Strategy 3: Steer customers away from email to automate 5% more requests

For most ecommerce support teams, email represents at least 60% of all requests. If you can drive the most repetitive and basic questions to automated alternatives, your team will save hours per week.

This may seem radical, but we recommend removing your support email from your website. 

3 ways to drive support volume away from email

Link to your Help Center instead

Wherever you currently link your support email — like your website footer or marketing emails — link to your Help Center instead. While email might seem like the preferred method of communication for customers, you might be surprised by how eager they are for a more self-service option. 

88% of customers expect brands to have some sort of self-service portal, thanks to its speed and convenience. A searchable library of help content (ideally with automation to track and manage orders) is much faster than typing a message and waiting for a response. 

Take advantage of a Contact Form

If a Help Center doesn’t resolve a customer’s query, a Contact Form is a great safety net. Contact Forms guide customers to structure their requests with dropdowns and prompts, which you can use this structure to automatically assign and tag incoming tickets in your helpdesk. 

Here’s an example of a great Contact Form from Ekster, which is accessible from their Help Center:

Even though Contact Form submissions aren’t automated, the additional context you’ll get from them will help you resolve the query in one touch. Especially compared to a one-line email that just says, “My thing is broken.”

Want to set up a Contact Form? With Gorgias, you can set up a standalone Contact Form or embed one in your Help Center. 

Enable your chat widget

When customers are on your website with a question, chat is a more direct path to an answer than email. You can enrich your widget with automated answers, order management portals, and more — check out the first section of this article for tips. 

Remember: On Gorgias, live chat is completely optional. You can activate your chat widget to provide automated support without turning on live chat. You can also set live chat to only be active during certain hours, or after the customer tries automation first. 

Use Autoresponders to handle common questions that still make it to your email inbox

If customers bypass your self-service options and send an email with a basic question — like “Where is my order?” or “Can I return this?” — you have one last line of defense before agents have to step in: Autoresponders. 

Autoresponders use AI to scan incoming email tickets and handle requests without any agent involvement. Unlike Rules, which you can configure to automatically respond to messages, Autoresponders are managed by Gorgias and have a 1-click setup. Also, Autoresponders are nicely designed, with prominent CTAs rather than plain text. 

There are currently three active Autoresponders, with more on the way:

• WISMO Autoresponder: When customers ask where an order is, automatically send an order tracking link.
• Returns Autoresponder: When customers request a return, automatically send a return portal link. 
• Article Recommendation Autoresponder: When customers ask a question that’s answered in your Help Center, automatically send the relevant article.
• Auto-close Spam Autoresponder: When you get a spam email or an email that doesn’t require a response, automatically close it.

“The auto-close of spam tickets is awesome. We had so much spam and now it dropped off.”

— Addison Debter, Head of Customer Service at Kirby Allison

You can see all three Autoresponders in action in this video:

Want to get started with Autoresponders? Learn how to set them up with this getting-started guide.