TL;DR:
- Start with your CX team—they know what customers are asking. Their insights reveal what’s confusing, what’s converting, and what’s causing returns before marketing ever gets involved.
- Turn pre-sale questions into better messaging. Use common support queries to improve landing pages, product descriptions, and emails so customers feel confident enough to convert.
- Your best-performing products aren’t always the most hyped. Let real customer comments guide your messaging by identifying what people rave about in chats and reviews.
- Customer confusion and returns usually stem from messaging gaps. Fix product pages, policies, and descriptions to better reflect what people need to know upfront.
Your CX team talks to customers every day. They know what’s confusing, driving purchases, and causing returns, because they hear it firsthand.
But all too often, those insights stay siloed in support tickets and live chat transcripts instead of informing the campaigns that shape the customer journey.
This post is here to change that. We’re breaking down the most valuable questions marketing teams should be asking their CX counterparts. When marketing and CX work together, you get more relevant messaging, smarter product positioning, and campaigns that convert.
Whether you’re planning a big seasonal push or just want to improve product education, this is where to start.
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1. What do customers ask about before buying?
Your CX team knows what makes shoppers hesitate. They’re the ones fielding questions like: Does this come in a larger size? Is it final sale? Will it arrive in time?
Beyond being pre-sale inquiries, they’re signals. They reveal what your customers care about most, and where your messaging may be falling short. When marketing teams tune into this, they can proactively address objections in landing pages, product detail pages (PDPs), emails, and top-of-funnel content.
At luxury jewelry store Jaxxon, Director of Customer Experience Caela Castillo saw firsthand how important it is to address these questions early.
“Chat used to be a support tool for repetitive questions and problem-solving, but now AI Agent takes care of that for us,” she said. Once those friction points were handled upfront, the CX team could focus on more meaningful conversations, and conversions improved.
And when AI recommended the wrong products? Conversions dropped. It was a clear signal that relevance matters, especially before the sale.
Ask your CX team:
“What do customers most often need to know before they buy, and how can we answer that earlier in the journey?”
2. What product do customers rave about—and why?
Your best-selling product isn’t always your hero product. Sometimes, it’s that under-the-radar item that customers can’t stop talking about. The one that shows up again and again in reviews, chats, and post-purchase surveys.
The insight is gold for marketers. The key is to find out why people love it. Is it the fit? The feel? The results?
At online fashion brand, Princess Polly, Alexandria shared that her team expected Gen Z shoppers to lean on AI for recs, but what really influenced them was customer feedback. Reviews, not bots, built trust. That’s why campaigns built around real customer language and experiences often outperform the most polished product copy.
Shopping Assistant can turn those rave reviews into real-time action. It highlights top products using your Shopify product catalog to make personalized recommendations, proactively assists shoppers by using behavior signals, and even offers tailored discounts when they’re ready to convert. That means less guesswork, greater relevance, and an easier path to purchase.
Ask your CX team:
“Which product do customers rave about most, and what exactly are they saying?”
3. What product causes the most complaints?
When customers are frustrated, it’s easy to blame the product. But in many cases, the issue isn’t quality, it’s communication.
At Shinesty, a men’s underwear brand, Molly Kerrigan, Senior Director of Retention, observed that high return rates often stemmed from unmet customer expectations.
She noted the importance of maintaining clear and consistent communication as the company grows, “We get a lot of praise from our customers, and they talk highly of our CX team after 1:1 interactions. We can’t lose that as we scale.”
Molly notes that using Gorgias AI Agent enables Shinesty’s customers to receive quick answers, freeing her team's time for more complex or sensitive issues.
Similarly, Princess Polly saw that delivering a standout customer experience meant being fast, consistent, and helpful at every stage. After switching to Gorgias, their support performance improved dramatically:
- 80% decrease in resolution time
- 95% decrease in first response time
- 40% increase in efficiency
Before changing the product, try updating the messaging. Use insights from CX to rewrite descriptions, add size guides, include user-generated content, or even build a quick-fit quiz. Small tweaks help set clearer expectations and reduce unnecessary returns.
Ask your CX team:
“Which products are driving the most complaints, and what do customers wish they knew before buying?”
4. What confuses customers the most?
Confusion is a conversion killer. If a customer isn’t sure about how something works, what’s included, or whether it’s right for them, they’re more likely to bounce.
That’s why it pays to ask your CX team where customers get stuck. Is it a product feature that needs more context? A vague store policy? A missing detail on a bundle?
The good news is that most confusion is fixable. Start with the following steps:
- Simplify your product pages
- Add quick-hit FAQs to your emails
- Use plain language and real examples
If you’re using Shopping Assistant, you can go even further. It can detect when shoppers are hesitant and provides real-time nudges. Like an assistant who knows all your needs, Shopping Assistant automatically surfaces the questions customers are likely to ask when evaluating a product, so they’re equipped with the clarity they need to proceed to checkout.
TUSHY, a modern bidet brand, faced similar challenges. As bidets aren't mainstream in North America, shoppers often had concerns about product compatibility and installation. They’d ask questions like:
- Will a bidet fit my toilet?
- Is installation complicated?
- Which bidet is right for me?
Without immediate answers, many potential buyers would abandon their purchase. To address this, TUSHY implemented Shopping Assistant, providing instant support. Taking this approach resulted in an 81% higher chat conversion rate compared to human agents and a 13x return on investment.
“The Shopping Assistant has been a game-changer for our team, especially with the launch of our latest bidet models. Expanding our product catalog has given customers more choices than ever, which can overwhelm first-time buyers. Now, they’re increasingly looking to us for guidance on finding the right fit for their home and personal hygiene needs,” said Ren Fuller-Wasserman, Sr. Director of Customer Experience at TUSHY.
Ask your CX team:
“Where do customers get confused most often—and how can we clear that up sooner?”
5. Which products are frequently bought together?
Your CX team picks up on patterns that analytics sometimes miss. They hear which items customers ask about in the same chat, which products get added to carts together, and which pairings people reorder time and time again.
That intel is a goldmine for bundling and upselling. It helps you build smarter campaigns that feel relevant and drive real value.
Zoe Kahn, owner of Inevitable Agency and former VP of Retention and CX at Audien Hearing, emphasizes the importance of using AI to enhance customer interactions.
“A lot of that revenue was potentially missed revenue because these were customers sitting on the site, asking questions about the products, and wanting an answer now so they could purchase…Now, AI can answer those questions immediately and convert those customers.”
With Shopping Assistant, you can act on these insights in real time. It will surface personalized product pairings, bundle suggestions, or accessories based on customer behavior. All before they hit the checkout page.
6. Which products lead to the most returns, and why?
Returns cut into your margins and chip away at trust. Most of the time, they’re not caused by poor-quality products. They happen because expectations weren’t met.
Your CX team already knows which items come back the most and why. Maybe the color doesn’t match the photos. Perhaps the fit runs small, or the product description left out a crucial detail.
Instead of pushing the product harder, reframe how you present it. Add real customer photos. Include fit notes or a sizing chart. Call out anything that might surprise the customer post-purchase. A little clarity upfront goes a long way in reducing returns and boosting retention.
At Pepper, an intimates brand specializing in bras for small-chested bodies, they recognized the importance of pre-sale education. When customers have sizing questions, their AI Agent, Penelope, can provide immediate assistance.
“Penelope takes the information we give her and responds better than a Macro. She tailors it so that it sounds like a natural conversation between two people,” said Gabrielle McWhirter, CX Operations Lead at Pepper.
By proactively providing instant support, Pepper improved customer satisfaction and saw an 18% uplift in average order value.
Ask your CX team:
“Which products get returned the most—and what could we do upfront to change that?”
CX + marketing = smarter campaigns, better results
Before you launch your next campaign, start with a quick sync with your CX lead. They already know what your customers need to hear. You just have to ask.
From fixing messaging gaps to surfacing the right products at the right time, these insights help you connect with customers in personal, timely, and relevant ways.
Tools like Shopping Assistant make it easier than ever to act on this data in real time. You can turn CX knowledge into dynamic recommendations, personalized nudges, and smarter discounts.
Ready to see how you can improve your online shopping experience? Book a demo to see how Gorgias Shopping Assistant engages customers in real-time.
TL;DR:
- Your support inbox is full of marketing gold. CX insights can sharpen messaging and inspire high-impact campaigns.
- Ticket data unlocks smarter segmentation. Use support interactions to build more relevant, behavior-based audiences.
- Chat campaigns work better with CX insights. Tackle objections in real time and lift conversions with proactive messages.
- Use objection data to reduce drop-offs. Identify common blockers and address them in product pages, ads, and chat prompts.
- Help Center stats guide better content. Turn top-searched questions into FAQs, landing pages, and ad copy.
Today’s best marketing starts with your customers.
According to Forrester’s 2024 research, “Customer-obsessed organizations reported 41% faster revenue growth, 49% faster profit growth, and 51% better customer retention than those at non-customer-obsessed organizations.”
Support teams interact with hundreds or thousands of customers every week, collecting valuable insights in the process. This voice of the customer (VOC) data is a goldmine for marketers, but it too often stays siloed among CX teams.
Ahead, we’ll break down how ecommerce brands can tap into CX insights to drive better marketing.
5 ways to use CX data to improve marketing
CX can play a crucial role in driving growth, but many brands aren’t leveraging it for marketing insights yet.
When connected to marketing, CX becomes a proactive engine that fuels better segmentation, sharper messaging, smarter campaigns, and more personalized content.
Support functions collect objections, complaints, compliments, and pre-purchase questions. When you capture and apply those insights, your marketing can target the precise roadblocks—and key sales differentiators—customers care about.
Here’s how to turn CX insights into a high-impact marketing strategy, with real examples from brands using Gorgias.
- Leverage ticket insights to improve messaging
- Segment customers based on support interactions
- Launch more targeted chat campaigns
- Reduce drop-offs and abandoned carts
- Monitor Help Center and Dashboard stats to craft smarter content
1) Leverage ticket insights to improve messaging
When you want to sharpen your brand messaging, there’s no better place to look than your support inbox. Your support inbox is a rich resource full of information specific to your brand and your customers.
Tools like Gorgias Ticket Insights help surface recurring themes, top questions, and friction points across all conversations. By analyzing these patterns, marketers can identify the exact words customers use to describe problems, questions, or product feedback and then reflect that language across ads, landing pages, and emails.
How to implement
Spikes in tickets around specific topics (sizing, shipping timelines, and materials, for example) are insights marketers can use to update and improve corresponding content.
This can increase confidence and conversion on key pages.
By incorporating the same terminology and phrasing customers use in support conversations, brands can also increase resonance across ads, emails, and social media. Messaging that mirrors the customer’s language builds trust and helps audiences feel understood.
Ask your CX team 💬 What product issues or themes have emerged this quarter?
For example, cordless heating cushion brand Stoov® used Ticket Fields in Gorgias to understand and resolve a ticket spike. By figuring out that some customers were dissatisfied with the battery life of its core product offering, the team was able to add an optional upsell. For €20, shoppers now have the option to purchase a larger battery.
The results were meaningful: the brand saw 50% of customers opt for this battery, resulting in a 10% increase in average order value (AOV). And while the team saw a significant increase in revenue, they saw no increase in support ticket volume.
2) Segment customers based on support interactions
Most marketers rely on transactional data—like past purchases or time since last order—to build audience segments. But support data reveals a whole new layer of context: behavior, concerns, sentiment, and urgency.
Tools like Gorgias’s Ticket Insights and Ticket Fields allow CX teams to customize different properties attached to tickets. Agents can fill these out to capture data more accurately.
Here’s how these types of tools work: tickets come with a mandatory field for return reasons, product feedback, contact reason, etc. Before the agent closes the ticket, they use a dropdown menu to fill out the ticket field.
How to implement
Studying support interactions helps answer key questions around why customers are getting in touch. This data can provide marketing teams with a way to build smarter segments for campaigns or personalized journeys.
For example, if one product is getting a large amount of inquiries, marketing teams could segment customers interested in those products and launch pre-sales education campaigns.
Fashion brand Psycho Bunny switched from Zendesk to Gorgias to improve access to reporting tools that surfaced customer patterns and support trends.
“By cross-referencing our Gorgias data with insights around basket size, product performance, and store performance, we can inform broader business decisions. For example, we can see if a certain store location generated more tickets or how many incoming queries are about a certain product,” says Jean-Aymeri de Magistris, VP IT, Data & Analytics, and PMO at Psycho Bunny.
By integrating insights like these with marketing workflows, teams can build more relevant segments that improve retention and engagement.
Ask your CX team 💬 Which customer segments are most likely to churn or repurchase?
3) Launch more targeted chat campaigns
Chat campaigns are proactive messages that trigger based on real-time behavior and context. You can use CX trends to design campaigns that directly address common objections, answer FAQs, or deliver tailored offers.
How to implement
Start by reviewing your most common pre-purchase questions with your CX team. Then, create chat prompts that address those concerns exactly where they arise. For example, a sizing guide prompt on product pages or a shipping FAQ in the cart.
Make sure your message feels helpful and not overly salesy. Conversational AI assistants like AI Agent can also tailor responses in real-time, helping customers get what they need without leaving the page.
Pepper, a size-inclusive bra brand, put this into practice by combining their AI Agent (named Penelope) with targeted chat campaigns to guide shoppers through one of their most common friction points: sizing. Thanks to insights from their support team, Pepper created messaging that helped customers find the right fit instantly. The result was an 18% uplift in average order value.
“With AI Agent, we’re not just putting information in our customers’ hands; we’re putting bras in their hands. With Penelope on board, we’re turning customer support from a cost center to a revenue generator,” says Gabrielle McWhirter, CX Operations Lead at Pepper.
Ask your CX team 💬 How are customers reacting to recent promotions or launches?
4) Reduce drop-offs and abandoned carts
When shoppers hesitate at checkout, it’s often because they don’t have the information they need.
Tapping into support conversations allows CX teams to identify common objections. They can then share those insights with marketing to refine product messaging, improve product pages, ads, and marketing campaigns.
How to implement
Use customer service data to identify the top three objections customers have before converting. These might be concerns about sizing, compatibility, delivery time, or product setup. Then, pair that knowledge with a proactive AI sales tool like Shopping Assistant to offer timely answers that move shoppers closer to purchase.
For example, TUSHY, a modern bidet company, found that many prospective customers were hesitant because they weren’t sure how difficult the installation would be. By using a real-time shopping assistant to address these concerns directly on-site, TUSHY was able to guide shoppers past uncertainty.
Ask your CX team 💬 What are the top three reasons customers contact us before they buy?
5) Monitor Help Center and Dashboard stats to craft smarter content
If you want to know what content your customers actually need, your Help Center holds the answers. Real customer questions are found right in Help Center search queries and article analytics.
By tracking which articles are most viewed, most searched, and most frequently updated, marketers can spot common knowledge gaps and fill them with high-value content.
How to implement
Start by reviewing your Help Center Statistics to see which articles are performing well, which ones are underutilized, and what terms customers are searching for.
If an article about “returns policy” is getting a spike in views, that’s your cue to simplify the policy or preempt questions with a dedicated email campaign. Marketing teams could also use this insight to build FAQ-rich landing pages, preempt questions in email flows, or even turn top-performing help content into organic blog posts or performance ad copy.
You can also use Gorgias's Dashboard to spot emerging trends across all your channels. This custom reporting feature lets you choose from various charts that reveal high-level patterns—like the most common contact reasons or sudden spikes in ticket volume—giving marketers early insight into shifting customer sentiment and trending topics across social platforms.
Ask your CX team 💬 Which articles in our Help Center are most searched right now?
Find alignment between CX and marketing teams
When support and marketing teams collaborate, you unlock a cycle of continuous improvement. CX teams surface the insights, marketing turns them into strategy, and both sides drive measurable results.
Here’s how to make it work:
- Set up recurring syncs between CX and marketing teams to review insights from customer service reports.
- Involve support in campaign planning to consider what customer objections might come up.
- Encourage CX to tag tickets based on themes or behavior that marketing can act on.
Unlock revenue by listening to your customers
We need to reframe CX as a proactive function that drives revenue.
Support teams already have the answers marketers are searching for. You just need the tools to tap into them. Gorgias makes that easy, with flexible reporting features, powerful AI, automated tagging, and integrations that bridge the gap between CX and marketing.
Want to connect your support data to better marketing?
Explore Gorgias’s analytics tools or book a demo to speak to a product expert about how to integrate your support strategy with marketing.
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Featured articles
The Hidden Cost of Not Adopting AI in Ecommerce
TL;DR:
- Ecommerce brands not using AI are falling behind, as 77.2% already use it daily to boost efficiency and revenue.
- AI saves time and cuts costs, like Trove Brands saving $23K/month and reducing cancellations by 70%.
- Customers want speed and privacy—AI provides fast, judgment-free answers in sensitive categories.
- AI empowers support teams by handling routine tasks so agents can focus on high-value interactions.
Doing nothing when there’s rapid change happening in an industry is risky business.
Right now, according to our latest report, 2025 Ecommerce Trends, 77.2% of ecommerce professionals are already using AI in their day-to-day work. What happens if you’re part of the 22.8% that isn’t?
Inaction is action—one that’s a quiet drain on revenue, resources, and reputation.
Every minute spent on manual work is a minute your competitors are focusing on higher-value customer interactions, improving CX, testing offers, and scaling campaigns.
And the cost of falling behind is compounding fast. Here’s what you’re losing when you pass on AI.
Time lost = money lost
As support volume grows, so does the cost of inefficiency.
Nearly 80% of CX professionals say AI saves them time. In fact, 83.9% of support leaders using AI in Gorgias say it has made their teams more efficient.
Trove Brands experienced this firsthand:
- They reduced missed cancellations by 70%
- And saved $23,000/month in labor costs by automating repetitive support tasks
If AI can handle 70% of your support tickets, your team finally has the time—and headspace—to focus on the 30% that actually builds trust, drives repeat revenue, and improves the customer experience.
Trust when customers need it most
Hot take: AI isn’t impersonal. Not using it is.
In 2024, nearly one-third of CX leaders worried AI would make interactions feel less human. A year later, that number dropped by half.
Why? Brands started to see that AI wasn’t hurting the customer experience, it was removing friction from it.
For sensitive or personal products—think wellness supplements, intimate gifts, or anything a shopper might feel awkward asking about—AI creates space for honesty without judgment. And that can change the outcome entirely.
“Too often, a great interaction is diminished when a customer feels reduced to just another transaction,” said Ren Fuller-Wasserman, Senior Director of Customer Experience at TUSHY. “With AI, we let the tech handle the selling—unabashedly, if needed—so our future customers can ask anything, even the questions they might be too shy to bring up with a human. In the end, everyone wins.”
It’s a powerful point, especially for brands where discretion matters. AI removes that barrier.
You're losing trust if your support experience still makes customers hesitate. For many, that means being able to get an answer without needing to explain themselves first.
Revenue hiding behind unanswered questions
Every unanswered pre-sale question or missed upsell is revenue slipping through your fingers.
Product recommendations alone have the potential to increase revenue by up to 300%, boost conversion rates by 150%, and drive 50% higher AOV. But those results don’t come from hoping customers find what they need. They come from proactively guiding them.
That’s where AI comes in.
With Gorgias AI Agent and automation features, for example, Kirby Allison
- Increased conversions by 23%
- Grew sales from support by 46% in just two months
“Our favorite features are definitely Flows and Article Recommendations. They drive so much automation for us. Shoppers get answers to their questions by themselves—what’s the right size hanger, where is my order, what shoe polish would you recommend, etc,” said Addison Debter, Head of Customer Service.
Flows let Kirby Allison surface up to six commonly asked questions directly in the chat widget. When clicked, each one opens a relevant help article—no agent needed.
Auto responses also allowed the team to handle common inquiries like sizing, shipping, and order tracking before a human ever steps in.
If your support team isn’t set up to handle pre-sale conversations at scale, the cost isn’t just in time. It’s in all the revenue you never realize you’re missing.
A CX team stretched thin
It might sound counterintuitive, but AI gives your team more space to be human.
The myth that AI replaces agents is still floating around in some circles, but the reality inside fast-growing ecommerce teams looks different.
In fact, AI frees up time for your team to focus on what they do best: solving complex problems, building relationships, and creating moments that actually drive loyalty.
SuitShop is a perfect example of this in action. When the team adopted AI Agent, they paired automation with intentional escalation:
“We’re helping customers feel confident during some of the most important moments in their lives—weddings, proms, job interviews, and everything in between. Naturally, my biggest concern with introducing AI was: ‘Will customers feel like they’re getting the same level of care from AI?’ But learning that AI Agent would pull knowledge from our Help Center articles and Macros, which are already written in our brand voice, made me feel more confident,” said Katy Eriks, Director of Customer Experience.
AI was able to handle common pre-sale questions like shipping timelines and product availability, while human agents stepped in for customizations, wedding-specific questions, and tailored styling support.
The goal wasn’t to remove the human element. It was to give their agents the time and context to show up more meaningfully.
The longer you wait, the harder it is to catch up
In just one year, AI adoption among Gorgias users jumped from 69.2% in 2024 to 77.2% in 2025.
Excitement is rising, too: 55.3% of ecommerce professionals now rate their interest in AI as 8–10 out of 10, up from 45.6% the year prior.
AI is no longer in its experimental phase. It’s the standard, baked into everyday workflows across ecommerce.
If you’re still on the sidelines, 2026 is going to feel like a catch-up game.
The good news? You don’t have to overhaul everything to get started.
So while we’re on the topic of speed, let’s walk through how to start implementing AI for your brand.
How to get started with AI
You don’t need to automate everything on day one. The best CX teams start small, pick the right entry points, and give AI the same level of care you’d give a new team member. Here’s how to roll out AI in a way that actually works:
1. Vet your options thoughtfully
When searching for a new AI tool to help you manage CX, look for one that:
- Offers strong tone-of-voice control so your AI doesn’t sound like a chatbot from 2012
- Delivers consistently accurate responses, even as inputs and workflows evolve
- Provides real post-sale support to help your team troubleshoot, train, and scale usage
Price matters, but it shouldn’t be your only filter.
Also, AI should make your team feel more capable. If it feels like a bolt-on or requires constant developer help, it’s going to create friction, not solve it.
2. Make someone own it
The most successful AI implementations all have one thing in common: someone owns it.
“One of our CX Managers spent 30–40 hours a week building and refining AI. That ownership was critical,” said Sarah Azzaoui, VP of Customer Experience at Clove, when she was explaining how her team first got started with AI.
What many people don’t realize is that AI isn’t going to be perfect out of the gate. AI takes real time and intention to build out. Assigning a clear point person—or better, a small squad—ensures someone is tracking performance, making optimizations, and flagging edge cases.
3. Involve your CX team from the start
No one knows your customer conversations better than your support team. They see the full range of questions, tone, friction points, and emotional nuance every day.
Bringing them into the AI rollout early helps you:
- Identify which questions are repetitive and low-stakes
- Flag which issues should always be handled by a human
- Set realistic expectations across the org about what AI should handle vs. what it could handle
This step also builds trust. If your agents feel like AI is something being done with them instead of to them, adoption is smoother and the outcomes are better.
4. Start small with the right topics
One of the biggest mistakes brands make with AI is trying to do too much, too soon. AI rollout should feel like a phased launch, not a switch flip.
Start in a test environment if your platform allows for it. Roll out automation in stages—by topic, channel, or ticket type—and QA every step of the way.
We suggest beginning with high-volume, low-complexity tickets like:
- “Where’s my order?”
- Subscription pauses or cancellations
- Returns and exchanges
- Store policies and FAQs
Platforms like Gorgias offer tools like Auto QA that track whether AI responses hit the right tone, offer accurate answers, and resolve issues effectively. Use those tools to catch gaps early and monitor performance over time.
That slow, deliberate rollout pays off in performance. At Psycho Bunny, AI Agent now automates 30% of customer tickets, with custom messaging that reflects their brand tone and processes.
Once you’re ready to scale, you’ll feel more confident that the simple queries are handled correctly while you start to train the AI on more nuanced questions.
For example, Gorgias’s Guidance feature gives AI access to non-public SOPs so it knows how to respond or when to escalate.
“The Guidance feature is so important,” said Tosha Moyer, Senior Customer Experience Manager at Psycho Bunny. “We have a lot of processes that we definitely don’t want described in a customer-facing article, but we want AI Agent to be able to access that information and manage tickets accordingly.”
5. Prep your knowledge base
Even the best AI platform can’t succeed without solid inputs.
Before you roll out, take a hard look at your help docs and macros:
- Are they accurate?
- Are they clear and consistent in tone?
- Are they tagged so AI can understand when to use them?
Think of this step as training your AI. The stronger your internal content library, the more helpful and brand-aligned your AI will be across every channel.
6. Communicate with customers
Whether you disclose AI usage is up to you, but be intentional.
Some brands choose anonymity for a more seamless experience. Others find that transparency builds trust, especially when something goes wrong.
What matters most is that your approach aligns with your brand tone and customer expectations—and that clear escalation paths are in place if a conversation needs a human.
Research shows that 85% of consumers want companies to share their AI assurance practices before rolling out AI-powered experiences. Customers are open to AI. But they expect clarity when it counts.
7. Scale the program over time
Once you’ve built the foundation, scaling AI across your CX org becomes a lot easier.
“We started with cancellations. Now we’re rolling out warranty claims, retention campaigns, and more,” said the team at Trove Brands.
After proving value with one or two ticket types, look for opportunities to expand:
- Pre-purchase product recommendations
- Exit-intent offers via chat
- Predictive personalization
- Multichannel automation across email, SMS, and live chat
The goal is to implement smarter automation that makes your team more effective and your customers more supported.
The future is human + AI
The best CX teams aren’t choosing between AI and human agents. They’re choosing both and building stronger systems because of it.
“It’s not human agents vs. AI,” said the team at Clove. “Our team helped shape the AI strategy—and that changed everything.”
But ignoring AI? That comes at a cost. And it’s not just inefficiency. It’s:
- Missed sales from unanswered questions
- Slower support that erodes customer trust
- Burnt-out teams stuck in reactive mode
- Lower CSAT from inconsistent experiences
- And eventually, falling behind as the rest of the market moves forward
It’s time to build it into your workflows. Not just as a helper, but as a core part of your team.
Start using Gorgias AI Agent to reduce ticket load, recapture revenue, and deliver the kind of support that actually feels personal.
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Stop Resolving These 7 Tickets Manually (Use AI Agent Actions Instead)
TL;DR:
- Actions are tasks automatically performed by AI Agent for customers. From address changes and subscription pauses to order cancellations, Actions can fulfill requests for your customers, even when your human agents are offline.
- Actions connect directly to your ecommerce apps. Currently, Actions have native integrations with Shopify, ShipMonk, ShipHero, ShipStation, Stay AI, Recharge, Loop, Subscriptions by Loop, Skio, Seal Subscriptions, and Wonderment.
- Use pre-built Actions or build your own. There are 12 Action templates available, or you can build Actions using custom HTTP requests.
- Watch out for setup snags. Conflicting Guidance, multiple matching Actions, older orders, or broken logic can block an Action from executing.
Automated responses don’t actually resolve anything. In reality, they increase customer wait time.
What a customer really wants is immediate resolution, whether they’re looking to cancel an order, change a shipping address, or pause a subscription.
So, how do you go beyond automated text responses? AI Agent Actions.
Below, we’ll go over the 7 most common customer service requests you can resolve with AI Agent Actions, so your team gets time back to strengthen customer relationships, increase revenue, and improve your CX strategy.
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What are AI Agent Actions?
AI Agent Actions are tasks AI Agent can complete for your customers, such as canceling an order or updating a shipping address.
Instead of handing it off to a human agent, AI Agent resolves the ticket by connecting to your ecommerce apps and performing the action on its own.
You get maximum control over when and how Actions are executed. Before performing the Action, AI Agent asks customers for confirmation, respecting your processes and maintaining a high level of customer service. Once an Action has been taken, you can even share feedback with your AI Agent to reinforce its behavior or finetune it further.
Pro Tip: Unlike Guidance, which tells AI Agent how to respond in a conversation, Actions determine what happens. It’s the difference between saying “I’ll refund your order” and doing it.
Related: How AI Agent works & gathers data
Top 7 customer requests you should be automating with AI Agent Actions
Ready to resolve requests in seconds? Activate these pre-built Actions in Gorgias to keep your team efficient and your customers happy.
1. Customer wants to update their shipping address
Action to use: Update shipping address
Supported apps: Shopify, ShipMonk, ShipHero, ShipStation
Incorrect shipping addresses lead to costly re-shipments, delays, and even refunds. Catch errors early to keep customers satisfied and excited about their order.
Why do you need this Action?
The reality is your agents aren’t available 24/7. Unless you hire a team to cover night and weekend shifts (which is unlikely), requests will be missed. AI Agent fills in that gap, handling time-sensitive issues when your team is off the clock. Missing them isn’t just about poor customer experience—it can also lead to extra costs, like reshipping orders.
2. Customer wants to cancel an order
Action to use: Cancel order
Supported apps: Shopify, ShipMonk, ShipHero, ShipStation
Perhaps a customer ordered the wrong item, chose the wrong size, used the wrong card, or simply changed their mind. Allow them to quickly cancel their order and receive a refund in one go.
“Actions responds to tickets within about 30 seconds and is available 24/7. Regardless of when a customer places their order, the likelihood of quickly catching and canceling the order has increased by 70% since we started using Actions. It’s an exceptional result."
—Jon Clare, VP of Customer Service at Trove Brands
3. Customer wants to replace/remove an item in their order
Actions to use:
- Replace item, or
- Remove item
Supported app: Shopify
It happens—shoppers order the wrong size or color and want to change their order immediately. Regardless of the reason, make their new decision easy to implement. Quick, accessible order updates prevent returns, lost revenue, and, most importantly, customer disappointment.
Here’s what the replace order item setup looks like in Gorgias:
Pro Tip: If you have unique workflows, you can create advanced, multi-step Actions and connect to your tools beyond our default integrations. This option requires some tech know-how (like custom HTTP requests), so feel free to bring in your developers for assistance.
4. Customer wants to skip or pause a shipment
Actions to use:
- Skip next subscription shipment, or
- Pause subscription
Supported apps: Stay AI, Recharge, Subscriptions by Loop, Skio, Seal Subscriptions
Subscriptions shouldn’t be all or nothing. Let customers skip a shipment or pause their subscription, so they can come back when they’re ready. Giving them full control lets them manage their subscription on their own terms, reducing churn rate in the process.
Here’s how AI Agent handles a skip shipment request:
5. Customer lost or damaged their order in transit
Action to use: Reship order for free
Supported apps: Shopify, ShipMonk
No customer expects a lost or damaged order. Let customers know that you have their backs by reshipping a new order free of charge. Fast resolutions during unexpected events demonstrate your commitment to customer satisfaction.
“An instant response builds confidence. We live in a world with short attention spans, so customers appreciate how quickly we can respond to their inquiries. Customers aren’t worrying unnecessarily for longer than they have to for an address change or order cancellation.”
—Mia Chapa, Sr. Director of Customer Experience at Glamnetic
6. Customer wants to know their return shipping status
Action to use: Send return shipping status
Supported app: Loop
Customers want to know that their return package is on its way to you, so they can redeem their refund. Easily send them a shipment tracking link to give them that peace of mind.
7. Customer wants to know about order status
Action to use: Get order info
Supported apps: Shopify, ShipHero, ShipMonk, ShipStation, ShipBob, Wonderment
Based on Gorgias data, order status ranks among customers' top 10 questions for support teams. Reassure your customers with quick updates on their orders, including product details, shipping progress, expected delivery date, and other helpful information.
What to know before turning on Actions
Here are a few helpful setup tips to make sure Actions run without a hitch:
- Guidance can override Actions. If conflicting Guidance exists, it may prevent an Action from triggering, even when all conditions are met. Review your Guidance to avoid overlaps, or write your logic into the Action description instead.
- Any Action that changes data requires shopper confirmation. Actions like canceling orders, updating addresses, or canceling subscriptions mean AI Agent will always ask the shopper to confirm before making a change.
- Currently, only one Action can run per ticket. If multiple Actions qualify, none will run, and the ticket will be handed off. Use conditions carefully to ensure only one Action matches per use case.
- AI Agent can only access the shopper’s last 10 orders. If the customer references an older order, the Action won’t trigger and the ticket will be handed over for manual handling.
AI Agent Actions speak louder than words
If you want…
- Fewer repetitive tickets
- Faster customer support
- Happier customers who get what they need instantly
- More time for your team to strategize
- Lower costs and higher efficiency
AI Agent Actions can get you there.
You’ve now seen how Actions can resolve tickets in a snap—no unnecessary handoffs, canned responses, or long response times.
Book a demo to see AI Agent Actions work in real time and start automating what you shouldn’t be doing manually anymore.
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How to Write Guidance with the “When, If, Then” Framework
TL;DR:
- AI Agent is only as good as the instructions you give it. Clear Guidance enables it to perform like your best support teammate.
- The “When, If, Then” framework makes writing Guidance easy and repeatable. Start with the scenario (when), define the conditions (if), and list specific actions (then) to create structured Guidance.
- Use Guidance to handle frequently asked questions, like returns, cancellations, or discount code inquiries, so your team can focus on more complex issues.
- If your Guidance isn’t working, formatting or logic gaps might be to blame. Check for missing conditions, unsupported tasks, or confusing formatting.
AI Agent is built to deliver fast, accurate support at scale, but like any teammate, it performs best when given clear and specific instructions.
That’s where Guidance comes in. Writing structured prompts that tell your AI Agent exactly what to do in a given scenario helps reduce escalations, speed up resolutions, and create a more consistent customer experience.
One simple, repeatable way to do that is with the “When, If, Then” framework.
In this post, we’ll show you how it works, using examples from our Gorgias Academy course, Improve AI Agent with Better Guidance.
You’ll learn how to write Guidance that results in:
- Fewer escalations
- Faster resolutions
- Smarter, more consistent AI behavior
Let’s break it down.
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What is Guidance?
Guidance is how you tell your AI Agent what to do. It’s a set of instructions that outlines how your AI Agent should respond in specific situations.
When Guidance is available, your AI Agent follows it first, even before checking your Help Center or website content.
That means if your Guidance is missing, unclear, or incomplete, your AI Agent might escalate the ticket, or worse, give a confusing or unhelpful response. Here’s an example:
Let’s say a customer wants to return an item. A human agent would send them a link to the return portal and explain the steps. But without that instruction in Guidance, your AI Agent might skip straight to escalation, turning a simple request into unnecessary work for your team.
That’s why clear, step-by-step Guidance is key to help your AI Agent respond the way your best support agent would.
Learn more: Create Guidance to give AI Agent custom instructions
Introducing the “When, If, Then” framework
Sometimes it’s hard to know where to start when writing Guidance. The “When, If, Then” framework gives you a simple, repeatable structure to follow, so there’s no need to guess.
Taking this approach mirrors how AI Agent processes information behind the scenes. When you write clear Guidance, your AI Agent can follow it step by step, just like a support teammate would.
Let’s walk through the three parts of the framework.
WHEN: Set the scenario
Start by identifying the situation your Guidance applies to. This is the trigger or scenario. Use it as the title of your Guidance so it’s easy to find later.
Example:
- WHEN a shopper asks to return an order
- WHEN a customer wants to cancel their subscription
Keep it simple and action-oriented. You’re setting the stage for what comes next.
IF: Add conditions
Once you’ve defined the scenario, add any conditions that determine what should happen. “If” statements help your AI Agent understand what to do based on specific details, like timing, order history, or customer tags.
Example:
- IF the order was placed less than or equal to 15 days ago
- IF the customer has a VIP tag in Shopify
Use as many “if” conditions as needed to guide different outcomes. Just make sure you cover all the possibilities so your AI Agent doesn’t get stuck.
THEN: Define the actions
This is where you tell your AI Agent exactly what to do. Be specific and use bullet points or numbered steps to keep things clear.
Example:
- Tell the shopper they’re eligible for a return
- Send them a link to the return portal
- Let them know they’ll receive a prepaid label once the form is submitted
The more clearly you outline the steps, the more consistently your AI Agent will perform.
The framework keeps your Guidance simple, structured, and easy to understand—for both your team and your AI Agent. When your AI Agent knows exactly what to do, it can deliver fast, accurate, and helpful responses that keep customers happy.
Put it all together
Say a shopper messages your store asking to return an item and you want AI Agent to send them to your return portal.
Here’s how this looks in a complete piece of Guidance:
WHEN a shopper asks to return an order:
IF the order was placed less than or equal to 15 days ago,
THEN
- Tell the shopper they’re eligible for a return
- Send them a link to the return portal
- Let them know they’ll receive a prepaid label via email once they submit the form
9 support scenarios made better with Guidance
These nine scenarios come up constantly in ecommerce support, and they’re perfect candidates for automation. They follow predictable patterns and are quick to resolve when your AI Agent knows what to do.
Use the examples below to jumpstart your setup. Each one is written using the When, If, Then framework and can be copied directly into Gorgias.
1. Where’s my order? (WISMO)
WHEN a customer asks about their order status:
IF tracking information is available,
THEN
- Provide the tracking number and link to the carrier's tracking page.
- Inform the customer of the expected delivery date.
IF tracking information is unavailable,
THEN
- Inform the customer that the order is being prepared for shipment.
- Provide an estimated shipping date.
2. What size should I order?
WHEN a customer inquires about product sizing for [item name]:
IF the customer asks what size to get, or mentions they’re unsure about sizing,
THEN
- Share the sizing chart or guide.
- Offer recommendations based on common fit feedback.
3. Can I change my shipping address?
WHEN a customer requests to change their shipping address:
IF the order has not been fulfilled,
THEN
- Confirm the new address with the customer.
- Update the shipping address in Shopify (or your chosen platform).
IF the order has already been fulfilled,
THEN
- Inform the customer that the address cannot be changed.
- Provide options for order interception or return.
4. Can I cancel my order?
WHEN a customer asks to cancel their order:
IF the order has not been fulfilled,
THEN
- Confirm that we can cancel their order.
- Tell them they’ll receive their refund in 5-10 business days.
IF the order has already been fulfilled,
THEN
- Inform the customer that the order cannot be cancelled.
- Help to initiate a return once the item is delivered.
5. How do I return an item?
WHEN a customer asks about returning an item:
IF the return is within the allowed return window of [x] days after the order was received,
THEN
- Provide the return instructions and link to the return portal.
- Inform the customer about the refund process.
IF the return window has expired,
THEN
- Inform the customer that the return period has ended.
- Offer alternative solutions if available.
6. Do you have any discount codes?
WHEN a customer inquires about discounts or promo codes:
IF there is an active promotion for [item name],
THEN
- Share the current discount code and its terms.
IF there are no active promotions for [item name],
THEN
- Inform the customer that there are no current promotions.
- Suggest subscribing to the newsletter or following social media for future promos.
7. I want to pause my subscription.
WHEN a customer requests to pause their subscription:
IF the customer has an active subscription,
THEN
- Provide instructions on how to pause the subscription through their account.
- Confirm the pause and inform them of the next billing date.
8. When will this item be back in stock?
WHEN a customer asks about product restocking:
IF a restock date is available,
THEN
- Inform the customer of the expected restock date.
IF the restock date is unknown,
THEN
- Offer to notify the customer when the product is back in stock.
- Suggest similar products.
9. Do you ship internationally?
WHEN a customer inquires about international shipping:
IF international shipping is available,
THEN
- Confirm that international shipping is offered.
- Provide estimated delivery times and any additional fees.
IF international shipping is not available,
THEN
- Inform the customer that shipping is limited to specific regions.
Pro Tip: Test out your Guidance by going to AI Agent > Test, and iterate as you go.
Troubleshooting: Why Guidance might not trigger
If your AI Agent isn’t following your Guidance, or it’s escalating tickets you thought it could handle, run through this quick checklist to spot the issue:
- Has a descriptive, easy-to-understand name: Name your Guidance based on the scenario (e.g. When a shopper asks about returns).
- Clear IF and THEN conditions: Make sure your Guidance spells out what to do when a condition is met.
- Covers all variations (no gaps in logic): Don’t leave your AI Agent hanging. Include fallback instructions for all scenarios.
- No wall-of-text formatting: Break things up with line breaks, headers, and spacing to help AI Agent scan quickly.
- Clearly written steps with bullets or numbers: Use lists to make actions easy to follow, like you would for a teammate.
- Doesn’t include unsupported tasks: Avoid unsupported instructions like “send macro,” “assign to agent,” or “delay the response.”
Bonus: Let AI do the heavy lifting
Don’t have time to write Guidance from scratch? The good news is AI can help with that, too.
AI-generated Guidance is available for all AI Agent subscribers. This feature analyzes your historical ticket data and uses it to generate ready-to-use, customizable prompts for your AI Agent.
Here’s what it does:
- Analyzes past tickets to identify common support scenarios
- Generates step-by-step Guidance based on what’s worked before
Ready to level up your Guidance?
Clear, structured Guidance is the key to unlocking better performance from your AI Agent. With just one well-written “When, If, Then” prompt, you can reduce escalations, speed up resolutions, and give your shoppers a smoother experience.
Not sure where to start? Try writing Guidance for one common question today—like returns, order status, or promo codes. Or, if you want to go deeper, check out our free Gorgias Academy course.
Further reading
Why Talent Sourcing is Key for Gorgias Recruiting (And How We Build Our Talent Pool)
As a Talent Acquisition Specialist, I firmly believe talent sourcing is a crucial component of recruitment. It involves proactively reaching out to good-fit candidates to broaden your talent pool and make key connections well in advance, rather than just waiting for the perfect person to find and apply to job postings once they go live.
Talent sourcing helps us at Gorgias cut through application noise and get the highest quality candidates possible. Our outreach emails for Engineering positions, one of the most challenging roles to fill, see 26%-46% response rates. And in this deeply competitive labor market, getting in contact with those gem candidates is especially important.
In this article, we’ll discuss the merits of talent sourcing as a hiring strategy, as well as the tools and tactics we use for talent sourcing at Gorgias.
The state of the hiring market in Q1 2022 (post-pandemic)
The state of the hiring market in 2022 is worrisome, to say the least. It seems like every single company has at least 10 open roles, and they’re all competing over the same pool of top-notch candidates.
Let’s take a step back and look at the last couple of years. Compared to Q1 2020, iCIMS reports job openings in Q1 2021 are up by 86%, hires are up by 45%, and job applications are down by 11%.
Meanwhile, 78% of companies report being unable to find enough talented candidates in the market to fill their open roles. Why? As we mentioned above, the labor market has tightened. This means that naturally, there are more jobs open than people to fill them, which consequently makes hiring even harder.
2022 continues these trends. There are now a record 5 million more job openings than unemployed people in the US, according to this article published by CNBC (which contains many top takeaways from the Bureau of Labor Statistic’s Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey.)
Also, like always, certain roles are particularly difficult to fill right now. Full-stack engineers are most in-demand right now, meaning they’re especially difficult to find and hire. Fortunately, a shift toward hiring remote talent in smaller regions is taking place. Software engineers who are open to remote work receive 20% more interview requests.
Part of appealing to this pool of in-demand talent is understanding software engineers’ top priorities. Here’s below the full list of the biggest motivators for software engineers, according to the 2022 State of Software Engineers Report:
These motivators are valuable insights because they can help you market your open roles (and, to get back to the topic, talent sourcing outreach) more sharply.
What exactly is talent sourcing?
There are differing opinions about the exact definition of talent sourcing. But the basic definition of talent sourcing is engaging candidates who are not active applicants. We call the targets of talent sourcing “passive talent,” which excludes candidates who apply traditionally, through a job posting.
For us, the goal of talent sourcing is to build a pipeline of talent that operates throughout the year as a proactive approach to the company’s hiring needs. Sourcing allows us to connect with potential fits long before a need develops. Considering that hiring a new employee can take anywhere from a week to several months, getting a head start on promising candidates is a great long-term strategy.
Why do we believe talent sourcing is an essential best practice?
In Q1 2022, it took our team an average of 53 days to extend an offer. In Q2, we were able to send out offers in 39 days thanks in part to talent sourcing. Therefore, we managed to speed up the process of extending an offer by 26% thanks to talent sourcing.
We looked at some statistics outside of Gorgias and here’s what we found: 70% of the world's workforce are passive candidates, and 86% of the most qualified candidates for your open positions are already employed, hence not actively looking for a job. That said, LinkedIn has found that 90% of the professionals active on their platform would like to hear about career opportunities.
Talent sourcing helps bridge the gap between the companies hiring and passive candidates (which, again, make up 70% of the workforce). We can build relationships with promising talent well before we’re urgently looking to make a hire.
Gem found that talent sourcing is the second most important recruiting trend (after diversity recruiting), according to their 2022 Recruiting Trends: Data-Driven Recruiting.
The impact of talent sourcing on key hiring metrics
Why exactly is talent sourcing such a prominent trend? Because it’s a strategic approach to improve many of the most important metrics a recruiting team pays attention to.
Time to hire
Talent sourcing can improve your time to hire because you can start refining a pool of candidates well before you have a live job ad. For us, one of the best tactics was to use outreach to identify a pool of talent that uses our tech stack. That way, when you post an engineering, product management, or non-tech role, you don’t have to source from scratch and filter out candidates because of basic misalignments.
Once a job posting goes live, our team has a huge headstart (and can therefore crush previous time-to-hire metrics). Instead of going to LinkedIn and starting a search from scratch, I would go to our refined pool of (currently, but forever growing) 111K candidates that match our company’s needs, tech stack, or overall preferences and start my search there.
Candidate quality
Talent sourcing helps us create a pool of pre-vetted candidates, so we’re never in a situation of having to accept a mediocre candidate because of a time crunch and lack of inbound interest.
Also, when a high-potential candidate doesn’t end up receiving (or accepting) an offer, they go back into our talent pool so we can potentially find another opportunity to work with that high-quality candidate.
Diverse hiring
We use Gem for robust top-of-funnel diversity reporting. The tool lets us deep dive into our natural sourcing tendencies and analyze passthrough rates across demographics like gender. This helps us point out some of the unconscious biases we each might have, so we can keep diversity and inclusivity in mind, implement action items, and source a diverse and strong team.
Our approach to building a Talent Pool
Explore our ATS for candidates we want to re-engage
As you likely know, a candidate’s potential (and journey with your company) doesn’t necessarily come to an end after a rejection. To make the most of high-quality candidates who have already gone through our screening once, we check out junior candidates we talked to 2+ years ago and marked as under-qualified. We do the same with candidates who have kept warm after rejection and candidates who withdrew from the process because they took another offer.
These candidates have already expressed an interest in our company and therefore get consideration to introduce into our ongoing talent pool.
Optimize our recruiting tech stack for searchability
One of our most helpful tools is HireSweet. The tool enables us to explore all of the 4,000 candidates who live in our ATS much easier than just searching the database. One of the best features is that HireSweet allows us to find candidates that may have switched careers completely but live in our ATS under an old position.
But the question still stands: how do we expand our talent pool to 111K people?
Source, scrape, and upload a massive number of leads
We don’t reach out to leads by hand: we contact them in bulk by sourcing and scraping. Before we explain our process, the important thing to keep in mind is that your search and bulk leads import should always resonate with the company’s hiring strategy. Simply put, we don’t do volume sourcing for the sake of doing high volume.
Bulk imports can help you in a few ways:
- While searching for candidates, you want to keep profiles that are not an exact fit so you can find them when a better-fit role comes along
- You want to reach out to a higher volume of leads
- You want to anticipate and pre-source for the future
Here’s an example of how we might pre-source our industry to collect a high volume of good-fit names:
- Find a list of start-ups (related to your industry if you want to be more precise)
- Break it down per country
- Find the companies’ LinkedIn pages (with automation, if possible)
- Scrape the “people” section of said pages
- Clean the data, and import it into your 3rd party tool to enrich it
- All employees that mentioned working for the companies you’re targeting are now in your talent pool
We use the following four tools to execute the process described above:
LinkedIn will limit the number of profiles you can scrape each day. If that’s the case, you can set up bot automation to run multiple times a day. With fewer profiles scrapped more frequently, you can stay under the radar.
Additional ways to improve your talent sourcing and recruitment marketing
Did you know that 66% of people who changed jobs were aware of the company they joined before they applied? That’s why we encourage you to do everything you can (with the resources and buy-in you have) to take a proactive approach to your talent strategy. Some more tactics include:
Create clear, engaging outbound messaging
A well-written message tailored to each candidate (or at least each role) is a terrific approach to draw top talent in, keep them interested, and persuade them to discover more about the company.
At Gorgias, we do our best to include the relevant information without plopping an entire job ad in the first message. We typically try and highlight a couple of unique features (including compensation, which we share with our SaaS calculator).
Encourage your non-recruiting team to source talent
Talent sourcing doesn’t just need to be a recruiter activity. We encourage employee ambassadorship, wherein the entire company is invited to source talent for live and upcoming roles. (They aren’t scraping LinkedIn, but can refer candidates our way and spread the word.)
When employees establish a direct relationship with candidates, they can provide a meaningful testimonial and sneak peek into the company’s culture.
Engaging passive candidates involves more effort than engaging active candidates because you have to persuade someone to be interested. But the effort is worthwhile: at the very least, you spread the word about the company.
Speaking of engaging your team, check out our article of five tips to engage a hybrid or distributed team.
Let us know your take on talent sourcing
At Gorgias, we managed to reach a 26%-46% response rate for our outreach emails for Engineering positions.
Even though recruiting and sourcing tactics constantly evolve, the mindset is still the same:
- Grab candidates’ attention
- Engage with them in a clear, helpful way
- Build relationships that make great placements easier in the longterm
Top talent is in high demand, and competition for their attention is severe. That’s why we need to establish a presence wherever potential candidates are — starting with their Inbox.
We’re hungry for lifelong learning and growth, so we want to hear from all the recruiters and sourcers out there. What’s your take on talent sourcing? How are you approaching it in your company? What can we learn from your practice?
Send me an email and let us know!
Playbook: How Berkey Filters Drove Customer Adoption of a New SMS Support Channel
When your company decides to launch a new support channel — usually for efficiency and customer convenience — setting it up is only half the battle. The other half is driving customers toward the new channel (and away from your old ones). Without a concerted effort for customer adoption, you risk paying for a support channel that nobody uses.
Berkey Filters, a world leader in water purification and seller of water filter systems, wanted to add SMS as a support channel for their shoppers. SMS is more convenient for on-the-go shoppers and allows agents to provide service to multiple shoppers more efficiently than other channels.
Berkey Filters launched SMS with Klaviyo, and wanted wanted to add the Klaviyo SMS integration to Gorgias to unify customer conversations in one platform.
The launch was one of the most successful we’ve seen to date, both in terms of ticket efficiency and customer adoption. Within a month of launching SMS, Berkey Filters:
- Achieved a 2-minute average first-response time for SMS
- Achieved a 20-minute average handle time for SMS
- Converted 2% of tickets to SMS from more time-consuming channels
- Decreased time-consuming phone tickets by 23%
- Decreased time-consuming email tickets by 21%
We sat down with Jessica, the Gorgias account owner and Customer Experience Analyst for Berkey Filters, to ask how Berkey Filters achieved such suburb support stats so quickly. Jessica was generously willing to share her strategies to drive customer adoption of the new support channel.
In this Playbook, learn about the six tactics Berkey Filters used to launch SMS, increase the number of customers using this channel, and decrease ticket volume on older channels.
Why add SMS to your helpdesk in the first place?
SMS is one of the fastest-growing support channels today. It’s one of five channels consumers expect from brands, alongside email, website, voice, and chat.
Consumers love SMS because it’s fast, convenient, and always with them (even on the go). They don’t need to block off time in their day to sit by their laptop or on the phone to deal with a support situation. They can carry about their day and effortlessly reply to texts whenever they have a moment – something most people already do.
Support managers love direct messaging channels because conversations are typically shorter and resolved faster. And as long as SMS tickets are managed in the same places as other channels, it’s easy for agents to manage.
Jessica was specifically interested in using the SMS channel in Gorgias for Berkey Filters to achieve the following goals:
- Decrease the number of phone calls they received (because agents can only talk to one person at a time)
- Decrease the number of times a customer reaches out across multiple channels for the same issue (because faster response times on SMS would make it less likely for duplicate tickets to come in)
- Let customers using mobile — which accounts for half of their website visits — contact customer service on the device they’re already using
- Easily send photos back and forth with customers (especially because they frequently get questions about how to fix or store their products)
- Offer a channel that doesn’t require a stable WiFi connection (because they have customers all over the country, including in rural areas that don’t always have reliable service)
Jessica’s team also views SMS as a modern support channel. More and more brands want to offer a customer service experience that’s seamlessly integrated into the shopper’s day, and Berkey wanted to be an early adopter.
While some of these benefits are pretty applicable to any store, make sure you’re clear on your “why” before adding a new support channels. This will help you know how to prioritize it compared to other channels and justify the work that goes into adding a new method of communication with your customers.
How to add Gorgias SMS to your helpdesk
For the purposes of this playbook, we’ll assume you’ve already created your Gorgias helpdesk. If you haven’t, get started with a free trial or schedule a call with our team for a personalized demo.
Gorgias SMS allows you to send and receive 1:1 SMS and MMS messages with your customers. To add it, go to Settings > Integrations > SMS.
You’ll need a Gorgias phone number to get started. If you have one already (likely because you use Gorgias voice support), you can add the SMS integration without changing numbers. If you do not have a number yet, it’ll prompt you to create one first.
If you already have a phone number but it isn’t owned by Gorgias, you’ll need to port it. Learn how in this help doc.
If you’ve just added SMS (or any new channel), there are a few administrative tasks we recommend before following the steps outlined this playbook:
- Create a dedicated view for SMS tickets
- Set up routing Rules for SMS tickets
- Create SMS-specific Macros (SMS messages should probably be shorter than some of your other channels, for example)
- Review existing Rules to add or exclude SMS as a channel trigger
Now, we’ll share exactly how Jessica promoted SMS for Berkey Filters customers.
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6 steps to drive customer adoption of your new SMS channel (inspired by Berkey Filters)
Jessica knew they would eventually add their SMS number directly on the Berkey Filters website, but she also knew she’d have to wait for her developer to do so. In the meantime, she started with the tools available to her in Gorgias.
Here are six tactics Jessica used to drive adoption of the newly launched support channel:
- Launch a Gorgias Chat Campaign on the Berkey Filters “Contact us” page
- Customize the auto-reply that was sent to new email tickets
- Add the SMS number directly on the “Contact us” page
- Promote SMS in the top banner of the website
- Leverage their 2 min. first response time (FRT) for SMS in messaging
- Maintain that FRT with an SLA view in Gorgias
Let’s break each of these down.
1) Launch a Gorgias Chat Campaign on the Berkey Filters “Contact us” page
Even though Jessica would need to wait for her developer to update the actual page content, she knew she could launch a Gorgias Chat Campaign on the “Contact us” page to announce they now offer support via SMS. (If you don’t know, a Chat Campaign is a live chat session that automatically and proactively triggers for targeted website visitors, often to announce special promotions.)
Here’s what their campaign looked like:
Jessica’s campaign automatically opens a live chat box announcing the launch of SMS for anyone who stays on the Berkey Filters contact page for longer than 30 seconds. That time frame is a good way to target anyone who’s clearly trying to identify the best contact method, and not someone who accidentally clicked onto the page (and would likely bounce before 30 seconds).
To create a Chat Campaign in Gorgias, go to Settings > Integrations > Chat and select the chat widget you want to use. Click the “Create Campaign” button in the top right.
From here, you can enter the URL(s) the campaign should appear on, set a required time spent on the page, and customize the message that displays.
Read this help doc to learn more about chat campaigns.
2) Customize the auto-reply on new email tickets
One of the best ways to tell customers about a new support channel is to promote it on one of your existing channels — especially to customers who are already accustomed to those existing channels and may never visit the contact page again.
For the segment of customers who already use email to contact support, Jessica leveraged the initial auto-reply that Berkey Filters sends when a customer emails them to announce the new, faster channel.
In addition to the standard, “Thanks for contacting us! An agent will reply back shortly,” Jessica added, “We are currently experiencing high contact volumes and will be responding as quickly as possible. Our chat and text response times are typically faster. We are now accepting text messages at 1-800-350-4170.”
By customizing the auto-reply to promote the new channel, Jessica met Berkey Filters’ customers where they were to make sure they knew about the latest and greatest way to get support.
3) Add the SMS number directly on the “Contact us” page
At this point, Jessica got developer support to add the support phone number to the website. The contact page is a natural location to add any new support channels, because you know new customers will go there looking for contact information.
Here’s what the Berkey Filters “Contact us” page looks like:
When building this page, Jessica made many intentional decisions to funnel visitors toward the new channel. Specifically, she:
- Featured SMS next to another efficient (and therefore preferred) channel
- Put the phone number in the headline so it’s easy to see
- Added “Text Us” and a chat bubble visuals to clarify the number is for texting, not calls
- Pointed out that texting is great for “Conversation On The Go,” reminding people to use the channel if they plan to step away from the computer
- Set expectations by listing each channel’s average response time (ART)
The lesson? When releasing a new support channel, don’t be afraid to give extra context around it to help your shoppers understand when they should use one over the other.
4. Promote SMS in the top banner across the website
The banner at the top of the website is a high-visibility location that’s especially great for getting in front of returning customers (since they may not need to visit your contact page anymore).
Brands usually use the top banner for promotions or sales, but Berkey Filters uses it for a mix of sales and support to cater to the entire customer experience. If you refresh their website a few times, you’ll see it rotate through three messages:
- Free shipping on orders over a certain amount
- Chat now for an immediate response
- Text us for support on the go
5. Promote first response time (FRT) for SMS in messaging
You might’ve picked up on this already, but Jessica was doing something really strategic with her messaging about SMS: She was promoting their first response time of 2 minutes.
That’s fast! And therefore, a pretty compelling reason for shoppers to use it over other, slower channels like email or voice.
Now, obviously this only works if your team is achieving a fast response time like that and willing to maintain it. (More on that in the next point.)
What’s important is that Gorgias gives you insights into your support team’s performance. While that’s useful for internal planning (staffing, budgeting, etc.), we also highly recommend leveraging these data points with your own customers to show the value of the support you provide.
Support stats that are great to leverage when promoting support via SMS:
- Global first response time
- SMS first response time
- Global resolution time
- SMS resolution time
- Global CSAT score
- Total or percentage of tickets your brand has answered via SMS (if you’re still trying to increase adoption post-launch)
We don’t currently include SMS CSAT score in Gorgias reporting. If you’d like to measure and promote your SMS CSAT score, share that product feedback here!
6. Maintain that FRT with an SLA view in Gorgias
To help her team keep those impressive first response and resolution times, Jessica knew she needed to improve (and not just measure) those times. She set up a service-level agreement (SLA) view in Gorgias that shows SMS tickets that are open and were created more than one minute ago.
Here’s what that looks like:
This view sits at the top of their sidebar along with a few other SLA-based channel views, so agents can quickly prioritize what tickets they should solve next.
In addition to the view, Jessica created an Auto-Reply Rule that sends the first message to an SMS ticket.
This message thanks the customer for texting support, and states the business hours for Berkey Filters. We love how this helps set expectations right from the start, especially for customers who might text in outside of these hours. (So they don’t text again waiting for a reply!)
Here’s what that Rule looks like:
Last but not least, it’s worth mentioning that Jessica was also incredibly intentional about rolling all of this out to the Berkey Filters agents. Specifically, she involved them in the decision to launch the new channel, trained them on the new system, and made sure they were prepared before launch.
None of this would be possible if agents were unsure how to handle incoming SMS tickets or use the SLA view.
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Berkey Filters’ results from adding support via SMS
We’ve already teased some of the impact that Berkey Filters has seen since adding SMS support, but how does it all add up?
In their first 30 days using Gorgias SMS, Berkey Filters:
- Closed over 250 SMS tickets
- Sent almost 1400 messages via SMS
- Achieved a 2-minute first response time
- Achieved 20-minute resolution time
- Converted 2% of all tickets to SMS
- Decreased phone calls by 23%
- Decreased emails by 21%
That’s remarkable! And while those stats certainly speak to the high quality of their support team, they first needed to make customers aware and excited about the new channel. If you decide to launch a new support channel, we recommend following Berkey’s lead and creating an intentional adoption campaign to accompany the launch.
Get your customers excited about texting your brand
Prioritizing SMS shifts customer service conversations to a “live” channel where agents can help multiple customers at once, giving everyone a better experience.
And even if you’re strained for resources (like waiting for your developer to be able to update your store’s site) you can follow Berkey Filters’ lead and use other features and channels in Gorgias to start promoting your new channel.
Gorgias also integrates with SMS marketing platforms like Klaviyo to make texting a seamless part of your customer journey (and easy for agents to manage).
Specifically, if customers reply to an SMS sent with Klaviyo, Gorgias will create a ticket so your agents can respond right away. Plus, Klaviyo and Gorgias share customer data in real time, so you have as much information about your customers as possible in both tools:
“Having the Gorgias + Klaviyo integration has helped provide a service to our customers that we did not have before. Our customer service department is now able to provide a near-instant response via text message without having to exit Gorgias. This feature has made the entire process of getting to these tickets so effortless and much more efficient.”
— Jessica Robles, Customer Experience Analyst at Berkey Filters
To get started with Gorgias SMS, log into your helpdesk or click here to sign up for free.
What’s New with Gorgias: June 2022 Product Updates
Every month, our product team holds a casual, conversational event with our customers to demo new features, receive real-time feedback, and host live Q&As.
Watch the video below or read on for a recap of our latest product updates.
1. Admins can require Two-Factor Authentication for all users (3:18)
While Gorgias does a lot to keep your data secure, one of the best ways to add an extra layer of security is to encourage agents to use secure passwords and two-factor authentication (2FA).
And with our latest update, you can do more than just encourage. Admins can now require agents to set up two-factor authentication.
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1. Admins can require Two-Factor Authentication for all users (3:18)
Once an admin toggles the option, all users in your account will have 14 days to set up 2FA. After 14 days, users will need to set it up to access your helpdesk.
2. Add a contact form in Gorgias Chat for a better CX outside business hours (11:38)
It can be hard to follow up with chat tickets that were left during off-business hours. Sometimes customers don’t include enough details in their message, making it harder to follow up on the next day.
Using a contact form in Gorgias Chat, you can capture a customer's email and message in a short conversational way. The contact form is designed to collect more information without disrupting the conversational experience, so you can easily follow up and help via email when you log back into Gorgias.
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The contact form prompts your web visitors to select a subject (to help you triage tickets faster), and then provide more details about their issue so your agents know what they’re trying to solve. Last, it collects the shopper’s email address so you know who to follow-up with and where to reach them. All of this information will be collected in a single ticket in your helpdesk.
Read this help center article to learn how to enable the contact form in your Gorgias chat.
3. Create sub-categories in Help Center (19:55)
Create multiple levels of categories to help your shoppers navigate to improve help center organization and find help content for related issues more easily.
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These new categories also give your team more options when creating a Help Center, so you can organize FAQs in whatever way makes sense for your brand.
4. New Managed Rules (For Automation Add-on Subscribers) (21:30)
Rules are a powerful feature that let Gorgias users automatically organize, tag, and reply to tickets. Thousands of Gorgias customers have adopted rules in their customer support workflow to save time and allow themselves to provide faster and higher quality service. Focusing on the common inquiries like WISMO, we’ve built Managed Rules to optimize time for Automate subscribers.
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Managed Rules are pre-built automations developed by the Gorgias team and include some of the most common and helpful automations. They need no code, no setup. Install them from the Rule Library and you’re good to go! If we improve the Rule, it will automatically update in your helpdesk, no action from you required.
Customer Q&A (24:44)
Tune into the above timestamp if you want the full 25 minutes of customer questions and answers from our product team. Here were a few of the highlights!
With only two weeks left in Q2, which of the planned releases on the public roadmap will actually launch? (25:44)
Some features listed in Q2 of our public roadmap will indeed be released in Q2, while others will spill into Q3 (or later). We’re proud to provide transparency with our public roadmap, but please understand that it’s subject to change throughout the quarter. We do our best to update our roadmap frequently but can’t always do so right away.
Although we can’t promise to release any of these features in Q2, a few features we plan to release sooner than later include:
- FAQ article recommendations in chat
- Create a Chat report in help desk statistics
- Display agents phone availability state
Our team is actively prioritizing the roadmap for Q3 right now. Check back soon to see the latest plan!
Will you be improving the returns and cancellations workflow for the Help center? We use Loop, but can’t integrate our self-service return portal with our new Help Center. (33:40)
This is a limitation we’re definitely aware of, and are exploring options. The long-term solution is to build better integrations with Loop and other top returns platforms. If this is a feature you’d like to see, please submit the request here.
When will the option to convert phone calls to SMS be available? (45:15)
We’re hoping to release more features around that at the start of 2023. Today if you receive a phone call, you can always reply to that ticket via SMS. In the future, we’ll focus on helping you deflect the phone call entirely and prioritize SMS instead.
Join us for the next monthly product event
Thanks for checking out the recap of our June customer product event. We hold these events once as a month as a way to share the latest releases and connect with our customers in real-time. It’s a favorite – from both customers, and the Gorgias team.
If you’d like to sign up for the next one to attend live, you can register here. We’d love to have you join us!
New apps that integrate with Gorgias: Summer 2022
There are now over 85 incredible integrations in the Gorgias App Store with the tools that power your ecommerce store. While each app is unique, together these integrations can help your agents work more efficiently to provide excellent service to your customers.
Take a look at the newest additions so far from 2022.
In the first half of the year, we’ve launched 15 new integrations for your Gorgias helpdesk:
- Klaviyo (updated!)
- Gorgias SMS
- Thankful AI
- Netsuite
- Okendo
- Narvar
- Skio
- Via Software
- Clyde
- Smartrr
- ShipMonk
- Annex Cloud
- Daton
- Shogun Frontend
- Gobot
- Shop2app
Read on to learn how you can use these tools to help manage your store, and visit the Gorgias App Store to activate them today!
Klaviyo (updated early 2022)
Klaviyo is an email and SMS marketing automation platform built for ecommerce. Gorgias was the first helpdesk to connect to Klaviyo SMS, allowing your brand to create seamless conversations between your marketing campaigns, shoppers, and support team.
With the updated Klaviyo integration, you can:
- Automatically create tickets in Gorgias from replies to Klaviyo SMS campaigns
- Reply to Klaviyo SMS messages in the same place as every other customer conversation, with all the context of your ecommerce integrations
- Create contact lists in Klaviyo based on support events in Gorgias
This integration helps you streamline customer interactions and create higher-converting marketing campaigns. To learn more, go to the Gorgias App Store.
Gorgias SMS
We recently released Gorgias SMS, an easy way for your brand to offer this convenient and conversational communication channel. It’s one of the fastest-growing support channels for ecommerce brands, and one of the most reliable for customers to contact you on (since it’s not dependent on internet access).
With Gorgias SMS, you can:
- Talk to customers on their (since they likely always have their phone on them)
- View order information in the same window as SMS tickets
- Easily send photos back and forth with customers
Click here to learn more about Gorgias SMS, available with all plans.
Thankful AI
Thankful AI is a platform dedicated to helping you deliver better support for the post-purchase needs of your customers. The AI is tailored specifically for retail and ecommerce businesses, so you don’t have to worry about a disjointed experience.
With this integration, the Thankful AI agent can:
- Triage and route tickets to real agents
- Tag tickets in Gorgias
- Respond to tickets across all written channels
This frees up your agents to focus on more meaningful conversations with customers. Visit the Gorgias App Store to learn more about the Thankful integration.
NetSuite
NetSuite is a cloud ERP including financials, CRM, and ecommerce. It helps brand work more efficiently, take control of inventory and fulfillment, and bring all your tools together in a unified business management suite.
Sync NetSuite data into Gorgias to give your agents important customer & order information in a single tab.
With this integration, you can:
- Add over 60 NetSuite fields to a widget in the Gorgias Customer Sidebar.
- Sync customer information from NetSuite into Gorgias.
- Sync order information & shipping details from NetSuite into Gorgias.
- Sync RMA information from NetSuite into Gorgias.
- View the last 10 orders that have been created or modified.
This helps your agents have all the context they need next to every conversation they have. Visit the Gorgias App Store to learn more.
Okendo
Okendo is a customer marketing platform and an Official Google Reviews partner that helps brands capture and showcase high-impact social proof such as product ratings & reviews, customer photos & videos, and Q&A messageboards.
With this integration, you can:
- Automatically create tickets in Gorgias for Okendo product reviews
- Easily respond to every customer who leaves a review
- Add an Okendo widget to the Gorgias Customer Sidebar for customer loyalty insights next to every ticket
Visit the Gorgias App Store to learn more about our Okendo integration.
Narvar
Link Narvar Return & Exchanges for Shopify with Gorgias to automate returns management and get rich insights that help you save costs and improve operations.
With this integration, you can:
- Create flexible return policies. Deploy tailored returns flows, policies, and fees for different products or customer segments to offer a differentiated experience.
- Retain revenue with recommended exchanges. Convert up to 45% of refunds to exchanges by recommending exchanges of same or different value to customers right within the returns flow.
- Bring customers back by incentivizing store credit. Add a credit bonus to store credit refunds based on specific exchange rules that will incentivize customers to keep shopping in your store.
To learn more about our Narvar integration, visit the Gorgias App Store.
Skio
Skio helps brands on Shopify sell subscriptions. With this integration, you can add a Skio widget to your Customer Sidebar in Gorgias. This gives your agents insights into customer subscriptions right in the helpdesk without having to switch tabs.
With this integration, you can:
- View Skio customer information in the Gorgias Customer Sidebar
- Quickly click out to Skio right from Gorgias if needed
- Respond to subscription questions from one central location
To learn more about our Skio integration, visit the Gorgias App Store.
Via Software
Via is a mobile commerce (SMS marketing) platform for ecommerce businesses. Send personalized messages to your customers for increased revenue and customer satisfaction.
With this integration, you can:
- Automatically create tickets in Gorgias based on customer replies to Via SMS
- Respond to Via SMS messages directly from the Gorgias helpdesk
- View the entire conversation, including replies from Gorgias, in the Via platform
Visit the Gorgias App Store to learn more.
Clyde
With Clyde and Gorgias working together, you can create a seamless and positive support experience by syncing all warranty data inside your Gorgias account. Stay focused and close tickets faster by viewing Clyde contracts and claims information in the same window you use to talk to customers.
With this integration, you can:
- See the full picture of every customer
- Find open warranty claims in a flash
- Turn your support center into a profit center
Manage warranty requests & find claims information in one tool. Head to the Gorgias App Store to learn more.
Smartrr
Smartrr is a seamless, full-service subscription solution. Paired with Gorgias, you can equip your team with the best customer service tools in one convenient location to increase customer satisfaction and drive customer loyalty.
With this integration, you can:
- Sync subscription data from Smartrr in Gorgias
- Help agents stay focused in a single tab
- Provide better, faster support for subscription questions
To learn more about our Smartrr integration, go to the Gorgias App Store.
ShipMonk
ShipMonk is an order fulfillment platform for eCommerce businesses ready to scale. They offer technology-driven fulfillment solutions that enable business founders to devote more time to the things that matter most in their businesses.
With this integration you'll be able to:
- Pull order fulfillment data and tracking information from ShipMonk to Gorgias
- Access specific orders in ShipMonk directly from the Customer Sidebar in Gorgias
Learm more about the ShipMonk integration in the Gorgias App Store.
Annex Cloud
Annex Cloud is a cloud-based customer loyalty platform for enterprises. They provide integrated loyalty, engagement, and retention solutions across a range of program types like paid memberships, incentives, and more.
With this integration, you can:
- Sync customer’s loyalty data across tools
- Show loyalty information of a customer when opening a new or existing ticket
Click here to learn more about our Annex Cloud integration.
Daton
Daton can replicate Gorgias data to your data warehouse in minutes, freeing up your analysts to focus on generating important business insights instead of extracting data.
With this integration, you can sync information from Gorgias to your data warehouse like:
- Customers
- Jobs
- Users
- Tickets
To learn more about Daton, visit the listing in the Gorgias App Store.
Shogun Frontend
Shogun is a headless ecommerce platform built for merchants. Convert more with richer merchandising and sub-second store speed. The Gorgias integration allows merchants to add chat capabilities to their Shogun-powered shops.
With Gorgias chat on your Shogun Frontend, you can:
- Promote your products and provide order details, all connected to your ecommerce platform
- Create chat campaigns to proactively message customers while they’re shopping live on your site
- Have agents answer live chats or create customizable, automated flows to free up agents for the most important conversations
Click here to learn more about our integration with Shogun Frontend.
Gobot
Gobot helps fast-growing Shopify stores convert more shoppers and reduce support burden with beautiful guided selling quizzes and AI-powered support chatbots.
With this integration, you can:
- Sync recommendation data from Gobot into Gorgias so reps can respond and address questions via chat or email.
- Collect post-purchase survey data and automatically connect select customers with questions/feedback to support reps in Gorgias.
- Automate repetitive customer support inquiries with Gobot’s AI Support Automation and seamlessly transition to Gorgias live chat or email support for those who require human assistance.
Visit the Gobot listing in the Gorgias App Store to learn more.
Shop2app
Shop2app is a mobile app builder. It’s designed for local delivery, national delivery, and in-store pickup, and also makes it easy to manage subscriptions and send push notifications to customers.
With this integration, you can:
- Automatically create tickets in Gorgias when customers contact a merchant from their mobile app.
- Allow customers to initiate a support ticket directly from past orders within the mobile app.
Visit the Shop2app listing in the Gorgias App Store to learn more.
Supercharge Gorgias, your CX command center
The Gorgias App Store features 85+ high-quality integrations with other leading ecommerce tools. By connecting the apps that power your store, you can give your agents the context they need to provide remarkable customer service from a single workspace. (No more switching tabs!)
To add any of these apps to your helpdesk, go to Settings > Integrations or visit the Gorgias App Store.
What’s New With Gorgias – May 2022 Product Updates
Each month, our product team holds a casual, conversational event with our customers to demo new features, receive real-time feedback, and answer live Q&As.
Watch the video recap here, or read on for a recap of the latest releases.
1. SMS is officially live for all accounts (3:10)
With this new channel, you can receive and respond to SMS and MMS messages within Gorgias. This makes it easy for your customers to communicate with your store while they’re on the go, and easy for your agents to provide fast, conversational support.
We’re releasing SMS this quarter as a free trial for every customer on every plan. Conversations will count toward your plan’s ticket count, but there are no additional charges for minutes, usage, phone numbers, etc. In the coming months, we’ll be assessing the best way to provide Voice and SMS so we can continue to innovate and build powerful new features for these channels.
2. SMS Pro-tip: Create a Gorgias Rule to set up a double opt-in (11:55)
If you want customers to consent to receive SMS messages before your agents actually reply, you can do this with a simple Rule in Gorgias. Here’s what it would look like:
Read this article for four more Gorgias Rules to help automate SMS.
3. Agents will now receive browser notifications when a ticket is assigned to them (14:55)
This is especially great for anyone who gets tickets assigned to them, but may not be looking at Gorgias throughout their entire workday. (Think managers, social media collaborators, etc.)
To see these notifications, you may need to adjust your browser and/or computer settings. You can see an example for Chrome + Mac in our official Product Update.
4. Quick response flows in self-service got a revamp (21:48)
Quick response flows bring in a critical component to self-service, creating more ways to engage with shoppers who visit your store online. We designed quick response flows with the guidance that 60% of the time, customers use chat to ask pre-purchase questions. Most successful merchants leverage their FAQ content to prompt conversation with quick response flows that result in generating revenue, trust and loyalty.
If you haven’t yet activated quick response flows, you’re in for a treat. With this revamp, you can now easily manipulate every step of the experience for quick response flows from self-service settings. Immediately under the Quick Response Flows tab, you can write in any question and answer you prefer and hit save. There is no other place or screen you’d need to navigate. Using the preview on the right, you can reassure the quality of the experience you want to create for your customers.
If customers click on a quick response flow and find the information they need, this will not count towards your monthly ticket volume.
If they click on a quick response flow and select “No, I need more help” option, it will create a ticket for an agent to address.
Best practices
It’s amazing when our merchants start using a feature and take it to the next level. We’ve seen some of the best practices to include creating unique tags for each quick response flow created (e.g. Quick_Response_Flow_1), then adding a corresponding view in Tickets. This way, you can track closely the conversations prompted by quick response flows and dedicate a select group of agents who are trained to expand on the subject and help your customers become fans. For more on this subject, check out Quick Response Flows help doc here.
Customer Q&A (26:50)
Tune into that timestamp if you want the full 25 minutes of customer-led questions and answers from our product team. Here were a few of the highlights!
Gorgias Phone vs Aircall: What are the differences? What’s the timeline for improvement for Gorgias Voice? (32:40)
Gorgias phone is an easy way to add a basic phone line to your store. If you’re looking for advanced, full call center features, our partners like Aircall or RingCentral may be a better solution for you.
For example, their phone-specific statistics are more in-depth than ours, but the ability to create a phone number and answer it in the Gorgias helpdesk is naturally easier with Gorgias.
Our long-term vision for Gorgias Phone is not to fully compete with apps like Aircall, but rather to invest in ecommerce-specific solutions so you can provide the best voice support to your shoppers.
What’s up with WhatsApp? (37:50)
It’s our next new channel, coming Q3! We have access to the API and are ready to start building at the end of the quarter. (Just need to polish up a few existing channel bugs first.)
Any plans to integrate with Shopify Blogs? (43:15)
Not yet, but we’d love to hear more feedback about this if it’s something you’re interested in! Submit this idea on our Product Roadmap to help us prioritize it.
Join us for the next monthly product event
That completes our recap of our May customer product event. We hold these events once as a month as a way to review the latest releases and connect with our customers in real-time. It’s a favorite – from both customers, and the Gorgias team.
If you’d like to sign up for the next one to attend live, you can register here. We’d love to have you join us!
4 Benefits of Adding Voice Support to Your Ecommerce Store
Wondering if your team should add voice support to your ecommerce channels this year? You’re not alone.
Over 15% of our customers currently have a phone integration added to their account, thanks to the Gorgias Voice integration and partners like Aircall and RingCentral.
While voice support may feel like an “outdated” channel in the age of live chat and social media, this tells us that ecommerce support teams are increasingly finding value in offering it to their clients.
Here are 4 benefits of adding voice support to your ecommerce store:
- You can achieve faster first response times and faster resolution times.
- It’s easier to express empathy with customers.
- Having a phone number builds trust and brand quality.
- It makes your support more accessible.
You can achieve faster first response times and faster resolution times.
Phones are an immediate communication channel, so it’s not surprising that adding voice support can boost your first response time. What we weren’t expecting, however, was by how much:
Our customers with phones have a first response time that’s 7x faster than merchants that don’t offer voice support. (30 minutes compared to 4 hours.)
What’s even more important to note, however, is that adding voice support doesn’t decrease resolution time (like many support managers fear). In fact, it makes quite a positive impact:
Our merchants using phones have an average resolution time that’s 34% faster than customers who don’t.
So not only does this channel help you respond to customers faster, but it helps you resolve their issues faster. That means your team can work more efficiently and spend up to 66% less time resolving each ticket. (Imagine how that could help increase your store’s revenue!)
It’s easier to express empathy with customers (which can lead to better Satisfaction scores).
Talking (literally) to shoppers and hearing their tone of voice is the best way your agents can adjust their responses to create a great customer experience.
While you can do your best to read clues in email and chat, it’s always going to be easier to match the customer’s tone when actually listening to them on the phone.
And when your agents can express empathy and solve the problem accordingly, you’ve got a better chance at getting that 5-star review and positive customer feedback.
Our customers using phones have an average Satisfaction score of 4.56 out of 5.
While that score also depends a lot on your support agents and their personal approach to customer service, there’s no denying that actually speaking to clients is helpful for both parties in those moments.
Having a phone number builds trust and brand quality.
Especially if you sell high-end products or have VIP customers (like wholesalers buying in bulk), having a phone number adds a level of legitimacy to your business.
Since most online stores don’t immediately add phones as a support channel, it will stand out to customers when your shop does offer voice support.
Phones add a sense of maturity to your business (and especially if you’re using an integrated solution like Gorgias Voice), there’s not much cost involved to elevate the status of your store like this.
It makes your support more accessible.
While the internet has come a long way over the years in terms of accessibility, the truth remains that phone support may be an easier and more comfortable contact method for some of your customers than digital channels.
Test your live chat experience with a screen reader, for example. What’s the experience like? (And how does it compare to dialing a phone number and talking verbally to someone?)
If there’s a chance that voice support is more approachable for a part of your customer demographic, you’ll create a better shopping experience for them by adding a phone line.
Now that you know the benefits of phone support, how do you actually add it?
The first thing you’ll need to decide is who on your team will actually be answering the phones.
A few options to explore:
- Having your existing support agents answer phones. This is best if your agents aren’t already too busy, or you have someone who’s particularly good at verbal communication.
- Hiring a new agent(s). This is the situation many support managers find themselves in -- they want to add phones, but don’t feel like they have the right staff yet to manage it. Hiring someone new can help, but we also recommend following these tips to keep resolution times fast and phone processes efficient.
- Outsourcing phone support. If you’re expecting a large amount of call volume and don’t feel you can internally staff the team to support it, outsourcing to a call agency is always an option. This can be expensive upfront, however, so it may be best to try one of the other options and consider this as a last resort.
Next, you’ll need to choose a phone platform.
If you’re adding our built-in voice channel to your Gorgias helpdesk, all you have to do to get started is log into your Gorgias helpdesk and create a new number (or forward or port an existing one, if you happen to have one already).
Our phone integration is included in all Gorgias plans, and unlike other providers, there’s no annual contract fee and no minimum seat requirement.
This makes it a great option for teams looking to add phones for the first time or who want to manage all communication channels in one place.
Plus, our ecommerce integrations save your agents time by displaying callers’ shopping history right in the helpdesk, so they don’t have to go searching for the last order, for example.
For more tips on how to create efficient phone processes and increase resolution time by 34%, check out this article.
Finally, once you’ve set up your team and chosen your provider, all that’s left to do is make your number visible.
If you’re offering voice support for all your customers, you might place it in the footer of your website or all transactional emails.
If you’re piloting voice support or using it exclusively for a segment of shoppers, you might save it for smaller email segments or place it only on dedicated landing pages just for them.
Wherever you decide to put your number, just make sure it's easily accessible and clearly visible so your shoppers can start calling, and your support team can start delivering even better customer experiences!
Start providing SMS support today, with Gorgias
SMS is a convenient way for customers to contact your brand and receive fast support. It’s no wonder it’s one of the top five channels that consumers expect to engage with brands, alongside email, voice, website, and in-person.
Every Gorgias plan now includes two-way SMS at no additional cost, making it easy for your brand to start offering this conversational channel.
Why offer SMS support?
There are many reasons to offer customer service messaging, but here are the top four:
It’s fast and conversational
SMS is a conversational, real-time channel. The benefit of this is that customers tend to keep the conversation short and reply quickly to follow-up questions, meaning your agents can resolve the situation quickly, too.
Customers can contact you while they’re “on the go”
Most people keep their phone with them everywhere they go. With SMS, it’s easy for customers to start the conversation and follow-up as they move throughout their day, instead of feeling stuck to a chat conversation on their laptop.
It’s natural for younger customers
Sending text messages feels like you’re texting a friend, even if it’s actually between customers and your brand. Younger clientele will feel natural using this support channel, and it can even help you build that friendly-feeling into your brand perception.
It makes sending photos back and forth easy
Does your refund or return policy require photo evidence to kick off the process? If your customers ever need to send pictures of damaged items or wrong products, SMS is the perfect channel because they’re probably taking those photos on their phone anyway.
Still not sure if SMS is a support channel your brand should prioritize? Try it for 2 weeks. Because SMS is included in every Gorgias plan, it’s easy to turn off if you decide it isn’t right.
Recommended reading: Our list of 60+ fascinating customer service statistics.
How to add SMS to your helpdesk
You’ll need two things to get started with Gorgias SMS. (Don’t worry, they’re both quick!)
If you’re new here, get started on the Gorgias helpdesk. It only takes a few minutes to create an account, and you can always book a call with our sales team if you have questions.
The second is a Gorgias-owned phone number, meaning you either created it in Gorgias or ported it from your previous phone provider. You can do both of these actions in Settings > Phone Numbers.
Note: SMS is currently only available for US, UK, and Canadian numbers.
Once your phone number is ready in Gorgias, you can add the SMS integration to it. You can do this from Settings > Integrations > SMS.
Once the integration is active, you’re ready to start replying to SMS conversations from your customers.
To tell your customers they can now text your brand, we recommend adding “Text us,” plus your phone number, in some or all of these places:
- The footer of your website
- The “Contact Us” page of your website
- Your Gorgias Help Center
- Transactional emails (order confirmation, return initiated, etc.)
4 automation Rules to help you get started
Below are four top automation rules to take full advantage of SMS customer service. We also have a full guide on customer service messaging that includes templates and macros to upgrade your SMS support.
Auto-tag with “SMS”
SMS is an official channel in Gorgias, meaning you can see SMS-specific stats or create SMS-specific Views out of the box. There may be times when you also want to Tag tickets with “SMS” however, in which case you can do so with a Rule like this:
Auto-assign to a real-time team
SMS is a fast, conversational channel, so you’ll want to assign these tickets to agents that can keep up with the pace. If you have a dedicated chat team, they’ll be naturals at answering questions via SMS, as well. Here’s a Rule that will automatically assign SMS tickets to a specific team.
Auto-reply: Message received
When customers text your brand, they’ll expect a fast response. In order to buy your agents some time, we recommend sending an auto-response to let the customer know their message has been received and an agent will be with them shortly. This will also give them confidence that the text message did in fact go through, so they don’t follow-up right away.
Auto-reply: Order status
Whenever you add a new communication channel for your customers, you should consider how you’ll respond to WISMO (“Where is my order?”) questions on it. With SMS, you’ll want to keep the length of your reply in mind so you’re not sending an insanely long text message back to customers. We recommend creating a Rule that can A) make sure the reply follows the best format for SMS and B) save your agents from having to answer these WISMO questions manually.
Next: Connect your SMS marketing apps for a seamless experience
Gorgias SMS empowers your brand to keep the conversation going on SMS, even when your customers are on the go.
We also integrate with SMS marketing apps, making it easier for agents to answer promotion replies from one workspace. They can work more efficiently while turning SMS questions into opportunities for better customer value.
In the Gorgias App Store, you’ll find some of the top ecommerce integration partners like Klaviyo, Attentive, Postscript, and more.
If your brand is using any of these apps to drive sales via SMS, we highly recommend integrating with Gorgias so your team can work more efficiently toward your revenue goals. When SMS marketing and SMS customer service work in tandem, they are far more powerful.
Want to see an example of a brand that successfully launched SMS customer support and effectively drove customers to use the new channel? Check out our playbook of Berkey Filters, an ecommerce merchant that did just that.
Ready to get started with this conversational support channel? Add SMS to your Gorgias helpdesk today or book a call with our team to learn more.
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