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For any business, email plays a crucial role in providing great customer service. But helpful customer support emails take time and effort from your customer service agents. 

Templated responses save time for your customer service team and help customers get the resolution they need faster. With templates, reps can answer questions and resolve customer issues much faster than writing each email from scratch. And data from over 10,000 ecommerce brands shows that by lowering resolution time to under 6 hours, you can raise overall revenue by 2%

Templates also ensure high-quality support. They provide a consistent baseline that busy agents can lean on, especially during high-volume times. This is mission-critical for keeping happy customers around: 92% of customers say they’re more likely to return for a second purchase after a positive customer support experience. And repeat purchases (plus reviews, referrals, and higher average order values) mean repeat customers generate 300% more than first-time shoppers.  

‎Below, you’ll find 30+ effective customer service email templates to help you get started. Here are the top five email categories that you might find most helpful:

• Emails that provide proactive support
• Order status emails to preempt "Where is my order?" requests
• Emails to help with product exchanges, returns, and cancellations
• Angry customer response email templates
• Email templates to help you make sales

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5 tactics for writing better support emails 

Before you jump into writing any customer support emails, here are some best practices to keep in mind:

1. Fully evaluate what each customer is asking for
2. Convey empathy with the words you choose
3. Provide all of the answers and resources they need  
4. Practice forward resolution
5. Personalize the response to show that you’re listening

1. Fully evaluate what each customer is asking for

You need context and a deep understanding of a customer's situation to resolve their issue. But, going back and forth with customers to get there creates a high-effort experience for them, which often results in negative feelings toward the support experience. 

Using a platform that displays past customer information – between past conversations, recent orders, and the initial message, you have the best chance of fully understanding what went wrong and what the customer needs without making them repeat information. 

‎In your message, be sure to state what you understand to be the problem so they can correct you if you got something wrong.

2. Convey empathy with the words you choose

Putting yourself in the customer’s shoes can be challenging sometimes, but it’s vital if you want to leave them with a positive experience. Convey that you appreciate where they’re coming from by rephrasing their request, question, or concern. 

It’s especially tempting to shut down empathy when customers seem unreasonable or mean. Even if a customer is inflamed or incorrect, try not to call them out or prove them wrong. Instead, focus on what future solutions you can provide. Stick with the conversation and find out what’s beneath each message or customer complaint. 

Empathy and understanding why a customer is frustrated (and acknowledging any effort they’ve already put into solving the issue themselves) can go a long way towards finding a resolution that makes them happy. 

3. Provide all of the answers and resources they need  

Customer service email templates help save time and increase professionalism. But, keeping them up-to-date at all times is key. Make sure templates reflect your most up-to-date processes and policies and are robust enough to fully answer customer questions. 

You can always edit a template to suit the context of each conversation but the most effective templates will be complete with the best version of the answer possible. That might mean encouraging customers to reference return policies and shipping times, an FAQ section, or help center articles to ensure templates are as detailed and accurate as possible.

Here’s a great example of clear help resources from Bobbie, an organic baby formula brand, organized with a Gorgias help center:

Templates should always reflect the voice and tone of your company. What your brand voice is — formal, casual, friendly, professional — determines the exact words your templates will use. 

4. Practice forward resolution

Forward resolution is where agents anticipate and answer customer questions before they even happen. Take a look through past conversations where you went back-and-forth many times with a customer to see if there are any patterns in the types of questions that came up. 

For example, imagine customers often write in asking whether you ship to Canada. If you just respond, "Yes, we ship to Canada," then they may respond "What are the shipping rates and estimated shipping times for Canada?" That would be a good sign to include that information in your original email, avoiding the need for a follow-up.

This way you save the customer the frustration of wondering where their order is, the time to reach out to your support team, and you save your agents the time it would take to answer their question.

📚 Learn more: Customer Delight Is A Losing Strategy in Ecommerce: Here’s What’s Better

5. Personalize the response to show that you’re listening 

Also keep in mind that templates are customizable tools, not complete solutions. Personalize your customer service emails to give them as much human touch and personality as your brand allows. This way, the customer knows they’re interacting with a real human and are also being treated like one as well. One risk of using templates comes when they aren’t personalized. Templates are amazing starting points, but they should always be personalized to the customer you’re chatting with. 

Some quick ideas for how to do this:

• Use your name and the customer’s name within the body text
• Repeat customer feedback so they know you’re actively listening
• Tweak boilerplate language to fit the actual customer issue
• Say, in your own words, how the situation will affect their workflow or day-to-day life (positive or negative) 
• If your customer is in a certain time zone, you could personalize your greeting with the time of day it is for them

30+ helpful customer service email templates 

Relying on well-built customer service templates for chats or emails can help you increase customer satisfaction and improve the customer experience. If customer support agents spend less time responding to the same repetitive questions, they'll have more time to support your pre-sales support strategy and have conversations that drive revenue. 

Below, we offer 30+ customer service email templates, categorized by the types of support conversations brands often have with customers. Feel free to read the templates in order or skip around to whichever is most relevant to your needs.

Email templates that provide proactive support

Proactive customer service starts before a new customer writes into your support team. Rather than waiting for customers to experience a problem before starting a conversation, you can set the tone for a positive customer relationship by reaching out and saying hello. 

Similarly, if you anticipate a problem for customers (like outages or pricing increases), it’s best to let them know with a proactive message.

You can also complement your proactive email templates with self-service resources, including FAQ pages and Help Centers. 

Below are some of the most helpful proactive support email templates you can start using today. While you can use the templates as they are, we suggest tweaking them to meet your individual voice and tone guidelines. 

1) Welcome new customers

Sending a welcome email makes customers feel like part of a community and can offer them key resources that allow them to self-serve answers to common questions, like return policies or shipping costs. 

Hey there {{Customer First Name}},

Thanks for {{Customer action: First purchase, sign-up, subscription}} with {{Company name}}. We’re thrilled that you’ve joined us, and we’re excited to help awesome customers like you in any way we can.

I know you’ve just joined us, so I want to send over {{Resource/offer links}} so you can get the most out of your experience with us.

If you haven’t yet, make sure to check out {{Blog link}} for ongoing tutorials, tips, and stories, and give us a follow on social media! 

I hope you’re already enjoying {{Product name}}, but if not, I’m happy to help. Or you can check out our {{FAQs or knowledge base links}} to troubleshoot on your own.

If there’s anything you need, please respond to this email. We’re here for you!

Best,

{{Current agent first name}}

2) Announce a new support channel or a new product/service 

Email is a great place to announce that you just launched a new support channel. It’s also a good channel if you’d like to involve your support team as a resource for new product launches or service offerings. 

Hi {{Customer name}}, 

Good news! We now offer {{Action or item}}. 

Questions? Reach out to us at {{Phone number, website URL, etc}} and we’ll get back to you within {{SLA}}. 

Looking forward to hearing from you! 

{{Company name}}

3) Announce a new self-service resource

Similar to the announcement above, let customers know when you launch a Help Center or self-service resource. 

Hi {{Customer name}}, 

Good news! In order to better support you, we’ve created a {{Self service resource with link}}. Here you’ll find answers to frequently asked questions and step-by-step instructions to set up and troubleshoot our products. We hope making this information more accessible provides a better experience — but always feel free to reach out to us directly for additional help! 

{{Company name}}

📚 Recommended reading: 29 Customer Service Scripts Inspired by Top Ecommerce Brands.

Email templates are even more powerful when combined with equally powerful customer service scripts, keeping your brand messaging consistent and on-target across channels. 

4) Provide renewal reminders to avoid passive churn

If your business includes a subscription-based product, you’ll want to provide reminders to customers that their subscription is about to renew.

Remember: Letting customers easily opt in and out is always the best decision for customer experience. While an easy opt-out process may sound scary for retention rate, you’ll actually do more harm by making customers jump through hoops to cancel their subscription. They’ll likely speak about the poor experience with friends and avoid coming back. 

💡 Tip: If you can let customers self-serve any subscription changes or updates, you eliminate the need for them to reach out to support to do so. Providing links within a subscription reminder email to unsubscribe, skip, or delay a delivery gives customers the ability to do it easily on their end, eliminating a touch point with support and reducing effort for the customer.

Hello {{Customer first name}},

This is a reminder that your subscription for {{Product name}} will renew automatically on {{Renewal date}}. We’ll continue charging the credit card ending in {{Last four digits of credit card number}}. No action needed from you, we’ll process and ship the order in 3-5 business days.

If you want to skip this shipment, click here: {{Link to skip shipment}}

If you want to unsubscribe, click here: {{Link to unsubscribe}}

Thanks,

{{Current agent first name}}

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📚 Recommended reading: Learn how to retain 20% of customers you lose to passive churn and raise overall revenue by up to 0.5%.

5) Announce website or product outages

If you have a planned outage coming up, a quick email goes a long way to stop panicked questions from rolling in. It also allows customers to plan for an outage, especially if your website is one they rely on or visit often. 

Hi {{Customer first name}},

We’re currently experiencing a service outage for {{Website / Product / Service}}. We’re actively working on resolving the issue, which we believe is due to {{Reason for outage}}. We apologize for the inconvenience and assure you we’ll have everything up and running as quickly as possible.

Stay tuned at {{Website / Social media page}} for the latest updates.

Thanks, 

{{Current agent first name}}

6) Announce a pricing increase

Raising prices, especially for a subscription service that’s automatically billed monthly? Loyal customers likely want a heads up and an explanation. If you give customers enough notice, it keeps them from feeling swindled.  

Hi {{Customer first name}},

Starting on {{Date}} we are increasing the pricing for {{Product or service}} to {{New pricing information}}. 

We don’t take pricing increases lightly, and we know it’s not the news our customers want to hear! Given {{Reason for pricing increase}}, we feel that this is the right move for our business and the best way to continue offering the best product possible. 

We are grateful to have you as a customer! 

{{Company name}} 

Order status update (before an order ships) emails

‎"Where is my order" is the main repetitive question that businesses get — up to 40% of all tickets, for some brands using Gorgias. Automating shipping confirmation emails and including a tracking number will provide a better shipping experience that doesn’t require shoppers to contact you whenever they want an update.

A helpdesk or customer service platform like Gorgias can help. Gorgias’s Macros automatically pull important personalized variables like the most recent order number or tracking information into the template. This is possible because Gorgias has a direct connection to your Shopify, BigCommerce, or Magento store, and can save your team hours each week. 

‎Regardless of whether you use Macros or another solution, here are a few plug-and-play email templates to get you started:

7) Change shipping address

Customers might be in the process of moving, planned a last minute trip, or realized they used an outdated shipping address for an order, which can cause panic. A quick email resolution will put them at ease and ensure their order goes to the right location. 

Hi {{Customer first name}},

I’ve updated your shipping address for order {{Number of last order}} and you should be all set now. You will receive a confirmation email when your package ships. 

Let me know if there’s anything else I can help with! 

{{Current agent first name}}

8) Order/shipping status (Where is my order?): Not shipped, preorder

When a customer inquires about an order that hasn’t shipped yet or an order that includes a pre-order item, make sure agents know your own internal policy and warehouse process. If something looks stuck for a long period of time (and it’s outside the warehouse’s SLA (Service level agreement), agents might have to open an internal investigation. 

Hi {{Customer first name}}, 

Thanks for getting in touch. 

It looks like your last order (order {{Number of last order}} from {{Date of last order}} includes a pre-order item. These take a bit longer to ship! 

If you haven’t received a tracking number in the next five days, please respond back to me and I’ll look into it. 

Thanks for your patience! 

{{Current agent first name}}

9) Order/shipping status (Where is my order?): Not shipped

Sometimes items take longer to ship than usual, or a customer isn’t familiar with your company’s estimated dispatch times. This is a common question, and its response can quell fears of an order being lost or out of stock. 

Hello {{Customer first name}}, 

Thank you for reaching out! Your order {{Number of last order}} has been received and we are working on getting it shipped out. Our processing time to ship an order is 3-5 business days, excluding weekends. 

We will email you a confirmation once it ships, which will include your tracking information as well. 

If you have any questions in the meantime, please don’t hesitate to reach out. 

Thanks, 

{{Current agent first name}}

10) Order Is out of stock

This template proactively informs shoppers of a delay and lets them know when they can expect their order to ship. 

Hi {{Customer first name}},

We wanted to let you know that your most recent order {{Number of last order}} is currently out of stock. We’re doing everything we can to get more in stock soon and we apologize for the delay!

The good news is that our next shipment should arrive by {{Date of availability}}, and you should receive your order within {{Number of business days}} once the item(s) gets to our warehouse.

Thanks for your patience! We’ll get you taken care of as soon as possible.

{{Current agent first name}}

11) Order change/cancel: Cancel and refund last order 

Sometimes customers change their minds about an order, and want to cancel before it gets shipped out so they don’t have to deal with returning it. This template provides a speedy response and solution. 

Hi {{Customer first name}}, 

I’ve canceled your last order (order {{Number of last order}}) and issued a refund. As a reminder, this was for {{Product name}} purchased on a credit card ending in {{Last four digits of credit card number}}.

The refund itself can take 3 to 5 days to process and will refund the original amount to the same card. Please let me know if you don’t see this reflected in your account after that time. 

Here if you need us, 

{{Current agent first name}}

12) Order change/cancel: Customer changed mind 

Simple automations can help catch requests like this before it’s too late. With Gorgias, you can swap out items (like switching a blue bike for a black one) without leaving the helpdesk, thanks to its deep integration with your ecommerce platform. 

Hi {{Customer First Name}}, 

Absolutely! I’ve swapped out {{Item name}} for the {{Item name}} you originally selected for order {{Number of last order}}. 

If you need anything else, just say the word. 

Best, 

{{Current agent first name}}

📚Recommended reading: Check out or post on how to prioritize customer requests so urgent questions like these don't get lost

Update on order status (after an order ships) email templates

‎Shipping comes with its own challenges: issues with carriers, delays due to weather or staffing, orders getting lost, or increased volume during busy seasons slows packages down. As a company, first align on your policy for shipping-related issues. Then, you can incorporate templated work flows that include features like a snooze button. This can come in handy when you need the customer to take action before you can help, like looking out for a package that was supposedly delivered.  

Gorgias Macros have a snooze functionality that reminds support agents to follow up in a given amount of time. For example, a Macro might snooze the ticket for two days to remind an agent to check back in about an order status. 

13) Order/shipping status (Where is my order?): Shipped

An extremely common question, customers like to be able to follow along with tracking information to see exactly when their order will arrive, whether they’re excited or need it by a certain date. 

Hello {{Customer first name}}, 

Thank you for reaching out! Your order has shipped and I’ve included the information below so that you can track it right to your doorstep. 

Order: {{Number of last order}}

Shipping date: {{Shipping date of last order}}

Tracking number: {{Tracking url of last order}}

Get back in touch if you need any more help. 

Thanks, 

{{Current agent first name}}

📚Related reading: Learn more about where is my order (WISMO) requests and how to reduce them with convenient self-service.

14) Order change/cancel: Already shipped

Sometimes shoppers change their mind when it’s too late, so having a template that lets them know how they can get a refund or an exchange quickly gives them a resolution, even if it’s not exactly what they want. 

Hi {{Customer first name}}, 

Thank you for reaching out to us! 

Unfortunately, it looks like your order {{Number of last order}} has already been shipped from our warehouse. Therefore, I’m unable to make any changes to it at this time. 

If possible, refuse the package at delivery. If that’s not possible, please let me know and I will send you a prepaid shipping label so that you can send the order back to us. Once we receive the order back at our warehouse, I will send a {{Replacement or refund}} to you right away. 

{{Current agent first name}}

15) Order is lost 

A lost order can be frustrating, especially because it means that it’s been delayed. This template offers a solution to get a shopper a new item or get them their money back.  

Hi {{Customer First Name}},

Thank you for reaching out! I’m so sorry to hear that you were unable to locate the missing package. Rest assured we will remedy this situation for you. 

I have two options to offer: we can ship a replacement to you or issue a full refund for the order instead. If you prefer a replacement order, we kindly ask that you confirm the shipping address of where you would like the replacement order sent. We look forward to receiving your reply.

{{Current agent first name}}

📚 Recommended reading: Learn how to deal with lost ecommerce packages.

Update on order status (order has arrived) email templates

‎Once an order arrives, customers might need help locating a missing package, initiating a return or exchange, or getting a replacement for a damaged item. 

16) Order/shipping status (Where is my order?): Delivered, not received 

Similar to a lost order, one that shows as being delivered but that hasn’t been received can cause anxiety for customers. This template offers up a solution and shares the internal policy for these types of packages. 

Hi {{Customer first name}}, 

I'm sorry to hear that you haven't received your order yet. It does appear to be in a delivered status. Sometimes this can be due to an incorrect scan by the carrier. If the package doesn't show up in the next {{Insert the number of days according to your policy}} please reach back out and we will {{insert internal policy}}. 

In the meantime, I've contacted the carrier and will be investigating on my end. 

Please reach out if I can help with anything else and I will keep an eye out for your email regarding the package.

{{Current agent first name}}

17) Item arrived damaged 

Items that shipped damaged or were damaged in transit can break trust between customer and company or spike quality concerns, especially for first-time purchases. This template asks for an image of the item so that the agent can offer a quick solution. 

Hi {{Customer First Name}}, 

Thanks for reaching out about your recent order {{Number of last order}}. I’m sorry to hear about your experience. As we try our best to provide exceptional service, some factors like shipping and handling are out of our control and issues like this can happen.  

Please send us a photo of the broken/damaged item(s) you received and we’ll do our best to resolve this as soon as possible. 

{{Current agent first name}} 

18) Item arrived damaged – follow up

A follow up email for items that arrived damaged. 

Hi {{Customer First Name}}, 

Thanks for sending over the photo of your damaged item. I've ordered a replacement to go out {{Insert policy: free of charge, just pay the cost of shipping, etc}}. Once the item ships we will send you an email confirmation. 

For your damaged item you can go ahead and {{Insert policy: donate, discard, send back to us, give to a friend, etc}}. 

{{Current agent first name}} 

📚 Recommended reading: Check out our list of essential ecommerce best practices.

Help with product exchanges, returns, and cancellations

According to the National Retail Federation, online purchases have a return rate of 20.8%. That means that many shoppers are writing into support teams to ask for an exchange or return if the online store doesn’t offer a self-serve return portal. 

Having a clear return policy minimizes questions, sets clear expectations before a customer makes an order, and can protect the business from losing too much revenue through returns or exchanges. Your policy should be where shoppers can find it easily: in your FAQ section, in your confirmation emails, and within your order flow. When a shopper requests an exchange or return, these templates can provide you with an effective email support script. 

19) Exchange request after order arrives

There’s a reason returns for online businesses average at 20% versus 9% for retail businesses: customers can’t experience what an item actually looks like, get a sense of its size, or try it on in person. The following two templates help with exchange and return requests. 

Hey there {{Customer first name}}, 

Thanks for reaching out about your recent order {{Number of last order}}. I see that you are interested in a product exchange. We do allow exchanges, and I’m happy to help you with this right away. 

{{Exchange policy and instructions}}

Once you have {{Required action(s)}}, I can process your exchange and get a new {{Product name}} shipped out to you right away. 

Thanks again, 

{{Current agent first name}}

📚Recommended reading: 

• A User-Friendly Guide to Ecommerce Tech Stacks
• 150+ Top Tools for Ecommerce

20) Request for return/refund (item eligible)

Hi {{Customer first name}}, 

Thanks for reaching out! For your order that was delivered on {{Shipping date of last order}}, we’d be happy to process a refund for you. 

To get the return process started, please go to our {{Link to returns portal}} and follow the steps. 

If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to reach out. 

{{Current agent first name}}

🤔 Getting too many refund requests? Check out our guide to reducing returns in ecommerce.

21) Request for return/refund (item not eligible) 

Items aren’t always eligible for returns, which can cause tension between a customer and business. Here’s a template for how to handle it. 

Hi {{Customer First Name}},

Thank you for contacting us. Unfortunately, your order {{Number of last order}} is unable to be returned because it is outside of the time window (30 days) outlined in our return policy.

I apologize for any inconvenience that you’ve experienced because of this. 

If there is anything else I can help you with, feel free to reply to this email or visit {{Link to help center}} at any time. 

Thank you again,

{{Current agent first name}}

Angry customer response email templates

The Effortless Experience notes that interactions with support teams are 4x more likely to cause disloyalty in customers rather than loyalty. So, unhappy customers who have had a bad experience expect a quick and kind email response. The following sample emails should help set your team up to support these customers with empathy.

‎22) General frustration with product or experience

This template provides a response for customers who complain about their overall experience with a brand. 

Hi {{Customer first name}},

Thank you for reaching out and letting us know about your experience with us. This is not up to our standard and I've passed this along to our team to ensure this doesn't happen again. 

In addition, I've {{Insert policy: refund, added a credit, send a replacement, etc.}} to make this right. 

We truly value you as a customer and apologize for the inconvenience this caused.

Please let me know if I can help with anything else.

{{Current agent first name}}

💡Tip: Build an escalation process internally to handle extremely frustrated customers who post publicly about a negative experience. This allows agents to refer these customers to a lead or manager for assistance. For very angry customers, using a template is usually not the right move, because their situations tend to vary on a case-by-case basis and require someone with experience to provide the best resolution. 

23) Escalate angry customers to more technical support

Occasionally, one rep might not have the information they need to figure out what went wrong or how to fix it. In that case, you might need to pass a customer onto an agent who has the resources to help. 

Hi {{Customer first name}},

Thank you for reaching out and letting us know about your experience with us. This is not up to our standard and I've passed this along to our team to ensure this doesn't happen again.

I have CC’d {{Technical agent first name}} on this email. They will be able to figure out what happened here and ensure that we resolve this for you. 

{{Current agent first name}} 

Make sales

While customer support emails are not marketing emails, you do have an opportunity to drive sales when having a conversation with a customer. A personal note at the end of a positive customer service experience may be more impactful than a mass email marketing campaign because it’s direct, builds upon any context from the full conversation, and can be adapted for the customer’s exact needs.

While you should never sacrifice quality of support to push a sale, here are some templates you can consider using to gently push customers back to your site for repeat purchases and upsells. 

24) Soft launch a product to a small group of customers 

Drum up hype, test out reception to a new item, establish product market fit, or get valuable feedback from a smaller group of customers before launching a new product to everyone. 

Hey {{Customer first name}}! 

We have been developing {{New product type}} for a long time now, and we can’t wait to release it to the world. Because you’re {{An email subscriber, SMS subscriber, made 5+ purchases, or other criteria}}, we’d like to give you the opportunity to buy this before everyone else can. 

{{Link to purchase page}}

Cheers, 

{{Company name}}

25) Promote sales and time-sensitive deals 

These types of targeted sales can help increase subscribers to different platforms (like social media, email, or SMS). They also create exclusivity and urgency for shoppers, who might jump on an item they’ve been waiting on to get a deal. 

Hey {{Customer first name}}!

Here at {{Company name}} we’re always looking for more and better ways to reach even more people with our exciting lineup of {{Products/services}}.

I’m excited to let you know about a deal that’s only available for {{Email subscribers, SMS subscribers, Instagram followers, etc.}}. 

For the next {{Length of time}}, we’re offering {{Offer details}} on {{Products/services}}.

We stand behind our quality {{Products/services}}, and sales like this don’t come often. That makes now the perfect time to {{Desired action -buy/expand/upgrade/sign up}}!

For starters, check out our {{Popular Sale Item/Service}}, it’s already selling fast!

Best,

{{Current agent first name}}

📚 Recommended reading: Email isn't the only channel to offer discounts and timely deals. Check out our guide to omnichannel customer service to see how you can expand your support and revenue-driving conversations.

26) Convert abandoned carts

With 70% of ecommerce shoppers abandoning their carts, reducing the number of customers who leave items unpurchased can increase your revenue. 

Hey there {{Customer first name}}!

We couldn’t help but notice you stopped by today, and you were this close to making {{Product name}} yours.

In case you were interrupted or pulled away, it’s not too late to buy!

{{Abandoned Cart Link}}

I can even offer you a {{Coupon/special offer}} if you’re ready to buy right now. This link will give you {{Describe the offer or discount}} if you purchase within {{Timeframe}}.

Thanks again for checking out our store! Let me know if I can answer any questions for you.

Best,

{{Current agent first name}}

27) Upsell customers 

Upselling existing customers is less expensive than going out and obtaining new customers for your business. The more purchases returning customers make, the less business have to spend on acquisition costs. 

Hi {{Customer first name}},

Thanks for your recent purchase of {{Product name}} — all of us here at {{Company name}} truly appreciate your business.

I’m reaching out today because I want to make sure you’re getting the most out of that purchase. {{Product name}} is fantastic as a standalone, but it shines when you use it alongside some of our other offerings.

For example, {{Strong explanation of how product/service enhances product they bought}}.

Does this sound like something you’d be interested in? If so, check out {{Product link}} or simply reply to this email.

Best,

{{Current agent first name}}

Collect feedback with these email templates

Customer feedback is powerful data for your business, helping you shape the future direction of your products or services and improve your email open rates. Customers enjoy feeling valued and knowing that you're working to make the product and service experience better and better for them can increase happiness and loyalty.

28) Request customer feedback

This gives customers an open invitation to share how their experience went, so you know what aspects went well and where you can improve. 

{{Customer First Name}},

Thanks so much for your recent purchase. By now, your item should have arrived, and you likely have a good idea of what you think about your purchase.

I’d love to get some feedback from you about your experience so far with us. You can just reply to this email and share your thoughts if you’d like. Even more helpful is if you wouldn’t mind filling out this {{Survey link}}. It shouldn’t take more than {{Estimated completion time}}, and it will help us keep improving as our business grows.

Of course, if you’re having trouble of any kind (or your purchase hasn’t arrived yet), please let me know. I’ll do everything I can to help.

Thanks again for your time!

{{Current agent first name}}

29) Thank customers for their feedback (positive)

Reviews go a long way to build trust in your business. Aside from thanking someone for taking the time to provide positive feedback, it’s a good idea to ask them to write a public review about their experience. 

{{Customer first name}},

Thanks so much for taking the time to give us feedback. We’re always working to improve our products and services, and we’re thrilled when we hear that we’re doing something right. Constructive criticism is great, too, since it helps us improve!

If you’re still feeling the love from your recent purchase, would you mind writing a quick review of your positive experience with us on {{Review site}}? It may not seem like much, but these reviews go a long way.

Thanks again,

{{Current agent first name}}

30) Request feedback from customers who left a negative review

Understanding why someone left a negative review is where, as a support team, you’re going to learn the most. Doing some outreach for customers who left a bad CSAT, NPS score, Yelp or Google review, etc. to see if they are willing to share a bit more information will help you improve the overall experience. 

{{Customer First Name}},

Thanks so much for your feedback on {{Customer survey, review site, etc.}}.

I wanted to check in and get a little more information from you about your experience. This will help our team improve future experiences for you and other shoppers. If you’re open to it, you can just reply to this email and share your thoughts.

Thanks for your time, 

{{Current agent first name}}

📚 Recommended reading: How to Collect Customer Feedback From Support Tickets (+ 8 Other Methods)

Emails that tell customers that they’re chatting with a bot 

31) Tell customers they’re getting an automated email response 

Automated responses can feel impersonal, especially if a shopper is upset. Letting someone know they’re getting an automated response and exactly how to reach a human if they need one can save time for busy teams and get customers a near immediate response. 

{{Customer first name}},

This is an automated response. We are a growing business and, in our best effort to deliver the information you’re looking for as quickly as possible, we do use some automation. 

We think you’re asking about the status of your order and have included information for it below. If you still need support or this didn't answer your question, just respond to this email and a live agent will jump in to help. 

{{Company name}}

Why use email templates for customer support?

Using response templates for your most frequently sent emails means a lower resolution time for customers and higher efficiency for your agents who no longer need to type out each response. For example, the brand Bagallery found that Macros (Gorgias’s version of templates) increased delivery by 3x. 

And templates (for chats and emails alike) don’t have to feel impersonal. While reps might start out with a template, they can personalize templated emails by filling in customer information (like the customer’s name) and important order details (like order tracking numbers). Scroll down to our section on Macros to learn how you can automatically include this kind of personalized information.

Overall, templates create a better, faster experience for everyone. They can:

• Decrease first response time
• Decrease resolution time
• Save time for your customer service team
• Provide an overall better customer experience

Decrease first response time

When customers write in for support, they expect a quick response no matter if they’re giving positive feedback or have an urgent issue they need resolved. By starting first with a pre-written email template, you can fast-track your team’s first-response time, which can lower anxiety in your customers, give them the answers they need, and allow your team to provide a personalized and high-quality experience at scale. 

A pre-written template might provide a response that lets a customer know the team will be with them shortly — but asks the customer several detailed questions upfront so that the agent can get them an answer faster. 

For example, Jetson, an ecommerce company that sells gut-healing probiotics and prebiotics, saw a 60% decrease in first response time by using Macro email templates.

Decrease resolution time 

Your email templates will also be detailed and quality-assured, helping fully resolve customer issues as quickly as possible. For example, templates might include links to a knowledge base or FAQ center that answers lingering questions. Or, you might be able to drop in detailed tracking information if your system allows for dynamic fields. 

Jetson also saw a 30% decrease in resolution time by using templated responses, improving the customer experience and giving the customer service team more time for their highest-value conversations. 

When implementing templates, make sure you’re including all the information the customer needs for a one-touch resolution. Ideally, customers won’t need to respond with follow-up questions. 

📚 Recommended reading: Our Director of Support’s complete guide to measuring and lowering resolution time.

Save time for your customer service team 

If reps start emails from scratch every time, they’ll spend hours each week typing up the same information, lowering efficiency and taking them away from more important projects. Templates raise the number of chats, emails, and SMS tickets agents can handle in a given day. Increasing efficiency without decreasing quality also means you won’t always have to hire new agents to handle more tickets.

In addition, if your team is not able to pull in customer data within the email platform, they’ll have to toggle back and forth to find it. Or worse, they’ll need to go back and forth with the customer to get simple info like their order number or tracking information.

Templates are especially helpful to help agents during customer service training, or to quickly onboard any temporary help you bring on to help during busy periods like Black Friday Cyber Monday (BFCM).

📚 Recommended reading: Learn how Princess Polly saw a 40% increase in agent productivity after switching to Gorgias and implementing templates and other time-saving features.

Provide an overall better customer experience

The quicker and easier you make the full support experience, you decrease the chance of the customer putting in a high level of effort. The Effortless Experience shows that 96% of customers who have to work hard to get support feel disloyal to the brand after.

🤔 Not convinced yet? Read our post on the importance of customer service to learn why customer service is more closely linked to revenue than you think. 

Why Macros are superior to regular templates

While regular email templates can be helpful in saving time for your support team, setting up automation takes your support one step further. This is possible with a tool like Gorgias, which offers Macros, or specialized templates that pull in data from a Shopify, Magento, or BigCommerce store.

‎Here’s how Macros upgrade your customer support templates:

They help you automatically personalize messages

Macros allow you to pop in variables like customer name, order number, tracking info, or delivery date, and what they ordered, which makes the entire experience feel more personal — even with templates.

Because Gorgias integrates with your ecommerce store, you don’t have to search or ask for customer data (like past order information, reviews left on your site, and so much more). 

‎You can automate follow-up actions

Macros can also be combined with Rules to automatically fire based on certain customer questions and trigger actions, like canceling an order. They can also snooze certain messages that might require a follow-up email so that support agents never leave a conversation without a full resolution. 

‎They include visual product links

When you link a product in a standard template, the customer only sees a URL or hyper-linked text. Plus, agents still have to copy the URL from your store and paste it in the email. But Gorgias’s Shopify product picker lets you search from your product library, select products, and include a visual link that entices customers to click back to your store.  

‎They work across channels

Macros can be used for any channel, not just email, since Gorgias is a centralized helpdesk. You can create shorter variations of your email templates to use for live chat, social media, SMS, and more.

They come with a supported Macros Library 

When you sign up for Gorgias, you’ll get access to a Macros Library, which has pre-made and dynamic templates to help get you started. 

These emails are a starting point for agents to save time and ensure consistency and correctness. Then, agents can further tweak templates based on each customer’s needs.  

You can easily measure template utilization

Gorgias comes with a number of Statistics dashboards that measure important customer support metrics like first-response time, revenue generated from customer support, and much more. The Statistics section includes a Macros tab, which shows you how frequently your agents use each Macro:

‎Customer support leaders can use this tab to understand the effectiveness of each Macro and identify when new Macros are needed.

📚 Recommended reading: Evaluating Customer Service: Why, Challenges, and KPIs That Matter

Create loyal and happy customers from day one with Gorgias

Loyal customers come out of great service experiences. Email templates help create a solid baseline so that teams are more equipped to provide high quality support. By removing the need to type out tedious responses to the same questions, email templates give teams the headstart they need so they can provide fast, personalized responses to repetitive questions and spend more time on higher-value conversations.

Gorgias is a customer service platform built for ecommerce merchants. Features like Macros help you provide personalized, self-service responses to repetitive questions and spend more.

Check out our video below to learn more or read our CX Growth Playbook to learn how to generate consistent revenue from your customer support team. 

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Today’s brands know the mission-critical value of customer service — especially fast, persnoalized service. And few customer service channels are more effective that live chat apps, especially when it comes to online shopping. 

Along with improving the customer experience, live chat apps can also help reduce repetitive support tickets and your customer support team’s workload. It also serves as a revenue-generating channel for ecommerce businesses — one that not many are tapping into (yet).

To help you start taking advantage of all the benefits of a good live chat solution, we'll explore what to look for in a live chat provider and cover the eight best live chat apps available today.

8 best live chat software for customer support 

If you would like to start offering customer support via real-time chat conversations, you can't go wrong with the live chat tools below.

We included ratings from Capterra next to each live chat’s names, plus the number of reviews for the app.

1) Gorgias: 4.6 ⭐(488 reviews)

Gorgias is an all-in-one customer support platform that offers a fast-loading live chat widget in addition to a wide range of other customer support tools. 

Given that 38% of customers report say they’re more likely to purchase a product if they offer live chat support, live chat can be an excellent way to drive sales and increase revenue (in addition to improving your customer support, of course). 

Gorgias’ live chat solution offers unique self-service features, like:

• Quick Answer Flows that automatically answer the most common customer questions
• Order Management Flows that let customers track, return, and cancel orders without waiting on an agent — that’s right, no more WISMO tickets

Plus, for small teams and round-the-clock coverage, Gorgias’ live chat service includes a contact form that customers see when you’re offline. They can still send their message and receive a follow up message via email.

Check out our live chat solutions here to see for yourself why Gorgias is the leading customer support service for revenue-focused ecommerce stores.

Key features

• Centralized customer support helpdesk and ticketing system
• Omnichannel customer service
• Helpful customer support metrics like first response time and resolution time
• Fast-loading live chat feature that won't slow down your website
• Seamless integrations with a variety of ecommerce tools, includin an open API
• Automated workflows for creating canned responses to common customer questions 
• An advanced knowledge base for FAQS and customer self-service
• Chat campaigns (when customers get popup chat invitations proactively) to help boost sales with live chat
• Works for Shopify, Magento, and BigCommerce

Pros

• Advanced automations and self-service features
• Customer data is displayed next to the live chat ticket, leading to better personalization and customer engagement
• Easy to install, set up, and use — perfect for small businesses

Cons

• Can’t get a standalone live chat app  
• Some reported issues with mobile app for iOS and Android users
• No way to pause your subscription when undergoing integrations or updating your website

2) HubSpot Live Chat: 4.4 ⭐(1,659 reviews)

Since 2006, HubSpot has provided ecommerce stores with some of the best tools available — and HubSpot Live Chat is yet another excellent offering. With HubSpot Live Chat, you can easily install a chat button on your ecommerce store. When customers contact you, agents can reply via an integrated messaging service like Slack or Facebook Messenger. 

HubSpot Live Chat also allows you to create automated templates and AI-powered chatbots for responding to common questions. Easily route customer inquiries to other support channels such as email or phone, create targeted, customizable welcome messages for different pages on your site, and automatically save your chat messages/chat history for future reference.

Key features

• Customizable live chat widgets
• Offers a no-code chatbot builder
• Live chat support agents can access data from HubSpot’s CRM to guide customer conversations and get the full context about the customer while chatting

Pros

• Free to download and use for unlimited chats
• Seamless plugin with other HubSpot tools
• No coding required to customize live chat widget

Cons

• Limited number of features compared to other live chat solutions
• Bots are not as advanced as some competitors’; don’t use artificial intelligence or natural language processing
• Only good “if you go all in” on the larger Hubspot Service Hub, according to one reviewer — better for teams who are already embedded in the HubSpot ecosystem

3) LiveChat: 4.5 ⭐(745 reviews)

LiveChat is a live chat solution for both sales and customer support. It allows customers to contact a live representative via chat when they have a question or issue, and lets sales agents proactively contact website visitors during the buying process. Along with enabling live chat support via a chat box, SMS, email, Facebook Messenger, and more, LiveChat also enables you to create AI chatbots for sales and for responding to common customer inquiries.

Key features

• AI chatbots to greet customers and quickly route chats based on their response
• Automatic visitor segmentation based on the pages that they visit for targeted, personalized messaging
• Message sneak peek allows agents to see what a customer is typing for faster responses

Pros

• Offers 200+ integrations with other ecommerce tools and platforms
• Provides detailed reporting and analytics
• Features an intuitive and easy to navigate user experience (UX)

Cons

• Pricing plans are somewhat on the costly side
• Reported glitches within the notification system 
• Difficult to install and set up

4) Pure Chat: 4.3 ⭐(204 reviews)

If you are looking for a straightforward and affordable live chat solution, Pure Chat is a great option. With Pure Chat, you can look forward to unlimited chats, a user-friendly dashboard, and a chat widget that is easy to customize. Pure Chat might not offer the range of features in more expensive live chat apps, but it does offer everything you need to start offering live chat support.

Key features

• Excellent chat widget customization options
• Unlimited chat history transcript storage
• Real-time analytics and visitor tracking

Pros

• Takes a matter of minutes to set up and is easy to use
• Affordable, flat-rate pricing
• iOS and Android mobile apps

Cons

• Only capable of supporting up to 10 live chat reps
• Limited features and integrations compared to more comprehensive live chat solutions
• Does not allow you to attach documents or images to a chat conversation

📚Recommended reading: Our list of email marketing automation campaigns every ecommerce business should consider.

5) LiveHelpNow: 4.2 ⭐ (145 reviews)

LiveHelpNow offers feature-rich live chat tools for both customer support and lead generation. With LiveHelpNow, you get features like SMS and text-to-chat, detailed reporting, customizable proactive chat triggers, conversion tracking, and much more.    

Key features

• Automatically translates over 100 different languages
• Auto chat tagging to simplify organizing customer interactions
• View chat transcripts in real-time and send agents messages that are visible only to the agent

Pros

• Free training and implementation support
• Provides AI tools such as canned response recommendations to speed up response times and reduce agent error
• Offers a long list of useful integrations

Cons

• Chatbots only available as a paid add-on
• Somewhat prone to bugs and glitches
• UI is a little messy and confusing

6) Olark: 4.3 ⭐(221 reviews)

Olark offers everything you could want out of a live chat app, including a highly customizable chat widget, automation rules for both sales and customer support workflows, a transcript archive, and detailed live chat analytics. In addition to an impressive list of features that come included with Olark's base plan, the app also offers additional "PowerUps" such as automatic language translation, visitor insights, and visitor co-browsing that allows agents to see a customer's screen.

Key features

• Custom chatbox forms for collecting information from customers before they connect with a live representative
• Real-time analytics for chat volume, customer satisfaction, and support agent activity
• Live chat automation rules for automatically greeting customers, sending messages based on customer behavior, routing customer queries to the right department, and more

Pros

• Chat transcripts are easy to search and navigate
• Offers 25 different integrations
• Easy to set up and use

Cons

• Additional costs to remove Olark branding from your chat box
• Does not provide AI chatbots
• Automation features are limited

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7) Chatlio: 4.3 ⭐(85 reviews)

If you are already using Slack to communicate with your team members, Chatlio is a great way to use Slack as a means for communicating with your customers as well. Once you install Chatlio on your website, visitors can connect with support agents via a live chat window and support agents can then manage and respond to these messages directly from their Slack dashboard. Chatlio doesn't offer the extensive list of features and tools provided by many apps on our list, but it is affordable and easy to use — especially if you and your team are already comfortable using Slack.

Key features

• Fully customizable chat widget
• Triggers for proactively engaging customers
• A user-friendly live chat support dashboard complete with helpful analytics

Pros

• Affordable flat-rate pricing
• Effortless to install and set up
• Offers lots of customization options

Cons

• No chatbots and limited automation features
• Heavily dependent on its integration with Slack
• Pricey given its limited features

📚Recommended reading: Our guide to conversion rate optimization built in partnership with Swanky, a leading ecommerce conversion rate agency.

8) LiveAgent: 4.5 ⭐(1,424 reviews)

Established in 2006, LiveAgent was one of the first live chat solutions for ecommerce to hit the market and is still renowned today as an app that is feature-rich and easy to use. With a LiveAgent subscription, you can look forward to proactive chat invitations with lots of customization options, chat analytics and customer tracking features, an unlimited number of customizable chat widgets, and an easy-to-navigate chat history database.

Key features

• Fast-loading, customizable, and reliable chat widgets
• Allows you to create canned responses for swift resolutions to common customer inquiries
• Website monitoring for tracking both customer and support agent activity

Pros

• Offers a free plan that includes one chat button and a limited yet useful list of features
• Great customer support that is available 24/7
• Easy to install and use

Cons

• Limited automation and chat routing features 
• Doesn't offer as many integrations as comparable apps
• Mobile app UI is a little clunky

Still want more suggestions? Check out our list of the best live chat apps for Shopify or, if you don't use Shopify, the best live chat apps for ecommerce.

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What features should you look for in a live chat app?

There are a lot of different apps that enable you to install a chat box or chat widget for your website visitors. There are even a number of free live chat apps available for download. 

However, not all live chat solutions are created equally. Before you go to the trouble and expense of installing a live chat app on your ecommerce website, make sure that it meets the following criteria:

Easy to set up and use for all your team members

One of the biggest benefits of live chat support is the fact it can make life easier for your support agents. If a live chat solution is overly complex and difficult to use, this defeats its purpose. 

Check out an app's reviews to see what other users say about its ease of use, and be sure to choose an app that makes life easier for your team members — not harder. Websites like G2 and Capterra offer a ton of details about thousands of business apps, including real customer reviews.

When weighing your options, reviews will also give you insights about how much technical know-how is needed to set it up. 

• Is coding required? 
• Will you need help from your IT team to roll it out to all your agents? 
• Can setupand troubleshooting be handled within your customer service department? 

Make sure that whatever you choose is reasonable and realistic for your organization.

📚Recommended reading: How to add live chat to your Shopify store.

Integrates smoothly with other tools

The best live chat apps can integrate with the rest of your tech stack, providing powerful new capabilities. For example, a live chat app that integrates with a larger helpdesk that’s connected to SMS, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, and Instagram allows you to offer live support to customers on social media. 

Likewise, a live chat app that integrates with other, non-support tools . For example, ecommerce stores should choose a live chat app that integrates with their:

• Ecommerce platform (like Shopify, BigCommerce, and Magento)
• Marketing tools (like Attentive and Klaviyo)
• Fulfillment and returns tools (like ShipBob and Loop)
• Loyalty tools (like LoyaltyLion and Yotpo)

Related: 150+ of the best tools for ecommerce.

Has a transparent pricing model

Before you purchase live chat software, make sure that you fully understand its pricing model. In some cases, it may seem that a subscription to a live chat app is highly affordable — until you read the fine print and get hit with hidden fees or a buggy free version with no support. 

Most of the apps on this list range in pricing from about $10 per month to $50 per month. 

However, every platform does things a little differently — some charge per user per month, some charge a flat rate, others may even charge per ticket. Determine what your organization deems “affordable” and keep this figure in mind as you compare tools.

📚Recommended reading: Live chat vs. chatbots — what’s the right combination?

Offers reliable, accessible customer support

Live chat apps are designed to enhance customer support, but it's important for the companies behind those apps to offer excellent customer support themselves. 

There are plenty of instances where your live chat app might not work like it should; whether it's difficulties installing the app, getting it to integrate with another tool, or any number of other issues. In these cases, you want reliable, fast support — so it's important to prioritize apps that offer it.

Live chat seamlessly with Gorgias

According to a 2021 survey, 65% of customers have higher expectations for customer service today than they did three to five years ago. Beyond improving customer satisfaction, live chat widgets can also serve as a powerful sales tool. They enable you to proactively contact customers and guide them through the buying process, increasing revenue along the way.

Gorgias is the customer service platform built for ecommerce, and our live chat is only the tip of the iceberg. Watch the video to learn more about how Gorgias can help you improve CX and unlock a whole new channel of revenue: Happy customers.

At Gorgias, our live chat solutions are perfectly suited for both customer support and lead generation. We help your organization be proactive about support, leading to happier customers and more revenue — get started today.

The best way to make customer service as convenient as possible is for ecommerce stores to meet customers where they already are. 

With that in mind, responding to customer interactions on a messaging platform can be an excellent way to provide better customer service — especially on one as popular as Facebook Messenger. 

According to research by Statista, Messenger has 106 million active daily users in America. And if a customer comes across one of your Facebook pages, your Facebook ad, or a Facebook comment that mentions you, the Facebook messaging app might be the first place they’ll go to ask you a question.

Below, learn how to use Messenger for business as an optimized customer service channel. 

Why teams use Facebook Messenger for customer service

According to data from Review42, 1.3 billion people around the globe use Facebook Messenger each month. This makes Facebook Messenger the second most popular mobile app for messaging in the world, behind WhatsApp (and, if you count it, SMS). 

Providing customer care via a channel customers already spend a lot of their time creates an easier, more comfortable experience for them overall. Here are some other benefits of implementing customer support on Facebook Messenger. 

Provide an omnichannel experience 

Asking customers to report a problem via your company's website or its customer support phone number may not seem like a big ask. However, allowing them to contact your company via the social media messaging apps that they are already most comfortable with increases the chances that they will reach out. If contacting support is too cumbersome or unfamiliar, they may simply take their business elsewhere without giving you the opportunity to make it right.

Answering customer queries seamlessly across channels is called omnichannel customer service, and it’s become a critical way for brands to offer better customer experiences. Research shows that getting support on the channels they love even influences purchase decisions.   

📚Recommended reading: How to usse social media for customer service. ‍

Make customer engagement more personal 

Messenger is one of the more personal communication channels to choose from, especially since many people use Facebook Messenger to communicate with friends and family. 

Because of this, managing customer relationships via Facebook Messenger is a more relaxed, natural, and personal way for customers to engage with your brand. 

📚Recommended reading: How to offer personalized customer service at scale.

Make public conversions private 

If a customer is upset, they might leave an angry comment on one of your Facebook posts. Bringing that conversation into a direct message takes that public conversation private, allowing you to offer more personalized support without the eyes of your entire follower base (or prospective customers) on you. 

• For curious or excited customers, you can have more personalized conversations, send over a small discount, and have a longer conversation that isn’t possible in public comment
• For escalated or upset customers, you can remove the heated conversation from a public forum and resolve the issues with minimal damage to your brand

Just be sure to ask them to message you first to comply with privacy standards. 

📚Recommended reading: How to deal with angry and escalated customers.

Integrate with a helpdesk and centralize communication 

When you open the floodgates to social media customer support, you or your team will likely be overwhelmed by the sheer volume of comments, questions, or posts that include your brand. While not all of these mentions will require support, the more you can stay on top of them, the better your brand perception will be. 

Facebook Messenger can integrate with a CRM or helpdesk that can centralize conversations from all of your other support channels (like email, live chat, SMS, voice, and social media) under one user-friendly dashboard. This makes it much easier to organize conversations so that reps can respond to things in real time or automate responses to common questions.

For example, Gorgias lets you create templated responses to common questions which saves your support reps time. It also lets you set business hours and automate responses to set customer expectations and let them know when you’ll respond. 

Learn more about how Gorgias integrates with Facebook Messenger. 

Messenger saves each customer's chat history and makes it easy to re-engage at any time

Even without any integrations, Facebook Messenger still automatically saves customers’ chat history. This makes it easy to re-engage with customers anytime you wish, which simplifies the customer service process and can potentially save your support team (and customers) a lot of time and hassle.

📚Recommended reading: Should You Delegate Social Media to Customer Support?

Use chatbots and automation to provide quick responses 

Chatbots offer near-immediate response and resolution times to simple customer inquiries. By addressing common issues without the need for a live support agent, chatbots can also reduce your support ticket volume and free your support team up to focus on more complex and pressing issues.

However, practice caution here. Most chatbots provide sub-optimal customer service. That’s why we prefer automation features that offer the same convenience (without deceiving your customers). While it’s not currently available on Facebook Messenger, take a look at how we build automation features into live chat to offer a better experience than chatbots:

https://gorgias.wistia.com/medias/gb277k8th0 

📚Recommended reading: 2022 Customer Service Automation Guide [+Benefits and Best Practices]

7 Facebook Messenger best practices for customer support teams

If you’d like to get as much value as possible from Facebook Messenger, here are seven best practices for using Facebook Messenger as a customer service channel.

1) Mind Facebook Messenger’s privacy policy 

Keep in mind that, as stated in Messenger’s privacy policy, you can only send messages to people who message you first. 

When moving from a public channel (like a Facebook comment) to a private channel, ask customers to make the move rather than messaging them. One way to maneuver this conversation is to ask the customer to message you something specific, privately, to resolve the issue. For example:

“No worries, {{Customer name}}! Your order hasn’t shipped so we can still change the mailing address. Please send us the new shipping address in a private message and we’ll make the change.”

2) Respond quickly, whether via a live chat experience or a chatbot

According to data from SuperOffice, 46% of customers expect a response time for customer service inquiries of four hours or less. Further, 12% of customers expect companies to provide a quick response in 15 minutes or less. 

‍Using Messenger chatbots can be a great way to ensure speedy responses to common customer questions. However, responding quickly is still important if you’re offering customers a live chat experience via Facebook Messenger rather than directing them to a chatbot. Even if you do use live chat, you can still set up chatbots to send an auto-response that thanks them for their inquiry and lets them know that an agent will assist them soon. 

Here’s how to set up that kind of automatic response Rule within Gorgias:

In all cases, it’s essential to make every effort to respond to customer inquiries as quickly as possible.

📚Recommended reading: Check out our case study of Berkey Filters, who achieved low response rates and high channel adoption rates after launching a new customer service messaging channel.

3) Automate simple questions that come through Facebook Messenger

In addition to lowering the average first response time of your customer support team, using bots to automate simple questions that come through Facebook Messenger can also free up a lot of time in your team's schedule. 

According to data from Tidio, 62% of customers would rather use a chatbot than wait for a customer service representative to take their call, making Facebook Messenger chatbots an excellent way to ensure that your customer service process is as speedy and convenient as possible. If you use a helpdesk, a plugin like ShopMessage can create this type of automation for you.  

If you use Gorgias, set up autoresponse rules to make each day’s workflow easier for your team. For example, set business hours and an autoresponse rule that fires if a customer does or doesn’t reach you during that time. 

For shoppers who message outside of business hours, automate text to let them know when you’ll be back online. For those who message during business hours, automate a message that approximates wait times: 

 4) Use content, FAQs, and knowledge base material to get customers to solutions faster

Resources like blog posts, FAQs, and knowledge base material can all serve as excellent customer service tools to supplement the support you offer via Facebook Messenger. 

Link your help center prominently on Facebook, send over links to your help articles for additional details or step-by-step walkthroughs once you answer their questions, or share blog posts that provide additional helpful information directly via chat.

Providing helpful self-service tools like these as part of your Facebook Messenger support strategy can go a long way toward making Facebook a more effective customer service channel.

5) Create short, Facebook-appropriate templates for FAQs

To save yourself or your team time, create templated responses for the most common questions that come through Facebook Messenger. 

Like a Facebook message would be, keep these responses short and sweet. Prioritize the messages that tend to come through Facebook. For example, shoppers will likely send in a message about an ad they saw or a product they’re interested in rather than asking for an update on their order status. 

📚Recommended reading: 10 Best Practices for Providing Exceptional Customer Service on Twitter

6) Seek out context to help customers with support requests

While it can certainly be beneficial for support agents to direct customers to resources such as knowledge base material, the reverse is true as well. Resources customers send in while seeking assistance can offer a lot of value. 

Facebook Messenger makes it easy for people to send photos, videos, and documents. These resources can provide helpful additional information about an issue support reps are attempting to resolve. For example, an agent might need to take a closer look at a crack in a defective product or see the color of an item they need to send a replacement for. 

Seeking context starts with having your agents ask customers the right questions. For example, asking customers how they are using the product that they purchased can provide agents with a lot more context regarding the issue that the customer is facing. Asking customers if there is anything else that you can help them with after the initial problem has been resolved is another question that can ensure that no issues go unaddressed. 

By making an effort to seek out as much context as possible, your customer support agents can ensure that they provide relevant information that fully resolves each issue. 

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7) Respond to every customer who sends you a message

It isn't always easy, but responding to every customer who sends you a message through Facebook Messenger is essential if you want to optimize customer satisfaction and reduce churn. This is especially evident when you consider the fact that Facebook Messenger shows users when their message has been seen. 

In other words, if you choose to ignore a customer's message, they’ll know about it. Thankfully, tools such as autoresponders and dashboards for centralizing customer conversations can make replying to each and every customer message a much more feasible goal. For example, if you use Gorgias, all open tickets will appear prominently until you close them.  

Respond to Facebook messages in your helpdesk to provide omnichannel service

Centralizing all of your customer conversations across channels under one easy-to-use dashboard makes managing Facebook Messenger conversations much more efficient for your support team. It lessens the possibility that high-priority messages will get lost, and allows teams to assign different conversations to the right agent who is best suited to support. 

This is where customer service platforms like Gorgias come in. Those that offer integrations will also show a customer's entire history with your business like their purchase history, past support conversations, and even social comments on different platforms. This allows your support agents to provide more helpful and personalized assistance. 

Omnichannel experiences help meet customers where they are, ensure a smooth, hassle-free experience, and let them message you from the app where they’re most comfortable. This increases the likelihood they will actually reach out to you, rather than deciding not to shop with you again instead. 

How to set up a Facebook customer service channel with Gorgias

With Gorgias, ecommerce stores can centralize customer conversations across multiple channels under one user-friendly dashboard, employ customer experience automation features complete with AI-powered customer intent and sentiment detection, create automated customer service workflows for Facebook Messenger, and much more. You can also expand your support messaging capabilities with our SMS feature.

Setting up the Gorgias and Facebook integration is quick and easy. Just visit Settings -> Integrations -> Facebook, Messenger & Instagram on your Gorgias dashboard. Make sure you’re logged into the correct Facebook account, authorize Gorgias on Facebook, select the page you want to add and your import settings, and then add the page! 

To see for yourself how Gorgias can streamline your customer service process by integrating with Facebook to create a unified customer service workspace, check out our social media features or sign up for a free trial today. 

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Black Friday and Cyber Monday are two of the biggest retail days in a year, for most businesses.

A good number of online businesses 11 months analyzing data, planning discounts, and building inventories just to prepare for the Thanksgiving week. One mistake many ecommerce businesses make is not paying enough attention to logistics.

During the Thanksgiving rush, a single mistake can throw off your entire supply chain. The holiday rush can get so hectic that last year, UPS hired more than 100,000 additional employees, in order to handle the anticipated increase parcel volume.

Seeing how order numbers are about to skyrocket during Black Friday, it’s important to prepare your business to handle it. 

If your business isn’t ready just yet, this blog post is for you. We’re going to cover:

• What can you do to make sure your store is prepared for BFCM
• The biggest logistic challenges your store will face during the holidays
• How to create a complete logistics plan in five easy-to-follow steps 

So let’s dive into it. 

How to Prepare Your Online Store for BFCM

During the holidays, the competition for consumers’ attention can be fierce. By the time Thanksgiving comes around, most store owners have already spent months developing BFCM marketing strategies and planning deals.

But if your website isn’t fully prepared for the occasion, you say goodbye to BFCM profit. Check out our complete guide to BFCM for ecommerce for more tips.

Check Website Performance

Around 45% of consumers buy only from brands they trust. Nothing can destroy your credibility and customer relationship quicker than a low-functioning website. Having a website capable of handling a huge surge of visitors is especially important during the holidays. 

For starters, make sure that the store functions properly on both mobile and desktop devices. Last year, almost 40% of Black Friday online sales came from phones and tablets. 

There are a lot of things that can slow your website down. In order to see if everything is working as it should, you need to check it. You can do this by going to Google PageSpeed Insights and running a checkup for free. 

Have a Look at Your Inventory 

While keeping track of inventory may be low on your totem pole of customer support Black Friday tasks, it’s important to be aware of. Your inventory can affect everything from advertising to logistics. 

One possible solution is to start using inventory management software in the months leading up to the Black Friday weekend. One solution is to use the Emerge App, which allows you to keep track of every single piece of inventory.

Inventory management solutions will help you know which products need to be restocked and which ones you can start pushing early. If a certain item has failed to sell out after more than 12 months, you can put a high discount on it. Examine your inventory in time and plan everything accordingly. 

Prepare Your Workers

Once Black Friday comes around, your workers better be ready to handle the increase in orders, BFCM returns, and complaints. If you want to keep satisfaction levels high, customer service agents need to do their jobs correctly. And in order for them to do their job, you need to make sure that they’re trained.

Talk to your staff. See if they’re aware that things are about to become more frantic than usual. Some workers thrive under pressure. Others aren’t accustomed to working in stressful situations. The best way to eliminate their fear – and subsequent mistakes – is to put in work and train them.

If they want to nail customer service, your workers need to:

• Respond to inquiries immediately
• Use positive/professional language
• Take a proactive approach to problem-solving‍

Logistics Challenges During BFCM

Last year, many retailers were caught by surprise by BFCM. Due to high discounts, many consumers hurried to make their purchases early. Those discounts pulled a bulk of sales into a narrow timeframe. Unsurprisingly, some merchants weren’t expecting such a high demand. 

Since most people will do a majority of their shopping online this BFCM weekend, you can expect a busy year again. Here are some logistic challenges that you’ll face in 2022. 

The Demand Can Vary Significantly

The biggest logistics challenge is the lack of control retailers have during the Black Friday weekend. Year-to-year, demand isn’t consistent. This can happen for many reasons. For instance, this year, in the United States, the demand may not be so high.

That’s because the last November payday falls after Black Friday. This will eliminate the spur-of-the-moment purchases. On the other hand, more people have probably saved up money during quarantine. All of these factors make the entire ordeal hard to predict. 

Lack of Communication

As we said earlier, even the biggest players in the delivery game like FedEx are forced to add capacity to meet the ever-increasing demands during BFCM. No matter what company you’re working with, chances are, they might not be able to deliver all of your product on time.

But you have to talk to them and find out for yourself. 

If you’re not communicating with your logistics partner, you won’t be able to create a delivery commitment schedule that’s manageable. By making unrealistic claims, you can jeopardize your entire operation and lose a lot of customers. 

Unrealistic Delivery Expectations

Large online stores like Amazon, Walmart, and Target all offer next-day delivery. To compete with them, many small and mid-sized companies are offering this option as well. However, during Black Friday, this may be impossible to maintain. 

While you want to offer fast delivery you need to be realistic with yourself as well as your customers. You can discuss this with your delivery company. If the delivery company you're working with can’t handle the load, notify your customers. 

And don’t worry, most consumers prefer honesty over speed. 

How to Plan BFCM Logistics in 5 Steps

Black Friday is unpredictable and so are the consumers. If you really want to have a successful Thanksgiving week, you need to be able to adapt to any situation. And you can do this by making sure that your business is prepared for the unexpected. 

Here are five steps you need to take in order to bulletproof your logistics and get your store ready just in time for BFCM. 

1. Conducting Demand Forecasting

If you take the time to prepare for Black Friday, you can expect good results. And by results, we do mean sales. But make sure you’re communicating delivery times, and following through with orders. Otherwise, you risk a ton of complaints, emails, and negative comments. 

To be prepared, you need to do some demand forecasting.

What’s demand forecasting, you might ask? Simply put, it’s a way of calculating how many sales you can expect to generate during a certain period. 

Your supply chain management solution probably has the ability to give you a demand forecast. In addition, talk to your supplier, they’re probably watching Black Friday trends closely and doing their own market research. They can possibly help you find the right level of product you should be carrying on BFCM. 

2. Preparing Great Shipping Deals

When talking about customer satisfaction levels, you can’t overlook delivery. Your customers want to be in the know. They want to know exactly when their order will arrive. As a matter of fact, 9 out 10 shoppers feel that on-time delivery is extremely important.  

Timely delivery is one thing, but you know what will really make you look good in the eyes of your customers? Making the shipping free. Not sure about it? Well, just consider this: more than 85% of Black Friday sales Salesforce tackled in 2019 had free shipping. 

If you’re afraid that you’ll lose a lot of money this way, just consider this an investment. Your customers will be happy with their purchase and will surely come back after BFCM. Keep this in mind: 85% of customers prefer free shipping to fast delivery. 

If you need shipping support, check out our list of the top shipping software for ecommerce.

3. Making an Effort With Customer Service

Everyone feels overwhelmed at times during a Black Friday sale. But no matter how hectic things become, you need to make sure that every customer question and request gets answered in short amount of time. 

Customer service is important all year round, but during the holiday season, it’s extremely important. Many customers will come across your website for the first time during the BFCM weekend. You want to leave a great first impression, don’t you?

Some customers will contact you directly, while others will message you on social media. Your help desk should allow you to see and answer all of these messages as quickly as possible. With Gorgias, you can decrease your first -response time by 78%. 

4. Automate As Much As You Can

Many aspects of your business operations can be automated. Countless companies lose countless hours every month on needless tasks. Now is the perfect time to get ahead and start looking into customer experience automation. Customer support is a great place to start to solve tickets quicker and drive revenue. 

By notifying your customers about the status of their purchase quickly, you’ll undoubtedly let them know that they can trust you. Also, if you’re working with a small delivery company, you should check to see if your supplier is up-to-date.

According to a recent study, one-third of warehouses in the United States are working with outdated storage and management equipment. New equipment is much faster and will prevent any delays in delivery. Make sure that your 3rd-party supplier is legitimate. 

5. Setting Up Reverse Logistics

The reality of any holiday seasons is: people can change their minds in a second. That’s why we see so many abandoned shopping carts and returned products. Even though you’ll hope for no returns, you need to be prepared for them. 

You can do this by doing some reverse logistics. This should be a part of every supply chain. In reverse logistics, the goods move from the end user back to the seller. The returned products may be disposed of in some cases, but more often than not, they’re resold. 

Reverse logistics may relate to any of these activities after the purchase:

• Product returns
• Product refurbishing
• Damaged packaging
• Delivery failure 

To prevent delivery failure, you can easily set up an order tracking page that will allow your customers to know about the status of their purchase at any time. 

Don’t Forget to Keep Your Shoppers in the Loop!

Preparing for the Black Friday weekend can be stressful. There are dozens of business aspects you need to prepare for the increase in orders. Logistics is one of the most important elements of your operation, so you need to put in extra work. 

Let’s go over the basics again. In the months leading up to BFCM, your business should:

• What’s the demand for your products and restock accordingly
• Prepare good shopping deals for your customers worldwide
• Beef up your customer service and implement live chat 
• Automate tickets and work with automated warehouses
• Set up reverse logistics to prepare for product returns 

Keeping the customers satisfied should be your #1 concern. If you manage to do that during the BFCM weekend, they’ll surely come back to your stare after the holiday. 

You can’t leave the customers waiting for their shipment or a response. To ensure that, you need a handy helpdesk. That’s why you should try out Gorgias. 

Gorgias is an ecommerce help desk that allows users to provide multichannel customer service from a single dashboard. 

Go ahead, sign up for Gorgias, get your 15-day free trial, and see your customer satisfaction rates skyrocket.

Starting a new ecommerce business can be a whirlwind of responsibilities and decisions — like choosing which ecommerce apps you'll use to run your business. When your time and budget are limited, how do you determine which apps and plug-ins will: 

• Be easy to manage?
• Have the biggest impact on your business?
• Make sense for an new store’s priorities?

Some ecommerce apps are a must-have right out of the gate, while others can wait until you get more budget and staff. 

To help determine which apps are necessary for your new business, we share the most important criteria early-stage brands should look for in an app before covering nine ecommerce apps that every online business needs to download.

The best ecommerce apps for small-but-mighty brands

Now that we've covered the specific criteria that new ecommerce stores should look for in their apps, let's take a look at a few of the most essential ecommerce apps to set your business up for success.

1) Shopify: An ecommerce platform for building your online store

The first and most essential app for anyone starting a new ecommerce store is an ecommerce platform for building and hosting a shopping app or website. As the most popular ecommerce platform on the market today, Shopify makes it easy for new stores to offer online shopping essentials, like:

• Mobile optimization for shoppers on mobile devices
• Multiple payment options (like credit card, PayPal, Apple Pay, and more)
• Simple checkout processes to limit cart abandonment

With Shopify, app development is easy-breezy: You can build a customized online store using simple drag-and-drop commands. Best of all, Shopify has an app store full of integrations with just about all popular ecommerce apps and tools, enabling you to expand on all of these features. For example, you can download a Shopify app to: 

• Sell your product on marketplaces like Amazon or Ebay 
• Search-engine optimize (SEO) your store
• Add pop-ups to reduce shopping cart abandonment

Take a look at how Shopify integrates with Gorgias to save time and provide personalized customer experiences. 

Key features

• Easy-to-use store creator
• Hundreds of customizable themes and templates
• Hundreds of apps and integrations available on the Shopify app store

Pros

• Intuitive and easy-to-use interface
• Affordable pricing
• Great customer support

Cons

• Not as customizable as more advanced ecommerce platforms such as Magento and BigCommerce
• Does not support email hosting

Pricing options

Shopify offers three pricing plans:

• Basic plan for $29 per month
• Shopify plan for $79 per month
• Advanced plan for $299 per month

While Shopify is a favorite choice for many, it’s not the only ecommerce platform. Popular alternatives include WooCommerce, BigCommerce, and Magento. We recommend staying away from general website builders like WordPress and Wix, which offer limited support for ecommerce. 

2) Huboo: Order fulfillment and tracking

Huboo is an order fulfillment solution that enables effortless order tracking and much more. With Huboo, you can outsource all of your company's order fulfillment responsibilities, shipping your products in bulk to Huboo warehouses, where they are stored, picked, packed, and delivered on behalf of your brand. 

Customers demand the ability to track their orders. 90% of consumers who engage in online shopping actively track their packages, with 20% of consumers tracking their packages multiple times a day. If you want to keep your customers happy and avoid a flood of "where is my order?" tickets, you will need to provide order tracking.

Using your Huboo Dashboard, you can see sales and listings by channel, courier tracking, inventory, costs, and billing, making it easy to provide order updates to your customers. 

To learn more about Huboo, check out our Huboo partner page.

Key features

• Capable of integrating with all popular sales channels and marketplaces
• Huboo Dashboard for easily tracking orders along with important fulfillment metrics and KPIs
• Wide-ranging fulfillment network in the EU and UK capable of fulfilling orders all over the world

Pros

• Helps eliminate fulfillment errors with 99.9% picking accuracy
• Removes the burden of order fulfillment and warehouse management

Cons

• Per-item pricing adds to your company's shipping costs
• Does not accept bulky, chilled, or frozen goods

Pricing options

Huboo charges per-item rates for every package shipped, varying based on the package size and how quickly it is delivered. For a detailed breakdown of these rates, check out Huboo's pricing page.

3) ShipHero: Warehouse management and order fulfillment

Another excellent warehouse management and order fulfillment app, ShipHero offers two solutions to ecommerce stores: 

1. A warehouse management system for managing your own warehouses more efficiently
2. Completely outsourced fulfillment. 

With ShipHero’s fully outsourced fulfillment services, store owners can ship their products in bulk to ShipHero warehouses, where they are picked, packed, and delivered with 99%+ shipping accuracy. 

ShipHero’s warehouse management system lets you automatically process orders and returns, manage your inventory, and access insightful analytics and reporting.

Key features

• Fully outsourced warehouse management and order fulfillment
• Built-in reporting features covering everything from COGS to Picker/Packer Efficiency to Replenishment
• Automation rules, including smart warehouse routing, shipping method mapping, and address validation

Pros

• Provides the option to manage inventory and order fulfillment yourself using ShipHero’s warehouse management system or the option to outsource these responsibilities
• Includes excellent automation features for improving order fulfillment efficiency and accuracy
• Enables 30% faster shipping and a 35% reduction in warehouse costs

Cons

• Somewhat difficult to set up and navigate by some reports
• Higher shipping costs

Pricing options

ShipHero offers three pricing plans for its warehouse management system:

• Standard WMS for Brands plan starting at $1,850 per month
• WMS for 3PLs plan starting at $1,995 per month
• Enterprise WMS for Brands plan with custom pricing available upon request

However, pricing for their outsourced fulfillment services is only available upon request.

4) Gorgias: Helpdesk and live chat

89% of customers are more likely to make another purchase with a company following a positive customer service interaction. While most brands want to offer great customer experience, doing so as a small team can be difficult. 

Luckily, helpdesks like Gorgias make it easy to offer great customer support without all the hassle, thanks to automation and self-service features. 

Thankfully, Gorgias makes it easy for brands of all sizes to offer personalized customer support via an industry-leading customer support platform. This includes features such as:

• A centralized dashboard for managing tickets and customer messages across numerous support channels
• Automation of tedious customer support tasks
• Help Centers and other self-service support options
• A fast-loading live chat widget for offering live chat support
• And much more

Key features

• Macros and Rules to provide automatic, personalized responses to common customer questions
• Centralized customer support dashboard that pulls in and organizes tickets from live chat, email, social media, SMS, phone, and more
• Advanced automation features to automatically respond to up to 30% of support requests

Pros

• Detailed customer support data and analytics for further fine-tuning your support services
• Broad range of customer support tools and features in a single platform
• Revenue-generation focused so that you can turn customer support into profits

Cons

• Can take some time to master all of Gorgias' tools and features
• Revenue statistics are only available on upper-tier plans

Pricing options

Gorgias offers five pricing plans:

• Starter plan for $10 per month
• Basic plan for $60 per month
• Pro plan for $360 per month
• Advanced plan for $900 per month
• Enterprise plan with custom pricing available upon request

5) Klaviyo: SMS and email marketing

Klaviyo is an SMS and email marketing platform with unparalleled personalization possitbilitieis. With Klaviyo, you can: 

• Design attractive custom emails and text for your ecommerce website’s shoppers without any coding experience
• Manage and segment contact lists with built in customer relationship management (CRM) features
  Create and launch automated SMS and  email marketing campaigns
• Track the results of those campaigns with detailed reports

Email marketing remains one of the most effective of all digital marketing channels and is something that every ecommerce store should take advantage of. Plus, SMS marketing has been one of the most trending marketing channels for the past few years thanks to texting’s highly visible push notifications. 

Take a look at how Klaviyo and Gorgias integrate for even more powerful experiences. 

Key features

• A/B testing and segmentation features for honing your email marketing strategy
• Drag-and-drop email builder
• Advanced campaign automation

Pros

• Easy to set up and use
• Affordable pricing, including a forever free plan

Cons

• Limited SMS marketing features
• Support team is sometimes unresponsive

Pricing options

Klaviyo offers three pricing plans:

• Free plan for $0 per month that supports up to 500 monthly email sends
• Email plan with pricing based on how many contacts your business has
• Email and SMS plan with pricing based on how many contacts your business has

6) Canva: Design and content creation

Whether it's creating graphics for your emails, website, social media posts, or anything in between, creating and running an online store requires you to design a lot of content. Canva makes content design and creation easy regardless of your artistic experience. 

With Canva, you can use attractive design templates and user-friendly drag-and-drop commands to create all manner of designs, including logos, flyers, banners, and much more.

Key features

• Drag-and-drop content designer
• Premium content library with 100 million+ photos, graphics, video, audio, and fonts
• Time-saving design tools such as Magic Resize and Background Remover.

Pros

• Very easy to use regardless of your design experience
• Advanced functionality that rivals expensive competitors like Photoshop

Cons

• Can't move one design to another, requiring you to create each design completely from scratch
• Limited video editing tools

Pricing options

Canva offers three pricing plans:

• Free plan for $0 per month
• Pro plan starting at $12.99 per month
• Teams plan starting at $14.99 per month

7) Typeform: Customer feedback surveys

Customer feedback is an invaluable resource for ecommerce stores of all sizes, enabling you to take a data-based approach to optimizing your store's customer experience. 

With Typeform, you can start gathering more customer feedback by using templates to create customer feedback surveys. 

Along with these customer feedback survey templates, Typeform also offers signup forms, report forms, order forms, and a ton of other professional templates.

Key features

• Hundreds of high-quality survey and form templates
• Quiz maker for creating customer quizzes (such as product recommendation quizzes)
• Brand kit for creating a set of custom fonts, colors, and media that you can use on any form

Pros

• Supports a long list of integrations with other popular ecommerce tools
• Makes it easy to create high-quality customer feedback surveys regardless of your design experience

Cons

• Only for creating surveys and forms; you'll need integrations to actually send these forms out and gather responses
• Offers mobile app for iOS but not for Android

Pricing options

Typeform offers three pricing plans:

• Basic plan for $25 per month
• Plus plan for $50 per month
• Business plan for $83 per month

8) Triple Whale: Analytics and reporting

Triple Whale is a complete ecommerce hub for Shopify stores that lets you track the metrics that matter most to your brand in one easy-to-use dashboard. 

https://youtu.be/RIaCgvdr2mc

Triple Whale's attribution features allow you to track how much you spend on each marketing channel and your return on these investments. If you are looking for a single solution that gives your brand access to all of the data and insights it needs to grow and improve, you'll find a lot to like about Triple Whale.

Key features

• Six attribution models and journey mapping for unlocking key insights in real-time
• Creative analysis tools for measuring ad performance
• Mobile app for viewing your data on the go

Pros

• Real-time insights provide much more flexibility and proactivity than monthly reports
• Single source of truth for your ecommerce store

Cons

• Somewhat costly for the features that it provides
• Only available for Shopify stores

Pricing options

Triple Whale offers five pricing plans:

• Dashboard plan for $100 per month
• Attribution plan for $300 per month
• Full Whale plan for $450 per month
• Custom plan with custom pricing available upon request

9) Recharge: Subscription management

It might surprise you to learn that 54% of online shoppers are subscribed to at least one ecommerce subscription. Leveraging the subscription model is a good way to create a reliable, recurring revenue stream for your business. However, it's also a model that entails its own unique requirements and complexities.

The best way to create and manage a subscription service for your online store is to utilize a subscription management app, and Recharge is a great one to consider. Recharge lets you quickly set up a subscription program, packaging your products or services into monthly or annual subscription plans. 

The app processes recurring subscription payments and makes it easy to manage every aspect of your subscription programs, providing detailed analytics into the performance of your program. Recharge also allows you to create a customer-facing subscription management portal where customers can easily view, change, or cancel their subscriptions.

Learn how Recharge and Gorgias integrate for powerful subscription management. 

Key Features

• Developer Hub for quickly creating and setting up subscription offers
• Analytics suite that provides insights into revenue, customers, and subscriptions
• Subscription management via RechargeSMS or a customer portal

Pros

• Gives customers the option to skip or delay deliveries rather than canceling, helping reduce customer churn
• Makes it quick and easy to create subscription offers

Cons

• Limited customization options
• The only subscription management app on the market for Shopify stores

Pricing options

Recharge offers three pricing plans:

• Standard plan with no monthly fees and 1% + 10 cents per transaction
• Pro plan for $499/month and 1% + 19 cents per transaction
• Custom plan with tailored pricing available upon request

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Key ecommerce app features small businesses should look for

Most new ecommerce businesses don't have the budget or the sales volume to justify purchasing a broad range of ecommerce apps right away. So, you'll need to narrow down your selection to the apps with great bang for your buck. 

With that in mind, here are the most important features that small business owners should look for in ecommerce apps:

Provides flexible, affordable pricing

Some ecommerce solutions can cost thousands of dollars a month or more, putting them out of reach for most small businesses and early-stage brands. 

These high-priced apps are almost always geared toward larger organizations anyway, meaning that you aren't likely to need all of the features they offer until your business grows. 

The good news is that there’s also a wide range of affordable ecommerce apps designed to support smaller stores and brands — those are the ones we’ll focus on below.

Automates manual tasks and ecommerce processes

Starting a new business requires a lot of hard work. The more manual tasks and workflows you can automate, the more time you have to focus on important activities like developing new products and growing your audience.

Creating automated email marketing campaigns rather than sending out emails manually is one example of how apps that offer automation features can save you time. Using automation to provide canned responses to common customer questions is another example of the time-saving benefits that automation can provide.

Monitors ecommerce performance

Whatever function of your ecommerce business that an app is designed to facilitate (whether it's customer support, marketing, sales, or order fulfillment), it also needs to be able to track your store's performance in these key areas. 

This is especially important for small stores, who don’t have full time data analysts to pull insights from tools. Choosing apps that provide detailed analytics and reporting will give your business the data and insights it needs for continual optimization.

Integrates with other ecommerce tools

Integrating all your ecommerce apps can enable powerful new features and capabilities. For instance, integrating your customer support app with your order tracking and fulfillment app might allow you to easily provide tracking numbers and order updates when customers request them. 

Along with choosing apps that offer a broad range of possible integrations with other popular ecommerce tools, it's especially important to ensure that the apps you select are capable of integrating with whatever ecommerce platform you use.

Supports your most important ecommerce KPIs

When you don't have the budget to purchase every app you might want, it's important to focus on the apps that align most closely with your important KPIs. Business of all sizes, but especially small businesses, do well to focus on one area at a time. Are you looking to: 

• Increase customer satisfaction? 
• Boost conversion rate?
• Raise brand awareness? 
• Improve customer retention?

Identifying the KPIs most important to your business and choosing your ecommerce apps based on these KPIs will ensure that you purchase apps that will have the biggest impact on your store's success.

Offers "try it before you buy it" model

When budgets are tight, you need to ensure that the app you purchase will meet your business's needs before you break out your wallet. For this reason, small businesses should prioritize apps that offer a free trial, a free version, or, at the very least, a free demo.

Includes customer success or support

Ecommerce apps are often challenging to set up and use. And as a small business owner, you can't afford to spend all your time troubleshooting issues with your ecommerce apps. This makes it important to choose apps with high-quality customer support or customer success services.

Offers additional pricing plans

While it's great to find an app with free or affordable pricing, you also need solutions that can scale alongside your company. Choosing apps with multiple pricing plans allows you to upgrade your subscription as your company grows, without having to switch to a new app.

Learn why ecommerce stores of all sizes favor the Gorgias app

Choosing the right customer support platform is just one of the many vital decisions you will need to make as an ecommerce store owner. While you’ve got plenty of options, only one is exclusively built for ecommerce and offers features and plans that scale from small stores to large enterprises.

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If you want to get started enjoying the many benefits of the best ecommerce customer support platform on the market, sign up for Gorgias today!

Modern customers have high expectations when it comes to customer service. One survey showed that nearly half of customers expected an email response from businesses in less than four hours. If your average response time is much higher than this, you could be losing out on a lot of business. 

Of course, meeting customer expectations regarding response time is often easier said than done. If your customer support team is struggling to keep up, the good news is that there are some effective ways to shorten your response times without having to hire a team of new employees.

In this blog, we'll discuss why a fast response time is such a vital component of great customer service and go over seven proven methods you can use to achieve a faster response to customer service emails and messages. 

What is a good customer service response time?

When a customer reaches out to you, you should aim for a first response time of one hour for emails, 15 minutes for social media messages, 40 seconds for SMS messages, and even less than that for live chat messages.

Why response times are important for customer service teams 

No matter what product or service you happen to be selling, creating a positive customer experience is an essential ingredient in the recipe for long-term success. While there is a lot that goes into creating a great experience for your customers, prompt customer service goes a long way. 

Here are a few of the reasons why achieving fast response times is such an important goal for your customer service department: 

1) Customers continue to demand faster responses 

More and more customers have come to expect near real-time access to companies across multiple channels. One Hubspot survey showed that 90% of customers rate an “immediate” response as important or very important when they have a customer service question. 

Furthermore, 60% of people who needed support defined "immediate" as 10 minutes or less. If your company isn’t responding to customer queries at least this fast, you risk falling short of expectations your competitors may be meeting. 

2) Poor response times reflect negatively on your company 

Fair or not, poor response times can hurt your brand image. Encouraging brand loyalty and return customers is a vital goal for any business, and poor response times can make this goal all the more difficult to reach. 

Keep in mind that customers expect fast response times since so many companies today can meet those expectations. If your company isn't keeping up with the customer service offered by the competition, it could damage your brand reputation among existing customers. 

3) Faster responses that lead to quicker resolutions can increase revenue

There are plenty of scenarios where responding to a customer query within a short time frame can lead to your business making more money. If a customer has a question about your product, for example, responding quickly before they move on to another product could lead to a sale you might not otherwise make. 

If a customer needs to return a product, prompt customer service could encourage them to exchange the product for another product or store credit rather than becoming frustrated and demanding a cash return. In instances such as these, fast response times that lead to quick resolutions can directly translate to more or retained revenue. 

4) Quick responses can boost customer satisfaction

Good customer service doesn't mean that you always have to solve a customer's issue on the first response. In many cases, simply acknowledging their email and letting them know that you’re working on a solution is enough to keep customers temporarily satisfied and buy your customer service team some time. 

Unless the issue is immediately resolvable, your goal in an initial response should be to acknowledge the customer's problem, let them know that you’ve assigned their ticket to a representative, and provide them with a time frame for when they can expect a resolution. 

Sending out an initial response that covers these bases can keep customers satisfied and patient while your team members work on their follow-up. 

Related: How To Measure Net Promoter Score (NPS)

5) Slow response times might increase your workload

Achieving fast response times may seem like a lot of work. Many times, though, slow responses can end up increasing the workload of your customer support team. If you don't respond quickly enough to a customer that needs assistance, they may end up contacting your company multiple times through multiple channels. 

This can lead to numerous support tickets being created for a single issue, bogging down your team and creating unnecessary confusion that could have otherwise been avoided if you had responded to the customer's initial query promptly. This is another reason it’s helpful to keep your average first response time as low as possible. 

How to reduce customer service response times

For all of the reasons listed above, responding to customer service emails in the shortest amount of time possible is ideal. Thankfully, there are many different methods you can use to speed up your response times across all your support channels that don't require huge investments or shifts.

1) Make sure you're measuring first response times 

Before you can test out solutions, determine what your average response time currently is (if you don’t already know). First response time is a crucial customer service metric to evaluate your team's impact because it affects revenue-related metrics like churn and retention rates.

To calculate the average first response time, all you have to do is add up all of your first response times for a given period then divide that number by the number of resolved tickets during that time.

Once you've determined what your average first response time is, you can then set goals for improvement and continue to measure your progress. Gorgias provides you with many analytic tools that allow you to track key customer service metrics, including average response time. By leveraging tools such as these, you can easily analyze your customer support team's efforts and set achievable benchmarks for more improvement.

Related: Customer Service ROI: How to Measure and Improve

2) Take advantage of customer service software

Responding to every customer email manually is a monumental task. If you’re still solely relying on traditional methods of responding to customer queries, achieving fast response times is going to be nearly impossible. Fortunately, there’s a wide variety of customer service software on the market today that can take a lot of the heavy lifting out of your workflows.

For example, help desk software allows your team members to see and reply to customer queries from any channel — like social media, ecommerce stores, WhatsApp, and SMS — from a single centralized dashboard. You can organize them based on factors such as the date and time received, priority, subject matter, and some other categories.

Customer service software also automates time-consuming tasks, like sending initial responses to customer emails. This is just a snapshot of the ways these platforms can help your team reduce your response times. We highly recommend leveraging software to optimize your customer support process. 

Related: Learn how Gorgias' support performance and live agent performance dashboards can help you measure

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3) Utilize customer service automation for 24/7 service 

We touched on it briefly, but customer service automation can free up your customer support team significantly during business hours. It provides customers with immediate, automated responses that you can personalize to make sound as friendly as a manual response. These small measures free up your team to focus on more complicated and pressing tasks.

That’s not all. Setting up an auto-responder allows you to send customers an all-important first response any time you like. There’s no need for a live representative, and a quick response could prevent another ticket or message from piling up to deal with in the morning. Most software lets you automate responses and send them via email, chatbot, app notification, text and more. 

Recommended reading: Ecommerce Customer Support Best Practices

4) Use scripts and email templates 

Having your customer service team type out a custom response to every new email they receive from a customer is inefficient. In addition to using an auto-responder to send out an automated first response, one simple way to speed up your reply time is to make use of scripts and email templates. 

To build your scripts, start by identifying common questions and issues that your support team encounters most frequently. You can then create helpful boilerplate answers with blank spots to plug in customer details using your software or other tools. 

One pro tip is to look back at positive customer feedback or five-star interactions to get ideas. See which answers made customers feel heard and satisfied while also solving their issues quickly. For live customer support channels such as phone calls or live chat, you can create scripts for each FAQ that representatives can follow. 

Leveraging scripts and email templates ensures that your team members aren't having to type out the same response over and over again to commonly asked questions, enabling them to provide service in a more efficient and timely manner. 

5) Create a system to categorize and segment priority tickets 

Some customer support tickets should take higher priority than others. A customer that’s reporting a fraudulent purchase with their debit card needs a quicker response than someone who’s asking if there are any discounts they can use.

• Start by prioritizing tickets that have been open the longest. These are the customers who may be growing impatient, or even angry enough not to shop or work with your business again.
• From there, you’ll want to prioritize the most complicated or resource-intensive tickets. This helps your team get a head start on the tickets that could end up taking a lot of time to resolve. 

Beyond prioritizing tickets, it’s also helpful to categorize them if they share similarities. Grouping similar tickets together boost efficiency. For example, your team can come up with one main solution (create a new discount code because the previous one is buggy) and easily resolve the entire group of tickets in a single pass. 

If you’re making use of email templates, a single rep may be able to clear an entire batch of tickets in seconds or minutes.  

6) Offer multichannel customer support options 

Every channel where you communicate with customers — from your main phone line and website to messaging platforms like social media and live chat support — should include customer support options. Having multichannel customer support options offers a couple of advantages.  

For one, it makes it easy for customers to reach out and engage with your company wherever they are. You may be serving customers across demographics, from Generation Z to baby boomers, all of whom have different communication preferences. The customer’s initial outreach is their first interaction with your customer service experience, and it’s great to start on a note of convenience and ease no matter who the customer is. 

Setting up multichannel customer support options can also give your response teams quicker access to the requests that they receive, allowing them to organize by priority no matter where the request originates.

Recommended reading: Customer Support Metrics

7) Leverage self-service to reduce tickets 

Any time a customer can resolve their issue on their own is a success for your business. Customer self-service support keeps your team’s hands-free and prevents one more support ticket from entering the queue. Here are some useful resources you can provide customers: 

• Company blog
• Product instructions, how-tos, and video tutorials
• FAQ page
• Community forum 
• Dictionaries or glossaries 
• Case studies 
• Knowledge base or help center

Equipped with this information, many customers will be able to answer their questions — and perhaps discover or try something new with your product. As you’re putting these resources together, think about how tech-savvy your audience is and how long they want to spend reading about their issue. 

With Gorgias Automate, you can improve your live chat widget with a self-service flows that let your customers track and manage their orders without any agent interaction. You can also enable a chatbot. Customers can type in their question or comments and the chatbot will pull up your content that matches those keywords. 

All of these tools combine to reduce the number of tickets your support team receives in the first place, which can ultimately result in faster response times for the tickets that do appear. 

Recommended reading on live chat:

• ‍9 Live Chat Support Metrics You Should Follow to Satisfy More Online Shoppers
• The Impact of Live Chat on Sales

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Gorgias helps support teams reduce response times

We’ve covered a variety of ways to roll back your response times, but that’s not all these best practices accomplish. They also optimize your customer service workflow overall, ensuring your customer service interactions are positive and helpful and your team isn’t overloaded or losing time to repetitive, manual tasks. 

At Gorgias, we’re proud to offer a number of different customer service software solutions, from live-chat solutions to chatbot solutions, to email auto-responders. To learn more about how Gorgias can help you speed up your response times in a way that is affordable and hassle-free, book a demo today.

As rising inflation, higher-than-ever customer acquisition costs, and the looming possibility of a global recession continue to weigh heavy on the minds of many brands, driving revenue via great customer service is now more important than ever before. In these turbulent times, many online businesses are doubling down on customer experience to retain and grow business through upsells, repeat purchases, and referrals — all of which offer higher ROI than pursuing new customers.

It’s clear that happy customers are a great path to growth. But how can you create a customer service strategy that leads to happy customers? We’ll suggest 16 tactics below to improve customer service in 2024, including new ways to incentivize your customer support team and self-service resources you can use to reduce customer effort. 

What’s the link between customer service and revenue?

Business leaders often view customer service as a necessary expense rather than an opportunity for business growth. However, every customer interaction along the entire customer journey presents a chance to create revenue for your business. Your customer service team’s exceptional customer service can generate revenue by:

• Answering pre-sales questions to improve your conversion rate
• Encourages happy customers to refer others to your brand
• Create loyal customers through helpful customer support
• Drive upsells and customer retention

According to data from Emplify, one in six customers will leave a company after just one negative customer care experience, while 86% of customers will leave a company after two negative customer service interactions. And 73% of customers will leave a brand after just a few poor interactions, according to a 2022 Coveo report. These negative interactions catch like wildfire and are an early warning of a sinking ship.

It’s not all doom and gloom, though — better customer service can be a huge differentiator for your brand, especially when you consider the value of loyal customers. According to data from 10,000 Gorgias, returning customers make up only 21% of a brand’s customers but generate 41% of orders and 44% of overall revenue.

‎16 tips to improve your customer service and drive more revenue

Let’s take a look at our top 16 tips to get your team on the way to creating a better customer experience — and generating more revenue in the process.

1) Incentivize your customer service agents to meet business goals

We already discussed the impact your customer service representatives can have on business outcomes. To get serious about providing the best customer service possible, align your customer service team’s KPIs around demonstrated business goals.

Here are a few business-related KPIs that your team can focus on improving:

• Customer satisfaction (CSAT)
• Conversion rate
• Total sales from support

Consider going a step beyond setting KPIs and offering bonuses, gift cards, and other incentives for individual agents or teams that reach their goals as part of your customer support team management strategy. It’s common for sales — why not customer support, if they’re also driving revenue through customer interactions?

2) Build a user-friendly customer help center

When customers encounter a problem, they won’t reach out to you immediately. In fact, 88% of customers say that they expect companies to provide self-service support tools so that they can resolve issues on their own.

How can you help your customers help themselves? You need to build a good FAQ page or knowledge base, also called a help center, to help your customers answer their questions without having to contact an agent. Important considerations to keep in mind as you go about designing your help center include:

• Have a clearly visible search bar at the top of every page
• Include a prominent CTA to contact a human agent
• Organize your help center in categories like Product, Shipping, and Returns

For an example of an excellent ecommerce help center that accomplishes all of these objectives, check out our post on FAQ pages and help centers.

‎3) Use technology to remember 100% of customer details

Every customer has a unique conversation history, order history, and sentiment toward your brand. Whenever you talk to those customers, you should make an effort to personalize the conversation by using their names, acknowledging past interactions, using past order information instead of asking them to repeat it, and so on. Thankfully, technology makes offering this sort of personalized customer service much easier than it used to be.

Tools such as Gorgias’ Customer Sidebar can provide your customer support team with the data that they need to offer each customer a personalized customer service experience:

‎4) Prioritize complaints and pre-sale actions

Customer complaints and pre-sale actions are high-priority customer service tickets since they can directly impact your company's revenue. Addressing customer complaints prevents customer churn and encourages repeat purchases. Pre-sale actions such as questions about product sizing or your shipping policy present the opportunity to drive a sale home — if your agents answer in time.

You can develop your customer service team to prioritize these tickets manually, or you can prioritize them automatically within your helpdesk. If you use Gorgias, a combination of automated Rules and Intents can automatically identify certain ticket types — like customer complaints, pre-sales questions, or tickets from VIP customers — and flag them as high priority.

Check out our Director of Support’s post on how to prioritize customer service requests for guidance.

5) Only use positive/professional language

Sometimes, it’s not about what you say — it’s about how you say it. This rings especially true for customer service. You must make sure you sound level-headed, calm, and collected whenever you contact a customer.

If you’re delivering bad news, there’s no way to sugarcoat it. You need to be direct and professional about it. At the same time, you should also try to find a way to solve the problem.

For instance, if a customer has ordered something that was out of stock, an automated email telling them that you don’t have the product right now won’t cut it. You should tell the customer when you expect it to be available or perhaps offer some other products instead.

It's best to have a written procedure ready to respond to frustrated customers so your customer support agents know how to deal with them without having to worry too much. Of course, active listening is important to hear the customer’s response and settle on next steps.

See our post on customer support tips for more suggestions like this.

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6) Introduce proactive customer support to your strategy

‎The classic image of customer support is reactive. When your customers encounter a problem, they come to your customer service reps for a solution. However, that doesn’t mean that you can’t approach certain problems proactively.

Case in point: shipping delays. In the past couple of months, ecommerce shipments have increased drastically. Recent reports indicate that there have been 47% more shipments since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. With such an increase, shipment delays are bound to happen.

To keep your customers in the loop, you can send out proactive communication about shipping setbacks. This will set customer expectations right and prepare them for any possible delays.

Another great example of proactive customer service is Gorgias' live chat campaigns, a tool that lets your team automatically reach out proactively to visitors browsing your website to ask if they need help, offer product recommendations or discounts, and guide them through the buying process. 

‎Creating clear product descriptions and convenient self-help resources is another great way to be proactive about customer service and can help reduce ticket volume while also improving the customer experience.

7) Be as clear as possible about your policies

More often than not, customers are worried about the fine print. As a matter of fact, 67% of online shoppers will check a company's return policy before making a purchase. Sloppily-written policies will turn off a lot of customers. Every policy on your website needs to be clearly articulated so users can easily find what they’re looking for.

Creating or updating your refund and return policies? Our policy generator can help you get started. We’re a big fan of the detail and organization of Steve Madden’s return policy:

8) Use automation strategically to dedicate your attention to high-impact tickets

Many tickets that a customer service rep handles throughout the day are repetitive, straightforward questions. Many of your agents are likely spending hours each day simply telling customers where their order is. Answering these common customer questions is a key part of good customer service, but these tickets are not high-impact tickets for revenue generation.

Fortunately, a customer service platform like Gorgias can help you completely automate these tickets so that your team can focus on more impactful tickets (such as escalated complaints and pre-sale discussions).

‎By creating Macros with answers to common questions and automated Rules to trigger with zero agent effort, you can free up your support agents to go the extra mile and provide a more personalized touch to the tickets that matter most.

9) Nurture customer relationships with community engagement

For some, a community engagement strategy consists of asking customers to like their page on Facebook, follow their business on Twitter, and not much else. Having thousands of followers and likes is a good look for your business, sure. But you can’t let those followers go to waste.

Engage your followers and get them talking about the experience with your brand. Then, ask them for some feedback about your business, operations, and employees. You can then use that information to tweak your business.

Here are a few questions you should ask yourself before building a community:

• What do you plan on doing with the community?
• Are you doing everything you can to engage the members?
• What type of information can you get from the members?

10) Use post-interaction surveys to collect customer feedback in real-time

If you’re looking to improve your customer service, you should send a customer satisfaction (CSAT) survey after every interaction. These short, simple surveys give you a snapshot of the quality of customer support you currently offer, which is a great first step toward improving customer support. 

Gorgias’ CSAT survey feature can be automatically sent out every time a customer interacts with one of your service reps. After every interaction, customers will get the following simple survey asking them to rate the interaction and, if they want, explain their answer:

‎Read our full guide to improving CSAT scores.

11) Train your employees in the areas where your customer service is weak

Many companies don’t place as much emphasis as they should on hiring and training talented customer service reps. Instead, they view the position as an entry-level, outsourceable role that doesn't justify a comprehensive onboarding process. However, if you want your customer service agents to perform like sales associates and drive revenue, then it’s essential to teach them the right customer service skills.

Your customer service reps are the front lines of your company and some of the only employees your customers will directly interact with. When you train customer service reps with an emphasis on revenue generation, you can turn your customer service team into a source of revenue that more than justifies its investment. Rather than simply instructing your agents to put out fires, train them on how to convert customer interactions into sales and promote customer loyalty. 

‎Read our complete guide to customer service training for more guidance. 

12) Follow up with the customer after they've had a chance to use your product or service

Following up with customers who have purchased your product/service (even if they don't contact you first) has many benefits: For one, it shows that you are committed to their satisfaction, even with their post-purchase experience.

It also provides you with the opportunity to collect valuable customer feedback. This feedback can be used to improve your product and overall customer experience and is something that many successful companies go to great lengths to collect.

Lastly, following up with customers can be a direct source of revenue generation. Recommending additional products to customers based on their experience with a previous purchase is an example of how following up with customers can lead to sales.

The most effective way to follow up with your customers is by setting up an automated email campaign that sends them an email after their purchase. What these emails include will depend on your specific goals (i.e., survey forms if you are trying to collect customer feedback or personalized product recommendations if you are trying to generate repeat sales).

13) Create a customer loyalty program

The more incentives you create for your customers to remain loyal to your brand, the better. While many considerations go into generating high ecommerce retention rates, creating a customer loyalty program is one proven effective option.

Customer loyalty programs give customers a financial incentive to remain loyal to your brand. They also turn the shopping experience into somewhat of a game, where reward points are the goal and making repeat purchases is how you score them. The more creative and fun you can make your customer loyalty program, the more effective it stands to be.

Along with repeat purchases, you can use customer loyalty programs to encourage other customer actions such as referrals, reviews, and survey responses by rewarding these actions with reward points as well.

Software solutions such as Smile.io and LoyaltyLion make it incredibly easy to create and manage customer loyalty programs – and they integrate with Gorgias to pull loyalty data into your helpdesk. These tools allow you to automatically track customer actions and reward loyalty-building actions with points and discounts.

14) Consider offering free shipping to qualifying customers

According to Small Business Trends, 66% of U.S. customers expect free shipping on every online purchase, while 80% expect free shipping if their purchase total exceeds a certain amount. 

Even if you have to raise your product pricing by a small percentage to maintain profitable margins, it’s still likely to positively impact both customer satisfaction and your conversion rates. Logical or not, a $50 subtotal plus free shipping is more appealing than a $45 plus $5 shipping.

If you can't afford to offer free shipping on every purchase, offering free shipping on purchases that exceed a certain amount can help you meet customer expectations and increase your average order value. For example, offering free shipping on orders over $100 will encourage many customers who have purchased just under that total to add an extra product or two to their cart.

Here’s what qualified free shipping looks like on apparel brand Woxer’s website:

15) Provide a solution for items that are out of stock

Create a policy for handling customer support tickets regarding out-of-stock products. Just a few ways to head off customer complaints regarding out-of-stock products include:

• Offering customers alternative products
• Placing an emergency order from your supplier
• Purchasing from an alternative supplier
• Offering customers discounts for their inconvenience

Along with offering one or more of these remedies, it’s also important to communicate effectively with customers trying to purchase an out-of-stock product. Follow up with them frequently to let them know the status of their order and when they can expect it to arrive.

Solutions for out-of-stock products can also be proactive and don't always require a customer to contact support. Giving customers the option to sign up for automated email alerts when a product is back in stock is one passive way to generate sales while improving customer satisfaction.

16) Add more customer touchpoints to shift to an omnichannel approach

According to a Salesforce report, 78% of customers prefer to choose between a variety of channels to reach a brand’s customer support. Depending on the issue, their mood, or the company, a customer may want to send a DM on social media, have a phone call, send a text message, or ask you their question on your website’s live chat. 

One of the biggest challenges support teams face when managing multiple channels is keeping up with messages spread across platforms. That’s why a helpdesk that unifies all these channels is so valuable: Your team can spend less time looking for messages and copy/pasting information, and more time providing quality care across all channels.

‎Examples of excellent customer service

Good customer service entails much more than being willing and able to help solve a customer's problems. If you want to transform your customer service team into a powerful source of revenue, here are some elements of great customer service to strive for:

• Your first-response time is below two minutes and your average-handle time is below one hour: Customers expect quick responses, making first-response/average-handle times two of the most important customer support metrics to track and lower.
• You have clear and lenient return and refund policies: Use Gorgias' refund policy generator to easily create a clear and well-thought-out return/refund policy for your store. (By the way, Gorgias data shows that offering free returns is actually cost-neutral because of the boost in revenue from customer loyalty it provides.)
• You reduce customer effort with self-service options like an FAQ page, a help center, self-service flows, and/or chatbots: Providing customers with self-service options can reduce the workload for your team members and improve customer satisfaction.
• You can clearly present the impact customer service has on revenue: Customer service teams often have to prove their ROI to earn the budget they need for additional agents and new tools, making it important to connect the dots between customer service and revenue growth.

Examples of bad customer service

Bad customer experience comes in many shapes and sizes. But some recurring elements leave customers feeling completely frustrated. Research from Hotjar reveals the top issues that have the most damaging effect on customer experience:

• Long waits and slow response times: If your customers are left waiting for your response for too long, they’ll probably go to your competitor.
• Failing to understand customer needs: Answering customer questions before truly understanding them will result in a frustrating customer experience.
• Unresolved issues and unanswered questions: Leaving tickets unanswered won’t leave a good impression and will leave your customer dissatisfied
• Lack of customer service personalization: Sending out generic responses to customer inquiries only shows that you don’t really care about your customers

Learn more about why customer service matters and how to measure it in this post from our Head of Success & Support: Evaluating Your Customer Service Program: Why, Challenges, and KPIs That Matter

Build a customer service engine that generates revenue

So far, the past few years have presented plenty of challenges for online retailers and 2024 will likely be no different. Moving forward, the ecommerce stores that can leverage customer service to their full revenue-generating potential will be the ones that succeed.

Want to learn more about how you can build a customer service operation designed to maximize your company's bottom line? Check out our CX growth playbook, a free resource that dives into 18 tactics to boost revenue by 44% by improving customer experience, based on 25+ interviews with top ecommerce brands and analysis of 10,000+ Gorgias customers.

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We’ve all heard that customer experience is the new battleground for businesses. Between the rising costs of customer acquisition and the huge benefits of loyal customers, your ability to quickly satisfy customers is key to customer retention and long-term growth; this is what makes customer service so important.

Some small businesses manage customer service requests directly on whichever support channel customers use. But this approach doesn’t support growth because you’ll lose hours each week shuffling between email, Facebook, and Instagram (or wherever your customers contact you) and copy/pasting information between platforms. Plus, you won’t have access to time-saving automation features and highly requested self-service options — more on those below. 

In this article, we’ll explain the top benefits of using a helpdesk and provide tips to help you use this tool effectively to improve customer experience — which will help you retain more customers. Keep reading to find out why it pays to become part of the 58% of businesses that actively use a helpdesk.

What is a helpdesk?

A helpdesk is commonly known as a place where customers go to get answers to their questions. In the ecommerce world, businesses use helpdesk software to help their customers with issues and questions surrounding products and orders.

Helpdesk software tools allow teams to collaborate on managing, organizing, responding to, and reporting on customer requests (or tickets). This is particularly important since there are several key metrics to track relating to customer tickets, such as first response time (FRT), average resolution time, unresolved tickets, and customer satisfaction (among others). These metrics can help you better understand how your customer service team is performing and gives you solid data — versus relying solely on customer feedback. 

It’s important to note that not all helpdesks are created equal. Helpdesks are a broad category that can range from simple ticketing systems to all-in-one customer service platforms that offer help centers, self-service options, automation workflows, and robust reporting. Some helpdesks, like Gorgias, are built for specific industries — our helpdesk is for ecommerce merchants:

Types of helpdesks 

Helpdesk ticketing systems are crucial for simplifying service management. It becomes very chaotic to manage increasing support tickets as your business grows without a centralized helpdesk ticketing system in your ecommerce tech stack.

But a customer support team needs a very different type of helpdesk than an IT department. 

Here are the main categories of helpdesks:

Digital or cloud-based helpdesks

Digital helpdesk providers host your helpdesk on their server and you pay them either a monthly or annual fee to use it. This option is ideal for small- and medium-sized businesses that don’t have an in-house IT team to build software from scratch. You avoid the hassle (and expense) of hosting and maintaining the helpdesk software yourself. 

If you’re looking for a way to provide better customer support, you’ll probably want this kind of helpdesk.

On-site helpdesks

This is the DIY option for helpdesks. Your company could purchase the software license for a helpdesk software tool and then host the software on your servers. The greatest benefit of this type of helpdesk is that you have complete control over data and security. That said, most cloud-based helpdesks are actually safer thanks to advanced security features.

As the world moves increasingly to the cloud, on-site helpdesks are fading into the past. Most organizations that keep on-site helpdesks are government offices or law firms that don’t trust external servers with sensitive data — and have IT infrastructure to protect the data themselves.

Enterprise or large organization helpdesks

Enterprise helpdesks can either be digital or on-site, but what distinguishes them from other types of helpdesks is that they are specifically built for large organizations. Usually, they are far more customized than an out-of-the-box solution and come with much more dedicated support (and higher pricing).

Unless you know you need enterprise software, this type of helpdesk is probably not for you.

Open-source helpdesks

An open-source helpdesk allows developers to freely access the source code without having to pay for proprietary software. This type of helpdesk is often free, but you’ll need an IT team to build and customize the software to suit your company’s needs. It’s also important to note that this type of helpdesk is more susceptible to customer data breaches and outages. Plus, open-source helpdesks don’t get the same level of dedicated support as an option you purchase.

Internal IT helpdesks

Some companies, usually larger enterprises like hospitals and universities, set up an internal IT helpdesk to help employees solve technical issues. Instead of conducting service management through email, an IT services team might set up a portal with self-service information (like troubleshooting guides) and an easy way to submit support requests to get extra help from an IT support member. 

Just like your customer support team, a helpdesk organizes support requests and saves time for the point of contact by collecting incoming requests and deflecting avoidable ones with self-service.

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Benefits of using helpdesk software

Above all else, helpdesk software helps you improve customer satisfaction and leads to more happy customers for your brand. Below, we’ll explore five of the most significant benefits of incorporating helpdesk software within your organization.

1) Better customer support helps your bottom line

Customer experience solutions have been proven to produce a 633% ROI increase over three years. Although helpdesks weren’t singled out in this Forrester study, the fact that they play a role in improving customer satisfaction means they also yield a positive ROI as part of the customer support function. 

As a reference point, the average merchant using Gorgias’s helpdesk sees about 5% higher revenue than before they used the tool.

If you want to learn more about the impact of helpdesks on your revenue, check out our guide to customer service ROI. Alternatively, see how Gorgias’ helpdesk resulted in over $9 million in revenue for BrüMate’s exclusively from the support team:

Customer Story: Brümate's CX Team Generating Millions Taking Care of Their Brücrew

2) Quick response times

66% of customers expect an immediate response whenever they reach out to a business. Helpdesk solutions organize customer queries in a way that makes it easier to prioritize these tickets, use automation to deflect repetitive and low-impact tickets, use templates to give customer service representatives a head start, and so much more to reduce customer wait time.  

See how our customer, Emuaid, used Gorgias’ automation functions to drastically reduce their first response time to 48 seconds (an 8% decrease). Since using Gorgias, their tickets are now centralized in one place, their customer support process is streamlined and supported by automation, and their agents are more productive than ever. Best of all? Customers spend far less time waiting for responses.

3) No missed or lost tickets

Things get messy when a company doesn‘t use helpdesk software — there‘s an unclear chain of support ticket handling. This frustrates customers because they have to repeat themselves to each new support agent they speak to. A helpdesk support tool organizes all your customer conversations from multiple channels into one dashboard and includes clear notifications about the number of open tickets, ensuring you never miss or lose any.

With Gorgias’s live statistics dashboard, you can even see which agents have open tickets in their queue, how many tickets they’ve closed this shift, and more:

For example, Milligram was able to use Gorgias to integrate into their full tech stack to condense their customer service tickets into a single platform. The result was a 33% reduction in response time and an uptick in ticket volume. 

4) Comprehensive customer information in one ticket view

While not all helpdesks offer this functionality, seeing information about customers within the helpdesk is a game-changer for companies trying to offer fast, personalized support. 

For example, Gorgias shows all historical order information and every conversation and transaction a customer has had with your brand — including on social media. This context allows you to understand the customer’s past interactions with your brand (whether positive or negative), leading to a quicker, more productive conversation. You can also avoid asking customers to repeat information they’ve already told your brand. 

You can even bring in customer information from other ecommerce apps like Klaviyo and Yotpo in the ticket’s sidebar view.

5) Combined power from integrating your favorite apps

Your apps are stronger together. With the right helpdesk, you can install integrations that keep agents from having to switch between apps and copy/paste customer information. All the customer information they need is accessible from the helpdesk.

Check out Gorgias’ app store to learn about our integrations, which include many top ecommerce apps you probably already use.

6) Enhanced agent productivity and collaboration

HubSpot research finds that 86% of teams using a helpdesk report greater productivity. This isn’t surprising since helpdesk software:

• Improves communication within a customer support team, because agents can privately comment on tickets
• Allows your team to prioritize requests so that the most urgent and time-sensitive queries can be addressed first through a triage strategy
• Enables your customer service team members to create an escalation plan so that urgent queries are given to the right teams

For instance, Death Wish Coffee Co. used Gorgias’ helpdesk tool to win back lost time for their support team. They had an ambitious goal of hitting a 200% growth target and saving 10 to 15 minutes helped them achieve the focus necessary to make that happen.

7) More consistency in your customer experience

Most helpdesk software allows you to turn your best messaging into templates for your whole team to use. This speeds up your helpdesk process, leading to a more reliable first response time, bringing consistency to your organization's CX, and helping your whole team (even the newer members) make a bigger impact by having the right words every time.

With Gorgias, templates are called Macros and include variables that personalize the message for every customer. Variables are like blanks that automatically pull customer information from your ecommerce platform, using customer support phrases that fit your brand. Personalized information without any copy/pasting:

8) Improved business operations

Helpdesk software helps you create more efficient business processes. All of your customer support metrics are brought into one system for better reporting, there’s a central dashboard that makes it easy to track customer issues, and all of this data can be used to better inform business decisions and optimize your support process. 

You’re also better able to meet your service level agreements (SLAs) thanks to the accountability of clear reporting dashboards.

Check out how Gorgias’ revenue statistics board helps brands quickly understand and communicate their impact on the company’s revenue:

9) Reclaimed agent time 

Automate repetitive requests, use templated responses to respond faster, and keep your agents from burning out so they can spend more time on the tickets that actually move your business forward. 

Princess Polly was able to do just that. Since using Gorgias, Princess Polly increased their customer service efficiency by 40%, lowered resolution time by 80% and first response time by 95%, and improved one-touch tickets by 15%. 

Trying to level up your customer service? Read our guide to essential customer service best practices.

Essential helpdesk features: What makes for a good helpdesk?

A good helpdesk app must have six key features to make technical support easy for both your customers and your helpdesk team. Let’s look more closely at why these features are important.

1) Multichannel communication

Google, in partnership with Forrester research, conducted research on what businesses need to know about communicating with customers. They discovered that customers prefer asynchronous communication such as text, social media, third-party messaging, and chat through a mobile app when trying to communicate with a brand. The businesses that do well are those that provide multichannel communication (whether asynchronous or in real time). In fact, these businesses do so well that they are 3.4 times more likely to experience revenue growth, according to the study.

A good helpdesk app pulls all customer queries and interactions from multiple sources into one platform, including social media interactions. There‘s no need to make futile attempts at keeping tabs on communication across all these channels. So, your customers can communicate with you on the channels they‘re most comfortable with rather than being forced to submit support tickets.

Features to note:

• Supports all the channels where your customers might show up, including email, live chat, phone, SMS, messaging apps (WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger), and social media
• Aggregates all of those channels in one ticket view per customer
• Allows agents to like and reply to comments on social media

Related reading: 8 customer service trends for the coming year

2) Ticket management

It‘s important to note that your helpdesk must offer you the capabilities to effectively organize and monitor customer tickets at any point of the day. 

Features to note:

• Creating, closing, re-opening, submitting, and resolving tickets
• Assigning and reassigning helpdesk tickets 
• Automated ticket routing, categories, and tags 
• Public and private actions on tickets 
• Canned responses, rule-based automated messages 
• Comprehensive ticket views that show historical customer interactions

3) Self-service features

It might surprise you just how badly customers want self-service options: 88% of respondents to a recent Microsoft survey report that they expect businesses to have online self-service support portals like helpdesks. But with this being the case, it’s pretty bleak that only 42% of teams are using self-service helpdesks to resolve customer issues. 

For example, an FAQ page (or better yet, a fully built-out knowledge base) can give customers an easy way to find detailed answers to their questions — no need to reach out to customer support and wait for agents.

Here’s an example of a Help Center built with Gorgias, which is free with all plans:

You can take self-service a step further by integrating self-service order management and quick, automated responses to your live chat widget to give customers instant answers and lessen the load on your agents:

Features to note:

• Knowledge base articles
• Community forums
• Self-service options in the live chat widget
• Customization options 

4) Automation capabilities

Helpdesks allow you to automate much of ticket communication. For instance, if a lot of customers need immediate help with issues already covered in your knowledge base, an automated response can direct them to the relevant resource — reducing the time spent on tickets. Even better, it can give them a personalized answer and take action based on the request — like updating their shipping address.

These automation capabilities will also help you resolve simple customer issues faster and free your agents to work on higher-impact tickets. Here’s an example. Loop earplugs used Gorgias’ Automate and integrations to decrease response and resolution times, and reduce “where is my order?” queries from 17% to 5%.

A mix of automation and self-service can deflect up to a third of your incoming tickets, according to Gorgias data, freeing your agents up for the tickets that matter to your business.

Features to note:

• Automatically tag and assign tickets based on the ticket’s contents or channel
• Automatically respond to certain tickets with pre-written Macros
• Trigger actions automatically, like canceling an order or updating a credit card number
• Provide automated answers in your live chat widget

5) Reporting functionalities

A helpdesk should have reporting tools that allow you to measure, analyze, and track your customer experience and helpdesk agents’ performance. They should bring your metrics into a single, interactive dashboard you can use to make real decisions and improve your bottom line. 

Gorgias has dashboards for individual agent performance, impact on revenue, customer satisfaction, and other important metrics like first-response time and resolution time.

Features to note: 

• Ticket-related metrics like tickets created, replied, closed, sent, resolution time, response time, etc. 
• Customer satisfaction like the percentage of how many surveys were responded to, the average rating, and rating distribution 
• Reporting on most commonly used tags and intents to understand what types of tickets are making up the bulk of your ticket volume
• View of most common product issues being brought to the customer support team so you can make improvements

6) Third-party integrations

Is your chosen helpdesk easy to connect with other tools or pre-built integrations? How many integrations are available? How many integrations do you actually need? Do you have to pay for those integrations? These are the questions you should keep in mind when looking for a helpdesk tool. 

For example, if you want an ecommerce helpdesk, you should choose the software that integrates well with the ecommerce platforms and apps you use, like Klaviyo, Recharge, and Yotpo — making Gorgias a top contender.

Meanwhile, if you have a large IT team, you may want to consider helpdesk software like Jira Service Desk because it provides many IT-focused third-party integrations. 

Features to note:

• Seamless integration of different apps with your helpdesk, bringing all of the customer data into one view
• Deep integration with the functionality of those apps for multi-app workflows (e.g. building segments in Klaviyo from Gorgias attributes, like a win-back campaign)

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Is a helpdesk the same as a CRM?

No, a helpdesk isn’t the same as a CRM.

CRM stands for customer relationship management and is a system for managing relationships with customers. It’s one central place that helps organize all the details about your leads and customers. Using this system, you can get a full picture of every customer and understand the status of every customer relationship. 

A CRM typically doesn’t have functionalities for ticket management because its primary focus is on data from sales and accounts. But ticket management is a fundamental component of a helpdesk — hence the difference between both software solutions. Platforms such as Salesforce are sometimes confused as helpdesk tools, but their focus is primarily CRM, not helpdesk management.

Strong helpdesk platforms like Gorgias do have some features of CRMs, like aggregating all interactions with a given customer in one location alongside loyalty data, marketing campaign responses, etc.

Is a helpdesk the same as a live chat?

No, but some helpdesks also include live chat software. 

Live chat tools are typically hosted on websites and allow website visitors to communicate with a brand in real time. Helpdesk software pulls customer requests from multiple places such as email, phone, and social media. Live chat is a component of more robust helpdesk software, but not vice versa.

Here’s an example: Gorgias is a helpdesk that includes live chat functionality, meaning all Gorgias users can install a live chat widget to their website in just a few clicks. Once installed, live chat becomes a channel within the helpdesk, so you can answer live chat messages, emails, social media DMs, and more without leaving the Gorgias helpdesk platform:

Related: Our list of the best live chat apps on the market.

Is a helpdesk the same as a service desk?

Most organizations don’t need to distinguish between a service desk and a helpdesk. They’re often used interchangeably to describe a tool used to centralize service management and improve the end user’s support experience. And, very few companies have both. 

Technically, a service desk is a bit broader than a helpdesk. While a helpdesk’s core feature is to help you quickly collect and respond to quick-fix customer support issues, a service desk could also include more account management features and feature requests. However, with today’s helpdesks, you can also achieve many of those same goals. 

If you’re looking for a tool to help organize and streamline your customer service efforts, we recommend sticking with the word helpdesk. Or you can call it a customer service platform, which better represents the breadth of features you can expect from modern-day tools.  

Key helpdesk statistics 

If you’re still not quite sold on the value of helpdesk services, let’s take a look at some numbers. Here are some eye-opening statistics that show just how crucial helpdesks are in helping your business provide the best possible customer service experience.

The helpdesk market size is projected to reach $11 billion by 2023

This statistic comes from research published by Transparency Market Research. In 2020, the online helpdesk market size was $8.9 million and is projected to increase to nearly $20 million by 2028. Therefore, not only will helpdesks continue to increase in popularity, but online helpdesks will take a bigger piece of the pie as time progresses.

90% of consumers regard resolution as their most important customer service issue

A helpdesk is useless if customers still aren’t getting their issues resolved, as this statistic by KPMG supports. A helpdesk can’t be used as a bandaid to hide other customer service issues that may exist within your company. Make speedy issue resolution a priority and if that isn’t happening, dig a bit deeper to discover underlying issues.

84% of shoppers are willing to spend more on products/services to get better customer service

This statistic comes from research by Gladly. As mentioned earlier, good customer service improves your bottom line. People will spend more money and become repeat customers if you offer the right support.

Experiences that don’t meet expectations cost businesses up to $4.7 trillion annually

Qualtrics finds that many customers are dissatisfied with the service they receive from brands, and that dissatisfaction costs a pretty penny.

One of the things you can do to make customers happier is providing an omnichannel experience where they can voice their concerns via their choice of online platform (social media, live chat on your website, etc.). The trick is to respond to them as quickly as possible and work swiftly to resolve their issue to provide an excellent customer service experience — poor experiences will cause your company to lose money.

How to choose the best helpdesk software for your business

Each company’s needs are slightly different, so we encourage signing up for a few demos and trials while shopping for a helpdesk. Here are a few considerations to keep in mind while reviewing your options:

• Pricing: Does the tool fit into your budget and does it offer multiple pricing plans?
• Ticket organization: Does the platform have an intuitive, visual way of sharing which tickets need attention, and from which agent?
• Automation: Does the platform feature time-saving automation features for your team and customers?
• Omnichannel support: Does the platform work with all the channels you use, from texting to social media?
• Integrations: Does the platform connect to tools you already (or plan to) use?

Shopping for a helpdesk? Check out these articles to guide your shopping:

• The best Shopify helpdesk apps
• The best software for customer service
• 150+ top tools for ecommerce

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Final thoughts: Helpdesks are CX must-haves that keep you ahead of the competition

The research is there: Helpdesks are an easy way to boost your bottom line, improve your response time, offer self-service resources, automate repetitive tasks, and free up time for your agents to handle more complex tickets. Getting into the heart of the customer journey and creating a solid customer experience can help you retain existing customers, and draw in new ones. 

Not satisfied with your current helpdesk solution or don’t know where to start? Gorgias has a cloud-based helpdesk system that integrates with leading ecommerce store providers such as Shopify, Magneto, and BigCommerce.

‍Book a demo to learn more about the results Gorgias can help you achieve.