How to Drive Growth with an Automated Subscriber Journey
TL;DR:
- Subscribers drive 3x more value than one-time buyers. Subscriptions create ongoing relationships that build loyalty and increase lifetime value.
- Make subscription opt-ins easy and appealing. Use tools like default subscription settings, upsell widgets, and A/B testing to encourage conversions at every step of the journey.
- Retain subscribers by treating key drop-off points as recovery moments. Use win-back campaigns, payment recovery, and personalized support to reduce churn.
- Meet customers where they are with AI-powered tools. Solutions like Gorgias Shopping Assistant and Recharge Concierge SMS provide real-time, contextual support and subscription management.
Vanessa Lopez, VP of Customer Experience at Recharge, recently led a workshop that outlined how brands can transform one-off interactions into rich subscription journeys that increase opt-ins, reduce churn rate, and boost lifetime value (LTV).
Here’s what we learned.
What are the different subscription types?
There are many different ways that you can offer subscriptions. Here’s a rundown of the most common.
Subscribe and save
The most common subscription type is “Subscribe and save.” Instead of making a one-time purchase, customers subscribe to a product and receive it on a different cadence, whether that's weekly, bi-weekly, monthly, or quarterly.
For example, Apothékary offers a Subscribe and Save option for its herbal remedies where shoppers get a discounted rate if they subscribe every one, two, or three months.
Subscription boxes
Subscription boxes ship to customers monthly. Shoppers subscribe over a course of time, like every quarter, six months, or year. For example, CrunchLabs offers a prepaid Build Box option for kids and adults who want to tinker like engineers.
Meal kits
Meal kits are weekly food delivery services that either include pre-packaged ingredients to cook a dish or fully cooked dishes.
Surprise and delight
For brands that are selling higher-cost or unique items, subscriptions to purchase the same product over and over might not be the best way to gain subscribers.
The better option is a curated box, also known as a "subscribe and delight" or “mystery” box. It’s a unique way to cater to customers who prefer trying out different products, rather than receiving the same product on a recurring basis.
For example, premium snack box brand Bokksu specializes in shipping Japanese snacks. Rather than packing the same treats each month, the brand curates different items with every package. This creates both excitement and differentiation each time a customer gets a delivery.
How to drive revenue growth with subscriptions
- Turn interactions into journeys
- Create multiple touchpoints for conversion
- Retain subscribers over time
- Meet customers where they are
- Approach AI as a solution-driver
Subscriptions are the original relationship between a brand and its customer. In fact, subscribers drive three times more value than the one-time buyer. That's because a one-time purchase is really just that—a moment in time—while subscriptions are a journey.
“When you have a customer and they subscribe, you get to see that moment they fell in love with your brand,” says Vanessa. “You get to see when they have those moments where they made you a part of their routine. Every time they engage with you and purchase something new, you learn their rhythms. You learn their preferences. It's impossible to do that with one-time buyers for the most part.”
Subscribers drive three times more value than the one-time buyer, and that's because a one-time purchase is really just that—a moment in time—while subscriptions are a journey.
1) Turn interactions into journeys
Subscribers can only drive growth if you can get those customers to subscribe in the first place. This is what Recharge does: it takes customer interactions and turns them into a customer journey, allowing you to act on those signals in a personal way at scale.
It all starts the moment a shopper browses a product. Each touchpoint is an opportunity to turn that shopper into a subscriber—from the product description page to the subscription widget to checkout.
Vanessa’s tip? Make subscriptions the default option on a product description page. When you present customers with the better and more convenient option, and they see this information at the right time, they're more likely to subscribe.
Put it into practice 💡
Now, it’s time to test. Here's a checklist you can follow to A/B test your subscription journey:
- Test the small details, like button styles, CTA copy, subscribe and save benefits, and their positions on the page.
- Compare different value propositions and discounts.
- Analyze the difference in opt-in and subscriber rates and product performance, and keep iterating.
When customers see the right information at the right time, they're more likely to subscribe. That's because it's the better and the more convenient option.
2) Create multiple touchpoints for conversion
Let's say you have a customer who starts on a product description page. They decide not to subscribe—no worries. You can catch them in the cart.
When they add a product to their cart, you can upsell them with different subscription benefits so they know what they're missing out on. Do it again when they review their cart, and then again when they go to checkout, showing them complementary products that they might be interested in.
And don’t forget to take advantage of that post-purchase "your order is confirmed" high—offer customers cross-sell products, complementary products to their order, or similar items to what they've purchased in the past.
By creating multiple touchpoints for conversion, you’ll increase the possibility that they’ll make a purchase.
Put it into practice 💡
Set up automations in the subscription tool –– like Recharge –– you use. That means adding on upsell and cross-sell tools, and perfecting the times they trigger for customers. Test out different copy and cross-sell/upsell offers to see what resonates the most.
3) Retain subscribers over time
Just as important as acquiring customers is keeping them around.
The Recharge team names three core customer moments that might actually diverge from what brands expect to happen in the customer journey:
- When a payment fails
- When a customer cancels their subscription
- When a customer skips—and keeps on skipping
And while they might seem like hiccups in the process, these moments are actually hero moments. They’re moments that give you the opportunity to actually win those customers back.
Put it into practice 💡
- Prevent cancellations by addressing individual customer concerns at scale with a help desk like Gorgias.
- Set up win-back campaigns. Recharge found that these types of campaigns can convert up to 35% of subscribers by giving them a compelling personalized offer and a straightforward reactivation.
- Recover failed payments to ensure small issues –– like billing and shipping address inconsistencies –– don’t get in the way of your sales.
- Connect all of your customer touchpoints with rewards and referral products.
4) Meet customers where they are
For browsing shoppers, educational and informational resources are the best way to meet their needs, hesitations, and objections.
For regular subscribers, it’s providing them with direct control over their subscription, whenever they want.
The goal is to reach customers where they already are and respond instantly to their needs in a personalized way.
Gorgias’s Shopping Assistant does exactly that—meeting customers where they are by answering customer questions and even initiating conversations based on browsing activity.
This AI sales tool detects a shopper's intent, cart contents, and browsing behavior to initiate conversations, recommend products, and even send discounts as they make a decision.
Modern bidet brand TUSHY saw a 20% increase in chat conversion rate after implementing the tool.
Put it into practice 💡
Decide how you’d like to leverage AI and automation to meet customers where they are. That might be by providing a phone number that customers can interact with via SMS, or implementing a tool like Shopping Assistant to strike up conversational AI chats. Using AI and automation will help you better meet your customers where they are and at scale.
5) Approach AI as a solution-driver
Rather than using AI to come up with problems your brand can solve, Vanessa recommends looking at the challenges your brand has already seen with subscriptions.
The key is to view AI as a tool that drives three core areas:
- Scaling your business without adding headcount
- Reducing churn
- Increasing how much customers spend with you over their lifetime
Vanessa says the most effective strategy starts with leveraging AI-powered tools, such as Recharge’s Concierge SMS.
Typically, SMS tools use template auto responses like, "How do you want to manage your subscription? Type one to cancel, type two to skip." But these aren’t compelling enough for customers to respond. What if they want to do something that doesn't fit in those two options?
Concierge SMS enables brands to build stronger relationships with their customers through conversations powered by pre-trained AI. It personalizes SMS support with customers, so relationships can expand into loyalty.
Put it into practice 💡
Implement an AI-driven subscription management tool that allows customers to interact and ask questions via SMS, rather than only being able to confirm or deny upcoming shipments.
Grow your brand sustainably
Gorgias and Recharge are a powerful combination when it comes to integrating subscription management with top-notch customer support.
With Recharge, efficiently convert one-time buyers into subscribers, retain subscribers through intelligent interventions, and connect every customer touchpoint into one cohesive journey.
With Gorgias, sell more and resolve support inquiries with conversational AI.
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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.
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Featured articles
How to Use CX Data to Improve Marketing, Messaging & Conversions
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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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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Further reading
3 Ways to Reduce the Load On Your Customer Support Team
By Ross Beyeler, Founder and CEO of Growth Spark
Often, a support team answers the same questions over and over…
Or issues returns repeatedly for reasons that could be addressed internally…
Maybe the sizing isn’t well represented, the fulfillment house has mixed up SKUs, or your product images aren’t clear or detailed enough.
If you can lighten the load for your customer support team, you can save significant time and costs, while at the same time improving the buying experience for your customers.
The goals here are to:
- Reduce repeat inquiries
- Shorten first response times
- Speed up problem resolution time
- Lower overall customer care costs
The key is to address your customers questions and issues before they ask your support team. Here's how you do that:
A Better FAQ Page
91% of shoppers would gladly try to answer their own questions first using an online knowledge base or FAQ page before reaching out to a customer service team, according to a survey by Coleman Parkes for Amdocs.
This means that your FAQ page is a huge opportunity to answer your customers’ most common questions and issues so they don’t need to reach out to customer support.
FAQ information typically falls into one of two distinct buckets: product-specific and buying process.
Product Specific: Common questions about individual products may be better off addressed on the product pages rather than in a broad FAQ page. You may need to provide clearer or more comprehensive product descriptions, or consider more or better photography to clear up common product questions.
Buying Process: Questions about shipping, returns, policies, and other operational topics are best addressed in a single easy-to-find page like an FAQ.
When is the last time you cross-checked the content of your FAQ page with the data from your customer support team?
There are many customer support tools like Gorgias that will make it easy for you to track the reasons behind why users submit a ticket.
Once you begin tracking the topic, or tag, of your questions, you can easily identify the questions that top the list, and permanently add the responses to the FAQ.
Bonus points: Prioritize the FAQ page based on the frequency of each customer service inquiry so that the most relevant answers are closer to the top.
Your next step is to set up a monthly meeting with your head of customer service to review the feedback coming in from your customers and ask yourself:
- What are the most frequent topics of support inquiries?
- What issues take up the majority of your support team’s time and resources?
- What issues are emerging or could emerge do to seasonality or new initiatives within our company?
Remember, an FAQ page is:
- Easy to find
- If shoppers can’t find it quickly and easily, they won’t use it and all your work answering all of their questions will go to waste. If you have an answer on your FAQ page, yet people are still inquiring, they might be having trouble finding the page.
- Searchable
- Include a search bar so that shoppers can easily find the answers for their specific problem without having to read through everything else.
- Easy to read
- Use simple, conversational language. Technical slang gives most of us a headache, and leaves most people reaching for the closest live human to explain it in terms they understand.
For more on FAQ pages, check out this Shopify article.
Now that you have your FAQ page squared away, be sure to track visitors to the page and note any changes in volume, and look for changes in your support ticket volume around those related questions.
Remember: You should never answer a support ticket only by referencing your FAQ page. Always include the information they are asking for directly within your response. After that, let the customer know that there is an FAQ page for more information, to avoid future tickets.
See Where Your Customers Get Tripped Up
Have you watched actual customers explore your online store to see where they stumble?
Customer behavior tools like Hotjar make it easy to review how customers navigate your website. One way that customer behavior analysis tools can help you understand exactly how your customers are using your site is with heat maps.
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A heat map is a visual representation of the most popular (hot) and unpopular (cold) elements of a website page. They can give you an at-a-glance understanding of how people interact with individual website pages. Elements that get the most views and interaction are shown in red, so you can immediately spot what your users are clicking on. Those that most people tend to ignore appear in blue.
Once you know which parts of your website are most (and least) useful to shoppers, you can tweak those elements to make the on-site experience easier to use.
Customer behavior data can inform on-site improvements, such as:
- Identifying any “dead” pages so you can remove them
- Recognizing “deep” content that requires too many clicks for customers to reach, and making it more visible or accessible
- Ensuring that customers can easily see and access main links, buttons, and CTAs
- Making sure that important elements are getting the attention they deserve
- Checking whether any static elements are getting clicked too often, and adjusting them to clarify that they aren’t a linked object
It may require some A/B testing to ensure your changes deliver results.
Learn from Returns
According to a recent Shopify post, during the holiday season, Ecommerce returns surge to 30 percent (or as high as 50 percent for “expensive” products).
Return deliveries are estimated to exceed $550 billion by 2020 in the U.S. alone.
Many of those returns are probably associated with a customer support ticket - whether customers are asking questions about the product they received, or need help processing their return.
Anything you can do to reduce the number of returns - and the number of customer support requests associated with them - can mean a huge boost for your bottom line.
So, what causes returns?
Returns can often be traced back to a disconnect between customer expectations and the reality of the product once they receive it. It may be that:
- It doesn’t fit the way they expected
- It doesn’t look or feel like they thought it would
- Delivery came later than they expected (or not at all)
All of these problems (and more) can be prevented in advance with improvements to your website content.
Sizing Issues
While fit can be a difficult factor to get right online, including detailed dimensions is a big step in the right direction. Some apparel merchants are taking sizing one step further with interactive fit guides, like the one above Nudie Jeans, which uses an app integration called Virtusize:.
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Appearance Issues
Poor quality or not enough product images can make it difficult for customers to accurately understand what your product will look like when it arrives at their home.
You can easily reduce your return rate by making sure your product photography is clear and high-quality, and illustrates all of the primary parts of each product. More complicated or detailed products can also benefit from a video or 360-view.
Detailed product descriptions can also help address confusion about product appearance and feel. Sol de Janeiro does this with a multi-tab product content area that defaults to a brief product highlight, with additional tabs to provide more details.
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Fulfillment Issues
Are orders not being fulfilled to the right customers?
Are deliveries taking longer than they should?
Analyzing your fulfillment data and using that information to make adjustments to your website content - such as average delivery times - can help eliminate a source of customer support calls.
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For example, maybe you want to be able to deliver every order within two days, but your current fulfillment resources simply can’t make that happen consistently. Being up-front and clear about realistic delivery times (like The Black Dog does in their Shipping FAQ page, above) will help set customers’ expectations appropriately.
Bonus: To get setup on two day shipping, consider our partners at ShipBob.
Final Thoughts
Continue to study your on-site data using Google Analytics or Shopify’s native analytics and look for high exit % pages. These may be pages where prospects or customers are running into a dead end and being forced to turn to support.
You can also create a goal in Google Analytics that corresponds to contacting support, then reverse the user path to determine which pages lead to them submitting a ticket / hitting that “contact” or “support” button.
Chances are, there are a few areas of “low hanging fruit” that can make significant improvements to your customer support load once you find them and address the root concerns. And with those small fixes, you could see a big impact on your bottom line, and a better on-site experience for your customers.
Read more about customer support on our trusted partner’s site, Growth Spark:
Customer Loyalty: Bringing The Human Touch Back To Ecommerce
Ecommerce has become awash with digital bells and whistles. Technology has no doubt enhanced the shopper experience but the rapid rate of digital innovation has had a profound effect on customer expectations. By 2020, customers expect brands to automatically personalize experiences to address (not just predict) their current – and future – needs.
But, although customers expect more in terms of tech, they still crave the person-to-person connection. In fact, 75% of consumers want to see more human interaction, not less.
At LoyaltyLion we know that bringing back this human-touch depends on providing a good customer experience. Clearly, a worthwhile cause, as studies show that 86% of shoppers who received great customer care are more likely to repeat purchase. By going the extra mile to treat your shoppers as people – rather than numbers – you can secure a faithful, constant customer base.
Here are three insights that will help you bring the human touch back to your online store.
Use Data To Personalize Communications
Each customer is unique. They interact with your brand in different ways, all while having their own personal needs and desires. When a customer feels that you have taken the time to understand their unique requirements, they will trust and value your brand more.
Data and personalization go hand in hand. By using member information to learn how customers engage with your loyalty program, you can understand their feelings towards your brand and react accordingly. Being data-driven is the key to true e-commerce success.
One golden opportunity to personalize your communications this is through targeted emails. Use your Gorgias dashboard to identify past interactions and purchases, as well as a customer’s loyalty points balance. You can then use that member data to create bespoke rewards that you can send right to your customer’s inbox.
Maybe you’ve noticed that they keep eyeing a specific product range? If so, give them discounts on new products in that collection to tempt them to back to buy again. Or perhaps you’re aware that they’re just a couple of points away from their next reward. Give them a little nudge to return and receive their reward sooner. For example, LoyaltyLion user Dr. Axe alerts customers when they have rewards waiting to be claimed, and suggests a particular product to redeem that reward on.
Find Ways To Delight Customers
Shoppers love to feel that they’re your only priority and that you care about them on a personal level. They want to feel valued as individuals, not just another number in an extensive database.
Loyalty strategies should incorporate ways to surprise and delight customers. For example, making it easy to offer customers points on their birthday or taking a moment to personally congratulate them when they’ve made a certain number of purchases with you. Beauty Bakerie, for example, offers their customers 500 points on their birthday.
With Connectors for Shopify Flow, it’s easy to use LoyaltyLion and Gorgias to set up triggers that automatically create tickets on a customer’s birthday, reminding a representative to get in touch. It’s the thought that counts and going the extra mile will ensure your customers trust and remember you. Plus, you’ll feel good about it too!
Convert Negative Experiences Into Positive Ones
Customers get frustrated when they feel their complaints aren’t taken seriously. Dissatisfied customers will tell between nine and 15 people if they have a bad brand experience. Using Gorgias’ helpdesk and macros, you can help resolve complaints whilst maintaining a personal touch. For example, ethical online yarn store, Darn Good Yarn uses the helpdesk to analyse and automate how they solve common customer issues, using a whole database of the shopper’s history to address specific queries in a more informed way.
If you are reacting to customers have had a negative experience, your loyalty program can help you demonstrate you care. You might consider offering bonus points or benefits such as free delivery, or moving them up a loyalty tier so that they can unlock more exclusive rewards in the future. These tokens of appreciation can turn a bitter experience into a sweet deal.
Research shows that 94% of customers who have their issues solved painlessly said they would purchase from that company again. This shows that helping customers to solve their problems is key to securing their long-term loyalty. Treat your most valuable customers well by making their shopping experiences as easy as possible. In return, they’ll give you their loyalty.
It’s all about people-to-people
In a world where technology and data can give ecommerce stores a competitive edge, there’s a risk that we could lose touch with the human side of retailing. Human exchanges are still, and always will be, the primary driver of loyalty. So, use digital personalization to your advantage and treat your customers as individuals.
Small engineering team as a competitive advantage
It's been over 3 years since we've started working on the Gorgias helpdesk. The engineering team started with just me (Alex) and then gradually grew to a team of 5 people. We're a small team, but we've accomplished a lot during this period. Here are some stats from 0 code/customers/revenue in Oct 2015 to this:
- Handled over 16 million tickets.
- 2000 daily active sessions with an average length of ~4h each.
- 600 paying customers (companies).
- 17% MoM revenue growth.
Modest numbers to be sure, but we're very proud that people use our product in a big part of their workday and hopefully are becoming more productive while doing so. The whole idea behind our product is to scale customer support with as little resources as possible. Given this, perhaps it's only natural to build our product with a small team as well?
We've been suffering chronically from "not having enough people" - we still do. That forced us to adopt a certain engineering culture that I want to talk about in this post.
When we first started building Gorgias, having just a few people on the team allowed us to progress at a pace where we could collect real feedback from our customers with things that really mattered to them rather than building every feature they ask for. A lot of their asks seemed legitimate, but because we didn't have a lot of people it forced us to prioritize the critical, high impact things first.
Having a small team can act like a barrier that blocks you from building a bloated product.
I want to make more of a case for the above statement, but first I'd like to get a bit more into what we did during the 3 year period.
Once we've build an initial version of the app and got our first customers we quickly realized that building a "second Gmail" is super-hard:
- Communication protocols (email/facebook/etc..) are complicated - we knew that before we even started, but it's difficult to describe the amount of work that needs to get done to make them work correctly. The amount of corner cases and weird protocol quirks is just staggering. In fact I would even go ahead and say that if you're integrating with any kind of external systems (webhooks, REST apis, etc..) then you're going to have a very hard time making them work correctly.
- Having a highly-available and fast app is very hard when you don't have a team of full-time SREs. Scalability was not our big concern when we first started because we didn't have customers, but having an app that was always on was very important, remember the ~4h average session length? It meant that we had to make some architecture and infrastructure decisions that allowed for a high uptime.
- Customer support software space has a very high barrier for entry these days. You need to have certain features before people start to even consider you as a platform. The switching costs are high as well because now you have to train your people on a new app and changing people's routine is hard.
It takes a lot of effort to get to a point where you can compete with the likes of Gmail or Zendesk - both amazing products btw. This was definitely the case for us, for close to 2 years we had only a couple of customers and our product wasn't that good if we're being honest.
So what changed a year ago? To put it simply: our product didn't suck anymore. Or sucked less. It had that minimum set of features and stability that made it attractive enough to our main customer base (Shopify merchants) that were passionate about productivity in the customer support space. That, and the tenacity of our CEO Romain who was convincing everyone that they should use us.
So we started having our second wave of early adopters and all our hard work was finally starting to pay-off!
Now that we had more and bigger customers we were starting to have performance issues, our app was slow, suddenly we were starting to get bombarded by viral facebook posts events or promotional events via an email campaigns, we didn't have enough monitoring in place, our app was pretty inefficient, the main database was a frequent source of congestion. So we started fixing those issues while still receiving numerous feature requests.
Thankfully we didn't actually optimize our code that much before (no customers!) and there were a lot of low hanging fruits at first, but it still put a lot of stress on the team which was becoming tired and overworked and requested to hire more people to build those features and help with the performance issues.
We all agreed that it would be for the best to have more people on the team, but hiring is hard. Competent coders are not just randomly looking for the next gig. SF is also a very expensive city and for a startup that raised $1.5M and a 2 years of money burned we couldn't really compete with other players in town. We've started working with some great devs in Europe, we worked with a few talented interns as well and we tried to get by until we could have more customers and hopefully raise some more money to hire more people.
I could speak more about hiring in the Bay Area and there are a lot of things we did wrong and still have a lot of things to learn, but that's probably an even longer post than this one. But yeah, it's hard to find someone good, it's expensive, etc...
So what is the situation right now? Well, it's not much better. We've raise d a seed extension round from SaaStr with Jason Lemkin and hired a few people in the Growth team, but we still have a hard time hiring in SF or remote. In the meantime we have a small team and want to talk about that.
On the importance of saying NO
I think it's important to realize the advantages of having a smaller team and the single most important super-powers that you're forced to acquire is saying NO more often that you would with a bigger team. If you have a bigger team and say no to a feature, new platform, integration, etc.. it's harder to justify the decision. There are arguments like:
... we have enough devs! They are paid to make features, so what's the problem!?
... the data shows that 50% of our customers are saying that they want this or that feature, we must build it!
But do we absolutely need to build that feature? Are the customers going to be a lot less effective with your product otherwise? Is it going to be a big boost for them or just a nice improvement? Once a feature is there you have to maintain it, fix bugs, improve it, etc.. The thing with data driven decisions is that sometimes it can be biased towards some historical practice that might not have a place in your current world.
Now, I'm not saying that you shouldn't listen to your customers, you absolutely have to, but be sure you understand well what they want before taking action and understanding takes time. Having an artificial brake on your enthusiasm might be a good thing.
Engineers build things, the natural tendency is to accept any technical challenge because of ego, curiosity, fun, etc... It takes discipline to say no and stick by it. A small team is making it easier to do it.
Automation
When you have a small team you're forced to automate a lot more often some of your workflows. You don't have the luxury to do repetitive stuff so:
- You start writing more tests because you don't have people hired in QA and you don't want to repeat the same tests all the time.
- You add optional static typing, linting and other code quality tools because you don't have time to deal with random type errors or have debates about tabs vs spaces.
- You resolve repetitive bugs by doing some refactoring because you can't deal with the constant flow of tech support tickets.
- You make a lot of tasks retry-able so if a HTTP request to facebook failed you don't have to manually retry them.
- Cronjobs, cronjobs everywhere.
Building the right culture is a long process
People that work at Gorgias come from different backgrounds and sometimes it can be challenging to be on the same page. In some cases our work processes are similar to many other companies:
- Github for our code and issues.
- Code-reviews on Reviewable - it's awesome!
- Jenkins to build our docker images and upload them to google cloud.
- Kubernetes to run everything on GKE.
- Sentry to collect production errors.
- Datadog to monitor everything.
But there is so much more than just the above processes to engineering:
- The way we all come together and decide how certain things will be built or fixed.
- The way we talk about a certain API decisions and refactoring.
- The way we deal with an outage and a bad bug that affects our biggest customers.
These things need time to happen to be embedded in your engineering consciousness and if you're the first-time founder (like myself) you also need the time to understand how to operate in this environment.
Management overhead
Never managed a big team so I can't really speak about it's dynamics, but I would expect that because there are more people there is a lot more bandwidth you have to manage, a lot more people have to agree, a lot more politics have to be settled. I don't look forward to that to be honest, the more time I can get away with hiring as little as possible without a big sacrifice of our growth as a company the more I'll try to delay it.
I conclusion I would say that it's totally fine to have a small team, in fact, I'm considering it a competitive advantage that you should try to keep as long as you can.
The irony
I made a point in this post that having a small team is a competitive advantage, but I also think that we are ready to grow our team a bit. Yep, we're hiring!
Scale your Messenger marketing with Octane AI and Gorgias
Integrate your Smile.io account to Gorgias!
Loyalty programs are widely used amongst e-commerce merchants to grow and maintain market share by improving the number of repeat customers and attracting new ones. These programs come in different formats - from loyalty points to surprise gifts depending on the level of loyalty of each customer - and have proven efficient to help brands build a community of consumers based on the emotional attachment to their identity and values.
As a customer support helpdesk, Gorgias is focused on providing the best experience for both end-consumers and support agents. Consequently, giving access to the most accurate information about your customers’ loyalty status enables your support team to adapt their answers to customer requests.
Thus, it seemed only natural that we partner with Smile.io, a rewards platform that has helped over 20,000 merchants reward their most loyal customers for performing profitable actions.
With Smile, you can create and manage reward programs such as loyalty points, referrals and VIP programs, to build a fruitful relationship with your customers.
Because Gorgias is appreciated for its ease of use and automation tools, we have decided to build a strong integration with Smile: not only can your support team have easy access to all the necessary data about your customers, but they can also use Smile variables in canned responses (or “macros”) and automation rules.
- Display your customers’ Smile profiles next to tickets
- Use Smile variables (loyalty status, points balance, VIP program, referral url) in both your macros and your rules
By integrating your Smile account to Gorgias, you’ll be able to improve yet again not only your customer support but also your customers’ engagement to your brand. Our early adopters of the integration are already thrilled by it!
"We're loving the Smile integration so far! Having access to the variables in the automation features of Gorgias (macros and rules) is a game-changer, especially now that we're focusing on improving our loyalty program. It would be great if the integration went a little further in the future to enable editing loyalty points!"
Chris Storey, Founder and CEO at Dinkydoo
If you're already a Gorgias customer, you can connect Smile directly from your Gorgias account, in the Integrations section. If not, you can create an account here and get started in a few minutes.
Announcing the Okendo integration
Here at Gorgias, our aim is to provide the best customer support tools to our clients, whatever their specific needs. The more you grow, the more we work to develop our offer so that you can benefit from a tailor-made spectrum of integrations. As your business becomes more successful, you need to adapt your website to a fast-growing community of consumers, especially regarding the quality of your reviews and how they appear.
This is why today we are proud to announce our new partnership with Okendo, a customer-marketing platform perfectly suited for high-performance Shopify businesses.
Okendo helps Shopify’s fastest growing companies like oVertone, Paul Evans and Dormify build vibrant customer communities through product ratings & reviews, customer photos/videos and Q&A.
Along with this, Okendo gives you the tools to leverage customer generated content across other marketing channels such as Google Search, Google Shopping, Facebook and Instagram.
Since one of the key advantages of using Gorgias is to manage all your customer support in one dashboard, we decided to design a straight-to-the-point integration:
If a customer leaves low rating review such as < 3 stars and/or with negative sentiment, Okendo can automatically create a ticket in Gorgias. This way, your staff can quickly engage in a conversation with them to understand what went wrong, and address the issue immediately.
We believe this integration will take your customer support teams to the next level, as Okendo has already convinced some of our key clients.
"One of our biggest assets is our unique customer community, so being able to maintain it as active and engaged as possible is key for our business. And making sure that we address any negative experience efficiently and in no time is just as important: this is exactly what the Okendo integration within Gorgias has enabled us to do, by automatically creating a ticket for these cases with the review displayed right next to it."
Dan Appelstein, Founder & CEO at BeGummy
"Aside from being excellent at building shopper trust, reviews enable us to identify customers who, for whatever reason, have had a less than stellar experience. The Okendo + Gorgias integration enables us to flag these instances and automatically assign a Gorgias ticket to a member of our Client Services Team, so that we can follow up and do our best to assist them with whatever issues they're encountering. This integration, along with Okendo’s consistent availability and unwavering support, have made the integration between these two platforms seamless and successful!"
Jae Sutherland, Director of Client Service at oVertone
If you're already a Gorgias customer, we can introduce you to Okendo to implement the integration directly from your Okendo account. If not, you can create an account here and get started in a few minutes.
How Campus Protein built a multi-million dollar business
The supplement industry is not often the first thing that comes to mind when looking to start a new business. It’s crowded, the barriers to entry are low, the margins are thin, and there are some established and well-known brands with large budgets to outspend competitors.
And yet, Campus Protein, a provider of supplement to college students that started in a dorm room in 2010, has managed to carve itself a highly profitable niche and power its way to millions of dollars in revenue.
No, there’s no magic sauce or secret weapon that helped them do it. They have the same access to resources as everyone else. In fact, they have a smaller team than older brands in the space.
The only difference is they focused on one thing that others in the industry weren’t, the customer experience. This is the story of how they did that and dominated behemoths like GNC in colleges across the US.
Identifying The Problem
Before coming up with the idea, founder Russell Saks was just another sophomore at Indiana University. After joining a fraternity, his new friends convinced him to start hitting the gym.
As Russell started getting into fitness, he noticed that every month his friends would head to the local supplements store to purchase $200 to $300 worth of protein and workout drinks. These were the same people who always complained that they didn’t have beer money on the weekends. Yet here they were, spending hundreds of dollars on supplements without batting an eyelid.
In any industry as crowded as the supplement industry, there are always cheaper options. You can go online and buy your supplements at a much lower price than at the local store. However, the drawback is that you have to wait for it. And, as Russell found out, college students never planned ahead and always needed their next tub of protein powder instantly.
Ever the entrepreneur, Russell figured there was an opportunity here. If he could combine the affordability of online prices with the same-day delivery of the local store, he had a business. All he had to do was bulk order product from a low-cost site in advance, store it locally, and then redistribute it to students when they needed it.
As with any business, those initial days were rough. Yes, there was demand and Russell would often sell out each batch soon after they came in, but the margins were razor thin. To maintain cost-effectiveness, Russell sometimes had to take a loss on certain products.
On top of that, Russell found that his life was getting consumed by the fledgling business. To scale it up, he needed help. His friend and first business partner (now Chief Sales Officer), Mike Yewdell, was a fellow student at Indiana University with lots of connections. With his network, they quickly became the go-to source for supplements on campus.
Russell’s next stop was his high school friend (now business partner and CMO), Tarun Singh, who was studying in Boston University at the time. Tarun noticed the same problems at his school and quickly expanded Campus Protein to his school and then the entire Boston area.
The final piece fell into place when they entered into a business competition and won $100,000 to scale up. With the up-front money, they could negotiate deals with supplement makers to improve their margins, and expand to more college to increase sales.
Today, Campus Protein is in over 300 colleges across the US and shows no signs of slowing down. But none of that would have happened if Russell hadn’t been hyper-focused on a certain type of customer and their needs.
Customer Experience As A Growth Channel
One thing Russell learned early on was that college students had very specific needs. Thus, they craved a personalized experience. They needed help with what supplements to buy based on their goals and budget.
At the local supplement stores, Russell noticed that they couldn’t get any of that. Firstly, they sold to everyone so they didn’t have any expertise specific to the college student market. Secondly, they were trained to sell as much product as possible, so they’d often push supplements that weren’t right for the students.
Russell realized that Campus Protein needed to really understand the needs of a college student to own the market. That meant the company needed to hire students who were into fitness. And so the Campus Rep program was born.
A Campus Rep's main job is sales and marketing. They grow awareness for the brand and encourage help other students achieve their fitness goals.
By recruiting Reps in each college, Campus Protein could keep their core team lean while maintaining a large salesforce on the ground.
This has been the real key to their growth. These Reps are their ideal customers, and they hang out with other prospective customers. Thus, they provide a customer experience that’s far better than anything other brands can offer.
Imagine you’re a college student. Before Campus Protein came along, you had to figure out which products to buy, got pressured into buying unnecessary stuff, and ended up with very little money left over.
Today, you probably have a Campus Protein rep in your gym, wearing a branded tank. He’s giving out free tasters, providing you with workout tips and nutrition advice, listens to your goals, and hands you a card with a link where you can buy exactly what you need for much less. How’s that for customer experience?
Extending The Experience Online
Campus Protein may be marketing offline with their campus reps but all their sales come from their Shopify website. That’s the best way for them to scale.
Here’s how it works - they have warehouses across the country where they stock product. Because of their deep customer understanding, they know exactly what to stock and what not to stock. The campus reps then go around building awareness, and students head to the website to make their purchase. Because of the warehouse network, they get their products pretty quickly.
Because the actual sale is made online, the website becomes a crucial part of their strategy. If they don’t provide the same level of customer support and care their reps do, they’ll drop the ball and lose the sale. More importantly, they’ll lose trust. One bad experience could hurt their reputation across an entire college.
To replicate the one-on-one support of their reps, they used website chat. In the early days, they started with Zopim Chat. But as they grew, they found that it was too basic for their needs. They couldn’t tell if someone they were chatting with was an existing customer or a new one. They couldn’t tell if it was a new conversation or a continuation of one that happened in a different channel. It was a poor experience for the customer and the company.
Remember, they have a small core team, so they needed a customer support tool that could do the heavy lifting for them. That’s when they came across Gorgias and it allowed them to create an online experience that increased conversions and revenues.
For starters, Gorgias combines all their customer support channels (chat, email, phone, social media) into one unified view, and builds a profile of each customer. When a student chats with them, Campus Protein know if they are a previous customer, can see all past conversations and sales in their dashboard, and can provide relevant support.
Compare that to the typical support you get when you’re forced to repeat your previous conversations each time you chat with someone.
To speed things up, Gorgias also has macros and templated responses based on the question. For example, if a customer wants to know where their order is, Gorgias presents the support agent with a templated response that pulls in the customer’s order details from Shopify. With just a click, the support agent can answer the question in near real-time.
Automations like this also frees up time for support agents to provide more detailed answers to complicated questions, like when a student asks for nutrition advice. Again, they can provide the same level of caring support that reps do and this helps increase sales.
Another way they increase sales is by detecting if customers are spending a lot of time on a certain page and initiating a chat with them. For example, if someone is on the checkout for too long, Gorgias automatically pops a chat and ask them if they need help. This directly increases conversions.
Perhaps the most important way Campus Protein uses customer support to increase revenues is by converting feedback into website and product changes. For every question that comes in, they try to understand why it wasn’t obvious on the website, and make the appropriate change. This leads to fewer tickets of the same type and higher conversions.
Widening The Moat
At the end of the day, Campus Protein is just another retailer. In an industry like supplements, anyone can replicate their model, or existing brands like GNC can enter the market. So why hasn’t that happened yet?
Like Warren Buffett says, every business needs to have a moat, something that defends them against competition. In Campus Protein’s case, it’s their deep customer knowledge and the personal level of support they provide.
A college student is introduced to Campus Protein via the local rep. They’re nice, helpful, and remember the student’s name each time. When the student goes online, they have the same experience. Their previous conversations are remembered and even their most complicated questions are answered with care.
Now, you may not be able to create a rep army like Campus Protein for your eCommerce business, but you sure can create an online customer experience that sets you apart from others in your industry.
With Gorgias, whenever a customer creates a ticket on any channel, you have all their information like previous conversations and sales, right there. Instead of asking the customer if they’ve written in before or what their order numbers are, you can get straight to the important stuff. And with all the templates, macros, and automations available, you can do it in minutes.
When a customer has to decide between purchasing at a store where they forget about you after the sale, versus one where they treat you like a friend and remember you a year later, which do you think they’ll choose?
Give your customers a great experience and, like Campus Protein, you’ll have a business that keeps going up.
Curious about how Gorgias can optimize customer service? Click here to learn more.
Gorgias Builds Strong Relationships With Aircall
Aircall is a cloud-based call center software made for support teams. With Aircall, support agents can track everything from A-Z, on any device, with zero hardware to manage. The right tool to increase agent efficiency and customer satisfaction!
Aircall Makes the Gorgias Helpdesk Complete
After listening to early customer feedback, we quickly realized we needed to find a phone integration that empowered users to manage voice calls as easily as emails or chats.
Traditional helpdesk integrations simply log calls as tickets. We wanted to go one step further and associate the phone call with the right customer. This way, agents can see the full conversation history between the brand and the customer.
By building Aircall’s cloud-based phone into the Gorgias platform, agents can also quickly edit orders while on the phone based on the case history they see. After a call has ended, all notes will be added to the correct customer’s profile along with a link to the full call recording.
Why Aircall was the Right Choice
Looking back, the partnership has been mutually beneficial and seamlessly implemented.
Aircall has a well-documented API that our dev team could easily use. We were able to build a working and robust phone integration with Aircall in just a few hours. Four days later, after QA testing, the new solutions were fully functional and ready to use.
Since Gorgias and Aircall both seek to provide the best customer experience possible, cross-company visibility has become a valuable source of new leads and sales. Furthermore, we conduct regular catch-up meetings and share a Slack channel to make sure both teams work hand-in-hand to create the best integration and the best results. The partnership with Aircall is super valuable for both our customers and our respective companies and we strongly recommend each others.
If you're already a Gorgias customer, head to your account and go to Integrations to connect Aircall. If not, you can create an account here and get started in a few minutes.
Building delightful customer interactions starts in your inbox
