TL;DR:

• Automating simple customer requests saves major time. AI Agent and automation features helped reduce response times by up to 69%.
• Obvi handled 27% of tickets with just two agents. Within two weeks of using AI Agent, their team saw major efficiency gains.
• Psycho Bunny resolved tickets 99.4% faster using AI Agent. The conversational AI tool boosted speed and reduced manual workload.
• ‍Kirby Allison saw 46% more sales with AI Agent. They used Flows to guide customers and drive purchases more effectively.

Guess what? Automating your customer support doesn’t mean you don't care about every customer interaction—it’s quite the opposite. 

Think about it… if someone wants to cancel an order, they simply want it done without any attempts at a personalized upsell. This type of response usually doesn’t require any additional flair.

Automation allows you to meet customers' needs promptly for straightforward requests. At the same time, it gives your team the bandwidth to invest more time and energy into solving intricate problems and building stronger customer relationships.

Many brands using Gorgias AI Agent are saving both time and money, reducing response times, and even increasing sales generated directly from support.

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First, who benefits from Gorgias AI Agent?

As a solopreneur, it’s pretty self-explanatory. You’re busy with all aspects of your business, so automating what you can is going to help you prioritize and focus on more important things. 

But what about those who have customer support teams? This might sound counterintuitive, but Gorgias AI Agent isn’t geared toward any specific type of brand. 

It benefits everyone at every stage of growth, whether you’re a single founder who wears many hats or lead a large CS team at an enterprise business.

Take Obvi—this mid-market health and wellness brand has a lean CX team of only two support agents. Although surprising, given their size and stage of growth, they’ve been able to automate the tedious and repetitive parts of CX.

For example, during BFCM 2023, Obvi’s CEO Ron Shah decided to use AI Agent to boost CX efficiency even further while still providing excellent customer support.

“I told our team we were going to onboard AI Agent for BFCM, so a good portion of tickets would be handled automatically. There was a huge sigh of relief knowing that customers were going to be taken care of.”

—Ron Shah, CEO and Co-founder at Obvi

Obvi now handles 150+ tickets per day without adding any headcount, thanks to a 27% automation rate—which they achieved within two weeks of onboarding AI Agent. 

Even for enterprise brands with larger CX teams, AI Agent helps them deal with the huge influx of queries that don’t require a human response—things like, “Where’s my order?” or “Can you cancel my order?”

And it’s also more than the support teams who benefit. With more time given back to agents for strategic thinking, support teams can share helpful advice across the entire organization:

• For the product team: Report on which products are causing the most tickets to identify and address issues. When the product team can directly reference customer pain points, it becomes easier to improve product quality and reduce future support inquiries.
• For the marketing team: Analyze which campaigns may have been misleading by tracking customer complaints and dissatisfaction to improve future promotions. Customer insights can help refine messaging that resonates better with your audience.
• For the operations team: Identify big spikes in lost or delayed packages to streamline order fulfillment logistics and improve delivery processes.
• For the sales team: Provide insights on customer feedback related to pricing and product preferences to refine sales strategies.

This way, customer support becomes less about the speed of ticket resolution and more about providing high-quality customer service that returns the favor with higher CLTV. How? Let’s review a few stories from brands using AI Agent.

💡 Pro Tip: Deflect WISMO tickets and let customers track their order by activating Order Management in your AI Agent settings. Go to Settings > Productivity > Order Management and toggle Track Order on.

AI Agent resolves tickets 99.4% faster than human agents

Every brand eventually faces a common dilemma: how to scale efficiently while keeping customer experience high and costs low.

This was no different for Psycho Bunny, the vibrant menswear brand known for its edgy twist on classic styles and its iconic skull-and-crossbones rabbit logo. As the company grew, so did the challenge of maintaining top-notch customer support without skyrocketing overhead costs.

"As we continue to grow this multi-million dollar company, the most important thing is maintaining or improving our current KPIs and CSAT, but without raising our customer support overhead. And being able to maintain this for the next 5–10 years."

—Tosha Moyer, Senior Customer Experience Manager at Psycho Bunny

Recognizing the need for innovation, the team turned to AI for a solution, specifically through Gorgias. Quickly after setup, the team began trialing AI Agent and named it Lisa.

Gorgias’s conversational AI tool, AI Agent, is an extension of your team. Just like a new support agent, AI Agent can:

• Learn all your support processes and policies
• Answer tickets in your brand’s tone of voice
• Perform Actions in Shopify and other tools for full resolutions
• Escalate tickets it cannot confidently answer

For Psycho Bunny, AI Agent quickly became a vital member of the team, resolving 26% of customer tickets with lightning speed—99.4% faster than human agents. 

By handling repetitive questions like order status and returns, Lisa freed up human agents to tackle more complex and high-value customer interactions.

One of its standout features is its ability to respond with empathy and personalization, reflecting the specific information customers provide. 

"We love the empathy in AI Agent’s responses," said Mary Mundy, Technical Support Specialist at Psycho Bunny. "Replacing a generic automated reply with a response that identifies the issues and has empathy, while communicating the key information the customer needs, is awesome."

The impact was immediate and impressive. Lisa answered queries 10 times faster than the team average, typically resolving tickets in under 2 minutes compared to the 4+ hours it took human agents.

Within the first two months, AI Agent shot to the top of Psycho Bunny’s customer support leaderboard for first response and resolution times, all while generating higher CSAT scores (4.67) than the team average (4.6). 

💡 Pro Tip: Give your AI Agent some personality to match how your human agents speak. Go to AI Agent > Settings tab, and in the Tone of Voice menu, choose from Friendly, Professional, Sophisticated, or Custom tones.

Kirby Allison generated 46% more sales from answering pre-sales questions

Kirby Allison, the luxury shoe and garment care retailer, has been a staple for well-dressed customers since 2011. However, their growing success came with a hefty challenge: an overwhelming influx of customer support inquiries.

With just two dedicated team members handling a surge of repetitive questions and manual processes, Kirby Allison’s customer support team was stretched thin. 

The pressure was on Addison Debter, Head of Customer Service, who not only managed customer queries but also juggled inventory management, product information updates, and website development.

"We were inundated with simple, repetitive questions: 'Where is my order?' 'What kind of shoe polish do I need?' We had to keep repeating similar answers to similar questions. And we were doing the exchanges and returns manually, one by one. We were losing so much time. We couldn't follow up with customers as quickly as we wanted," Addison shared. 

The team wanted a better way to handle these tickets, so they switched from Zendesk to Gorgias, specifically for the automation features.

"Our favorite features are definitely Flows and Article Recommendations," Addison said. "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."

Flows allow you to display up to six commonly asked questions directly in your chat widget. If a customer clicks on one of those questions, they’re redirected to articles from your knowledge base where they get the answer quickly. It’s an entirely self-serve experience.

Auto responses have also been impactful for this team. These work by using Rules to automatically reply to emails and messages based on the context of the customer's message.

The results? Within just two months, Kirby Allison saw a 23% increase in conversions and a staggering 46% boost in sales from support. 

Automating responses to pre-sales questions freed up the team to engage in conversations that led to sales, improving both revenue and efficiency.

💡 Not sure which FAQs to include in your Chat? Check out our list of 50+ FAQ templates here.

Boost holiday efficiency with 69% faster resolution times

The holidays are always difficult for support teams. The stakes are high, and so is the influx of support tickets.

Thankfully, customers can get the answers and guidance they need faster and more easily via self-serve order management, Flows, and AI-driven Article Recommendations.

Shinesty, the brand that’s all about making the world take itself less seriously, started out selling wacky vintage suits. Nowadays, they’re best known for their men’s underwear range, including the signature Ball Hammocks, which promise booty bliss and scrotal serenity. 

Shinesty also offers a subscription service, delivering a fresh pair of underwear each month with exclusive prints and discounts.

As with many ecommerce brands, Shinesty’s peak sales period spans from Black Friday through Christmas. The year-round customer support team of three builds up to 20 agents during the holidays to handle this surge.

For the 2023 holiday season, Molly Kerrigan, Senior Director of Retention, aimed to boost efficiency through automation. The goal? Help the CX team work smarter, not harder, and maintain their stellar customer satisfaction without increasing headcount.

“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 emphasized.

The team was swamped with repetitive questions about order status, discounts, and account management—all important queries but ones that don’t necessarily build customer relationships. Self-service solutions seemed like the answer, but previous tools struggled with Shinesty’s subscription model complexities

“Other tools required a high level of customization to handle the subscription element. But Gorgias AI Agent has been straightforward,” said Molly. 

After seeing the impact early, Molly and her team doubled down on optimizing their use of AI Agent:

• One-step Flows offer customers instant answers to common questions. When customers ask questions in Chat, AI checks Shinesty’s Help Center for relevant articles and shares them, often resolving the query without agent interaction. 
• Multi-step Flows guide shoppers through a more interactive experience for picking the right undies, managing their subscriptions, and applying discounts.
• Self-serve order tracking and management have become extremely popular. Customers can get instant updates on their orders and report issues through the Help Center or Chat.

These automations are accessible via Chat, the Help Center, or the Contact Form, giving customers fast answers without needing to speak to an agent.

📚 Read more: Offer more self-serve options with flows: 10 use cases & best practices

Shinesty’s Flows are so effective that many have an automation rate of over 90%, meaning they resolve customer inquiries 90% of the time without human intervention. 

AI Agent helped Shinesty significantly save on recruitment, training, and overtime costs. Shinesty’s first response time has dropped by 65% and resolution time by 69%. This has resulted in the fastest resolution times Shinesty has ever seen, with the smallest CX team they’ve ever had—just five agents for the 2023 peak season, compared to 20 in 2021 and 12 in 2022.

Why you need a knowledge base for automation

Today, shoppers expect a high-quality shopping experience, and we know that they love having the power to solve problems on their own, on their schedule. In fact, 84% say a company's customer experience is as important as its products and services.

While we’ve seen how AI Agent can help you meet those expectations, a core component to making all of the flows work effectively is a customer knowledge base. This is crucial for any effective customer support automation strategy. Why? 

A few reasons:

• Customers get the answers they need quickly and easily, leading to a better overall experience.
• By deflecting common queries to the knowledge base, your support team can focus on more complex issues, improving efficiency.
• Providing detailed product information helps customers make informed purchase decisions, leading to higher conversion rates.
• Educated customers are less likely to make returns, saving your business time and money.

A knowledge base is an interactive portal that connects your customers to both sales and customer service. That means making it easy for them to find answers before making a purchase and helping them troubleshoot any possible issues afterward.

Here’s a helpful example from BrüMate 

This brand’s Help Center shines with its customer-focused design. 

At the top of the page, it addresses common questions like returns policy and product compatibility, allowing customers to find answers quickly without scrolling. To enhance the shopping experience, BrüMate offers an interactive quiz that guides customers to the perfect product, saving them the hassle of extensive research. 

The Help Center also includes easily accessible links for package tracking and returning to the main site, with a chat bubble for immediate assistance. When the customer service team is offline, customers can still access helpful articles.

💡 Did you know? You can teach AI Agent information from specific URLs. Simply go to AI Agent > Knowledge > Public URL sources.

“We’ve started pushing people towards resources that are in our Help Center. We're trying to help our customers self-solve.”

—Colin Waters, leading at The Feed & former Associate Director of Customer Experience at BrüMate

Automate 50% of support volume in 50 days

By integrating AI into your customer support strategy, you can significantly reduce your team's workload. Gorgias AI Agent is proven to be able to handle 30% of inquiries autonomously within just 30 days. 

Curious about how conversational AI can benefit your business? Book a demo to learn about the advantages of AI Agent and see firsthand how they can transform your customer support operations.

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While new customer acquisition is always going to be the most important driver of business growth, it’s important to keep existing customers coming back for more. Good customer retention helps brand reputation—which is itself important for new business growth—while making your overall marketing program more efficient. 

Paid social media advertising is one of the most powerful customer retention tools that brands have at their disposal. In this blog, we’ll break down: 

• Why social retention is essential 
• How to build social retention audiences 
• Ways to craft effective retention campaigns 
• How to validate retention success 
• What to avoid when targeting retention audiences 

Let’s get started. 

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The importance of social media in customer retention 

Put simply, if you don’t use social media to stay top-of-mind for your existing customers, your competitors will. Competitor conquesting is a very real part of paid social strategy, and competing brands will always try to woo your existing audience, often with an appealing deal or offer. Retention strategies, in part, are a way to defend your brand from those encroachments. 

On top of that, customers often need a reminder. Even if they love your brand and products, they aren’t going to be thinking about them all the time, so it’s on you to do a little of the lifting for them. It’s important to pop out every now and then to show them what new items you have in stock, or to encourage their next purchase with a great sales offer. 

Lastly, every person’s preferred communication style is different. Not all customers read emails or marketing texts, but social usage is pretty ubiquitous: More than 7 out of 10 American adults use at least one social media platform, with Facebook (68%) and Instagram (47%) being the most popular. That makes paid social a good way to ensure your customers remain aware of your latest and greatest offerings when they’re passively browsing their preferred social apps. 

How much of your budget should go to retention?

Generally speaking, prospecting should always get the majority of your paid social marketing budget. At ADM, we encourage no less than 60%, and often more depending on a brand’s business model. That means retention campaigns should always represent a minority of your budget. 

This is for a number of reasons: One, most businesses can’t survive without constantly restocking their pipeline of new customers. And since it’s much harder to convince an unfamiliar user to make a purchase if they haven’t heard of your brand or enjoyed your products yet, new customers will typically require more touchpoints to produce a conversion—which means more budget. 

Retention campaigns, on the other hand, often work more efficiently. If you’re properly nurturing existing customers by offering perks like exclusive deals and early access to sales, they will keep purchasing. So deciding how big of a majority share your prospecting efforts get compared to retention shouldn’t be solely based on the volume of purchases you can get from each bucket: The cost of driving a purchase from each segment is a deciding factor as well. 

Targeting retention audiences

The march towards a cookieless future has made traditional remarketing less effective on social media. Custom audiences are still useful on Meta and other social platforms, however, which means retention campaigns should rely on first-party data. Your CRM lists, which use first-party data willingly provided by your customers, will be your most important resource—though Pixel-based past purchaser audiences can also be useful for speaking to existing customers who may have purchased more recently. 

The rise of AI-powered campaign types, like Meta’s Advantage+ campaigns, have also changed how marketers approach these audiences. These campaigns use algorithmic insights to deploy different ad creative based on inferences about the user and its own learnings about how different creative performs for different purposes. That makes it possible to utilize “blended” targeting—running prospecting, remarketing, and retention audiences all under the same campaign, provided you have appropriate ad creative options for each audience type in the campaign. 

The most important part of this “new era” is staying on top of the spend allocated to these segments. A strong retention audience can help lift ROAS, but brands still need to monitor where spend is going within those campaigns to ensure it isn’t all gravitating to one customer type. Putting spend caps on a retention audience, or using an existing customer percentage cap in Advantage+, can be good ways to regain some control over your audiences.

Tips for retaining customers on social media

There is no one-size-fits-all strategy for making sure customers come back for more, but there are some best practices to follow to set your retention efforts up for maximum success. Here’s what ADM recommends: 

Upsells/Next step products:

Create targeted ads featuring “next step” products in the customer journey. For example, a running apparel brand might advertise running shoes specifically to existing customers, as these items typically have a higher price point and require more research compared to items like tights or a running bra. 

First looks/early access to new products or releases: 

Utilize custom lists to incentivize first-time purchasers to make a subsequent purchase with a small discount. Offer VIP early access to sales for existing customers with steeper discounts, making them feel valued and encouraging repeat business. 

Special deals for existing customers only:

Target existing customers with exclusive deals on their favorite products in new colors or offer early access to new releases related to previously purchased items. This approach can enhance customer loyalty by making them feel special and appreciated. 

Creative messaging specific to retention audiences:

If it’s a retention ad, users should get the impression you’re inviting them back to buy again. That’s why it’s important to differentiate retention messaging from prospecting, with ideas like: 

• Back In Stock: “We made more of your favorite, get it before it sells out again.” 
• You Asked, We Listened: “You asked for this polo in green, we made it.” 
• Most Requested Feature: “The feature/upsell you’ve all been asking for is now here.” 

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Validating success

Because retention campaigns typically use first-party data, there’s often less guesswork involved when it comes to your results. The user is verifiably tied to the action they undertake, so marketers feel confident that they are accurately reaching existing customers they intend to. 

In order to validate success, it’s best to look at the return on ad spend (ROAS) you’re getting from your retention audiences relative to your prospecting efforts. Since existing customers already have brand affinity, they should be expected to purchase more while requiring a shorter journey from impression to purchase.

That means your retention audience ROAS targets should be as much as double those of prospecting. For example, if a comfortable ROAS for one of our client’s prospecting audiences was 1.5, we would consider targeting a retention ROAS goal closer to 2.5 or 3. 

Customer retention mistakes to avoid 

The only thing as valuable as knowing what to do is knowing what not to do. Here are some of the common customer retention mistakes we have seen around the industry: 

Running Generic Ads: Creating generic ads is the easiest way to lose with any segment. If your messaging isn’t tailored to your audience, it will always fall flat. This is especially true with retention audiences who already loyal customers don’t want to be spoken to like they’re brand new. 

Letting Ads Go Stale: An ad might work great the first time someone sees it. It might still make an impact the fifth or tenth time. But if your same existing customers are receiving the same message repeatedly—and not converting—then fatigue can have a negative impact on performance. Make sure you’re updating retention ads frequently enough that users don’t get annoyed by or immune to your message. 

Inappropriate Spend Split: As mentioned in the budgeting section, the wrong spend split and not tailoring goals to each audience can also be major hindrances to retention performance. It’s important to make sure you’re not neglecting your existing customers by putting too little budget towards them, but since existing customers are finite and new customers aren’t, it’s possible to reach oversaturation and diminishing returns if you put too much budget into those campaigns. 

Bad or Outdated Customer Data: Healthy, accurate customer data is key to ensuring you are reaching the right audiences. Using outdated customer lists for targeting can be a big mistake. When using CRM segments for retention campaigns, make sure you are updating those segments frequently (or using a third-party integration like Klaviyo) to ensure segments update automatically. 

Retaining customers is an art 

As we’ve laid out here, a lot goes into running effective customer retention campaigns on your paid social media. If you’re looking for an expert performance marketing agency that can assist in all facets of your online growth, reach out to our team at Accelerated Digital Media to set up an audit.

TL;DR:

• Gorgias views AI as an extension of CX teams, treating it like a human support agent by onboarding it with your policies, automating ticket handling, observing its response quality, and coaching it with continuous feedback.
• AI Agent uses a combination of GPT-4o, brand-owned data, and third-party integrations like Shopify to provide accurate responses while limiting hallucinations.
• AI Agent can fully resolve requests and perform actions to improve first response and resolution times without sacrificing support quality.‍
• Human feedback continuously refines AI Agent performance to keep it effective and on-brand.

Chances are, you’ve had at least one frustrating experience with AI in customer support. Even with 69.2% of customer support professionals using AI, you’re still skeptical about making AI a permanent part of your customer support operations.

At Gorgias, building AI has been a thoughtful process. We insist on only shipping AI features that improve customer experiences, not degrade them. 

To help you understand how we’re approaching AI, we’ll walk through the four pillars that ensure a positive AI experience for you and your customers: Onboard, Automate, Observe, and Coach.

• Onboard: Teach the AI your processes and brand voice.
• Automate: Let the AI start handling tickets in your inbox.
• Observe: Keep a close eye on the quality of the AI’s response.
• Coach: Give feedback to continually improve the AI’s accuracy.

Putting it all together: we view AI as the ultimate assistive tool for customer experience (CX) teams.

AI changes the way CX teams operate

Before diving into the four pillars, let’s set the stage. Two major changes have occurred in the past few years:

1. Customer expectations for instant answers across channels are growing.
2. We have the technology to answer hundreds of tickets simultaneously, each in <1 minute — without breaking the budget on uncapped hiring.

As AI removes the grunt work from support teams’ plates, repetitive tasks such as providing order status updates, processing returns, and answering frequently asked questions can be offloaded to AI.

AI can even handle the mental work of reading, summarizing, categorizing, prioritizing, and tagging, even when a human needs to step in.

Agents can then focus on higher-impact tasks, like speaking to VIP customers on the phone, offering new support channels, driving upsells and cross-sells, and much more. This is how CX teams evolve. 

Brands using Gorgias AI Agent in the alpha testing phase are already automating as much as 30% of email tickets. By the end of 2024, we envision over half of brands’ customer tickets to be handled by AI Agent.

The 4 pillars of AI at Gorgias

Our overall goal is to make CX tools, including AI, that are great for customers and their overall business goals. We follow four pillars when it comes to AI at Gorgias.

Onboard: Teach the AI your processes and brand voice

Bringing AI into your support team is like onboarding a new agent. Like any agent, AI should know:

• How to talk like your brand, using brand-specific voice and language
• Your policy, products, and FAQs
• How your helpdesk processes work, i.e. tagging tickets for organization
• Which topics should be handed over to a superior (in the case of AI, a human)

AI should model the most efficient support reps who know their brand inside and out — while being able to empathize with customers at lightning speed. That is the future of great customer service. 

How it looks in Gorgias

AI Agent’s main knowledge reference is your owned data, including your Shopify storefront and backend, Help Center articles, order data, brand voice, conversation history, and other URLs where your brand content is stored. 

When adding AI Agent to your Gorgias account, you can sync each of these resources to empower your AI Agent with the knowledge it needs to answer questions and resolve basic issues. 

To enhance AI Agent’s answering power, the Guidance feature allows you to provide detailed instructions on how AI Agent should interact with customers. 

While the prior resources are centered around brand knowledge, Guidance is more like team processes. You can instruct AI Agent to ask follow-up questions, confirm details, and treat customers one way or another depending on factors like whether:

• Their order was placed within the last XX days
• They have spent more than $XX with your brand
• They are domestic or international customers
• And so much more

Tosha Moyer, Senior Customer Experience Manager at menswear brand Psycho Bunny, highlights the value of our internal guidance feature. “Guidance is so important because we have a lot of internal processes that we do not need to be described in a customer-facing article, but we want AI Agent to be able to access that information and manage tickets accordingly.”

Last, you can instruct AI to speak in your brand’s voice. When setting up AI Agent, you can provide your team’s tone of voice guidelines, brand bible, and other resources to ensure your agent represents your brand identity. 

Automate: Let the AI start handling tickets in your inbox

AI can do so much more than restate your brand policies. At Gorgias, we believe AI should fully resolve inquiries — and that means taking action.

According to a report by Gartner, 82% of customers say quick resolutions influence their decision to stay loyal to a brand. When we empower AI to take action, customers have better experiences and are more likely to keep doing business with a brand.

How it looks in Gorgias

AI Agent uses the latest model of ChatGPT, 4o, combined with the content you already have to send human-like answers to customers.

But AI Agent doesn’t only regurgitate your Help Center content. It goes one step further by updating customers’ orders, changing addresses, sending order and return statuses, and more.

Native integrations with Shopify and other apps in the Gorgias ecosystem allow AI Agent to fully resolve basic inquiries by pulling customer-specific data and performing actions in other tools. 

Our goal is to make connecting these tools as simple as possible, minimizing the need for technical setups like configuring API calls. 

Of course, AI’s decisions on when to execute these Actions should come from your team. That’s why you can set up conditions for each Action, specifying when (and for whom) the Action can fire.

AI Agent includes a variety of pre-built Actions from popular ecommerce apps like Shopify, Recharge, and Loop Returns — with many more on the way. You can also build Custom Actions with any 3rd-party tool. 

Within two months, AI Agent outranked Psycho Bunny’s human agents’ resolution times. It resolved tickets in under 2 minutes, compared to the human average of 4+ hours. Customers even gave AI Agent a 4.67/5 CSAT score —  nearly 0.1 points higher than human agents’ average CSAT score.

Observe: Keep a close eye on the quality of the AI’s response

AI is a new technology — we humans are still building trust and comfort. In fact, only 3 in 10 Americans are able to identify AI use in digital use cases, according to the Pew Research Center. This suggests a lack of transparency in how companies use AI.

In a problem-solving service like customer support, AI’s role and decision-making should be transparent: Agents should know which tickets are handled by AI, what exactly the AI did, and why. 

How it looks in Gorgias

Agents can see the logic of AI Agent right in the ticket view.  This includes the knowledge source it used, the specific actions it took, and the exact responses it generated. All actions made by AI Agent are highlighted in purple or symbolized by the purple sparkle AI Agent icon.

Being able to discern AI responses from human ones allows brands to: 

• Ensure the accuracy of AI responses to provide speedy resolutions.
• Quickly correct AI missteps to maintain high standards of service.
• Build customer trust by being transparent about AI’s role in the customer support process.

We highly recommend nominating one human agent to review AI Agent’s responses. Set aside time each week to review to understand how it behaves, when it responds vs hands over, and the most common knowledge resources it pulls from.

Coach: Give feedback to continually improve the AI’s accuracy

Inevitably, AI won’t be perfect from day 1. Just like a new agent, AI needs coaching. That’s why the final pillar of our AI philosophy is improving AI’s knowledge and performance through coaching. 

When AI makes a mistake, you should have the power to correct it so that future errors are avoided. When AI acts correctly, you should also be able to encourage and reinforce its positive behavior. 

A continuous cycle of coaching helps AI become more aligned with your brand’s standards.

How it looks in Gorgias

Feedback is built into AI Agent. Every decision AI Agent makes can be rated with a thumbs-up/down system. Encourage AI Agent to continue making the same actions with a thumbs up, and change behavior with a thumbs down. 

You can see how AI handles every situation in detail, giving you full transparency. Reviewing these decisions leads AI to better align with your brand’s standards.

In addition, you can easily instruct AI Agent to pull from different Guidance instructions and Help Center articles or execute different Actions — with the easy ability to create or edit those resources in just a few clicks.

Empower your team with AI

At Gorgias, we designed AI to enhance your customer support experience. By leveraging the pillars of Onboard, Automate, Observe, and Coach, we ensure that AI Agent is an effective and reliable partner for your team.

With AI handling low-priority repetitive questions, your team can focus on creating more meaningful connections. This includes prioritizing VIP customers and escalated tickets, upselling, and engaging in higher-impact activities.

The future of AI at Gorgias is bright, with continuous improvements and new features on the horizon. Embrace the power of AI and see how it can transform your customer service team.

Book a demo today to experience the benefits of AI Agent for yourself.

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TL;DR:

• Revisit your data: Use data from historical support tickets and customer feedback to identify common concerns.
• Encourage real-time conversations: Use live chat support with specific CTAs to entice customers and provide personalized assistance.
• Optimize timely messaging: Deliver campaign messages at the right moment based on browsing patterns.
• Educate to reduce returns: Clear and thorough product information helps set accurate expectations, leading to fewer misunderstandings and returns.

In the competitive ecommerce landscape, turning browsers into buyers is like… trying to get a cat to take a bath (if you know, you know). You can activate various website campaigns until something sticks, but without relying on concrete data, you may never see the conversions you want.

This is where addressing pre-sales friction points comes into play. In other words, resolving concerns that customers face before making a purchase.

Once you’ve determined the problem areas, you can use Convert campaigns to lead customers to the checkout. These onsite campaigns have proven to enhance customer engagement, drive conversions, and significantly reduce return rates. 

Ready to gain new customers? Let’s deep dive into identifying pre-sales friction points and resolving them with Convert campaigns.

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How to identify pre-sales friction points

Creating campaigns that convert requires identifying your top pre-sales barriers. These are obstacles in the buying journey that prevent customers from proceeding with a purchase.

Some sale-preventing questions could be:

• How do I know which size will fit me best?
• What are the shipping costs and delivery times for my location?
• What is your return policy if the product doesn't meet my expectations?
• What are other customers saying about this product?

Proactively addressing these friction points can remove customers' hesitation when purchasing.

Take a look at three data sources to identify your brand’s specific friction points.

1. Historical Tickets: Review your past customer support tickets, especially those in the product or pre-sale categories, to find valuable insights into customer concerns. For instance, TUSHY, a leading bidet brand, discovered that many shoppers had questions about toilet compatibility. After they targeted this concern with a campaign, they reduced customer hesitation and boosted the conversion rate by 10%.
2. Customer Feedback: Surveys, reviews, and customer interactions are rich sources of data. Collecting and analyzing customer feedback can help identify recurring issues and areas where additional information or support is needed. 
3. Website Analytics: Use tools like Google Analytics to determine when visitors drop off or spend excessive time on certain pages. For example, if many visitors exit on the product detail page, they might need more information or reassurance before making a purchase.

3 solutions to reduce friction points using Convert

After you’ve identified the obstacles in customers’ buying journeys, the next step is to resolve them.

Targeted onsite campaigns with Convert are an excellent way to tackle these issues. 

Here are three effective strategies to address common pre-sales friction points and enhance the shopping experience for your customers.

Solution #1: Use real-time messaging on the cart page

As of 2024, 70% of customers worldwide end up abandoning their online shopping carts. Price, value, competitors — there are many reasons why customers choose not to checkout. The solution is to engage with customers in real time while deep in shopping mode.

Conversational campaigns are among the highest-performing Convert campaign strategies, allowing brands to address customer questions and provide personalized assistance instantly.

TUSHY enhances product education by launching an educational campaign for shoppers browsing their product pages. The campaign features a video demonstrating how easy it is to install their bidets, reassuring customers about the simplicity of using their products.

Tips for Effective Real-Time Engagement:

• Compelling Call to Action (CTA): A generic CTA like “Let us know if you have any questions” is good, but specificity can resonate more with shoppers. For example, if you sell linen pants, try a CTA such as: “Ask our team below if you have any questions on linen care instructions or how you can expect the fit to adjust after washing.”
• Bandwidth Management: If 24/7 live chat support isn’t feasible, consider implementing different versions of the campaign for business hours and off-hours. Offer options for future scheduling or provide offline resources like quizzes, guides, or FAQs to keep customers engaged and informed. Brands can also leverage AI Agent to handle email conversations.

Solution #2: Capture customer attention at the right time using historical data

Timing is a critical factor in the success of onsite campaigns. Messages should be delivered at the right moment to ensure visitor attention without interrupting their browsing experience.

Fortunately, with Convert, you can target an audience based on the time spent on a visit or specific page. 

Check out how cosmetics brand Glamnetic appeals to browsing customers who spend more than a minute on their page:

Strategies for Timely Messaging:

• Analyze Browsing Patterns: Study the typical browsing time on your target pages. Campaign messages should appear after the visitor has had enough time to process the content but before they move on to another page. This balance is essential to maximize engagement without causing frustration.
• A/B Testing: Experiment with different delay times and message formats to identify what works best for your audience. Continuous testing and optimization can refine your approach and improve overall campaign performance.

Solution #3: Proactively assist shoppers in the product page

Educating customers is about providing information and empowering them to make confident purchasing decisions.

If customers are hesitant to buy from you, consider creating educational campaigns for:

• Product installation
• Product use 
• Sizing/fitting guide
• Product comparison guide

Glamnetic runs focused educational campaigns to provide customers with helpful product info and tutorials, like how to apply lash extensions. These campaigns make shopping easier and answer customers' specific questions, helping them make better buying choices. 

The results? +27% higher conversation rate and +12% AOV. 

Convert campaigns success: compelling data

Numbers don’t lie, and these impressive data points highlight the impact of well-crafted educational campaigns:

• 6%+ Engagement Rate: Convert educational campaigns have an average engagement rate of 9.09%, compared to the 1-3% benchmark. This means customers are more engaged with relevant and informative content.
• 11%+ More Conversions: 31% of tickets in these campaigns are converted, far exceeding the industry benchmark of 5-20%. Educational content helps resolve customer queries and moves them closer to making a purchase.
• 3%+ Boost in Conversion Rate: Convert campaigns have an overall conversion rate of 12.52%, compared to the 3-9% benchmark. Educated customers are more likely to complete their purchases, boosting sales.

Experience the true meaning of conversions with Gorgias Convert

Making the leap from browser to buyer is no easy feat. By addressing the friction points in the buyer journey, brands can smooth the path for their customers. These strategies not only enhance the shopping experience but also build customer confidence and trust. 

The data speaks for itself: well-crafted educational campaigns drive higher engagement, better conversion rates, and significantly reduce returns. Remember, you're not just selling a product — you're providing a solution, building relationships, and fostering long-term success in your brand.

Let the campaigns do all the work, and book a demo with Gorgias if you’re not leveraging Convert campaigns already.

TL;DR:

• Automation increases repeat purchase rates, boosts response times, improves resolution times, and allows brands to scale faster while saving time and money.
• 94% of ecommerce experts agree that automation is going to be more important in ecommerce.
• Brands saw an 8-point increase in repeat purchase rates in 28 days by handling repetitive inquiries with automation.
• Gorgias users report 52% faster resolutions, reducing response and resolution times, making customers happier.

For most CX teams, budgets are getting tighter, but tickets are on the rise. 

With strapped teams and incoming customer issues, automation is becoming an ideal tool. 

94% of Gorgias customers agree, according to our recent survey. 

Supporting automation in your workflow now is a surefire way to set your team up for success. Let’s explore why we’ll see an AI and automation-driven future within CX. 

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Automation increases repeat purchase rates 

Happy customers are the best fuel for growth. Why? 

Happy customers want to come back to shop with you, and we know that repeat customers give long-term value to your brand. 

Findings from 12,000+ Gorgias merchants show that repeat customers: 

• Account for only 21% of customers but generate 44% of revenue
• Make up 46% of orders
• Generate 300% more revenue than first-time customers

Our research also found that it is five times less expensive for a brand to retain an existing customer than it is to source a new one. 

If you want to see improvement in your repeat purchase rates, automation is the way to go. Automation can handle repetitive inquiries from customers, like “Where’s my order?” so your team can focus on high-touch problems. 

Brands that use Gorgias to fuel automation see improved repeat purchase rates. Within 28 days, merchants who automated up to 20% of tickets increased their repeat purchase rate by 8 points.

Automation boosts response times

Gorgias's research found that 90% of U.S. customers expect an immediate customer service response. Of those customers, 60% want that response in 10 minutes or less.

A significant advantage of automation is that it effectively gives you a zero-second response time. When you trust automation to handle even a tiny percentage of your incoming tickets, you will see a decrease in your first-response time (FRT). 

After Shinesty implemented Gorgias AI Agent, the company saw a 65% boost in its first response time. This change in FRT made a monumental impact on the support team's workload.

Thanks to AI Agent, Shinesty is able to deflect 55% of incoming tickets with automation, giving CX agents more time to deliver personalized and proactive support to customers. 

On this improvement, Molly Kerrigan, Senior Director of Retention at Shinesty, says: 

“AI Agent has allowed us to focus on improving customer experience from the ground up, because we're not so deep in ‘ticket town.’”

Thanks to automation features from Gorgias, Shinesty gained the best of both worlds, providing excellent customer service while saving the budget. 

Automation improves resolution times

An added benefit of lightning-fast response times is getting to a resolution faster. This is more than just a nice-to-have — it makes your customers happier. 

As we said earlier, happy customers are more likely to shop again and cite an overall more positive experience with your brand. This is a full-circle moment that shows how a slight change in workflow can lead to significantly positive results. 

In 2022, Gorgias studied over 10,000 ecommerce brands to understand the connection between customer experience and growth. We found that lowering the average resolution time to under 6 hours gave companies a 2% boost in revenue. 

With Gorgias, customers see resolution times improve dramatically, with automatically handled tickets resolving issues 52% faster than those handled without.

That happened at Psycho Bunny, where the customer support team saw resolution times improve by a staggering 99.4% after implementing Gorgias AI Agent to automate 26% of customer tickets.  

With AI Agent to support the team, Psycho Bunny’s human customer support agents were free to spend more time on higher-value tasks beyond answering FAQs.

“Our customer support KPIs are already fantastic: we're already leading in the industry,” says Tosha Moyer, Senior Customer Experience Manager at Psycho Bunny. “To improve on that, we need AI — it’s not physically or financially possible with human agents alone.”

Automation allows brands to scale faster

Growth is always the goal, and incorporating automation into your existing CX workflow is a tool for achieving that growth. 

Brands that use Gorgias's automation tools can successfully scale their customer service operations quickly.  

For example, just 30 days after deploying Gorgias's automation features, brands see an average 1% increase in CSAT. 

It's a small move in the meter that has a long-lasting impact on team morale, improved customer interactions, and a more positive experience for shoppers. 

Obvi relies on Gorgias’s automation features to efficiently handle 150+ tickets each day with a slim team. 

AI Agent manages about 27% of Obvi’s incoming tickets — which consist of low-priority, simple, or repetitive customer inquiries. This frees up the support team to answer complex tickets and drive sales, leading to an astonishing 10x boost in revenue over BFCM. 

Even better, Obvi was able to achieve all of this after onboarding Gorgias in just two weeks. 

“AI is going to help us transform ourselves into deeper thinkers by taking over simple, standardized functions,” says Ron Shah, CEO and Co-founder at Obvi. “In the ecommerce world, Gorgias is getting ahead with doing that for customer support — they’re the center of the AI revolution, and that is the standard customers are expecting.”

Automation saves time & money

Your team can focus on more meaningful work by automating responses to repetitive questions or low-priority tickets. 

Quickly solving a customer's problem also means they can get back to checkout faster. 

But remember, automation is a tool, not a replacement for human agents. Automation helps teams of all sizes drive value, gaining extra support without spending more overhead.

‎July turns to AI Agent to tackle 30% of incoming tickets, taking on the workload of three extra agents. 

In this case, the company has the demand to support a bigger team but not the budget. Automation helps July fill this gap to provide a seamless customer experience without overextending their human teammates. 

“We immediately deflected 450 tickets a month just by setting up some automated Flows,” says Alex Naoumidis, Head of Operations and CX at July. 

“Now, we don’t waste the customer or the agent’s time with basic questions that probably don’t require any human interaction.”

Gorgias AI Agent: Your solution to an automated future

Gorgias is leading the revolution in conversational AI for ecommerce.

Features like our AI-generated Help Center, AI Agent, Flows, and Quick Responses allow brands to autonomously answer customer questions and track and measure AI-customer interactions to create more meaningful customer experiences and transform how support is delivered. 

Start a free trial to see Gorgias AI Agent and automation features in action.

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Unfortunately, many shoppers struggle to find the information they need while shopping online, even when self-service portals should be standard, according to 88% of consumers.

At Gorgias, we focus on simplifying customer experiences with AI and automation tools. Our automation tool, Flows, is a self-service feature that delivers shoppers instant answers throughout the entire buying journey, whether it’s to find the right size or track an order.

Keep reading, and we’ll show you how to leverage self-service options at every customer touchpoint using Flows. We’ll start with 10 Flows examples from ecommerce brands, show you how to do it yourself on Gorgias, and then put all the learnings together with some best practices.

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What are Flows? 

Flows are designed to initiate simple interactions that quickly guide shoppers to the information or actions they need. They minimize website bounce rates and enhance automation rates for ecommerce customer support teams.

Flows enhance your website's chat by automating interactions with customers. They provide an immediate automated response with just one click or guide customers through a branching path that caters to their specific needs. This path could include multiple-choice questions or even prompt customers to log in and select an order.

Effective ways to use Flows:

• Sizing guide
• Returns and exchanges portal
• Warranty claim handler
• Free shipping checker
• And more

Read more: The types of Flow steps

10 powerful use cases for Flows

Flows are so versatile that they can be used for every type of shopping experience, whether a shopper has just discovered you or they’re already a dedicated brand advocate.

We’ll go through 10 use cases that could benefit from a Flow, show you how real ecommerce brands use them, and how you can make them yourself with Gorgias AI Agent.

1. Answer shipping policy inquiries

Provide instant answers to customers' shipping inquiries with an easy-to-access shipping policy Flow directly on your website. This Flow efficiently resolves questions about shipping times and fees, helping customers quickly go from browsing to buying.

Nomad states their shipping policy in a Flow that conveniently answers processing time, shipping time, and shipping rates:

Do it yourself on Gorgias

Gorgias has a templated Flow to get you started. Here's what a shipping policy Flow might look like:

2. Automate returns & exchanges 

If a customer isn’t satisfied with your product, don’t make it harder for them to return it.  A returns Flow not only clarifies your return policy to motivate a customer who's on the fence but also connects them directly to the right process to start a return or exchange. All they have to do is enter their order number and email, and they’re done.

No handling it on the agent side and waiting from the customer end.

Try out bag brand CALPAK’s returns Flow in the tour below:

Do it yourself on Gorgias

Gorgias has a templated Flow to get you started. Here's what a return and exchange Flow might look like:

3. Recommend products to browsing customers

A product-matching quiz can solve decision fatigue if shoppers are faced with multiple versions of a product — like a supplement for different concerns, beverage flavors, or makeup for different skin tones. 

Sol de Janeiro, the fast-growing body care brand, boasts shower gels, body creams, and fragrances of different scents and colors. To prevent customers from feeling overwhelmed, Sol de Janeiro offers product-matching quizzes.

For example, their What body cream is right for me? quiz asks customers about their main skin concern. If a customer’s concern is smooth skin, they’ll recommend a body cream supporting skin elasticity. If the concern is firmer-looking skin, they recommend a cream rich in antioxidants.

Here’s what the Flow looks like on Sol de Janeiro’s website:

Do it yourself on Gorgias

Gorgias has a templated Flow to get you started. Here's what a simple product recommendation Flow might look like:

4. Manage subscriptions in a few clicks

Seventy-four percent of customers forget they’re paying for a subscription, based on C+R Research. Keep customer relationships honest and show customers that they have full control over their memberships, whether they want to upgrade, downgrade, or cancel their subscription plans.

Even if you have a customer portal for managing subscriptions, not all customers will look for it on their own. A Flow can bridge this gap by guiding customers directly to the portal while significantly reducing the volume of subscription-related tickets in your inbox.

Online vet care service Dutch lays it all out with a subscription management Flow, providing customers with straightforward instructions: 

Do it yourself on Gorgias

Gorgias has a templated Flow to get you started. Here's what a subscription management Flow might look like:

5. Display your warranty policy

Big ticket purchases need extra support in case of defective parts. Tell customers you’ve got their back by displaying your warranty policy upfront. You’ll ease their concerns and earn their loyalty knowing their premium buy is protected.

Bidet brand TUSHY sells premium bidets. To provide similarly premium customer experiences, they have a 12-month guarantee on equipment and parts. They present their warranty policy Flow on their website:

Do it yourself on Gorgias

Gorgias has a templated Flow to get you started. Here's what a warranty policy Flow might look like:

6. Notify customers about product restocks

“Sold Out” or “Out of Stock” aren’t the nicest words to see on a product page, especially if you’re a repeat customer ready to buy your favorite product. To keep customers in the loop, create a Flow that lets them know the status of your products.

For the baby stroller brand Zoe, popular products sell out quickly. To efficiently manage customer inquiries, they created a When are you expecting a restock? Flow. It informs customers about product availability and also encourages them to leave their email address or SMS number. This ensures they can purchase a stroller as soon as it's back in stock and allows Zoe to connect with them for future marketing efforts.

Do it yourself on Gorgias

Here's what a restock notification Flow might look like:

7. Troubleshoot an order

Products may require additional assistance depending on their usage. These can be products like electronics, apparel, and furniture. If customers are asking the same troubleshooting question, it would be best to add a troubleshooting Flow.

Check out how CAKES handles product issues with a simple Troubleshoot Flow:

Do it yourself on Gorgias

Gorgias has a templated Flow to get you started. Here's what a troubleshooting Flow might look like:

8. Welcome new customers

Nothing beats a warm welcome, especially for new customers who are just starting their journey with your brand. A welcome Flow is essential for engaging these newcomers right from the start. It provides them with crucial product education and relevant information, setting the tone for a supportive customer relationship. 

Take a look at how Crunch Labs, STEM building kits for kids, assists customers with a welcome Flow:

Do it yourself on Gorgias

Here's what a welcome Flow might look like:

9. Ensure perfect product matches with a sizing guide

Apparel brands face frequent sizing inquiries that can lead to returns. A sizing guide Flow provides clear, self-service information upfront, reducing sizing issues. This Flow acts as a self-service tool that customers can use to find their correct size before purchasing. 

Here’s how gender-inclusive apparel brand Both& guides customers to the right size:

Do it yourself on Gorgias

Gorgias has a templated Flow to get you started. Here's what a sizing guide Flow might look like:

10. Answer pre-sales questions

Unanswered pre-sales questions can deter purchases. A pre-sales question Flow delivers immediate, thorough answers, leads to a boost in customer confidence, and reduces post-purchase dissatisfaction.

Organic soap brand Dr. Bronner’s provides shelf life information for all their products with a Flow:

Do it yourself on Gorgias

Here's what a pre-sales question Flow might look like:

Keep these Flows best practices in mind

Stick to 1-step Flows to maximize automation potential 

Single-step Flows are the most engaging Flows because there’s no opportunity for shoppers to drop off. Single-step Flows can link out to additional resources, like a Help Center article or a returns and subscription portal through tools like Loop Returns or Recharge. 

💡 Pro Tip: Keep Flows to a maximum of five steps. Any more and you're likely to lose customers’ attention.

Include shipping and returns policies in your Flows

Online stores’ top-performing Flows are almost always about shipping and return policies. Make sure to anticipate customer questions by creating a Flow for each policy, succinctly answering questions like:

Shipping Policy:

• How long does shipping take?
• How much does shipping cost?
• Where do you ship?
• Where is my order? (with a link to Order Management tracking if possible)

Return Policy:

• What is the return window?
• Cost of return shipping
• Condition item(s) must be in
• How do I initiate a return? (with a link to the Return Portal if possible)

Create Flows for each language

Flows will not appear for shoppers unless the language of the Flow matches the language of the shopper's browser — including regional languages. 

If a Flow is only in English (UK), it will not show up for American shoppers whose browsers are in English (US).

If you sell internationally, we highly recommend adding all possible languages to Flows, including regional languages.

Note: Gorgias Chat supports 15 languages, including English (US and UK), French (France and Canada), Spanish, Danish, Swedish, Italian, Dutch, German, Norwegian, Czech, Brazilian Portuguese, Japanese, and Finnish.

Read more: Multi-language support for Chat

Link to other self-service tools (like Loop, Recharge, Help Center, etc.)

Flows often automate interactions when they send customers to another page (like a Recharge login page or a Loop portal, or even sometimes a Help Center article). 

If a customer’s inquiry could be solved with one of these tools, include a link to the right page in the Flow’s automated answer.

Automate engagement with Gorgias AI Agent

Join brands like Shinesty that use AI Agent to transform their customer experience. By using our AI and automation features, Shinesty has been able to automate over 50% of their customer tickets. 

Book a demo now and be a part of the 15,000+ ecommerce brands using Gorgias to transform their customer experiences.

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TL;DR:

• The benefits of automating chat include reduced workload, round-the-clock support availability, multi-language support, FAQ resolutions, and a convenient customer self-service channel
• Use Gorgias Automate’s Quick Responses, Flows, Order Management feature, and Article Recommendations to provide a complete automatic chat experience
• Automated chat uses answers pre-set by you which means it cannot produce answers without your approval

Live chat users wait an average of 30 seconds before they get an answer. However, large language models like ChatGPT have flipped customer expectations with unbeatable rapid responses. 

Thirty-second replies may be possible for customer service teams who handle one chat conversation at a time — assuming they have deep product knowledge — but agents who handle multiple chats will be hard-pressed to beat that average.

Chat automation is the best way to offer instant support without an agent. Automating chat means customers get support 24/7 in multiple languages and relevant answers in seconds. More importantly, agents can provide more meaningful customer experiences because they don’t have to monitor chat.

Below, learn how to turn live chat into an automated channel in four steps with Gorgias Automate. Then, we’ll go over how three ecommerce brands overcame some of the most common chat challenges.

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The benefits of automating chat

Automating live chat support results in a win-win situation for agents and customers. These are the five instant benefits you get when automating chat. 

Benefit 1) Reduces agent workload 

Automated chat responses mean team members don’t need to operate chat unless customers specifically ask for human support. 

Using automation as your first line of defense means fewer repetitive tickets and more time for agents to take care of urgent, customer-specific inquiries.

Benefit 2) Empowers customers to resolve issues on their own

According to Tidio, around 73% of customers prefer to find answers on their own as opposed to getting them from a support rep. Automated chat provides easy-to-receive answers and is a simple way to let customers self-serve without the wait time. 

Listen to how shoe brand Merry People uses Gorgias Automate’s chat-based automation features called Flows to cut response time down by 60%:

‎Benefit 3) Delivers support 24/7

Having a live chat widget may be an excellent way to expand customer support, but its functionality is also limited by your business hours and agent availability. 

With automated chat, these concerns disappear since chat can remain active even when your agents are off the clock.

Read more: There’s more to chat than you think: debunking 5 chat myths

Benefit 4) Speaks in multiple languages

According to a survey by CSA Research, 40% of customers will not buy from websites in other languages. 

With multi-language automated chat, you don’t have to worry about losing prospective customers. Rather, it’ll be easier for you to turn website visitors into repeat shoppers.

Gorgias Chat is a multi-language chat solution that can serve shoppers from anywhere. Languages include English (US and UK), French (France and Canada), Spanish, Danish, Swedish, Italian, Dutch, German, Norwegian, Czech, Brazilian Portuguese, Japanese, and Finnish.

Benefit 5) Resolves frequently asked questions

Chances are, customers on chat will ask one of these questions: 

• Where’s my order?
• Do you take returns? 
• Do you ship internationally?
• What size should I get? 

If you’re used to manually responding to these questions, know that there’s a faster way. Once you’ve identified your brand’s most asked questions, you can automate the answers to them, eliminating the need to type out replies on chat.

How to automate chat in 4 quick steps

If you have chat on your website, you’re halfway there. The next step is automating it to start reaping the benefits. Here’s how to use Gorgias Automate to automate chat in four steps.

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Step 1) Resolve FAQs with Quick Responses

Automated chat’s main ability is to answer frequently asked questions. You probably know that tickets with FAQs can pile up extremely quickly, causing your agents to miss the important questions.

To automate FAQs, use Quick Responses. These are one-click Q&A scenarios displayed on chat for customers to quickly get the answers they need. You can activate up to six responses and may toggle questions on and off to save them for later.

💡 Pro Tip: Gorgias Chat is multi-language and automatically detects a shopper’s default language based on their browser settings. This way, you can provide global support without hiring additional agents.

Step 2) Simplify order management

A third of online purchases are returned which means agents ultimately spend time processing refunds. The most effective solution is to automate order management through chat so that agents can instead use the extra time upselling.

With Gorgias, you can provide a self-service returns portal through integrations like Loop. This allows customers to process returns on their own, making their shopping journey straightforward and strengthening their trust in your brand.

💡 Pro Tip: Always encourage exchanges by recommending products in a different size or variant or a product of a similar value. This way, customers can still experience what you have to offer without requesting a refund.

Check it out: Return policy template generator

Step 3) Provide personalized support with Flows

Flows are more dynamic than Quick Responses and let you create personalized and interactive conversations. The resulting answer or action of these Flows all depends on the customer’s input, enabling you to deliver answers for every type of shopper.

As the name suggests, Flows are based on a flowchart structure and are best used for questions that have multiple answers. Here are some ways you can use Flows:

• Product matching quizzes 
• Sizing guides
• Filing warranty claims 
• Scheduling services 

Step 4) Deliver detailed answers with AI-powered Article Recommendations

For more comprehensive answers, turn to Article Recommendations. When customers ask a question on chat, Gorgias AI finds the most relevant article to send. These articles are pulled right from your Help Center or customer-facing knowledge base.

To get Article Recommendations on chat, you’ll need to first populate your Help Center with articles your customers care about.

Here are some Help Center articles to get you started:

• Do you offer free shipping?
• How much does shipping cost?
• Do you ship internationally?
• What is your return/exchange policy?
• What do I do if I receive the wrong item in my order?
• How do I cancel my membership/subscription?

Related: How to optimize your Help Center for AI Agent

How 3 brands debunk automated chat myths

If you still have some hesitation about automating chat, it’s time to clear them up. Let’s take a look at real use cases and how three ecommerce brands have cleared up misconceptions about automated chat myths with Gorgias Automate.

Myth 1) Automated chat is complicated to set up

Solution: No coding or special add-ons are required to set up automated chat. 

With Gorgias Automate, you can set up Quick Responses, Flows, Order Management, and Article Recommendations in a matter of minutes. Each feature can be toggled on or off, helping you shorten setup time and offer support in whatever way is best for your brand.

Collagen supplement brand Obvi found Automate’s user experience to be intuitive, setting up chat just a few weeks before Black Friday–Cyber Monday. They were able to increase conversion rates (CRO) and earn $10,000 in revenue just by activating automated chat.

Here’s how Obvi’s CEO, Ronak Shah, benefited from using Gorgias Automate:

Myth 2) Automated chat increases your tickets

Solution: Automated responses deliver instant resolutions, which keep ticket volumes low. 

Tickets are only created when customers talk to live agents. This allows customers to solve issues on their own, unlike when using social media for support.

Underwear brand Shinesty uses Flows to address a variety of inquiries, from account registration to order tracking. Their Flows are so effective that 90% of the time, inquiries are completely resolved by automation. 

Here’s how Shinesty’s four-person team increases customer satisfaction scores with Automate:

‎Myth 3) Automated chat gives inaccurate answers 

Solution: Automation is customizable and acts on parameters set by you. 

Unlike AI chatbots or generative AI which produces responses through machine learning, automated chat uses responses defined by you. 

In Gorgias, you can customize Quick Responses and Flows with your brand voice in mind. This guarantees that customer messaging is always relevant, on-brand, and accurate. Chat cannot compose brand-new answers on its own. 

According to Alex Naoumidis, Head of Operations and CX at July, Flows helped their support team accomplish the work of three agents. They were still able to provide a human touch, resulting in 450 tickets deflected.

‎Support and sell more with Gorgias Automate

If the success stories of these brands have inspired you to upgrade your customer experience, it’s time to see what Gorgias Automate can do for you. 

Setup is straightforward — no coding needed — and you can start seeing improvements in your customer agents’ workflow and your customers’ satisfaction straight away.

Book a demo with Gorgias today and discover how chat automation can streamline your operations and increase customer engagement.

TL;DR:

• Automating customer experience (CX) can save costs, reduce agent burnout, and increase customer satisfaction
• A good website user experience consists of fast load times, informative product pages, mobile optimization, and guest checkout
• Automate CX by using automated chat, replacing email links with contact forms, updating your help center, and deploying onsite campaigns
• Do not overcomplicate the user journey by only providing automatic support — route back to human agents

Nowhere is the customer experience more important than on your website. CX is so much more than post-purchase troubleshooting. CX that grows your brand makes the entire buying journey as effortless as possible, from the first ad to the 10th item purchased.

Your website isn’t only the marketing team’s domain. Your support team’s input is crucial to ensure customers can find all the answers they need without waiting around.

With a better website experience for your customers, you enable more sales and reduce the repetitive inquiries for your agents.

Here are some tips to enrich your website with CX automations that will delight your customers and your team.

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Why automating CX is essential

With 63% of consumers expecting service agents to know their unique needs and preferences, your efforts should be focused on improving support speed and responsiveness — and that starts with automation. 

Here are the five benefits of automating your customer experience:

1. Cost efficient: Automating routine questions cuts down the cost of human labor, redirecting resources to more impactful areas of customer service.
2. Reduced workload for agents: Your support team can focus on more complex issues instead of spending time on questions that can be answered with automated replies.
3. Increased customer satisfaction: Automation provides fast answers, keeping the shopping experience uninterrupted.
4. Enhanced navigation and user experience (UX): A website optimized for automation is easier to navigate and shop from, and reduces cart abandonment rates.
5. Prevents support overload: Automation helps your agents from lessening their touchpoints with customers where it’s not needed, allowing customers to feel in control of their own journeys.

How website UX and CX work together

If done correctly, your website's UX should be so intuitive and smooth that shoppers barely notice it. For ecommerce stores, a well-thought-out website UX consists of everything from a logical menu to a straightforward checkout flow. 

Below, pay attention to the following website elements as they directly influence the buying journey and can impact customer satisfaction.

Informative product pages

Engaging and detailed product descriptions add substantial value by influencing buying decisions and simplifying the shopping experience.

Take a look at how Good Protein keeps descriptions engaging but short in three bullet points, includes social proof by displaying customer ratings, and provides flavor, size, and subscription options in one section:

Mobile optimization

According to Airship’s 11,000-respondent survey, 76% of shoppers shop through retailers’ mobile websites. With a significant portion of online sales coming from smartphones, it’s best to test your website on mobile devices. If users can’t complete a purchase through mobile, you lose out on a large fraction of sales.

Minimized distractions

Reducing distractions like unnecessary pop-ups and banners keeps the shopper focused on the main goal of conversion. Streamlining content to spotlight key campaigns or product launches can dramatically improve conversion rates.

Quick page load times

Fast-loading pages are crucial for keeping potential customers engaged. Delays can significantly deter shoppers, as studies show that even a one-second delay in page loading can reduce conversions by 7%.

Check out Google’s PageSpeed Insights to assess your website's performance.

Streamlined checkout process

Simplifying the checkout process and providing multiple payment options, such as guest checkout, removes common barriers to conversion by offering a convenient purchasing process.

Swimwear brand TRIANGL makes shopping easy and fast by adding a Quick Buy button to every product:

‎Exceptional customer support

Tools like live chat or help centers provide a portal through fast support. AI-powered support tools like Gorgias Automate combine automated responses with the option for human interaction, ensuring customer inquiries are addressed promptly.

This integration of website UX with automated customer experience strategies creates a more efficient, enjoyable, and productive shopping environment that exceeds customer expectations.

Related: Stop Marketing, Start Converting playbook

Implement these 5 strategies to prep your website for automation

Keeping your customer support options visible is the key to prepping your website for automation. 

Follow these five methods to provide easily accessible support routes, simplify communication, and help customers quickly find the information they need. 

1. Keep chat active 24/7

When you hear “chat,” you may think about not having enough bandwidth to offer live chat all the time. Well, that’s just a common chat myth. 

In fact, chat doesn’t require agents to operate 24/7. You can configure live chat to only be active during your busiest hours or even deactivate it altogether and replace it with automated FAQs to keep customer questions answered throughout the day. 

Here’s how ALOHAS keeps their chat running using Gorgias Automate’s Quick Responses:

‎Beyond automating common questions, chat can also accomplish other support-related tasks:

• Email Capture: When live agents aren’t available, automation can ask for customer emails so that their inquiries can be routed to your support inbox.
• Article Recommendations: Chat questions can be scanned and matched with the most relevant article, reducing the need to talk to an agent.
• Order Management: Automate WISMO requests with an order management portal right in chat. Customers can track, return, cancel, or report an issue on their own without waiting for an agent to do it for them.

Don’t forget that chat is one of the most visible components on your website. Make sure the chat dialog can be minimized and hidden to avoid disrupting the shopping journey.

2. Replace email with structured contact forms

Leaving your customer support email on your contact page is the equivalent of leaving plain URLs on your website — it’s disorganized and can attract spam like no other channel.

Contact forms are far superior to email links because they collect all necessary information (like issue type and contact information). This helps agents provide resolutions as efficiently as possible because tickets are already structured and include the necessary details.

For example, Gorgias Chat includes Offline Capture to collect customer inquiries while agents are offline. Gorgias Helpdesk then uses the structured information to detect customer intent, making interactions easier to manage.

3. Display your Help Center and contact form prominently

Make your Help Center visible no matter which page shoppers are on. Displaying important customer support resources like this in your website's header, footer, and various emails like marketing messages and order confirmations allows customers to self-serve, without having to contact a live agent.

With Gorgias, you can use one-page Help Centers to create a seamless experience from one page to another on your online store. This setup allows customers to quickly find the answers they need, improving accessibility while reducing the demand on your team.

Here’s what clothing brand Princess Polly’s one-page Help Center looks like:

4. Make sure your knowledge base is up-to-date and comprehensive

Updating your knowledge base, whether it's a Gorgias Help Center or another FAQ page, directly impacts the customer journey. Gorgias's AI Agent uses the Help Center as its primary source to autonomously handle over 30% of customer email inquiries, drawing on articles that cover necessary topics like shipping, orders, product information, and account management. 

To optimize your Help Center for AI, ensure your content is comprehensive and current, particularly in areas such as policies and product updates. All articles should be published, not saved as drafts, to be accessible to AI Agent. Regularly reviewing your articles encourages customer self-service and reduces reliance on agent assistance.

5. Maintain engagement with targeted campaigns

Targeted onsite campaigns on product pages educate customers and boost confidence, especially when tailored to your top-selling products. For instance, when items are out of stock, campaigns can redirect customers to similar products, as demonstrated by Glamnetic during their product launches.

Additionally, Gorgias Convert chat campaigns like those used by Manduka, which highlight product guarantees, provide valuable pre-sales information that mimics the support of a physical store.

Related: Convert Campaigns playbook

The 3 don’t s of website optimization

There are pitfalls to avoid when optimizing your website for better user experiences. Keep the user journey simple and always provide options for human assistance like live email or voice. Below are three key mistakes to steer clear of.

1. Don't complicate the user journey

The user journey includes all interactions from browsing to the post-purchase experience, and automation should make this process seamless, not hinder it. Avoid adding unnecessary steps or making critical information hard to find, as this can disrupt the shopping experience and force customers to seek help when it isn't needed.

For instance, include a guest checkout option on the checkout page to simplify purchases, and ensure that links to your Help Center or Contact page are easily accessible in the top navigation. 

Watch out for these common elements that can confuse the user journey:

• Complex navigation: A convoluted menu system can make it difficult for customers to find what they need.
• Hidden support information: Essential details like shipping costs and return policies should be visible and easy to find.
• Excessive pop-ups: Overloading pages with pop-ups can frustrate users.

2. Don't only provide automated support

Automation is valuable but don’t rely on it — it's still important to provide avenues for human assistance when needed. This includes support options like live chat, email, phone, and social media. 

The key is balance: make it easy for them to reach out to human support once they realize self-service options are insufficient. This might involve including contact options in a Help Center or contact page rather than displaying raw email addresses everywhere.

3. Don't forget to test regularly

Maintaining an optimized website requires data-driven testing and optimization. You can improve your website by following customer feedback and suggestions. Once changes have been applied, monitoring performance metrics and user behavior can ensure the user journey remains solid.

Metrics to track: 

• Cart abandonment rate: A high abandonment rate may mean that your checkout process is too complex, causing shoppers to exit early.
• Page load time: Slow-loading webpages negatively impact the customer experience. 
• Bounce rate: Difficult navigation, slow loading times, or an unattractive layout are all factors that contribute to a high bounce rate. 
• Conversion rate: Conversion rate indicates which areas of your website are performing well and which are not. Pay attention to conversion rate to prioritize areas for improvement, such as optimizing landing pages or adjusting the user journey.

Automate 30% of CX for exceptional customer experiences

July, a leading luggage brand, uses the power of Gorgias Automate to deliver unbeatable user experiences. With Automate, routine tasks typically handled by level 1 agents are accomplished automatically. Agents are then able to free up valuable resources to focus on more complex inquiries.

Ready to elevate your CX game? Book a demo today and unlock the full potential of automation for your business.

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