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TL;DR:
Your Help Center is a great resource for sharing information with customers. And as AI technology transforms customer support, the Help Center now also serves as a data source that provides AI with the knowledge to answer questions.
Gorgias’s AI features function by drawing on information from knowledge sources. For example, Gorgias’s AI can draw upon your past support tickets to generate Help Center content. Likewise, our upcoming AI Agent uses your Help Center to write and send answers to customer questions.
Our AI Agent is coming July 1st (with a Beta starting in May). Below, we'll explain why an up-to-date Help Center that covers all your policies is the best way to prepare for AI Agent, gain admission to the Beta, and resolve 30%+ of your email support interactions.
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AI Agent is a conversational AI tool that answers customer support emails by learning your brand’s policies and processes from your Help Center. It can understand a wide array of questions and generate unique responses that are helpful, personalized, and accurate.
Unlike AI tools like ChatGPT or Gemini, which are trained on public information, AI Agent specifically works with your data. Its first layer of support is your Help Center, a database of articles about your products and policies. From there, you can complement its knowledge with data from Macros and connected ecommerce tools like Shopify.
With AI Agent as your level 1 support, your team can focus on escalated or VIP tickets and other projects you may not currently have time for.
The crucial step to fully prepare AI Agent is to make sure your Help Center articles are accurate and up-to-date. You don’t need to have your Help Center published or linked on your website — however, articles must be published and not saved as drafts.
To hit the ground running with AI Agent, your Help Center must meet a few criteria. Here’s a checklist to prepare your Help Center:
Ideally, customers should find answers with just one click. You can achieve this by publishing articles that answer your customers’ top concerns.
We’ve compiled the most important Help Center articles to have, with the starred questions being essential to include. You can skip to the bottom of this post to find templates for these topics:
As an online business, your information constantly changes, including policies, product updates, and brand revamps. Review older articles, particularly those over a year old, to ensure the information is still accurate.
Here are the most important elements to update:
If your articles point to other web pages, you’ll want to make sure the right texts are hyperlinked, and the links do not lead to 404 pages.
Some important links to include:
💡 Pro Tip: Avoid including statements in your articles like, “To resolve this issue, contact us at [email]” as this confuses the AI Agent.
Ensure your articles are published so AI Agent can learn from them. Whether the article is Unlisted or Public, you must take them out of Draft mode. An article left in Draft mode remains invisible to AI Agent. To confirm that your article is published, check the top right corner of the editor to ensure the article is “Published” and not “Unsaved.”
That said, if you’re not ready to share your Help Center with customers, you don’t need to publish the Help Center itself.
Related: How to boost your Help Center’s visibility
If you don’t currently have a Help Center, you can set one up and start filling it with articles within a couple of hours. Below are three strategies that will let you create the most comprehensive Help Center, fast.
When you create a Help Center on Gorgias, you can access the AI Library. The AI-generated articles are based on your past conversations with customers and their concerns. You can edit them to suit your brand voice and policies.
As of now, only accounts with a single Shopify store connected have access to the AI Library. We expect multi-store accounts to gain access to this feature by mid-May 2024.
Related: Our AI Library Help Doc
Accelerate the setup of your Help Center by using pre-written article templates. These templates cover common customer inquiries and ensure consistency in response quality and format.
Gorgias offers six ready-to-use Help Center article templates that cover essential topics. These templates enable you to quickly establish a strong database without wasting agents’ time.
Take stock of your existing content, such as FAQs, product guides, and blog posts. Convert this content into Help Center articles and properly categorize them based on the topic for seamless user navigation.
💡 Pro Tip: Each article should only ask one question. This helps AI Agent to easily decipher the purpose of each article.
To speed up Help Center creation, we’ve provided article templates covering topics from shipping and tracking and account creation to product information. Simply edit the details and add the necessary links based on your policies.
⭐️ Where is my order? (WISMO)
To check the status of your order, please visit our Order Tracking Portal and enter your email address and order number. We update our tracking information as soon as it is available.
⭐️ How do I track my order?
Once your order has shipped, we'll send you a confirmation email with a tracking link. Click on the link to view the latest updates on your order and its estimated delivery date.
⭐️ How do I get my tracking number?
Your tracking number will be emailed to you when your order ships. If you haven't received it, please check your spam folder. If it's not there, please contact our customer support team.
⭐️ How much does shipping cost?
Shipping costs vary depending on the weight of your order and the destination. To view shipping costs, simply add items to your cart, proceed to checkout, and enter your shipping address. The applicable shipping fees will be displayed before you finalize your order.
⭐️ Do you offer free shipping?
Yes, we offer free standard shipping on orders over [$#]. A standard shipping fee will be applied to orders under [$#].
⭐️ Do you ship worldwide?
We ship to [#] countries worldwide. Shipping costs and times vary depending on the destination. For detailed information and to see if we ship to your country, please visit our international shipping page.
⭐️ Do you offer expedited shipping?
Yes, we offer expedited shipping options for most locations. You can select your preferred shipping method at checkout. Additional charges will apply for expedited shipping.
⭐️ How long does delivery take?
Delivery times vary depending on the destination and the shipping method selected. For standard shipping in [country], expect your order to arrive within 5-7 business days. International orders may take 10-20 business days.
Why can’t I track my order?
If you can’t track your order, it may be for several reasons: the tracking information is not yet available, the tracking number is incorrect, or there may be a delay in the tracking system updates.
Please allow up to 24 hours for your tracking information to become available after receiving your shipping confirmation email. If you still face issues, contact our customer support team for further assistance.
⭐️ Can I edit or add anything to my order?
Once an order is placed, we are unable to make changes to the order. However, if you need to update your shipping address or contact information, please contact our customer service team immediately after placing your order.
⭐️ How do I apply promo/discount codes?
To apply a promo or discount code, proceed to checkout and enter your code in the 'Discount Code' field. Click 'Apply' to see your new total before finalizing your order. Only one code can be used per order.
What methods of payment do you accept?
We accept various payment methods including Visa, MasterCard, American Express, and PayPal.
Please note that we do not accept personal checks or money orders.
Where do I get promo codes/discounts?
To get promo and discount codes, make sure to subscribe to our newsletter, check our homepage, and follow us on social media to get the latest deals.
My promo code isn’t working.
The promo code you entered may not work due to an incorrect input (check that you have entered the right letters and numbers), specific conditions (like minimum spend), or an expiry date. If you continue to experience issues, please contact our support team for assistance.
I forgot to add a promo code but already made a purchase.
If you forgot to apply a promo code at checkout, please contact our customer service team as soon as possible. Depending on the status of your order, our team may be able to apply the promo code for you.
How do Shop Pay installments work?
Shop Pay Installments allow you to split your purchase into multiple payments, interest-free. At checkout, choose Shop Pay, select 'Installments', and follow the prompts to set up your payment plan.
How do I update the billing information on my order?
To update your billing information, you may log in to your account and change your information from the Account Settings page. If you do not have an account, please contact our customer service immediately.
How do I purchase a gift card?
Gift cards can be purchased directly from our website. Visit our gift card section, choose the amount, and complete the purchase. The gift card will be directly emailed to you or to the specified recipient.
How do I use a gift card for my purchase?
To use a gift card, enter the code in the 'Gift Card or Discount Code' box at checkout. The value of the gift card will be deducted from your order total.
Do you price match for sales?
We offer price matching for sales within [specific timeframe] of purchase. If an item you’ve bought goes on sale within this period, please contact our customer service to adjust the price difference. Note that certain conditions may apply.
⭐️ What is your return/exchange policy?
We accept returns and exchanges within [30] days of purchase. Items must be in their original condition and packaging. Some items may not be eligible for return. Please see our detailed return policy for more information.
⭐️ What is your cancellation policy?
Orders can be canceled within 24 hours. After this period, we may not be able to cancel your order as it might already be in processing or shipment.
⭐️ How do I initiate a return?
To initiate a return, please visit our Returns & Exchanges Portal and enter your order number and email address.
⭐️ How do I initiate an exchange?
To exchange an item, please visit our Returns & Exchanges Portal.
⭐️ How do I cancel my order?
If you need to cancel your order, please contact us immediately. If your order has not yet been processed, we will cancel it and issue a full refund. If the order is already processed, please refer to our Returns & Exchanges policy.
⭐️ How do I get a refund?
Refunds are processed upon receipt and inspection of the returned item. Please allow up to 10 business days for your refund to be credited back to your original form of payment.
⭐️ Order is marked delivered but not here.
If your order is marked as delivered but you haven't received it, please check around your delivery location and with neighbors. If you still can't locate it, contact our customer support for assistance.
⭐️ What do I do if I receive the wrong item in my order?
If you receive the wrong item, please contact our customer service immediately. We will arrange for the correct item to be sent to you and provide instructions for returning the incorrect item.
I received the right product but in the wrong size/style/color.
We apologize for any inconvenience caused. Please contact our customer service team within [#] days of receiving your order to initiate an exchange for the correct size/style/color. Visit our Returns & Exchanges policy for more information.
What should I do if an item is missing from my order?
We're sorry to hear that you're experiencing issues with your order. Please check your confirmation emails to ensure all items were included in your shipment. If an item is missing, please contact our customer service team immediately so we can resolve the issue.
What can I do if my item doesn't fit or isn't true to size?
If the item you purchased does not fit, you can return it for a refund or exchange it for a different size. Please refer to our Returns & Exchanges policy for details on how to initiate a return or exchange.
What should I do if I'm having a reaction to the product?
Your safety is our priority. Please stop using the product immediately and consult a healthcare professional as needed. To report a reaction and request a return or exchange, contact our customer support team. We also recommend checking the ingredients list to identify any potential allergens.
What should I do if my order arrived damaged?
We apologize for the inconvenience. Please take a photo of the damaged item and email it to our customer service department within [#] days of delivery. We will assist you with a return or exchange as quickly as possible.
Where can I find sizing information?
Our sizing runs true to size unless stated otherwise.
For detailed sizing information, please visit our Sizing Guide page. The guide includes size charts and tips on measuring yourself to ensure the best fit.
Which style is best suited for my needs?
Our various styles cater to different preferences and requirements. For a breakdown of our styles and their best uses, please check out our detailed Style Guide.
What are the materials or ingredients used in this product?
We use high-quality materials/ingredients to ensure the best experience with our products. For a full list of the materials or ingredients in this product, visit the product page.
What product do you recommend for [trait/preference/condition]?
For [trait/preference/condition], we recommend our [Product Name], designed to provide a [benefit here].
How do I use this product?
For optimal results, follow these steps:
How long does this product last and how should it be stored?
This product typically lasts [X amount of time] when used as directed. Store in a cool, dry place away from direct sunlight. For perishable products, refrigeration may be required.
What's the best way to care for this product?
To maintain the quality of your product, we recommend [specific care instructions, e.g., machine wash cold, hand wash only]. For more detailed care instructions, please visit our Care Guide.
What's the difference between Product A and Product B?
Product A is designed for [specific use], while Product B is better suited for [different use].
⭐️ How do I use these rewards points?
You can redeem your rewards points at checkout. Enter the amount of points you wish to apply in the 'Rewards' field, and the discount will be applied to your total.
⭐️ I’m having trouble logging in.
If you're having trouble logging into your account, please try resetting your password using the 'Forgot Password' link on the login page. If you still experience issues, contact our customer support team for help.
⭐️ How do I cancel my membership/subscription?
To cancel your membership or subscription, please log into your account and navigate to the 'Subscriptions' section. You can choose to cancel your subscription from there. If you need assistance, our customer service team is here to help.
⭐️ How do I skip a subscription shipment?
You can skip a subscription shipment by logging into your account, going to the 'Subscriptions' section, and selecting the shipment you wish to skip. Please do this before the billing date for the next shipment.
⭐️ How do I update my subscription items?
To update the items in your subscription, log into your account and visit the 'Subscriptions' tab. You can add or remove products or change the quantities for your next shipment.
How do I set up an account?
Create an account [here] by using the same email address you ordered with.
Please note that if you haven’t created a password, you do not have an account. Additionally, signing up for our emails or ordering doesn't mean you have created an account.
How do I become a member/subscriber/loyalty program?
Become a member by visiting our Membership page.
What are the membership benefits?
You’ll earn many perks as a [company name here] member! Upon joining, you’ll receive a 10% off discount on any purchase.
Plus, more benefits:
I forgot my password.
To reset your password, please click [here].
How do I change my default address?
You can change your default address from your Account settings.
If you need to change your shipping address for a current order, please [contact us].
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Nick’s Top Advice:
Nick O’Brien didn’t think he would find himself back in the print packaging industry, a trade that’s been written in his family tree for four generations. Then 2015 came and Nick witnessed how difficult it was for New York City business owners to find print packaging suppliers. This reignited a fire in him, pushing Nick to start his own print packaging business called Templi in 2017.
There were already “two big strikes” against Nick starting as a non-technical and solo entrepreneur. Although he had spent his younger years working for his family’s print shop Concept Print, Templi was new territory. Not only was there printing to worry about, there was also the coordination work of wrangling together a reliable group of suppliers, designers, and buyers.
He accepted this operations puzzle completely, “I worked through it by realizing, know what you don't know, and trying to get 1% better and more technical every day.”
Nick took it upon himself to fill in the gaps even without a background in business. Code Academy, an online learning platform for coding, was foundational to Nick’s learning and helped him overcome early obstacles. “You can’t run away from learning,” he says, “you have to try to get proficient in all of these areas before you make your hires.”
“You could start non-technical, but you shouldn't end up non-technical.”
The balance between leader and learner was hectic in the early days of Templi, and Nick could only survive as a one-man operation for so long. Building his team was ultimately a self-assessment of what duties he could and couldn’t handle as a founder. He was “basically replacing [himself] with the things he felt were the most easy to train — like customer service, bookkeeping, artwork.”
For those beginning the hiring process in their startup, he advises to “start small with the technical hire to keep your costs low, then bring in administrative hires to relieve yourself of smaller tasks, so you can stay focused on sales and the customer relationship.”
Now, with 10 people on the team, maintaining a healthy workplace culture is top of mind. “Find people who are good communicators and who raise the standards of the team with each new hire.” As a CEO, that means being eager to receive criticisms from both employees and customers so you know which company standards need to be improved.
“How you deal with problems as CEO is how your culture ends up getting defined.”
In 2020, Templi was one of many U.S. businesses shocked by the global COVID-19 pandemic. When orders stopped coming in, Nick had to start selling personal protective equipment (PPE) to keep the business afloat, “I relied on some connections I had from living and working in China for a couple of years, and that gave us just enough money to keep the business going.”
Maintaining a network is crucial for Templi since they serve design agencies in charge of multiple brands. “Creatives, by nature, have higher standards, and if we do right by them, we make their life easier, they bring us more customers.”
“You may think that because you're in ecommerce, you're not physically connected to your customer, but I would implore you to get connected in every way you can — visit a customer, call them, understand deeply the problems you’re trying to solve. Those relationships will pay off for you and them.” —Nick O'Brien on connecting with your customers
Nick often talks about iterating quickly, and to him, that means integrating customer feedback. He still makes sure to spend time with customers, whether he’s visiting their offices or getting their feedback through an email.
To make sure they’re on track, their KPIs address consistency and speed: “We're always trying to optimize for anything that involves those two things, like optimizing for repeat orders. We ultimately want to put these types of purchases on autopilot for the customer and create as much consistency as we can.”
Templi’s minimum order quantities (also known as MOQ) are at the high end of the spectrum, with coffee cup orders starting at a minimum of 2,000 cups per order and bar coasters at 2,500. At this level of manufacturing, printing errors and product defects can occur. How does Templi salvage them? Or, more importantly, how do they keep customers happy?
“To retain a customer, sometimes you may not want to give a certain discount, but then you realize you need to retain them as best you can. That plays into your customer experience, doing whatever you can to keep customers happy, and optimizing the customer experience at every turn.”
When the work day ends, Nick comes home to his wife and three-year-old daughter. He is mindful about time, dividing his day into half-hour blocks. For Nick, a great day equates to 10-12 hours of focused work, which he uses carefully: “You need to be able to focus, turn off, and be present for your family.”
Templi has already beat the odds of startup longevity as a seven-year-old business. Focus is also Nick’s mantra when it comes to leveling up Templi, “Just making those incremental improvements on focus is probably the best thing I've done in building the team.”
Nick reminds aspiring entrepreneurs not to shy away from collaboration and to continue getting better 1% every day.
“I'm doing my best. I'm not perfect, so I always try and keep getting better everyday.”
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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 by 8 points.
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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The best in CX and ecommerce, right to your inbox
TL;DR:
At this point, you’re already well aware that CX is now proving itself to be an invaluable acquisition tool — not just a retention lever.
But to drive the hammer home, we looked into our database to see how CX-focused strategies like onsite campaigns enhance the customer journey and drive substantial increases in sales and conversion rates, specifically with Gorgias Convert.
Using these well-curated campaigns, businesses like Manduka have witnessed a remarkable increase in revenue — approximately $130,000.
We’ll show you how you can achieve similar results and why it’s a crucial marketing strategy — just as important as paid and email marketing.
Gorgias Convert is an onsite revenue generation tool that helps ecommerce brands boost their conversions by over 6% — and it isn’t your typical intrusive pop-up. This feature seamlessly integrates with your website, recommending products to shoppers in a subtle but still captivating way.
Targeting customer segments based on their browsing behaviors, Convert makes timely and relevant suggestions via chat.
Here are a few ways you can use it:
Imagine this: someone clicks on your social media ad for acne removal solutions, lands on your site, and isn’t just greeted with a standard product page but accompanied by a personalized message that offers valuable product education.
In fact, Gorgias users see that we typically generate $20 for every $1 spent. So think of onsite campaigns as a way to make your ad dollars work harder with a more personalized experience by:
Here’s a fun example from TUSHY, the modern bidet company.
When customers visit a bidet page, they receive a message from TUSHY’s support team, letting them know about their toilet compatibility page to help them select the right bidet:
Here’s something many brands get wrong about ecommerce upselling: It’s not about pushing the most expensive items; it’s about showing customers the value of an upgrade that’s complementary to the problems they’re already trying to solve.
As your customers shop, Gorgias Convert suggests complementary items. It’s like when you’re in a store and an associate suggests a tie to match the shirt you’re buying.
Manduka uses these campaigns brilliantly. Targeting shoppers nearing the free shipping threshold, they suggest just the right little extras to tip the scales.
This makes it quick and easy for customers to top up their orders with relevant products.
The results?
Jessica Botello, the Customer Service Manager at Manduka, explains why this campaign works so well:
“People want free shipping. So if they've already got over $75 worth in their cart, they're almost there. Then we pop up and suggest: check out these items. It’s a curated list of the easy little add-ons that you'll need anyway for your yoga practice, but will also take you over the free shipping threshold,” she explains. “What's really helpful is that it pops up, rather than the customer having to go through the menu and look for things.”
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You’ve likely tried exit-intent pop-ups before. You know, those pop-ups that trigger when a customer indicates they’re about to abandon their cart or browsing session.
As more brands adopt these pop-ups, customers are becoming more accustomed to them. But what’s less obtrusive is a personalized message directly from your team.
There are many ways you can grab your customers' attention with these messages. Maybe it's offering a little nudge with a timely discount, waiving that shipping fee, or answering a last-minute question they had about the product.
Here, let’s look at two examples of how effective these campaigns can be.
Manduka uses these exit-intent messages to offer $20 on orders over $100 (a strategic way to not only reduce cart abandonment but also increase AOV and email subscribers simultaneously.)
By engaging visitors with personalized, timely messages right when they’re about to leave, Gorgias Convert helps transform potential bounces into real conversions.
You can read more about how Manduka set up these campaigns with Gorgias Convert here.
Glamnetic has had particular success with an exit intent campaign offering a discount for new customers, new product promotions, and educational campaigns.
Its most successful campaign offers a sweet 15% discount and boasts an on-ticket conversion rate of 18.39%.
Here’s how it works:
You can peek at the campaign setup below. It runs 24/7, ready at any moment to engage:
Countless new products pop up every day; consumers are bombarded with options. The challenge for brands is to launch new products in a visible and desirable way.
As you’re well aware, that’s tougher than it sounds amidst all the noise consumers already experience daily.
This is where Gorgias Convert stands out and is different from the other pop-up tools.
Unlike your latest TikTok and Instagram ads, these onsite campaigns feel genuine because a friendly support agent makes the recommendation without disrupting the shopping experience.
For example, when Glamnetic unveiled its vibrant Rainbow collection in May 2023, the team deployed targeted, visually appealing onsite campaigns that immediately drew visitors’ eyes to the new products.
Directly on the homepage, visitors were greeted with eye-catching product images from live chat, featuring a seamless and effortless option to add new items to their cart.
Mia, Head of Customer Experience at Glamnetic, shares the strategy behind the success: “The aim was to elevate the visibility of new releases without requiring customers to hunt for them. Our onsite campaigns proactively present our latest products through compelling visuals and straightforward navigation, simplifying the decision-making process for the buyer.”
That’s why Glamnetic prominently placed top-selling items in the product carousel, directly in the live chat box. The products were impossible to ignore, leading to a 49% sales increase for featured items.
Product education is a powerful sales and retention tactic. By building trust with customers right away, they’ll feel more confident purchasing your products because they know they will use them successfully.
Manduka uses onsite campaigns to educate potential customers. Triggered when visitors spend more than 15 seconds on the yoga props page, the campaigns guide customers through their yoga journey and help them choose the perfect props for their practice.
Jessica Botello, Customer Service Manager at Manduka, highlights the campaign's impact:
“This yoga props blog suggestion campaign is really great because we have several options, and that can feel confusing to someone who doesn’t know which one to get because they are new to yoga and aren't familiar with which props would benefit them. The blog explains in more detail how to use the different props in your yoga practice, and the different benefits of a round bolster vs a rectangular bolster. So it helps people go ahead and choose the right product for them.”
In other words, simply explaining the nuances between choices like a round versus a rectangular bolster helped customers feel more confident about the products they purchased.
And the proof is in the pudding. Between April–August 2023, this campaign achieved the following:
By proactively addressing potential questions and concerns, Manduka enhances the shopping experience, leading to higher satisfaction and fewer post-purchase issues.
Holidays aren't just for festivities — they're prime opportunities for brands to connect with customers in fun, thematic ways.
Take TUSHY, for example. To celebrate US Independence Day, TUSHY ran a cheekily-themed on-site campaign called "USofSPRAY," offering a patriotic 25% off all bidets.
Yes, you read that right — cleaning your bum has never been more patriotic!
Why it works: TUSHY’s approach to holiday promotions is smart and spirited. By aligning their campaign with a major holiday, they tapped into the celebratory mood of their customers, making it not just about a discount but about being part of a nationwide celebration. This not only makes the promotion more memorable but also more engaging.
The USofSPRAY campaign not only captured attention but also captured significant sales:
Investing time in well-thought-out onsite campaigns can significantly amplify your marketing efforts, driving a notable increase in conversion rates and better capturing paid traffic.
Here’s how you can design campaigns that catch the eye and convert browsers into buyers.
The more targeted your campaign, the better your results — plain and simple.
By segmenting your audience based on specific criteria, such as the amount spent with your brand or past products purchased, you can tailor your messages to match the unique interests and buying habits of different customer groups.
Note: Gorgias is deeply integrated with platforms like Shopify, so it’s easy to leverage shopper data to create highly personalized onsite campaigns that resonate with your audience.
Set up your campaigns to activate based on specific behaviors, such as browsing certain products, adding items to the cart, or showing signs of exit intent. You can also use more niche triggers, like:
For instance, by setting up a trigger for VIP customers, you can send campaigns to those high-value shoppers, like exclusive discounts or personalized style recommendations based on past purchases.
One of the most powerful tools in your marketing arsenal is A/B testing. By systematically testing messaging, design, or offer variations, you can uncover what resonates most with your audience and refine your strategies accordingly.
TUSHY provides a prime example of A/B testing done right. They conducted an experiment where:
The results were telling:
This test highlights the effectiveness of providing personalized support over just using discounts and how A/B testing your offers and messaging — even for one week — helps you understand what makes your customers tick.
Effective campaign management isn't just about launching strategies; it’s also about understanding their impact.
With Gorgias Convert, every campaign you run is tracked in detail through the Campaigns Statistics dashboard. This gives marketers a granular view of performance across different time frames and campaign specifics.
Some specific features you can expect are
In addition to tracking basic metrics, the dashboard also provides insights into more nuanced aspects of campaign performance, such as engagement trends over time or the effectiveness of specific call-to-action placements.
Check out an overview of the Campaign Statistics page in the image below.
Onsite campaigns stand as pillars in digital marketing, carrying immense potential to captivate and convert visitors into loyal customers. Through them, you can get directly in front of your customers and showcase products or services – but in their capacity to tailor experiences, foster engagement, and ultimately drive conversions.
Gorgias Convert's innovative approach makes revenue generation easy through onsite campaigns - you will find that you’re increasing your ecommerce revenue quickly and cost-effectively. By leveraging this tool, you can navigate the digital landscape with confidence whether you’re in CX or Marketing.
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TJ’s Top Advice:
Everybody wants to skip to the answers, but for TJ Balo, there is more joy to be found in the learning. Since 2014, TJ has been the Head of Customer Relations and Marketing at Andrea Iyamah, a fashion line founded in 2011 by Nigerian designer Andrea Dumebi Iyamah. From Toronto, TJ leads a group of customer service reps from around the world, including New York and Nigeria, teaching them the ins and outs of customer service operations, logistics, and lingo.
Brainstorming is one of the most exciting parts of the job for TJ, who’s always finding ways to improve the customer experience. When his team gets together, there is no wrong answer. TJ encourages his staff to think outside the box. Whether it’s a bold social media marketing play or a never-before-done collection, he wants to hear it all.
“I always want them to bring new concepts and ideas to the table. I think that for success, it's not about the implementation. It's about what you’re thinking,” he says.
The vulnerability to share out-of-the-box ideas allows his team to create a playground where creativity is the only goal. It’s where every idea has a chance to shine when the time is right, whether it’s in a month or in the next year. All TJ asks is for every person to be fearless and confident: “Let your presence be known. The minute I can identify you, that's when I know that you're doing something right and I'm doing something right.”
Online businesses, especially fashion brands, are no strangers to the challenge of meeting customer expectations. Sometimes colors don’t appear the same way on a screen as they do in person. Other times, sizes may run a smidge too loose or snug. Regardless of the issue, “it’s about consistent communication first,” TJ says.
How can you show up for the customer and show them they matter? For TJ’s team, customer satisfaction is their guiding light. They always remember to throw in an incentive for customers, whether it’s a refund, discount, or replacement.
TJ pays the same heed to internal feedback. His team’s opinion takes precedence before a product is released. They answer questions like, “What’s missing?” “Does it translate well to different body types?” People naturally gravitate towards good products, and TJ wants to hit that mark as closely as possible the first time around.
When mishaps occur, broadcasting the solution to their customer base is imperative. “I think that that's one step a lot of fashion and retail brands miss. They take the feedback in, and they come out with a new or better product, but the customer doesn't know because they don't communicate that message to them to say, ‘We took this in from you, we have this new version out, come and try it again,” he says.
Peruse Andrea Iyamah’s Pinterest and their inspirations draw from a cornucopia of African cultures, stories, and experiences. Traditional details can be found in every piece, from a modern sleeveless dress in the recognizable silhouette of a Kaftan to jumpsuits adorned with sculptural pleats similar to those found on a Gele. The room to innovate is boundless, especially with their Treasures.
Treasures, the term of endearment for their customers, are the backbone of Andrea Iyamah. Without the support and feedback of their Treasures, the brand would not have crossed international borders, dressing icons like Michelle Obama, Gabrielle Union, Ciara, and Kate Hudson.
“We treat our customers as our stakeholders. We believe they’re the driving force of the brand and its vision, hence our goal to make them feel valued and appreciated,” TJ emphasizes.
On Instagram, they spotlight their Treasures’ voices with Instagram carousels of rave reviews on Twitter. One Treasure confidently states, “Andrea Iyamah never misses… I swear.”
“You have to take in every single detail. That is where the brand meets the stakeholder. That's where they both come together. I never give credit to just either or. They both come together to create and to curate this amazing masterpiece.” —TJ Balo on handling custom orders
For a business that’s been operating for over a decade, you could say Andrea Iyamah has accomplished everything. But for TJ, the learning never stops. “Research and ensuring that you're actually taking in that research is the genesis of staying on the cutting edge.”
He recognizes that they aren’t the first to do it in their industry, that there are countless other companies making great strides. Nonetheless, he wants to be the best to do it. “As we grow, as a business, as a brand, as a company, even just as a team generally, I want to be a reflection of what I would like from my team. You can never know it all. Continuous learning is also leadership.”
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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.
TL;DR:
At this point, you’re already well aware that CX is now proving itself to be an invaluable acquisition tool — not just a retention lever.
But to drive the hammer home, we looked into our database to see how CX-focused strategies like onsite campaigns enhance the customer journey and drive substantial increases in sales and conversion rates, specifically with Gorgias Convert.
Using these well-curated campaigns, businesses like Manduka have witnessed a remarkable increase in revenue — approximately $130,000.
We’ll show you how you can achieve similar results and why it’s a crucial marketing strategy — just as important as paid and email marketing.
Gorgias Convert is an onsite revenue generation tool that helps ecommerce brands boost their conversions by over 6% — and it isn’t your typical intrusive pop-up. This feature seamlessly integrates with your website, recommending products to shoppers in a subtle but still captivating way.
Targeting customer segments based on their browsing behaviors, Convert makes timely and relevant suggestions via chat.
Here are a few ways you can use it:
Imagine this: someone clicks on your social media ad for acne removal solutions, lands on your site, and isn’t just greeted with a standard product page but accompanied by a personalized message that offers valuable product education.
In fact, Gorgias users see that we typically generate $20 for every $1 spent. So think of onsite campaigns as a way to make your ad dollars work harder with a more personalized experience by:
Here’s a fun example from TUSHY, the modern bidet company.
When customers visit a bidet page, they receive a message from TUSHY’s support team, letting them know about their toilet compatibility page to help them select the right bidet:
Here’s something many brands get wrong about ecommerce upselling: It’s not about pushing the most expensive items; it’s about showing customers the value of an upgrade that’s complementary to the problems they’re already trying to solve.
As your customers shop, Gorgias Convert suggests complementary items. It’s like when you’re in a store and an associate suggests a tie to match the shirt you’re buying.
Manduka uses these campaigns brilliantly. Targeting shoppers nearing the free shipping threshold, they suggest just the right little extras to tip the scales.
This makes it quick and easy for customers to top up their orders with relevant products.
The results?
Jessica Botello, the Customer Service Manager at Manduka, explains why this campaign works so well:
“People want free shipping. So if they've already got over $75 worth in their cart, they're almost there. Then we pop up and suggest: check out these items. It’s a curated list of the easy little add-ons that you'll need anyway for your yoga practice, but will also take you over the free shipping threshold,” she explains. “What's really helpful is that it pops up, rather than the customer having to go through the menu and look for things.”
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You’ve likely tried exit-intent pop-ups before. You know, those pop-ups that trigger when a customer indicates they’re about to abandon their cart or browsing session.
As more brands adopt these pop-ups, customers are becoming more accustomed to them. But what’s less obtrusive is a personalized message directly from your team.
There are many ways you can grab your customers' attention with these messages. Maybe it's offering a little nudge with a timely discount, waiving that shipping fee, or answering a last-minute question they had about the product.
Here, let’s look at two examples of how effective these campaigns can be.
Manduka uses these exit-intent messages to offer $20 on orders over $100 (a strategic way to not only reduce cart abandonment but also increase AOV and email subscribers simultaneously.)
By engaging visitors with personalized, timely messages right when they’re about to leave, Gorgias Convert helps transform potential bounces into real conversions.
You can read more about how Manduka set up these campaigns with Gorgias Convert here.
Glamnetic has had particular success with an exit intent campaign offering a discount for new customers, new product promotions, and educational campaigns.
Its most successful campaign offers a sweet 15% discount and boasts an on-ticket conversion rate of 18.39%.
Here’s how it works:
You can peek at the campaign setup below. It runs 24/7, ready at any moment to engage:
Countless new products pop up every day; consumers are bombarded with options. The challenge for brands is to launch new products in a visible and desirable way.
As you’re well aware, that’s tougher than it sounds amidst all the noise consumers already experience daily.
This is where Gorgias Convert stands out and is different from the other pop-up tools.
Unlike your latest TikTok and Instagram ads, these onsite campaigns feel genuine because a friendly support agent makes the recommendation without disrupting the shopping experience.
For example, when Glamnetic unveiled its vibrant Rainbow collection in May 2023, the team deployed targeted, visually appealing onsite campaigns that immediately drew visitors’ eyes to the new products.
Directly on the homepage, visitors were greeted with eye-catching product images from live chat, featuring a seamless and effortless option to add new items to their cart.
Mia, Head of Customer Experience at Glamnetic, shares the strategy behind the success: “The aim was to elevate the visibility of new releases without requiring customers to hunt for them. Our onsite campaigns proactively present our latest products through compelling visuals and straightforward navigation, simplifying the decision-making process for the buyer.”
That’s why Glamnetic prominently placed top-selling items in the product carousel, directly in the live chat box. The products were impossible to ignore, leading to a 49% sales increase for featured items.
Product education is a powerful sales and retention tactic. By building trust with customers right away, they’ll feel more confident purchasing your products because they know they will use them successfully.
Manduka uses onsite campaigns to educate potential customers. Triggered when visitors spend more than 15 seconds on the yoga props page, the campaigns guide customers through their yoga journey and help them choose the perfect props for their practice.
Jessica Botello, Customer Service Manager at Manduka, highlights the campaign's impact:
“This yoga props blog suggestion campaign is really great because we have several options, and that can feel confusing to someone who doesn’t know which one to get because they are new to yoga and aren't familiar with which props would benefit them. The blog explains in more detail how to use the different props in your yoga practice, and the different benefits of a round bolster vs a rectangular bolster. So it helps people go ahead and choose the right product for them.”
In other words, simply explaining the nuances between choices like a round versus a rectangular bolster helped customers feel more confident about the products they purchased.
And the proof is in the pudding. Between April–August 2023, this campaign achieved the following:
By proactively addressing potential questions and concerns, Manduka enhances the shopping experience, leading to higher satisfaction and fewer post-purchase issues.
Holidays aren't just for festivities — they're prime opportunities for brands to connect with customers in fun, thematic ways.
Take TUSHY, for example. To celebrate US Independence Day, TUSHY ran a cheekily-themed on-site campaign called "USofSPRAY," offering a patriotic 25% off all bidets.
Yes, you read that right — cleaning your bum has never been more patriotic!
Why it works: TUSHY’s approach to holiday promotions is smart and spirited. By aligning their campaign with a major holiday, they tapped into the celebratory mood of their customers, making it not just about a discount but about being part of a nationwide celebration. This not only makes the promotion more memorable but also more engaging.
The USofSPRAY campaign not only captured attention but also captured significant sales:
Investing time in well-thought-out onsite campaigns can significantly amplify your marketing efforts, driving a notable increase in conversion rates and better capturing paid traffic.
Here’s how you can design campaigns that catch the eye and convert browsers into buyers.
The more targeted your campaign, the better your results — plain and simple.
By segmenting your audience based on specific criteria, such as the amount spent with your brand or past products purchased, you can tailor your messages to match the unique interests and buying habits of different customer groups.
Note: Gorgias is deeply integrated with platforms like Shopify, so it’s easy to leverage shopper data to create highly personalized onsite campaigns that resonate with your audience.
Set up your campaigns to activate based on specific behaviors, such as browsing certain products, adding items to the cart, or showing signs of exit intent. You can also use more niche triggers, like:
For instance, by setting up a trigger for VIP customers, you can send campaigns to those high-value shoppers, like exclusive discounts or personalized style recommendations based on past purchases.
One of the most powerful tools in your marketing arsenal is A/B testing. By systematically testing messaging, design, or offer variations, you can uncover what resonates most with your audience and refine your strategies accordingly.
TUSHY provides a prime example of A/B testing done right. They conducted an experiment where:
The results were telling:
This test highlights the effectiveness of providing personalized support over just using discounts and how A/B testing your offers and messaging — even for one week — helps you understand what makes your customers tick.
Effective campaign management isn't just about launching strategies; it’s also about understanding their impact.
With Gorgias Convert, every campaign you run is tracked in detail through the Campaigns Statistics dashboard. This gives marketers a granular view of performance across different time frames and campaign specifics.
Some specific features you can expect are
In addition to tracking basic metrics, the dashboard also provides insights into more nuanced aspects of campaign performance, such as engagement trends over time or the effectiveness of specific call-to-action placements.
Check out an overview of the Campaign Statistics page in the image below.
Onsite campaigns stand as pillars in digital marketing, carrying immense potential to captivate and convert visitors into loyal customers. Through them, you can get directly in front of your customers and showcase products or services – but in their capacity to tailor experiences, foster engagement, and ultimately drive conversions.
Gorgias Convert's innovative approach makes revenue generation easy through onsite campaigns - you will find that you’re increasing your ecommerce revenue quickly and cost-effectively. By leveraging this tool, you can navigate the digital landscape with confidence whether you’re in CX or Marketing.
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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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Customer service agents are front and center when they provide customers with outstanding support. But once you pull back the curtains, you’ll find the support operations team behind the scenes supporting conversations, tools, and more.
Like backstage managers, a customer support operations team identifies opportunities for your support team to be more efficient while keeping both your company and customers happy.
I’m Bri Christiano, the Director of Customer Support at Gorgias, and I know first-hand how hectic it can be to perfect your customer service processes. We'll go through how a support operation team functions, the benefits, how to build the team including key roles.
Customer support operations oversees the technical, operational, and organizational parts of customer support. As a distinct team, they support the customer service team, including the representatives and managers.
You may think, but isn’t that what customer service managers are for?
Not quite.
Customer support managers are on the frontline with agents and ensure the operations run smoothly. A support ops team member enables the frontline team to do their best work.
A support operations team constructs the blueprint that makes your company’s customer service processes run more efficiently while hitting your business targets. Some common roles on a support ops team include managers, analysts, developers or product managers, trainers, and specialists.
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Investing in a support operations team is a step toward improving the customer experience, which can lead to a 2-7% increase in sales revenue.
Below we'll explore the advantages of establishing a support ops team, show you the tell-tale signs of when it's time to invest, and provide an overview of each role and function.
When you enlist the help of a strategic support ops team, you gain:
A full-fledged support ops team includes a manager, developer, analyst, trainer, and specialist. However, not all organizations have the budget for every support ops role. In that case, you’ll want to find candidates who can take on the responsibilities of multiple roles.
Below, we’ve ranked each support ops role based on your company’s hiring budget.
Hiring budget: Low
Customer operations specialists provide support to customer service teams by managing technical aspects, including assisting with setup, analyzing metrics, and reporting, while also lending a hand to enhance customer experience.
Responsibilities:
Hiring budget: Low
A customer support operations trainer is responsible for educating and preparing customer service representatives to effectively handle inquiries, issues, and interactions with customers.
Responsibilities:
Hiring budget: Medium
A customer support operations analyst analyzes data and metrics related to customer interactions and customer service processes to identify trends and improve the overall quality of customer support.
Responsibilities:
Hiring budget: High
A customer support operations developer (also known as a product manager) creates and maintains the systems, tools, and processes used to enhance and streamline customer support operations.
Responsibilities:
Hiring budget: High
A support ops manager oversees and coordinates the operational aspects of customer support teams.
Responsibilities:
There are a few signs that indicate you’re ready to expand and join forces with a support ops team.
As your business grows, new roles start to emerge to accommodate your team’s size and customer base. This may look like managers and agents finding themselves taking on more operational tasks like leading training sessions, tool workshops, or focusing on data to increase profits.
If these duties are taking away time for you to do your regular customer service responsibilities (like resolving customer issues or supervising your agents), it’s time to invest in support ops.
If support leads are located in various time zones, it’s harder for your team to get on the same page. For instance, one team lead may prioritize using brand voice more than another lead does. This results in inconsistent and confusing brand messaging.
To align your team leads, you’ll need one source of information to standardize your processes — and that can be fulfilled by a support ops manager.
If your workflow fails to cover all your customer inquiries, it may be time to redesign your processes. Unfortunately, building an efficient workflow from scratch takes time that managers typically don’t have. Support ops is exactly the team you need to ideate, test, and deploy these workflows.
Rushing to fill positions will only harm your brand and customers in the long run. When hiring for customer service, use a proactive hiring process. This means taking the time to take stock of your needs and resources, and being selective about your candidates.
Here are three ways to be intentional with the hiring process:
🧠 Learn more: Why proactive customer service is essential for growing your business
A customer service policy is a document containing a set of guidelines, rules, and standards for customer service teams. Its goal is to help agents handle day-to-day tasks and set benchmarks for great customer service.
These documents are essentially guides for how the customer service team should work. Agents can use them when they onboard or need a refresher. They can even be adapted into customer-facing policies.
📚 Related reading: How to build an FAQ page + 7 examples
A service level agreement (SLA) is a contract that outlines the minimum acceptable service between one party and another. In your case, the ops team and the support team. An SLA typically covers topics like SLA best practices, including service availability and average response times.
Here’s how to create one:
Elevating the quality of training for the support team significantly increases customer satisfaction. Improvement is key: 40% of customers claim that they stop doing business with companies who have poor customer service.
Some ideas for useful training activities:
When you put these strategies together, you empower your ops team with the expertise and resources needed to excel in their roles, allowing them to pass the knowledge on to your customer service reps.
Agents shouldn’t have to spend their time crafting templates — that’s a job for the support ops team. With templates, agents can speed up resolution times and increase customer satisfaction scores (CSAT).
Here are the key templates to prep for customer service agents:
On Gorgias, you can quickly create a library of templates with Macros. Whenever you need to send a canned response, just click the template or Macro you need and you’re done — no need to type anything out.
🧠 Learn more: 25+ customer service scripts inspired by top ecommerce brands
An unorganized inbox can ruin customer experience and risk your highest-value customers. By implementing a system that strategically tags and prioritizes tickets, the customer support team can focus on delivering exceptional customer experiences.
To create a library of useful tags, ask yourself these questions:
Based on these questions, you can start creating Tags based on the most relevant customer query topics, ticket urgency, high-value vs. low-value tickets, and response urgency.
Automating parts of the customer service workflow can be a game-changer. Work with the customer service team to identify the repetitive tasks in their day that they can go without and offload to automation.
On Gorgias, you can create Rules to…
Check out our customer service automation guide for more tips on which automations can speed up your support.
Princess Polly, the leading Australian fashion DTC brand, is an expert when it comes to establishing streamlined customer service operations.
With their priorities set on comprehensive metrics and a constant feedback loop, they entrusted Gorgias to do the heavy lifting. Immediately after using Gorgias, Princess Polly managed to increase their efficiency by 40%, decrease resolution time by 80%, and decrease first response time by 95%.
📚 Read more: Princess Polly improves their CX team efficiency by benefiting from Gorgias-Shopify integration
Whether you're starting your support ops team from scratch or expanding it, Gorgias can be there to build it with you. With powerful features like Macros for automating routine tasks and detailed support performance and revenue statistics at your fingertips, Gorgias empowers your support ops team to work smarter, not harder. Unlock a new level of productivity by booking a Gorgias demo today.
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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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As the Customer Experience Manager at Dr. Squatch, a men's naturally-derived personal care company, I’m constantly looking for ways to craft exceptional experiences for our customers. But the question to ask is: does it actually make a difference to our revenue?
Unearthing the impact of your customer service team starts with evaluation. To do this, it’s essential to track metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) around customer service.
Evaluating the impact of a customer service team can sometimes be an ambiguous task. That’s why I’m here to outline the most important customer service metrics to watch, so you can effortlessly recognize the ways your customer service team directly moves the needle.
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Customer support evaluation is the process of measuring your customer service program's impact on the business.
It requires using metrics and KPIs to understand whether your support team is providing a great customer experience that can generate repeat customers, positive reviews, referrals, and more.
Evaluating your customer support also requires understanding the return on investment (ROI). In other words, do the benefits produced by your support efforts outweigh the cost of your support program?
In almost every business, a developed support program is worth its weight in gold. Evaluating your program is how you prove it to company leadership, earning you additional budget for tools and team members.
You can think of a strong customer experience as a rising tide that lifts all ships — the impact is vast but also hard to quantify.
At Dr. Squatch, we’re close with our customers and even closer to the numbers. Once we started employing a data-driven approach to customer support management, it made a huge difference in both customer satisfaction and hitting company targets.
Let’s look at the five incredible benefits you get after you make evaluation a regular part of your customer service program.
Customer inquiries are a treasure trove of rich data for you to dig into to create a better experience for future interactions. By evaluating metrics like customer satisfaction (CSAT) or average resolution time, you can identify key trends and issues online shoppers are dealing with and update your customer service strategy.
On Gorgias, your incoming tickets are automatically sorted by AI-powered intent and sentiment detection, giving you a quick overview of which customer issues should be at the top of the list.
It’s not enough to have a talented team replying on behalf of your brand. You need to make sure your team is focusing on the right activities and not wasting their time on the wrong ones.
By measuring metrics related to your team’s performance — like first response time and resolution time — you can identify which tasks can be done with automation. You’ll also be able to figure out which agents on your team may need more training and support.
Customer acquisition is becoming more expensive, so keeping track of customer service can give you an idea of how much customer service truly provides within your organization.
True lifetime value is the measure of a customer’s worth over the duration of the customer-business relationship.
Keep in mind, it’s less expensive to keep current customers than to find new ones. This is increasingly true as customer acquisition costs and social media ad prices soar.
Solid customer support quality is predictable. And that’s not a bad thing. That means when anything new, surprising, or daunting happens, you don’t need to call in a special task force.
Thanks to your stable operations, your whole team will simply need short-term and long-term action plans, like establishing a list of steps to take and point of contacts and to inform.
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Beyond bad reviews and customer complaints, there are a few quick ways you can tell if your customer service program is not doing well.
These four key indicators are major signs that your customer service program needs some refining.
A contact rate of over 33% means something about your customer journey, communication, or product is not quite right. Your customers aren’t getting the answers they need.
The goal of your customer service team should always be to resolve tickets efficiently. If a customer has to reach out to your brand multiple times, you most likely need to update your support resources.
Leading indicator: Multiple touchpoints per customer
How to fix it: Include more self-service options to give customers quick answers without having to wait to talk to an agent. Add a Help Center, chat widget, or send informative confirmation and post-purchase emails. For example, our chat widget at Dr. Squatch suggests common questions and answers them via an automated quick response flow based on the customers’ reply.
Your customers should be coming away from interactions feeling good about your brand and the support it provides. There’s no acceptable reason for a low CSAT score, so you should always take a closer look when it starts to fall.
Leading indicator: Friction in customer conversations
How to fix it: Provide additional training to your support agents to ensure they’re equipped to handle the most pressing customer requests effectively and empathetically. Then, actively seek feedback from customers and use their input to make continuous improvements to your program.
Your first response time (FRT) will fluctuate, and most people understand that, but waiting 4 days for an email from support is unacceptable for today’s shoppers. In general, customers want answers within 10 minutes.
Leading indicator: More customer complaints and a low CSAT
How to fix it: Align with your team and identify your customer base’s main complaints. To deflect repeat inquiries, immediately add self-service options like a Help Center or a chat widget to your online store. You can also use automated responses to acknowledge inquiries right away.
Ecommerce companies should aim to spend anywhere from 10% to 15% of revenue on customer service. If you’re spending significantly more than that, it may be a sign that it’s time to reprioritize and take a closer look at how your agents are performing.
Leading indicator: Low agent efficiency
How to fix it: Analyze ticket volume and estimate how many tickets each agent should be able handle and in what set amount of time. When expectations are set within a service level agreement (SLA), align your team and train them on your new methods.
Managing a customer service program comes with challenges that typically start from the top of the organization and quickly become a domino effect.
Here are the most common challenges a customer service program faces:
These challenges usually exist for one reason: your company hasn’t seen the tangible value your customer service program brings.
So, how do you prove it? By prioritizing data collection and evaluating your customer service program, of course.
📚 Read more: 12 customer service challenges harming your team and revenue (+ how to solve them)
Let’s dive into 12 of the most important customer service KPIs to track to help evaluate your customer service program. By doing so, you’ll be able to recognize how the assistance you provide directly impacts your goals, revenue, and customers.
Note: It’s hard to create a one-size-fits-all reporting template — due to the differences between industries and companies — but a solid understanding of these metrics will help you create a plan for tracking the ones that matter most to your business.
The customer satisfaction score tracks how satisfied customers are with your company’s products and services. A high CSAT is a reliable measure of good customer service.
First, you’ll need to collect customer data through a customer satisfaction survey, typically sent through email. It includes a single question like, “On a scale from 1 to 5, how satisfied are you with your experience today?”
Once you’ve collected enough responses, use this formula:
CSAT = (Satisfied customers / Total customers surveyed) x 100
There are a ton of tools out there to help you track your organization’s CSAT, but a few to check out include:
Tracking your company’s CSAT gives you important insight into exactly how satisfied customers are right after an interaction with a member of your team. It can even help identify potential issues before they grow too large.
Net promoter score (NPS) measures how likely a customer is to recommend your brand to another person. It indicates how effective your customer service is as well as how satisfied customers are by gathering data about how likely they are to promote your brand.
Like measuring CSAT, you can use a survey approach. Through email, you can ask your customers, “How likely are you to recommend our brand to a family member or friend?”
To determine your NPS, subtract the percentage of detractors (people who say they wouldn’t promote your brand) from the percentage of promoters (those who said they would promote your brand). The resulting score is a whole number between -100 and 100.
Here’s the formula:
NPS = Percentage of promoters - Percentage of detractors
Similar to tracking CSAT, NPS data can be continuously gathered, but we recommend checking in on a monthly basis.
Read more about NPS scores and how they’re calculated.
Check out our guide to how to create an NPS survey that gets responses.
Your brand’s NPS directly ties to the customer relationship as well as how well your customer success team is doing. Tracking NPS along with CSAT can give you a clearer picture of how customers feel about your brand.
As mentioned previously, retaining customers is always less expensive than finding new customers, that’s why your customer retention rate is a vital metric to keep track of. In particular, ecommerce companies have an average CRR of about 30%, according to Omniconvert, so if your company’s CRR is lower than that, it could be a sign that your customer support isn’t as effective as it could be.
To calculate CRR, you’ll need the following information: number of customers at the end of a given time period (E), number of customers gained within that time period (N), number of customers at the beginning of the time period (S).
Then, plug those numbers into this formula:
CRR = [(E-N)/S] x 100
Your company’s ability to retain customers directly relates to its success because when customers disappear, so does revenue.
Sometimes known as net dollar retention (NDR) or net revenue rate, NRR is the percentage of recurring revenue retained from your existing customer base over a period of time. This period can be monthly, quarterly, or annually. According to Klipfolio, a good NRR can range between 90% and 125% depending on your brand’s target customer size.
NRR = [(Monthly recurring revenue (MRR) at the start of a month + expansions + upsells - churn - contractions) / MRR at the start of the month] x 100
Net revenue retention is another extremely valuable metric that helps you understand how your customers are feeling about your brand and products, as well as how your business is doing from a financial standpoint.
First reply time, or first response time is how long it takes one of your customer service reps to respond to a customer inquiry on average. This could be over email, phone, or chat. Typically, a “good” first reply time is less than 24 hours in a ticketing system, less than 90 seconds for live chat, and three minutes for phone, according to Klipfolio.
If your brand dedicates a lot of time to live chat, check out these metrics specific to live chat.
You can calculate your first reply time by measuring the duration of time between when a customer submits a request and the time when a member of your customer support team responds.
FRT = Total first response times during period of time / Total number of tickets resolved in that period
First reply times are directly related to your brand’s CSAT. No customer wants to wait days for an email response, or sit on hold for several minutes. Decreasing your first reply times will inevitably increase customer satisfaction.
First contact resolution, or first call resolution (FCR), measures an agent’s ability to resolve a customer’s problem or question within the first interaction without requiring a follow up. The average standard benchmark for FCR is 70% to 75%, according to global research.
You can use this simple formula to calculate FCR:
FCR = Total number of inquiries resolved on the first call / Total number of unique inquiries
Your company’s FCR also directly ties to boosting customer satisfaction. According to McKinsey & Company, 83% of customers expect to be able to resolve their complex issues within one interaction. When you meet customer expectations, you encourage brand loyalty and repeat customers, and reduce encountering difficult customers.
Customers are happier when they don’t have to wait a long time, and average resolution time (ART) is another metric that keeps track of this data. ART shows how customer service team members are performing, and lets you see who may need additional training or support.
To measure average resolution time, take the total duration of all resolved conversations and divide that by the number of customer conversations that took place over a specific period of time. This metric is also sometimes referred to as the mean time to resolve, or MTTR.
ART = Total resolution time for all resolved tickets / Total number of tickets solved
Your ART is a vital metric that helps keep tabs on how efficient your customer service team is. If your ART is long, or you notice that it’s getting longer, this is a sign that you need to give your processes a closer look and adjust your strategies if needed.
Resolution time is the total time it takes to complete a customer interaction. This is similar to average resolution time, but focuses on the total time spent resolving tickets rather than the average time spent resolving tickets.
To measure your total resolution time, note the start and end time of each customer conversation over a specific time frame, such as a one-month period.
Measuring your total resolution time doesn’t require a formula, but is much easier to track with a helpdesk that includes support performance statistics like Gorgias.
Total resolution time gives you a deeper look into how long your customer service team spends helping customers solve their issues, which can help inform further strategy and business direction.
For example, if the total response time steadily increases over several months, you may need to look at hiring additional customer support reps.
Your customer effort score (CES) tracks how much effort customers feel like they need to put into resolving an issue. The effort customers should have to put into resolving the issue should be minimal, so you want this score to be as low as possible.
To measure your brand’s CES, you can use a questionnaire with a scale and ask the question, “On a scale of 1 to 5, how easy was your experience today?” with 1 being “very easy” and 5 being “very hard.”
Once you have your responses, tally up how many of each score you received — meaning, how many times were you rated a 1, a 2, etc. Then, you can use this formula to determine your CES:
CES = Percentage of “very easy” responses - Percentage of “very hard” responses
Much like NPS, CES is a whole number between -100 and 100.
CES gives you the opportunity to see how your support team is performing through the eyes of your customers. It can also help identify areas for improvement within your operations if you give customers a place to voice feedback within your questionnaire.
Your brand’s abandonment rate is a simple, yet highly informational metric. Whether the conversation is happening via email, chat, or phone, if a customer abandons the session, it should be a red flag that there is friction in the process.
All you need to track is the number of abandoned incidents and the total number of incidents. In this context, “incidents” refers to either calls, emails, or live chat sessions. Once you have those two numbers, you can plug them into the following formula:
Conversation abandonment rate = (Number of abandoned incidents / Total number of incidents) x 100
A customer abandoning a conversation they initiated is a bad sign and can lead to poor net promoter scores and high churn rates.
Contact rate, also known as customer contact rate, measures the percentage of active customers who ask for help in a given time period — usually a month.
To calculate your company’s contact rate, you can divide the number of customers who contact your customer service team for help over the course of a month by the number of total customers. Then, multiply that number by 100.
Contact rate = (Number of customers who contact you in a month / Total number of customers) x 100
Contact rate is helpful in diagnosing your company’s overall health. For example, a high contact rate may indicate that customers are contacting your support team about everything because you don’t have alternative resources like a Help Center or FAQ page.
Otherwise known as revenue backlog, backlog is a metric that determines how much revenue will be coming into your business. This metric can be especially helpful if you’re an ecommerce brand that operates on a subscription-based model.
The only thing you need to determine your revenue backlog is the sum of the values of your customers’ subscriptions. However, this can be much more complicated in practice if your business model has multiple types of subscriptions, so it’s beneficial to use tools to track this metric.
Keeping tabs on your revenue is vital to ensuring the growth and continued success of your brand. By tracking your revenue backlog, you’ll be able to see if revenue is going to drop before it actually does.
Understanding your customer service program at an organizational level is an excellent step. But what about individual employee performance?
A customer service performance review is key. It gives the agent constructive feedback and provides clear guidance for improvement. The goal of a performance evaluation is to assess their abilities, yes, but also motivate them towards even better performance.
Let’s look at the common performance review phases step by step.
Lay out the objectives of the review. Is it to assess past performance, set future goals, identify areas of improvement, or all of the above?
Take a look at the relevant metrics to gauge agent performance. Make sure you have a record of any previous performance reviews, goals set, training undergone, and feedback received.
Key metrics to pinpoint individual performance:
With Gorgias, it’s easy to keep track of every agent’s performance with Support Performance Statistics. Their intuitive dashboard provides a quick look at the health of your support team and even gives you detailed information on each of your team member’s stats, like their first response time, total closed tickets, and more.
How effectively does the agent communicate with customers? Are they clear, empathetic, and responsive? Assess the agent’s ability to diagnose customer problems and find solutions. Look at important customer service skills like problem solving, communication skills, as well as teamwork skills.
Share the metrics you’ve collected and any feedback received from customers. Present this so customer service agents understand how customers perceive them. Discuss the agent’s strengths and achievements, where they need improvement.
Discuss immediate and future objectives with the agent. Encourage open dialogue and assure them to come to you with any feedback or concerns.
At the end of the day, you have to care. Make feedback a regular occurrence. It doesn’t have to be scary. Give feedback whether it's positive, negative, or you just want to tell someone to continue going in the same direction.
Be prepared to create action plans and reset expectations for bottom performers or people you just want to improve. Having a low performer doesn't necessarily mean that they're tanking, but maybe there's just one area of improvement they can really work on. It's just a matter of having an action plan.
Absolutely.
Customer service is the backbone of a business’s success. When you focus on giving outstanding customer service (in addition to product quality, of course), you get customer satisfaction, which turns into new and repeat customers and more revenue.
The customer service metrics outlined in this article are helpful tools to set you on the right path toward building a more successful customer service program. Paying closer attention to the data that matters most can help you identify areas for improvement, which is necessary in order for any business to grow.
Now that you know which customer service metrics are the best to track to ensure your ecommerce business’s success, you can start evaluating your customer service program.
Every metric I included above can offer your business better insights into what your current customer service program is doing right, and where there’s room for improvement. You don’t have to track all of these KPIs, but I highly recommend using a platform like Gorgias to keep your customer conversations and metrics in one spot.
If you’re ready to revamp your customer service program and improve your level of service, learn more about what Gorgias can do for ecommerce businesses or sign up today.
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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TJ’s Top Advice:
Everybody wants to skip to the answers, but for TJ Balo, there is more joy to be found in the learning. Since 2014, TJ has been the Head of Customer Relations and Marketing at Andrea Iyamah, a fashion line founded in 2011 by Nigerian designer Andrea Dumebi Iyamah. From Toronto, TJ leads a group of customer service reps from around the world, including New York and Nigeria, teaching them the ins and outs of customer service operations, logistics, and lingo.
Brainstorming is one of the most exciting parts of the job for TJ, who’s always finding ways to improve the customer experience. When his team gets together, there is no wrong answer. TJ encourages his staff to think outside the box. Whether it’s a bold social media marketing play or a never-before-done collection, he wants to hear it all.
“I always want them to bring new concepts and ideas to the table. I think that for success, it's not about the implementation. It's about what you’re thinking,” he says.
The vulnerability to share out-of-the-box ideas allows his team to create a playground where creativity is the only goal. It’s where every idea has a chance to shine when the time is right, whether it’s in a month or in the next year. All TJ asks is for every person to be fearless and confident: “Let your presence be known. The minute I can identify you, that's when I know that you're doing something right and I'm doing something right.”
Online businesses, especially fashion brands, are no strangers to the challenge of meeting customer expectations. Sometimes colors don’t appear the same way on a screen as they do in person. Other times, sizes may run a smidge too loose or snug. Regardless of the issue, “it’s about consistent communication first,” TJ says.
How can you show up for the customer and show them they matter? For TJ’s team, customer satisfaction is their guiding light. They always remember to throw in an incentive for customers, whether it’s a refund, discount, or replacement.
TJ pays the same heed to internal feedback. His team’s opinion takes precedence before a product is released. They answer questions like, “What’s missing?” “Does it translate well to different body types?” People naturally gravitate towards good products, and TJ wants to hit that mark as closely as possible the first time around.
When mishaps occur, broadcasting the solution to their customer base is imperative. “I think that that's one step a lot of fashion and retail brands miss. They take the feedback in, and they come out with a new or better product, but the customer doesn't know because they don't communicate that message to them to say, ‘We took this in from you, we have this new version out, come and try it again,” he says.
Peruse Andrea Iyamah’s Pinterest and their inspirations draw from a cornucopia of African cultures, stories, and experiences. Traditional details can be found in every piece, from a modern sleeveless dress in the recognizable silhouette of a Kaftan to jumpsuits adorned with sculptural pleats similar to those found on a Gele. The room to innovate is boundless, especially with their Treasures.
Treasures, the term of endearment for their customers, are the backbone of Andrea Iyamah. Without the support and feedback of their Treasures, the brand would not have crossed international borders, dressing icons like Michelle Obama, Gabrielle Union, Ciara, and Kate Hudson.
“We treat our customers as our stakeholders. We believe they’re the driving force of the brand and its vision, hence our goal to make them feel valued and appreciated,” TJ emphasizes.
On Instagram, they spotlight their Treasures’ voices with Instagram carousels of rave reviews on Twitter. One Treasure confidently states, “Andrea Iyamah never misses… I swear.”
“You have to take in every single detail. That is where the brand meets the stakeholder. That's where they both come together. I never give credit to just either or. They both come together to create and to curate this amazing masterpiece.” —TJ Balo on handling custom orders
For a business that’s been operating for over a decade, you could say Andrea Iyamah has accomplished everything. But for TJ, the learning never stops. “Research and ensuring that you're actually taking in that research is the genesis of staying on the cutting edge.”
He recognizes that they aren’t the first to do it in their industry, that there are countless other companies making great strides. Nonetheless, he wants to be the best to do it. “As we grow, as a business, as a brand, as a company, even just as a team generally, I want to be a reflection of what I would like from my team. You can never know it all. Continuous learning is also leadership.”
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Nick’s Top Advice:
Nick O’Brien didn’t think he would find himself back in the print packaging industry, a trade that’s been written in his family tree for four generations. Then 2015 came and Nick witnessed how difficult it was for New York City business owners to find print packaging suppliers. This reignited a fire in him, pushing Nick to start his own print packaging business called Templi in 2017.
There were already “two big strikes” against Nick starting as a non-technical and solo entrepreneur. Although he had spent his younger years working for his family’s print shop Concept Print, Templi was new territory. Not only was there printing to worry about, there was also the coordination work of wrangling together a reliable group of suppliers, designers, and buyers.
He accepted this operations puzzle completely, “I worked through it by realizing, know what you don't know, and trying to get 1% better and more technical every day.”
Nick took it upon himself to fill in the gaps even without a background in business. Code Academy, an online learning platform for coding, was foundational to Nick’s learning and helped him overcome early obstacles. “You can’t run away from learning,” he says, “you have to try to get proficient in all of these areas before you make your hires.”
“You could start non-technical, but you shouldn't end up non-technical.”
The balance between leader and learner was hectic in the early days of Templi, and Nick could only survive as a one-man operation for so long. Building his team was ultimately a self-assessment of what duties he could and couldn’t handle as a founder. He was “basically replacing [himself] with the things he felt were the most easy to train — like customer service, bookkeeping, artwork.”
For those beginning the hiring process in their startup, he advises to “start small with the technical hire to keep your costs low, then bring in administrative hires to relieve yourself of smaller tasks, so you can stay focused on sales and the customer relationship.”
Now, with 10 people on the team, maintaining a healthy workplace culture is top of mind. “Find people who are good communicators and who raise the standards of the team with each new hire.” As a CEO, that means being eager to receive criticisms from both employees and customers so you know which company standards need to be improved.
“How you deal with problems as CEO is how your culture ends up getting defined.”
In 2020, Templi was one of many U.S. businesses shocked by the global COVID-19 pandemic. When orders stopped coming in, Nick had to start selling personal protective equipment (PPE) to keep the business afloat, “I relied on some connections I had from living and working in China for a couple of years, and that gave us just enough money to keep the business going.”
Maintaining a network is crucial for Templi since they serve design agencies in charge of multiple brands. “Creatives, by nature, have higher standards, and if we do right by them, we make their life easier, they bring us more customers.”
“You may think that because you're in ecommerce, you're not physically connected to your customer, but I would implore you to get connected in every way you can — visit a customer, call them, understand deeply the problems you’re trying to solve. Those relationships will pay off for you and them.” —Nick O'Brien on connecting with your customers
Nick often talks about iterating quickly, and to him, that means integrating customer feedback. He still makes sure to spend time with customers, whether he’s visiting their offices or getting their feedback through an email.
To make sure they’re on track, their KPIs address consistency and speed: “We're always trying to optimize for anything that involves those two things, like optimizing for repeat orders. We ultimately want to put these types of purchases on autopilot for the customer and create as much consistency as we can.”
Templi’s minimum order quantities (also known as MOQ) are at the high end of the spectrum, with coffee cup orders starting at a minimum of 2,000 cups per order and bar coasters at 2,500. At this level of manufacturing, printing errors and product defects can occur. How does Templi salvage them? Or, more importantly, how do they keep customers happy?
“To retain a customer, sometimes you may not want to give a certain discount, but then you realize you need to retain them as best you can. That plays into your customer experience, doing whatever you can to keep customers happy, and optimizing the customer experience at every turn.”
When the work day ends, Nick comes home to his wife and three-year-old daughter. He is mindful about time, dividing his day into half-hour blocks. For Nick, a great day equates to 10-12 hours of focused work, which he uses carefully: “You need to be able to focus, turn off, and be present for your family.”
Templi has already beat the odds of startup longevity as a seven-year-old business. Focus is also Nick’s mantra when it comes to leveling up Templi, “Just making those incremental improvements on focus is probably the best thing I've done in building the team.”
Nick reminds aspiring entrepreneurs not to shy away from collaboration and to continue getting better 1% every day.
“I'm doing my best. I'm not perfect, so I always try and keep getting better everyday.”
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