It’s true that a great customer experience is key to winning happy customers — but to keep a pulse on customer satisfaction, you need to dig a little deeper. 

To understand the quality of a customer’s experience with your brand, you need to track Customer Effort Score (CES). This metric lets you evaluate your customer service efforts by tracking the level of effort a shopper must exert to fix an issue with your customer support team.  

In this article, you’ll learn exactly how to track and monitor CES, as well as how to optimize your support strategy to minimize customer effort as much as possible.  

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What is Customer Effort Score (CES)?

Customer Effort Score (CES) is a way ecommerce brands can accurately measure how much effort a customer has to exert in order to interact with your support resources. 

This metric is relevant to any interaction a shopper might have that touches your customer support strategy, like: 

• Talking with a rep through Live Chat 
• Navigating a return
• Answering tricky product questions 
• Canceling an order in progress 

The easiest way to measure customer effort score is by sending customers a survey after their interaction with customer success ends. In this survey, ask them to rate their service experience on a 1-10 point scale. 

We’ll dive into the details behind how to create a survey to measure the amount of effort your customers take shortly.  

📚 Related: 13 live chat support metrics

Why customer effort is the key to customer loyalty

No shopper wants a high-effort experience. According to The Effortless Experience, 96% of high-effort customer experiences drive a customer to be disloyal to your brand — making retention nearly impossible. 

Clearly, it's worth the effort to make life a little easier for your customers — doing so will convince many of them to shop with your brand again. 

When you calculate your customer effort score, you’re able to keep a pulse on exactly what it takes to create seamless experiences that lead to increased loyalty. The metric is a strong predictor of customer retention and can help identify pain points in your customer support strategy. 

A quick-start guide to measuring CES with surveys

As we mentioned earlier, you can measure customer effort by sending customers a customer effort survey.

In this survey, customers are asked to rate their experience with customer support on a Likert scale from “less effort” to “a lot of effort”. 

Let’s walk step-by-step through how to build a CES survey and how to send them to your customers. Then, we’ll look at how to interpret results once you’ve compiled enough data. 

When to send a CES survey

You can send a CES survey immediately after any customer interaction, like post-purchase.

To zoom in even more on customer effort, consider only sending a CES survey once a shopper has a service interaction with your support strategy, like chatting with a live agent, visiting a self-service portal, or clicking through an interactive FAQ page. 

This way, you’re able to get an accurate idea of how easy, or how frustrating, your support touchpoints are. 

How to create a CES survey

A CES survey typically has one simple question that asks, “How easy was it to solve your problem today?”

Every brand tracks responses a little differently, using a scaled system. Here’s a few examples of different kinds of scales you can choose from: 

Word-based scale

A word-based scale lets respondents share their experience by choosing a word or phrase ranging from “very easy” to “very difficult.” 

Sentiment scale

A sentiment scale gives customers the option to share their experience using angry, happy, or sad faces to depict the emotion they felt while seeking support from your brand.

Numerical scale

A numerical scale lets customers share their experience using a scale of 1 to any number of your choosing. Some brands like a scale of 1 to 10, while others prefer scales of 1 to 5. 

No matter what thresholds you set, 1 should always be the lowest, meaning the worst, and your end number should be the highest, meaning the best. 

It's important to note that no option is better than another. The survey type you choose all depends on your shop’s needs. 

Some brands might also ask an open-ended question as a follow-up so customers can share specific details about their experience. 

You can send a CES survey question through email, SMS, or a similar channel to customers who recently reached out to your support team. 

Of course, you can send a customer effort score question manually, but it takes precious time away from your reps who are busy handling active tickets. Automating the process means your agents can focus on more meaningful work, like following up with disgruntled shoppers. 

Gorgias integrates with Delighted to provide easy-to-use survey templates to automatically distribute customer surveys, including for CES. Once a customer makes a purchase, it triggers Gorgias to automatically send a customer effort score survey to that customer. 

How to calculate your CES score

Like many other customer service metrics, you want to calculate your average CES in order to get a snapshot view of how most customers perceive their experience with your support resources. 

If you want to calculate customer effort manually, start by tracking response data from your CES surveys over a given period of time. 

The timeframe all depends on your goals. You can look at a month, quarter, half-year, etc. Ultimately, it's more important to be consistent with the timeframes you measure. That way, you can accurately track how your CES changes over time.

Once you’ve collected enough data, plug it into this simple formula: 

Divide the number of customers who agree the interaction was easy by the total number of responses. 

To put it in actual numbers, if 100 people responded to your CES survey, and the total sum of their scores amounts to 800, that means your CES score is 8 (out of 10).

What drives a high CES?

Like most other customer service metrics, there is no such thing as a standardized “perfect” benchmark for customer effort. 

That’s because it all goes back to your brand and its goals. What makes sense for your customer effort might not translate to another ecommerce shop. 

As a general rule of thumb, when it comes to CES you want your score to be as high as possible. 

A high CES shows that your support strategy is clear cut and that customers have to exert minimal effort to have their problems resolved. Conversely, a low CES means customers find their experiences with your support resources arduous — putting your brand at risk of a high churn rate. 

The best way to drive a high CES is to provide a painless and straightforward experience. If your CES isn’t quite as high as you’d like it to be, start by asking yourself these questions: 

• How many touchpoints did the customer have before their issue was resolved? 
• How long did it take for an agent to respond to a customer ticket? 
• Are all your links up-to-date for important self-service options like a knowledge base, forum, or FAQ? 
• Do you agents have access to the resources they need to make well-informed decisions? 

From there, you can look into ways to optimize your support strategy to boost your customer effort score.

How to improve your Customer Effort Score

To improve your customer effort score, you need to build pathways to make it as easy as possible for customers to find the answers they’re looking for. That means decreasing the number of steps it takes for a customer to complete a task and optimizing your first response time.

Research from Genesys shows that 94% of customers intend to make a purchase after a low-effort experience — versus 4% of customers after a high-effort experience. 

Clearly, it’s worth the effort to optimize your customer experience. 

Let’s look at some of the easiest ways ecommerce brands can lower their CES using functions commonly found in helpdesks. 

1) Build out a thorough knowledge base

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A knowledge base is a portal, of sorts. It connects your shoppers to both sales and customer service so they can make an empowered purchasing decision. 

The beauty of a knowledge base is that is goes way beyond just a static library of articles. 

BrüMate's Help Center is a learning environment where customers can go to in-depth knowledge about their products. 

2) Lean on self-service

Customers might not reach out to your agents immediately. 

According to Gartner, 70% of customers seek out self-service options before contacting support. 

Offering more self-service options also means you can deflect low-priority tickets so your agents can focus on solving more challenging customer issues. 

We’ve already discussed a popular self-service option: knowledge bases. Here are some other examples of what customer self-service might look like: 

• FAQ page: Answer your customers’ most frequently asked questions with key information like operating hours, product availability, pricing, return policy, basic troubleshooting, and more.
• Forums: Build community among your shoppers and encourage them to talk to each other about their experiences so that they can empower themselves to resolve low-effort problems.  
• On-demand webinars: Educate your customers with step-by-step tutorials about your brand’s products. Record webinars so that you can publish them as evergreen content on your website for customers to access anytime.  
• In-product tutorials: Give customers step-by-step instructions in the moment its needed. In-product tutorials are effective at helping customers get value out of your product quickly.

3) Harness automation

Many of the tickets your agents handle are repetitive. 

Sure, tracking a customer’s order is important, but automation can handle these kinds of straightforward questions for your team. 

In customer service, automation likely won’t replace your hardworking support reps. Rather, automation can work with your teams to improve workflows and optimize communication with your customers by tackling redundant manual work. 

A helpdesk like Gorgias can help you completely automate 60% of repetitive tickets with a 0-second response time.

4) Auto-prioritize tickets to reduce response times

Assigning ticket priorities is a best practice to empower your team to become more efficient. But you could spend all day on this task alone.  

Ticket prioritization is another useful form of automation, assigning low-, medium-, and high-value to every incoming request. This way, your team can handle the higher-priority issues first. 

Gorgias comes with advanced intent and sentiment detection features to automatically assign value to incoming tickets based on Rules that you can set. 

5) Use Macros to streamline responses

Macros are another form of automation that optimize a customer support team’s workflow. 

Macros are pre-written, automatic responses to incoming customer requests. 

Gorgias Macros automatically pull customer data into your messages, like name, order number, and shipping addresses. This makes for a more efficient conversation and helps customers get to a resolution with minimal effort for both the customer and the agent. 

Other important customer experience metrics to consider

Customer effort is a big slice of the pie when it comes to monitoring your customer experience, but it can’t show the whole picture on its own. 

We recommend bolstering your CES efforts with additional metrics in order to add helpful context to your customer support strategy. 

Customer satisfaction metrics such as CSAT score, Net Promoter Score (NPS), and customer churn rate (CCR) can all provide helpful insights into how your support team is performing. 

Plus, it gives you a better look into the customer’s journey, so you can see how shoppers experience your brand — and give you ideas for how to boost satisfaction and drive loyalty. 

Customer Satisfaction (CSAT)

Customer satisfaction score (CSAT) is a metric to measure your customer base’s level of satisfaction with their experience. 

The metric is one of the most important measurements your support team can track. Satisfied customers are the key to unlock loyalty, reviews, and referrals, along with returning customers that boost revenue for your brand. 

With Gorgias, you can automatically send a customer satisfaction survey after each interaction with customer support:

Net Promoter Score (NPS)

Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a commonly tracked metric that lets you learn how likely your customers are to recommend your brand to their friends and family. 

This metric likely correlates closely with your CES. A customer who has had a great experience is likely to want to hype you up to their networks, versus a customer who had to put in a ton of effort to resolve an issue. 

If you optimize your NPS, there’s a good chance your CES will also improve — which can lead to more repeat customers and a boost in customer loyalty. 

Ecommerce Churn Rate 

Ecommerce churn rate is the percentage of lost customers your business sees over a given period of time. 

This metric is similar to Customer Churn Rate (CCR), which is typically measured by SaaS or subscription-based B2B companies. These companies can easily see when a customer cancels their subscription, making this data easy to monitor. 

Ecommerce, or online stores, can measure churn rate by looking at negative customer feedback, like a high CES, in order to identify customers at risk for churn. 

Gorgias: Your ecommerce helpdesk to lower Customer Effort Score

A helpdesk like Gorgias has the power to immediately optimize your customer service team — which, as we’ve learned, directly impacts the effort a customer has to exert with your brand. 

Because Gorgias has purpose-built automation features like Chat, Macros, and ticket prioritization, it can empower your customers to find a resolution to their problems as fast as possible. 

Sign up for Gorgias or book a demo to start tracking and improving your customer effort score today!

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Your first priority as a customer service manager should ensure fast, consistent, high-quality support. 

However, good customer service management can be very complex, requiring technical skills and an understanding of many interconnected operational tasks. Strong people and team management skills are the foundation for success. 

In this guide, you’ll learn customer service management and how to improve as a leader. Here’s everything we cover below:

• What is customer service management?
• What a smoothly functioning customer service team looks like.
• How to measure your customer service team’s performance.
• Four essential tools and resources for customer service managers.

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What is customer service management?

Customer service management is the role of running a customer service team in a way that ensures customer satisfaction, loyalty, and long-term retention. 

This involves various tasks, from hiring agents to ensuring everyone on the team has the necessary tools and resources to do their job. 

We can organize these tasks into two broad categories:

• People and team management, which we’ll discuss in the next section.
• Operational management and optimization, which we’ll discuss later in this guide.

What is customer service team management? 

Customer service team management is the collection of actions the customer service manager takes to consistently enable agents to perform their job well. This can include a whole range of activities, including:

• Hiring agents with the right customer service skills and attitude
• Training them on how to deal with different customer inquiries
• Setting standards for individual agents and the team as a whole
• Providing regular feedback and constructive criticism when necessary
• Establishing targets, metrics, and KPIs for the customer service team and analyzing agents’ performance based on them

What a smoothly functioning customer service team looks like

As a customer service manager, most of the success of the customer service team rests on you. It’s your job to build the team and the rules, systems, and guidelines agents will use daily. 

A helpful starting point is to learn what a smoothly functioning customer support team should look like. This will help you lay the foundation for effective customer service management.

Easy interdepartmental communication

As with all other team activities, internal communication is the key to success. In a good customer service operation, agents are ready to communicate and have the tools to do so.

For example, Slack, Microsoft Teams, and other chat and video conferencing software should always be available for real-time communication in urgent situations. Asynchronous communication methods like email should be encouraged in other cases. 

As a manager, it’s your job to set clear rules around communication methods in different situations (e.g., no real-time calls where an asynchronous email or Slack message will do). Good communication rules can guarantee that everyone values their colleagues' time and attention.

Clearly defined workflows

A good customer service manager ensures each agent knows:

• How to handle common inquiries, e.g., where to look for information, when to escalate the issue, etc.
• What to do in abnormal situations.
• What’s expected of them in terms of response and resolution times.

The key here is that agents should have this information before they need it. 

💡 Tip: Build a detailed hub of all the essential documents and information your agents need. This can include your customer service policy, refund and return policies, escalation rules, video walkthroughs of challenging situations, and much more.

“Remember, you can't pour from an empty cup –– taking care of yourself is beneficial for you and crucial for your ability to support your customers effectively.” - Eli Weiss, CX Unlocked

Low stress and less risk of burnout

High-stress environments and burnout are all too familiar in customer service. This often stems from understaffing, poor training, or confusing workflows. 

Eli Weiss provides a few great tips for avoiding burnout in his CX Unlocked Guidebook:

1. Practice mindfulness. Train your team to recognize when they’re starting to feel frustrated. That might look like realizing when a customer’s harsh tone is beginning to bother them, taking a moment, and responding calmly (rather than acting on impulse). 
2. Create and respect boundaries. Designate “work-free” zones in your life. These could be certain hours of the day, specific locations, or even mental spaces.
3. Celebrate every win, no matter how small. Boost morale and motivation by reminding your team how amazing they're doing.

Performance tied to specific KPIs

A big part of customer service management is evaluating your team’s performance. The only way to do that fairly is to use specific, measurable key performance metrics (KPIs). This ensures you’re evaluating agents objectively, giving them clarity and goals to aim for. 

For example, response and resolution times are two of the most critical metrics for any support team. Keeping them consistently low shows a well-managed, prepared, appropriately trained team. It also shows that there are enough agents to handle the incoming inquiries.

The better your agents’ time management skills, the faster their response and resolution times will be. As a manager, you can help your team prioritize tickets and reduce the time spent on repetitive tasks with automation (like Rules) and pre-made template resources (like Macros).

Also, remember that while industry-standard KPIs are helpful, you shouldn’t use them just because other organizations do so. All KPIs should be tailored to your customer service and business goals — whether that’s higher customer satisfaction, better customer engagement, more revenue, higher on-site conversion rates, or anything else.

Five most important tips for first-time customer service managers

First-time managers can easily find themselves overloaded with information about customer service management. So, we’ve gathered five essential tips to help you get started.

1) Put your team first

This doesn’t just mean monitoring agents’ performance. It means being there for them when they need you, whether it’s about work or their personal lives. Team members must know they can count on you when it matters.

That’s also why regular 1:1s are essential. They allow you to check in on everyone and detect potential problems early on. 

2) Don’t neglect customer self-service 

Customer self-service combines technology and resources, allowing current and new customers to resolve issues independently. For example, FAQ pages, articles, videos, self-service chatbot flows, and other resources can help massively reduce repetitive support tickets.

Besides being beneficial for your agents, offering self-service is a must for customers. According to Statista, 88% of customers in the US expect companies to provide a self-service support portal. 

3) Fill the valleys before creating the peaks 

Eli quotes this tip from The Power of Moments by Dan and Chip Heath in his guidebook. 

The premise? Focus on finding and fixing the problems your customers face before trying to wow them with exceptional customer service experiences. That way, you’re laying a good foundation for your customer service strategy.

Any customer journey has its low points (i.e., valleys). You can identify these with data analytics or customer feedback. Once you’ve addressed the problems, you can move on to creating the “peaks” that form a truly memorable experience and build customer loyalty.

4) Give agents the techniques, tools, and guidance they need for success

Agents can’t be expected to do their job well without the necessary resources. As their manager, it’s your job to give them:

• Impactful customer support tools, like a powerful and versatile helpdesk (like Gorgias).  
• Clear and specific standards and goals, like each customer service channel's expected response and resolution times (if you take an omnichannel approach).
• Extensive training materials during their onboarding, like articles, videos, workshops, webinars, and more. These should be tailored to each team since call center agents will need different institutions for handling customer requests than ones providing support via written communication channels like email or SMS.
• Regular feedback, like how well they’re performing, their strengths, and where they can improve.

5) Analyze results and base decisions on reliable data

Customer service is ultimately about people, which makes it easy to let subjective opinions affect your judgment. However, accurate data is a much more reliable gauge of how your team is performing.

It allows you to avoid biases and enables key outcomes like customer satisfaction, loyalty, and retention to guide your decisions. We’ll explore some key metrics that can help you in this regard below.

How to measure your customer service team’s performance

Evaluating the impact of a customer service team can be a complex and nuanced task. There are many factors and metrics to consider, which can easily overwhelm first-time managers.

Below, we’re keeping things simple by focusing on three key ways to gauge your team’s performance.

Tie support tickets to revenue

The best way to get buy-in from stakeholders for your customer service program is to prove its impact on business outcomes. That’s why it’s a good idea to track metrics related to revenue, including: 

• Customer retention rate
• Conversion rate from customer service conversations
• Customer satisfaction metrics, which we’ll discuss later in this guide

This will help you prove customer service ROI and get buy-in for future new hires, software, or training.

Get direct customer feedback

Support interactions can massively impact customers’ overall experience with your brand. It’s crucial to keep a pulse on your customers’ opinions of them, especially since people who rate their experience with a company as very good are 94% more likely to buy again, according to Qualtrics.

You can do this by running regular customer satisfaction surveys. For example, you can run a quick, low-friction survey by asking customers, “On a scale from 1 to 5, how satisfied are you with your experience today?”.

Taking the total number of 4- or 5-star responses, dividing it by the total number of responses, and multiplying the result by 100 will give you a customer satisfaction (CSAT) score — a key metric for measuring support performance.

Track key customer service performance metrics

You can use many quantifiable metrics to gauge your team’s performance. Here are some of the most widely used ones:

• First response time (FRT) is the time that elapses between a customer's question and your team’s initial response. Aim to keep FRT as short as possible, especially on real-time channels like live chat and SMS. 
• Resolution time is the amount of time a customer spends interacting with a business’s customer support, helpdesk, or customer service team before their issue is solved. Like with FRT, the lower your resolution times, the better.
• Support performance score, which represents the overall performance of your team (or an individual agent). This unique metric we developed for our in-house team at Gorgias combines average first response time, average resolution time, and CSAT. The result is a score between 1 and 5, representing the team’s (or an individual agent’s) performance.

Like with CSAT scores, Gorgias can track these metrics for you and give you a more nuanced view of them. For example, you can use our software to analyze average resolution time by channels, agents, time frames, and more.

Four essential tools and resources for customer service managers

1) Helpdesk

Helpdesks are platforms that help manage all of your customer service interactions. Collaborate on managing, organizing, responding to, and reporting on customer tickets. Or, set up automation for key processes like ticket prioritization. 

For example, Gorgias can enable your team to:

• Manage tickets. This can include simple actions like closing, assigning, and resolving tickets. It can also involve more complex automation around ticket tagging, categorizing, and more.
• Centralize customer communications from multiple channels — like email, SMS, social media, WhatsApp, and live chat. This can drastically simplify agents’ workflows by giving them a unified view of all customer interactions and relevant customer data in one place, so they don’t have to constantly switch between tabs.
• Implement proactive customer service. For example, your agents can proactively contact customers via a live chat widget to walk them through the purchase process. They can even automate this process and trigger a live chat only in certain situations, e.g., when customers reach specific cart values or linger on a purchase page.

• Track key metrics and measure support performance. Gorgias can help you monitor response and resolution times, open and closed tickets, CSAT scores, and more.

2) Self-service tools 

Customer self-service combines technology and resources that let customers resolve issues independently. 

Self-service is great for your support team and your customers because:

• Agents don’t have to deal with as many repetitive tickets, which reduces their stress and ensures their focus is on high-value activities. 
• Customers don’t have to wait for a response from a live agent.

Common self-service resources include:

• Frequently asked questions (FAQ) pages. One of the simplest resources to create, FAQ pages provide straightforward answers to customer questions. These pages are often grouped together so customers can find what they need by browsing categories or using a search function, as shown in the example below. 

• Knowledge bases. These interactive portals make it easy for customers to find answers before making a purchase and help them troubleshoot any possible issues afterward. Process Polly’s knowledge base is a good example here — it’s well-organized, helpful, and consistent with the overall brand.

• Self-service flows. Good self-service flows can help you deflect up to a third of all tickets. They’re projected to save companies $11 billion this year. For example, Gorgias’ self-service flows let you create multistep automated responses to customer questions without engaging an agent.

3) Customer service policies and SLAs

Customer service policies and service level agreements (SLAs) are among the first documents new agents should learn.

• A customer service policy is an internal document containing your customer service team's fundamental guidelines, rules, and standards. It includes steps for handling common workflows (e.g., refund or return requests), ticket prioritization rules, and standards for response and resolution times.
• An SLA is an external document that defines the expected service level between your business and your customers. SLAs contain information about your support team’s working hours and their expected response and resolution times on different channels.

Without these documents, customer service agents can’t be expected to do their job well. That’s why ensuring they’re detailed, well-written, and included in each agent’s mandatory training is essential.

4) Practical courses and other training materials

All agents need a solid foundation of knowledge before they can start resolving problems quickly and consistently. 

The specific training topics will differ depending on your business. However, most support courses and training should cover:

• In-depth product knowledge. All agents should be experts in what your business is selling.
• Policy and process knowledge, like how to handle return requests, when to grant refunds, and what to do when customers ask for an exchange.
• Customer service tools used in your company, like your helpdesk software, live chat, customer relationship management (CRM) system, and so on.
• Tone of voice, phrases to avoid, and other brand-related considerations.
• Technical skills, like following internal escalation rules.

Become a better customer service manager with specialized training (and Gorgias) 

As you can see, a lot goes into being a good customer service manager. This guide will give you a good foundation for success in your journey, and you can get even more valuable tips in:

• The CX Unlocked Guidebook by Eli Weiss. Eli is known for his work around customer experience and retention at DTC brands like OLIPOP and Jones Road Beauty. This book will give you his first-hand experience and help you become a better customer service manager.
• These 19 best customer service certifications. In this article, you’ll find 19 customer service certifications for different use cases, including certifications for helpdesks, leadership, call center service, and more.
• The support leader’s guide to customer service training. This guide will walk you through the basics of customer service training and show you 15 practical training activities to try with your team.

Finally, Gorgias can be your centralized customer service software that lays the foundation for a successful customer service management strategy. Our software can help your agents prioritize tickets, save time with automation, drive revenue with proactive customer service, and much more. 

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Customer service dictates your customers’ entire experience with your brand. When you pair a memorable experience with a product that resonates with people, you've got the recipe for attracting repeat customers.

I’m Eli Weiss, the Senior Director of Customer Experience & Retention at Jones Road Beauty and a proud Gorgias Ambassador. After working in customer experience roles for almost a decade, I’ve learned the best ways to build strong customer relationships and teach teams to do the same.

This is the first article in Gorgias’s Intro to Ecommerce Customer Service series. We’ll go over the basics of ecommerce customer service, setting up a successful customer service program, the challenges, and the best tools for customer service teams.

What is ecommerce customer service? 

Ecommerce customer service combines the power of support agents with self-service resources to assist online shoppers throughout their experience with a brand. It includes everything from pre-sales and purchase questions to returns and exchanges.

The traditional view

The old-fashioned approach to ecommerce customer service is like a game of whack-a-mole ––– it’s reactive. The goal of customer service representatives under this traditional view is simply to resolve issues.

This may have worked back when call centers were the primary customer service channel, but today, brands and marketing are so entrenched in our lives that customers want authentic experiences with whoever they do business with. 

The cutting-edge view

Today, ecommerce customer service is about giving customers the full VIP treatment. Customers don’t only matter once they send in a complaint. The goal is to provide them everything they need from the get-go so they don’t ever have to complain.

What a successful ecommerce customer service program looks like

Picture a well-oiled assembly line of seamless interactions, happy customers, and glowing reviews. It's like having your own customer service dream team who know the best techniques to keep your customers satisfied. But to get to that point, you'll need some key ingredients. 

Below are the top six elements an ecommerce customer service program should have to succeed.

1. Builds customer loyalty

Customers rave about brands that not only align with their values, but give them zero friction throughout the buying journey. When you create thoughtful customer experiences at every point, it will be a no-brainer for customers to stick with your brand, instead of moving over to a competitor.

Here are the building blocks to gaining customer loyalty:

• Maximize pre-sales moments. What does customer experience look like when customers aren’t contacting you? Take this opportunity to reach out to customers with an email, text, or chat message to grab their interest.
• Elevate the voice of the customer. When you make changes, how will your customers feel? Are you updating your pricing or return policies? Represent your customers in all internal meetings and discussions because the decisions you make will affect them.
• Create honest, customer-centric policies. Update your customer service policies to answer all of a customer’s potential questions. Leaving anything out is likely to decrease brand loyalty and bring you a barrage of complaints.

2. Offers proactive support 

Make the first move and don’t wait for your customers to contact you. Taking a proactive approach involves not only initiative and common sense but research.

Here are a few ways you can deliver proactive customer service:

• Ask for customer feedback at every opportunity. Feedback is the basis of delivering effective support. Ask for feedback at every point of the customer journey, from on-site pop-up surveys to customer reviews.
• Track live statistics. Taking note of metrics like the total number of tickets being opened and resolved within a time period can help you identify trends or issues so that your services can be more efficient.
• Celebrate customer moments. It’s easier to keep customers than find new ones. Make sure to recognize your customers on their birthdays or anniversaries by giving them discounts or gifts.

3. Offers omnichannel support

Online businesses can make the most out of their digital presence by offering omnichannel customer service. This is a multi-channel approach to support and includes assistance given on email, live chat, chatbots, voice, and social media.

When you use a helpdesk that leverages omnichannel communication like Gorgias, you benefit from:

• More customer engagement. Offering multiple support channels allows you to reach customers of all demographics.
• A streamlined workflow for your agents. With all conversations in one place, agents don’t need to split their attention between multiple tabs.
• An easier time scaling. A helpdesk makes it easier for growing ecommerce platforms to take care of their customers in an organized fashion.

📚 Related reading: A guide to all the different types of customer service companies need to know

4. Delivers rapid response times

Customers just want answers. Meet their expectations by providing solutions as quickly as possible. Ultimately, this means getting your internal customer service operations right before the questions even roll in.

Here are some ways to hike up your first response times:

• Train your support team thoroughly. Training your agents on customer service skills, brand voice, and exposing them to potential customer questions will ensure they have the foundation to handle both familiar and new inquiries.
• Auto-assign your tickets with Rules. Automating ticket management makes sure your inbox is organized and easy for your agents to navigate. Rules allows you to sort your tickets when certain conditions are met.
• Use Macros and scripts. Simplify responses by using customer service scripts (called Macros on Gorgias), so your agents can stop doing repetitive, manual work and get straight to delivering good customer service.

5. Includes useful & easily accessible self-service

Customers shouldn’t always need to go to your support team for answers. Empower them to find their own answers with self-service options like a Help Center, knowledge base, or FAQ section. It’s a win-win: your customer support team dodges a pile of tickets and your customers have an answer in seconds.

Don’t forget that self-service options should be easy to access, too. Put them front and center, like on your website’s menu or as a fixed element at the bottom right corner of all webpages. Customers should be able to find what they need with just a few clicks.

6. Always measuring & improving

You'll want to dig into your customer service metrics, like response times, customer effort score, customer satisfaction scores, and feedback from your customers. Measure it, analyze it, and figure out where you can refine customer service even more.

Maybe your response times are extremely slow, and you need to start using automation. Maybe customers are complaining about a confusing checkout process. Whatever it is, your customers are your cheat sheet. Use the feedback to make improvements, and implement those changes. 

💡 Note: Contrary to what online customers think, customer service agents, and even leads, don’t know everything. Their goal is to continuously learn about how to improve the customer service experience with the help of customer feedback.

5 common challenges of ecommerce customer service 

Challenging customers and questions are part of the job. But if you’re struggling to handle what you feel should be an easy fix, you may not have the resources you need.

To mitigate those problems, I’ll show you the solutions to the five most common challenges in ecommerce customer service.

1. Too many customer inquiries

❌ Problem: Your inbox is full of customer questions and you don’t know where to start.

✅ Solution: Prioritize tickets by urgency based on each customer’s message and whether the customer is a new or returning customer.

On Gorgias, you can create a Rule to automatically tag tickets into their appropriate categories. For instance, tickets that contain complaints can be automatically identified and tagged as “high priority,” while “where is my order?” tickets are tagged as “low priority.”

The benefits of automating ticket management leads to better managing customer expectations, response times, and makes it easier for you to keep loyal customers.

2. Not enough agents to handle customers

❌ Problem: You have a small team of agents and too many customer inquiries to resolve in a timely manner.

✅ Solution: Automate your recurring tasks so your agents can handle more important interactions.

With Macros, app integrations, and Automate, routine tasks like organizing your tickets, sending scripted responses, and checking up on customers can take seconds. When agents don’t need to handle repetitive work, they can focus on delivering more thoughtful support.

📚 Related reading: 14 best customer service software for every kind of business

3. Too many support channels

❌ Problem: You have too many tabs open and customer conversations to track.

✅ Solution: Integrate all your communication channels under one platform.

An omnichannel strategy is the easiest fix, which Gorgias specializes in. By combining your email, social media, SMS, and phone support in one platform, your attention won’t be split across multiple tabs, allowing you to provide personalized customer service no matter which channel a customer chooses. 

4. No customer feedback loop

❌ Problem: You routinely send customer surveys but don’t know how to effectively apply the feedback.

✅ Solution: Determine the most important issues to resolve, create an actionable plan, and share your findings with the appropriate teams.

Collecting customer feedback is pointless if you don’t know what to do with it. The main purpose of feedback is to gain insights that can resolve issues or bring forth new questions.

Most CX teams have one of two problems:

1. Not collecting enough data and therefore not having the answers to customer questions
2. Collecting a lot of data but not synthesizing it effectively and sharing it with the right people

Bridge the gap between data collection and insights by sharing your learnings with the appropriate team members to inspire them to take action. In essence, it’s about translating critique into innovative support methods.

5. Tough customers

❌ Problem: A customer is wrong but insists they’re right, and you don’t know how to reply properly. 

✅ Solution: Acknowledge their frustration and provide them with the correct information by using positive language.

Surprise, surprise — customers are not always right but it’s important stay respectful even during tense conversations. You shouldn’t outright tell them they’re wrong, instead do the following:

1. Thank them for writing. Let them know your brand values all customer feedback to ensure your interaction starts off on a positive note.
2. Acknowledge their frustration and issue. Give them the peace of mind that the agent they’re talking to understands them and can lead them to a resolution.
3. Provide multiple solutions. Chances are, your customer has already browsed your website for answers, so be sure to offer alternate solutions and resources in addition to the most obvious ones.
4. Escalate the ticket to a customer service lead. If the customer is still not satisfied, direct them to a specific agent that could provide them with more information.
5. If necessary, make an exception. Some issues simply can’t follow your policy and may be better solved with a refund, discount, or novel solution. Allowing exceptions for returning customers can be the means of retaining them.

📚 Related reading: How to respond to angry customer emails

How to improve ecommerce customer service with a helpdesk

If you could invest in just one tool, make it an ecommerce helpdesk. Having a single hub to manage customer conversations and order management streamlines the customer experience.

I've tried almost every helpdesk out there, and Gorgias is by far the most intuitive helpdesk I've used. Gorgias goes beyond the basics of a customer service tool by giving you the ability to talk to customers across multiple support channels, manage tickets efficiently, and handle customer queries all within Gorgias's easy-to-use interface.

Try it out for yourself with their interactive tour:

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3 ways top-notch customer service can boost your bottom-line

Delivering exceptional customer service isn't just about addressing inquiries. It's a reimagining of your brand’s overall experience that directly impacts your financial success. When customer service is your priority, it leads to repeat purchases, a boost in your repeat customer rate, and the creation of customer ambassadors.

1. Drive repeat purchases

Your CX team has the 411 on what your loyal customers love about your product and what they'd like to change. 

This data is invaluable for your retention team when crafting engaging campaigns and creating educational content post-purchase to ensure they know how to use the products they ordered.

2. Create customer ambassadors

Customers are more likely to remember your brand if you initiate moments that cause happiness after they use your products. 

How exactly do you do it? You introduce a bit of surprise and delight to the online shopping journey instead of sticking to the script. You want to delight customers with memorable moments — without overdoing it to the point of being predictable.

When I worked at OLIPOP, one of my favorite moments was when a customer ordered 20 cases of OLIPOP for her wedding. However, our shipment was cutting it close to their wedding date. To compensate for the panic our newlyweds might’ve been feeling, we asked them for their wedding registry and got them a shiny new waffle iron.

3. Boost onsite conversions

When potential customers are given speedy support, it’s easier to turn window shoppers into brand new customers. A well-integrated customer service strategy can remove obstacles and can push browsing customers into making their purchase.

How Gorgias has helped top ecommerce brands grow revenue

Delivering great customer service might involve some experimenting. With the right tools, you can help your customers feel more connected to your brand overall. 

If you're in search of ecommerce customer service software, give Gorgias a try. Gorgias is designed specifically for ecommerce businesses and their customer support needs.

At OLIPOP, we were able to decrease our first response time by 88% in the first two months of using Gorgias — even when our ticket volume doubled. And our revenue? It grew over 1200%. 

If you want to learn about how we accomplished this, read the OLIPOP case study.

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You’re no stranger to the complicated challenges of customer service management. From dealing with frustrated customers, solving problems in real-time, and striving to provide a consistent level of service across multiple channels, the hurdles are numerous and often interlinked. 

How can you make your customer service operations more efficient? What’s the right strategy for offering personalized experiences to a broad customer base? How do you handle high-volume customer queries while maintaining quick response times?

Generic tips and one-size-fits-all best practices rarely offer the answers you need to address these complex challenges. You’re searching for actionable, strategic approaches that can genuinely transform your customer service from being just another function to becoming your company’s ultimate competitive advantage. With this backdrop, this guide delves into key strategies tailored to alleviate your most pressing customer service pain points.

What is a customer service strategy? 

A customer service strategy is a company’s comprehensive plan for delivering exceptional customer service. It’s the blueprint that outlines how your customer support team interacts with customers, from the channels used for communication to the quality and speed of service. The strategy often integrates various tools, techniques, and metrics to ensure a seamless and compelling customer experience across multiple touchpoints.

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The underlying goals of a customer service strategy

An effective customer service strategy is not just a nice-to-have — it’s a significant lever of business success. Beyond problem-solving, a well-rounded strategy yields tangible benefits like increased revenue, stronger brand reputation, and long-term loyal customers. This isn’t just about satisfying customer queries; it’s about elevating every interaction into an opportunity for growth and brand advocacy.

Drive additional revenue

In the competitive world of ecommerce, every bit of revenue counts. According to a McKinsey report, enhancing the customer experience can boost sales revenue by 2% to 7% and raise profitability by 1% to 2%. Customer service has evolved into a critical part of that equation. 

With customer acquisition costs rising, the economics of retaining existing customers through top-notch service becomes increasingly important to consider. Exceptional customer service is a potent differentiator, elevating average order values and nurturing customer loyalty. The net effect is not just happy customers but an ongoing relationship that keeps the virtual shopping cart full.

Maximize the ROI of your team’s time

Balancing service quality and efficiency is crucial for ecommerce businesses, especially during high-demand events like Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Optimal resource allocation isn’t just about cost-saving; it’s about leveraging your team's time to create the most impact. 

When customer service is finely tuned and effective, team members function at their maximum capacity. This efficiency allows for quicker response times and more personalized service. As a result, their time becomes a high-return investment that enhances both the customer experience and the company’s bottom line.

Create a personalized customer experience across all channels

In an era where consumers are inundated with options, personalized service is key to keep customers coming back. For ecommerce companies, the stakes are even higher: the entire customer journey is digital, making every touchpoint an opportunity for personalized engagement. 

Whether tailoring product recommendations in an email or responding promptly via social media channels like Instagram, a personalized approach to customer service can elevate your brand, turning transactions into relationships.

Reduce customer churn

Customers can effortlessly switch to a competitor with just a few clicks. As a result, minimizing churn is crucial for sustainable ecommerce growth. Identifying the factors that lead to customer dissatisfaction early on presents a difficult challenge but is vital for retention. 

In Gorgias's data from 12,000+ merchants, repeat customers make up 21% of buyers but contribute 44% of revenue and 46% of orders.

Customer service departments serve as the frontline in recognizing early warning signs that customers may churn. By swiftly addressing these customer issues and executing well-planned retention strategies, customer service teams can reduce the churn that eats away at revenue and profits.

Improve your brand reputation

In 2022, 85% of companies thought that customers were increasingly likely to share both good and bad experiences compared to previous years. In the absence of a physical storefront to build rapport with shoppers, building online trust is particularly crucial for ecommerce businesses. 

Your brand’s reputation is directly tied to the quality of interactions, and the customer feedback shoppers share across multiple platforms — from social media to review sites. Excellent customer service boosts brand credibility and positive word-of-mouth by efficiently resolving issues and exceeding expectations.

TUSHY has earned a reputation for great customer service, contributing to its strong following. The company leverages Gorgias Convert to run highly targeted chat campaigns, which influence 25% of total revenue and effectively educate prospective buyers, reducing bounce rates by 37%.

Streamline operational efficiency 

What if you could seamlessly manage customer expectations while optimizing operational costs? A well-designed customer service strategy in ecommerce involves a blend of automated solutions for frequently asked questions, real-time data analytics for efficient resource allocation, and highly-trained staff for personalized customer interactions. This multi-faceted approach exceeds customer expectations and reduces operational expenses while boosting operational efficiency.

The 6 most important customer service strategies every team should use

When we talk about “customer service strategies,” we’re referring to overarching approaches that capture various aspects of customer service — from essential technology to critical processes. Unlike generic best practices like “know your customer,” these are multi-faceted, actionable game plans designed to elevate customer service from a reactive function to a proactive advantage. Let’s dive in. 

1) Implement proactive customer support to anticipate needs

Adopting proactive customer support practices isn’t just about resolving issues; it’s about foreseeing them before they even happen. By identifying potential problems and offering solutions in advance, you’re not just fixing issues but enhancing the entire customer experience. This level of foresight streamlines your support processes, making them more efficient.

When you proactively address concerns, you’re signaling to your customers that you care about their experience, which leads to higher satisfaction levels. Fewer complaints mean fewer support tickets, lightening the load on your customer service team. More importantly, a proactive approach encourages customer loyalty. Customers will likely stick around when you make the first move to ensure their comfort.

BrüMate, a premium drinkware and cooler brand, improved its customer experience by taking a proactive approach to customer support and solving issues at the root. For example, BrüMate’s former Associate Director of Customer Experience, Colin Waters told us, “based on customer feedback, we might add more details to our product pages, update language at checkout, or highlight specific reviews.”

Their transition to Gorgias allowed the company to reduce its first response time to 1.5 minutes and generate more than $9 million in revenue from its support team.

How to implement proactive customer support

• Gorgias Live Chat allows real-time communication between your support reps and website visitors. Using it to contact customers with items in their cart pre-purchase, you can address questions or concerns on the spot, reducing cart abandonment.
• Gorgias Chat Campaigns let you send targeted messages to customers browsing your website based on their behavior or specific conditions. By strategically implementing chat campaigns, you can proactively reach out to users at points in their browsing where they are most likely to have questions, guiding them toward a purchase.
• Gorgias Help Center is a centralized hub where customers can find answers to their questions — from shipping information to product details. By proactively answering FAQs and providing detailed walkthroughs, you reduce ticket volume for your support agents, making the support process easier for staff and customers.
• Help Center Article Recommendations in Chat automatically suggest relevant help center articles to customers based on their chat input. This provides immediate, detailed solutions and educates customers, reducing the need for live agent assistance.

2) Craft personalized customer support for enhanced engagement

Personalized customer service goes beyond using a customer’s name in emails; it means meaningfully understanding and catering to their unique needs. By providing tailored support, you set your brand apart from competitors and build deeper, more meaningful customer relationships. This bespoke level of interaction strengthens your brand’s identity and keeps customers returning.

Shoppers who feel seen and understood are likelier to stay loyal to your brand, ultimately boosting customer retention rates. Moreover, knowing your customer’s preferences and history allows you to recommend relevant products or services, creating new revenue streams. On the operational side, readily available customer history allows your support team to resolve issues more efficiently, reducing the time and resources spent per ticket.

Absolute Collagen, a specialist in marine collagen drinks, uses Gorgias to centralize customer inquiries and provide a holistic view of each customer. By doing so, they’ve achieved a customer satisfaction score of 4.9 and reduced their average response time across all channels to less than five minutes.

How to craft personalized customer support

• Gorgias Macros are templates with dynamic fields that let your agents auto-fill customer-specific data like tracking info or shipment dates. This speeds up response times and ensures personalized, relevant communication for each customer.‍
• Gorgias Integrations pull in additional data into Gorgias from third-party tools like Attentive, Yotpo, or Klaviyo. These integrations give you a comprehensive view of customer interactions for more personalized and insightful support experiences.

3) Develop customer self-service options for user empowerment

Offering customer self-service puts control in the hands of your customers. When customers can resolve simple issues themselves, they experience greater convenience and satisfaction. Quicker problem resolution meets modern consumers’ immediate expectations, further enhancing their overall experience.

The financial benefits are noteworthy, too. You can achieve a more cost-effective operation by reducing the number of simple queries directed at your support staff. Meanwhile, it lightens the workload for your customer service agents, letting them put their human expertise to better use. 

Loop Earplugs leverages Gorgias’s Automate to improve their customer self-service experience. This automation has decreased WISMO (“where is my order”) inquiries from 17% to 5%, allowing customers to independently check shipping statuses, freeing up customer service agents for more complex issues and revenue-generating activities.

How to develop customer self-service options

• Gorgias Automate is a collection of features designed to handle up to 60% of repetitive customer service tickets autonomously, allowing teams to focus on complex issues. It offers Autoresponders, Quick Response Flows, Order Management Flows, and Article Recommendation Flows. ‍
• Gorgias Flows let you create customer self-service workflows to guide users through solutions without agent intervention. Flows can improve the user experience by giving shoppers immediate answers to common queries, reducing ticket volume.‍
• Gorgias Rules automate ticket management by performing specific actions like tagging or auto-responding based on custom triggers you set. Rules efficiently sorts incoming queries to the appropriate resources or information, streamlining the customer service process for agents and customers.‍
• Gorgias Help Center is a centralized hub for customer service, education, and engagement, offering a knowledge base or FAQ for customers seeking answers. such information on your website. See these resource hubs in action — Branch Furniture uses Gorgias for its Help Center, while BruMate hosts their FAQs on the Gorgias platform.  

4) Build an omnichannel support system for seamless interactions

According to a recent report, 53% of consumers say customer support interactions feel fragmented. An omnichannel customer service system is the backbone for a seamless customer experience — that means consistent interactions across email, social media, or live chat. This interconnected approach eliminates the common frustration of customers repeating information when switching channels. The result is a unified, streamlined customer experience.

This ease of interaction translates to less work for the customer, smoothing their path to resolution or purchase. The rich data from multiple channels also becomes valuable for refining your customer service approach and shaping marketing initiatives. Building this integrated system promotes better inter-team communication, ensuring that customer service agents are well-equipped to provide top-tier support.

Ohh Deer specializes in creating quirky, eye-catching stationery, gifts, and homeware. To provide a seamless customer experience, they integrated Gorgias Chat to centralize support channels like Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, email, phone, and live chat, increasing efficiency and revenue. This omnichannel approach contributed to a high average CSAT score of 4.95 and an additional $12,500 quarterly revenue.

How to build an omnichannel support system

Gorgias allows businesses to manage all their support channels, such as email, Instagram, Facebook, phone, and live chat, in a single interface. By consolidating these channels, businesses can provide a more seamless customer experience, streamline support operations, and improve response time, increasing customer satisfaction and revenue.

5) Leverage pre-sales support to boost conversions

Strategic pre-sales support engages prospective customers right when they are wavering on the edge of a purchase decision. You can guide them through uncertainties by offering prompt and insightful assistance, creating a more frictionless path to conversion and sales. Immediate and expert guidance can accelerate a potential customer’s transition from consideration to purchase, shortening the overall sales cycle. 

You can promote higher-value packages or complementary items with skilled pre-sales interactions, raising the average order value. Pre-sales service not only aids in conversion but also sets the tone for future interactions, elevating your brand’s reputation in a competitive landscape.

Topicals excels in customer support by adopting a proactive pre-sales approach to educate their customers, addressing a previously high return rate due to incorrect product selection or usage. They employ Quick Response Flows and Macros, which deflect 69% of customer queries to provide immediate, automated answers to frequent questions. This approach has enhanced customer satisfaction scores to 4.8/5 and led to a 78% increase in sales driven by customer support.

How to leverage pre-sales support

• Gorgias Quick Response Flows offer self-service options via a chat widget that can answer common customer queries instantly. Automating immediate, accurate answers improves customer satisfaction and frees up human agents to handle more complex pre-sales inquiries.
• Gorgias Chat Campaigns allow you to initiate proactive live chat conversations with online shoppers, offering tailored promotions or vital product information. This feature engages potential customers at crucial touchpoints in the sales funnel, providing the necessary nudge to convert browsers into buyers.

6) Incorporate automation in customer service for operational efficiency

Embracing customer service automation simplifies daily operations by taking over mundane, repetitive activities. This operational ease allows customer service agents to dedicate their customer service skills to more nuanced and complex customer needs, often requiring a human touch. Automation becomes the backbone that supports a highly efficient customer service operation.

Automation technology quickly scales to manage increased customer inquiries, making it easier to handle peak periods without inflating your workforce. Immediate automated responses to straightforward queries mean customers don’t have to wait in long queues, elevating the customer experience. Moreover, since automated systems operate based on programmed logic, the chances of errors occurring in routine tasks are significantly reduced, bolstering the credibility and dependability of your customer service function.

ALOHAS, a Barcelona-based sustainable fashion brand, has effectively incorporated automation into its customer service through Gorgias Automate. By setting up self-service resources and Quick Response Flows, ALOHAS has achieved an 83% automation rate, resulting in faster response times and doubling revenue.

How to incorporate automation in customer service

• Gorgias Automate enables businesses to set up automated self-service resources and flows, streamlining customer interactions and reducing manual ticket handling.‍
• Gorgias Flows create workflow automations that guide the customer support process, making it more efficient and consistent.‍
• Gorgias Macros program predefined responses that can be used to quickly answer common customer inquiries, speeding up the customer service process.

How to prioritize customer service strategies

Prioritizing customer service strategies can be complex, especially when resources and team sizes vary. A well-thought-out approach can make all the difference in effective strategy implementation.

For smaller teams (1-10 people)

When operating with a compact team, every action has to count. Automation can be a lifesaver for small customer service teams. A feature like automated responses in chat can field common customer inquiries, freeing up team members for more complex tasks. Additionally, investing in proactive support — like anticipating customer needs before they reach out — can significantly improve customer satisfaction without requiring a lot of hands on deck.

For mid-sized teams (11-50 people)

Having a larger team presents both opportunities and challenges. The key is to capitalize on the resources at your disposal while avoiding inefficiencies to provide the best customer service possible. One way to achieve this is through omnichannel support, allowing customer inquiries from different platforms — email, social media, chat — to be funneled into a single dashboard for easier management. 

This streamlines the customer service process, aiding in quick response times. Simultaneously, a customer self-service portal can offer solutions for everyday problems, enabling customers to help themselves.

For larger teams (51-200+ people)

With an extensive team, the focus shifts toward fine-tuning and optimizing customer service operations. Here, coordination among team members and units becomes essential. Real-time monitoring systems can track customer satisfaction and response time, enabling immediate adjustments. 

Additionally, specialized teams can be set up for specific functions like pre-sales support, each contributing a unique value to a comprehensive customer support strategy. This segmented yet integrated approach allows for breadth and depth in customer service capabilities.

Make Gorgias the foundation of your customer service strategy

Don’t just adapt to the future of customer service — lead it. Gorgias centralizes all your customer interactions into a single platform for streamlined efficiency. From proactive support through our Gorgias Chat Campaigns to omnichannel capabilities that unify email, chat, and social media conversations, Gorgias offers a one-stop solution.

Whether you’re a team of 10 or 200, make the shift to intelligent, scalable, and personalized customer service with Gorgias. To learn more about Gorgias, book your demo today.

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Written in partnership with Okendo. 

Repeat customers are a revenue-boosting engine in the world of ecommerce. 

According to data from Gorgias’s merchants, repeat customers generate 300% more revenue than first-time customers. The small act of winning back a customer has a huge impact on your brand.

That’s why it's important for brands to understand repeat customer rate (RCR), or the percentage of customers who shop with your brand beyond a one-time transaction. 

In this article, you’ll learn how to track and measure repeat customer rate for your brand, along with tips to boost purchase frequency and improve RCR among your shoppers. 

What is repeat customer rate?

Repeat customer rate (RCR) is a key metric used by retailers to measure the percentage of shoppers who make multiple transactions over their customer lifetime. 

In ecommerce marketing, you may see this metric go by a few other names, including returning customer rate, customer retention rate, or repeat purchase rate. 

Why winning repeat customers is so critical in ecommerce

If you want a major revenue win for your brand, look no further than your own customer base. 

The benchmarks for a typical RCR vary by market, but data collected from Gorgias's 12,000+ merchants shows that repeat customers account for only 21% of customers but generate 44% of revenue and 46% of orders. 

If that wasn’t compelling enough, retaining an existing customer is five times less expensive for a brand than finding a new customer. 

📚 Recommended reading: 25 customer support metrics to measure your team’s impact & how to calculate

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What drives repeat customer rate?

To entice customers to come back, brands work to provide incredible experiences throughout a customer’s entire journey.

“My biggest piece of advice is to really understand the customer journey for your business,” says Bri Christiano, Director of Customer Support at Gorgias. “Which touchpoints are going to drive the most revenue?”

For online stores, customer support acts as a vital touchpoint. Build an iron-clad retention strategy, and you’ll see customer satisfaction soar, including boosted conversion rates and repeat business. 

How to calculate repeat customer rate

Repeat customer rate is very simple to calculate, but getting started takes a little pre-work. 

To calculate RCR, you first need to track the number of repeat customers you have over a specific time period. 

Of course, this can be done manually by combing through transactional data, but it would mean days of looking through customer information with a fine-tooth comb. Plus, since customer data is always coming in, you might never see the full picture.

A helpdesk like Gorgias can automatically find repeat customer data for you so you can focus your energy on ways to improve your RCR. 

Once you’ve collected your returning customers, divide the number of repeat customers by your total number of customers. Then, multiply that number by 100. 

The formula for RCR looks like:

(Total repeat customers / total paying customers) x 100 = RCR

Here’s what calculating RCR looks like using real numbers:

(80 repeat customers / 230 paying customers) x 100 = 34.78%

What is a “good” repeat customer rate in ecommerce? 

Like many customer support metrics, there’s no specific benchmark for a “good” repeat customer rate. Ultimately, it all comes down to your brand’s goals, along with factors like industry, audience needs, and the size of your ecommerce business.

The key to returning customer rate is to strike a balance between customer acquisition of new shoppers and re-engaging with existing customers. 

Based on Gorgias’s own first-party data with our merchants, we estimate that a 20% increase in customer base can boost your brand’s revenue by 6%. 

RCR works well in tandem with a few other metrics to determine the actual value of your marketing efforts: 

• Customer Lifetime Value (CLV): How much money a customer will likely spend on your products over a specific timeframe. 
• Customer Acquisition Costs (CAC): How much it costs your brand to obtain a new customer versus retaining existing ones. 
• Average Order Value (AOV): The amount of money your customers spend per transaction. 
• Churn Rate: The percentage of customers your brand loses over time.  

6 steps to improve your repeat customer rate

In a recent study, HubSpot found that 93% of customers were more likely to become repeat customers with brands they believe have excellent customer service.

What characterizes excellent customer service? These days, it’s personalization that incentivizes customers to keep coming back. 

Let’s look at six tried-and-true steps to create a positive, personalized shopping experience that will encourage your customers to return for more. 

1) Build a strong post-sales experience

A customer’s journey doesn’t end when they click checkout. 

The post-sales, or post-purchase, experience is a prime moment to keep a customer thinking about your brand or products long-term. 

Post-sales can also lead to better brand trust, a critical factor in gaining loyal customers. Bri says, “You're catching that person at a point where they're feeling really energized about the brand.”

The customer service team at TUSHY realized a post-sales strategy was exactly what they needed to close a knowledge gap around their bidets. They found customers who bought a bidet needed help understanding how to install them.

Reps were able to communicate with customers that installing a TUSHY bidet wasn’t a major plumbing project by creating an omnichannel support strategy with email, social media, SMS, live chat, FAQs, and a robust Help Center.  

2) Reduce response times

We noticed an interesting customer service trend: 90% of US customers say an immediate customer service response is “important” or “very important.” 

To give your customers a near-instant response, consider these ideas that not only boost customer satisfaction but can reduce the load on your support team. 

Automate repetitive questions

According to McKinsey, 71% of shoppers want personalized interactions with support teams, and 76% are frustrated when they don’t receive one.  

But a team stuck repeating return policies or tracking down orders doesn’t have much time to personalize a well-thought-out response.  

Gorgias Automate can help deflect up to 60% of your chat ticket volume by automating responses to repetitive questions. It works by sending personalized answers to customers based on their unique Shopify data.

Use a helpdesk to prioritize tickets 

You never want to leave a frustrated customer waiting. A helpdesk like Gorgias can automatically assign priority levels to your incoming tickets so agents know exactly which tickets to respond to first. 

Quickly resolving a frustrated customer’s problem could be just the thing to turn the negative interaction into a positive one that makes the customer want to come back again. 

Drive support traffic to your preferred channels

Customers prefer to have multiple ways to get in touch with your support team. However, some channels have longer response times than others. 

Customers who send a support request via email might fear their problem is lost in the void. Use slower channels as a springboard to push customers to faster channels, like SMS or Live Chat.

📚 Recommended reading: First response time: your guide to understand + lower the metric

3) Collect customer feedback 

Customer feedback is your golden ticket to creating great experiences that encourage repeat shopping. 

Customers have high expectations for brands these days — and without customer feedback, you’re stuck in the dark about how to meet those expectations. 

Here are a few ideas for your team to collect customer feedback and improve your brand experience: 

• Monitor customer reviews to find out what actual customers are saying about you. Gorgias customers can manage reviews by integrating with Yotopo, which allows users to track and respond to reviews in a central space. If the feedback you see is positive, that’s a sign your team is in the right direction. If it’s negative, use the feedback to look for areas of improvement.
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• Send out surveys to shoppers using a customer marketing platform like Okendo. CSAT helps gather general customer satisfaction. Likewise, you can offer an NPS survey to determine how likely customers would recommend your brand to their friends.
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• Build questions into your customer support scripts so agents can talk directly to customers about their experience. Your agents can find out if there are any gaps in the customer journey or reasons why the customer had a negative experience.
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• Implement a customer feedback loop to tie your tactics into a cohesive strategy. 

4) Create loyalty programs

Customer loyalty programs encourage customers to stay engaged with your brand after their initial purchase — which can dramatically boost your repeat customer rate. 

A loyalty program works by rewarding customers for shopping with your brand and incentivizing them to want to come back. It also shows your customers that you value the relationship. 

Consider also offering incentive-based referral programs to reward customers for sharing your brand and products with their friends. 

Software solutions such as Smile.io and LoyaltyLion make it incredibly easy to build a customer loyalty program from the ground up. Best of all, these options both integrate with Gorgias to pull loyalty customer data into your helpdesk. 

5) Offer discounts

So many people hear the word “discount” and get scared for their bottom line. In reality, a sale or deal is just the thing to sweeten the pot and entice a customer to return for more. 

That’s because a discount creates the perception of value in the hearts and minds of your customers. Remember how often you offer a deal since many customers will only buy with a discount.

A helpdesk, like Gorgias, can help you automate the process of giving a discount once you pinpoint great moments to offer them to customers. 

• Add a discount to your confirmation email to send to customers who recently completed a transaction. 
• Leverage SMS messaging to send a small discount to customers who purchased in the last month. 
• Use live chat to message a customer who added an item to their carts but moved it to “saved for later” or outright deleted it. 

Find out what went wrong, offer a new product recommendation, and a small discount to entice the customer to return to their cart and complete a new transaction. 

6) Upsell and cross-sell relevant products

For ecommerce brands, upselling is a tactic to encourage customers to purchase a higher-priced item instead of the one they initially selected. 

At its simplest, it’s a way to convince a customer to spend more money on an item.

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Cross-selling is a similar sales tactic where you can strategically recommend add-ons related to whatever the customer has put in their cart. 

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With upselling and cross-selling, the goal is the same: create higher ticket value, encourage greater sales, and improve customer satisfaction.  

Okendo recently launched a feature called Quizzes to provide personalized shopping experiences. 

With Quizzes, brands can ask their shoppers questions to make product recommendations and help customers make fast purchasing decisions.

Invest in a helpdesk to win more repeat customers

You could spend hours scrolling through transaction lines, physically track repeat customers, and manually build marketing campaigns to follow up with customers. 

Or, invest in a helpdesk to automate these processes for you. That way, you can focus on building a customer experience that incentivizes customers to shop beyond their first purchase. 

Ready to learn how to optimize your returning customer rate and maximize your company’s bottom line? Check out our CX growth playbook, a free resource that dives into:

• 18 tactics to boost profitability by 44%
• 25+ interviews with top ecommerce stores
• Analysis of +12,000 Gorgias customers.

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TL;DR:

• Start by cleaning up your Help Center. Update your articles based on last year’s data, using plain language and clear policy details to boost self-service.
• Use automations to streamline ticket routing and support efficiency. Set rules for tagging, escalation, and inbox views, so your team can respond faster.
• Prep your macros, AI, and staffing plan in advance. Build responses for top FAQs, train AI on the right sources, and forecast agent needs to avoid burnout.
• Automate logistics, upselling, and QA to stay ahead. From showing shipping timelines to flagging low-quality responses, automation ensures smooth operations and more revenue during peak season.

Getting ready for that yearly ticket surge isn’t only about activating every automation feature on your helpdesk, it’s about increasing efficiency across your entire support operations.

This year, we’re giving you one less thing to worry about with our 2025 BFCM automation guide. Whether your team needs a tidier Help Center or better ticket routing rules, we’ve got a checklist for every area of the customer experience brought to you by top industry players, including ShipBob, Loop Returns, TalentPop, and more. 

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2025 BFCM automation checklist

• Tidy up your Help Center
  
  • Audit your docs
  • Review last year’s BFCM data to find your must-have articles
  • Update your policy details
  • Edit content using easy-to-understand language
• Expedite your ticket routing automations
  
  • Set up automated ticket tags
  • Create an inbox view for each category
  • Set escalation rules for urgent tickets
  • Set up mandatory Ticket Fields
• Prep your macros and AI agent
  
  • Write macros for your top FAQs
  • Train your AI on the right sources
  • Define the limits of what AI should handle
• Forecast your BFCM staffing needs
  
  • Use ticket volume to estimate the number of agents
  • Plan extra coverage with automation or outsourcing
  • Run agent training sessions on BFCM protocols
• Map out your logistics processes
  
  • Negotiate better rates and processing efficiencies
  • Automate inventory reorder points
  • Build contingency plans for disruptions
  • Show shipping timelines on product pages
• Maximize profits with upselling automations
  
  • Guide shoppers with smart recommendations
  • Suggest alternatives when items are out of stock
  • Engage hesitant shoppers with winback discounts
• Keep support quality high with QA automations
  
  • Automate ticket reviews with AI-powered QA
  • Track both agent and AI responses
  • Turn QA insights into coaching opportunities

Tidy up your Help Center

Your customer knowledge base, FAQs, or Help Center is a valuable hub of answers for customers’ most asked questions. For those who prefer to self-serve, it’s one of the first resources they visit. To ensure customers get accurate answers, do the following:

• Audit your docs
• Review last year’s BFCM data to find your must-have articles
• Update your policy details
• Edit content using easy-to-understand language

1. Audit your docs

Take stock of what’s currently in your database. Are you still displaying low-engagement or unhelpful articles? Are articles about discontinued products still up? Start by removing outdated content first, and then decide which articles to keep from there.

Related: How to refresh your Help Center: A step-by-step guide

2. Review last year’s BFCM data to find your must-have articles

Are you missing key topics, or don’t have a database yet? Look at last year’s tickets. What were customers’ top concerns? Were customers always asking about returns? Was there an uptick in free shipping questions? If an inquiry repeats itself, it’s a sign to add it to your Help Center.

3. Update your policy details 

An influx of customers means more people using your shipping, returns, exchanges, and discount policies. Make sure these have accurate information about eligibility, conditions, and grace periods, so your customers have one reliable source of truth.

Personalization tip: Loop Returns advises adjusting your return policy for different return reasons. With Loop’s Workflows, you can automatically determine which customers and which return reasons should get which return policies. 

Read more: Store policies by industry, explained: What to include for every vertical

4. Edit content using easy-to-understand language

Customers want fast answers, so ensure your docs are easy to read and understand. Titles and answers should be clear. Avoid technical jargon and stick to simple sentences that express one idea. To accelerate the process, use AI tools like Grammarly and ChatGPT. 

No time to set up a Help Center? Gorgias automatically generates Help Center articles for you based on what people are asking in your inbox.

Expedite your ticket routing automations

Think of ticket routing like running a city. Cars are your tickets (and customers), roads are your inboxes, and traffic lights are your automations and rules. The better you maintain these structures, the better they can run on their own without needing constant repairs from your CX team. 

Here’s your ticket routing automation checklist:

• Tag every ticket
• Create views for each category you need (VIP, Returns, Troubleshooting, etc.)
• Set escalation rules for urgent tickets
• Set up mandatory Ticket Fields 

1. Set up automated ticket tags

Instead of asking agents to tag every ticket, set rules that apply tags based on keywords, order details, or message type. A good starting point is to tag tickets by order status, returns, refunds, VIP customers, and urgent issues so your team can prioritize quickly.

Luckily, many helpdesks offer AI-powered tags or contact reasons to reduce manual work. For example, Gorgias automatically detects a ticket’s Contact Reason. The system learns from past interactions, tagging your tickets with more accuracy each time.

2. Create an inbox view for each category

Custom or filtered inbox views give your agents a filtered and focused workspace. Start with essential views like VIP customers, returns, and damages, then add specialized views that match how your team works.

If you’re using conversational AI to answer tickets, views become even more powerful. For example, you might track low CSAT tickets to catch where AI responses fall short or high handover rates to identify AI knowledge gaps. The goal is to reduce clutter so agents can focus on delivering support.

3. Set escalation rules for urgent tickets

Don’t get bogged down in minor issues while urgent tickets sit unanswered. Escalation rules make sure urgent cases are pushed to the top of your inbox, so they don’t risk revenue or lead to unhappy customers. 

Tickets to escalate to agents or specialized queues: 

• Lost packages
• Damaged items
• Defective items
• Failed payments
• Open tickets without a follow-up

4. Set up mandatory Ticket Fields to get data right off the bat

Ticket Fields add structure by requiring your team to capture key data before closing a ticket. For BFCM, make fields like Contact Reason, Resolution, and Return Reason mandatory so you always know why customers reached out and how the issue was resolved.

For CX leads, Ticket Fields removes guesswork. Instead of sifting through tickets one by one, you’ll have clean data to spot trends, report on sales drivers, and train your team.

Pro Tip: Use conditional fields to dig deeper without overwhelming agents. For example, if the contact reason is “Return,” automatically prompt the agent to log the return reason or product defect.

Prep your macros and AI agent

Macros and AI Agent are your frontline during BFCM. When prepped properly, they can clear hundreds of repetitive tickets. The key is to ensure that answers are accurate, up-to-date, and aligned with what you want AI to handle.

• Write macros for your most common FAQs
• Train your AI on the right sources
• Define the limits of what AI should handle

1. Write macros for your top FAQs

Customers will flood your inbox with the same questions: “Where’s my order?” “When will my discount apply?” “What’s your return policy?” Write macros that give short, direct answers up front, include links for details, and use placeholders for personalization. 

Bad macro:

• “You can track your order with the tracking link. It should update soon.”

Good macro:

•  “Hi {{customer_firstname}}, you can track your order here: {{tracking_link}}. Tracking updates may take up to 24 hours to appear. Here’s our shipping policy: [Help Center link].”

Pro Tip: Customers expect deep discounts this time of year. BPO agency C(x)atalyze recommends automating responses to these inquiries with Gorgias Rules. Include words such as “discount” AND “BFCM”, “holiday”, “Thanksgiving”, “Black Friday”, “Christmas”, etc.

2. Train your AI on the right sources

AI is only as good as the information you feed it. Before BFCM, make sure it’s pulling from:

• Your Help Center with updated FAQs and policies
• Internal docs on return windows, promos, and shipping cutoffs
• Product catalogs with the latest details and stock info
• BFCM-specific resources like discount terms or extended support hours

Double-check a few responses in Test Mode to confirm the AI is pulling the right information.

3. Define the limits of what AI should handle

Edge cases and urgent questions need a human touch, not an automated reply. Keep AI focused on quick requests like order status, shipping timelines, or promo eligibility. Complex issues, like defective products, VIP complaints, and returns, can directly go to your agents.

Pro Tip: In Gorgias AI Agent settings, you can customize how handovers happen on Chat during business hours and after hours. 

Forecast your BFCM staffing needs

Too few agents and you prolong wait times and miss sales. Too many and you’ll leave your team burned out. Capacity planning helps you find the balance to handle the BFCM surge.

1. Use ticket volume to estimate the number of agents

Use your ticket-to-order ratio from last year as a baseline, then apply it to this year’s forecast. Compare that number against what your team can realistically handle per shift to see if your current staffing plan holds up.

Read more: How to forecast customer service hiring needs ahead of BFCM

2. Plan extra coverage with automation or outsourcing

You still have options if you don’t have enough agents helping you out. Customer service agency TalentPop recommends starting by identifying where coverage will fall short, whether that’s evenings, weekends, or specific channels. Then decide whether to increase automation and AI use or bring in temporary assistance. 

3. Run agent training sessions on BFCM protocols

Before the holiday season, run refreshers on new products, promos, and policy changes so no one hesitates when the tickets roll in. Pair training with cheat sheets or an internal knowledge base, giving your team quick access to the answers they’ll need most often.

Map out your logistics processes

Expect late shipments, low inventory, and more returns than usual during peak season. With the proper logistics automations, you can stay ahead of these issues while reducing pressure on your team. 

ShipBob and Loop recommend the following steps:

• Negotiate better rates and processing efficiencies
• Automate your reverse logistics
• Connect your store, 3PL, and WMS
• Automate inventory reorder points
• Show shipping timelines on product pages

1. Negotiate better rates and processing efficiencies

Shipping costs add up fast during peak season. Work with your 3PL or partners like Loop Returns to take advantage of negotiated carrier rates and rate shopping tools that automatically select the most cost-effective option for each order.

2. Automate inventory reorder points

To maintain a steady supply of products, set automatic reorder points at the SKU level so reorders are triggered once inventory dips below a threshold. More lead time means fewer ‘out of stock’ surprises for your customers.

3. Build contingency plans for disruptions

Bad weather, delays, or unexpected demand can disrupt shipping timelines. Create a playbook in advance so your team knows exactly how to respond when things go sideways. At minimum, your plan should cover:

• Weather disruptions - Do you have a backup plan if carriers can’t pick up shipments due to storms or severe conditions?
• Carrier overloads - Which alternative carriers or routes can you switch to if primary partners are at capacity?
• Inventory shortages - How will you handle overselling, low stock alerts, or warehouse imbalances?
• Demand drop-offs - How will you reallocate inventory if BFCM sales don’t match forecasts?

4. Show shipping timelines on product pages

Customers want to know when their order will arrive before they hit checkout. Add estimated delivery dates and 2-day shipping badges directly on product pages. These cues help shoppers make confident decisions and reduce pre-purchase questions about shipping times.

Pro Tip: To keep those timelines accurate, build carrier cutoff dates into your Black Friday logistics workflows with your 3PL or fulfillment team. This allows you to avoid promising delivery windows your carriers can’t meet during peak season.

Maximize profits with upselling automations

You’ve handled the basics, from ticket routing to staffing and logistics. Now it’s time to go beyond survival. Upselling automations create an end-to-end experience that enhances the customer journey, shows them products they’ll love, and makes it easy to buy more with confidence. To put them to work:

• Guide shoppers with smart recommendations
• Suggest alternatives when items are out of stock
• Engage hesitant shoppers with winback discounts

1. Guide shoppers with smart recommendations

BFCM puts pressure on customers to find the right deal fast, but many don’t know what they’re looking for. Make it easier for them with macros that point shoppers to bestsellers or curated bundles. For a more advanced option, conversational AI like Gorgias Shopping Assistant can guide browsers on their own, even when your agents are offline.

2. Suggest alternatives when items are out of stock

No need to damage your conversion rate just because customers missed the items they wanted. Automations can recommend similar or complementary products, keeping customers engaged rather than leaving them empty-handed.

If an item is sold out, set up automations to:

• Suggest similar items like another size, color, or variation of the same product.
• Highlight premium upgrades such as a newer model or higher-value version that’s in stock.
• Cross-sell and offer bundles to keep the order valuable even without the original item.
• Notify customers about restocks by letting shoppers sign up for back-in-stock alerts.

3. Engage hesitant customers with winback discounts

Automations can detect hesitation through signals like abandoned carts, long checkout times, or even customer messages that mention keywords such as “too expensive” or “I’ll think about it.” In these cases, trigger a small discount to encourage the purchase.

You can take this a step further with conversational AI like Gorgias Shopping Assistant, which detects intent in real time. If a shopper seems uncertain, it can proactively offer a discount code based on the level of their buying intent.

Keep support quality high with QA automations

During BFCM, speed alone is not enough. Customers expect accurate, helpful, and on-brand responses, even when volume is at its highest. QA automations help you prioritize quality by reviewing every interaction automatically and flagging where standards are slipping. To make QA part of your automation prep:

• Automate ticket reviews with AI-powered QA
• Track both agent and AI responses
• Turn QA insights into coaching opportunities

1. Automate ticket reviews with AI-powered QA

Manual QA can only spot-check a small sample of tickets, which means most interactions go unreviewed. AI QA reviews every ticket automatically and delivers feedback instantly. This ensures consistent quality, even when your team is flooded with requests.

Compared to manual QA, AI QA offers:

• Full coverage: Every ticket is reviewed, not just a sample.
• Instant feedback: Agents get insights right after closing tickets.
• Consistency: Reviews are unbiased and use the same criteria across all interactions.
• Scalability: Works at any ticket volume without slowing down your team.

2. Track both agent and AI responses

Customers should get the same level of quality no matter who replies. AI QA evaluates both human and AI conversations using the same criteria. This creates a fair standard and gives you confidence that every interaction meets your brand’s bar for quality.

3. Turn QA insights into coaching opportunities

QA automation is not just about grading tickets. It highlights recurring issues, unclear workflows, or policy confusion. Use these insights to guide targeted coaching sessions and refine AI guidance so both humans and AI deliver better results.

Pro Tip: Pilot your AI QA tool with a small group of agents before peak season. This lets you validate feedback quality and scale with confidence when BFCM volume hits.

Give your ecommerce strategy a boost this holiday shopping season

The name of the game this Black Friday-Cyber Monday isn’t just to get a ton of online sales, it’s to set up your site for a successful holiday shopping season. 

If you want to move the meter, focus on setting up strong BFCM automation flows now. 

Gorgias is designed with ecommerce merchants in mind. Find out how Gorgias’s time-saving CX platform can help you create BFCM success. Book a demo today.

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Every business has to have customer service. But what makes an experience memorable versus just functional means imbuing every customer interaction with magic. 

I’m Ren Fuller-Wasserman, the Director of Experience at TUSHY. At TUSHY, our end goal is to have everyone using bidets — and that means it’s crucial for our team of Poo-Rus (our customer service reps who are poop gurus!) to make people feel comfortable enough to talk about what they would never dare — bathroom hygiene.

On paper, customer service and customer experience may have different definitions, but ecommerce founders need to know that they’re inseparable when crafting long-lasting relationships with customers.   

How customer service and customer experience intersect

When you build customers a world that intertwines both customer service and customer experience, you have a higher chance of aligning them with your brand mission and converting them into loyal amb-ass-adors.

What is customer service?

Customer service is the functional side of interacting with customers and addressing customer needs. It is assistance that can be managed by service agents or automation, like a one-on-one conversation on email or an automated conversation through an AI chatbot or self-service options on your website.

There are several ways to evaluate your customer support program, like response time or keeping track of how many customer service interactions it takes to resolve an issue, or what’s called a Customer Effort Score (CES).

Where does customer experience come in? 

If you think of customer service as the reception of an establishment, it’s necessary, essential, and expected. Customer experience is all the welcoming perks, extra treats, your favorite corner table with your name on it, and fancy decorations that take the rating of an establishment from three stars to five.

In short, customer experience comes down to how a customer feels after interacting with your brand — and what will bring them back again and again. It includes every interaction a customer has with you, from seeing an ad and liking a post on your social media, to browsing your website and receiving the product on their doorstep. 

You want each experience to mimic your brand’s core values. At TUSHY, we want our customers to experience magic and delight at all touchpoints. 

Customer experience is usually quantified by customer perception of your brand, using metrics such as a Net Promoter Score (NPS) or Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT).

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5 ways to blend customer service with customer experience

Below are five ways our CX team wraps customer service in a nicely packaged experience with the help of Gorgias. We’ll look at how we build an exceptional experience with a chat widget, the right tone, omnichannel support, a proactive attitude, and a consistent experience across all platforms.

➡️ See our posts on why customer service is important and how to improve customer service. 

1. Anticipate customer needs with automated chat conversations

Customer and agent conversations are where we see the most friction, which is why it's crucial to pad it with a customer experience that can make customers feel taken care of right off the bat.

Often, the first tickets we get from new TUSHY customers are about bidet installation and usage. To prepare for these inquiries, we use Flows, or pre-configured conversations, to customize our chat widget to include an “I need help with installation!” button. In a couple of clicks, customers can watch our video tutorials to install their TUSHY product on their own.

Customer service isn’t only about getting an agent in front of a customer. It’s also about finding the most convenient ways to get an answer to your customer with the least amount of obstacles. Changing culture is hard, so we want to make it as easy as possible for customers to learn more about bidets.

🚽 Where customer service comes in: Agents identify and anticipate the customer issue.

🚽 Where customer experience comes in: An easily accessible chat widget on the homepage offers one-click answers to the appropriate issue. 

2. Find the right tone for customers

While TUSHY is known for its cheeky brand voice, we turn it down a notch when it comes to answering customer tickets. Customer interactions about a bidet can get pretty intimate and we want people to know we’re trustworthy and have their backs (and bottoms).

The Customer Sidebar on Gorgias is helpful in adjusting our tone for each customer since customers don’t always speak to the same Poo-Ru. When a different Poo-Ru gets assigned to an existing customer, they can find the customer’s order history, location, and personal notes from the sidebar and use the right tone to naturally continue the conversation.

We once even had a mother tell us how using TUSHY helped her daughter deal with threadworms! When we put effort into building relationships, customers feel comfortable enough to tell us even the most personal details, and we often learn new things about how our customers interact with our product that we might not have even considered.

🚽 Where customer service comes in: Agents adjust their voice and tone depending on the customer.

🚽 Where customer experience comes in: Conversations are continuous and don’t have to restart with every interaction, allowing customers to feel valued and heard.

3. Provide multiple avenues of support at post-purchase

We pay close attention to the post-purchase stage for two reasons: to make sure customers are educated and satisfied.

To ensure our customers are confident with their new bidets, we educate them through Gorgias omnichannel support or support through channels like email, SMS, live chat, FAQs, and our Help Center.

Through these channels, we manage customer expectations by letting them know that installing a bidet isn’t actually a major plumbing project. Our comprehensive TUSHY Support Center covers everything from order management and installation videos, to our rewards program and fun fact articles about our eco-conscious efforts.

🚽 Where customer service comes in: Provides your customer base with multiple support channels to reach them where they are.

🚽 Where customer experience comes in: Customer conversations are continuous and streamlined with Gorgias’s omnichannel support feature.

📚 Related reading: How omnichannel communication can drive revenue & boost customer loyalty

4. Foster a proactive team unafraid to talk to customers during slip-ups

Our TUSHY CX crew is a deeply empathetic bunch who truly care about being of service to people even when slip-ups happen. That means we don’t just fix pain points in the customer journey, we encourage our Poo-Rus to be proactive and reach out to the affected customers.

We’re fervent believers that even the worst customer experiences are actually opportunities ripe for the Poo-Rus to convert into meaningful customer interactions, experiences where we can show a customer that we’re truly listening and have heard their concerns. We can’t always solve every problem, but our customers knowing that they have a real live pooping human supporting them through their woes has been invaluable in building lifelong product and brand relationships.

If you can believe it, multiple customers have sent us photos after devastating house fires, showing the TUSHY still intact but needing a replacement part or two. We respond by sending them the full suite of TUSHY products, including our now famous “Ask me about my butthole.” shirts. This small gesture can mean so much in this time of need, and it’s the least we can do!

These are the great customer experiences, coupled with support, that define our brand.

By creating an environment that motivates agents to be creative and empathetic problem-solvers, maintaining customer retention becomes a breeze.

🚽 Where customer service comes in: Agents engage in proactive customer service to listen to customers.

🚽 Where customer experience comes in: Customers feel heard knowing their opinion will be directly applied to how customer service will run in the future.

💡 Pro Tip: Team-building is integral to keeping your customer service team aligned and thriving. At TUSHY, we have a monthly space called TUSHY Gang where we engage in group activities to build stronger bonds with each other, and for our remote team this has made our CX game even stronger. Investing in our team has been a valuable way to invest in our customers — we’ve seen how when they feel cared for they always want to pass this along! 

5. Continue the customer experience across all platforms and mediums

Some customers purchase TUSHY outside of our website, like Amazon or Walmart, which can make it challenging for us to provide a uniform customer experience.

We realized that the common touchpoint for all customers regardless of their entry point is the unboxing experience. Thus, the easiest way we would bring them into the TUSHY-verse would be right at their fingertips.

Here’s what we print on our packaging to bring customers closer to TUSHY:

• A scannable QR code: Customers can access product registration, warranty activation, and a list of other resources with a quick scan of their phone. 
• Our website: hellotushy.com is printed on the front flap of the box in big, clear text.
• Our social media handles: Our username and the icons for each of our social media platforms on the front flap of the box.

The goal is to give customers just enough information but also make them curious enough to check us out and engage with us. If they dig in, there’s a wealth of bidet knowledge!

🚽 Where customer service comes in: The essential contact points like website and social media handles are included on the packaging.

🚽 Where customer experience comes in: We provide an uncomplicated unboxing experience with only the essential information customers need, and they can find more as needed without feeling overwhelmed. 

How TUSHY provides poo-rific post-purchase support

As we mentioned before, new customers often have problems with installation. Right after purchase, we see a drop-off when customers aren’t comfortable installing TUSHY. We uncovered this gap via user focus groups, return reports via Loop, Stella Connect reviews, NPS score ratings, and Okendo product reviews.

Our customers tend to get very excited when they learn about a bidet, and might pull the trigger on a purchase only to later discover they aren't ready to take on a small DIY project. It's pretty common for TUSHYs to sit in their box for weeks, months, or years before getting installed. So we're aiming to close that gap with more in your face installation guidance and instructions, so that TUSHYs aren't sitting in closets, but rather under butts delighting the customer!

To recapture customers who may need help, we make use of post-purchase SMS and emails (we use Klaviyo). In our messages, we make sure to give customers exactly what they need with a link to our YouTube video tutorials and our website for additional educational resources.

Go beyond the numbers and learn from customer feedback

Metrics are important, but they need the context that comes from customer feedback. That’s where insights from your agents who talk to customers day in and day out will be extremely beneficial.

For example, we noticed that a percentage of customers were returning their bidets, but we didn’t know why. So, we had a chat with 10 customers and took note of the challenges they were facing with our product and the improvements they wished to see in our service. Turns out, they simply didn’t want to go through the hassle of installation. 

Without taking the time to reach out to our customers, we wouldn’t have had the knowledge to fix a critical metric like churn rate.

Build unforgettable customer experiences with Gorgias

When you weave CX and CS together, the most memorable customer moments can happen. At TUSHY, we can attest to that. With the help of a customer-centric helpdesk like Gorgias backing our Poo-Rus, we’ve managed to make over tens of thousands of bums happy with our best-selling, five-star-rated Classic bidet.

Gorgias puts brands in the driver’s seat by championing personalized customer service. They let you customize everything from scheduled messages with Macros, interactive messages with Flows, and an educational hub with a Help Center.

From the overall customer experience, to customer support, and everything in between, Gorgias makes it easy for TUSHY users to feel supported through the entire customer journey. As a result, every touchpoint builds the potential to gather a mass of loyal customers.

📚 Related reading: How TUSHY influences 25% of sales with Gorgias Convert

All we had to do was refine our customer service experience and we got brand ambassadors. How amazing is that? If you’re looking to do the same, book a demo today.

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I’m Colin Waters and I’m the Director of Customer Experience at The Feed. You might know me from my experience at BrüMate, where I was the Associate Director of Customer Experience. In three years, I worked my way up from answering tickets and being on the front line with customers to overseeing the entire customer experience team. 

My different roles have shown me the various ways to adapt your customer service to fit your team’s and customer’s needs.

In this article, I’ll walk you through the different types of customer service, support channels, strategies, and philosophies you can offer based on what your company requires.

3 types of customer service + when and how to use each

Customer service is kind of like a sandwich. You’ve got your bread or the necessary foundational elements like a great customer service strategy and philosophy, and then you’ve got your support channels which can be more varied and customizable, like the sandwich fillings.

We’ll start with support channels, which you can take care of first, and move onto the strategies and philosophies of customer service. Let’s get into it!

Channels

There are many different support channels out there. But instead of offering them all — which can actually harm your support team in the long run — take a look at your customer service responsibilities, resources, and business needs to figure out which channels make the most sense for you.

Here’s a rundown of the different support channels you can offer and what they’re best used for.

Email

Email is flexible in terms of the type of customer inquiries they’re best for (most of them!) and turnaround time, unlike more instantaneous and short-form support channels like live chat and social media.

Provide email support if…

• Customer inquiries are lengthy and detailed. Email is best suited for comprehensive responses that can handle file attachments and additional resources like images, videos, and links.
• Your operating hours are flexible. Customers can reach out to your support team outside of regular business hours, no matter their time zone.
• You deal with sensitive issues. Email provides a private platform for discussing sensitive matters that customers might not want to share publicly.
• You provide technical support. You can easily share resources like documents, videos, and screenshots in a continuous conversation that would be harder to do through other support channels like voice or social media.

Social media

Social media customer service is fairly new. However, as 26% of people learn about a product through social media, it’s a good idea to follow the trend and use your social media platforms to not only assist new customers, but take note of feedback. 

Provide social media support if…

• You want to reach a younger audience. With Gen Z on apps like TikTok and Instagram, offering your presence and assistance where they are in their free time can boost exposure and conversions.
• Your marketing strategy is social media-focused. Take advantage of the brand recognition you’re getting by personally connecting with followers and getting them closer to your brand.
• Many of your brand mentions are on social media. Mentions are a fantastic way to build a connection with your followers and turn them into customers, exhibit how your brand prioritizes customer service, and collect criticisms to pass along to your team.
• You have a product or service that’s going viral. Get excited with your customers, or provide important information like restock timing or shipping delays. 

Live chat, chatbots & automation

If your main source of traffic comes from your company’s website, using live chat or chatbots can easily capture your customer inquiries and lessen the load for your team. Sometimes, however, chatbots may provide inconsistent answers — that’s when using automation to create templated conversations will be your best option.

Provide live chat, chatbots, and automation if…

• You receive a lot of customer inquiries. A chat widget with automatic responses or a chatbot is one of the easiest ways to decrease tickets that contain the same inquiries. 
• You’re a small team. With fewer hands on board, routing tickets to AI and automatic responses can keep your customer service reps focused on more complex issues. 
• It’s the holiday season or peak hours. Getting a barrage of tickets, especially on Black Friday-Cyber Monday when most people are hunting for sales, can be a nightmare for customer service teams. Let a chat widget be your first line of defense.
• You sell personal or specialized products. Think of products like skincare and health supplements when most of your consumers will need to divulge personal information to get the answers they need. With live chat, customers can resolve their worries with an empathetic agent on their side.

Help center

A help center (also referred to as a knowledge base) is a collection of self-service resources that customers and employees can use to resolve questions and issues. They can contain FAQs, troubleshooting guides, instruction manuals, video tutorials, and more. 

Provide a help center or knowledge base if…

• You update or change your products regularly. If you release new versions of your products or services every year, a one-stop hub to update documents will be extremely helpful. 
• You sell specialized products. If your products need additional explanation before using them, a knowledge base can answer all customer questions and curiosities.
• You want to optimize your website for SEO. On top of being a helpful resource hub, a knowledge base can point eyes to your website. In turn, it earns your brand more exposure and new customers.

On BrüMate, our Help Center is made with Gorgias. It’s organized in sections like FAQs, shipping, and returns and exchanges which can be modified when our product lineup expands.

Voice, messaging & SMS

Voice support can still be an extremely valuable channel when you want to resolve tricky situations. In fact, 42% of Americans still prefer to resolve customer service issues via phone conversations.  

Provide voice support if…

• You deal with technical and complex issues. Having a support agent empathize and understand a customer’s problems is crucial not only to boost customer satisfaction but also to lay out solutions in a clear way.
• You serve customers internationally. Language barriers can make written communication difficult. With voice support, it can be easier to resolve issues when you can talk through instructions in real-time.
• Your customer issues are time-sensitive. Offering phone support can give customers an option to resolve urgent issues within minutes, instead of waiting for an email or social media reply back.

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Strategies

Depending on your goals as a customer service team, there are a few strategies you can choose from. In my experience, employing a mix of strategies allows you to adapt to more types of customers, resulting in higher customer satisfaction. 

Let’s look at the four customer service strategies, omnichannel, proactive, self-service, and personalized. I’ll go through what they are, their purpose, how to employ them, and my experience with each strategy at BrüMate.

Omnichannel support

What is it? Omnichannel customer service is offering support on multiple channels to create a seamless customer service experience. 

Purpose: To make your support as accessible as possible, so all customers can reach you from whichever channel they prefer.

How to implement it: Use a helpdesk that can combine support channels. 

At BrüMate, we use Gorgias to combine all customer conversations in one tool. Our main channels are email, social media, and live chat. 

Using Gorgias as a single source of truth for all of our channels helps to ensure that our customers get consistent responses. And, it means that all messages from a customer, regardless of channel, are visible in one place and can be handled by the same agent.

Proactive support

What is it? Proactive customer service is an approach to customer service that anticipates customer needs and meets customer expectations.

Purpose: To lessen the effort customers need to make to find answers to their questions.

How to implement it: Monitor your most common customer tickets and implement resources in advance to avert future inquiries.

We work closely with our marketing and digital teams to deflect issues as they come in and solve them at the root. For example, based on customer feedback, we might add more details to our product pages, update language at checkout, or highlight specific reviews. 

Self-service support

What is it? Self-service support is a customer service approach that empowers customers to independently find solutions to their problems using available resources and tools.

Purpose: To speed up resolution time by allowing customers to find answers on their own without waiting for an agent.

How to implement it: Provide self-service options (like a Help Center, automated responses in chat, or ways to easily track orders) at all customer touchpoints, from pre-sales and product inquiries to order status emails and returns. 

On the BrüMate website, we display helpful self-service resources in the Gorgias chat widget so that it’s easy for folks to get the help they’re looking for quickly. 

We strategically show links for customers to check order status, get warranty or return information, or learn more about the products that would best fit their lifestyles. 

We also leverage this area to highlight new products or call out any major issues at the moment (i.e. preorders, shipping delays, etc.) and drive those back to more detailed help center articles and resources.

Personalized support

What is it? Personalized customer service focuses on personalizing customer interactions. 

Purpose: To enhance customer satisfaction by customizing interactions to each customer’s preferences and needs.

How to implement it: When interacting with customers, adjust to their voice, acknowledge their history, and suggest solutions relevant to their preferences.

A majority of the BrüMate customer base is female and, fittingly, the majority of our Customer Experience agents are female as well.. This takes empathy to a new level since our team knows exactly what our customers are going through, whether they’re a mom of three or a college student. We’re also big brand ambassadors which helps make the connection more individualized.

Philosophies

What are your priorities when it comes to customer service? Do you prioritize speed? Or would you rather go slow and build out from there? 

The way you approach customer service will dictate the overall customer experience. Like customer service strategies, your team can follow more than one philosophy. But make sure to pick one philosophy as your north star to create a clear path towards your goals.

Below are four customer service philosophies that can help establish brand loyalty.

Long-term foundation

Since BrüMate’s CX team is still pretty small, our core philosophy is to build a strong foundation. Delivering good customer service starts with making sure you’ve got all your bases covered, so you can prevent headaches along the way. Make it easy for the customer to find you early in their experience and that CX is a valuable resource along any point in their journey.

When I’m onboarding new agents, I want them to take their time learning our process. For instance, our team is very particular with naming conventions for ticket tags and Macros. While some will find it tedious, the upside is anybody could come in — agent or not — and start answering tickets without too much guidance.

The customer is (not) always right

As a customer service representative, it’s easy to realize that the customer is not always right. Products wear down over time, delays happen, and unpredictable changes come up. The goal is to prepare your team to handle difficult situations that still align with your brand’s values.

For example, I’ve had to deal with a customer being irritated because we couldn’t cancel an order a few hours after it was placed. From their point of view, cancellations should be a given. They were unaware of the complex behind-the-scenes process and that our team will start fulfilling an order immediately after it is placed. 

We started educating customers on our order fulfillment process and giving them insight on the reason the cancellation was no longer available. Fortunately, the context allowed them to cool down and forgive the inconvenience. We also provided them with options once the item was delivered.

Balancing human support & automation

Automation is handy for handling smaller customer hiccups. It’s important to note, though, that the best customer service balances automation with human touch. 

When customers reach out to the BrüMate support team, we try our best to keep them with the same agent until their ticket is resolved. This way, their experience with BrüMate is tied to a personal connection. On occasion, I have a few customers who I prefer to work directly with to resolve their issue to ensure they are satisfied with their experience. They are even willing to wait until I’ve returned from vacation due to this level of personalized touch.

Surprise and delight

The concept of "surprise and delight" is a philosophy that makes the customer experience unexpected but delightful. This can come in the form of exceptional, personal customer service (like at BrüMate!) or through gifts and discounts.

Our customer support team at BrüMate plays a pivotal role in building strong relationships. We like to turn the perception of customer service upside down and give customers a pleasant experience. It's an amazing thing to hear when customers mention our agents by name because we've gone above and beyond to build a connection with them.

Customer support as a revenue center 

Many people think of customer service teams as a way to resolve problems. I see our team as a marketing and revenue driving machine that can take it a step further by taking a sales approach. This means support’s main goals are to divert unsatisfied customers by using methods of upselling and cross-selling.

Your team should be experts and help close orders. Incentive your team to be one part customer service and sales. I guarantee you’ll see results! 

With a help desk you can deliver support whenever, however, and wherever you need

Gorgias makes multitasking look like a breeze. Its simple user interface makes it easy for new and experienced agents to use. You can speak to multiple customers at one time across different channels and integrate with ecommerce tools like Shopify, Affirm, and Yotpo without leaving the window.

Take a look at what Gorgias has helped some of my other favorite CX brands do:

• Pit Viper’s first response time and CSAT skyrocketed to 4.9
• Oger boosted its first response time by 69% 
• Kulani Kinis saved $400K in refunds by using Gorgias and Loop Returns 

If you’re ready to join me and these other amazing companies using Gorgias, book a demo today.

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