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Since ChatGPT was introduced in November 2022, customer service automation has stormed its way into almost every industry, including ecommerce. This leap in technology has paved the way for companies to increase their support efficiency dramatically, as demonstrated by the buy-now-pay-later service Klarna, which recently resolved two-thirds of customer service chats with AI.
The business gains arising from automation are evident. Faster and smarter tools mean less time handling mundane tasks and more time improving the customer journey with meaningful conversations, personalized experiences, and seamless upselling opportunities.
At Gorgias, our mission is to elevate customer experiences with automated solutions. To determine the impact, we analyzed data from over 14,000 merchants who use automation compared to those who do not.
Our data revealed a 36% increase in repeat purchases, a 37% reduction in first response time, a 52% reduction in resolution time, a 27% decrease in the ticket-to-order ratio, and a 1% increase in CSAT when automation is used.
These compelling results assert our belief in automation as the next, inevitable step for scaling support teams.
“AI is going to help us transform ourselves into deeper thinkers by taking over simple, standardized functions” —Ron Shah, CEO and Co-founder at Obvi
Before automation, customer service teams scrambled to hire more agents as their customer bases grew. When Black Friday and other peak seasons arrived, hiring more agents was the Band-Aid fix. Today, companies are opting for leaner support teams as automation allows them to do more with less. The benefit? Teams can scale and improve the quality of service without temporarily bringing on new staff.
Automation works like a junior support agent but at a higher efficiency. It can handle frequently asked questions like where is my order? and customize responses according to brand voice. So, as repetitive tasks are handled in the background, agents can focus on more complex tickets, such as product-specific questions or technical issues that require troubleshooting.
“Before, agents had to handle it all. Now, they rarely take a ticket about frequently asked questions. They’re only handling escalations, special product-related questions, and things like that.” —Caela Castillo, Director of Customer Experience, Jaxxon
The flexibility of automation makes it the ideal tool for personalized customer service. Aside from being a keyboard shortcut or macro, automation can be a hands-off assistant that can engage customers and influence as much as 25% of revenue.
At Gorgias, automation is at the core of our products, powering almost every feature in Helpdesk, Automate, and Convert. It allows merchants to deliver delightful and personalized customer interactions across various channels and touchpoints in the customer journey.
While automation is only one of many factors, we’ve found it to positively impact support performance metrics. Based on our data, merchants who used automation saw clear improvements in repeat purchase rates, response times, resolution times, tickets per order, and CSAT scores.
Retaining customer loyalty is challenging even when brands launch loyalty programs, as customers are discouraged by the effort required to receive rewards. However, Gorgias data shows that simply using automation can increase repeat purchase rates. Within 28 days, merchants who automated up to 20% of tickets increased their repeat purchase rate to 8%.
Yoga apparel brand Manduka used Gorgias Convert's on-site campaigns to influence customers to purchase multiple products. The campaign convinced shoppers to hit a $100 order total for free shipping by recommending small additional items they may be interested in. Their campaign brought in nearly $12,000, proving that automation can directly affect revenue.
“We want to be able to target our repeat customers who have purchased a lot, and say, ‘Welcome back! Here's a new product that would go wonderfully with the item you bought last time.’ It would be a wonderful translation of the in-person retail experience where staff know what you like, so they can assist you better.” —Jessica Botello, Customer Service Manager at Manduka
Automated responses resolve tickets in zero seconds and result in faster first response times. On average, merchants using automation respond 37% faster than ones who don’t automate customer service.
Responding to customers as quickly as possible is especially important during busy seasons like Black Friday and Cyber Monday so that revenue-generating questions don’t get pushed to the backlog. The customer experience team at health supplement brand Obvi was able to drive 3x more purchases from support conversations compared to previous years.
Faster response times also mean agents are able to make stronger connections with customers. For Obvi’s CX team, it translated to more time to engage with their vibrant Facebook community:
“Instantly, our CX team had time to prioritize important matters, like being active in our community of 75,000 women instead of sitting answering emails.” —Ron Shah, CEO and Co-founder at Obvi
When customer tickets are automated, resolution times improve dramatically. Merchants using automation resolved tickets 52% faster than those without.
Automation is especially helpful in answering pre-sales questions. High-end luggage retailer July deflected 450 tickets a month immediately after activating Quick Responses, one-click FAQs that live in Chat. Their Head of Operations and CX, Alex Naoumidis, notes that setup was “so easy, with a huge payoff.”
This significant efficiency gain ensures customers are well-educated about their products, leaving agents time to personalize the rest of the customer journey.
As automated responses provide quick solutions to customer issues, customers need to contact support less. Based on our data, brands that automate 10% or more of their tickets see a decrease in billable tickets per order. Brands with little to no automation do not see a significant improvement in the ticket-to-order ratio.
For apparel brand Shinesty, automating more than 10% of tickets greatly decreased the number of tickets per order by 27%. Self-serve tools like interactive conversations called Flows and Article Recommendations enabled customers to solve issues relating to discounts, subscription policies, and returns on their own.
“Automate would be useful for any ecommerce company that needs to lower their ticket counts, or wants to provide a more consistent experience.” —Molly Kerrigan, Senior Director of Retention at Shinesty
Thirty days after setting up automation in Gorgias, brands enjoyed a 1% increase in CSAT score, a 4.51 score compared to 4.46 for non-automating brands. Even though satisfaction only nudged an inch, the positive effects reached support teams, improving agent morale and team alignment.
Molly Kerrigan, Senior Director of Retention at Shinesty, emphasizes the importance of preserving quality customer interactions during growth, "We get a lot of praise from our customers, and they talk highly of our CX team after 1:1 interactions. We can’t lose that as we scale."
Since Gorgias provides in-depth conversation analytics, CX teams are finally able to see their impact.
“Tracking customer satisfaction scores in Gorgias is a really big help to us. Before, we didn't know if we were doing well or not, but now we can see people like the service we provide. We use the KPI tracking data for internal monthly meetings to review performance and see where we can improve,” says Deja Jefferson, Customer Experience Manager at Topicals.
Clearly, balancing automation with personalization significantly improves the customer journey. Given that customers with positive customer experiences are 2.7 times more likely to do repeat business, the value of automation is unmistakable.
AI progress has advanced in a short amount of time. But to remind you, this is only the beginning of what automation and AI can do in customer service. We envision AI as a constant work in progress, meant to intake information until it is capable enough to handle more complex tasks. This means agents will spend more time building strong customer connections and finding ways the business can grow.
Gorgias is at the forefront of this evolution, developing automation and AI-driven solutions like an AI-generated Help Center, an AI Agent, a generative AI assistant that autonomously answers customer questions, and an Interaction Quality Score to measure and report on AI-customer interactions. Gorgias aims to transform how support teams and customers interact with AI, paving the way for more impactful customer experiences on a human scale.
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I firmly believe everyone should experience working in customer support because, let’s face it, working in support isn't always recognized for the challenging job it is.
The importance of customer service for brand success has been proven time and again. Yet, customer support continues to get regarded as a necessary cost the business has to bite. It's often under-resourced and under-performs as a result, reinforcing the perception that support brings little value.
I’m on a mission to change that.
I'm Amanda Kwasniewicz, VP of Customer Experience at Love Wellness, and my journey has taught me that we customer support professionals have to be loud and proud about the importance of our work, since we're repairing a pretty damaged reputation.
In this article, I will share practical tips and firsthand experiences to help you showcase the significant impact of customer support on your bottom line, and make the case for more budget and respect in the organization.
A great customer experience is crucial to any business. And at the heart of that experience is good customer service.
Right now, every small business owner is experiencing the frustrations of rising customer acquisition costs. The solution? Leverage the relationships with customers you already have by focusing on repeat purchases and customer lifetime value (LTV). This strategy is much more profitable: Keeping customers costs much less than attracting new ones, and returning customers generate 300% more revenue than first-time shoppers (according to Gorgias data).
Your customer service agents are your brand’s frontline representation. Whether you’re a small business or a large enterprise, great reps have the capacity to enable sales and keep customers coming back. And undertrained or ill-equipped reps have the capacity to drive new customers away and dissolve relationships with current customers.
Simply put, customer service is important because it has a huge impact on your revenue. Let’s break that truth down into some specifics.
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From generating more referrals to increasing your average order value, there are several benefits to offering a great customer service experience.
The truth is, new customers are often hesitant to trust a company that they’ve never done business with before.
Studies have found that 18% will abandon their cart if they don’t trust the website with their credit card information. And, even if a customer trusts your business enough to make a purchase, still roughly 70% of all online shopping carts are left abandoned.
Why? Some of the top reasons are
These are all customer problems that live chat support agents can address proactively, which will increase trust and decrease abandoned carts. Adding live chat to your website can boost conversions by 12%.
Picture a shopping experience where uncertainty is met with immediate guidance, and questions are answered before they even arise—this is the essence of Love Wellness' commitment to elevating pre-sales support.
On our product description pages, we prominently feature
In addition to what we do at Love Wellness, you can enable chat campaigns to proactively guide customers through the checkout process or answer common questions that are blockers to purchasing.
Chat campaigns can trigger when certain conditions are met (like visiting/dwelling on a certain page or being a repeat shopper). You can hit these targeted shoppers with a message, like offering personalized product recommendations or providing a unique discount code. Now that’s an experience worth telling your friends about.
Remember: Customer service involves more than just resolving customer issues post-purchase. Support reps also act as sales agents, answering pre-sales inquiries and offering discounts to encourage orders.
Already using Gorgias? Learn how our platform integrated with referral platforms like Smile.io and LoyaltyLion to combine the forces of your word-of-mouth marketing and customer experience.
According to a report from Salesforce, 97% of marketers report an improvement in business results due to personalization. Customer service is no exception: including customers' names, avoiding asking for the same information multiple times, and providing customer-specific recommendations all help build customer loyalty.
Your customer support platform should make personalization easy by showing a customer’s order and conversation history with your brand, so reps have the full context when speaking to customers:
And, with a helpdesk like Gorgias, you can build templated Macros, which automatically pull customer data into your messages (names, order numbers, shipping addresses, etc).
One way we offer personalized customer support at Love Wellness is our “Shop with a wellness specialist” program. Shoppers can take a short quiz, get matched with an expert, and text that specialist directly to build a personalized wellness routine.
Customer service can be a goldmine of key data that benefits the entire team, serving as a wellspring of insights that drive informed decisions and overall business success.
How? Customer service acts as a direct line to your customers' thoughts and experiences. By consistently collecting and analyzing feedback, you gain an understanding of pain points, preferences, and trends that can influence product development, marketing strategies, and overall business direction.
One word: convenience.
Your customers should be able to share feedback without leaping through hoops.
And, when you've got a vault of feedback, don't let it gather digital dust. Your team has so much data they can review between channels like email, SMS, chat, and social media—both compliments and complaints. You need to be willing to listen to every customer’s needs.
We have a channel in Slack dedicated to customer feedback. Dropping in feedback is part of the team’s daily and weekly responsibilities, which helps them get really familiar with all of the content. It also allows our team to dissect them and collaborate on how we can improve. You could also schedule recurring feedback share sessions with the Product or Website teams, or even invite them directly into Gorgias (at no extra cost) and create a dedicated view for product feedback, website feedback, and so on.
Happy customers are much more likely to recommend your brand to others than customers who have a poor customer service experience.
94% of U.S. shoppers will recommend companies with service they rate as “very good.”
Along with increasing the likelihood of organic referrals, a great customer service experience can earn your more positive reviews.
Considering 95% of customers report reading online reviews before making a purchasing decision, showcasing just how important these reviews can be when it comes to attracting new business. We have a whole page dedicated to this on the Love Wellness website.
There’s also a filter option on every product page review widget so that shoppers can see the most common things people are saying about a product and filter down accordingly.
Customer service is one of the main ways we build trust with customers, which is especially important in the personal care and women's health niche. Our aim is to provide a safe space for questions that customers might not even be comfortable asking a doctor.
At Love Wellness, we believe that every single team member plays a vital role in creating a haven of care and understanding. That’s why we created an immersive customer experience training program that involves each and every one of us, including the president of the company and even our office manager!
This program is about truly understanding Love Wellness' purpose, from top to bottom. Whether I'm involved in customer service management, product sourcing, managing our online presence, or crafting compelling copy, I've come to realize that a customer-first mindset is the key.
Bonus reading: See Gorgias’ tips on customer service training to help improve the quality of support.
Your customer support team can create self-service resources like an FAQ page or Help Center to educate customers about your return policies, shipping practices, and the quality of your materials or ingredients. And by proactively during the pre-purchase process, you can provide first-time customers with the answers they need to make a purchase.
Here’s what ours looks like at Love Wellness, which answers key pre-sales questions about each product, plus frequently-asked questions about payment, shipping, and more.
By addressing any questions or concerns that may be preventing a customer from making a purchase, proactive customer support can boost your AOV by encouraging customers to purchase additional products they might not have bought otherwise.
The proof is in the pudding: businesses that offer proactive live chat customer support generate a 10%-15% higher AOV than those that do not.
At Love Wellness we have a proactive outreach program for delivery issues, with the goal of reaching out to the customer to triage before they reach out to us. Since starting this, of our ~250 tickets, 105 have received a CSAT and the score is a solid 5 across the board!
According to Gorgias data, repeat customers make up only 21% of the average brand’s customer base but generate 44% of that brand’s revenue thanks to these higher cart values:
Another effective way that customer support boosts AOV is by providing your sales team with upsell and cross-sell opportunities.
For example, at Love Wellness we make sure to explain to customers how they should use the product on the description page. In this section, we also call out additional products that pair well with what they’re looking at.
One well-known rule of business is that attracting new customers is always more expensive than marketing to your existing customer base.
And fun fact: A staggering 95% of U.S. consumers use customer service quality as a factor when determining whether or not to do business with a company.
My point? By prioritizing customer relationships and positive customer experiences, you can ensure that the customers you attract remain loyal to your brand and offer as much value as possible over the full course of their relationship with your business.
Promises made, promises kept. Make sure you have the means to follow through on your claims—and the backup available when mistakes happen
My two-fold advice:
When customers consistently receive what they expect, they are more likely to become repeat buyers and advocates for your brand.
Between social media, content, advertising, and SEO, marketing can get very expensive very quickly. For small businesses, these expenses cost thousands of dollars every month.
I’ve already mentioned how exceptional customer service improves customer retention rate. By investing in your support team, your brand can generate positive word-of-mouth, reviews, and repeat customer service.
This means you’ll draw more value from your existing customers rather than spending money trying to attract new ones, which is a much more cost-effective and sustainable path to growth.
In the past, we had a custom tech stack that operated in isolation, causing manual errors and a great deal of confusion. We were practically solving puzzles blindfolded when something went wrong.
After finally having enough, we dismantled our old tech stack and reconstructed it with components that had native integrations already in place. We've learned the hard way that a well-integrated tech stack is the backbone of efficient customer service.
There's no more frustrating tab-switching or tedious copy/pasting to handle tasks like creating discount codes, editing orders, and processing refunds — trust me, it’s saving us from a lot of hair-pulling moments.
One tool that has been a game-changer for us is Gorgias, thanks to its integrations with Shopify (ecommerce), Okendo (reviews), Yotpo (loyalty rewards and referrals), and Recharge (subscriptions). These integrations have streamlined our customer support process by helping agents make changes to those other tools (like refunding an order or updating subscription status) without changing tabs. It also helps our agents offer more personalized support (with less back-and-forth) by giving them the full customer context, right in the ticket view.
Every customer has a different communication preference. Omnichannel support makes it easy for them to reach you on various channels like text (SMS support), live chat support on your website, and social media support).
Offering omnichannel communication is important and can be effective, but only if it's tailored to the consideration of your customers and business needs.
For example, the bulk of our inbox is subscription management, so tackling those tickets via SMS is not effective for us. The messages are too long, and often include details customers need to hang onto to reference back to, so email is by far the better channel.
Want more tips? Read our list of customer service best practices.
We've all been there — waiting endlessly on hold, being bounced around different departments, and feeling the frustration mount. It's not a feeling we relish.
Take contacting your bank, for instance. The last thing that crosses your mind after that ordeal is calling them again anytime soon. Instead, it's more like, "Phew, glad that's over. Hope I won't have to do that again."
Now, transpose that to an ecommerce scenario. A lousy customer service experience can easily push a shopper to the point of churn, or even talk bad about your brand online or to their friends.
Above, we discussed the impact of great customer service on your bottom line. But the real thing to be aware of is just how damaging bad customer service is — enough to tank a great product, brand, and company.
The costs of subpar service are staggering, ranging from $75 billion to a jaw-dropping $1.6 trillion annually. Plus, according to Retail Dive, a whopping 73% of customers won’t return to your brand after just a couple of poor customer service expenses.
There’s a compounding snowball effect beyond losing customers as well: your customer service team gets burnt out and quits, you hire quickly (and not carefully) to replace those reps, and you’re left with an untrained and understaffed team.
As a result, your company has poor customer service, so execs never get to see the impact that good experiences could have on your bottom line, leading to even fewer resources for customer success. The cycle continues from there.
Thankfully, good customer service can have the opposite effect.
CB Insights shared a story about how, in 2012, Best Buy grappled with a $1.7 billion loss due to rising ecommerce and Amazon's Price Check app. The company turned this around by putting customer service at the forefront by
This customer-centric approach revitalized the brand. If they hadn’t made these improvements, Best Buy might not be here today.
Looking back, I've realized that nailing customer support is all about staying ahead of the game and making smart moves — fast.
Remember, your customer support situation can impact your revenue in ways you might not imagine, and profitability is essential these days. The goal is to ensure your customer support strategy cultivates loyalty rather than driving customers away. That's where Gorgias comes in.
Designed exclusively for ecommerce, Gorgias equips online stores with powerful tools to enhance customer interactions, ultimately driving revenue growth, including:
I encourage you to book a short time with the team to learn all about it. Gorgias has been a game-changer for Love Wellness and I’m confident it can be for your brand too.
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Customer service professionals (and the customer service skills they possess) are at the frontline of creating great brand experiences.
All too often, customer service workers aren’t valued as truly skilled or strategic members of the business. It’s a shame (and a missed opportunity), given how big a role customer service agents play in the success of a business.
According to 2022 McKinsey research, three out of five customer service leaders view attracting, training, and retaining skilled customer service workers as a top business priority.
My name is Deja Jefferson, and I’m the CX and Consumer Insights Manager at Topicals. We’ve upskilled our customer experience associates with both soft and hard skills to give our customers complete support and unwavering confidence when making a purchase.
Here are 16 of the most important hard and soft skills for customer support that we train for at Topicals, and that you should build your support team to possess.
Customer service soft skills are the non-technical, interpersonal traits agents use while supporting shoppers. Ultimately, soft skills help to problem solve through good communication and clear thinking.
These aren’t technical skills, nor are they easily quantifiable, but they are vitally important to improve customer communications.
Your support agents need to have a firm understanding of how their tone of voice and word choice affect customer satisfaction.
Using positive language is a valuable customer service technique that steers conversations toward positive emotions, which generate positive outcomes for customers and your business.
Here are some examples of how your team can use positive language in customer service situations.
For further clarification, here are a few examples of what these same interactions might look like using negative language instead:
You can get a sense of a person’s positive language skills early on, even during an interview when hiring for customer service roles.
If your support agents need help using positive language for any scenario, write customer service scripts or Macros that incorporate positive language. This helps all your agents stay positive, whether they're brand-new employees or established team members.
“I ensure that customer service provided by Topicals not only exhibits empathy when issues arise but should be seamlessly integrated throughout the entire transaction process. Our priority is to ensure that our customers feel fully supported at every step.”
—Deja Jefferson, CX and Consumer Insights Manager at Topicals
It's a key customer service skill to show empathy for a shopper, especially when a difficult situation comes up.
When customers share their challenges and frustrations, it's essential for them to feel assured that their concerns are being understood by empathetic listeners. In the realm of targeted skincare for specific skin conditions, we must consider the vulnerability of consumers as they seek out new skincare solutions. Let's be honest — they've received recommendations from friends, witnessed numerous skin influencers endorse their preferred "featured" products for various skin types, and might be following advice from various dermatologists, (if they're lucky). I ensure that customer service provided by Topicals not only exhibits empathy when issues arise but should be seamlessly integrated throughout the entire transaction process. Our priority is to ensure that our customers feel fully supported at every step.
Take a look at this hypothetical customer issue with an angry customer:
Empathy is hard to teach. At Topicals, I train my team to get inside the customer’s mind.
Our customers are real people facing challenging (and highly personal) skin issues, from Hyperpigmentation, Atrophic/Acne Scarring, Keratosis Pilaris, and so much more.
Sure, some customers lose their patience when they feel defeated — that’s unavoidable. But most of them are feeling frustrated and hopeless. And my team has an opportunity to give them hope that we can work together to help fix the customer’s issue.
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Whether in a physical retail setting or digital, active listening is a key step to adapting to nuanced questions or navigating tense situations with customers.
Active listening is listening with the intent to obtain information and understand it, rather than simply listening with the intent to reply.
Active listening requires the agent to acknowledge that they understand our customers during a conversation, and provide feedback or ask follow-up questions when appropriate.
First, let’s look at a hypothetical customer issue:
Here’s what a generic, canned response looks like:
But when you use active listening skills, the reply becomes more like this:
The second example response showcases that the support agent has heard the problem and is actively looking for a solution.
Use active listening alongside a helpdesk like Gorgias, which helps your customer service representatives “remember” past interactions. It’s like active listening but at scale.
Gorgias displays customer information like past conversations and orders, current orders, and data from your other apps (like loyalty points or product review scores).
Your agents can use this information to avoid asking for information the customer already gave, and automatically pull it into their responses with variables like [Last Order #] or [Shipping Address].
Related reading: Our full guide on personalized customer service
Time management is the ability to get the most important things done, with a limited number of hours in a day.
As a customer service skill, it's make-or-break: The better an agent's time management, the quicker their first response time and the more tickets they can resolve.
Customer service response times tremendously impact your store’s bottom line. If a response to a query takes too long, customer satisfaction plummets.
In a customer support environment, managing time effectively allows an agent to handle a larger volume of tickets (without breaking their back).
Effective time management is a team sport. You need to make sure:
Your agents have better things to do than copy/paste order statuses all day. We use Gorgias’s Automate at Topicals to handle repetitive questions (like “Where is my order?” or “Where do you ship?”) so that my team can spend their time on issues that need human attention.
Plus, Automate helps customers, even when my team isn’t online.
Support services is an industry that is stressful by nature, largely because most shoppers’ problems are a little tense.
Your agents need to understand when a situation is tense and what to do to defuse the emotional heat:
We know we can’t make everyone happy, but we can always make sure people feel heard. In this example, a shopper shared on Instagram that the product we were featuring didn’t work for them.
Instagram comments are public-facing and we always want to be sure we address feedback from disappointed customers in this kind of arena.
So, we apologized and recognized what the commentator said. Then, we suggested carrying the conversation to a private DM so we could find a solution.
In addition, support agents need to care for themselves, drink plenty of water, and get enough rest.
"People underestimate the emotional and mental resilience that working in CX requires. It’s hard not to take things personally sometimes."
—Grace Choi, Customer Experience Team Lead at TUSHY
When an agent takes time for self-care, they are prepared to be resilient to the job's stresses and approach customer problems with understanding. It’ll improve both a customer's patience with your rep as well as their ultimate satisfaction.
Reflecting is the act of repeating a concern to the person speaking — and it’s a crucial customer service skill your agents must master.
It will make your shoppers feel heard, which is the foundation of a great experience.
Reflecting accomplishes three things:
Let’s see what reflecting looks like in action in a customer support context.
Sometimes, the most challenging part of solving a problem is understanding what the problem actually is.
Here are a couple of clarifying phrases to keep in your back pocket.
A strong brand voice is crucial for any brand, but keeping the brand tone consistent in customer comms is a challenge — especially for technical tickets.
Skilled customer service reps know that maintaining brand voice in customer communications goes a long way toward improving customer experiences.
Personalized Macros help brands plug in automated responses for commonly asked questions. You can build pre-made responses that are infused with your brand voice, so you can maintain fast and effective response times without sacrificing your core messaging.
At Topicals, we use Macros to help maintain brand voice while handling a high volume of customer service tickets. We’ve built a library of templated responses based on our audience persona of skincare-obsessed Gen Z-ers and millennials.
As a result, 69% of tickets at Topicals are now dealt with using automations.
In addition to Macros, consider following up with customers using SMS messaging.
At Topicals, we tested out SMS so customer service reps could follow up with customers. The less formal format made it easy to keep up with our brand persona of Gen-Z and millennials who prefer quick messaging over emails or phone support.
We were blown away by the positive response. Customers were willing to open up about their experiences and were happy to chat about how much they loved our products.
Beyond the soft skills we’ve discussed above, there are hard skills every customer service representative needs to master.
Customer service techniques or hard skills are defined as the hands-on, technical requirements of the job. This entails understanding the company's products and the tools and technology that your customer service team uses.
The most obvious customer service skill your agents (and your virtual assistants) must possess is the ability to answer questions and communicate information about the products you sell.
An essential part of customer service training is making sure your agents really understand the product, so they can answer in-depth questions and questions about how to use the product:
If hiring, you may occasionally come across an applicant who has existing knowledge of your products, which is a bonus. Still, you should maintain a knowledge base that gives your support team (and your customers, if you chose to make your knowledge base public) easy access to the information they need.
Product knowledge includes product ingredients, uses, compatibility, troubleshooting, and more. Your training should also include process and policy information, like shipping times, packaging, returns and exchanges, and other common questions in ecommerce.
↗️ Check out our Director of Support’s guide to customer service training for more guidance.
Your support staff doesn’t need to illustrate beautiful images with their wordplay — actually, that risks confusing the customer. However, they do need a sharp understanding of the language they’re using and know how to use proper grammar and spelling.
Test your prospective agents on the following:
If your agents are having trouble with spelling or grammar, consider giving them access to tools they can incorporate into their day-to-day work.
A few great language and grammar tools to consider include:
Typing speed may not sound like the most crucial skill on this list, but when you break it down faster typing speed = faster response times.
90% of customers rate an immediate response as "important" or "very important" when they have a support request. So, the faster you can move through tickets, the more satisfied your customers are likely to be.
Take a typing speed test to know exactly how your typing ability stacks up.
Generally speaking, here’s a ranking of words per minute (WPM):
If you’re a professional typist, you’re likely typing at a whopping 60 - 90 WPM (or more!)
A bulk of communication with your customers will take place via email.
Make sure your support staff has excellent email communication skills in place and that they understand how to leverage your email platform’s features.
One great way to make email customer support more streamlined and convenient for your team is to utilize a single platform for all of your customer support channels.
With Gorgias, agents can respond to emails, SMS messages, and social media messages from a single, easy-to-use dashboard rather than having to master each channel individually.
↗️ Check out our email templates for a way to scale quality email customer service.
Considering 59% of the world's population uses some form of social media, it makes sense to arm your support staff to field questions and concerns that come through your social media comments.
Build a clear protocol to handle public tickets. Will you move the conversation to another communication platform or handle it where it starts? Your support agent should know what you expect as well as how to use the social media platforms you promote your brand on.
If you don’t have a helpdesk, you’re missing out on opportunities to provide great experiences and turn more casual browsers into loyal buyers:
“Gorgias has so much integration between Shopify, Instagram, and Facebook. The Facebook ad comment has been very interesting. People have been converting right there, thanks to simple social interaction.” —Cody Szymanski, Customer Experience Manager, Shinesty
↗️ Learn more about how Shinesty earns more sales and answers questions faster with Gorgias.
↗️ Read our complete guide on social media and customer service for more tips.
Most customer relationships span multiple channels. As your brand grows, make sure your customer service agents are comfortable switching from one channel to the next.
If you don’t have a helpdesk, this will require a bit of tab-shuffling throughout the day to respond to comments and messages from all these different platforms.
That said, a helpdesk will save your agents hours every week by unifying your omnichannel approach to one platform, where agents can see every past interaction — be it an hour-long phone call or a 5-star review — and respond to customers without leaving the platform.
Offering customer support via multiple channels such as live chat, email, call centers, and social media provides customers with more touchpoints for contacting your company.
A helpdesk that can unify customer support interactions across channels in one view is helpful for agents because it reduces the amount of app swapping they have to do. It also gives every customer's entire interaction history with your brand across all channels.
Here are a few effective tips to optimize your omnichannel support approach:
↗️ Check out our complete guide to omnichannel customer service for more tips.
The skills we’ve covered so far can apply to agents that work to manage customer issues for in-person or online experiences.
For those agents who solely work in ecommerce, there are four more valuable skills to help improve customer satisfaction with your brand.
Nearly 80% of customers told PwC that a speedy, helpful answer is the most important aspect of good customer service. So, brands are turning to messaging-based customer support channels (like live chat support, WhatsApp, and SMS texting) to meet these customer expectations.
If your support team isn’t trained on these fast-moving channels, you could miss out on opportunities for sales.
In addition to the technical skill required to maneuver these channels within your helpdesk, your staff should refine their skillset to drive sales with live chat. Live chat can boost your conversion rate by 12%, and it’s made a huge difference in raising our purchase rate and lowering our return rate here at Topicals:
Check out our detailed guide to live chat support for more tips and tricks.
When talking directly with customers you need to be able to solve their issues quickly — and that involves fast decision-making.
It’s the responsibility of the customer service rep to take care of the customer by providing the best possible solution to their problem right away.
Sometimes what the customer wants isn’t beneficial to your business’s bottom line. If that happens, your agents need to be able to weigh this one issue with the customers’ entire lifetime value.
Let’s look at a hypothetical example.
While the delivery person didn't take great care to keep the packaging intact, the customer was clear that the serum works as advertised. It might not be realistic for your brand’s bottom line to offer a replacement in this case.
Instead of giving the customer something that could hurt your bottom line, a strong customer service agent might make a quick decision:
Sometimes, bending your rules to keep a customer happy (even if it’s not the most cost-effective) can pay you back with repeat purchases, positive reviews, recommendations, and more.
In your customer service policies and training, be extremely clear about what kinds of situations are black-and-white, where the agent must follow company policy.
But also be very clear where there's some gray area, where the agent can deviate from the stated policy to delight a customer or make sure an interaction ends positively.
Make sure your customer service reps know what they are allowed to do on their own, and when they need a manager's review.
In a physical retail setting, employees can welcome customers, ask if they need any help, and give customers the information (and encouragement) they need to make a purchase.
Pre-sale support means you are able to communicate with a shopper during their browsing experience — helping the shopper make a confident purchasing decision before they click “checkout.”
It's tricky to pull this off in an ecommerce setting, but it can have a huge impact on the ROI of your support team. That’s why it's important to think critically about how your brand offers pre-sale support and give agents the skills to pull it off.
Empower your customer service reps to speak with shoppers during their browsing experience.
At Topicals, we offer a lot of education about our products, so we can arm agents with the knowledge they need to talk about Topicals with customers.
Here are a few examples of common pre-sale questions your agents might see:
For brands that use Gorgias, Convert lets you proactively reach out to customers based on their browsing behavior.
This way, you can ask if the customer has questions, remind them of a timely promotion or free shipping offer, point them to a product recommendation quiz, or even offer a discount to nudge them toward a purchase.
When you’re looking for a new agent, it’s a great idea to hire for the skills in this list right out the gate. Then, continue to offer training opportunities for your customer service reps to master their craft.
Training for the skills listed in this article has a great impact on your company’s reputation and revenue.
Once you’re ready to put those skills to use, sign up for Gorgias to turn your customer support team into a revenue-generating machine.
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The best in CX and ecommerce, right to your inbox
TL;DR:
This year, we witnessed customer service teams from 16,140 brands support over 77 million shoppers and millions of tickets with Gorgias.
As we turn to a new chapter, we want to spotlight how six of the top-performing industries delivered customer service in 2023.
From food to fashion, we’ll see how quickly agents answered questions, then discover what customers were asking, and learn from experts about what customer experience trends to expect in the new year.
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Step into the ecommerce world, where you’ll find a vibrant population of merchants, each with their own niche and groups of loyal customers. Together, they generated $1.45 billion in revenue in 2023.
Of course, this would not have been possible without the grit of customer service teams and their dedication to customer satisfaction.
Support teams across 20 industries answered customer inquiries within one business day and solved them in two and a half, resulting in very satisfied shoppers. Impressively, 15% of interactions were fully automated and resolved on average.
Here are the average industry support stats:
The most popular ecommerce industries — Apparel and Fashion, Health, Wellness, and Fitness, Cosmetics, Food and Beverage, Consumer Goods, and Luxury Goods and Jewelry — were the top performers.
Using exclusive Gorgias data, we’ll look at how support teams from these industries handled tickets. Then, we’ll gain expert insight into the ecommerce experience in 2023, and how experts predict it will change in the coming year.
Our first stop is the bustling market of Apparel and Fashion. We’re all familiar with how tricky online clothes shopping can be. Most likely due to issues with sizing and style, support teams mainly dealt with inquiries about:
Yet, despite receiving the highest number of customer tickets among the six industries, Apparel and Fashion brands kept customers happy. They responded within one business day and resolved issues within two, with 15% of interactions being resolved with automation.
Here are their stats compared to the overall industry average:
According to Loop, over 50% of their merchants now charge for certain returns, including fees for exchanges and returns for store credit. This change aligns with consumer preferences, as their report shows 70% of shoppers are willing to pay for premium, convenient experiences, a trend already embraced by half of these customers.
The next stop on our tour is the thriving Health, Wellness, and Fitness industry.
Unfortunately, brands in this sector had a challenging year keeping up with unpleasant tickets about:
Perhaps support teams could have automated more than 15% of interactions to handle these repetitive tickets better. But despite their slower-than-average first response time, customers were still pleased with the support experience:
Expert Insights: Amanda Kwasniewicz, the VP of Customer Experience at women’s wellness brand Love Wellness, highlights that personalized customer service has been a key trend of 2023. She’s observed that customers now expect to receive personal recommendations during their shopping journeys.
Now, take a peek at the fast-growing Cosmetics industry, and you’ll see how eager customers were to check out the hype around both small businesses and celebrity brands.
Given the boom of influencer marketing for these highly personal products, customers often inquired about:
To solve these tickets, support teams automated 18% of interactions and attained faster times than average:
Getting hungry? This year, the growing appetite for Food and Beverage in the ecommerce world was unmistakable. Beef jerky or freshly squeezed fruit juice, customers savored their snacks. But it also didn’t stop them from being tough critics.
The main issues raised to Food and Beverage support teams revolved around:
Luckily, they cut down their first response time by automating 15% of interactions — nearly three hours faster than average:
Expert insights: Zoe Kahn, former Manager of CX & Retention at Chomps and now Owner of Inevitable Agency, saw inventory issues as a major challenge of 2023. The complexity of inventory logistics is difficult for consumers to understand, leading to higher outreach from customers wondering when items would be back in stock. "Quieting those concerns is really difficult," Zoe notes. However, after witnessing inventory issues over the last few years, Zoe realized that "it's inevitable that inventory problems will happen because of how challenging the logistics of selling a product are."
There’s a lot to explore in the all-encompassing Consumer Goods industry. You’ll find brands that sell everything from sustainable water bottles and furniture to everything else in between, like dog toys and mystery subscription boxes.
While Consumer Goods brands only automated 14% of interactions, their resolution time was two hours faster than the industry average, resulting in the happiest customers among the six industries:
The top tickets Consumer Goods brands received were about:
Expert Insights: Ren Fuller-Wasserman, the Director of Experience at TUSHY, notes that the impact of the macroeconomic climate was among the top challenges faced in 2023. “As there's talk of recession and inflation, people are really looking for products that provide added value,” she says.
Our partner Okendo, a growth marketing platform that has worked with well-known brands like SKIMS and Rhode, notes that tech stack consolidation has been the top priority in 2023. They saw that merchants who used a multifaceted product with app integrations resulted in a 15x return on investment.
Our final stop is at the small gem of an industry, Luxury Goods and Jewelry. Making sure their pricey wares arrived to customers safely was the top priority. That’s why the top questions support teams received were in regard to:
Out of all the industries, Luxury Goods and Jewelry brands automated the most interactions at 28%, which certainly helped to shorten response and resolution times:
Expert Insights: Caela Castillo, Director of CX at Jaxxon, advises preparing early for BFCM but being flexible to change. She notes, “Sometimes you need a different perspective,” acknowledging that agents are valuable resources to gain customer insights, especially when it comes to planning new customer service strategies.
It’s been a fruitful year of expediting the traditionally slow support process. However, with greater strides made in AI technology, ecommerce has only scratched the surface of providing accelerated service.
We interviewed ecommerce experts who saw the rise and fall of trends in 2023 and are ready to use their learnings to make the new year better.
Here are the top four actions ecommerce companies should take in 2024.
We’re constantly fed an endless stream of new technology, which can be a distraction to business goals. That’s why the CTO of ecommerce agency Novatize, Pierre-Olivier Brassard, highly recommends planning a robust strategy first. Clear business goals will help teams pick the best tools — not the other way around.
Customer service management platform TalentPop saw AI as the top CX trend of 2023. They foresee late adopters using AI next year, while early adopters will focus on optimization. To get ahead of the game, TalentPop recommends that support teams research all AI options since CX will only become more saturated with AI tools.
Brandon Amoroso, Founder & President at Electriq and Co-founder at SCALIS observed similar trends. In 2023, many CX teams implemented more self-service options for customers. Going into 2024, Brandon notes that a “continual integration of AI into the entire customer experience” is likely.
As social shopping gains traction, marketing platform Yotpo predicts customers are going to look for more real-time communication with brands. In fact, HubSpot reports a 45% year-over-year surge in using social media DMs for customer service. Therefore, using tools that enable interactions through DMs or text, like Yotpo SMS, will be a crucial strategy in the upcoming year.
Amanda Kwasniewicz, VP of Customer Experience at Love Wellness, advises CX leaders to ensure their contributions are recognized. Kwasniewicz notes that support teams often know the business better than any other department. "Beat the CX drum loudly. If you're not in the room, find a way in the room," she stresses.
Consumers are increasingly multi-screen and multi-channel. From desktop to mobile to tablet, they interact with businesses through Instagram DMs, Facebook Messenger, emails, support chat, and even phone calls.
Though omnichannel customer service lays a valuable foundation, communicating effectively as a brand involves weaving marketing, sales, and customer service into a cohesive omnichannel communication strategy.
An omnichannel communication approach makes it easier to talk to customers in a personal way, helping drive sales and keep customers loyal.
This article explores how centralizing communications offers your team — from marketing and sales reps to support staff — the tools and insights they need for a consistent customer experience.
By doing so, you don’t just react to customer needs; you anticipate them, opening avenues for proactive engagements that positively impact both relationships and revenue.
Omnichannel communication is a customer-centric approach that integrates different methods of communication and business channels into a unified, seamless experience for prospective and existing customers.
Omnichannel communication goes beyond just offering multiple avenues for customer interaction; it creates a seamless and integrated experience across all touchpoints.
Omnichannel communication focuses on three key facets—data unification, fluidity of customer interactions, and data-driven insights. By focusing on these key tenets, omnichannel communication moves beyond being a buzzword to a strategic approach that places the customer at the center of your business operations. This strategy allows retailers to deliver an experience that is consistent, contextually relevant, and highly personalized.
Centralizing customer data from various digital channels like email, social media, and in-store interactions enables a more consistent and personalized experience. Also, it serves as the foundation for customer profiles. These profiles are critical for delivering targeted offers, rewards, and personalized service to shoppers.
Customers don’t experience channels; they experience your brand. They want to transition effortlessly between online chats, phone calls, and physical visits and have a conversation pick up right where it left off. This seamlessness is particularly beneficial for ecommerce retailers, who can use these channels to provide real-time updates such as stock availability or order status, enhancing customer satisfaction and reducing friction.
Turn data into actionable insights. By analyzing integrated data across platforms, you can discern valuable patterns in customer behavior and preferences, allowing you to continuously refine your marketing strategies and improve the overall shopping experience.
Omnichannel communication moves beyond being a buzzword to a strategic approach that places the customer at the center of your business operations.
While the concept sounds promising, how does it manifest for a single brand?
Graza excels at omnichannel communication, offering its customers a seamless and enriched experience across various touchpoints.
Using Gorgias Live Chat, they provide real-time customer support, resolving queries when customer service reps are online. As an alternative, their customer service email channel serves as both a satisfaction tool and a means for personalized marketing, sending targeted offers.
On social media platforms — like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram — they respond to customer inquiries and engage the community with educational content about their single-origin olive oils.
This multi-layered approach ensures that every interaction is not just a transaction but an opportunity to deepen the relationship. The outcome is higher customer satisfaction and increased brand loyalty, leading to repeat purchases and a more robust bottom line.
We’re in a platform renaissance: retailers now have many ways to connect with customers.
However, not all channel strategies are created equal. Understanding the differences between omnichannel and multichannel approaches is critical to developing a communication plan that meets customer expectations.
Both omnichannel and multichannel strategies use multiple channels for customer engagement. Omnichannel takes it a step further by integrating data across these platforms. This provides cohesive and personalized customer experiences, rather than fragmented interactions that are often the result of multichannel approaches.
An omnichannel strategy focuses on offering a seamless customer experience across all touchpoints, whereas multichannel often treats each channel as an isolated silo. This can result in a disjointed and less satisfying journey for customers who hop from one channel to another, asking the same question to different customer service reps.
Omnichannel doesn’t just collect data; it leverages real-time analytics. This level of insight can drive data-driven decision-making, which is generally absent in multichannel strategies. This makes multichannel less effective for optimizing customer engagement and marketing efforts.
To make an omnichannel strategy work, you need strong tech systems that bring together data and tasks from different channels. While this may cost more at first compared to simpler multichannel setups, the benefit is happier customers and smoother day-to-day running of your business.
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In the retail landscape, multiple channels connect your brand and your customers. To harness the full power of an omnichannel strategy, you need to focus on integrating different types of customer service and specific channels that offer different advantages for customer engagement.
Selecting the right mix of channels allows you to meet your customers where they are and offer them a consistent and seamless brand experience. Keep in mind that different communication channels have different customer expectations. According to data collected by Gorgias from over 12,000 ecommerce brands, here are the average response times for different communication channels:
With that in mind, here are some channels to consider including in your own omnichannel communications strategy:
Email remains a powerful tool for businesses to speak to customers, allowing for targeted marketing campaigns tailored to specific customer segments. Personalized follow-up emails are also critical for nurturing long-term customer relationships and encouraging repeat purchases.
SMS is an increasingly effective channel for businesses, offering real-time customer engagement. Targeted SMS campaigns can reach specific customer groups with timely offers and updates, while personalized follow-up messages help sustain long-term relationships and promote repeat business.
Platforms like Facebook and Instagram facilitate immediate customer engagement and provide a wealth of data on customer preferences and behavior. This data can be integrated into your larger omnichannel strategy to refine marketing campaigns and product offerings.
Live chat offers real-time, on-site customer support, which can drastically improve conversion rates. Resolving customer queries and concerns in real time removes barriers to purchase and enhances customer satisfaction.
A dedicated mobile app can be a hub for personalized promotions and a streamlined shopping experience. A well-designed app can significantly boost customer engagement, build loyalty, and even integrate with your in-store experiences.
Physical stores are not just about sales; they offer tactile and immediate experiences that are challenging to replicate online. They also provide opportunities for cross-promotion with online channels, making a thoughtful in-store experience a vital part of a cohesive omnichannel strategy.
Even in the digital age, phone support retains its value. According to a report, 43% of consumers favor non-digital customer service methods, such as in-person consultations or phone calls. Many customers prefer the immediacy and personal touch of voice support, especially for resolving complex queries or deciding about high-ticket items.
Implementing an omnichannel strategy has far-reaching implications for your business, affecting everything from customer engagement to your bottom line. Here, we delve into how this integrated approach can drive revenue, increase customer loyalty, and offer other pivotal advantages for your ecommerce business.
A solid omnichannel strategy amplifies brand awareness by offering unified messaging across all customer touchpoints, whether social media, email, or in-store interactions.
This consistency strengthens brand recognition and facilitates customer engagement as they know what to expect from your brand. This multi-pronged strategy, leveraging both digital and traditional channels, ensures you’re where your customers are.
Parade, an undergarment brand committed to comfort and inclusivity, maintains a solid social media presence that includes customer support on platforms like Instagram and Facebook. Using Gorgias tools, Parade offers customers a seamless omnichannel communication experience.
Omnichannel communication isn’t just about convenience — it’s a revenue multiplier. Customers who feel understood and valued across all touchpoints are more likely to become repeat buyers. This is achieved by harnessing data for personalization and ensuring consistent, real-time communication. Here’s how:
Earning customer loyalty is about creating brand advocates through consistently exceeding expectations. Exceeding expectations across all channels fosters a sense of reliability and trust in your brand. Here’s how:
BYCHARI is a luxury jewelry brand established in 2012, known for its unique and modern handmade pieces designed for women who desire luxury while appreciating simplicity. The brand excels in omnichannel communication, offering a variety of customer touchpoints, including a contact form, live chat powered by Gorgias, calls, and emails.
To empower customers 24/7, especially when live support is unavailable, BYCHARI also provides self-service options like comprehensive FAQs, and uses Gorgias Flows to automate tasks such as order tracking and management.
Centralized data and analytics make your marketing campaigns smarter and more efficient. When you understand your customers’ behaviors and preference across channels, your targeting becomes dynamic and your messaging more personalized. Here’s how:
A holistic view of customer data from multiple touchpoints uncovers insights that can drive quick, informed decisions. This rich data not only refines marketing efforts but also helps product teams tailor their offerings. Here’s how:
An omnichannel communication strategy can transform customer engagement and drive meaningful business results. This section will guide you through the essential steps for crafting a practical omnichannel approach that aligns with your retail goals.
Understanding your customer’s journey begins with measuring engagement across multiple channels. Use analytics tools to capture key metrics such as click-through rates and time spent on various pages, providing a quantitative foundation for your omnichannel communication strategy. By comparing these performance metrics, you gain insights into which channels are most effective in capturing and holding customer attention.
While these analytics can offer a comprehensive view of customer activity on marketing platforms, don’t overlook support channels. Platforms like Gorgias can measure engagement metrics within customer support, supplementing your overall data collection. Gorgias Support Performance serves as a control center for tracking key metrics such as ticket volume and agent activity, offering actionable insights to improve customer experience and measure engagement across various platforms.
Combining this support data with your broader analytics will provide a fuller understanding of customer engagement, equipping you to refine your omnichannel strategy.
Employee training ensures that your omnichannel communication strategy reflects your brand’s voice and values. Developing a robust employee training program can instill these crucial elements in all customer-facing personnel, setting the stage for consistent brand representation. Real-life scenarios can serve as effective teaching tools, guiding employees on maintaining branding consistency during interactions, whether via email, social media, or SMS.
Given that companies evolve, your training materials must keep pace with any shifts in brand messaging or objectives. Regular updates to these resources can help your support team adapt to changes and continue to offer an aligned and cohesive customer experience across all touch points.
Don’t miss our article on customer service training, which provides 15 valuable activities your team can try to improve customer interactions.
When creating an effective omnichannel communication strategy, the importance of centralizing customer data can’t be overstated. A CRM system aggregating customer information from various touch points into one database is invaluable. It brings together disparate data and provides an integrated view of customer interactions, helping your team make data-driven decisions.
To realize the full potential of this centralized approach, ensure your CRM seamlessly integrates with all communication channels your company uses, enabling real-time data updates. Data from customer support platforms like Gorgias can then be merged with the information in your CRM, enhancing the quality and depth of the customer profiles that drive your omnichannel strategy.
Effective omnichannel communication necessitates collaboration that extends beyond the confines of individual departments. One approach is to conduct regular cross-departmental meetings where teams can share and discuss customer data insights. This guarantees everyone is on the same page about customer behaviors and needs, contributing to a holistic customer engagement strategy.
All departments should be aligned to respond more cohesively to customer needs. Amanda Kwasniewicz, the VP of Customer Experience at Love Wellness, ensures that her team collaborates broadly by having an internal communication channel for discussing customer concerns.
“We have a channel in Slack dedicated to customer feedback,” she says. “Dropping in feedback is part of the team’s daily and weekly responsibilities, which helps them get familiar with the content. It also allows our team to dissect them and collaborate on how we can improve.”
Establish a feedback loop, particularly with customer service, to continually share frequently encountered customer issues and trends. This feedback can catalyze improving products, services, and customer communication strategies.
Elevate your omnichannel strategy by tailoring your communications to the specific channels your customers prefer. Leveraging your centralized customer data, identify which channels—email, social media, or in-app notifications—are most effective for reaching your audience. Then, craft personalized messages that are not generic but informed by customer behavior and past interactions.
Continuously monitor how well personalized customer service resonates with your customers by tracking engagement metrics such as click-through and open rates. Equally important is collecting and analyzing customer feedback to understand the qualitative impact of your efforts. Based on these insights, make necessary adjustments to your messaging strategy, ensuring it remains aligned with customer preferences and behavior.
According to a report from Statista, 88% of consumers anticipate that brands will offer self-service support options. Automation is vital for maintaining a 24/7 connection with your customers. Implement chatbots on your website and social media channels to answer frequently asked questions immediately, enhancing user experience and satisfaction through proactive customer service.
Employ customer experience automation tools like Gorgias Automate to configure automated Flows for common customer queries. Fable, a brand dedicated to elevating dining experiences with premium dinnerware, utilizes Automate to provide round-the-clock customer service. Their automated flows are designed to swiftly answer common customer queries, such as active discounts and return procedures, ensuring customers can always find the information they need.
Despite the benefits of a unified approach to customer communication, a 2022 report found that only 12% of digital platforms are “highly integrated.” Gorgias can be your key partner in achieving an omnichannel communication strategy, offering core helpdesk capabilities designed to seamlessly integrate customer interactions across multiple channels. Gorgias ensures that you meet and exceed customer expectations while driving revenue.
Gorgias equips agents with enriched customer profiles, pooling data from different channels — including social media, voice, and SMS — to provide context during interactions. This feature allows for quicker, more accurate support, as agents don’t have to switch between each communication platform to gather customer history.
Gorgias is a one-stop hub, consolidating communications from email, chat, social media, and more, enabling easier management and response. The centralized system facilitates proactive support, which can directly impact sales by addressing customer concerns before they abandon their shopping carts.
Gorgias allows you to maintain consistent branding by customizing the look and feel of your customer support channels. This ensures that no matter the channel, customers always have a uniform omnichannel experience that reinforces brand identity and trust.
Cupcakes and Cashmere, founded by Emily Schuman in 2017, has gained a devoted following for its curated jewelry, loungewear, and home goods. To extend this trust and cohesiveness into customer support, the brand uses Gorgias, its chat widget color-matched to the brand’s palette, ensuring a visually seamless and engaging user experience across its website.
If you’re focused on streamlining customer interactions across various channels, consider exploring what Gorgias offers. With features that centralize communication, enrich agent information, and ensure brand consistency, Gorgias aims to make the omnichannel communication strategy more manageable and effective for ecommerce retailers.
Take a closer look to see how these capabilities could fit into your existing operations and customer engagement efforts. To learn more about Gorgias, book your demo today.
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TL;DR:
As of June 2022, 64% of US customers prefer email when contacting brands, so it’s clear why email is a mainstay in customer support programs. Even still, the Internet’s snail mail can sometimes translate to a slow and negative experience.
So, how do you maximize email as a customer service channel? You use it as a stepping stone to point customers to faster support channels.
Email is simply the medium; the resources are your answer. From including Help Center articles in your emails to replacing a raw mailto link with a user-friendly contact form, we’ll present plenty of ways to transform email into an efficient support channel.
Like all channels, email has its benefits and weaknesses, but you can’t rely on it alone. Here’s what you can expect from email as a customer service channel.
It would be unwise to skip offering email support when more than half of customers prefer it over social media. Email support provides a vital bridge to connect with customers, especially if you’re a DTC business that can't engage with your shoppers in person.
Email can illustrate solutions for customers with embedded links, images, and attachments — something instant channels like social media DMs and SMS would handle with more difficulty.
For example, look below at Dr. Squatch’s eyecatching promotional email. Their use of multiple high-quality images, call-to-action buttons, social links, and logos proves how email can accommodate the most elaborate messages.
If you have a digital footprint, email is almost always a requirement. You need it when creating a new account or when contacting people. It’s even accessible on all devices. Email’s prevalence means customers will expect online stores to offer email support at the very least.
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The average first response time for email is 7 hours and 34 minutes. While most people tolerate how slow email is, it still doesn’t make for the best customer service experience. Urgent customer questions about product defects or bank account issues require rapid responses that other channels are better suited for.
Email allows for more creative liberty than other messaging channels but also has downsides. Since customers are free to format their own subject lines and messages, the responsibility of sorting through your inbox is on your agents.
The problem here isn’t just about maintaining a clean workspace but ensuring urgent messages like angry customer emails aren’t overlooked due to a messy inbox.
Support teams often feel their inbox is an obstacle course rife with concerned customers and a flood of recurring questions. Luckily, there’s a solution: use a customer service helpdesk that can consolidate email and other support tickets to keep your inbox and support team at bay.
Here’s how to effectively use email as a support channel with a helpdesk like Gorgias.
Why? To maintain organization 🗂️ and increase service quality ✨
Plainly leaving your email address on your contact page can be intimidating for customers. What should they put in the subject line? Will they actually get a reply back? Since this contact method has practically no guidelines, you’ll want to set parameters to make reaching out more approachable.
How? Do away with a raw email link and use a contact form. Contact forms provide structure to emails. Thanks to step-by-step guidance through drop-down menus and required fields, you can sort emails even before they reach you.
💡 Tip: We recommend that merchants don't direct customers to an email address for support. Instead, use a contact form to intake email support. Contact forms are superior because messages get structural data that helps customer service agents categorize and prioritize incoming tickets.
Why? To increase customer satisfaction (CSAT) score 👍
Don’t forget that you can start an interaction via email and move to a different channel. This tactic isn't new — it's known as omnichannel communication. After all, 46% of customers expect a response time of 4 hours or less, and if switching support channels is the key to providing faster service, then go for it.
How? Let’s say a panicked customer wants to reverse duplicate charges on their credit card ASAP. This interaction could take multiple back and forths spanning several business days. Instead, you can reap the benefits of voice support, SMS or WhatsApp by directing them to your phone number.
“Being able to organize and divert tickets internally, having a good FAQ, making sure that you're actually solving the problems instead of putting band-aids on them, all goes into [reducing] resolution time.” —Zoe Kahn, Manager of CX & Retention at Chomps
Why? To maintain organization 🗂️ and increase customer retention 🤝
A common customer service mistake is treating tickets on a first-come-first-serve basis. This can lead to more unhappy customers because some tickets are less urgent than others. This is where prioritization can be effective.
How? First, categorize incoming tickets with Gorgias Rules and Tags. Do this by determining the conditions for which tickets should be tagged with an “Urgent” tag. For example, emails containing the word “cancel” will be tagged “Urgent.” Now your most high-value tickets will be solved and your loyal customers won’t need to worry.
How to prioritize unsatisfied customers: Set up a Rule to identify and auto-tag customer complaints as Urgent so you can turn their day around with exceptional customer service.
Why? To increase service quality ✨ and enforce brand voice 🗣️
Being an advocate for personalized customer service doesn’t mean automation needs to be off-limits. Automation can and should be your best friend.
Automating customer service reduces response times and standardizes service quality. Automation can also capture data from customer interactions, letting support teams make data-driven improvements to their operations.
How? Use Macros (pre-written sample emails) to immediately answer questions about common topics, such as shipping information, return policies, and product-specific questions. Macros are a convenient way to compose professional messages, like customer apology emails, while allowing agents to add a personal touch.
📚 Related: The risks & rewards of customer service automation
Why? To increase customer satisfaction 👍 and service quality ✨
The biggest challenge about sending emails as a business is striking a balance between valuable and bothersome. It’s not only about crafting attractive promotional emails but making even the most mundane “Your order has shipped!” emails pop with purpose.
How? Integrate your ecommerce platform of choice, whether it’s Shopify, BigCommerce, or Magento (Adobe Commerce), with Gorgias. You can view customer information from your chosen platform in the Customer Sidebar and extract the data to automatically populate emails.
Why? To increase customer satisfaction score 👍 and reduce ticket volume 🔻
In ecommerce, a self-service resource is any resource that answers customer issues without talking to an agent. They include a Help Center (or knowledge base), FAQs, or automated chat widgets.
How? Create a Help Center with linkable articles that can be inserted into customer support emails. This is especially useful for new customers who may want to ask several frequently asked questions. A Help Center effectively acts as technical support, while freeing up agents to deal with more unique tickets.
A successful customer support program should maximize self-service options to minimize manual effort.
How well are you serving your customers through email? The answer lies in measuring how quickly you accomplish support tasks like opening and closing a ticket. But it's not only about speed. Tracking metrics is invaluable for troubleshooting gaps in your customer service operations.
Here are three metrics that can shed a light on how well your customer support team is using email.
Average first response time is the average time it takes for your customer service team to send the first response to a customer after receiving a request.
🕒 Industry average: 18 hours (Timetoreply)
🟢 Time to aim for: Under 4 hours
🔻 What slows it down: Inadequate staffing, lack of automation, and poor prioritization
➕ How to improve it: Use automation like Rules, Tags, Macros, and more self-service options
Average resolution time refers to the average amount of time it takes to resolve or address a specific issue or request, typically measured in hours or days.
🕒 Industry average: 18.1 hours (Gorgias)
🟢 Time to aim for: Same day
🔻 What slows it down: Inefficient process, disorganized inbox, and complex issues
➕ How to improve it: Reroute tickets to faster channels like voice, and build self-service options like a Help Center
First contact resolution rate or FCR rate measures the rate of resolving a customer inquiry within the first interaction. An excellent FCR rate indicates that your support team is well-trained to be able to solve issues efficiently.
🕒 Industry standard: 70% (Fullview)
🟢 Rate to aim for: 78% (Qualtrics)
🔻 What slows it down: Complex issues and lack of customer service skills training
➕ How to improve it: Add more self-service options, ensure agents are given complete information on product/service knowledge and resolution techniques
[Callout] How to calculate FCR: Total number of requests resolved with one interaction in a single time period / the total number of requests in the same time period
Once you’ve got the hang of the basics, you can refine your operation by tracking 25 more customer support metrics.
Email is stronger when combined with other channels — no one knows this better than multitasking expert Gorgias.
As a powerful helpdesk tool, Gorgias offers omnichannel support and powerful automation features like Macros and Rules that make managing email effortless. You can even supercharge Gorgias with integrations to ecommerce apps like Shopify, Yotpo, and Shipbob to keep you focused on delivering support without distractions.
Ready to bring in a crowd of happy customers? Book a demo now.
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Modern customers have high expectations when it comes to customer service. One survey showed that nearly half of customers expected an email response from businesses in less than four hours. If your average response time is much higher than this, you could be losing out on a lot of business.
Of course, meeting customer expectations regarding response time is often easier said than done. If your customer support team is struggling to keep up, the good news is that there are some effective ways to shorten your response times without having to hire a team of new employees.
In this blog, we'll discuss why a fast response time is such a vital component of great customer service and go over seven proven methods you can use to achieve a faster response to customer service emails and messages.
When a customer reaches out to you, you should aim for a first response time of one hour for emails, 15 minutes for social media messages, 40 seconds for SMS messages, and even less than that for live chat messages.
No matter what product or service you happen to be selling, creating a positive customer experience is an essential ingredient in the recipe for long-term success. While there is a lot that goes into creating a great experience for your customers, prompt customer service goes a long way.
Here are a few of the reasons why achieving fast response times is such an important goal for your customer service department:
More and more customers have come to expect near real-time access to companies across multiple channels. One Hubspot survey showed that 90% of customers rate an “immediate” response as important or very important when they have a customer service question.
Furthermore, 60% of people who needed support defined "immediate" as 10 minutes or less. If your company isn’t responding to customer queries at least this fast, you risk falling short of expectations your competitors may be meeting.
Fair or not, poor response times can hurt your brand image. Encouraging brand loyalty and return customers is a vital goal for any business, and poor response times can make this goal all the more difficult to reach.
Keep in mind that customers expect fast response times since so many companies today can meet those expectations. If your company isn't keeping up with the customer service offered by the competition, it could damage your brand reputation among existing customers.
There are plenty of scenarios where responding to a customer query within a short time frame can lead to your business making more money. If a customer has a question about your product, for example, responding quickly before they move on to another product could lead to a sale you might not otherwise make.
If a customer needs to return a product, prompt customer service could encourage them to exchange the product for another product or store credit rather than becoming frustrated and demanding a cash return. In instances such as these, fast response times that lead to quick resolutions can directly translate to more or retained revenue.
Good customer service doesn't mean that you always have to solve a customer's issue on the first response. In many cases, simply acknowledging their email and letting them know that you’re working on a solution is enough to keep customers temporarily satisfied and buy your customer service team some time.
Unless the issue is immediately resolvable, your goal in an initial response should be to acknowledge the customer's problem, let them know that you’ve assigned their ticket to a representative, and provide them with a time frame for when they can expect a resolution.
Sending out an initial response that covers these bases can keep customers satisfied and patient while your team members work on their follow-up.
Related: How To Measure Net Promoter Score (NPS)
Achieving fast response times may seem like a lot of work. Many times, though, slow responses can end up increasing the workload of your customer support team. If you don't respond quickly enough to a customer that needs assistance, they may end up contacting your company multiple times through multiple channels.
This can lead to numerous support tickets being created for a single issue, bogging down your team and creating unnecessary confusion that could have otherwise been avoided if you had responded to the customer's initial query promptly. This is another reason it’s helpful to keep your average first response time as low as possible.
For all of the reasons listed above, responding to customer service emails in the shortest amount of time possible is ideal. Thankfully, there are many different methods you can use to speed up your response times across all your support channels that don't require huge investments or shifts.
Before you can test out solutions, determine what your average response time currently is (if you don’t already know). First response time is a crucial customer service metric to evaluate your team's impact because it affects revenue-related metrics like churn and retention rates.
To calculate the average first response time, all you have to do is add up all of your first response times for a given period then divide that number by the number of resolved tickets during that time.
Once you've determined what your average first response time is, you can then set goals for improvement and continue to measure your progress. Gorgias provides you with many analytic tools that allow you to track key customer service metrics, including average response time. By leveraging tools such as these, you can easily analyze your customer support team's efforts and set achievable benchmarks for more improvement.
Related: Customer Service ROI: How to Measure and Improve
Responding to every customer email manually is a monumental task. If you’re still solely relying on traditional methods of responding to customer queries, achieving fast response times is going to be nearly impossible. Fortunately, there’s a wide variety of customer service software on the market today that can take a lot of the heavy lifting out of your workflows.
For example, help desk software allows your team members to see and reply to customer queries from any channel — like social media, ecommerce stores, WhatsApp, and SMS — from a single centralized dashboard. You can organize them based on factors such as the date and time received, priority, subject matter, and some other categories.
Customer service software also automates time-consuming tasks, like sending initial responses to customer emails. This is just a snapshot of the ways these platforms can help your team reduce your response times. We highly recommend leveraging software to optimize your customer support process.
Related: Learn how Gorgias' support performance and live agent performance dashboards can help you measure
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We touched on it briefly, but customer service automation can free up your customer support team significantly during business hours. It provides customers with immediate, automated responses that you can personalize to make sound as friendly as a manual response. These small measures free up your team to focus on more complicated and pressing tasks.
That’s not all. Setting up an auto-responder allows you to send customers an all-important first response any time you like. There’s no need for a live representative, and a quick response could prevent another ticket or message from piling up to deal with in the morning. Most software lets you automate responses and send them via email, chatbot, app notification, text and more.
Recommended reading: Ecommerce Customer Support Best Practices
Having your customer service team type out a custom response to every new email they receive from a customer is inefficient. In addition to using an auto-responder to send out an automated first response, one simple way to speed up your reply time is to make use of scripts and email templates.
To build your scripts, start by identifying common questions and issues that your support team encounters most frequently. You can then create helpful boilerplate answers with blank spots to plug in customer details using your software or other tools.
One pro tip is to look back at positive customer feedback or five-star interactions to get ideas. See which answers made customers feel heard and satisfied while also solving their issues quickly. For live customer support channels such as phone calls or live chat, you can create scripts for each FAQ that representatives can follow.
Leveraging scripts and email templates ensures that your team members aren't having to type out the same response over and over again to commonly asked questions, enabling them to provide service in a more efficient and timely manner.
Some customer support tickets should take higher priority than others. A customer that’s reporting a fraudulent purchase with their debit card needs a quicker response than someone who’s asking if there are any discounts they can use.
Beyond prioritizing tickets, it’s also helpful to categorize them if they share similarities. Grouping similar tickets together boost efficiency. For example, your team can come up with one main solution (create a new discount code because the previous one is buggy) and easily resolve the entire group of tickets in a single pass.
If you’re making use of email templates, a single rep may be able to clear an entire batch of tickets in seconds or minutes.
Every channel where you communicate with customers — from your main phone line and website to messaging platforms like social media and live chat support — should include customer support options. Having multichannel customer support options offers a couple of advantages.
For one, it makes it easy for customers to reach out and engage with your company wherever they are. You may be serving customers across demographics, from Generation Z to baby boomers, all of whom have different communication preferences. The customer’s initial outreach is their first interaction with your customer service experience, and it’s great to start on a note of convenience and ease no matter who the customer is.
Setting up multichannel customer support options can also give your response teams quicker access to the requests that they receive, allowing them to organize by priority no matter where the request originates.
Recommended reading: Customer Support Metrics
Any time a customer can resolve their issue on their own is a success for your business. Customer self-service support keeps your team’s hands-free and prevents one more support ticket from entering the queue. Here are some useful resources you can provide customers:
Equipped with this information, many customers will be able to answer their questions — and perhaps discover or try something new with your product. As you’re putting these resources together, think about how tech-savvy your audience is and how long they want to spend reading about their issue.
With Gorgias Automate, you can improve your live chat widget with a self-service flows that let your customers track and manage their orders without any agent interaction. You can also enable a chatbot. Customers can type in their question or comments and the chatbot will pull up your content that matches those keywords.
All of these tools combine to reduce the number of tickets your support team receives in the first place, which can ultimately result in faster response times for the tickets that do appear.
Recommended reading on live chat:
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We’ve covered a variety of ways to roll back your response times, but that’s not all these best practices accomplish. They also optimize your customer service workflow overall, ensuring your customer service interactions are positive and helpful and your team isn’t overloaded or losing time to repetitive, manual tasks.
At Gorgias, we’re proud to offer a number of different customer service software solutions, from live-chat solutions to chatbot solutions, to email auto-responders. To learn more about how Gorgias can help you speed up your response times in a way that is affordable and hassle-free, book a demo today.
Imagine leaving your angriest customers to spar with an automated script in your website’s chat window. Now picture your support team reading “Where is my order?” for the hundredth time and glancing at the clock, only to find six hours left in the workday.
Who do you think is more frustrated?
Luckily, you won’t have to answer that, because these are completely avoidable problems. Once you learn the important distinctions between chatbot software and live chat software, you’ll understand how to use them both more effectively and lower blood pressures across the board.
Chatbots rely completely on automation and artificial intelligence (AI) while live chat software connects customers with human agents via a real-time chatbox. A third option, self-service chat, is an appealing alternative.
To determine which solution(s) is best for your business, let’s compare chatbots and live chat software and go through the top use cases for each.
Live chat support connects customers with human support agents who can answer their questions and assist them with any issues. When a customer opens the chat box on a live chat support solution, they are connected with a real person from the company's customer support department.
Support agents then use live chat messaging to address customer inquiries and walk customers through the solution to their problem.
Interested in getting live chat software? Check out one of these lists for tailored recommendations:
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Unlike live chat software, chatbot software doesn’t connect customers with human agents. Instead, chatbot software connects customers with a chatbot that utilizes AI and machine learning to provide natural language answers to common questions.
Automation assists customers with less complex issues and provides quick answers. Chatbot technology enables companies to reduce their average response time, and frees up support agents to focus on more complex queries.
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When comparing chatbots with live chat solutions, it's important to recognize that each category offers its own unique advantages. Many companies choose to employ both live chat and chatbot apps on their ecommerce websites.
With that in mind, let's explore the strengths of each solution.
One of the biggest advantages of chatbot solutions is the fact that they allow for immediate responses to customer inquiries. Live chat solutions can also help companies reduce their wait times, though not to the same degree.
According to data from HubSpot, 90% of customers rate an "immediate" response as important or very important when contacting customer service, with 60% of customers defining "immediate" as 10 minutes or less.
With a chatbot app, offering immediate response times to customer queries is a much more attainable goal. Best of all, these immediate response times are a 24/7 offering for customers, whereas live chat agents may not always be on the clock.
The problem with relying solely on chatbots to reduce customer wait times is the fact that even the best and most intelligent chatbots are often unable to resolve complex issues. Chatbots are excellent at pulling information from internal databases to answer common questions, such as providing the status of a customer's order or editing it.
But for uncommon questions or complex issues, a chatbot alone may not be sufficient. Because they can only handle one thing at a time, it can take forever before you get all of your questions resolved.
Many companies use chatbots alongside live chat support. This allows businesses to offer both immediate responses, as well as more in-depth support for complex issues.
For example, a customer may first be connected with a chatbot that provides instant responses to their query and assists with gathering initial information. If the chatbot determines the customer's question or issue is too complex to resolve, the customer is then connected to a support agent via live chat.
This combination is an ideal solution for many companies, allowing them to quickly resolve common issues without the need for a live chat agent. At the same time, customers have the option to speak with a real person in cases where assistance from a chatbot alone isn’t sufficient.
While chatbot apps can help reduce customer service wait times and the number of customer service reps needed, many customers prefer speaking with a person.
A CGS study found that 86% of customers would rather interact with a human agent than a chatbot. Further, 71% of customers say that they would be less likely to purchase from a brand that did not have real customer service representatives available.
Chatbots have come a long way toward replicating natural language and determining customer intent for better customer engagement. Today, the best chatbot applications can come quite close to sounding like actual human beings.
Chatbots leverage AI and machine learning to deliver personalized responses, as opposed to only “canned” responses, and can better serve your customers.
Even the most advanced chatbots still fall short of a live representative when it comes to delivering a personalized, human touch. They’re also lacking when it comes to handling more complex questions or customer issues.
Once again, a combination of automation and live chat support is typically the best approach.
Chatbots and live chat applications have unique advantages when it comes to delivering consistent and accurate responses to customer queries.
Chatbots are excellent at delivering consistent, on-brand messaging. They can be programmed to systematically follow templates or scripts to provide a consistent customer service experience.
When working with human customer support agents, this high degree of consistency can be a little more difficult to achieve.
While live chat support may not offer the same consistency as chatbots, human support agents do tend to be more accurate when determining the intent of the customer they are assisting.
For example, a simple spelling error can sometimes confuse chatbots, whereas a human customer support agent would be much more likely to look past the error and correctly figure out what the customer needs.
A human agent is also much more likely than a chatbot to accurately interpret questions that are worded strangely.
For companies that are choosing between chatbots and live chat support, it’s a question of whether they’d like to prioritize consistency or accuracy. This is yet another reason why a combination of chatbots and live chat support is often the best solution.
More chat features to provide self-service support without the bots
Many of the issues your website visitors have with bad chatbots involve their mimicry of support from real people. It’s easy to tell when you’re chatting with a robot, but it’s not always made clear to you by the chat widget.
But there’s a third chat option that you should consider in addition to live chat and chatbot software.
Self-service chat options make it clear to your customers that they are receiving automated help. By presenting menus instead of imitating a human conversation, self-service customer support empowers customers to find the answers they need on their own.
It’s a win-win, because the customers get the answers they need in real time, at any hour. And your team can focus on support tickets that are more important to the business.
Here are a few ways self-service chat options can work.
Up to 30% of incoming customer service tickets are shipping status requests. With self-service order management in the chat widget, customers are empowered to make these queries on their own — providing fast answers and reducing your support tickets.
These automated options are easy to add with Gorgias. This self-service adds buttons to the chat widget to automatically:
Quick service with chat automation provides quick, responsive customer service, which means better customer experience and a positive impact on revenue.
Barcelona-based shoe brand ALOHAS added self-service order management flows with Gorgias after experiencing a high chat volume. This allowed customers to find information on their own without a human needing to respond.
Here’s how a “track order” request looks in action:
When using a chat widget, you’ll notice the same questions come up again and again. You can satisfy those FAQs by adding quick answer flows into the chat widget.
These automations can be set up in the widget for questions like:
These automations can be customized for whatever FAQs are most relevant to your ecommerce store.
Here’s how it looks, for example, when an ALOHAS customer wants to find out more about the brand’s shipping policy.
Luxury jewelry brand Jaxxon has used these self-service quick responses with great success. The customer service team found themselves overwhelmed with customer questions and unable to respond as quickly as desired.
Jaxxon upgraded their live chat widget with Gorgias Automate with Quick Responses for customers. The result, combined with using Gorgias’ helpdesk, reduced live chat volume by 17% and lifted the on-site conversion rate by 6%.
Even when a customer chooses to type out a question, automation can be used to provide quick, customized service through the chat widget.
Gorgias can detect questions that come in through chat and provide automatic answers using Rules and Macros.
Here’s how the flow works:
The best part is this can not only be used for chat, but for responses to tickets coming in through other communication channels like email, social media, and SMS.
With Gorgias, you can make sure your chat widget isn’t missing a single ticket, even if your customer support team is offline.
First, you can set up your business hours to correspond with when you have live chat available. This will show up on your site’s chat widget by either showing the current status as online or offline.
From there, you can create automated responses for whether you’re offline or online. During business hours, this message can tell customers you’ve received their request and give a time by which they can expect a response.
After business hours, the responder can tell customers that although you’re offline, they can expect a response during the next day’s business hours via email.
You can also use a contact form which turns a chat into an emailed ticket. This is great to use after-hours and to make sure chat requests don’t get lost overnight.
The use of automation within customer service is multifaceted. As we discussed earlier, a human touch is critical for many customers, and speaking with an automated chatbot can be a turn-off. However, automation certainly has its place in the customer service process.
On the customer’s side, starting with self-service chat helps them receive quicker customer support at scale — a more satisfying experience. On your team’s side, automation allows for sorting, segmenting, and prioritizing tickets.
When self-service chat can’t solve an issue, someone from your support team can easily step into the conversation. You can use Macros — scripts that automatically bring in the customer’s information — to scale the human touch on your support team.
So in reality, it’s not automation vs human support. These are two complementary tools that work better together. And the result is a stronger and faster customer experience for your website visitors, which can increase your conversion rate by as much as 12%.
Still not convinced? In 2021, brands using the Gorgias chat widget generated an average of $38,702 from conversations involving chat. We have a whole post on live chat statistics that can help illustrate the impact our chat widget can have on your business.
If you’re an ecommerce business looking for an all-in-one customer support solution that includes live chat support and AI-powered chatbots, Gorgias is your one-stop shop.
Our algorithms are trained on hundreds of millions of ecommerce tickets, so you can be sure your customers are getting the right responses every time.
Plus, you can manage both live chat and chatbot conversations in the same dashboard that you use for all your other channels, including phone, email and major social media platforms. Bring in chat from other channels, including Facebook Messenger. We’ll even be supporting Whatsapp in early 2023.
Our customer support platform is available for Magento, Shopify, and BigCommerce users.
Read more about our chat offerings by clicking here.
Customer service messaging (also known as conversational customer service) is a powerful way to elevate the customer experience and delight customers beyond their expectations. For customers, texting with a support agent feels much more convenient and casual than slower channels like email. And, SMS is a much better channel for “on-the-go” communication, since most people always have their mobile phones and can usually reply to text messages quickly.
That’s why customer service messaging is one of many recent customer service trends shaking up how ecommerce and D2C businesses offer support.
In this guide, we’ll discuss how your business can implement or improve this type of customer support and other conversational channels in your customer service strategy.
Let’s get started with why it’s important for businesses to offer SMS customer service.
SMS customer service is when support teams resolve customer questions and issues via text message.
Customers love these one-to-one messaging channels for customer service because they’re so quick and convenient. When implemented well, conversational messaging allows customers to reach your CS team and get answers quickly — within 42 seconds, most of the time. Especially considering that 42% of customers prefer communicating with customer service on messaging apps over any other channel, introducing a conversational channel may do wonders for your brand’s customer satisfaction.
Your customer support team can also use these channels to proactively reach out to customers with important updates and timely discounts.
SMS customer service is especially attractive to your customers because they don’t have to stay glued to your website or check a social media app for new DMs. They can get answers to their questions on a device they already check 96 times per day. Let’s take a closer look at SMS, a channel that’s quickly gaining ground as a standard support option.
Adding each messaging channel at one time might overwhelm your customer support team. Likewise, a new channel may have low adoption if you don’t announce it to your customers. As you begin offering messaging experiences as a part of your customer care portfolio, use our top 10 techniques to maximize the effectiveness of your workflows on those channels.
For issues with easy solutions, there’s no reason for customers to engage with email or phone. Emails are slow and clunky and phone calls can lead to customer frustrations, especially if your wait times are excessive. Texts are far faster than either option and can provide simple, accurate information that leads to speedier solutions — and happier customers.
For that reason, we recommend setting up your contact page and information so that text and other live channels are your first line of communication — well, after self-service support. You can always move to email or phone if the customer requests it or if the problem you’re trying to solve is better suited to one of those channels.
Tip: Speed is an important factor in all customer service interactions, but it’s critical when sending any sort of instant message. First response time (FRT) is a key customer service metric you can measure with Gorgias through the analytics dashboard. Make sure to track the speed of your responses when you start your support messaging program.
To inform your customers they can now text your brand, we recommend adding “Text us,” plus your phone number, in some or all of these places:
You can put your messaging app information in the same spots, and make sure to say you accept support requests via DM in your social media bios so customers know they can shoot you a message.
Tip: Because conversational customer service usually takes place on a user’s phone, you need to keep responses short and friendly. The long, detailed macros and templates you might use for emails won’t work when communicating through short messages — depending on your platform and your customer’s phone, long messages might not send or might get broken into multiple text messages. Plus, depending on your brand’s tone of voice, conversational channels are a great place to use emojis, images, and GIFs to make the conversation even more friendly and casual.
Start every messaging interaction with an autoresponder. This tactic lets your customer know that you received their request, and it gives your human agents a small buffer of time to finish up their current encounter before starting the new one. You can also include a link to your help center in case they want to look for their answer on their own.
You can use this tactic whether you’re incorporating chatbots for basic query automation, or using your customer service agents for all customer interactions.
See page XX for an example of an autoresponder Rule for messaging.
Some customer support tickets should take higher priority than others. A customer that’s reporting a fraudulent purchase with their debit card needs a quicker response than someone who’s asking if there are any discounts they can use.
You can start by prioritizing:
You can even set up dual priority queues for all priority-tagged tickets: One for priority tickets that are about to go past the first response time in your SLA and another for all other priority tickets. Then prioritize the former, followed by the latter, followed by other tickets, to keep your first response time and resolution time down while giving attention to important tickets.
Beyond prioritizing tickets, it’s also helpful to categorize them if they share similarities. Grouping similar tickets together boosts efficiency. For example, your team can come up with one main solution (create a new discount code because the previous one is buggy) and easily resolve the entire group of tickets in a single pass.
If you are responding to customer service messages on a platform like Gorgias that supports Macro templates, you need to take advantage of this time-saving feature. But you can’t just take your existing email templates and drop them into these conversations.
You need to create a specific set of Macros for messaging purposes, using the principles we mentioned earlier: short, friendly, personalized, etc. That means you need to use variables like [Customer first name] or [Last order number] to personalize messages. If you set up your Macros strategically for DM and SMS messaging, many can be reused for live chat, as well.
To prioritize building Macros that will have the highest impact, create Macro templates to respond to the most common questions that have come through your helpdesk. You can also ask your team which responses they end up writing out the most and add those templates too.
Once you create and launch these Macros, you can automatically add Tags to Macros for reporting to see which Macros are being used the most. This will help you understand where you have gaps (or unhelpful Macros) and can make tweaks to improve your agent workflow and customer experience.
If your customer service platform supports automation, as Gorgias does through our Automation Add-on, you can deflect up to a third of repetitive, tedious tickets instantly, with no human interaction. Much of this automation can be applied to customer service messaging, as well.
When we mention automated answers, some support professionals say something like, “We don’t want to send low-quality automated responses to our customers.” We completely agree: For many tickets, automation doesn’t provide the best customer experience.
However, as you know, most tickets your support team receives are repetitive and low-impact, like questions about order status (WISMO) or your refund policy. We recommend setting up automatic responses for these tickets, so customers get instant answers and agents have more time to respond to tickets that actually need a human touch.
Look through your reporting dashboards to see the tickets that are taking up the most time on your support team, and prioritize those requests for automation with Rules, where appropriate.
WhatsApp Business, Facebook Messenger, and SMS support images, and luckily so does Gorgias. This is a more engaging way to interact with customers, and it also allows you to exchange relevant images like broken parts, malfunctioning equipment, and screenshots for more helpful instructions.
If you want to go this route, maintain a catalog of fun, topical images that your support team can use in their customer conversations, and give them the freedom to collect their own images to insert. It’s a great way to make your support feel more personal and human, but use common sense: Frustrated customers don’t want to receive a picture or meme, they want their problem solved as quickly as possible.
SMS and other personalized one-to-one support channels can get a little complicated because not everyone wants to interact on the same messaging application. True SMS support goes out over cellular networks and lands in users’ actual text messages, the same way messages from their friends and family do.
But you may need to be ready to handle other support channels that use similar short, text-based communication. These include Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, and your website’s web chat. Certain channels may be a better fit for your unique customer base — for example, Instagram attracts a younger audience than Facebook Messenger, and WhatsApp is more common outside the US. Likewise, you may have other specialized messaging channels or messaging platforms that you need to support.
As a rule of thumb, you need to be where most of your customers are, which varies across businesses and industries. But to reach the desired level of customer engagement, most businesses need to be reachable via most, if not all, the major applications and support channels.
That’s where a unified customer service platform can be really useful. By keeping all of your customer conversations in one feed, you can handle more channels more strategically, through triage and routing to dedicated agents for specific tasks. For example, you could have one agent who just handles messaging and route all messages to that person for a quicker response.
On platforms like WhatsApp Business, you don’t have to wait around to hear from customers. This allows for a wide range of strategic and proactive support interactions.
For example, you can send out text blasts:
A proactive approach builds trust with your audience — they will see you going above and beyond with these efforts, and know that you’ll be upfront with potential issues.
SMS marketing is a useful tool for your ecommerce store, but it becomes even more powerful when you integrate your SMS marketing tool into Gorgias. Send out SMS blasts and have support agents on hand to handle any questions you get in response, to help nudge those customers closer to a sale.
With certain integrations — Klaviyo, for example — you can even use Gorgias attributes to segment and build campaigns. Use this function for win-back campaigns, or to send a special offer to customers who posted low CSAT scores.
Text messages are an effective method for collecting feedback from existing customers, too. Once customers opt in to SMS communication, you can use this point of contact to launch quick surveys that provide valuable feedback.
Response rate is always an issue with email surveys, and other channels see higher response rates. Using a multichannel approach will supply you with more responses and help you make more data-driven decisions with the results.
Note: In a customer service tool like Gorgias, you would use one of our integrations with Klaviyo or Attentive to send the survey to entire segmented lists of customers or prospects, all at once.
Ready to start implementing an SMS customer service strategy but not sure what to say? We get it: Staying concise yet friendly is tough, and so is conveying all the needed information in such a short space.
We’ve put together a collection of proven templates you can start using today. Adapt as many of these as you need to fit the contours of your business, and bring them into your customer service platform of choice. In Gorgias, you could auto-populate these responses through our Macros.
Note: We’re sharing these templates as text messages, but they can easily be adapted to other conversational channels like social media DMs and live chat.
As we mentioned earlier, it’s a good idea to set up an autoresponder. This tactic can buy your team time to finish up a previous interaction or send an email, yet it shows you’re on top of the interaction and will be back soon.
Here’s our template for a ticket received autoresponder:
Thanks for texting {Brand Name}. An agent is reviewing your question now. We’ll get back to you shortly :)
The introduction message is the point where your autoresponder or chatbot passes off the reins to a human agent. It’s the first point of personalization, and you want to make a solid impression. Still, your agents don’t need to be typing these out every single time. Use a template like this one to break the ice (just with a little less repetitive stress injury):
Hello, {Customer First Name} {Customer Last Name}! I’m {Your Name} from {Brand Name}. Thanks for messaging us. What can I help you with today?
There are two frequent scenarios where an hours-of-operations text makes sense. One is as an answer for when customers message you on social media or elsewhere just to ask when you’re open. In those cases, use this template:
Hello, {Customer First Name}! I’m {Your Name} from {Brand Name}. Our hours of operation are Monday through Friday, 9 a.m. to 8 p.m. Best, {Your Name}
The other scenario is when a customer reaches out via a messaging channel and there’s no one on the other end. If your helpdesk isn’t open 24 hours a day, use a template like this when the team isn’t live:
Hello, {Customer First Name}! Our live chat helpdesk is open {list hours}. You’ve reached us outside those hours. Leave a short message here and we’ll get back to you tomorrow.
By the way, if around-the-clock coverage is a goal of yours, you might be interested in introducing contact forms into your live chat widget. These forms let you keep your live chat on 24/7 and, when nobody’s available to answer, they ask customers for contact information so you can be sure to follow up. Learn more about Gorgias’ automation add-on and contact forms.
This one’s pretty obvious: You want to let the customer know the status of an order, and there’s no reason to manually type a whole message to do it.
Use this template when a customer asks for their order status. You can create variations of this one for delays or other order status updates, and even customize it further to include tracking information.
Hey {Customer First Name}, great news: Your order has shipped! It will arrive on {delivery date}. Let me know if I can help you with anything else!
Customers with recurring subscriptions sometimes forget the frequency they sign up for or when their next payment will be. Use this template if customers frequently ask your brand when their next payment is:
Hello, {Customer First Name} {Customer Last Name}! I’m {Your Name} from {Brand Name}. Your next payment of {amount} is coming up. Your card on file will be charged {due date}. Questions? Reply here or call {phone number}.
Pro tip: While there’s nothing inherently wrong with soliciting payment via SMS, many consumers will view this with suspicion. Text channels may not be the best avenue for inviting bill payments or collecting credit card information. It could also lead to more cancellations, which makes it a balancing act, though customer clarity is important to have. Always track the impact of changes to your process and be mindful of how new touchpoints could affect it.
If you’re trying to build brand loyalty or win back an upset customer, sometimes a simple discount code can go a long way. At the end of an SMS conversation, there may be times when you can surprise and delight customers by sending over an exclusive deal. Here’s a template (though you’ll certainly need to customize this one further to fit the details of your offer):
{Customer First Name}, thanks for being such a loyal customer. We’d like to give you {details of the offer}! Click to redeem: {short URL}
Refunds happen, and they don’t always require a massively complicated interaction with your contact center. If you’re able to resolve a ticket and issue a refund with a simpler interaction, this template can finish the one-to-one portion of the encounter.
Notice the template specifies that the interaction will finish up asynchronously (via email). It’s a great way to tie off the synchronous, real-time interaction and lead the customer right to the next step (check your email.)
Here’s the template:
Hey {Customer First Name}! We’ve issued a refund for your last order. We’ll send all the details to your email, but feel free to let me know here if you need anything else.
Pro tip: You can tie discounts and future order credits into this template, but make sure your entire team is aligned on your official policy as you update the Macros to match it. You may also want to have different tiers of intervention (and offerings) depending on the severity of the issue.
The customer check-in is another asynchronous message that occurs outside of an active conversation. Perhaps the customer walked away from a previous encounter or seems to be stuck on the customer journey based on other CRM data.
Whatever the reason, a gentle, well-timed message can sometimes get the customer back on track.
Here’s a model:
Hello, {Customer First Name} {Customer Last Name}! I’m {Your Name} from {Brand Name}. Just checking in to make sure everything is working well for you. If you have any issues with our {products/service} or need anything else, let me know!
Though a customer service platform can handle the above templates, you’ll likely want to expand even further through additional integrations with the platform. If you take that approach, here are some opportunities that open up:
If you’re running a sale or trying to drive traffic to your site, a great way to do so is by texting a discount code to customers on your SMS list. Because their phone is probably close by, it’s great way to promote your sale and make sure it gets noticed. Here’s a template you can use (but remember to update with your own promotion!):
Flash sale, this weekend only! Up to 40% off, including our latest collection. Shop now: {insert URL}
Medical offices and other organizations that schedule appointments or meetings can bolster attendance and reduce no-shows by providing yet another reminder — one that reaches patients and customers directly via phone.
If your SMS system supports it, you can invite an auto-reply to confirm or cancel an appointment, too. Use this template:
Hello, {Customer First Name} {Customer Last Name}! I’m {Your Name} from {Brand Name}. Your appointment is scheduled for tomorrow at {appointment time}. See you then! Reply Y to confirm, N to cancel.
Order confirmation messages simply confirm that your business has received and is processing a customer order. These don’t typically take place during an active one-to-one customer service interaction. Instead, they’re sent automatically and asynchronously, whenever the order confirms.
Still, you can set them up as personalized messages and enable replying so that, if something happens to be wrong, the customer knows how to reach out.
Hello, {Customer First Name} {Customer Last Name}! I’m {Your Name} from {Brand Name}. Your order #{order number} has been received, and we’re working on it now! We’ll message you again when it ships. Questions? Reply here.
If you’re in an industry that offers pickup services (whether curbside pickup, custom goods like eyeglasses, or anything else), a text message is a great way to let someone know their order is ready for pickup. SMS reaches customers when they’re on the go in a way that email frequently doesn’t.
Here’s an example:
Hello, {Customer First Name} {Customer Last Name}! I’m {Your Name} from {Brand Name}. Your recent order #{order number} is now available for pickup at {location}. Stop by to grab it anytime today before {closing time}!
This message asks your customers to respond to a survey or poll. It’s a data-gathering tool that can pull in responses from people who ignore your emails or the messages at the bottom of store receipts. Try a script like this:
Hello, {Customer First Name} {Customer Last Name}! I’m {Your Name} from {Brand Name}. We value your opinion as a customer and we’d love specific feedback on {topic}. Here’s a 5-minute survey: {short URL}
Membership renewals, like payments, ought to be set up as automatic occurrences. Still, it’s helpful to remind a customer that a charge will hit their bank account soon — you don’t want to track down non-payments, and you don’t want angry customers who weren’t prepared for a bill.
Here’s an example:
Hi, {Customer First Name} {Customer Last Name}! I’m {Your Name} from {Brand Name}. Your annual membership renewal is coming up on {date}. Your card on file will be charged on that day.
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At Gorgias, we believe any industry can find value in conversational support, though some industries and brands will get more bang for their buck with these channels.
For ecommerce brands that deliver physical products, conversational support is a no-brainer. Imagine your customers get shipping updates via SMS and can just respond to the message if the package isn’t delivered correctly to get immediate help. No need to open up a laptop and log into a support portal or compose an email.
If you’re on the fence about offering conversational customer support, consider whether any of these points are relevant for your business:
First, consider your primary audience. If you sell to millennials and Gen Z, conversational customer service deserves serious consideration. These groups value speed and convenience more than anything: Millennials prefer live chat over every other channel, and 71% of people between 16 and 24 agree that faster customer service would drastically improve the shopping experience.
These two generations grew up texting. It’s a very natural communication style for them, so they’ll feel right at home texting and DMing your brand. They’re also absolutely massive groups — combined, they make up a staggering 42.3% of the U.S. population.
If you’re targeting an older generation, texting may not feel as natural. They have a higher tendency to prefer email or phone, although that’s changing by the day.
One of the biggest hurdles to implementing conversational support is getting the systems, hardware, and staff in place to respond to SMS texts and messaging app requests at scale. If you’re already sending SMS marketing campaigns, then you already have some of that infrastructure in place.
So, if you’ve already made the investment in SMS for marketing purposes, then integrating messaging with your customer service platform and team requires minimal additional investment.
Fortunately, your helpdesk and SMS marketing software may integrate to give you a centralized way to spark conversations if customers reach out via text or respond to SMS campaigns. With Gorgias and Klaviyo, for example, customer responses to SMS marketing campaigns get assigned directly to an agent for fast response times.
One of the benefits of messaging is that customers don’t have to stay on the phone or by their computer — they can easily continue talking even if they have to take the dog out, go to work, or even fall asleep and respond in the morning. Plus, while email conversations often span multiple days which is frustrating for customers with simple requests, requests on messaging channels usually get resolved before customers lose interest or patience.
If you notice that your brand currently sees lots of unresolved email threads or phone calls, you might need to offer customers a more convenient and flexible channel to talk to your team. This is a perfect use case for SMS and other messaging channels.
It’s important to show up where your customers are. That’s why most brands post and engage with customers on social media pages. But if you’re posting on social media and not providing support to customers who reach out via DM, you’re missing a big opportunity.
By adding conversational support via Facebook Messenger and Instagram and Twitter DMs, you can maximize your presence on those platforms and provide an omnichannel customer experience for both existing and prospective customers.
We often discuss the importance of customer feedback to monitor brand perception and constantly improve the product and customer experience. But as most brands know, getting feedback via email can be a challenge because of low survey open rates and lack of follow-up from customers.
Business texting lets you ask your customer base for feedback on a channel they are less likely to ignore. Text messages have a whopping 98% open rate. Consider sending CSAT, NPS surveys, and other requests for customer feedback on this channel to raise your response rate for more accurate customer support metrics. Of course, with great power comes great responsibility: Spamming customers will quickly damage customer relationships, so don’t send too many messages to their personal devices.
SMS customer service is an avenue that customers are growing to expect. But managing yet another communication channel — much less one that demands real-time responses — takes careful planning.
Implementing a messaging strategy requires using tools built for that purpose. Some customer service messaging platforms offer SMS support natively, while others integrate a third-party SMS integration tool to add this functionality.
As you consider the available options, make sure the one you choose offers the features you need. Some tools are full-fledged SMS marketing solutions. Others focus specifically on SMS as a support channel.
It’s easier for most businesses to use an all-in-one customer service platform like Gorgias to support an omnichannel approach. With this kind of helpdesk platform, SMS tickets can be handled in the same feed as your other tickets and benefit from the same workflows and automation.
Here are some other features your customer service tool needs to have to handle SMS ticket effectively:
As we mentioned earlier, SMS marketing lets brands connect with consumers in a personalized and measurable way, just like with customer service. According to Attentive, average read rates of 97% within 15 minutes make SMS a prime channel for connecting with prospects and customers.
If you’re looking for the right SMS marketing tool to work in tandem with your new SMS customer service channel, consider these four leading tools. Each one integrates with Gorgias, along with most of the rest of your tech stack.
Each tool offers a slightly different feature set. Revisit the list of features we compiled earlier in this article to help determine which are the most important to you, then vet these four tools against your customized list.
Integrating any of these SMS marketing tools with Gorgias is a great way to unify your marketing and support efforts to improve the overall customer experience.
For example, if customers respond to an SMS marketing blast from a tool integrated with Gorgias, the response gets brought into the helpdesk. The agent can see the initial marketing message and the customers response, so they can answer any follow-up questions. It's like an alley-oop from your marketing to your support team.
Also, these integrations help your marketing team be more aware of active support conversations to avoid tone deaf marketing. For example, by integrating Gorgias and your SMS marketing tool, you can pause marketing campaigns on customers awaiting a response from support. (Nobody wants to get marketing messages if they're waiting on a delayed order, or troubleshooting their last purchase).
Customer service messaging across a wide range of message-based platforms can be a powerful addition to your customer service channels. Of these, the SMS channel is one of the most powerful options for businesses that want to reach customers directly where they are.
The scripts and tools provided in this guide should put you well on your way toward a successful SMS support rollout. But make sure that at the core of your customer service operation, you have a platform robust enough to handle everything you need to do — and whatever functionality you might add in the future. For more examples and tactics to launch a successful rollout of SMS support, check out our playbook of Berkey Filters, an online store that released SMS support to great adoption.
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Gorgias is the customer support and helpdesk platform built for ecommerce businesses like yours. Our live chat tools and 150+ integrations equip you to reach your customers — whenever and however you choose.
See how Gorgias supercharges customer support and helpdesk via SMS. Alternatively, check out more information about our integrations with:
The competition to provide customer satisfaction in ecommerce today is fierce. Now, shoppers demand free shipping on every order and expect lightning-fast order processing and fulfillment. What once were “nice to have” differentiators for small businesses have become necessary for growth and success.
Similar to getting orders quickly and with no shipping fees, customers expect a tracking number to see an order’s status and its location at any given time. Even better are real-time alerts and SMS or email notifications at each point in an order’s journey from purchase to doorstep.
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Below, explore the benefits of tracking customer orders and why you should consider implementing an order tracking tool for your business.
Customers have been trained by huge ecommerce vendors like Amazon and tracking to track their online orders from the order processing stage to the moment a delivery person from FedEx, UPS, or USPS drops it at their doorstep — with photo evidence. This has set high expectations.
Offering real-time tracking data for purchases benefits both your customer and your business in four distinct ways.
Once customers place an online order, waiting for it to arrive can be both exciting and stressful. Questions like, “Will it get here on time?” or “Is it ever coming?” are heightened if customers can’t check the delivery status in real time themselves. Plus, as a business, you can follow along to ensure that orders are getting where they need to go.
A 2021 survey by OptimoRoute found that 24.6% of online shoppers said they were extremely likely to return for additional shopping if a brand provides real-time order tracking.
There are reasons beyond “I'm just curious” that consumers need to know an order is on its way and when it will arrive. For example, if a product is expensive, customers won’t want it to sit on their front porch all day. If a signature is required, they might have to work from home to accept the package. In these instances, status updates are crucial.
According to ProShip, "80% of customers want to track their order status not only online, but also on their mobile devices. And of that 80%, 76% of them want SMS communication throughout the entire shipping process."
Keeping in constant contact with their order at home and on the go via a mobile device gives customers the transparency they need to plan ahead for a fun unboxing or essential item they can’t live without.
The customer experience you provide on your ecommerce platform is essential to business growth. Providing shoppers with tracking information, email notifications, and delivery dates can create a positive association with your brand, build a better customer experience, and drive loyalty and retention.
The Effortless Experience found that 96% of customers who have high-effort experiences feel disloyal to those companies afterward. And forcing customers to dig or compose an email just to know the status of their order is a high-effort experience.
New customers appreciate seamless experiences and are more likely to make repeat purchases from businesses that offer them. Creating a cycle of repeat business will help your business grow, so encouraging loyalty through an easy-to-use order tracking tool is a big advantage.
📚Recommended reading: Our guide to offering free shipping and boosting customer loyalty at an affordable price.
Many ecommerce companies are looking for ways to alleviate customer service workloads and reduce time spent handling simple requests. Providing real-time order tracking is one of those ways since customers no longer need to ask, “Where is my order (WISMO)?”
Instead of calling and emailing to check their order status — one of the most common questions customers ask any ecommerce business — tracking systems proactively send email notifications or provide access to a portal where customers can take a look at progress in real-time. This solution streamlines the process and cuts down on call volumes. This increases productivity for you or your customer service team because they’ll be freed up to address more complex issues.
Typically, you can automate customer order tracking notifications via SMS, app notifications, or email — we’ll cover this in more detail below. Or, create a self-service portal where customers can use their purchase order number to access order status — we’ll cover this more in a later section.
📚Recommended reading: Our guide to customer service automation for faster, friendlier service.
People often return items because they arrive late and the customer no longer wants or needs them. With detailed and up-to-date order tracking (as well as a clear returns policy), customers can better anticipate the arrival date of the product, making it less likely they’ll just ship the package back to you when it finally arrives. And, as you might expect, reducing returns has a great positive impact on your business’s revenue.
📚Recommended reading: Our list of best practices for reducing returns in ecommerce and our list of the best returns management software.
There are numerous advantages to using a customer order tracking system. We recommend using a pre-built solution — and put our recommendations below — because maintaining a manual tracking system is time-consuming.
A custom-built tracking page may require more data entry than necessary with other solutions. Not only do manual processes open your system up to human error, but they also eat up productivity.
If you try to provide order tracking yourself, you’ll save in the short term but end up spending plenty of time building and maintaining a system to send tracking information.
For example, once you sync your tracking components up successfully, you'll need to create different templates that collect or communicate information to your customers. For example, you might build an order form that collects order information like a customer’s name, address, phone number, and credit card information. Or, write a pre-written email that you can use to send out shipment notifications for each step of the order process.
You might also create templated responses that answer common questions like, “Where is my order?” or that provide tracking information or shipment and delivery updates.
For an order tracking system to work properly, your manufacturers, website, helpdesk, social media commerce, SMS, inventory management software, and shipping carriers’ information must all "talk to" each other. If they don't, information gets bottlenecked or not communicated at all. The result is that your customer isn't able to access their order status, which causes frustration and has them calling your customer support team.
If you’re manually recording and sending out order tracking information in an excel document, you’re likely feeling very frustrated right now.
One of the most common incoming questions teams get is Where is my order? (WISMO). And the best way to mitigate those messages is to implement an order tracking system that allows for self-service order tracking and automates shipping tracking notifications. Here's how to do it:
This creates an overall better customer experience by providing transparency and reducing stress or frustration — customers see exactly where their orders are at any point in time. You’ll also be available for customers when they’re most engaged.
Here’s how to implement one.
First, you’ll choose an order tracking tool like ShipBob, ShipStation, or AfterShip — we discuss each in more detail below. These tools take order information like tracking numbers and shipment status and automate their delivery to a customer. Many order tracking apps integrate with different ecommerce systems like Shopify, BigCommerce, Magento, 3DCart, or WooCommerce. So, you’ll need to make sure that the tool you choose integrates well with the ecommerce system you use.
As an example, we’ll walk through setting up order tracking with AfterShip on a Shopify store.
This is usually quick and easy, depending on the tool. You can add AfterShip from your Shopify store by visiting the Shopify App store from the apps section on the sidebar of your store’s dashboard. Then, click “Customize your store” and search for the AfterShip app.
Or, you can sign up for an AfterShip account, visit the apps section, search for Shopify, and add it that way. Either way, visit the integrated app section on your Shopify/AfterShip account to make sure that the installation succeeded.
Now, you’ll want to make sure your courier mapping, import settings, and tracking page settings are good to go. You can access these from your AfterShip account’s app page — here’s AfterShip’s help doc on to assist with setup.
Now that you have AfterShip set up, it will sync every three hours and pull shipping information from any new orders via a shopping cart, CSV file, or marketplace. You can also opt for AfterShip to send out automatic notifications via email or SMS at each milestone in the shipping process.
Create a seamless experience for your customers and support team by integrating your order tracking tool with your helpdesk. By linking all shipping data and tracking information, you can get resolutions to customers faster and access all necessary information in one place.
Why is this helpful? Well, in case customers end up bypassing your self-service order tracking information and ask your support team about the status of their order. Without the integration, you’ll have to switch tabs and copy/paste order information like tracking number, shipping address, and estimated delivery date.
With an integration set up, that information automatically populates. Take a look at the image below. On the left is a Macro (or template) sent by a customer service agent, which contains variables that auomtatically pull tracking information from the integration. On the right is the personalized message the shopper receives.
Set up is as simple as creating a connection between the two platforms so that they can talk to each other. To get an idea of what this looks like, take a look at the step-by-step installation guide to setting up the integration between AfterShip and Gorgias.
Save time, provide order transparency, and create better customer experiences by linking Gorgias and AfterShip
“With all the Gorgias integrations, my team doesn't need to jump between tools. This has helped us dramatically improve customer satisfaction.”
— Amanda, Director of Operations at Darn Good Yarn
Once you have your automated order tracking system set up, you’re not quite off the hook yet. While many customers will opt in for email and SMS notifications, some may ignore those notifications, lose the tracking link, and still come to your website (or support inbox) looking for the status of their order.
That’s why we recommend putting an order tracking portal in (at least) the following three places:
Whenever a customer places an order, they should get an order confirmation that includes a receipt and any additional information they could need between that moment and the arrival of their new item. This includes a prominent tracking number, and a link to the order tracking portal, whether that’s with a service like AfterShip or directly on your carrier’s website.
If your fulfillment process doesn’t let you send this information right away, consider adding an additional shipping confirmation email to your post-purchase experience flow.
If you don’t currently send order (or shipping) confirmation emails, take a look at this guide (for Shopify users) on setting one up.
While the primary function of the chat widget is to connect with customer support agents in a conversational way, some live chat apps like Gorgias allow you to embed buttons shoppers can click to track their order. In Gorgias, this is called a self-service order management flow.
Self-service order tracking in chat is possible natively in Gorgias, no integration required.
Here’s how the flow works for customers:
Self-service order management is convenient for customers, and it also serves as a last layer of protection for your customer support inbox. Right when a customer opens the chat widget to send a question, they get the opportunity to see the status of their order, much faster than an agent could tell them.
If you have an FAQ page or a larger knowledge base (which we call a Help Center), you can also embed order tracking here for customer accessibility.
Standalone self-service order tracking in the Help Center is possible natively in Gorgias, no integration required.
Much like order tracking built into the chat widget, this feature lets customers track their order with just a few clicks, right where they’d find other help content:
To direct customers here, you can include a link to your Help Center at the bottom of all your customer support and automated emails, in an email signature, for easy clicking.
There are several great choices on the market for customer order tracking systems that are both scalable and flexible depending on your needs and the ecommerce platform that you use.
Start with customer support software that acts as your central hub
A powerful customer service team is the building block of a successful order management system. Helpdesks like Gorgias help centralize the communication of tracking requests via apps into one place. From there, customer service teams can respond/automate responses related to tracking and order statuses. These tools optimize the response time and increase the instances of a positive customer experience.
Gorgias integrates with a ton of popular ecommerce tools, making it a great single-view hub. A few of the most popular integrations are NetSuite, Reveal, Tolstoy, Magento, ChannelReply, and Shopify.
Choosing the best tools to automate your customer order tracking can be overwhelming. The good thing about having so many options is that you’ll end up with an order tracking system that works exactly the way you need it to. Here are some of the best order tracking providers that you can use to create a successful project management pipeline when it comes to tracking customer purchases.
ShipBob is a global logistics platform that provides online companies best-in-class order fulfillment, so customers receive fast and affordable shipping. With reliable fulfillment services and connected technology that powers their fulfillment network, they help improve transit times, shipping costs, and the delivery experience for your customers.
Check out this app in the Shopify App Store or the BigCommerce App Store. And if you use Gorgias, check out our integration with ShipBob.
With its seven notification triggers, easy-to-use email editor, and filter tracking tools, AfterShip helps your online business provide transparent communication to your customers. It also helps you keep an eye on delivery issues, so you can address them before they become problems that could end up damaging your customer experience.
Check out this app in the Shopify App Store and the BigCommerce App Store. And if you use Gorgias, check out our integration with AfterShip.
ShipStation helps you save time, money, and sell more. You can compare rates and delivery times for all your carriers in one place to get the fastest, most cost-effective shipping for your customers. The app automates almost every facet of your shipping process, and offers intuitive dashboards and seamless interfaces for an optimal workflow.
Review this app's full offerings in the Shopify App Store and the BigCommerce App Store.
Below, take a look at three recommended order tracking extensions that integrate with Magento 2.
ShipStation is highly scalable and provides everything you need for order management in one location. It integrates with Magento 2, as well as Shopify and BigCommerce.
See if ShipStation is right for your ecommerce business in the Magento Marketplace.
Whether you're shipping 50 or 50,000 orders a month, Easyship can help you lower shipping costs and increase conversion rates. Use this extension to manage your post-purchase process the way it makes the most sense for your business.
Read more about Easyship in the Magento Marketplace.
📚 Recommended reading: Our list of best practices for ecommerce shipping and our list of the best shipping software for ecommerce.
The Mageworx Order Editor extension lets you edit errors customers have made with their street number, phone number, name, and other shipping and billing details that they accidentally get wrong during checkout. You can also add or remove products, change pricing, and add coupons after an order has been placed. This saves your customer support team from having to cancel the order and start it again from the beginning.
Learn more about Mageworx in the Magento Marketplace.
Employing automation to facilitate easy order tracking, status updates, and real-time delivery information for your customers is a smart move for your online business. By committing to an end-to-end order tracking system, you make it possible for your company to cut costs, increase productivity, and encourage customer retention.
Gorgias is a powerful and comprehensive ecommerce help desk solution that can help you deflect repetitive tickets so your team can spend more time on higher-value conversations.
Reach out today to learn how we integrate with your order status tracking system.
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For any business, email plays a crucial role in providing great customer service. But helpful customer support emails take time and effort from your customer service agents.
Templated responses save time for your customer service team and help customers get the resolution they need faster. With templates, reps can answer questions and resolve customer issues much faster than writing each email from scratch. And data from over 10,000 ecommerce brands shows that by lowering resolution time to under 6 hours, you can raise overall revenue by 2%
Templates also ensure high-quality support. They provide a consistent baseline that busy agents can lean on, especially during high-volume times. This is mission-critical for keeping happy customers around: 92% of customers say they’re more likely to return for a second purchase after a positive customer support experience. And repeat purchases (plus reviews, referrals, and higher average order values) mean repeat customers generate 300% more than first-time shoppers.
Below, you’ll find 30+ effective customer service email templates to help you get started. Here are the top five email categories that you might find most helpful:
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Before you jump into writing any customer support emails, here are some best practices to keep in mind:
You need context and a deep understanding of a customer's situation to resolve their issue. But, going back and forth with customers to get there creates a high-effort experience for them, which often results in negative feelings toward the support experience.
Using a platform that displays past customer information – between past conversations, recent orders, and the initial message, you have the best chance of fully understanding what went wrong and what the customer needs without making them repeat information.
In your message, be sure to state what you understand to be the problem so they can correct you if you got something wrong.
Putting yourself in the customer’s shoes can be challenging sometimes, but it’s vital if you want to leave them with a positive experience. Convey that you appreciate where they’re coming from by rephrasing their request, question, or concern.
It’s especially tempting to shut down empathy when customers seem unreasonable or mean. Even if a customer is inflamed or incorrect, try not to call them out or prove them wrong. Instead, focus on what future solutions you can provide. Stick with the conversation and find out what’s beneath each message or customer complaint.
Empathy and understanding why a customer is frustrated (and acknowledging any effort they’ve already put into solving the issue themselves) can go a long way towards finding a resolution that makes them happy.
Customer service email templates help save time and increase professionalism. But, keeping them up-to-date at all times is key. Make sure templates reflect your most up-to-date processes and policies and are robust enough to fully answer customer questions.
You can always edit a template to suit the context of each conversation but the most effective templates will be complete with the best version of the answer possible. That might mean encouraging customers to reference return policies and shipping times, an FAQ section, or help center articles to ensure templates are as detailed and accurate as possible.
Here’s a great example of clear help resources from Bobbie, an organic baby formula brand, organized with a Gorgias help center:
Templates should always reflect the voice and tone of your company. What your brand voice is — formal, casual, friendly, professional — determines the exact words your templates will use.
Forward resolution is where agents anticipate and answer customer questions before they even happen. Take a look through past conversations where you went back-and-forth many times with a customer to see if there are any patterns in the types of questions that came up.
For example, imagine customers often write in asking whether you ship to Canada. If you just respond, "Yes, we ship to Canada," then they may respond "What are the shipping rates and estimated shipping times for Canada?" That would be a good sign to include that information in your original email, avoiding the need for a follow-up.
This way you save the customer the frustration of wondering where their order is, the time to reach out to your support team, and you save your agents the time it would take to answer their question.
📚 Learn more: Customer Delight Is A Losing Strategy in Ecommerce: Here’s What’s Better
Also keep in mind that templates are customizable tools, not complete solutions. Personalize your customer service emails to give them as much human touch and personality as your brand allows. This way, the customer knows they’re interacting with a real human and are also being treated like one as well. One risk of using templates comes when they aren’t personalized. Templates are amazing starting points, but they should always be personalized to the customer you’re chatting with.
Some quick ideas for how to do this:
Relying on well-built customer service templates for chats or emails can help you increase customer satisfaction and improve the customer experience. If customer support agents spend less time responding to the same repetitive questions, they'll have more time to support your pre-sales support strategy and have conversations that drive revenue.
Below, we offer 30+ customer service email templates, categorized by the types of support conversations brands often have with customers. Feel free to read the templates in order or skip around to whichever is most relevant to your needs.
Proactive customer service starts before a new customer writes into your support team. Rather than waiting for customers to experience a problem before starting a conversation, you can set the tone for a positive customer relationship by reaching out and saying hello.
Similarly, if you anticipate a problem for customers (like outages or pricing increases), it’s best to let them know with a proactive message.
You can also complement your proactive email templates with self-service resources, including FAQ pages and Help Centers.
Below are some of the most helpful proactive support email templates you can start using today. While you can use the templates as they are, we suggest tweaking them to meet your individual voice and tone guidelines.
Sending a welcome email makes customers feel like part of a community and can offer them key resources that allow them to self-serve answers to common questions, like return policies or shipping costs.
Hey there {{Customer First Name}},
Thanks for {{Customer action: First purchase, sign-up, subscription}} with {{Company name}}. We’re thrilled that you’ve joined us, and we’re excited to help awesome customers like you in any way we can.
I know you’ve just joined us, so I want to send over {{Resource/offer links}} so you can get the most out of your experience with us.
If you haven’t yet, make sure to check out {{Blog link}} for ongoing tutorials, tips, and stories, and give us a follow on social media!
I hope you’re already enjoying {{Product name}}, but if not, I’m happy to help. Or you can check out our {{FAQs or knowledge base links}} to troubleshoot on your own.
If there’s anything you need, please respond to this email. We’re here for you!
Best,
{{Current agent first name}}
Email is a great place to announce that you just launched a new support channel. It’s also a good channel if you’d like to involve your support team as a resource for new product launches or service offerings.
Hi {{Customer name}},
Good news! We now offer {{Action or item}}.
Questions? Reach out to us at {{Phone number, website URL, etc}} and we’ll get back to you within {{SLA}}.
Looking forward to hearing from you!
{{Company name}}
Similar to the announcement above, let customers know when you launch a Help Center or self-service resource.
Hi {{Customer name}},
Good news! In order to better support you, we’ve created a {{Self service resource with link}}. Here you’ll find answers to frequently asked questions and step-by-step instructions to set up and troubleshoot our products. We hope making this information more accessible provides a better experience — but always feel free to reach out to us directly for additional help!
{{Company name}}
📚 Recommended reading: 29 Customer Service Scripts Inspired by Top Ecommerce Brands.
Email templates are even more powerful when combined with equally powerful customer service scripts, keeping your brand messaging consistent and on-target across channels.
If your business includes a subscription-based product, you’ll want to provide reminders to customers that their subscription is about to renew.
Remember: Letting customers easily opt in and out is always the best decision for customer experience. While an easy opt-out process may sound scary for retention rate, you’ll actually do more harm by making customers jump through hoops to cancel their subscription. They’ll likely speak about the poor experience with friends and avoid coming back.
💡 Tip: If you can let customers self-serve any subscription changes or updates, you eliminate the need for them to reach out to support to do so. Providing links within a subscription reminder email to unsubscribe, skip, or delay a delivery gives customers the ability to do it easily on their end, eliminating a touch point with support and reducing effort for the customer.
Hello {{Customer first name}},
This is a reminder that your subscription for {{Product name}} will renew automatically on {{Renewal date}}. We’ll continue charging the credit card ending in {{Last four digits of credit card number}}. No action needed from you, we’ll process and ship the order in 3-5 business days.
If you want to skip this shipment, click here: {{Link to skip shipment}}
If you want to unsubscribe, click here: {{Link to unsubscribe}}
Thanks,
{{Current agent first name}}
📚 Recommended reading: Learn how to retain 20% of customers you lose to passive churn and raise overall revenue by up to 0.5%.
If you have a planned outage coming up, a quick email goes a long way to stop panicked questions from rolling in. It also allows customers to plan for an outage, especially if your website is one they rely on or visit often.
Hi {{Customer first name}},
We’re currently experiencing a service outage for {{Website / Product / Service}}. We’re actively working on resolving the issue, which we believe is due to {{Reason for outage}}. We apologize for the inconvenience and assure you we’ll have everything up and running as quickly as possible.
Stay tuned at {{Website / Social media page}} for the latest updates.
Thanks,
{{Current agent first name}}
Raising prices, especially for a subscription service that’s automatically billed monthly? Loyal customers likely want a heads up and an explanation. If you give customers enough notice, it keeps them from feeling swindled.
Hi {{Customer first name}},
Starting on {{Date}} we are increasing the pricing for {{Product or service}} to {{New pricing information}}.
We don’t take pricing increases lightly, and we know it’s not the news our customers want to hear! Given {{Reason for pricing increase}}, we feel that this is the right move for our business and the best way to continue offering the best product possible.
We are grateful to have you as a customer!
{{Company name}}
"Where is my order" is the main repetitive question that businesses get — up to 40% of all tickets, for some brands using Gorgias. Automating shipping confirmation emails and including a tracking number will provide a better shipping experience that doesn’t require shoppers to contact you whenever they want an update.
A helpdesk or customer service platform like Gorgias can help. Gorgias’s Macros automatically pull important personalized variables like the most recent order number or tracking information into the template. This is possible because Gorgias has a direct connection to your Shopify, BigCommerce, or Magento store, and can save your team hours each week.
Regardless of whether you use Macros or another solution, here are a few plug-and-play email templates to get you started:
Customers might be in the process of moving, planned a last minute trip, or realized they used an outdated shipping address for an order, which can cause panic. A quick email resolution will put them at ease and ensure their order goes to the right location.
Hi {{Customer first name}},
I’ve updated your shipping address for order {{Number of last order}} and you should be all set now. You will receive a confirmation email when your package ships.
Let me know if there’s anything else I can help with!
{{Current agent first name}}
When a customer inquires about an order that hasn’t shipped yet or an order that includes a pre-order item, make sure agents know your own internal policy and warehouse process. If something looks stuck for a long period of time (and it’s outside the warehouse’s SLA (Service level agreement), agents might have to open an internal investigation.
Hi {{Customer first name}},
Thanks for getting in touch.
It looks like your last order (order {{Number of last order}} from {{Date of last order}} includes a pre-order item. These take a bit longer to ship!
If you haven’t received a tracking number in the next five days, please respond back to me and I’ll look into it.
Thanks for your patience!
{{Current agent first name}}
Sometimes items take longer to ship than usual, or a customer isn’t familiar with your company’s estimated dispatch times. This is a common question, and its response can quell fears of an order being lost or out of stock.
Hello {{Customer first name}},
Thank you for reaching out! Your order {{Number of last order}} has been received and we are working on getting it shipped out. Our processing time to ship an order is 3-5 business days, excluding weekends.
We will email you a confirmation once it ships, which will include your tracking information as well.
If you have any questions in the meantime, please don’t hesitate to reach out.
Thanks,
{{Current agent first name}}
This template proactively informs shoppers of a delay and lets them know when they can expect their order to ship.
Hi {{Customer first name}},
We wanted to let you know that your most recent order {{Number of last order}} is currently out of stock. We’re doing everything we can to get more in stock soon and we apologize for the delay!
The good news is that our next shipment should arrive by {{Date of availability}}, and you should receive your order within {{Number of business days}} once the item(s) gets to our warehouse.
Thanks for your patience! We’ll get you taken care of as soon as possible.
{{Current agent first name}}
Sometimes customers change their minds about an order, and want to cancel before it gets shipped out so they don’t have to deal with returning it. This template provides a speedy response and solution.
Hi {{Customer first name}},
I’ve canceled your last order (order {{Number of last order}}) and issued a refund. As a reminder, this was for {{Product name}} purchased on a credit card ending in {{Last four digits of credit card number}}.
The refund itself can take 3 to 5 days to process and will refund the original amount to the same card. Please let me know if you don’t see this reflected in your account after that time.
Here if you need us,
{{Current agent first name}}
Simple automations can help catch requests like this before it’s too late. With Gorgias, you can swap out items (like switching a blue bike for a black one) without leaving the helpdesk, thanks to its deep integration with your ecommerce platform.
Hi {{Customer First Name}},
Absolutely! I’ve swapped out {{Item name}} for the {{Item name}} you originally selected for order {{Number of last order}}.
If you need anything else, just say the word.
Best,
{{Current agent first name}}
📚Recommended reading: Check out or post on how to prioritize customer requests so urgent questions like these don't get lost
Shipping comes with its own challenges: issues with carriers, delays due to weather or staffing, orders getting lost, or increased volume during busy seasons slows packages down. As a company, first align on your policy for shipping-related issues. Then, you can incorporate templated work flows that include features like a snooze button. This can come in handy when you need the customer to take action before you can help, like looking out for a package that was supposedly delivered.
Gorgias Macros have a snooze functionality that reminds support agents to follow up in a given amount of time. For example, a Macro might snooze the ticket for two days to remind an agent to check back in about an order status.
An extremely common question, customers like to be able to follow along with tracking information to see exactly when their order will arrive, whether they’re excited or need it by a certain date.
Hello {{Customer first name}},
Thank you for reaching out! Your order has shipped and I’ve included the information below so that you can track it right to your doorstep.
Order: {{Number of last order}}
Shipping date: {{Shipping date of last order}}
Tracking number: {{Tracking url of last order}}
Get back in touch if you need any more help.
Thanks,
{{Current agent first name}}
📚Related reading: Learn more about where is my order (WISMO) requests and how to reduce them with convenient self-service.
Sometimes shoppers change their mind when it’s too late, so having a template that lets them know how they can get a refund or an exchange quickly gives them a resolution, even if it’s not exactly what they want.
Hi {{Customer first name}},
Thank you for reaching out to us!
Unfortunately, it looks like your order {{Number of last order}} has already been shipped from our warehouse. Therefore, I’m unable to make any changes to it at this time.
If possible, refuse the package at delivery. If that’s not possible, please let me know and I will send you a prepaid shipping label so that you can send the order back to us. Once we receive the order back at our warehouse, I will send a {{Replacement or refund}} to you right away.
{{Current agent first name}}
A lost order can be frustrating, especially because it means that it’s been delayed. This template offers a solution to get a shopper a new item or get them their money back.
Hi {{Customer First Name}},
Thank you for reaching out! I’m so sorry to hear that you were unable to locate the missing package. Rest assured we will remedy this situation for you.
I have two options to offer: we can ship a replacement to you or issue a full refund for the order instead. If you prefer a replacement order, we kindly ask that you confirm the shipping address of where you would like the replacement order sent. We look forward to receiving your reply.
{{Current agent first name}}
📚 Recommended reading: Learn how to deal with lost ecommerce packages.
Once an order arrives, customers might need help locating a missing package, initiating a return or exchange, or getting a replacement for a damaged item.
Similar to a lost order, one that shows as being delivered but that hasn’t been received can cause anxiety for customers. This template offers up a solution and shares the internal policy for these types of packages.
Hi {{Customer first name}},
I'm sorry to hear that you haven't received your order yet. It does appear to be in a delivered status. Sometimes this can be due to an incorrect scan by the carrier. If the package doesn't show up in the next {{Insert the number of days according to your policy}} please reach back out and we will {{insert internal policy}}.
In the meantime, I've contacted the carrier and will be investigating on my end.
Please reach out if I can help with anything else and I will keep an eye out for your email regarding the package.
{{Current agent first name}}
Items that shipped damaged or were damaged in transit can break trust between customer and company or spike quality concerns, especially for first-time purchases. This template asks for an image of the item so that the agent can offer a quick solution.
Hi {{Customer First Name}},
Thanks for reaching out about your recent order {{Number of last order}}. I’m sorry to hear about your experience. As we try our best to provide exceptional service, some factors like shipping and handling are out of our control and issues like this can happen.
Please send us a photo of the broken/damaged item(s) you received and we’ll do our best to resolve this as soon as possible.
{{Current agent first name}}
A follow up email for items that arrived damaged.
Hi {{Customer First Name}},
Thanks for sending over the photo of your damaged item. I've ordered a replacement to go out {{Insert policy: free of charge, just pay the cost of shipping, etc}}. Once the item ships we will send you an email confirmation.
For your damaged item you can go ahead and {{Insert policy: donate, discard, send back to us, give to a friend, etc}}.
{{Current agent first name}}
📚 Recommended reading: Check out our list of essential ecommerce best practices.
According to the National Retail Federation, online purchases have a return rate of 20.8%. That means that many shoppers are writing into support teams to ask for an exchange or return if the online store doesn’t offer a self-serve return portal.
Having a clear return policy minimizes questions, sets clear expectations before a customer makes an order, and can protect the business from losing too much revenue through returns or exchanges. Your policy should be where shoppers can find it easily: in your FAQ section, in your confirmation emails, and within your order flow. When a shopper requests an exchange or return, these templates can provide you with an effective email support script.
There’s a reason returns for online businesses average at 20% versus 9% for retail businesses: customers can’t experience what an item actually looks like, get a sense of its size, or try it on in person. The following two templates help with exchange and return requests.
Hey there {{Customer first name}},
Thanks for reaching out about your recent order {{Number of last order}}. I see that you are interested in a product exchange. We do allow exchanges, and I’m happy to help you with this right away.
{{Exchange policy and instructions}}
Once you have {{Required action(s)}}, I can process your exchange and get a new {{Product name}} shipped out to you right away.
Thanks again,
{{Current agent first name}}
📚Recommended reading:
Hi {{Customer first name}},
Thanks for reaching out! For your order that was delivered on {{Shipping date of last order}}, we’d be happy to process a refund for you.
To get the return process started, please go to our {{Link to returns portal}} and follow the steps.
If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to reach out.
{{Current agent first name}}
🤔 Getting too many refund requests? Check out our guide to reducing returns in ecommerce.
Items aren’t always eligible for returns, which can cause tension between a customer and business. Here’s a template for how to handle it.
Hi {{Customer First Name}},
Thank you for contacting us. Unfortunately, your order {{Number of last order}} is unable to be returned because it is outside of the time window (30 days) outlined in our return policy.
I apologize for any inconvenience that you’ve experienced because of this.
If there is anything else I can help you with, feel free to reply to this email or visit {{Link to help center}} at any time.
Thank you again,
{{Current agent first name}}
The Effortless Experience notes that interactions with support teams are 4x more likely to cause disloyalty in customers rather than loyalty. So, unhappy customers who have had a bad experience expect a quick and kind email response. The following sample emails should help set your team up to support these customers with empathy.
This template provides a response for customers who complain about their overall experience with a brand.
Hi {{Customer first name}},
Thank you for reaching out and letting us know about your experience with us. This is not up to our standard and I've passed this along to our team to ensure this doesn't happen again.
In addition, I've {{Insert policy: refund, added a credit, send a replacement, etc.}} to make this right.
We truly value you as a customer and apologize for the inconvenience this caused.
Please let me know if I can help with anything else.
{{Current agent first name}}
💡Tip: Build an escalation process internally to handle extremely frustrated customers who post publicly about a negative experience. This allows agents to refer these customers to a lead or manager for assistance. For very angry customers, using a template is usually not the right move, because their situations tend to vary on a case-by-case basis and require someone with experience to provide the best resolution.
Occasionally, one rep might not have the information they need to figure out what went wrong or how to fix it. In that case, you might need to pass a customer onto an agent who has the resources to help.
Hi {{Customer first name}},
Thank you for reaching out and letting us know about your experience with us. This is not up to our standard and I've passed this along to our team to ensure this doesn't happen again.
I have CC’d {{Technical agent first name}} on this email. They will be able to figure out what happened here and ensure that we resolve this for you.
{{Current agent first name}}
While customer support emails are not marketing emails, you do have an opportunity to drive sales when having a conversation with a customer. A personal note at the end of a positive customer service experience may be more impactful than a mass email marketing campaign because it’s direct, builds upon any context from the full conversation, and can be adapted for the customer’s exact needs.
While you should never sacrifice quality of support to push a sale, here are some templates you can consider using to gently push customers back to your site for repeat purchases and upsells.
Drum up hype, test out reception to a new item, establish product market fit, or get valuable feedback from a smaller group of customers before launching a new product to everyone.
Hey {{Customer first name}}!
We have been developing {{New product type}} for a long time now, and we can’t wait to release it to the world. Because you’re {{An email subscriber, SMS subscriber, made 5+ purchases, or other criteria}}, we’d like to give you the opportunity to buy this before everyone else can.
{{Link to purchase page}}
Cheers,
{{Company name}}
These types of targeted sales can help increase subscribers to different platforms (like social media, email, or SMS). They also create exclusivity and urgency for shoppers, who might jump on an item they’ve been waiting on to get a deal.
Hey {{Customer first name}}!
Here at {{Company name}} we’re always looking for more and better ways to reach even more people with our exciting lineup of {{Products/services}}.
I’m excited to let you know about a deal that’s only available for {{Email subscribers, SMS subscribers, Instagram followers, etc.}}.
For the next {{Length of time}}, we’re offering {{Offer details}} on {{Products/services}}.
We stand behind our quality {{Products/services}}, and sales like this don’t come often. That makes now the perfect time to {{Desired action -buy/expand/upgrade/sign up}}!
For starters, check out our {{Popular Sale Item/Service}}, it’s already selling fast!
Best,
{{Current agent first name}}
📚 Recommended reading: Email isn't the only channel to offer discounts and timely deals. Check out our guide to omnichannel customer service to see how you can expand your support and revenue-driving conversations.
With 70% of ecommerce shoppers abandoning their carts, reducing the number of customers who leave items unpurchased can increase your revenue.
Hey there {{Customer first name}}!
We couldn’t help but notice you stopped by today, and you were this close to making {{Product name}} yours.
In case you were interrupted or pulled away, it’s not too late to buy!
{{Abandoned Cart Link}}
I can even offer you a {{Coupon/special offer}} if you’re ready to buy right now. This link will give you {{Describe the offer or discount}} if you purchase within {{Timeframe}}.
Thanks again for checking out our store! Let me know if I can answer any questions for you.
Best,
{{Current agent first name}}
Upselling existing customers is less expensive than going out and obtaining new customers for your business. The more purchases returning customers make, the less business have to spend on acquisition costs.
Hi {{Customer first name}},
Thanks for your recent purchase of {{Product name}} — all of us here at {{Company name}} truly appreciate your business.
I’m reaching out today because I want to make sure you’re getting the most out of that purchase. {{Product name}} is fantastic as a standalone, but it shines when you use it alongside some of our other offerings.
For example, {{Strong explanation of how product/service enhances product they bought}}.
Does this sound like something you’d be interested in? If so, check out {{Product link}} or simply reply to this email.
Best,
{{Current agent first name}}
Customer feedback is powerful data for your business, helping you shape the future direction of your products or services and improve your email open rates. Customers enjoy feeling valued and knowing that you're working to make the product and service experience better and better for them can increase happiness and loyalty.
This gives customers an open invitation to share how their experience went, so you know what aspects went well and where you can improve.
{{Customer First Name}},
Thanks so much for your recent purchase. By now, your item should have arrived, and you likely have a good idea of what you think about your purchase.
I’d love to get some feedback from you about your experience so far with us. You can just reply to this email and share your thoughts if you’d like. Even more helpful is if you wouldn’t mind filling out this {{Survey link}}. It shouldn’t take more than {{Estimated completion time}}, and it will help us keep improving as our business grows.
Of course, if you’re having trouble of any kind (or your purchase hasn’t arrived yet), please let me know. I’ll do everything I can to help.
Thanks again for your time!
{{Current agent first name}}
Reviews go a long way to build trust in your business. Aside from thanking someone for taking the time to provide positive feedback, it’s a good idea to ask them to write a public review about their experience.
{{Customer first name}},
Thanks so much for taking the time to give us feedback. We’re always working to improve our products and services, and we’re thrilled when we hear that we’re doing something right. Constructive criticism is great, too, since it helps us improve!
If you’re still feeling the love from your recent purchase, would you mind writing a quick review of your positive experience with us on {{Review site}}? It may not seem like much, but these reviews go a long way.
Thanks again,
{{Current agent first name}}
Understanding why someone left a negative review is where, as a support team, you’re going to learn the most. Doing some outreach for customers who left a bad CSAT, NPS score, Yelp or Google review, etc. to see if they are willing to share a bit more information will help you improve the overall experience.
{{Customer First Name}},
Thanks so much for your feedback on {{Customer survey, review site, etc.}}.
I wanted to check in and get a little more information from you about your experience. This will help our team improve future experiences for you and other shoppers. If you’re open to it, you can just reply to this email and share your thoughts.
Thanks for your time,
{{Current agent first name}}
📚 Recommended reading: How to Collect Customer Feedback From Support Tickets (+ 8 Other Methods)
Automated responses can feel impersonal, especially if a shopper is upset. Letting someone know they’re getting an automated response and exactly how to reach a human if they need one can save time for busy teams and get customers a near immediate response.
{{Customer first name}},
This is an automated response. We are a growing business and, in our best effort to deliver the information you’re looking for as quickly as possible, we do use some automation.
We think you’re asking about the status of your order and have included information for it below. If you still need support or this didn't answer your question, just respond to this email and a live agent will jump in to help.
{{Company name}}
Using response templates for your most frequently sent emails means a lower resolution time for customers and higher efficiency for your agents who no longer need to type out each response. For example, the brand Bagallery found that Macros (Gorgias’s version of templates) increased delivery by 3x.
And templates (for chats and emails alike) don’t have to feel impersonal. While reps might start out with a template, they can personalize templated emails by filling in customer information (like the customer’s name) and important order details (like order tracking numbers). Scroll down to our section on Macros to learn how you can automatically include this kind of personalized information.
Overall, templates create a better, faster experience for everyone. They can:
When customers write in for support, they expect a quick response no matter if they’re giving positive feedback or have an urgent issue they need resolved. By starting first with a pre-written email template, you can fast-track your team’s first-response time, which can lower anxiety in your customers, give them the answers they need, and allow your team to provide a personalized and high-quality experience at scale.
A pre-written template might provide a response that lets a customer know the team will be with them shortly — but asks the customer several detailed questions upfront so that the agent can get them an answer faster.
For example, Jetson, an ecommerce company that sells gut-healing probiotics and prebiotics, saw a 60% decrease in first response time by using Macro email templates.
Your email templates will also be detailed and quality-assured, helping fully resolve customer issues as quickly as possible. For example, templates might include links to a knowledge base or FAQ center that answers lingering questions. Or, you might be able to drop in detailed tracking information if your system allows for dynamic fields.
Jetson also saw a 30% decrease in resolution time by using templated responses, improving the customer experience and giving the customer service team more time for their highest-value conversations.
When implementing templates, make sure you’re including all the information the customer needs for a one-touch resolution. Ideally, customers won’t need to respond with follow-up questions.
📚 Recommended reading: Our Director of Support’s complete guide to measuring and lowering resolution time.
If reps start emails from scratch every time, they’ll spend hours each week typing up the same information, lowering efficiency and taking them away from more important projects. Templates raise the number of chats, emails, and SMS tickets agents can handle in a given day. Increasing efficiency without decreasing quality also means you won’t always have to hire new agents to handle more tickets.
In addition, if your team is not able to pull in customer data within the email platform, they’ll have to toggle back and forth to find it. Or worse, they’ll need to go back and forth with the customer to get simple info like their order number or tracking information.
Templates are especially helpful to help agents during customer service training, or to quickly onboard any temporary help you bring on to help during busy periods like Black Friday Cyber Monday (BFCM).
📚 Recommended reading: Learn how Princess Polly saw a 40% increase in agent productivity after switching to Gorgias and implementing templates and other time-saving features.
The quicker and easier you make the full support experience, you decrease the chance of the customer putting in a high level of effort. The Effortless Experience shows that 96% of customers who have to work hard to get support feel disloyal to the brand after.
🤔 Not convinced yet? Read our post on the importance of customer service to learn why customer service is more closely linked to revenue than you think.
While regular email templates can be helpful in saving time for your support team, setting up automation takes your support one step further. This is possible with a tool like Gorgias, which offers Macros, or specialized templates that pull in data from a Shopify, Magento, or BigCommerce store.
Here’s how Macros upgrade your customer support templates:
Macros allow you to pop in variables like customer name, order number, tracking info, or delivery date, and what they ordered, which makes the entire experience feel more personal — even with templates.
Because Gorgias integrates with your ecommerce store, you don’t have to search or ask for customer data (like past order information, reviews left on your site, and so much more).
Macros can also be combined with Rules to automatically fire based on certain customer questions and trigger actions, like canceling an order. They can also snooze certain messages that might require a follow-up email so that support agents never leave a conversation without a full resolution.
When you link a product in a standard template, the customer only sees a URL or hyper-linked text. Plus, agents still have to copy the URL from your store and paste it in the email. But Gorgias’s Shopify product picker lets you search from your product library, select products, and include a visual link that entices customers to click back to your store.
Macros can be used for any channel, not just email, since Gorgias is a centralized helpdesk. You can create shorter variations of your email templates to use for live chat, social media, SMS, and more.
When you sign up for Gorgias, you’ll get access to a Macros Library, which has pre-made and dynamic templates to help get you started.
These emails are a starting point for agents to save time and ensure consistency and correctness. Then, agents can further tweak templates based on each customer’s needs.
Gorgias comes with a number of Statistics dashboards that measure important customer support metrics like first-response time, revenue generated from customer support, and much more. The Statistics section includes a Macros tab, which shows you how frequently your agents use each Macro:
Customer support leaders can use this tab to understand the effectiveness of each Macro and identify when new Macros are needed.
📚 Recommended reading: Evaluating Customer Service: Why, Challenges, and KPIs That Matter
Loyal customers come out of great service experiences. Email templates help create a solid baseline so that teams are more equipped to provide high quality support. By removing the need to type out tedious responses to the same questions, email templates give teams the headstart they need so they can provide fast, personalized responses to repetitive questions and spend more time on higher-value conversations.
Gorgias is a customer service platform built for ecommerce merchants. Features like Macros help you provide personalized, self-service responses to repetitive questions and spend more.
Check out our video below to learn more or read our CX Growth Playbook to learn how to generate consistent revenue from your customer support team.
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Every year, businesses lose a total of $75 billion due to poor customer service. To prevent bad experiences with support from limiting your company’s growth, you need to prioritize improving customer satisfaction with a fast, low-effort, and helpful customer experience.
Most brands would agree that customer satisfaction is important, but few realize just how much interactions with customer support matter for your revenue. In our analysis of over 10,000 online businesses, we found that raising CSAT score by just one point — from 4 to 4.9 — lifts overall revenue by 4%.
In this article, we’ll dive deep into a metric that tells you a lot about your company’s customer experience and revenue potential: customer satisfaction score (CSAT). We’ll offer nine strategies to help you measure and boost your CSAT score, and share some tips to get more customers to rate their satisfaction so you have the best data to work with.
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If you're looking for a quick summary, you've found it! Here are the top ways to raise CSAT and response rates:
Customer satisfaction (CSAT) score is a customer support metric that measures how a customer feels after an interaction with your brand’s customer support. Brands measure CSAT by sending out customer satisfaction surveys as a follow-up to customer service interactions. The survey simply asks customers to rate the interaction on a scale from 1 to 5, 1 being the worst and 5 being the best.
While customers rate the interactions between 1 and 5, many company’s run scores through a formula that will spit out an overall CSAT score somewhere between 0 and 100. However, we at Gorgias keep CSAT simple and just average all CSAT responses for an overall score from 1-5. Our recommended goal for CSAT is 4.8.
On top of the numeric score, CSAT surveys also usually include a field for customers to explain why they chose that rating. This qualitative feedback is a hugely important benefit of measuring CSAT because they help you understand your customer support’s strengths and weaknesses.
One way to calculate your overall CSAT score is to divide the number of respondents who rated their interaction as 4/5 or 5/5 by your total number of CSAT survey responses. Then, multiply by 100. The number you are left with is your company's overall CSAT score.
For example, if you have 500 CSAT responses and 400 of those responses are positive (4/5 or 5/5), then your CSAT score is 400/500 x 100 = 80.
However, you can also keep things simple by taking the average of all your CSAT responses and using that as your CSAT score. That’s what we do at Gorgias: If a company’s CSAT responses are 50% 4 and 50% 5, their overall CSAT score is 4.5.
The average CSAT score varies from industry to industry, but here’s a general breakdown of CSAT score by industry:
As mentioned, we at Gorgias simply average all CSAT responses to result in a score from 1-5. We recommend our customers, all of whom are ecommerce merchants, aim for a CSAT score of 4.8.
That said, if your CSAT score doesn’t line up with your industry, don’t be discouraged. Every brand starts somewhere. Rather than focusing on your industry’s benchmarks, focus on the changes you can make to improve your CSAT score one point at a time, month after month. You might even see your CSAT score shoot up when you start collecting more responses or start tweaking your customer service offerings.
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The main point in tracking your CSAT score is to look for ways to improve it. If you would like to start creating more satisfied customers, here are nine effective tips to try:
Positive CSAT survey responses are great, but negative responses tend to offer the most value. Auditing CSAT responses lower than 4/5 can help you identify common themes and issues harming customer satisfaction.
If you use Gorgias, you can go to Statistics > Satisfaction to see every single ticket in chronological order and investigate tickets four stars and under:
Jot down common themes that pop up and tally up the number of tickets that mention those issues: Wait times, unclear answers, and unresolved product issues are all common offenders. Issues with lots of tallies are likely to be high-impact opportunities for improvement. For instance, if long wait times are a common theme in your negative CSAT responses, then you know what your support team will need to do in order to improve customer satisfaction — find ways to reduce wait times.
As your brand grows and receives more tickets, analyzing every single low-scoring CSAT response may not be possible. If you don’t have an internal team to help you analyze large amount of data, a thematic analysis tool that uses natural language processing (NLP) can quickly scan all your tickets and look for common themes.
Here’s how the process works:
Just like we described above, these themes help you isolate one or two areas to work on at a time, which is the most strategic way to improve your CSAT score.
CSAT surveys are great for forming a general idea of a customer's satisfaction level, but they don't always tell you everything you need to know. Even with the open-ended field, you may not get much detail about why customers pick a certain rating. In cases where customers give your company a low CSAT score, reaching out to them to get detailed feedback could reveal more about how you can prevent low scores in the future.
One issue that may cause lower CSAT scores is poor or inconsistent responses coming from your team. Creating a detailed rubric that breaks down what a quality ticket response looks like can provide both a valuable template for your agents and a more comprehensive system for objectively measuring ticket quality. By aligning your team’s efforts around this kind of rubric, you’ll be much closer to providing satisfying responses to all customer inquiries.
In the rubric, you can include aspects like response time, accuracy (with company policy), alignment with brand voice and tone, and anything else you believe contributes to a great customer service interaction for your brand.
While the purpose of the rubric is to help agents create responses that get high satisfaction scores, that may not always be the case. For example, if your brand voice is very punny and whimsical, a response with lots of puns will score high on the rubric. However, that ticket might not be clear enough to be satisfying for the customers. If you notice that interactions score high on your rubric but low on CSAT, then you may need to update the rubric.
Once you use CSAT surveys to identify areas with room for improvement, it's time to put that data into action. Bolstering your customer service training and resources can help you eliminate specific issues harming the customer experience and improve your CSAT score.
Creating an internal knowledge base so that agents have easy access to the information they need to assist customers can be one effective way to bolster the quality of your customer support. Providing your agents with templated responses is another way to ensure that every customer interaction is satisfactory and on brand.
When agents have more time to give each support ticket their undivided attention and A+ effort, customer satisfaction is bound to improve. But chances are that most tickets that your company receives don't actually need an in-depth response from a live agent. And if those repetitive tickets take up too much time, agents won’t be able to take the time to give a high-quality response when it’s needed.
Support tickets such as "where is my order?" inquiries, common product questions, and other repetitive tickets take time and resources away from more complex tickets requiring a more detailed and personalized response.
By using Gorgias to create automated responses to these repetitive tickets, you can free up time in your support team's daily schedule so that they can put more focus and effort into high-value or complex tickets. Specifically, you can use:
Customer satisfaction doesn't begin with customer support, and it doesn't end there, either. Along with boosting customer satisfaction by improving your customer support quality, you can also improve your CSAT score by searching for opportunities to improve the customer experience beyond the agent level.
This can include:
Of course, your support team will need to pass along customer feedback with ideas to improve the product and customer experience. Check out our post on collecting and sharing customer feedback for tips.
Meeting customer expectations regarding customer support is one crucial key to high CSAT scores. Consider incorporating customer support best practices like the following three suggestions to meet those customer expectations.
Omnichannel support is the strategy of creating and uniting customer touchpoints on many channels: email, social media, SMS texting, and more. An omnichannel approach gives you more chances to meet customers where they’re at. Plus, with a helpdesk that combines all of these channels, you can easily manage incoming messages without having to spend half your day switching between windows.
Customer self-service is any tool or resource that helps customers answer questions without having to reach out to an agent — resources like FAQ pages and knowledge bases, self-service flows, or chatbots. 88% of customers expect self-service resources because they are fast and low-effort. Fortunately, self-service resources also reduce the number of repetitive tickets your agents receive on a day-to-day basis.
Proactive customer service is a strategy to reach out to customers before they think to reach out to support. Common self-service tactics include live chat campaigns that ask customers if they need help while browsing your site or welcoming customers with a DM when they follow your social media profiles. Proactive customer support gives you more opportunities to answer customer questions, offer discounts that boost your conversion rate, or find new ways to make happy customers.
Slow response times are another common customer support issue that can harm customer satisfaction. If you notice that long wait times are a recurring complaint in your low-scoring CSAT responses, introducing touchpoints that allow fast, one-to-one interactions can lower your response times (and hopefully, by extension, your CSAT score).
The most effective of these conversational channels include live chat, social media DMs, and SMS texting. These real-time support channels enable your agents to quickly handle multiple tickets at a time, without hours of delay, which is common in emails.
If you have the bandwidth to keep up with these channels, they can dramatically improve response times and resolution times. That said, be sure you’ve hired enough agents to respond to requests on these live channels within the first few minutes to keep your customer experience great.
CSAT survey responses are valuable, and collecting as many of them as possible is important. However, customers aren't always going to jump at the opportunity to fill out a survey. To improve your CSAT survey response rate and start collecting more valuable customer feedback, here are a few effective tips:
You should send out a CSAT survey following every customer interaction. One great way to ensure that every customer is sent a survey without further burdening your support team is to send these surveys out automatically.
With Gorgias, you can create CSAT surveys that send automatically following every customer service interaction, ensuring that every customer gets the opportunity to leave feedback.
Customers are more likely to respond to a CSAT survey when the interaction is still fresh on their minds. It is typically best to send out CSAT surveys immediately following a customer interaction.
The only exception is if you have a particularly complicated product, like a piece of software that the customer needs to set up. That’s because the customer might still need to configure something before they know whether or not your support team effectively addressed the pain point. But for most products, the sooner the better.
While detailed feedback is great, most of your customers won't be willing to answer dozens of survey questions. It's usually best to keep your CSAT surveys short and simple. A single question that asks customers to rank their satisfaction on a scale of 1 to 5, along with an optional form for providing more detailed feedback, is the tried-and-true best format for CSAT surveys.
With that said, there are certainly times when you will want to reach out to customers for more detailed feedback. We've already mentioned how reaching out to low-scoring customers can be a great way to identify issues and take another stab at satisfying them. However, it's best to use these long-form surveys and feedback requests as a follow-up to low-scoring CSAT survey responses instead of the initial survey.
Making it fun and interesting for customers to fill out your CSAT surveys can go a long way toward boosting your response rate. One simple way to make your surveys more appealing is to include visually engaging elements such as buttons, images, and stars:
Something as simple as including the customer's name in your CSAT survey email can add a professional touch to these emails and help ensure that customers don't mistake them for spam. Referencing the ticket number in question is another effective practice for personalizing CSAT survey emails.
It might not be sustainable long term, but offering incentives such as discount codes or gift cards for CSAT responses can certainly improve your CSAT response rate. If you can't afford to offer incentives for every CSAT response, offering incentives for customers to complete your more long-form feedback surveys can effectively gather more detailed customer feedback.
We recommend all brands measure customer satisfaction and use CSAT scores as a key performance indicator (KPI) for the customer support team. That’s true whether you have a large in-house support crew, outsource to a call center, or are a one-person business. Regardless, keeping tabs on your customer satisfaction will pay off. Here’s why:
According to Shopify data, even small ecommerce companies with less than four employees spend between $21 to $533 on average to acquire a new customer, depending on the industry. So if your strategy is too focused on customer acquisition — and not customer retention — you’re building a ship with a hole. In other words, you’ll leak revenue from existing customer churn and sink under ocean-sized acquisition costs.
A high CSAT score indicates you don’t have a hole in your ship: Your customer loyalty is high and you’ll stay afloat at a much lower cost. And the best way to keep customer loyalty high is to deliver a customer experience that satisfies your customers.
In our CX Growth Playbook, which analyzed data from over 10,000 ecommerce merchants, we also found that raising your CSAT from 4 to 4.9 could raise overall revenue by 4%, thanks to the number of repeat purchases that follow high CSAT responses.
Customer experience is complex and multi-dimensional. Everything, from the quality of your website’s FAQ page to the email customers receive after a purchase, stacks up into a customer experience that’s either satisfying or frustrating.
Tracking CSAT scores is one of your best bets to measure the overall quality of your customer support experience. And measuring the quality of your customer support experience is the first step to identifying where you excel and where you have an opportunity to better satisfy customer needs.
CSAT scores tend to directly correlate with other important customer service KPIs such as first-response time (FRT), average handle time (AHT), average reply times, and resolution times. Tracking all of these KPIs gives you a fuller picture of your customer support experience.
For example, if your CSAT score and resolution times start to fall but your response times are high, the takeaway is that your support team needs to focus on quality responses, not just fast ones. Low CSAT scores and resolution times indicate that your responses — even if they’re near-instant — aren’t solving customer needs. For example, a cause of this might agents blindly applying canned responses, or Macros, without updating information or making it relevant for the customer.
Tracking customer satisfaction can help you pinpoint the root cause of issues harming the customer experience, whether that’s slow responses, low-quality responses, or some other aspect of the customer experience that customers find dissatisfying. For example, while auditing, you might find that many customers are upset about a discount code not applying at checkout. Only once you realize it’s a pattern might you realize that you’ve been communicating the wrong discount code to customers.
By measuring your CSAT and digging into themes across qualitative responses, you may be able to triangulate issues that need customer service training or new resources like a knowledge base. Plus, with the right helpdesk, you may be able to see CSAT broken down by a customer service agent so you can see which agents need additional training or quality assurance.
Above, we explained how you can use the customer feedback from CSAT surveys to improve your customer support service quality. However, you can also use it to improve other areas of your business, too. For example, your team can pass feedback regarding the product itself to your product development team. Similarly, feedback regarding your website can be routed to your marketing or software development team.
CSAT is an insightful metric for customer support teams to track, but it doesn't tell the whole story about customer satisfaction. For example, you could have a high CSAT but never get to 10% of your tickets — those customers would not be satisfied but never get the chance to fill out a survey. Similarly, CSAT may give you a skewed sample population if only your most engaged and happy customers respond to your survey requests.
For that reason, keep an eye on other signals of customer satisfaction, like social media mentions and customer referrals. Other important metrics to track include net promoter score (NPS), first-response time (FRT), average handle time (AHT), and customer effort score (CES).
Gorgias developed a new metric called support performance score, which is our best shot at creating a single north-star metric that measures the overall quality of your support. Support performance score combines CSAT, first-response time, and resolution time to estimate how fast, helpful, and satisfying your support is. If you use Gorgias, you’ll find your support performance score in your Statistics dashboard:
By tracking multiple customer support and customer satisfaction metrics, you can form a comprehensive view of how satisfied customers are with your company and better identify areas where there is room for improvement.
Improving your ecommerce store's CSAT score can improve customer retention, boost referrals, limit negative reviews, and provide a wide range of other business-boosting benefits.
From freeing up your team via automated responses to repetitive tickets to speeding up first-response times via SMS and live chat support, Gorgias enables you to move faster, make more happy customers, and grow your store.
Our platform also offers tools for collecting and analyzing customer feedback automatically so that the valuable information you need to improve your customer experience further is always at your fingertips. See how our customer, Ohh Deer, uses Gorgias' live chat to maintain a 4.95 CSAT score (and generate $50,000 in revenue annually.)
Get started with Gorgias now to see how our industry-leading customer support platform can help you track and improve your CSAT score.
Most ecommerce businesses understand that offering great products at a reasonable price isn’t enough. We know that customer experience is key to gaining long-term loyal customers, obtaining reviews and referrals, and growing in the long term. But too many brands believe that a great customer experience means surprising and delighting customers.
Frankly, handwritten notes and freebies don’t make for a great customer experience or a winning strategy. That’s not why customers reach out to your brand, nor is it what drives customer retention. They reach out to support for quick, helpful, effortless experiences; this is what makes top-notch customer service so important. Then (and only then) should you put the cherry on top with surprising, delightful extras.
Top-notch customer support is like an ice cream sundae, and efforts to thrill customers are the sprinkles and cherries on top. Sprinkles and cherries are great, but they don’t make for a satisfying sundae on their own.
Customers won’t be that amused if you make them wait on hold for 45 minutes and greet them with lighthearted jokes. Likewise, you’ll make a customer feel frustrated if you spend your budget on freebies but ignore implementing customer feedback about the product.
More than anything, customers who contact a brand's customer service team want their problems solved quickly and well. Fast, helpful, low-effort experiences are the base of your sundae, and any extra efforts to delight the customer are sure to fall flat if you can't do that.
According to Emplifi, 49% of consumers have left a brand in the past year due to a poor customer experience. Also, according to The Effortless Experience, an influential customer service book by best-selling author Matthew Dixon, customer service interactions are 4x more likely to drive customer disloyalty than they are to drive customer loyalty.
If 20% of support interactions leave customers delighted and 80% leave customers frustrated, your greatest opportunity is to reduce frustration, not chase after hard-to-achieve delight.
The Effortless Experience also reveals that going “above and beyond” isn’t even what drives that 20% of loyalty-building interactions. While companies assume exceeding customer expectations generate superfans, customers are generally just as satisfied when companies simply meet their expectations.
And 80% of companies who use customer delight as a strategy say they spend heavily on providing this delight: More overhead from giveaways, VIP kickbacks, refunds, and policy exceptions. Given that these delightful experiences don’t correlate to customer loyalty, this is not money well spent.
If we zoom into what drives customers away, the most common issue is a high degree of effort — not a lack of gifts or delightful conversations. Common reasons for high-effort experiences include:
The negative impact of these high-effort experiences is staggering. According to The Effortless Experience, a whopping 96% of customers who had high-effort experiences feel disloyal to those companies afterward.
To put it simply, most companies are trying to go “above and beyond” before they effectively provide the baseline of customer service, which is a helpful and low-effort experience.
The key to customer retention is reducing customer effort. 94% of customers intend to purchase after a low-effort experience compared to a slim 4% after high-effort experiences, making it an essential part of a best-in-class customer experience. Lowering customer effort involves designing an intuitive user experience, decreasing the number of steps required to complete tasks, improving reply and response times (along with other key customer support metrics), and using forward resolution in support.
Here are five more quick wins to reduce customer effort in ecommerce:
88% of customers expect your online store to offer some kind of self-service. Self-service resources could be as simple as a frequently-asked questions (FAQ) page or more interactive functionality to manage orders without having to reach out to customer support.
For merchants using Gorgias, you can set up a Help Center that does both in just a few clicks. Customers can read articles about your brand and shipping policy, and check their delivery status (which they do an average of 4.6 times for every order) instantaneously.
Here’s a great example of self-service order management on Steve Madden’s Help Center:
Learn more about self-service order management with Gorgias.
Once you have an FAQ page or customer knowledge base, one type of question to proactively answer is pre-sales questions. These are questions potential customers have while mulling over a purchase in their heads before hitting “Place order” at checkout:
If customers have to reach out and wait for an answer, they might just abandon the purchase and look for another online retailer that better addresses their questions. At least, that’s the case for the 63% of customers who attempt to solve issues via self-service support before reaching out.
So, don’t delay in making clear sizing guides, shipping policies, returns policies, and other self-service information that your customers need to confidently make a purchase.
Forward resolution is the practice of solving anticipated issues for customers before the customer even thinks to ask.
Let’s look at a real-world example: A customer inquires about shipping times to their local region. The support agent can see they have items in their cart that are on pre-order and, while answering the customer’s question about shipping time, also tells them that pre-order items are sent separately and that they can track delivery status through self-service. The agent has answered the initial question and forward-resolved two potential issues — reducing effort for the customer.
If you can, audit multi-touch tickets from the past few months to understand which questions tend to have natural follow-ups you can proactively answer. Then, add that follow-up information to your templates, or Macros if you use Gorgias, to improve your customer experience.
Here’s a Macro that not only answer’s a customer question about the location of an order, but lets them know when that order will be shipped:
Learn more about resolution time from Gorgias’s Director of Customer Support.
One of the most damaging mistakes is making customers repeat themselves. Agents need that information to do their jobs well, but asking a customer to repeat their story at every juncture is a surefire way to damage a valuable customer relationship.
Instead, give customer service representatives all the customer context they need from the jump. Gorgias’s customer sidebar gives agents valuable context like purchase and communication history (from Shopify or BigCommerce), reviews information, cart data, social media engagement, and much more so customers don’t need to constantly retell their story.
90% of customers say an “immediate” response is important, and 78% of customers prefer a variety of support channels to get in contact with customer support.
To answer questions faster, consider using a customer support platform with automation features to help your team move faster and automatically respond to repetitive customer questions. Gorgias’ automated system can help you prioritize customer service requests, tag the appropriate agent, and close no-response tickets so you spend less time on admin work. And, with the help of pre-written Macros, automated Rules, and chatbot-like self-service flows, you can send instant, personalized responses to questions like, “Where is my order?”
Additionally, explore expanding to an omnichannel or multichannel ecommerce customer service strategy, which gives customers more touchpoints for your brand. Customers value the convenience of texting your brand, calling your brand, and hearing from you on social media. If you’re only available via email, you will likely lose customers due to high effort.
Read our guide to omnichannel customer service or check out our unified helpdesk to learn more.
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Don’t get us wrong, customers usually enjoy an extra bit of pizazz or a freebie. And those sprinkles can even boost your brand’s conversion rate in the short term and boost customer loyalty in the long term — as long as they’re not associated with a high-effort experience.
Take a look at the following customer delight strategies and consider adopting them only once you’ve developed a low-effort customer experience as a foundation.
According to a 2021 survey, 66% of customers expect free shipping with every online purchase. This means that free shipping is often more of an expectation than a bonus — thanks, Amazon. Nevertheless, offering free shipping to your customers can still be a great way to encourage customer delight in many cases.
Customers love the word "free," even if the money that they are saving is only a few dollars. In fact, many stores can raise their product pricing slightly to make up for shipping costs and still see a boost in conversion rate from offering free shipping.
If you can’t offer free shipping to every customer, setting qualifying amounts is a good way to delight customers with free shipping while also driving higher average order values.
Woxer is one ecommerce brand that offers free shipping on all domestic orders and some international orders. Plus — another best practice — Woxer makes this information easily accessible as a Quick Response in their live chat widget.
Creating a customer referral portal or program offers dual benefits. For one, it helps your brand attract new customers by encouraging them to refer their friends, family, and colleagues through word-of-mouth advertising. Along with introducing your brand to new potential customers, referral programs can also be a great way to blow away your customers: Everyone loves the opportunity to earn discounts and rewards!
If your ecommerce company has a strong net promoter score (NPS), you’re positioned to launch a referral program, capitalize on that goodwill, and delight your customers. If you want to start a referral marketing program, check out tools like Extole which systematically reward customers who bring you business via word of mouth.
Recognition is its own reward, and a shout-out on social media is something most customers enjoy. Highlighting customers who use your products, positive customer reviews, and other delightful interactions allow you to celebrate customers and add social proof to your social media profile. It also reduces the number of content marketing materials you need to produce on your own.
Marine Layer's Instagram is full of customer shout-outs and other user-generated content that your brand may be able to pull inspiration from:
Like a referral program, a loyalty program rewards customers for repeat purchases and continued brand loyalty. If your customer experience is already smooth enough to bring in repeat customers, delighting those superfans with rewards is a strong strategy.
If you already use Gorgias, you can integrate loyalty platforms like LoyaltyLion to make the customer experience even more seamless. For example, esmi Skin Minerals uses Gorgias and its integration with Loyalty Lion to bring loyalty data into Gorgias and provide even more personalized, automated service to shoppers. Thanks to this powerful integration, esmi achieved a 58% boost in brand loyalty program enrollment and a 2X increase in average loyalty program member spend.
Even if you don’t have an official loyalty program, you can celebrate your VIP customers at key milestones like birthdays or the anniversary of their first purchase. On top of sharing some warm and fuzzies (and maybe free product), one benefit of this kind of celebration is to potentially get a shoutout from customers on social media for your surprise.
Check out our CX Growth Playbook to learn how to implement this tip with Zapier, plus read about 18 other tactics to drive growth through customer experience.
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One way to delight customers is to move beyond purely reactive customer service, which requires customers to reach out to get help. With proactive customer service, a combination of directly reaching out to customers and creating self-service resources, you can help more potential customers, reduce cart abandonment, and improve your brand’s customer experience.
Proactive customer support could include self-service resources, like those described above. It also includes non-intrusive chat campaigns, which let you automatically reach out to customers who display certain behaviors to offer support. For example, you could reach out to customers who linger on a product page to ask if they have questions about the product or need a recommendation on sizing.
Here’s what Ohh Deer, an online retailer that sells delightful stationery, says about chat campaigns:
“With chat campaigns, the goal is to remove any customer equivocation and get the customer to the product they really want.”
– Alex Turner, Customer Experience Manager at Ohh Deer
Learn how Ohh Deer drives $12,500 each quarter through Gorgias chat.
The key to great customer service isn’t some sparkly delight. It’s efficient, convenient, and helpful support that customers can access in a variety of ways.
With Gorgias, ecommerce brands can access the tools and integrations they need to automate time-consuming tasks, provide instant answers, and reduce the number of times customers have to write in and wait for your customer support team’s answer. Through our platform, your customer support team becomes more than just a team to answer customer questions — it becomes a revenue-generating machine.
Book a demo to see how Gorgias can help your ecommerce brand.
How many times have you left an online store, mid-purchase, after trying and failing to find the answers you needed?
According to Baymard Institute, about two-thirds of carts end up abandoned. Luckily, live chat can help convert those customers — providing well-time customer service at the height of buying intent.
Companies that leverage live-chat tools on their websites provide a stronger customer experience, maximize the efficiency of their customer support agents and see bigger gains in revenue and customer retention.
Plus, it has exploded in popularity recently and continues to grow. Even if you don’t have live chat enabled on your website, there’s a good chance your competitors are in the 85% of companies projected to be using it in 2022.
In this article, we’ve listed 22 live chat and chatbot statistics that show just how beneficial these tools can be for your company and customer support team.
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Recent live chat statistics from the Gorgias platform demonstrate that the majority of customers are satisfied with their live chat experiences for support. In fact, we found 86% of live chat conversations on the Gorgias platform end with a 4- or 5-star CSAT rating. There are a number of issues that can arise with any type of digital customer communication method, but based on these statistics, it’s fair to say that live chat offers a clear path to customer satisfaction.
Source: Gorgias
This data point drives home the win-win nature of live chat for companies and customers. If your company is going to invest in new technology and take the time to train your customer support team in how to use it, you’ll want to make sure it’s worth it.
If you’re still not convinced: In 2021, brands using the Gorgias chat widget generated an average of $38,702 from conversations involving chat.
Sources: ltvplus
Converting website visitors to customers is key to any successful ecommerce business, so most companies will do whatever they need to in order to boost their chances of a conversion. Recent statistics show that adding live chat can increase conversion rates by 12%. This data also tells us that visitors who chat via live chat are 2.8 times more likely to convert than those who do not engage in this form of communication.
This is much more attainable when you combine automation and a human touch in your chat strategy. (Not sure of the difference? Read our post on live chat vs chatbots.)
Source: ltvplus
Leveraging chat tools on your company’s website can help save your company money on staffing and the costs of high churn, and can improve overall customer experience — which often leads to customers spending more money while on your site.
Source: Intercom
Keep reading with our list of 60+ customer service statistics you should use to inform your team’s support strategy.
Nearly two-thirds of buyers report that they expect an immediate response from a support team (“immediate” is defined as within 10 minutes). This may be partially because many customers are used to old-fashioned phone support, which usually results in an immediate solution to the problem.
This statistic should also tell you that when your customer success team is providing live chat support, they should either respond immediately, or set up an automated message that is sent immediately that states when a team member will be available to assist them.
With some live chat products, you can also provide a self-service solution. We have found that it can deflect up to 30% of tickets and provide your customers with immediate responses at any hour. You can see an example of the Gorgias self-service chat below.
Source: HubSpot
Speed doesn’t mean much for live chat customer service if the issues aren’t ultimately resolved. The good news is that a recent industry assessment shows that most customer issues brought to a company via live chat are resolved in less than one minute, once the agent gets to the ticket.
At the end of the day, your customers want to know they can rely on you and your team to help them out in a reasonable amount of time — especially if the issue is simple and straightforward.
Source: SnapEngage
There’s no question that real-time support via chat is taking over traditional phone support. But it’s not just phone support that is losing to live chat — there are other forms of digital communication that are no longer preferred among customers. Only 23% of customers report preferring email communication for support, and 16% report social media (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc.) and forums as their preferred mode of support communication.
If a customer has a question, they’re more likely to visit your company’s website and try to engage with a live chat agent. But the real takeaway here is that different customers have different support needs.
It’s important to choose a solution that unifies your support operation across all channels, so you can meet customers where they are without keeping 15 different tabs open.
Source: SuperOffice
Most people can agree that talking to a robot with scripted responses can be a negative and even entirely unhelpful experience. Furthermore, 38% of companies agree that their customers are most annoyed by scripted responses on live chat.
At Gorgias, we have found shoppers are less bothered by self-service features if they are fast and, more importantly, helpful in getting them to the right agent more quickly. But if you’ve ever typed “I need an agent” five times in a row in a live chat window, you know firsthand that those experiences can be rare.
Source: ltvplus
As we discussed earlier, many customers are still turned off by auto-scripted chat bots. Even though many companies agree with this notion, more than two-thirds of companies continue to use canned responses in their live chat services.
It is important to recognize that there is a distinction between a bot that provides automated responses, and a live customer service agent who refers to a script. Your customer support agents should be able to bring in their own personalities and styles when chatting with customers, but it’s not necessary to reinvent the wheel for each response.
For example, a script at Disney might look like this:
The above script is called a Macro, and it’s an example of how we strike this balance at Gorgias. Agents can use Macros to quickly respond in a way that is personalized and in line with your company’s voice. This allows for a warmer, more natural support experience. Plus, all the information is pulled in automatically.
Source: Forbes
When the pandemic started, online shopping increased dramatically. A household can easily spend $250 per month online — especially if they’re ordering groceries or items they would have normally bought in person.
Statistics show that, out of consumers who spend between $250 and $500 a month online, 63% are more loyal to companies that have live chat services. They are also more likely to be repeat customers.
Live chat services can help customers feel seen and heard, so regular customers feel comforted knowing that someone from your customer success team is one message away. This level of service will keep them coming back time and time again.
Source: Kayako
Even if customers don’t necessarily take advantage of your live chat support feature, over one-third of consumers report they are more likely to make a purchase from an online retailer if they simply have live chat support as an option. Live chat can help show customers that your company is available for any question they have, and that the company cares about their experience.
Source: Kayako
To further support the fact that many customers in today’s retail landscape prefer live chat, close to one-third say that they expect to see a live chat option on a company’s website. Similarly, almost 50% of mobile device users visiting your website expect to see a live chat option. To ignore live chat is to ignore a large portion of your customers’ expectations, leading to a poor ecommerce shopping experience and ultimately, less revenue.
Source: Forrester through TechJury
Have Shopify? Learn how to add a live chat to your store.
Recent data shows that by 2022, the majority of businesses are expected to incorporate some form of live chat experiences to their websites or mobile apps.
In addition to the statistical benefits of live chat, other benefits include an overall increase in customer satisfaction rate, better customer experience with personalized interactions, and fewer costs while providing simultaneous support to multiple customers.
Source: Software Advice
Keep your business ahead of the curve: Read about 8 must-know customer service trends for 2022.
Live chat is most commonly used among B2C businesses for customer support and to further enhance the customer experience. According to recent data, more companies use live chat for sales than support. Among B2B companies, 85% are using live chat mainly for sales and 66% are using it mainly for support. Among B2C companies, 74% are using live chat for sales more, while 67% are using it mainly for support.
Source: FinancesOnline
Drive more sales with these 9 tips for ecommerce upselling.
Perhaps one of the most important statistics on this list, the global live chat software market is set to grow at unprecedented rates over the next year. The live chat software market is also registering a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 7.5% from 2017 to 2023.
As a business leader or owner, this is excellent news for your company because it means that you will have multiple options for live chat products. All live chat software is not created equal, so researching companies and asking questions to make sure a product can meet the unique needs of your business is key.
For example, you should consider:
Source: Allied Market Research
Related: Get our in-depth list of the best live chat apps for Shopify.
Research shows that almost all customers (95%) value higher quality support over speed when it comes to live chat apps. This isn’t to say that customers are content with long average wait times. Rather, it reveals that consumers prefer slower, more personalized live chat support when it leads to higher quality service.
Luckily, with a combination of live chat and a chatbot, you don’t have to compromise between speed and customer experience.
Source: Finances Online
Among the reasons customers prefer live chat over any other form of customer communication are the lack of wait times (34%) and the increased convenience (26.9%). The data also shows us that customers appreciate that they can privately engage with a brand, express their concerns, and receive quick solutions to their issues.
In this case, live chat is a critical tool for building trust with your customer base and establishing long-term customer relationships.
Source: SoftwareAdvice
The time spent talking to a customer service agent is often cited as a reason customers prefer live chat over other customer communication options. In one study, chatting online with a human came in first place for the shortest chat duration, resolving an issue in just 24 minutes. This is compared to email (157 minutes), social media messaging (58 minutes), and online chat with a bot (27 minutes).
Source: TopBots
Although customers prefer live chat sessions over email, phone, and social media support, two-fifths of them lack faith that they’ll get the support they need in a reasonable amount of time.
While this lack of confidence isn’t ideal, it provides an opportunity for you and your customer success team to prove to your customers that your company’s live chat is fast and helpful. This is also a key reason many of our customers use self-service features in their live chat experiences.
Building trust with your customers turns them into lifelong customers, helps with your company’s ecommerce churn rate and lead generation, and can ultimately boost your customer success team's morale as they successfully resolve tickets.
Source: Kayako
When it comes to younger generations, speed and convenience are priorities. Among millennials specifically, live chat tools are the preferred method of communication when contacting a company.
According to a report by Software Advice, the top reason they prefer live chat is because it can dramatically decrease holding time. Even more, 71% of those surveyed between 16 and 24 years old think the customer experience could be drastically improved with quicker response times. That percentage drops only slightly (65%) for those between the ages of 25 and 34.
Source: Comm100
As much as marketing and sales have gone digital, there’s still something extremely powerful about word of mouth. People are more likely to share positive customer service experiences over “just okay” experiences. Among younger generations like millennials and Generation Z, talking among friends and sharing experiences about online retailers is the norm.
Online shopping experiences have become even more widely discussed since the coronavirus pandemic began in 2020, as many people have defaulted to shopping online instead of making trips to brick-and-mortar stores.
Source: Kayako
Following up on how millennial customers prefer to communicate with brands, more than half expect to be able to engage with a brand whenever they choose.
To be available to them across all platforms, you need to ensure your live chat integrates into a customer support solution that can bring those channels into your dashboard. Otherwise, you’ll be clicking back and forth between different windows for every new ticket.
It may seem easier to just make them come to your preferred channels, but overlooking the preferences of millennials and Gen Z can negatively affect your business as their buying power grows.
Source: Comm100
Now that you’ve explored the latest data on chat tools, you can see why a live chat tool is a worthy addition to any ecommerce business. But as we mentioned earlier, all live chat solutions are not created equal. I
Gorgias live chat integrates into our leading platform for ecommerce customer support. You can handle live chat tickets alongside those from email, phone, and social media to more easily serve your online customers. You can even proactively reach out to customers to resolve more issues and boost sales. Then automate your most repetitive inquiries to make time for the conversations that matter to your business.
Our tool was specifically built to work seamlessly with major ecommerce platforms like Shopify, Magento, and BigCommerce, and our integrations go deeper than any other platform. Sign up today to see how our chat tools can help your business grow.
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