Food Huggers is on a mission to reduce food waste and single-use plastic at home. The company sells reusable food savers that help people keep leftover fruits and vegetables fresh long enough to enjoy while making sustainable habits easy and fun without giving up convenience or style.

As a customer-centric company, Food Huggers always strive to offer excellent shopping experiences, from developing the highest-quality products to providing quick answers to customer questions. Every month, their geo-dispersed support team receives an average of 1,100 tickets from all channels, including live chat, wholesale, and Amazon. They're currently working on integrating customer tickets via social media into their Gorgias system to speed up their support.

In a recent interview, Juliana Brasil, Director of Operations at Food Huggers, shared how Gorgias makes it easier for their team to implement self-service, expand their support team, improve agents' productivity, and boost CSAT.

The challenge: HelpScout's limitations hindered scalling customer support

Juliana shared that previously, Food Huggers used HelpScout for ticket management. However, it created some challenges for the team.

For example, Food Huggers has 3 support agents. As they plan to leverage automated responses for social media, they'll need to bring in a social media manager. Since HelpScout applies a per-user pricing model, every time the Food Huggers team wants to add an agent to the platform, they'll need to double the bill. This keeps them from growing their customer support.

Over time, HelpScout also showed some limitations regarding functionalities. They needed a better platform to offer self-service, answer customer questions faster, and use Shopify data to create automated rules for specific tasks. The team later moved to Gorgias.

The solution: Automated customer support that is tightly integrated with Shopify

After switching to Gorgias, the Food Huggers team found it easy to connect their 3 inboxes into Gorgias, integrate with Shopify and manage everything in one place.

They can look at analytics to see the number of tickets created, track how each member works, and consistently deliver assets to other channels. Their agents use Gorgias' internal notes to work asynchronously and share knowledge with each other.

Also, since Gorgias charges by usage, Food Huggers can add as many agents to the platform as they want without having to pay additional fee.

Below is how the Food Huggers team has used Gorgias to handle their customer service:

• Use tags and rules to automate simple tasks like auto-close emails, assigning tickets to the best rep, exchanging/returning requests, and providing timely responses.
• Develop a help center and self-service automation to give customers quick answers, drive conversations, and remove their doubts purchasing
• Connect Yotpo Reviews with Gorgias to track customer reviews. When a shopper leaves a bad review, agents can quickly see that review within Gorgias and identify problems/solutions.

The result: Fewer live chat tickets, faster support, and increased efficiency

Thanks to Gorgias' self-service chat portal, Food Huggers reduced live chat tickets to 11% and increased CSAT to 4.6. Approximately 63% of their chat interactions are quick responses. Food Huggers' agents now have more time to focus on complicated tickets and revenue-generating activities.

With that incredible result, they plan to use Gorgias' automation for email, test using quick responses to drive conversions and grow Yotpo reviews to take advantage of Yotpo Gorgias integration. They're also looking to expand to new marketplaces like Asia and Australia, and Gorgias will play a key role in their growth plan.

"Gorgias allows us to connect our new Shopify stores, leverage all our processes, customize Help Center, and serve new customers very quickly and efficiently."

- Juliana Brasil, Director of Operations at Food Huggers