same-day shipping
• This item will be held in your cart for 5:00
• Remaining inventory counts

You can also create social proof using count ups.

• Backed by 383 investors on Kickstarter
• Shipped to 83 countries
• Over 10,000 shipped and 983 positive reviews

Learn more about ecommerce growth and conversion optimization

At this point, we hope you understand the importance of conversion rate optimization and a few strategies to improve it. However, it’s always helpful to learn directly from ecommerce leaders about their individual experiences with CRO.

Want to learn more about how real stores improved their conversion rates by focusing on their customer experience? Check out our customer story on Lillie’s Q. They increased their conversion rate by 75% by working with Gorgias to implement real-time customer support and reduce cart abandonment. 

Alternatively, watch the replay of our ecommerce expert talk. They discuss their tips to drive growth and boost conversion rates through great customer experience.

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If you own an ecommerce store, you’re undoubtedly already familiar with the term “conversion rate.” It’s arguably the single most important metric in ecommerce: Without a high conversion rate, all your web traffic, brand awareness, and marketing dollars never turn into revenue.

We’ve invited one of our agency partners and European CRO Agency of the Year 2022, Swanky, to share their expertise on the key ingredients of a successful CRO strategy.

What is CRO in ecommerce?

Ecommerce conversion rate optimization (CRO) is the strategy of gradually improving the user experience on your site to turn more browsers into buyers. At the highest level, CRO is all about identifying areas of opportunity to convert throughout the customer journey and continually A/B testing small tweaks.

The benefits of CRO for your ecommerce business

Of course, the ultimate goal of CRO is to improve your bottom line. However, there are plenty of ways to do this, and CRO can be used across many elements of your business to optimize every part of your activity. 

Some of the benefits of CRO include:

• Drive traffic and sales volume: Improve your customer acquisition and click-through rate to bring more customers to your store
• Reduce cart abandonment: Identify and eliminate the barriers to purchase so that more customers make it through checkout
• Increase your average order value (AOV): Use upselling, product bundles, recommendations, and other tactics to increase the amount spent on each order  
• Boost the Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) of your customers through loyalty programs that encourage customers to return again and again
• Improve your marketing ROI: Test the effect of each campaign, to optimize future campaigns and analyze results to inform where to channel your future marketing budget
• Encourage advocacy: Get your customers to sell your products for you by incentivizing referrals and positive customer reviews
• Reduce overheads: Increase the availability of your support team to answer urgent pre-sales questions by learning from your customer data, so that you can streamline your support processes 

How to build an ecommerce CRO strategy

Swanky helps ecommerce businesses around the world boost their sales revenue through effective CRO strategies. When we work with ecommerce brands, we build and run CRO strategies in six stages (and recommend you do the same).

These stages form a circular process that continues indefinitely, as you continually learn from your results, shift your focus, and make further improvements.

1) Define your goals

The first step of the CRO process is to define your goals. While people use the term “optimize” to mean “improve,” the correct usage is to optimize for something, be it more page views, sign-ups, or purchases.

• Are you looking to build your email list and improve customer retention?
• Do you need to raise profit margins by increasing your AOV?
• Do you want to target new customers, or focus on returning shoppers?

Every business will have different priorities, and these priorities will inform what changes you will need to make to your customer experience.

If you’re just getting started with CRO for the first time, consider testing and optimizing your checkout flow. 70% of all carts get abandoned during checkout, many of which are due to a poor checkout experience. While this isn’t a catch-all solution for every brand, most see a healthy lift in purchase rate by optimizing their checkout flow for completed purchases.

2) Analyze your existing data

Before you begin making any changes to your site, you need a clear picture of how your customers are currently progressing through your funnel. A deep analysis of your data will allow you to spot pain points along the customer journey. This helps you focus your efforts on areas likely to have the greatest impact.

The customer journey can be broken down into various stages:

• Discovery: The research phase, when the customer learns about or looks for a product, service, or business. This is the stage where they need to be attracted. 
• Engagement: Where the customer seeks further information about the product or service. This is after they’ve been attracted but need to be sold to. 
• Purchase: Where the customer purchases the product, through a seamless and enjoyable checkout experience, from start to finish, online and offline. 
• Loyalty: When the customer is most likely to be willing to form an ongoing relationship, place repeat purchases, and promote your brand to friends and family. 

Besides your ecommerce platform, you can collect data from various sources, such as Google Analytics and Search Console, CRM data, online marketplaces, and so on, as well as a range of other tools such as Crazy Egg or HumCommerce.

For more in-depth analysis you can use customer exit surveys and heat mapping to get a better picture of your customers’ onsite behavior, as well as their motivation for failing to convert during a site visit. 

‍📚 Related reading: Learn how to collect and implement customer feedback from your helpdesk.

3) Build a hypothesis

Once you have collated all your customer insight, you will start to triangulate the pain points throughout your customer journey. Now, you can start to hypothesize on how you might improve your conversion rate.

Of course, you’ll want to use your data to guide your search. If you have one product page that converts three times higher than the rest of your pages, look into the difference to understand what elements of that page you could test on others. 

Conversely, if a significant percentage of carts get abandoned at one step of the checkout process, start looking at that step to understand what could be the conversion barrier.

You might want to consider:

• Which pages are central to your customer journey?
• What are the main things blocking conversions?   
• What changes could you put into place that would help more customers convert? 

Some of these hypotheses will rest on common sense (e.g. a small, hard-to-find email submission box is a likely barrier to email newsletter signups). Others may be inspired by CRO best practices, like the 13 we share below.

If you’re having trouble developing a hypothesis, consider asking a friend to try and sign up for your newsletter, purchase an item, or achieve some other conversion goal. Ask about their experience and watch as they navigate the site. A fresh user’s perspective may help you discover opportunities to re-design webpages, re-organize your website, and use alternative copy.

4) Prioritize your testing roadmap

No doubt you will have a long list of improvements you could make. Some of these will be easy wins — fixes that are quick to implement and highly likely to be effective. Others may be more complex to implement, usually requiring support from a developer, with less guarantee of having a meaningful impact. 

You will therefore want to start prioritizing your ideas for improvement, identifying low-hanging fruit that is likely to bring you the most immediate impact. When in doubt, fall back on the goals you established in the first step. Your results will be easier to interpret if you test against one goal at a time.

📚 Related reading: See our tips on how to build a prioritized testing roadmap for your store.

5) Test one hypothesis at a time

This is the stage where you put your ideas to the test. Using a testing platform such as Optimizely or Kameleoon, build your new variants of the page, segment your audience, and start comparing the results. 

For the most accurate results, you will want to test small changes individually. If you make multiple changes at the same time, it will be impossible to tell which is having an impact. For a concrete example of A/B testing in action, check out Swanky’s CRO experiment for Saltrock, a UK-based surfwear brand.

Here was the original mobile menu, where visitors would get text-only sub-categories after clicking on any of these buttons:

And here was a variant that used blocker shapes and photographs, to increase menu use (measured by an increase in collection page landings, product page landings, and revenue per user). 

Note: While the image below features the same photograph, the test was conducted with actual product photography.

After running this experiment, Swanky found the variant outperformed the original with 76% confidence and helped Saltrock build the polished menu they still use today.

6) Learn from your A/B test

What were the results of your tests? It’s tempting to view A/B testing as a means to simply find the winning result, and to see any change that does not improve conversion rate as a failure. However, the goal of testing is far broader, with one of the main goals being to learn more about your clients. 

Were the results what you expected? Perhaps you saw an increase in transactions but a decrease in AOV as a result. Why do you think this is? Was the impact greater among one demographic than another? Analyzing how your customers respond in different situations will help you to understand them better and serve them with what they need.

This final step of interpretation is in some ways the most important of all as it helps you to improve your strategy and form new ideas. Now you are ready to go back to the start, redefine your goals, draw up some new hypotheses and prioritize what tests to perform next.  

5 tactics to improve CRO for your ecommerce business

1) Implement dynamic checkout buttons on product pages

Dynamic checkout buttons streamline the buying process by allowing customers to skip the cart and go directly to checkout when they're ready to purchase. This reduces the number of steps in the purchasing process and effectively reduces cart abandonment.

To implement, use platform-specific features or plugins that detect the user's preferred payment method (like PayPal, Apple Pay, or Google Pay) and display that option prominently on each product page. Additionally, make sure these buttons function on mobile devices to cater to the growing number of mobile shoppers.

2) Use targeted website campaigns to offer exclusive deals

Targeted on-site campaigns can significantly increase revenue by as much as 284% in five months. You can use campaigns to offer special discounts to first-time visitors or free shipping to customers in regions where you have logistical advantages. 

To implement, use Gorgias Convert to set up specific campaigns for different customer segments. These on-site campaigns can be adjusted based on customer data like location, time spent on a page, and whether or not they’re an existing customer. 

Pro Tip: Ensure your campaigns are timed appropriately. We recommend displaying a campaign 30 seconds after a visitor has browsed a webpage.

Related: How 3 brands boost conversion rate by 15% with Gorgias Convert Campaigns

3) Optimize product pages with user-generated content

Prospective buyers often look for validation from other customers before making a purchase. Incorporating user-generated content or UGC, such as customer reviews, ratings, and a photo gallery, directly on product pages can significantly boost trust and conversion rates. 

To implement, offering incentives like discounts on future purchases in exchange for photo submissions and customer reviews. Make sure the UGC is visible and integrated seamlessly into the product pages for a seamless user experience.

4) Introduce a loyalty program with immediate benefits

Launch a loyalty program that offers immediate benefits to new sign-ups, such as a discount on their first purchase or bonus points redeemable against future orders. This tactic encourages new customers, while increasing retention, average order value, and lifetime value for existing customers. 

Pro Tip: Clearly communicate the benefits of the loyalty program on your homepage, during the checkout process, and in your marketing communications. Use a loyalty program platform like LoyaltyLion to track customer points and manage rewards efficiently.

5) Leverage A/B testing for detailed product descriptions

It's essential to understand what type of information your customers find most valuable. You can do so by A/B testing your product descriptions. 

Start by testing different formats, lengths, and types of information, such as technical specifications versus usage ideas. Then, use analytics to measure the impact of different versions on conversion rate and customer engagement. 

Why A/B testing is the backbone of CRO

Changes to your ecommerce site should always be approached with caution — or more specifically, with A/B testing. While every change to your website has the potential to affect your conversion rate, that difference could be positive or negative. 

For example, you may think a pop-up advertising a new promotion will lead to higher conversion rates. That’s possible, but the intrusive experience of a pop-up may also turn visitors away from your website, lowering conversion rate. 

The only way to know for sure what will improve your conversion rate is to test every change that you make. So before charging ahead with perceived improvements, it is vital to have a testing plan in place. 

The most robust way to test your CRO experiments is through split testing, often referred to as A/B testing. 

Split testing, as the name suggests, splits your audience into two or more segments (segments A, B, and so on). Each of the segments is served a different version of the page when they arrive on your site, although none of your users will be aware of this. The first segment will view the original version of your page — the control — while others will view a variant. 

By measuring the rate of conversion from each segment, as well as a range of other metrics, you can build a clear picture of how each variant impacts your conversion rate. You can then confidently stick with the more effective approach and start A/B testing another element of the page. 

To further improve your data, you can choose to separate segments according to customer type. For example, you might choose to test new visitors compared to returning customers, allowing you to personalize your customer experience for different users and get richer test results.

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Start boosting your ecommerce CRO today

Improving conversions is a complex process, especially if you’re still new to ecommerce. If you’d like a CRO agency to guide you through the process, you can reach out to Swanky to discuss their CRO services.

Additionally, understand that a helpful, responsive, and self-service customer service program is a key ingredient for high conversion. Gorgias is the customer service platform built exclusively for ecommerce, and we help over 10,000 online retailers turn web traffic into happy repeat customers. 

‍Book your demo to learn how Gorgias can help turn your customer service program into a conversion, retention, and revenue-generating machine.