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As a manager of customer experience and retention, I've seen my fair share of customer service challenges. I even co-host the Oopsie Podcast, where we chat with leaders in DTC about their biggest on-job mistakes. 

While the occasional error is inevitable, these random blunders don’t determine the quality of your company’s customer support. It’s really about how you address not only these one-off situations but also the bigger challenges that customer service teams face, day in and day out. 

In this article, I'll talk through 12 of the most common pitfalls plaguing growing support teams, and give actionable advice to resolve each one. 

With some awareness of these challenges, and the right systems to solve them, you’ll set your team up for success and give your customers the A+ experience that keeps them coming back.

Team management and resourcing challenges

Striking the right balance of staffing and skills for a customer service team is tricky. Under-resourcing leads to agent burnout, but overstaffing drives up costs and causes even bigger problems. 

Use the strategies ahead to better allocate your company resources, increase the productivity of your team, and maintain consistent service quality (without going over budget).

1) Proving the team’s ROI and getting buy-in for additional agents and tools

Let’s bring it back to basics for a moment: a customer support agent’s job is to answer questions and address customers’ problems, along with maintaining incredible feedback loops. However, too many teams strictly focus on clearing the ticket queue, measuring the impact of their support teams with non-business metrics like response and resolution times. 

Of course, these customer support metrics are important. But they’re only pieces of the larger picture of your team’s impact on the business.

Another common pitfall? Aiming for overly broad goals of “surprising and delighting” customers without a real understanding of how support impacts the whole customer journey or business ROI. 

The reality is that customer experience (largely driven by the support team) has many touch points across the entire customer journey (from pre-sales to post-sales) that lead to more sales and customer loyalty.

It’s important for your customer service team to proactively measure and prove ROI. Without knowing how much money your customer experience (CX) drives, you’ll never: 

1. Actually understand the impact you're having on the business 
2. Learn about the biggest opportunities to improve your CX 
3. Have up-to-date data about your impact on revenue to ask for more resources from company leaders 

Solution: Shift your support team’s metrics and KPIs

If you only measure first response time and average handle time, you're only seeing whether your agents are good at answering tickets. Not whether they’re boosting revenue. 

Expand your KPIs and reporting dashboard to track customer retention rate (CRR), customer satisfaction (CSAT) score, and conversion rate from customer service conversations. 

If those are your base measurements, you'll incentivize support team members to act more as sales agents by reaching out to customers proactively to suggest products. This encourages happy customers to leave product reviews and other tactics that boost revenue. 

And if you use Gorgias, like my team at Chomps, you can focus on CX-driven revenue even more with this Revenue Statistics dashboard:

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2) Hiring quality customer service agents at scale

As your business gets bigger, it’s tougher to build a team that provides high quality customer support. 

Growing a team? Easy, lots of people are looking for jobs. But scaling with the right people? That’s another challenge entirely. If you hire low-quality agents and provide poor training, your team’s morale, performance, and ROI will begin to snowball:

Solution: Hire agents like they’re sales associates

Hiring skilled customer service reps — that you compensate competitively — is the first key to solving this challenge. People often view customer service as a junior, anyone-can-do-it kind of role. That’s just not the case. 

Especially in ecommerce, customer support has a huge impact on revenue. Between pre-sales support and post-sales conversations that drive loyalty, it makes much more sense to hire support reps as though they are sales associates. Because, in many ways, they are. 

Once you hire an all-star team, choosing a customer support platform that includes built-in product training (like Gorgias Academy) can improve your onboarding process. Base your training on real data about your support team’s performance to help you focus your training on the areas that matter most.

Check out this ultimate guide to customer service hiring for a step-by-step process that attracts strategic, empathetic, and business-minded agents. 

3) Too many service tickets for your team to handle (especially during busy seasons)

For all the excitement of shopping events like Black Friday and Cyber Monday, there’s also a bit of pre-holiday scaries. Record sales also mean record tickets and record returns. It’s a great season, but an incredibly busy one.

The challenge is keeping up with a high degree of tickets without losing the fast responses and helpful, customer-centric approach. 

Solution: Deflect low-impact tickets (without sacrificing support quality) using self-service

The best way to keep up with tickets (and preserve enough energy to nail the most challenging tickets) is to lean on self-service in your chat widget. 

Self-service is a bit like a chatbot, but set up for customer success (rather than customer irritation). While chatbots try and imitate people, self-service provides simple functionality and workflows to answer common questions, track orders, request returns, and more. 

Watch this video to understand a bit more about what self-service from Gorgias’ Automate can do for your brand:

If you still struggle to meet demand during busy seasons, even with the help of automation, think about how you can engage your larger team, beyond even CX, to help. 

I always talk about how everyone at Chomps is trained on Gorgias (whether they work in CX or not) so that if we have a temporary increase of tickets, we can ask anyone in the company to step in and help out. We love the feature that Gorgias allows unlimited seats that allows this to be possible unlike other helpdesk platforms.

Another option to consider are services such as Simplr which provide remote support agents on demand.

4) Managing stress and avoiding burnout from high-pressure situations

Customer service teams are deeply empathetic, wanting to create the best experience possible for every customer. Unfortunately, this can be a double-edged sword. Even if 99% of customers are patient and understanding, it's hard not to dwell on the 1% who are rude or impatient. The frustrated customer messages and the social media callouts take an emotional toll over time, leading to burnout and turnover. 

When good reps leave due to unrelenting pressure, it creates gaps in knowledge and relationships that weaken customer service overall. The long-term effects can ripple through an organization, affecting morale, team cohesion, and the reputation of your customer service department.

Solution: Provide your team with the resources they need — before they need them

The key is being proactive in supporting your team, not reactive. If a rep tells you they need help, it's often too late — the stress has already set in. Instead, provide a range of resources ahead of time. 

• Add additional team members. Empower your team to request extra hands based on early warning signs. Bring in temporary contractors to handle seasonal spikes before things get unmanageable. Or, train employees in multiple departments across your company in CX so they can jump in to help. 
• Develop go-to templates and scripts. Respond to emails with existing templates (called Macros in Gorgias) — whether that’s replies to shoppers with shipping and delivery problems, customers who got the wrong product, or folks who want to provide positive feedback.
• Wellness resources. Implement wellness initiatives like reset breaks and mental health days before burnout sets in. 

Being proactive with resources shows your team you care, prevents disengagement, and ultimately provides better customer experiences. Supporting your team’s well-being strengthens service quality across the board.

Technology and customer service tools

New technologies can improve how your customer service teams operate, giving customers a better overall experience. But there’s always the whole "how the heck do we use this?" phase. offering innovative solutions to better processes and elevate customer experiences. 

Balancing the excitement of modernization with the hurdles of integration is a common challenge that teams grapple with. 

5) Choosing the right tools (and applying them correctly)

Many companies fall into the trap of investing in customer service tools that promise to do it all — from automated chatbots to crowded helpdesks. But trying to be everything for everyone often leads these generalized tools to frustrate customers more than help them.

A general chatbot, programmed to answer a broad range of queries, can misinterpret nuanced or specific questions, leading to inaccurate responses. Instead of guiding the customer towards a solution, it becomes an obstacle, prolonging the resolution process and frustrating customers more. Without customization, the promise of convenience is overshadowed by the bot's lack of specialized knowledge and inability to provide personalized customer service. 

Solution: Select tools built for your business goals

Rather than investing in generic tools that promise to do it all, carefully evaluate solutions purpose-built for your business’s specific needs. For ecommerce, this means identifying where automation can step in to handle high-volume repetitive inquiries like order tracking and refunds. Investing in tools designed to deflect these common questions frees your team to focus on more complex issues that need a human touch.

My team uses Gorgias Order Management Flows for self-service order tracking and automated return/refund requests. Customers can quickly check their status, report issues, or start a cancellation without agent assistance. Not only does this resolve the most frequent customer questions instantly, but it also reduces ticket volume so our customer service reps can spend time building relationships through personalized service.

With the right tools to handle common inquiries in the background, your team is empowered to deliver exceptional human-centric experiences. 

6) Creating a unified and seamless customer experience across various platforms

Customers jump between email, social, chat, and self-serve, expecting seamless support. A 2019 report from Salesforce found that 69% of customers want connected experiences, anticipating that the customer service representative they interact with across various channels to have the same information. 

Yet, delivering omnichannel customer service across all platforms isn’t easy. Siloed experiences across channels frustrate customers and complicate agent workflows.

Solution: Use an omnichannel helpdesk for a seamless customer experience

An omnichannel helpdesk, like Gorgias, unifies customer service delivery across platforms. Instead of toggling between disconnected inboxes, agents handle all queries from one tool. Customers receive quick, consistent assistance whether they email, chat, SMS, or reach out on social media.

Making use of omnichannel communication comes with a slew of benefits:

• Consistent experiences across all platforms build trust
• Seamless hand-offs between channels reduce repetition
• Unified context gives agents the entire history to personalize interactions
• Meeting customers on preferred channels boosts satisfaction
• Omnichannel analytics uncover service gaps to improve

With a unified helpdesk, interactions build loyalty rather than frustration. The simplicity of managing all touchpoints from a single window creates seamless customer and agent experiences.

Knowledge and training in customer service

Well-informed, knowledgeable agents provide better service. From inconsistent rep expertise to keeping docs updated, knowledge-related challenges impact customer satisfaction.

7) Customer service representatives don’t have the answer to customers' questions

If a customer calls your company and doesn't get the answer to their question, they won’t leave the interaction feeling good about your brand. 

Of course, customer service reps can't know the answer to every question off the top of their head. If your team doesn’t have the correct answers, often it’s a leadership issue. This makes it essential to provide your reps with all the resources they need to address each customer’s needs — fast.

Solution: Create a knowledge base, use templates, and thorough onboarding with product and process information

Lean on a knowledge base videos, and other resources that your customer support staff can use to find answers to common questions. It’s different from an external help center or customer-facing knowledge base and more extensive than an FAQ page. Your knowledge base can be an easy reference tool for agents whenever they need to double-check a customer service policy or product. 

You can also program that knowledge directly into your helpdesk. Gorgias allows brands to create templated Macros that are easy to use and customize as needed. You can create templates for common questions and issues, building an internal knowledge base for your agents to pull directly into customer tickets. 

Here’s an example from our Macros at Chomps, for a technical question that agents might not know off the top of their heads:

This way, customers get consistent, accurate information, and agents don’t have to guess or dig for an answer. 

That said, when it comes to instilling product and policy knowledge, nothing replaces your onboarding and training process. I recommend spending these sessions to educate your reps on the following:

• Product and service knowledge
• Policy and process knowledge
• Customer service tools
• Technical skills
• Good vs. bad tickets
• Brand voice and tone
• Soft skills (like how to empathize with customers)
• Helpful customer service phrases

8) No crisis management or escalation policies

Sometimes support tickets need a higher-up to step in and sort them out. If your company doesn't have clear steps for bumping these tickets up, some might slip through the cracks.

This leads to angry customers who feel your company isn’t interested in fixing their problem.

Solution: Automate the ticket escalation process

Creating policies for escalating support tickets is the obvious place to start in addressing this challenge, but it's also helpful to automate ticket escalation to ensure that no ticket (or customer) gets left behind. 

With Gorgias’ Rules, support agents can automatically transfer a ticket to another agent or team without having to manually collect customer information and reassign the ticket.

Gorgias also allows you to create rules for escalating tickets automatically, such as a rule for automatically escalating tickets when the platform's Sentiment Detection feature detects that a customer is angry. 

Here’s an example of a Rule that uses Sentiment Detection to flag tickets where someone may leave a bad review:

Customer interaction management

Every chat with a customer matters for keeping them happy and loyal to your brand. The tough part? Calming down heated chats, juggling multiple questions at once, and giving that personal touch even when you're swamped. The way agents handle each chat really shapes how the customer feels.

9) Dealing with a frustrated or angry customer

Dealing with angry customers is a part of the job that very few support agents enjoy. 

However, empathizing and working with customers, no matter how upset they are, is just part of good customer service. 

Angry customers who eventually calm down are potential customers who might return to your company — they are also less likely to leave negative reviews that could damage your brand image.

Solution: Improve your CX proactively with clear product and policy descriptions (plus self-service)

Most blog posts claim the best way to deal with an angry customer is to practice patience and empathy, maybe with a pre-written script. And if you want that kind of advice, check out this blog post with an example script for how to deal with an angry customer.

But let's look closer at the root of most customers' anger: The shopping experience didn't happen like they thought it would. The best way to mitigate that anger is to lean into proactive customer support:

• Create incredibly clear product descriptions (to avoid a customer feeling duped)
• Display detailed policies (for things like shipping and returns) prominently on your website
• Use pop-ups, banners, and mass emails to proactively warn customers about delays and outages before they get frustrated
• Build detailed FAQ pages and Help Centers to help customers find answers fast, before they get angry about having to reach out and wait  

For example, develop a great post-purchase experience to avoid customer anger. Send customers a detailed order confirmation, clear step-by-step information about when their product will be shipped, and how to track their order. 

If you’re not sure where to start, listen to your customers. This guide to collecting customer feedback explains how to take insights from customer support tickets.

10) Providing customer service to multiple customers at a time

If you want any hope of achieving industry standards for metrics like first response time and resolution time, your customer support reps need to be able to work with multiple customers in real-time, across communication channels (like live chat and social media). 

This is one of the more challenging aspects of the job for small teams. Thankfully, it is also something that the right customer service software can go a long way toward helping your customer service agents achieve.

Solution: Use a centralized helpdesk

If you aren’t already, consider using a helpdesk to manage customer conversations across all channels. A helpdesk pulls these conversations into one centralized inbox so your team can offer omnichannel service — a fancy way of saying offering support to customers on all channels without having to switch between tabs.

Once your helpdesk is up and running, direct your customers away from calling your support line and towards your Contact Us page. 

I recommend funneling as much traffic to a Contact Us page as possible because we have Rules set up based on the drop downs that the customer chooses. Those Rules organize the tickets into different views so that we can work based on urgency.

If they want to talk to an agent quickly, use channels like SMS or live chat. 

Service quality and efficiency

Delivering excellent service quickly is crucial, yet difficult. Customers expect fast, personalized responses and consistent experiences. Challenges include managing wait times, meeting service-level agreements (SLAs), and upholding quality across a growing customer base.

11) Maintaining a singular brand voice across different customer service agents

Customers want the same feel every time they chat with your brand, no matter which agent they get. But since each rep is different, you might find a mix of tones and messages. It's a bit of a balancing act to keep the brand voice consistent while letting agents be themselves.

Solution: Integrate your brand style guide directly into customer service workflows

Having a solid brand style guide keeps things consistent whenever you chat with customers. To create one, define your brand personality, voice, tone, and writing style. Provide guidelines and verbatim examples for everyday interactions like greetings, apologies, confirmations, and closings. Make sure the language aligns with your values. 

Here’s how to put your brand style guide into action: 

• Incorporate your brand voice directly into canned Macros and automated workflows. Customers will get on-brand, personalized responses.
• Ensure all agents can easily reference the guide as they craft customer conversations.
• In team reviews, collaborate to improve examples and optimize messaging.
• Allow reasonable personalization; agents should represent themselves within the guardrails of your brand voice. The goal is consistency with customer expectations, not rigid uniformity. 

12) Slow resolution times

While most customer service teams need to start thinking beyond resolution times, they’re still a tentpole of your team’s performance — and one of the biggest customer service challenges.

Customers expect an immediate response to their questions. This is especially true of younger customers, with 71% of customers between 16 and 24 years old stating that a quick response to questions and issues can drastically improve their customer service experience. 

When your team already has more tickets than it can handle, meeting these customer expectations can be a real challenge.

Solution: Give customers instant help with self-service (and prioritize the rest)

Yet again, the answer isn’t to work harder — it’s to work smarter. Rather than trying to answer every question as quickly as possible, set up self-service resources to deflect simple questions and build systems to prioritize the rest of your requests.

I talked about self-service above, but to recap, here are a few easy-to-implement solutions worth considering:

• A robust help center with articles and videos to explain your policies and products 
• A public forum where customers can post and answer questions, which becomes a self-service resource for future customers with similar problems 
• A customer self-service menu in your chat widget, which customers can click for instant information about their order status or shipping progress 

Once you’ve deflected, it’s time to prioritize. While you could prioritize each ticket by hand (sometimes called manual ticket routing), a helpdesk like Gorgias can help you do this automatically. Here’s an example of automation in Gorgias, called a Rule, that will put any customer requests to cancel a recent order (before it ships) into a priority queue:

That’s just one example. Read this full guide to customer service prioritization for more guidance.

Conquer customer support challenges with Gorgias

The common customer service challenges we've explored aren't just annoying — they directly impact revenue and customer loyalty. 

Companies need to take CX seriously (and invest accordingly) to boost retention. We all know I’m a Gorgias girlie. My team at Chomps uses Gorgias for support, and it helps us be fast, helpful, and strategic with our support

If you’re an ecommerce company that hasn’t checked out Gorgias, I really recommend giving it a shot. Most of the challenges are going to be extremely difficult to solve without the right tools. And for my money, Gorgias is the best tool for ecommerce support teams.

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What if you could deflect a third of your support tickets, automatically, without any agent interaction? With customer self-service and automation, that’s possible. I see it all the time with our customers at Gorgias.

Customer support doesn't always have to mean direct communication with support agents. A healthy support organization also leverages self-service to help customers answer their own questions without waiting for (or dealing with) an agent. On top of helping customers, self-service also reduces ticket volume and first-response time for your support team.

Self-service isn’t just a nice-to-have: 88% of customers in the United States expect company websites to offer a customer self-service portal according to a 2022 survey from Statista. Below, we'll explore the definition and types of customer self-service, the advantages of offering a suite of self-service options, and the best practices to help you meet customer expectations.

What is customer self-service?

Customer self-service is a combination of technology and resources that let customers resolve issues on their own. If a customer answers a question or resolves an issue using resources your company provides (and without messaging your support team), they’ve successfully used self-service. 

For example, a customer finding an answer to their question on your website's FAQ page is an instance of customer self-service. Getting information about your order’s status from a chatbot is another. Even though the customer technically receives AI assistance in this second instance, it still counts as self-service because a human support agent isn’t involved. 

Does self-service work?

It's fair to wonder whether static resources will actually improve your brand's customer support — and ultimately improve customer satisfaction. 

But according to our research at Gorgias, customers with a robust mix of self-service and automation options deflect up to a third of tickets automatically. So there’s no doubt about the benefit to your business.

And keep in mind, most customer issues are not overly unique or complex. Your support team’s time isn’t optimized if they spend a third of the day answering "how do I track my order?" and "how do I return a product?" And your customer’s time isn’t optimized if these questions get routed through a human agent, since they now have to wait for the agent’s response.

Your customers don’t care how they get their answers, they just want them now.

The 9 main types of customer self-service

Customer self-service channels can come in several different forms. While some of these self-service options are more popular than others, it’s typically best to create a self-service portal that offers multiple support options. With that said, here are the four most beneficial types of self-service tools for ecommerce stores.

Editor’s note: We developed a scoring method to represent the difficulty of setting up each method of self-service, as well as the volume of tickets each method usually deflects. More determined faces (😤) indicates that the form of self-service is more difficult and labor-intensive to set up. Lots of tickets ( 🎟) means that the form of self-service will likely deflect a high volume of tickets. Five emojis is the max for both scores.

FAQ page

Difficulty: 😤 /5

Ticket deflection: 🎟 🎟 🎟 🎟 /5

A frequently asked questions (FAQ) page is a great place to start your self-service efforts. These pages list common customer questions that your brand receives, along with answers to each. FAQ pages typically answer straightforward questions that don't require in-depth explanation. 

FAQ pages may be simple, but they are incredibly effective. Given that simple questions can eat up a lot of your support team's time, a single FAQ page can do wonders for reducing support ticket volume. If you’re ready to deflect even more tickets, build out your FAQ page into a full-blown help center — a series of FAQ pages organized into searchable categories. More on help centers below.

Quick win to get started: Create a page that lists the five questions that usually fill up your support inbox and answer them fully. If you don't have an FAQ page, use our FAQ template generator to get started.

FAQ page example:

Brümate’s FAQ page — powered by Gorgias — is a great example of an eye-catching, organized, and easy-to-navigate FAQ page. Brümate even separates its FAQs into multiple categories, making it much easier for customers to find what they’re looking for. And they include top articles that would be helpful for specific, common questions.

Knowledge base

Difficulty: 😤 😤 😤 /5

Tickets deflected: 🎟 🎟 🎟 🎟 🎟 /5

A knowledge base is a digital library of customer support content. Written knowledge base articles (or technical documents) are most common, but a knowledge base can include video and audio files as well. This is the natural evolution of your FAQ page.

At Gorgias, we call knowledge bases help centers, and they can end up looking a lot like a company blog (with some important differences). For one, the resources in a knowledge base are specifically geared toward resolving customer issues rather than for general information. An effective knowledge base should also be searchable (or, at the very least, organized and broken into specific categories) so customers can find the answers they need without wading through page after page of irrelevant content.

Quick win to get started: Create a page that lists the ten questions that usually fill up your support inbox and answer them fully.

Knowledge base example

Branch’s help center is a great example of a knowledge base that provides everything customers need (and nothing they don’t). It’s categorized by type of customer question, and even includes a section for the most popular FAQs.

Because this help center is set up on Gorgias, Branch shoppers can also track their packages, alert Branch of any issues, or even start a chat or email — all from the help center’s main page. It’s a one-stop shop for customers who want to find their own answers.

Self-service flows

Difficulty (without Gorgias): 😤 😤 😤 😤 😤 /5

Difficulty (with Gorgias): 😤 😤 /5

Ticket deflected: 🎟 🎟 🎟 🎟 🎟 /5

Self-service flows and customer service portals have been around for a while, and they can be hugely helpful, both for ticket deflection and user experience. Unfortunately, many of the existing ones are difficult to set up and require a login, creating a lot of friction for the customer.

Gorgias’s self-service flows give customers exactly what they’re looking for, nothing more. With seamless verification and an easy transition to a live agent when requested, these flows can automatically deflect a third of your support tickets (while providing customers efficient, low-effort service).

Quick win to get started: Set up Gorgias’ native self-service flows on the default settings and track how many tickets are deflected. (Deflecting order status requests can handle 15%, alone.)

Self-service flow example

Unlike a chatbot, which mimics a human agent, self-service flows use menus. They are easy to navigate and make it clear to the customer that they aren’t yet interacting with an agent.

Our default self-service options are:

• Track an order
• Return an order
• Cancel an order
• Report an issue with an order

And if the customer needs help at any time, they can bring an agent into the conversation seamlessly.

Chatbots

Difficulty: 😤 😤 😤 😤 😤 /5

Tickets deflected: 🎟 🎟 🎟 🎟 🎟 /5

Unlike live chat, chatbot software doesn’t require human interaction — at least at first. Instead, chatbot software connects customers with a chatbot that uses AI and machine learning to provide natural language answers to common questions. Unlike self-service flows, chatbots aim to mimic human agents.

Chatbots solve less complex issues and provide quick answers to your customers. And if you combine it with live chat, staffed by agents, you or your shoppers can easily tag in a human support agent for conversations that need a human touch.

Quick win to get started: It can be difficult to set up a chatbot, but integrating a pre-built chatbot like Ada (which works with Gorgias) can be a huge time saver.

Chatbot conversation example

If your customer breezes by your self-service flows and still wants to know the status of their order, there’s still no reason to waste an agent’s time. Set up a chatbot (Gorgias makes this possible through an integration with Ada) or configure a custom automation Rule (see below) as a second line of defense before an agent receives the question.

Custom automation workflows

Difficulty: 😤 😤 😤 /5

Tickets deflected: 🎟 🎟 🎟 🎟 🎟 /5

Questions that can’t be answered through self-service flows and chatbot conversations can usually be handled by an automation Rule. Rules are another line of defense against the repetitive requests that eat up your agents’ time.

In most platforms, Rules follow a specific logic to make building them easier. And in Gorgias, they can include templated Macro responses that bring in customer and order information automatically, deflecting tickets without an agent’s attention.

If you get a simple question over and over, consider setting up a Rule to deflect that kind of ticket. 

Quick win to get started: If you already have self-service flows set up, trigger an automated answer to “Where is my order?” for customers that bypass them.

Automation Rule example

One powerful automation Rule that isn’t covered in self-service is a triage Rule that prioritizes tickets and sends them to the right teams while also sending a message to the customer that the team will be with them shortly.

This Rule can also take advantage of Gorgias’ unique sentiment and intent detection, which can process and tag your ticket automatically. The algorithms are quite precise after training on hundreds of millions of ecommerce tickets.

At Gorgias, we offer 24/7 support and dedicated managers who will help you get custom rules set up for these specific use cases.

Here’s what the Rule would look like when you’re building it:

Check out our guide to ecommerce email marketing automation to learn how automated emails can help you get customers, not just provide great service.

An informative blog

Difficulty: 😤 😤 😤 😤 😤 /5

Tickets deflected: 🎟 /5 (but good for SEO/marketing)

A blog is a valuable marketing tool for ecommerce brands (and something that is sure to boost your website's SEO). And populating it with well-written, informative content can also be a great way to empower customers to resolve issues on their own. 

Asking customers to search your blog for the answers that they need might not be the most straightforward approach to customer support. But an informative blog can certainly be a valuable self-service tool when combined with other tools — such as a knowledge base that organizes your blog articles in a way that makes it easier for customers to search.

At the very least, an informative blog will proactively educate your customers, even if it's not the first resource they turn to when they are having issues. Remember: an educated customer base is likely to experience issues less frequently.

Quick win to get started: Blogs aren’t about quick wins — they are long-term investments that only pay dividends over time, with consistent publishing. If you aren’t fully committed, hold off on the blog until you have more resources.

Blog example

Spoonful of Comfort is a great example of an ecommerce brand using its blog to find new buyers and serve current customers. The company sells care packages and uses the blog to (among other things) give customers ideas about what to send for specific situations — like when someone’s in the hospital for Christmas.

Forums and communities

Difficulty: 😤😤/5

Ticket deflection: 🎟 🎟 /5

Most people don't consider browsing online forums as a customer service experience, but many companies host forums as a layer of self-service. Online forums allow customers to collaborate to resolve issues. 

Once these communications between customers are live, future shoppers experiencing the same issue can see the solution. In other words, forums can serve as a shopper-generated knowledge base populated with support content your company doesn't even have to create.

Forums are more than a customer self-service strategy: they are also a great way to encourage a sense of community among your customers. That said, consider appointing a forum moderator to keep your forums a friendly, welcoming, and informative space.

Quick win to get started: Create a Facebook or Reddit community. Or show up consistently on existing forums dedicated to your space (or brand).

Forum example

Fitbit has an excellent forum called Fitbit Community. The forum is broken down in many ways: a section for each Fitbit device, features, challenges, and so on. Fitbit users respond to questions and can vote on the best answers. 

If you want to get started without setting up forum infrastructure on your website, you can start a community on Reddit, Facebook, or a similar social media site to provide similar support. For example, Gorgias has a community where customers help each other and share ideas, and our support team monitors it to step in and add value.

How-to content or online webinars

Difficulty: 😤 😤 😤 😤 😤 /5

Tickets deflected: 🎟 🎟 🎟 🎟 /5

How-to videos and online webinars can be an excellent way to educate your customers with step-by-step tutorials on the proper use of your brand's products. Customer education is especially relevant for companies in the SaaS space, where confusing or complex software can get in the way of customer adoption.

By saving recordings of your webinars so that they are accessible to anyone who visits your knowledge base, you can double your webinars’ value — first as a lead magnet for those who choose to view the webinar live, and then as a permanent piece of support content future customers can access at any time.

Quick win to get started: Record a welcome video that serves as a product introduction and tour of the main features. Track views and other types of engagement to see if it’s resonating.

Webinar example

ActiveCampaign is a great example of a company that uses webinars to teach customers how to use its products. The above link goes to a page where ActiveCampaign aggregates all of their past webinars in specific categories and shares information on how to attend upcoming webinars live.

In-product tutorials

Difficulty: 😤 😤 😤 😤 😤 /5

Tickets deflected: 🎟 🎟 🎟 🎟 🎟 /5

If you are a software company, in-app tutorials are one of the easiest ways to streamline your onboarding, reduce initial churn, and reduce your support costs.

In-app walkthroughs are powerful because they appear when they’re needed. Webinars, by contrast, are great for in-depth walkthroughs, but customers have to find the webinar when they need it. Many won’t know they exist. In-app tutorials provide guidance automatically, at the ideal moment, to help your users understand how to get value out of your product. 

Quick win to get started: Create an onboarding tutorial that guides new users around your platform, highlighting common tools to get started (and shepherding the user away from advanced features they can wait to discover). Candu and Appcues are our favorite tools for in-product training.

In-product tutorial example

We created in-app tutorials for Gorgias to strengthen our new-user journey, improve product adoption, and scale our onboarding efforts. When users log on or navigate to certain pages for the first time, a step-by-step tutorial appears to help them with setup.

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7 best practices for excellent customer self-service

Customer self-service is powerful, but requires a well-thought-out approach. If you would like to start empowering your customers to solve issues on their own, here are the seven most helpful customer self-service best practices to follow.

1) Aim for one-click resolution

Chatbots are a perfect example of self-service taking too many steps and turning customers against the concept. While there are chatbots that streamline the experience — like Ada, which integrates with Gorgias — may lead customers on a multi-message journey that leaves them begging for a live agent.

Anything more than a few clicks is a suboptimal customer experience. That’s why Gorgias starts with self-service flows as the first line of defense. These menus are clearly self-service (whereas a chatbot imitates a real agent) and lead customers to the solutions they’re looking for in one click, in many cases.

2) Start with your frequently asked questions 

A knowledge base is one of the easiest options to start executing a customer self-service strategy, and that starts with a strong FAQ page. Compared to managing a community forum or routinely publishing blog posts, an FAQ page is a very light lift. It's also a resource that your customers are sure to find helpful since an FAQ page necessarily addresses the most common questions your customers ask.

Before you create an FAQ page for your website, take the time to truly understand your customers and the issues they experience. Start by speaking with some of the more experienced members of your customer service team to see which questions they encounter most often. Weed out questions that are situational (and don't have a generalized answer), and include the remaining questions on your FAQ page.

If you use a tool like Gorgias, analyzing your tickets at scale to see the most common issues you encounter becomes much easier.

3) Offer a mix of self-service options

Providing multiple self-service options for your customers lets them choose the option they prefer. Not only does this create a better customer experience, but it also increases the likelihood that customers will answer their own questions instead of messaging your agents.

Above, we offered a comprehensive list of self-service options you can use to help your customers help themselves. Once you have built your FAQ page and set up your self-service flows in your chat widget, continue adding self-service options based on what makes sense for your business.

If you have a more complex product, you might prioritize a knowledge base and webinars. If you have a strong community around your offerings, you might focus on building a forum and blog to keep them engaged. There’s no one-size-fits-all solution.

4) Provide useful content such as images, video, and audio

When creating support content — whether it’s knowledge base articles, FAQ questions, or anything else — don't underestimate the power of images, video, and audio to get your point across. Sometimes it's easier to show than tell, and a single image can often do more to resolve a customer's issue than an entire article of text. 

For example, if you are helping customers navigate to a specific page on your website in an article on how to track orders, showing screenshots that point out which buttons they need to click makes the process much easier.

Plus, some customers simply don't like to read, and presenting support content in the form of images, video, and audio will make them more likely to enjoy their customer service experience.

5) Improve and update content continuously

Unless your products and services never change, you aren't going to be able to publish support content once and just forget about it. Even if your overall business is relatively static, the rest of the world is not, and the needs and issues of your customers are sure to evolve over time. 

While it's a good idea to try and make the content in your support portal as evergreen as possible, it's also important to continually improve and update your support content anytime there are changes to your product, business, or audience.

You'll also want to regularly improve and add to your content. If you notice that a lot of customers are struggling with a specific issue, then it's probably a good time to publish a new article on the topic to your knowledge base.

6) Enhance the mobile functionality of your self-service options

Every page on your website should be mobile friendly, including your self-service options. In fact, it's arguably even more important for self-service options to be mobile friendly because many customers search for solutions while they are actively using a product and may only have access to their mobile phones. 

Given that mobile searches currently account for about 63% of all online searches, you’ll provide a poor experience to many customers if your self-service pages don't look, load, and function correctly on mobile devices.

7) Use automated chatbots as a customer support tool

Leveraging automation in the form of customer support chatbots is one of the most powerful customer self-service strategies since it often leaves customers feeling as if they've received immediate help from a live agent. 

When integrated with customer service tools such as Gorgias, chatbots powered by artificial intelligence can detect a customer's sentiment and intent, then either answer the customer’s question or direct them to self-service resources where the customer can find what they need.

For example, Gorgias can detect when a customer is frustrated and auto-tag the ticket to trigger an automatic response, letting the customer know someone will be with them shortly. On the backend, that ticket can be prioritized to ensure they don’t wait long and escalate their frustration.

How customer self-service benefits businesses & consumers

The data above shows us that customers expect and value self-service options when communicating with brands. But why, exactly — especially when the conventional wisdom is that the “human touch” always wins? 

Below, we’ll explore a few ways that self-service options directly enhance the customer experience, which can help guide you as you build your self-service strategies. 

Customer issues get resolved quickly

Unless a support agent picks up the phone immediately, it is almost always going to be faster for customers to solve their own issues — assuming the self-service resources are truly useful. Given the value of swift customer service for today's customers, you cannot overlook the importance of resolving customer issues quickly.

Even if customers have to spend a few minutes to solve their own problem, the fact that they are actively working to solve the problem (rather than waiting on hold) goes a long way toward improving customer satisfaction. 

Some customers prefer solving problems on their own

For the independent (and introverted) among us, reaching out for help can feel like an admission of defeat (or at least an unappealing effort). Some customers simply prefer to solve issues by themselves, and giving them the option to do so is an important part of improving their customer experience. In fact, if given the option, most customers would prefer to solve problems on their own before they go through the hassle of contacting customer support.

You can maximize the customer experience by providing a thoughtful mix of self-service features, so shoppers can choose their method of choice. For example, you could have a help center to help provide in-depth information, self-service flows in the chat to deflect conversations, and automation Rules and chatbot integrations for the customers who still want a more conversational approach.

Customer service costs go down

Providing customers with self-service solutions means you can resolve plenty of questions that would have otherwise turned into support tickets for a human agent. Fewer support tickets to deal with means that your company can reduce the size of its customer support team, allowing you to dramatically reduce the expense associated with providing great customer support.

Read our guide to customer service ROI to learn more about reducing costs (and generating revenue) with customer service.

Support team members will be happier and more productive

Most customer support teams spend a great deal of their time responding to mundane, repetitive questions. While these questions and issues typically aren't challenging to resolve, they are tedious and not very stimulating. By eliminating these simple, repetitive issues from your support team's daily routine, you can make their job a lot more enjoyable. 

When support agents don't have to answer "where is my order?" a hundred times each day, they are free to focus on resolving more unique and challenging issues. Giving agents more time to tackle challenging issues will enhance their productivity and make their job more interesting and enjoyable.

Customer support is more readily available

Customer self-service tools such as knowledge bases and chatbots are available 24/7 without human intervention. Offering customers these tools is a great way to make omnichannel support options more readily available without any additional staffing.

It empowers your team to spend more time on the tickets that matter 

The end goal of automation is not to remove agents from the support process or handle all incoming tickets automatically. Many tickets need a personalized, human touch.

However, your team won't have time to provide a human touch to tickets that need it most — especially as your ticket volume grows. Automating 100% of simple, repetitive tickets is the best way to spend more time on the tickets that matter to your business.

With self-service and automation, you can drive revenue through support and spend more time handling inquiries from VIPs while other companies are busy responding to hundreds of “Where is my order?” tickets.

Provide customers more value, faster

When given the right resources, customers can often resolve issues on their own in much less time than it takes to get a support agent involved.

First response time (FRT) is one of the major metrics in evaluating customer service, and self-service options will help you decrease it dramatically.

Reduce your ticket volume (and spend on support)

A 2019 Microsoft study found two-thirds of customers try self-service before contacting a live agent. Imagine that kind of reduction in the support tickets coming through your inbox.

Whenever customers solve problems on their own, you don't have to pay a support agent to assist them. This means that companies with effective self-service options are often able to save money by reducing the size of their customer support teams. 

Generate additional revenue

Use self-service to trigger an automated sales workflow or present customers with upsell opportunities within your self-service content. Customer support should be an important part of your company's sales funnel, and these tactics can help you put that process on autopilot.

Provide around-the-clock support

According to data from HubSpot, 90% of customers expect an "immediate" response when they have a customer service question. However, most companies can’t provide immediate responses — especially not around the clock. 

Customer self-service tools such as FAQ pages and knowledge base articles are available at all times, enabling swift 24/7 support without staffing support agents at all hours. Rest easy: your self-service options are handling the night shift.

How Gorgias approaches self-service for online stores

As the team behind the market's leading customer support solution for ecommerce, we at Gorgias designed our self-service flows and portals for online stores, first and foremost. Every feature, process, and design choice was made to serve the specific needs of companies dealing with the shipment of physical goods to their customers. 

And while a lot of that process can be unpredictable, you are fully in control of how your buyer moves through delays and issues with your support team.

Our innovative self-service approach includes three main lines of defense meant to deflect time-wasting tickets and save agent time for the tickets that matter.

This self-service process provides:

Proactive support through how-to content

The proactive customer service process starts with a customizable help center that can be populated with FAQs, how-to articles, instructional videos, past webinars, and more. This help center is the first page that customers see when they search for support and is designed to deflect support tickets by encouraging customers to first browse self-service options.

Self-service flows that deflect the most common requests

The second pillar of our approach to customer self-service includes self-service menus that can answer common ecommerce inquiries — both inquiries that have general answers and inquiries with answers that are specific to the individual customer. Our self-service workflows include the following commands that move the customer into a dedicated menu:

• Track my order
• Return my order
• Cancel my order
• Report an issue with my order

In addition to these customer support commands, Gorgias also offers automated flows designed to answer common pre-sale questions such as "How do I pick the right size?" or "Are there any discounts available?" and help ecommerce stores improve their conversion rate.

One of the main benefits of these flows is that they keep users on your site to get the answers they need, instead of bouncing to the shipping carrier's website or elsewhere. And maybe they’ll stick around to put in another order.

Chatbots and automation to mimic traditional support

If customers manage to get past your self-service flows with repetitive questions, a pre-built chatbot can engage them and answer their questions.

Any other advanced queries that aren’t covered by the above self-service options can still be answered automatically. Customizable automation Rules can be tailored to the questions you receive the most, as an additional line of defense against time-wasting tickets.

With intent and sentiment detection powered by AI, Gorgias can detect a customer’s question no matter how it’s worded. Gorgias also allows you to create customizable Rules and flows for each command, making customer self-service a dynamic process that is much more similar to traditional customer support.

Enjoy optimized customer self-service with help from Gorgias

With Gorgias, you can automate the answers to pesky and repetitive questions and deflect up to a third of the tickets in your support process. With a full suite of self-service and automation features, you can provide a mix of options so your customers can choose the ones that suit their needs.

If you would like to improve customer satisfaction while reducing your customer support costs, then Gorgias’s cutting-edge self-service tools are the solution for your business. Find out more about what Gorgias can do to streamline and improve your self-service support strategies.

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Customer service messaging (also known as conversational customer service) is a powerful way to elevate the customer experience and delight customers beyond their expectations. For customers, texting with a support agent feels much more convenient and casual than slower channels like email. And, SMS is a much better channel for “on-the-go” communication, since most people always have their mobile phones and can usually reply to text messages quickly.

That’s why customer service messaging is one of many recent customer service trends shaking up how ecommerce and D2C businesses offer support.

In this guide, we’ll discuss how your business can implement or improve this type of customer support and other conversational channels in your customer service strategy. 

Let’s get started with why it’s important for businesses to offer SMS customer service.

What is SMS customer service?

SMS customer service is when support teams resolve customer questions and issues via text message.

Why SMS text messaging improves the customer service experience

Customers love these one-to-one messaging channels for customer service because they’re so quick and convenient. When implemented well, conversational messaging allows customers to reach your CS team and get answers quickly — within 42 seconds, most of the time. Especially considering that 42% of customers prefer communicating with customer service on messaging apps over any other channel, introducing a conversational channel may do wonders for your brand’s customer satisfaction.

Your customer support team can also use these channels to proactively reach out to customers with important updates and timely discounts.

SMS customer service is especially attractive to your customers because they don’t have to stay glued to your website or check a social media app for new DMs. They can get answers to their questions on a device they already check 96 times per day. Let’s take a closer look at SMS, a channel that’s quickly gaining ground as a standard support option. 

10 tips to successfully incorporate messaging into your customer service strategy

Adding each messaging channel at one time might overwhelm your customer support team. Likewise, a new channel may have low adoption if you don’t announce it to your customers. As you begin offering messaging experiences as a part of your customer care portfolio, use our top 10 techniques to maximize the effectiveness of your workflows on those channels.

1) Funnel all interactions to SMS or messaging channels and then move to email or phone if needed

For issues with easy solutions, there’s no reason for customers to engage with email or phone. Emails are slow and clunky and phone calls can lead to customer frustrations, especially if your wait times are excessive. Texts are far faster than either option and can provide simple, accurate information that leads to speedier solutions — and happier customers.

For that reason, we recommend setting up your contact page and information so that text and other live channels are your first line of communication — well, after self-service support. You can always move to email or phone if the customer requests it or if the problem you’re trying to solve is better suited to one of those channels.

Tip: Speed is an important factor in all customer service interactions, but it’s critical when sending any sort of instant message. First response time (FRT) is a key customer service metric you can measure with Gorgias through the analytics dashboard. Make sure to track the speed of your responses when you start your support messaging program.

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2) Consistently let your customers know that you’re available on quick messaging channels

To inform your customers they can now text your brand, we recommend adding “Text us,” plus your phone number, in some or all of these places: 

• The footer of your website
• The “Contact Us” page of your website
• Your Gorgias Help Center
• Transactional emails (order confirmation, return initiated, etc.)
• The signature of your support agents

You can put your messaging app information in the same spots, and make sure to say you accept support requests via DM in your social media bios so customers know they can shoot you a message.

Tip: Because conversational customer service usually takes place on a user’s phone, you need to keep responses short and friendly. The long, detailed macros and templates you might use for emails won’t work when communicating through short messages — depending on your platform and your customer’s phone, long messages might not send or might get broken into multiple text messages. Plus, depending on your brand’s tone of voice, conversational channels are a great place to use emojis, images, and GIFs to make the conversation even more friendly and casual. 

3) Use autoresponders for a lightning-fast first response

Start every messaging interaction with an autoresponder. This tactic lets your customer know that you received their request, and it gives your human agents a small buffer of time to finish up their current encounter before starting the new one. You can also include a link to your help center in case they want to look for their answer on their own.

You can use this tactic whether you’re incorporating chatbots for basic query automation, or using your customer service agents for all customer interactions.

See page XX for an example of an autoresponder Rule for messaging.

4) 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. 

You can 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. This can be set up with a View of tickets that have been open for more than X minutes, where X is an amount of time corresponding to your service-level agreement (SLA).
• Tickets from VIPs and loyal customers. You can tag these customers and make a View based on that tag to surface their questions and concerns.
• Tickets that fall into certain intents, like “order/damaged,” which Gorgias auto-assigns through our proprietary algorithms. You can auto-assign these tickets with a “priority” tag using a simple automation Rule and set up a View that has all open priority tickets.

You can even set up dual priority queues for all priority-tagged tickets: One for priority tickets that are about to go past the first response time in your SLA and another for all other priority tickets. Then prioritize the former, followed by the latter, followed by other tickets, to keep your first response time and resolution time down while giving attention to important tickets.

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

5) Use Macro templates to respond faster to repetitive requests…

If you are responding to customer service messages on a platform like Gorgias that supports Macro templates, you need to take advantage of this time-saving feature. But you can’t just take your existing email templates and drop them into these conversations.

You need to create a specific set of Macros for messaging purposes, using the principles we mentioned earlier: short, friendly, personalized, etc. That means you need to use variables like [Customer first name] or [Last order number] to personalize messages. If you set up your Macros strategically for DM and SMS messaging, many can be reused for live chat, as well.

To prioritize building Macros that will have the highest impact, create Macro templates to respond to the most common questions that have come through your helpdesk. You can also ask your team which responses they end up writing out the most and add those templates too. 

Once you create and launch these Macros, you can automatically add Tags to Macros for reporting to see which Macros are being used the most. This will help you understand where you have gaps (or unhelpful Macros) and can make tweaks to improve your agent workflow and customer experience.

6) …Or deflect those repetitive requests altogether with automation Rules

If your customer service platform supports automation, as Gorgias does through our Automation Add-on, you can deflect up to a third of repetitive, tedious tickets instantly, with no human interaction. Much of this automation can be applied to customer service messaging, as well.

When we mention automated answers, some support professionals say something like, “We don’t want to send low-quality automated responses to our customers.” We completely agree: For many tickets, automation doesn’t provide the best customer experience. 

However, as you know, most tickets your support team receives are repetitive and low-impact, like questions about order status (WISMO) or your refund policy. We recommend setting up automatic responses for these tickets, so customers get instant answers and agents have more time to respond to tickets that actually need a human touch.

Look through your reporting dashboards to see the tickets that are taking up the most time on your support team, and prioritize those requests for automation with Rules, where appropriate.

7) Go beyond text-only interactions with multimedia messaging

WhatsApp Business, Facebook Messenger, and SMS support images, and luckily so does Gorgias. This is a more engaging way to interact with customers, and it also allows you to exchange relevant images like broken parts, malfunctioning equipment, and screenshots for more helpful instructions.

If you want to go this route, maintain a catalog of fun, topical images that your support team can use in their customer conversations, and give them the freedom to collect their own images to insert. It’s a great way to make your support feel more personal and human, but use common sense: Frustrated customers don’t want to receive a picture or meme, they want their problem solved as quickly as possible.

8) Provide proactive support at scale on platforms that allow it

SMS and other personalized one-to-one support channels can get a little complicated because not everyone wants to interact on the same messaging application. True SMS support goes out over cellular networks and lands in users’ actual text messages, the same way messages from their friends and family do.

But you may need to be ready to handle other support channels that use similar short, text-based communication. These include Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, and your website’s web chat. Certain channels may be a better fit for your unique customer base — for example, Instagram attracts a younger audience than Facebook Messenger, and WhatsApp is more common outside the US. Likewise, you may have other specialized messaging channels or messaging platforms that you need to support.

As a rule of thumb, you need to be where most of your customers are, which varies across businesses and industries. But to reach the desired level of customer engagement, most businesses need to be reachable via most, if not all, the major applications and support channels. 

That’s where a unified customer service platform can be really useful. By keeping all of your customer conversations in one feed, you can handle more channels more strategically, through triage and routing to dedicated agents for specific tasks. For example, you could have one agent who just handles messaging and route all messages to that person for a quicker response.

On platforms like WhatsApp Business, you don’t have to wait around to hear from customers. This allows for a wide range of strategic and proactive support interactions. 

For example, you can send out text blasts:

• When you have an issue affecting all customers (i.e. website downtime) to let them know what’s going on (and avoid getting excessive tickets about the issue)
• When you have new product launches or add-ons, driving revenue and customer education
• When you have relevant announcements for customers: limit these to news that actually affects customers (i.e. shutting down your community or a time-sensitive sale), not company news (i.e. your latest fundraising) 

A proactive approach builds trust with your audience — they will see you going above and beyond with these efforts, and know that you’ll be upfront with potential issues.

9) Integrate your SMS support with your marketing efforts

SMS marketing is a useful tool for your ecommerce store, but it becomes even more powerful when you integrate your SMS marketing tool into Gorgias. Send out SMS blasts and have support agents on hand to handle any questions you get in response, to help nudge those customers closer to a sale.

With certain integrations — Klaviyo, for example — you can even use Gorgias attributes to segment and build campaigns. Use this function for win-back campaigns, or to send a special offer to customers who posted low CSAT scores.

10) Conduct surveys using text messages to collect feedback from customers

Text messages are an effective method for collecting feedback from existing customers, too. Once customers opt in to SMS communication, you can use this point of contact to launch quick surveys that provide valuable feedback.

Response rate is always an issue with email surveys, and other channels see higher response rates. Using a multichannel approach will supply you with more responses and help you make more data-driven decisions with the results.

Note: In a customer service tool like Gorgias, you would use one of our integrations with Klaviyo or Attentive to send the survey to entire segmented lists of customers or prospects, all at once.

SMS customer service templates for common response types

Ready to start implementing an SMS customer service strategy but not sure what to say? We get it: Staying concise yet friendly is tough, and so is conveying all the needed information in such a short space.

We’ve put together a collection of proven templates you can start using today. Adapt as many of these as you need to fit the contours of your business, and bring them into your customer service platform of choice. In Gorgias, you could auto-populate these responses through our Macros.

Note: We’re sharing these templates as text messages, but they can easily be adapted to other conversational channels like social media DMs and live chat. 

Ticket received template

As we mentioned earlier, it’s a good idea to set up an autoresponder. This tactic can buy your team time to finish up a previous interaction or send an email, yet it shows you’re on top of the interaction and will be back soon.

Here’s our template for a ticket received autoresponder:

Thanks for texting {Brand Name}. An agent is reviewing your question now. We’ll get back to you shortly :)

Introduction message template

The introduction message is the point where your autoresponder or chatbot passes off the reins to a human agent. It’s the first point of personalization, and you want to make a solid impression. Still, your agents don’t need to be typing these out every single time. Use a template like this one to break the ice (just with a little less repetitive stress injury):

Hello, {Customer First Name} {Customer Last Name}! I’m {Your Name} from {Brand Name}. Thanks for messaging us. What can I help you with today?

Hours of operation template

There are two frequent scenarios where an hours-of-operations text makes sense. One is as an answer for when customers message you on social media or elsewhere just to ask when you’re open. In those cases, use this template:

Hello, {Customer First Name}! I’m {Your Name} from {Brand Name}. Our hours of operation are Monday through Friday, 9 a.m. to 8 p.m. Best, {Your Name}

The other scenario is when a customer reaches out via a messaging channel and there’s no one on the other end. If your helpdesk isn’t open 24 hours a day, use a template like this when the team isn’t live:

Hello, {Customer First Name}! Our live chat helpdesk is open {list hours}. You’ve reached us outside those hours. Leave a short message here and we’ll get back to you tomorrow.

By the way, if around-the-clock coverage is a goal of yours, you might be interested in introducing contact forms into your live chat widget. These forms let you keep your live chat on 24/7 and, when nobody’s available to answer, they ask customers for contact information so you can be sure to follow up. Learn more about Gorgias’ automation add-on and contact forms.

Order status template 

This one’s pretty obvious: You want to let the customer know the status of an order, and there’s no reason to manually type a whole message to do it.

Use this template when a customer asks for their order status. You can create variations of this one for delays or other order status updates, and even customize it further to include tracking information.

Hey {Customer First Name}, great news: Your order has shipped! It will arrive on {delivery date}. Let me know if I can help you with anything else!

Payment reminder template

Customers with recurring subscriptions sometimes forget the frequency they sign up for or when their next payment will be. Use this template if customers frequently ask your brand when their next payment is:

Hello, {Customer First Name} {Customer Last Name}! I’m {Your Name} from {Brand Name}. Your next payment of {amount} is coming up. Your card on file will be charged {due date}. Questions? Reply here or call {phone number}.

Pro tip: While there’s nothing inherently wrong with soliciting payment via SMS, many consumers will view this with suspicion. Text channels may not be the best avenue for inviting bill payments or collecting credit card information. It could also lead to more cancellations, which makes it a balancing act, though customer clarity is important to have. Always track the impact of changes to your process and be mindful of how new touchpoints could affect it.

Deals or rewards template

If you’re trying to build brand loyalty or win back an upset customer, sometimes a simple discount code can go a long way. At the end of an SMS conversation, there may be times when you can surprise and delight customers by sending over an exclusive deal. Here’s a template (though you’ll certainly need to customize this one further to fit the details of your offer):

{Customer First Name}, thanks for being such a loyal customer. We’d like to give you {details of the offer}! Click to redeem: {short URL}

Refund issued template

Refunds happen, and they don’t always require a massively complicated interaction with your contact center. If you’re able to resolve a ticket and issue a refund with a simpler interaction, this template can finish the one-to-one portion of the encounter. 

Notice the template specifies that the interaction will finish up asynchronously (via email). It’s a great way to tie off the synchronous, real-time interaction and lead the customer right to the next step (check your email.) 

Here’s the template:

Hey {Customer First Name}! We’ve issued a refund for your last order. We’ll send all the details to your email, but feel free to let me know here if you need anything else.

Pro tip: You can tie discounts and future order credits into this template, but make sure your entire team is aligned on your official policy as you update the Macros to match it. You may also want to have different tiers of intervention (and offerings) depending on the severity of the issue.

Customer check-in template

The customer check-in is another asynchronous message that occurs outside of an active conversation. Perhaps the customer walked away from a previous encounter or seems to be stuck on the customer journey based on other CRM data.

Whatever the reason, a gentle, well-timed message can sometimes get the customer back on track.

Here’s a model:

Hello, {Customer First Name} {Customer Last Name}! I’m {Your Name} from {Brand Name}. Just checking in to make sure everything is working well for you. If you have any issues with our {products/service} or need anything else, let me know!

Templates for SMS marketing and relevant integrations 

Though a customer service platform can handle the above templates, you’ll likely want to expand even further through additional integrations with the platform. If you take that approach, here are some opportunities that open up:

Discount template

If you’re running a sale or trying to drive traffic to your site, a great way to do so is by texting a discount code to customers on your SMS list. Because their phone is probably close by, it’s great way to promote your sale and make sure it gets noticed. Here’s a template you can use (but remember to update with your own promotion!): 

Flash sale, this weekend only! Up to 40% off, including our latest collection. Shop now: {insert URL} 

Appointment reminder template

Medical offices and other organizations that schedule appointments or meetings can bolster attendance and reduce no-shows by providing yet another reminder — one that reaches patients and customers directly via phone.

If your SMS system supports it, you can invite an auto-reply to confirm or cancel an appointment, too. Use this template:

Hello, {Customer First Name} {Customer Last Name}! I’m {Your Name} from {Brand Name}. Your appointment is scheduled for tomorrow at {appointment time}. See you then! Reply Y to confirm, N to cancel.

Order confirmation template

Order confirmation messages simply confirm that your business has received and is processing a customer order. These don’t typically take place during an active one-to-one customer service interaction. Instead, they’re sent automatically and asynchronously, whenever the order confirms.

Still, you can set them up as personalized messages and enable replying so that, if something happens to be wrong, the customer knows how to reach out.

Hello, {Customer First Name} {Customer Last Name}! I’m {Your Name} from {Brand Name}. Your order #{order number} has been received, and we’re working on it now! We’ll message you again when it ships. Questions? Reply here.

Pickup notification template

If you’re in an industry that offers pickup services (whether curbside pickup, custom goods like eyeglasses, or anything else), a text message is a great way to let someone know their order is ready for pickup. SMS reaches customers when they’re on the go in a way that email frequently doesn’t.

Here’s an example:

Hello, {Customer First Name} {Customer Last Name}! I’m {Your Name} from {Brand Name}. Your recent order #{order number} is now available for pickup at {location}. Stop by to grab it anytime today before {closing time}!

Survey or poll template

This message asks your customers to respond to a survey or poll. It’s a data-gathering tool that can pull in responses from people who ignore your emails or the messages at the bottom of store receipts. Try a script like this:

Hello, {Customer First Name} {Customer Last Name}! I’m {Your Name} from {Brand Name}. We value your opinion as a customer and we’d love specific feedback on {topic}. Here’s a 5-minute survey: {short URL}

Membership renewals template

Membership renewals, like payments, ought to be set up as automatic occurrences. Still, it’s helpful to remind a customer that a charge will hit their bank account soon — you don’t want to track down non-payments, and you don’t want angry customers who weren’t prepared for a bill.

Here’s an example:

Hi, {Customer First Name} {Customer Last Name}! I’m {Your Name} from {Brand Name}. Your annual membership renewal is coming up on {date}. Your card on file will be charged on that day.

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Is conversational and SMS customer service right for your business?

At Gorgias, we believe any industry can find value in conversational support, though some industries and brands will get more bang for their buck with these channels. 

For ecommerce brands that deliver physical products, conversational support is a no-brainer. Imagine your customers get shipping updates via SMS and can just respond to the message if the package isn’t delivered correctly to get immediate help. No need to open up a laptop and log into a support portal or compose an email.

If you’re on the fence about offering conversational customer support, consider whether any of these points are relevant for your business:

First, consider your primary audience. If you sell to millennials and Gen Z, conversational customer service deserves serious consideration. These groups value speed and convenience more than anything: Millennials prefer live chat over every other channel, and 71% of people between 16 and 24 agree that faster customer service would drastically improve the shopping experience.

These two generations grew up texting. It’s a very natural communication style for them, so they’ll feel right at home texting and DMing your brand. They’re also absolutely massive groups — combined, they make up a staggering 42.3% of the U.S. population.

If you’re targeting an older generation, texting may not feel as natural. They have a higher tendency to prefer email or phone, although that’s changing by the day.

Is your marketing team already sending SMS campaigns?

One of the biggest hurdles to implementing conversational support is getting the systems, hardware, and staff in place to respond to SMS texts and messaging app requests at scale. If you’re already sending SMS marketing campaigns, then you already have some of that infrastructure in place.

So, if you’ve already made the investment in SMS for marketing purposes, then integrating messaging with your customer service platform and team requires minimal additional investment.

Fortunately, your helpdesk and SMS marketing software may integrate to give you a centralized way to spark conversations if customers reach out via text or respond to SMS campaigns. With Gorgias and Klaviyo, for example, customer responses to SMS marketing campaigns get assigned directly to an agent for fast response times.

Are customers abandoning conversations on other channels? 

One of the benefits of messaging is that customers don’t have to stay on the phone or by their computer — they can easily continue talking even if they have to take the dog out, go to work, or even fall asleep and respond in the morning. Plus, while email conversations often span multiple days which is frustrating for customers with simple requests, requests on messaging channels usually get resolved before customers lose interest or patience. 

If you notice that your brand currently sees lots of unresolved email threads or phone calls, you might need to offer customers a more convenient and flexible channel to talk to your team. This is a perfect use case for SMS and other messaging channels.

Are you already active on related channels?

It’s important to show up where your customers are. That’s why most brands post and engage with customers on social media pages. But if you’re posting on social media and not providing support to customers who reach out via DM, you’re missing a big opportunity. 

By adding conversational support via Facebook Messenger and Instagram and Twitter DMs, you can maximize your presence on those platforms and provide an omnichannel customer experience for both existing and prospective customers.

Are you struggling to gather customer feedback?

We often discuss the importance of customer feedback to monitor brand perception and constantly improve the product and customer experience. But as most brands know, getting feedback via email can be a challenge because of low survey open rates and lack of follow-up from customers. 

Business texting lets you ask your customer base for feedback on a channel they are less likely to ignore. Text messages have a whopping 98% open rate. Consider sending CSAT, NPS surveys, and other requests for customer feedback on this channel to raise your response rate for more accurate customer support metrics. Of course, with great power comes great responsibility: Spamming customers will quickly damage customer relationships, so don’t send too many messages to their personal devices.

What to look for in text messaging tools

SMS customer service is an avenue that customers are growing to expect. But managing yet another communication channel — much less one that demands real-time responses — takes careful planning.

Implementing a messaging strategy requires using tools built for that purpose. Some customer service messaging platforms offer SMS support natively, while others integrate a third-party SMS integration tool to add this functionality. 

As you consider the available options, make sure the one you choose offers the features you need. Some tools are full-fledged SMS marketing solutions. Others focus specifically on SMS as a support channel.

It’s easier for most businesses to use an all-in-one customer service platform like Gorgias to support an omnichannel approach. With this kind of helpdesk platform, SMS tickets can be handled in the same feed as your other tickets and benefit from the same workflows and automation.

Here are some other features your customer service tool needs to have to handle SMS ticket effectively:

• Conversation history (for SMS and other text-based channels like Facebook Messenger or webchat) so your agents know what this client has asked about or needed support for in the past
• Ability to create and customize macros as replies to SMS questions
• Ability to send and receive images or videos (this is great if your support teams need to see the damaged item to issue a refund, for example)
• Routing or triaging capabilities to make sure SMS conversations don’t get lost in a queue of tickets
• Integration with other ecommerce tools so your agents have all the context they need to reply in a single space (e.g., surfacing Shopify customer data or CRM data during a support interaction)

Ecommerce SMS marketing tools to complement your customer experience

As we mentioned earlier, SMS marketing lets brands connect with consumers in a personalized and measurable way, just like with customer service. According to Attentive, average read rates of 97% within 15 minutes make SMS a prime channel for connecting with prospects and customers.

If you’re looking for the right SMS marketing tool to work in tandem with your new SMS customer service channel, consider these four leading tools. Each one integrates with Gorgias, along with most of the rest of your tech stack.

Each tool offers a slightly different feature set. Revisit the list of features we compiled earlier in this article to help determine which are the most important to you, then vet these four tools against your customized list.

• Klaviyo, a Gorgias preferred partner, is a leading customer data and marketing automation platform that leans heavily on SMS communications. Automatically create tickets in Gorgias if customers reply to Klaviyo SMS messages, and send Gorgias events into Klaviyo to create targeted audience lists based on support experiences. 
• Attentive, also a Gorgias preferred partner, sends automatic text messages to your subscribers at each step of the customer lifecycle. It collects real-time behavioral data on customers as well, and the Gorgias integration allows you to see that customer data within the Gorgias sidebar. If a customer replies to an Attentive SMS, it’ll automatically create a ticket in Gorgias for agents to reply to. 
• Postscript is an SMS messaging tool that drives revenue growth and improves the customer experience over SMS. If a customer replies to a Postscript SMS, it’ll automatically create a ticket in Gorgias for agents to reply to.
• SMSBump is a D2C focused SMS customer journey automation tool by Yotpo that boasts powerful results: 45% conversion rate and 25x ROI for D2C brands. By connecting SMSBump with Gorgias, tickets will automatically be created if customers reply to SMSBump campaigns. 

Integrate your SMS tool with your helpdesk for a seamless customer experience

Integrating any of these SMS marketing tools with Gorgias is a great way to unify your marketing and support efforts to improve the overall customer experience.

For example, if customers respond to an SMS marketing blast from a tool integrated with Gorgias, the response gets brought into the helpdesk. The agent can see the initial marketing message and the customers response, so they can answer any follow-up questions. It's like an alley-oop from your marketing to your support team.

Also, these integrations help your marketing team be more aware of active support conversations to avoid tone deaf marketing. For example, by integrating Gorgias and your SMS marketing tool, you can pause marketing campaigns on customers awaiting a response from support. (Nobody wants to get marketing messages if they're waiting on a delayed order, or troubleshooting their last purchase).

Message your customers in real time with Gorgias

Customer service messaging across a wide range of message-based platforms can be a powerful addition to your customer service channels. Of these, the SMS channel is one of the most powerful options for businesses that want to reach customers directly where they are.

The scripts and tools provided in this guide should put you well on your way toward a successful SMS support rollout. But make sure that at the core of your customer service operation, you have a platform robust enough to handle everything you need to do — and whatever functionality you might add in the future. For more examples and tactics to launch a successful rollout of SMS support, check out our playbook of Berkey Filters, an online store that released SMS support to great adoption.

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Gorgias is the customer support and helpdesk platform built for ecommerce businesses like yours. Our live chat tools and 150+ integrations equip you to reach your customers — whenever and however you choose.

See how Gorgias supercharges customer support and helpdesk via SMS. Alternatively, check out more information about our integrations with:

• Instagram messages
• Facebook messenger‍
• WhatsApp messaging

As your brand grows, maintaining great customer service is challenging. At a certain point, you can’t obsess over every customer’s experience yourself — even small businesses have to delegate. But you can’t trust just anyone: CX is far too important for your brand’s reputation and bottom line.

Outsourcing customer service is one way to scale up. But that might conjure an image of underpaid, contracted agents alienating your customer base with poor service. These horror stories should make you very nervous: 55% of customers won’t return to your brand after a bad experience, so you should be picky about who can access your customers.

But outsourcing customer service can work — with a particular approach. The trick is an in-house/outsourced hybrid model. One that leverages outsourced knowledge and human power without losing sight of your brand’s unique business needs, voice, and processes. 

That’s the model we use at HelpFlow, where we’ve hired and managed customer service teams as a Gorgias Premier Partner for over 100 brands for nearly a decade. Clients who outsource support to our services have reached chat response times of 10s, email response times of < 4 hours, and CSAT scores of 90+. 

Drawing from first-hand experience, I’ll share common landmines brands typically encounter with outsourcing customer support and how to choose an outsourcing solution to help your brand grow. Last, I’ll tell you what customer service outsourcing companies — like the one I run — need from you to be successful.  

What is customer service outsourcing?

Customer service outsourcing involves hiring external agents to help you handle customer service tickets. 

While outsourced call center service used to be the primary way to get help with customer support, most modern services are omnichannel. That means they can help you keep up with customer interactions on email, live chat support, social media, SMS, WhatsApp, and phone calls. 

Outsourced agents can be individual agents you hire directly (through a freelancing service like Fiverr) or employees of customer service outsourcing companies. These customer service outsourcing companies are business process outsourcing (or BPO).

Let’s dive more into these differences (and why they matter):

Types of customer service outsourcing

There are three main models of outsourced customer support, each with a unique way of supporting your team. You’ll still find a wide range of pricing and quality within each model. But before looking for solutions, you’ll want to decide which general model would work best for your team. 

Agencies: Partner with a customer service company that hires agents for you

Customer service agencies are businesses that help you recruit, hire, train, and manage agents. 

Great agencies have tried-and-tested processes for hiring and training, close-knit teams of high-performing agents, and a public roster of past clients to help you make an informed choice when evaluating solutions. 

However, that’s not always the case. Some agencies — especially the ones with too-good-to-be-true pricing — hire the cheapest agents available, don’t provide training, and will degrade the quality of your support. As with all things, you get what you pay for.

Agencies are the best solution for brands that want an outsourcing solution that’s flexible, long-term, and quick to ramp up. 

Individual agents: Hire, train, and manage support agents directly

You can also hire external customer service agents individually as contractors.

Like an agency, this saves costs compared to hiring a full-time employee. And compared to an agency, hiring individual agents gives you more direct control over the quality of service since you manage the hiring process yourself. 

However, you’ll have to hire, train, and manage the agent(s) yourself. Plus, guaranteeing 24/7 coverage and scaling up and down throughout the year will be more challenging than with an agency.  

Individual agents are the best solution for small businesses that only need one or two more part-time customer support agents and are willing to invest significant time in hiring and training those agents. 

“Pay-per-ticket” customer service services

In recent years, there has been an influx of pay-per-ticket services for customer service. These providers offer a scalable plan, where you only pay for the number of tickets in your inbox instead of contracting agents for a set number of hours.

While the pay-per-ticket model can sound attractive, hidden feed and steep minimums make these contact centers less cost-effective than advertised.

Generally, it’s best to hire contract agents directly or use a higher-quality agency. 

Pros and cons of customer service outsourcing

Customer service outsourcing isn’t the right customer care solution for every company. Sometimes, hiring full-time agents or using customer service automation to stretch your current team’s time further is the right choice.

Here’s a snapshot of the pros and cons of outsourcing:

Pros of outsourcing

The most significant benefit of customer service outsourcing is that it provides your company with additional help. Some other benefits of bringing on an external customer service provide include: 

• Increase and decrease agent headcount as volume changes (like for Black Friday—Cyber Monday) without having to hire and fire full-time agents
• Cover your agent availability outside of business hours, especially by working with a customer service provider that offers 24/7 staffing
• Cost savings, typically through hiring overseas, lower-cost domestic agents, and the fact that you don’t have to pay for health insurance and other full-time benefits
• Knowledge about customer service tools and best practices to level up your support

Cons of outsourcing

• Less control of agent workflow and processes than a full-time, in-house agent
• Less integration of agents into your brand’s unique voice and culture
• High agent turnover, especially at poorly run outsourcing agencies

Why outsourcing typically fails

Before getting into how to succeed with customer support outsourcing, let’s dig deeper into the typical traps that cause outsourcing to fail.

Brands choose cheap services that sacrifice quality

When hiring directly, brand operators get enamored with the cost savings of outsourcing and try to put together a cheap solution that optimizes cost — but not quality. 

For example, if a service can get a customer service agent in the Philippines for $8/hour and takes that great deal regardless of the applicant’s quality or experience, they’re missing the point. Hire a more senior-level Filipino person for $9/hour, and they’ll run circles around brands that hire based solely on price. 

“Pay per ticket” volume machine models incentivize the wrong thing

Startups in the space pitch a “just pay for each ticket we handle” model, which is a variation of the cheap issue above. Per ticket sounds nice until you realize it means the agents handle 10-20+ brands with little to no training and (sometimes) churning ticket volume to drive up the cost. 

$/ticket models become a way more expensive solution than managing CS in-house. 

The outsourced team doesn’t work close enough with your support team

Often, customer service managers don’t manage the external team closely enough — think integration into the team, coaching, etc. This leads to agents operating a bit like customer service robots and eventually leads to turnover.

Nearly all the situations where “outsourcing didn’t work” come down to one of these — or a combination. 

In-house/outsourced hybrids are the right solution

A hybrid structure for your customer service operation offers the best of both worlds: you maintain quality by keeping your in-house closely aligned, and scale impact with the humanpower of an outsourcing partner. 

One note: Before you get started, your in-house Customer Service Manager builds an initial effective customer service process. While an excellent outsourcing agency should help you improve your process, an outsourced partner can’t build a customer support program from scratch. Always start in-house, then bring on outsourced help to scale.

Once that’s done, a customer service outsourcing partner offers additional agents and helps optimize your operation. They can handle tickets, suggest process improvements, implement more robust reporting, and assist with special projects like capacity planning and forecasting.

The key to this process is hiring agents who work exclusively with your brand (either directly or through an agency) and working closely with them. That’s the only way to balance quantity, scale, and flexibility.

We use this model at HelpFlow with a wide range of brands. Here’s what Sam Menleshon at Sivana Spirit said about the process:

“I have hired a lot of agencies and service providers over the past ten years. Some great, some decent, and a lot terrible. Helpflow has been the best experience I have ever had with an outside service provider. Their team analyzed our customer communication, streamlined it, and built processes. After 2-4 weeks of training, three agents went live. It was like having in-house employees appear out of thin air.”

— Sam Menleshon, Owner, Sivana Spirit

How to tell if you should outsource your customer service

One of our clients — an ecommerce brand in the apparel industry — came to us after a growth boom. They had a 4-day response time and 9-day resolution time, a serious threat to any brand’s customer retention. 

While they ended as a success story (we helped reduce response time to 6 hours and resolution time to 30 hours), they should have sought support earlier. 

Here are three key metrics indicating when your customer support team may need extra help.

Increasing response times

If your first response time and average handle time start to increase, it could be a sign that your agents are hitting their capacity with the ticket volume they can handle. 

• Industry averages for first response time are 90 seconds for chat support and 24 hours for customer service email support
• Average response time of 48 seconds for live chat and 12 hours for email

These metrics can be helpful to benchmark, but you should track your own metrics over time and watch for changes in the wrong direction.

Consistent resolution times but low satisfaction

If resolution time is consistent, but customer satisfaction is down, it could be a sign that your agents are not giving each ticket the same amount of thought and attention, potentially from overwork. 

Tickets/day varies between agents

Lastly, if your response times and customer satisfaction are consistent, but some agents handle tons more tickets per day than others, take note. It could be a sign that specific agents are handling the excess volume that will eventually become difficult for the team. 

Note: Be sure to filter out social media comment-related tickets if you are routing them all into the same helpdesk. Combining these with normal tickets can massively skew your insights since they usually require a like or simple response. 

Best practices to make sure your outsourcing is successful

There are a lot of different factors that make outsourcing work (or not), some of which could be entire posts. For example, hiring agents, setting up helpdesk workflow, etc. But this post will provide a mid-level guide to each step so you can see the big picture and build an effective outsourced structure. 

Prepare your customer service process for outsourcing

It’s much easier to scale up the human side of customer service if your infrastructure, workflow, and management routine are dialed in. It doesn’t need to be perfect, but here are the main areas to solidify with your in-house team before outsourcing.

Configure your helpdesk for success

Set up your helpdesk to properly intake and route inbound calls and tickets. For example, in Gorgias, you can set up specific views to organize certain types of tickets in real-time. 

This allows your team to divide and conquer based on ticket type and prioritize certain types of tickets to drive more revenue (or save customer risk situations). 

Setup proper customer service KPI tracking

You should have basic KPI tracking in place before outsourcing. For example, the most important customer service metrics are first response time, resolution time, customer satisfaction, and volume of tickets per agent. 

These should be tracked by default with most helpdesks, but make sure the data is clean as soon as possible. 

Then, establish a weekly cadence to review these, (re)set targets for each one, and notice when the numbers start to get out of whack. 

Prepare knowledge base and templates for agents

A robust knowledge base and templates may not be needed for your initial team, but they’re the best method of proactive quality assurance for external support reps. Gorgias has Macros, or dynamic templates, so that you can build a library of on-brand and in-policy responses. 

Vet customer service outsourcing companies carefully

At HelpFlow, we’ve offered outsourced support for nearly a decade. We’ve seen competitors come and go because agencies are very easy to start but difficult to sustain long-term. They can handle a few clients easily but start cutting corners once they grow past about 15. 

Here are the key ways to dodge many agencies that can’t back up what they’re selling. 

Vet the agency’s process for hiring agents

Many agencies hire any agent they can find at the cheapest rates possible to juice their margins. To make sure you’re getting A Player agents, ask the following:

• What level of ecommerce and customer service experience do you require?
• How do they screen new hires for experience, skills, and culture fit?
• What’s the entry-level pay for new agents?

For context, we created a post with Gorgias on ‎hiring customer service agents. It goes deep into the recruitment and screening process. Most agencies you encounter won’t have this intense of a process refined over a decade. But it’s a good example of how methodical a hiring process should be. 

Evaluate their agent retention rate

It’s common for customer service agencies to have internal management issues that lead to poor retention of agents, with 20-30% or more of front-line agents turning over each year. 

This can create a tough situation for your brand, as you’ll constantly be training new agents instead of reaping the rewards of long-term outsourcing services.

• Ask for the turnover rate of front-line agents and the average tenure of management
• Ask if the agency provides employee benefits like sick pay, health insurance, etc. 

Great agencies regularly poach the best agents from competitors that mistreat their agents with low pay, poor benefits, and long hours. If you choose a cheap agency, any high-quality agents on your account may get snatched by an agency that treats them better.

Be wary of US managers of overseas agents

It’s common to have customer service teams operate in The Philippines or other countries overseas. However, if most middle and senior-level management is not in the same country as the support reps, it can lead to a major disconnect and poor quality.

If you’re talking to a Sales Executive in California who brings in a Team Leader from New Jersey who talks about their great team in The Philippines (that you haven’t met), that’s a major red flag.

Ask how often the team meets in person for get-togethers. Remote support teams are great, but the culture is usually pretty weak if they’re not getting together in person. 

At HelpFlow, our entire team is in the Philippines. It includes the Client Success Manager, Sales, and all other team members. This enables us to hire middle to senior-level people for all roles while keeping costs to our clients low even as we scale.

Competitors with US-based management or sales experience communication and management breakdown as the company grows. This leads to clients paying more than they should for cheaper and less experienced agents, which shows up as agent and client retention problems.

Does the agency bring value up front?

The “sales process” you go through with the right agency should feel like a powerful customer service strategy consultation. For example, the agency should dig into your helpdesk, ask questions about processes, and analyze your current customer experience to suggest solutions. 

For instance, they could look at your tagging to suggest auto-tags that would make your helpdesk more organized. 

Or, if your team already uses Gorgias, the agency should suggest ways to improve your team’s speed and create a great customer experience with self-service. 

If the agency doesn’t drive the sales process and make you feel like they’re experts who have done this exact dance many times over, that’s another red flag.

Spend time on the training and onboarding process

Once you’ve found an excellent customer support service to work with, the real work begins. On both ends! The training and onboarding process is the most critical part of the process and a place where things either fall off the rails or start to accelerate and make you realize the power of the team you just hired. 

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There are a few key things that should happen during onboarding:

Kickoff the onboarding process smoothly

The sales team you worked with should have a smooth handoff process with the account management team.

The agency should ask about the project's specifics, timelines, quirks of your tools, and details of who’s involved. This process should give the account management team everything they need to know before you start working with agents. 

Intake key information efficiently for training

The agency should have a robust intake process to access your systems and gather many details about your customer service process (but efficiently!). On top of the kick-off call, expect a well-designed questionnaire, an analysis of your tickets, and then a call to discuss their findings. 

Conduct robust training for agents 

The agency should be able to create and drive through a robust training process for their agents, regardless of your current training process. 

Even if you have little to no documentation, the agency should be able to use the accesses provided and intake information to create a robust knowledge base for the agents to use. 

Commit to ongoing management for your hybrid team

Once training is complete and agents are up and running, it’s crucial to maintain a management cadence of the team. This should include monitoring the key metrics we shared above to gauge the quality and capacity of the operation. 

In addition, set up recurring working meetings where your team and the agency discuss specific customer service challenges and initiatives that can improve the process. 

Many brands operate daily without intentionally flagging and pursuing longer-term opportunities within teams (especially outsourced teams). 

But ongoing management and hybrid structure help your agency up-level your team even further — like expanding your multichannel operation, exploring outbound calls and messages, and more. 

Top customer service outsourcing options

Looking for a customer service outsourcing provider that can meet your needs? Start with these recommendations as you explore your options:

• HelpFlow: HelpFlow can manage your entire customer service operation or simply provide additional agents. It’s an Elite Partner and Certified Services Partner of Gorgias.
• Fluency Firm: Fluency Firm is a full-stack digital and growth marketing agency with a customer service offering. The Gorgias Partner can also do Gorgias implementation and optimization. 
• Happiliver: Gorgias Partner Happiliver specializes in supporting ecommerce brands with a focus on quality, efficiency, customer experience, and customer loyalty. 
• *In Social Incorporated: Hire *In Social Incorporated for help with customer service or anything digital marketing-related. It’s a Premier Partner with Gorgias and can offer Gorgias onboarding, implementation, and optimization. 
• ModSquad: The Gorgias Certified Services Partner can offer everything from configuration through expansion. Work with them on Gorgias implementation, onboarding, and optimization. 

So what’s next? Let’s audit your process

Scaling past your initial core team is challenging, and outsourcing can be scary. If you get it wrong, it can bring down the brand you built by creating an army of angry customers in the market. 

But if you get outsourcing right, you can continue to scale up revenue while keeping customer service great — and improving it significantly over time. 

HelpFlow is a Gorgias Premier Partner with experience setting up customer service teams for 100+ brands over nearly a decade. At the start of any project, we get deep in the weeds with the brand’s team to audit the customer service process. We share a roadmap that calls out issues and how to resolve them, along with initiatives to improve the customer service operation.

You can get a lot of value by going through this process with us, and we’d be happy to do it with any member of the Gorgias community. We include a proposal to work together, but even if you don’t work with us, you’ll get a ton of ideas you can implement with your team. 

Get in touch with us today to audit your process.

TL;DR:

• Customer expectations for quick and efficient customer service are higher than ever.
• It's important to strategically choose a few customer service channels to focus on, rather than spreading attention across many.
• Self-service options, live chat and chatbots, email, messaging and SMS, voice and phone support, and third-party channels are essential customer service channels to consider.
• Each channel has its own benefits and should be chosen based on your brand and audience demographics.
• The future of customer service is omnichannel, where multiple channels work together to provide a cohesive customer experience.

Customer expectations are higher than ever. According to Intercom’s recent Customer Service Trends report, 83% of customer service teams are noticing an increase.

Most customers want an answer about their issues immediately, and without a hitch. That’s a big reason why you need to think strategically about how you communicate with customers and the customer service channels you invest in.   

While it’s tempting to sprinkle your attention across a dozen different channels, consider choosing just a handful. That way, you can focus your efforts on resolving customer problems and can become an all-around more efficient team.

Let's dive into the most commonly used channels, like self-service, chatbots, and SMS messaging. Then, we’ll break down exactly how these channels work so you can make a sound investment for your support team.

‎The 6 essential customer service channels for your brand

A majority of shoppers these days expect to have their issues solved quickly, successfully, and in their channel of choice. 

Salesforce reports that 78% of customers prefer to have access to a variety of engagement channels for support.

Ultimately, it’s up to you to find the proper channels that best suit your brand and audience demographics. That’s because customer service service channels aren’t one-size-fits-all — different audiences have different preferences. But, it’s helpful to understand basic channels and how they function so you can make an informed decision about where to invest your energy. 

We’ll walk you through the 7 essential channels that most organizations use to support their shoppers, like self-service options, email, and SMS messaging. 

1) Help customers help themselves with self-service

A growing number of shoppers prefer self-service options, where they can quickly help themselves to solve their problems — no human interaction needed.

Research from Nice supports the trend to self-service options: 81% of surveyed consumers say they want brands to offer self service. 

An added bonus for implementing self-service options? It frees up your team to focus on higher-priority, or more complex, tickets. 

How to implement self-service in your customer support strategy 

A help center, sometimes called a knowledge base, is an example of self-service in customer support. It’s designed to provide detailed information that helps customers answer simple questions, like “Do you ship to my area?” 

This kind of self-service option can reduce ticket volume for your support agents.

For example, office furniture store Branch’s help center created using Gorgias, is like a one-stop shop to help customers solve common problems. 

Branch’s help center has an extensive offering of resources, including detailed shipping and delivery information. It also includes informative articles dedicated solely to answering customer’s most frequently asked questions. 

Help centers are a great starting point to power self-service support. Used in tandem with Gorgias’ Automate features, like Flows, your brand can become a support powerhouse. 

If you’re not ready to create a comprehensive help center, you can start out with a simple FAQ page. Check out our free FAQ template generator to get started. 

Read our guide on customer self-service to learn about indirect ways to boost customer satisfaction.

2) Live chat & chatbots: Create better customer experiences

Shoppers expect a quick answer to their issues — and 90% of customers in the US agree that an immediate response from a brand is important. 

One way to meet these rising customer expectations is to consider implementing both live chat and chatbots that work in tandem to provide a seamless experience.  

This way, you can leverage live agents during working hours, then let the bots take over customer queries when it’s time for your reps to clock out. 

Similarly, you can use a Flow via Gorgias to build in personalized, automated responses based on customer input. If the issue isn’t resolved by the bot, it can be automatically elevated to a live agent. 

How to implement live chat and chatbots in your customer service strategy 

Live chat is one of the most preferred methods of communication for shoppers. So much so, that 86% would rather interact with a human over a bot. 

The team at CROSSNET made use of live chat to quickly handle support tickets. Their efforts resulted in massive growth, including $450,00 in a single sale. 

Weaving an automation option into your customer service strategy helps your team provide a seamless customer service experience, working 24/7 to answer customer tickets even after your reps have gone home. 

Gorgias offers a few automation options that act as quick-response tools, like Quick Response Flows, Macros, and Rules, to help resolve tickets faster. 

With Macros, you can build premade responses and set up Rules to that trigger them when a customer asks a common question, like “where’s my order?” 

3) Gain customer trust by responding quickly through email

Email is one of the most tried-and-true methods to communicate with customers. 

Unlike some of the other channels mentioned in this list, email support is an asynchronous method of communication. This is largely because a customer isn’t immediately connected to an agent or support resource. 

But, that doesn’t mean you can relax on your response time. Treat an email like the first step before a shopper leaves a bad review. Take steps to thoroughly read their message and offer a thoughtful response to resolve the issue.  

How to use email to support your customer service strategy

If an agent receives a customer service email from an angry customer, a great first step is to apologize right away. 

From there, the agent can take steps to de-escalate the situation and offer a solution.  

{{Customer First Name}},

Thanks so much for your feedback on {{Concern or issue they had with the brand or their experience}}.

We strive to provide an amazing experience for all of our customers, and sometimes we fall short of doing that. We sincerely apologize for the experience you’ve had with our brand.

As a token of our appreciation, we’d like to offer you {{Discount code, free gift, free shipping on next order; whatever aligns with your policy}}. Have a great day,

{{Current agent first name}}

Read more about how to use emails in your customer service strategy + templates to respond to angry customers.

4) Messaging & SMS: Make your support convenient

Customer service SMS is quickly rising in the ranks as a preferred way for shoppers to get in touch with a brand. 

One reason for messaging’s popularity may lie in the fast response times. Most customers expect to have a response to their message within 10 minutes. 

Plus, a text message is convenient. Most people have mobile devices and they’re more willing to respond to a quick text in their day-to-day life. For some shoppers, it’s just easier to send a text than it is to find a contact-us page, or type up an email. 

How to implement SMS messaging in your customer service strategy

OLIPOP has seen an 88% decrease in response time since implementing SMS messaging — powered by Gorgias — in their customer support strategy.  

"Don't treat SMS like email - talk to these folks like they're your friends. That's something that OLIPOP does via SMS really well." - Claire Goodill, Head of Partnerships, Postscript

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5) Voice & phone support: Creating person-to-person relationships

Reliable phone support is one of the most traditional forms of customer service channels out there. Voice support is one of the most powerful ways for support agents to foster empathy with customers. 

This empathy can lead to positive support outcomes as well — letting agents earn customer trust and boosting customer satisfaction metrics, or CSAT.

“I've seen that a phone call can actually turn things around,” says Bri Christiano, Director of Customer Service at Gorgias. “Some people just need to be heard on the phone, especially people who are more used to having conversations over the phone. I've called angry customers, and if you let them speak and hear them out, and repeat back to them their frustrations, that alone will save that customer in the end.” 

Gorgias’s customers prove time and time again that voice is a powerful tool: Our customers that use phones in their support strategy have an average Satisfaction score of 4.56 out of 5. 

How to use voice and phone support in your customer service channels 

Phone support works really well when it’s integrated into your organization’s overall support strategy. 

Try The World invested in Gorgias to help merge its customer contact channels into one cohesive platform, including phone. 

"Another big time-saver is the fact that chats, emails, and phone calls are united under one customer view. This way, when a customer calls, we immediately see previous conversations with them," says Amanda, the Customer Support Manager at Try The World. 

In Gorgias, when a customer calls for support, agents can pull up all other points of contact with the customer. This makes it easy for agents to give detailed and personalized support to handle customer issues. 

6) Third-party channels: Leverage social proof to boost brand awareness  

By 2025, Gartner estimates 60% of your customer base will turn to third-party channels, like social media or forums, for information about your brand. This makes a compelling case to invest in these channels and thoughtfully integrate them into your larger support strategy. 

It may be scary to think about shoppers talking about your brand in a place where you have little-to-no control of the narrative. But, third-party channels have a few benefits.

It’s a massively useful form of brand awareness that taps into social proof — aka, that your brand and its products are as great as they seem on your website. Plus, you can turn great posts from customers into marketing collateral, like user-generated content (UGC). 

When you take the time to respond to customers in third-party channels, it also shows prospective shoppers that your brand is dedicated to providing a really great experience. 

“It's really important to be monitoring social posts, even if you don’t have a massive following. These are public platforms where potential new customers are going to look at your brand and see immediately how you engage with customers,” says Bri Christiano, Director of Customer Service at Gorgias. 

Meet customers where they are on social media

A growing number of younger shoppers — particularly Gen Z-ers — treat social media like a search engine. These shoppers use social platforms to answer their questions about brands and products by scrolling through content created by real customers. 

As social media customer service becomes more common, more and more shoppers will turn to social media platforms, whether through comments or DMs, to engage with brands.

Ecommerce, or direct-to-consumer brands, might see more success on platforms like Instagram or TikTok, while B2B organizations might want to lean heavily into a more professional platform like LinkedIn. It all boils down to where your target audience is already spending time online. 

A helpdesk can help your team keep track of customer communication on social channels.

These platforms are designed to integrate into your existing social media presence.

Gorgias, for example, pulls social media channels into one central space for your agents to easily monitor, respond to, and track comments or tags from customers. 

For example, Everyday Dose turned to Gorgias to help manage the massive influx of comments and DMs they received from shoppers on their social profiles. 

The main goals were to lower first-response and resolution times while maintaining high CSAT scores.

After implementing Gorgias, Everyday Dose met their goals, reducing response time by 60% and saw resolution time reduced by 45%. On top of this, the brand was able to convert 30% more tickets into sales, giving their revenue a nice boost.  

Build community with your audience on forums

Online forums are excellent spaces for community building. For shoppers, forums are useful to swap experiences or get information about a brand and its products. 

Some brands opt to build their own forums from the ground up, but there are many free options available you may already be familiar with, like Discord, Reddit or Facebook groups.

Do your research before building from scratch to see if your brand already has a word-of-mouth presence on a third-party forum.

Read more about the best practices to leverage online forums as spaces for community building. 

How to choose the right support channels to manage customer interactions 

We’ll let you in on a secret: When it comes to choosing the best customer support channels to invest in, there’s no perfect answer. 

You don’t need to use every channel out there in order to successfully and efficiently support your shoppers. The communication channels used by your team to manage customer expectations will differ across organizations. 

That’s largely because of who your target audience is and how your customer service team best communicates with them. 

For example, at Topicals, the customer support team leans into SMS messaging to follow up with customers. 

This works because an important part of their communication strategy is to sound relatable to skincare-conscious millennials and Gen Z-ers. 

SMS messaging is less useful for a company like Comme Avant, who sees a bulk of their customer support tickets come through social media DMs. 

To choose the best right channels for your brand, start by thinking about your audience. Some questions you may want to ask include: 

• Where is my audience already hanging out online?
• How does my audience prefer to communicate? 
• How do our support agents typically interact with shoppers? 
• Does my audience want a self-service option over a service agent? 
• Is there a process to route complex customer issues to a different channel? 
• How long is my audience willing to wait in a queue to troubleshoot their issues? 

The future of customer service is omnichannel

The old-school way of customer service was single-channel, mainly by way of call centers. 

Then, as technology evolved, customer service became increasingly multi-channel. This meant customers could reach a brand through channels like email, chat support, or phone calls, etc. 

Now, customer service has become about omnichannel support — allowing multiple channels to work together to form a cohesive system. 

Gorgias leverages omnichannel support by connecting a customer service team’s tools into one simple system. That way, agents can handle tickets across social media, SMS messaging, live chat, and more. 

It also gives your customers multiple touchpoints to reach your brand and allows them to communicate through a preferred channel for troubleshooting issues. 

Achieving true omnichannel support with a consistent customer experience across all channels is tough, but it is possible with support from a modern help management platform, like Gorgias. 

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Every customer service interaction is a representation of your brand, and the words you use when communicating with customers matter. The right customer service phrases could make the difference between:

• A high-effort vs. a low-effort customer experience
• A high CSAT score vs. a low one
• An escalated customer vs. a quick resolution
• A one-time buyer vs. a repeat customer

Whether your goal is to update your customer service templates, improve customer service training, or just raise CSAT, have your customer support team members use these 15 phrases made up of customer service power words (and avoid the 5 harmful ones) to cultivate better conversations. 

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15 useful phrases for customer service

The following customer service lines can be used on phone calls, emails, live chats, or any other channel.

If you use a helpdesk, you can incorporate them into your library of templates (or Macros, if you use Gorgias). to scale the quality of your support and make sure all agents are using the best language possible:

Greeting customers

Customer service representatives can make a good first impression with customers by using positive language right out of the gate. Here are some common customer service phrases for greeting shoppers:

"How are you doing today?"

Asking someone how they’re doing adds a personal touch that makes customers feel valued. It's a great ice-breaker and provides a more natural transition into addressing the customer's problem.

“Nice to meet you” 

Similarly, if your customer service team starts out a chat by saying that it’s nice to meet the customer, it adds a more personal feel to the entire conversation. 

“Happy to help!”

Positive words are a key part of great customer service, and this phrase lets customers know that your service reps are excited and ready to resolve an issue or answer a question. 

When to use customer greetings 

Use a cheerful greeting to set a positive, warm mood for the forthcoming conversation. For example: “It’s so nice to meet you! Thanks for reaching out today.” Or, “How has your day been so far?” Or, “I’m more than happy to help in any way I can!”

Follow up with a greeting at the end of a conversation, once you’ve answered a shopper’s questions or resolved their issue. For example: “It’s been so nice to chat with you! Thank you for reaching out to us.” Or, “I’m happy to help. Reach out again any time.” 

Solve customer issues

Once a customer explains their problem, validate their concerns and transition into offering solutions. A few great customer phrases to help your support team make this transition include:

"Excellent question. I'll find out for you."

Complimenting a customer for asking a great question (even if it's a question your team members hear a thousand times a day) makes customers feel validated. It also ensures that you’ll get to the bottom of the customer's request and figure out the right answer.

Examples of when to use this phrase

On social media, when answering product questions to help shoppers make a purchase decision. 

“That’s an excellent question! Let me see if we can make that ring in a brushed finish for you.” 

When providing a status update on an order. 

“Great question—I’m seeing the same thing on my end: Your order has been stuck in the same location for a few days. Let me check in with our shipping team to see why.”

If a customer asks about a price match or adjustment. 

“Good question! Let me find out if we do offer price matching.” Or, “Great question, we can adjust the cost of your order if an item goes on sale within two weeks of its purchase date.”

📚Recommended reading: Tips and Templates for Customer Service Messaging on SMS + Conversational Channels

"Thanks for bringing this to our attention!"

This phrase lets customers know that you’re committed to offering good customer service and are willing to listen to customer feedback. It's a phrase that reassures shoppers that the customer service agent takes their issue seriously.

Examples of when to use this expression

When a shopper points out an issue with the checkout or shopping process. 

“Thanks for letting us know that the discount code we provided didn’t work for you! This affects all of our customers and we’re grateful you caught it before we did. It should be fixed now!” 

If a customer receives a defective or damaged item. 

“Thank you so much for bringing this to our attention. This item does not represent the quality that we strive for with our products, and we’d like to send you a replacement ASAP.”

When a customer’s order hasn’t shipped after the allotted processing time. 

“Thank you for bringing this to my attention! We’re experiencing an unprecedented amount of orders due to our feature in a recent magazine.”

📚 Recommended reading: 20 Ecommerce Customer Service Best Practices to Help You Level Up

De-escalating angry customers

Dealing with upset customers is a challenging aspect of customer service, and the way your reps diffuse the situation is critical to success. 

"Please let me clarify, and correct me if I got anything wrong."

Miscommunication or misunderstandings are common reasons why customers get upset. This phrase provides customer support agents with the opportunity to fully understand what happened and why the customer is angry. 

Examples of when to use it 

After a customer tells you what they’re upset about. 

“To clarify, the order arrived a week after we had quoted you and you no longer need the item. Is that correct?” 

To confirm that you’re offering the resolution that they’re looking for. 

“Let me clarify to make sure that we’ve resolved this for you. Is there anything else that I can help you with, besides sending you a replacement for the item that arrived damaged?” 

To clarify what’s wrong with the item they received. 

“Are you able to send in a photo of the item you received? It sounds like we sent you the navy sneakers, rather than the black sneakers, by accident!” 

"I understand how __ that must be."

"Frustrating," "difficult," and "disappointing" are all words that you can use to fill in the blank in this phrase, and they all accomplish the same purpose. The best customer service is empathetic and seeks to solve customer complaints quickly and with compassion. 

Examples of when to use it 

When a frustrated customer finishes explaining their problem. 

“I understand why you’re upset, and I would be too! Let’s figure out a solution that makes you happy and that fully resolves this issue.”

If a package they were waiting on gets lost in the mail. 

“I understand how frustrating this must be, especially since it sounds like we really missed the mark on getting the item to you in time for your son’s birthday.”

If the color of an item looks different in person than it did online. 

“I can understand why you’re frustrated—what shows up as light blue online looks to be more of a dove gray in person.”

Apologizing for order issues

Even if your company is not entirely at fault for a customer's issue, it's still essential to validate their concerns and apologize for the inconvenience. When it comes time to apologize for a problem that a customer is experiencing, here are a few great phrases to try.

“I'm sorry to hear that you haven't gotten your order yet. Let me check on the status for you.”

Inquiring about order status is a very common reason why customers contact customer support, so it's an issue that your support team needs to be ready to address. Apologizing for the delay and offering to check the order's location and status is the most effective way to resolve this common issue.

Examples of when to use it

When an order is delayed. 

“I'm sorry to hear that you haven't gotten your order yet. Let me check on the status for you. With the storm on the east coast, we’ve been having some shipping issues with items coming from our New Jersey warehouse.”

If an order is lost or hasn’t moved in a week. 

“I'm sorry to hear that you haven't gotten your order yet. Let me reach out to our warehouse team, as they’re on the ground and can give us the best idea of when your order will get to you.”

For pre-ordered items that haven’t shipped by the expected release date. 

“I'm sorry to hear that you haven't gotten your order yet! Let me check on the status of that item for you. Last I heard, the pre-ordered items were running behind on their shipping dates.”

💡Tip: Use a customer service platform that automatically displays the shipping status of each order next to the customer ticket, so your agents don’t have to waste time chasing (and copy/pasting) information from other apps. Here’s what a ticket in Gorgias looks like, with information from Shopify displayed next to the customer message:

“I apologize for the inconvenience you are experiencing. I'll look into it right now and get back to you with more details.”

This is a versatile phrase that your support team can use to address a wide range of customer issues, from wrong or incomplete orders to credit card issues and beyond.

If you can’t solve something right away, letting customers know that they can expect a follow up can help build a more positive customer experience, rather than just leaving them hanging. 

Examples of when to use it

To validate a customer’s feelings about a frustrating order issue. 

“I apologize for the inconvenience you’re experiencing! This is not how we want our customers to feel when shopping with us. Let me look into what happened so that I can make this right for you.”

To look into alternative solutions for a missing order that’s now sold out. 

“I apologize for the inconvenience, especially since you were so excited about this item and now it’s sold out. Let me check in with my team to figure out when the item will come back in stock, or if we will be stocking something similar in the meantime.”

When you can’t figure out where an order is right away. 

“I apologize for the inconvenience here! I’ll look into this with our shipping and processing team and get back to you with more details. Is the email we have on file for you the best way to get back in contact?”

📚 Recommended Reading: 30+ email templates to improve your customer support responses.

Putting customers on hold

A HubSpot survey finds that waiting on hold is the most frustrating part of the customer service experience for 33% of respondents. Of course, sometimes there is no other option but for a call center support agent to place a customer on hold. To soften the blow and help prevent frustrated customers, here are two phrases to use when you need to place a customer on hold.

"I'll forward this to our __ specialist. Just a moment."

If you have to forward a customer to another agent, this is a great phrase to use since it lets the customer know that you are passing them off to an expert who can better address their needs. 

Examples of when to use it

When their question requires information you don’t have access to. 

“I’ll forward this to our warehouse team, who will be able to let me know if your order has reached the warehouse yet. That will give us a better idea of when it will reach you. Just a moment.”

If there’s a different department that is better equipped to answer the question. 

“Let me connect you with our product specialists, who can better answer your questions about the installation of our roof racks onto your car.”

If your support agents specialize in different business areas. 

“I’ll forward this to our damaged orders specialist, who will look into what happened and get this sorted out for you. Just a moment.”

💡Tip: Read our guide on automatically prioritizing and routing tickets in Gorgias to minimize handoffs by putting customers in touch with the right person from the jump. For example, here’s a Gorgias Rule that automatically tags VIP customers (who have spent more than $100) so a dedicated high-touch agent can jump on the request:

"I can certainly check that for you. May I put you on a brief hold?"

Asking for a customer's permission before you put them on hold is a polite way of validating the inconvenience and giving the customer a sense of control over the interaction. Highlighting the word “brief” assures customers that they won't have to wait on hold for long.

Examples of when to use it

When you need a moment to look deeper into a customer account. 

“Let me look into this for you! Is it alright if I put you on a brief hold while I take a look?”

If you need to check in with a lead or manager for approval. 

“Let me look into this for you. Is it okay if I put you on a brief hold so that I can check in with my team?”

To get guidance or more information from a different team. 

“Let me check in with my team about that. Is it alright if I put you on a quick hold? It should only take a minute.” 

💡Tip: Use a helpdesk that displays customer information from your ecommerce platform (like Shopify, BigCommerce, or Magento) and other tools (like Klaviyo, AfterShip, and Yotpo) to get all the customer information upfront. This will help you avoid asking customers for skippable follow-up information or pausing the conversation to check another tool.

Thanking customers

Thanking customers for their feedback and continued business is an important part of customer service interactions. If you would like to let your customers know that you are truly grateful for their call, here are a few excellent phrases to try.

"Thank you for your feedback."

Thanking customers for their feedback assures them that your company is open to constructive criticism. Customer feedback of any variety is a gift to your company, and it's important that customers don't feel guilty about raising issues. You can also use words like insight, comments, and suggestions — all of which can sometimes sound a little less robotic.

Examples of when to use it

Use this phrase anytime a customer offers any kind of comments about your company, its product, or its services. Remember, all feedback is good feedback, whether it’s positive or negative, so be sure to have a system in place for tracking it and acting upon it when possible.

"Thank you for being our customer."

Every customer needs to know that they’re valued, and this versatile phrase can be used at just about any point in a customer service interaction to show customers that you appreciate them.

Examples of when to use it

As part of wishing a customer well at the end of a conversation. 

“Thank you for being our customer! We so appreciate you.”

"Thank you for contacting us for help. If this problem arises again, don't hesitate to reach out to us."

For various reasons, many customers hesitate to contact customer support when a problem occurs. But having a customer contact your support team is always better than having them leave your company for another without giving you a chance to make it right.

Examples of when to use it

To conclude a conversation after solving an issue or answering a question. 

"Thanks for reaching out to us! If you have any other problems or have any questions, don’t hesitate to write in again.”

Providing proactive support 

Offering proactive customer service can take your support to the next level by giving customers the tools to answer their own questions before they need to reach out to you. 

“If you have any further questions and we’re not online, you can always check out our extensive help center.”

Providing self-service resources can supplement product guides or tutorials, give deeper information about returns and shipping policies, and offers information for shoppers to answer their own questions and avoid the hassle of reaching out to your team. 

You can share these resources at the end of a conversation, or as an automated pop up when someone visits your website. 

As a supplement to great support, to look up any details about their product.  

“This handy FAQ article should answer any further questions you might have about how to use your new product, especially if we’re not online to help right away!”

To share more info about returns, orders, shipping, etc.  

“If you have any other questions about our returns process and you’d rather not have to chat with us (we get it, it takes time!), you can always check out our Help Center.”

💡Tip: Here’s an example of a Gorgias Help Center, where customers can read help articles about the product, shipping and return policies, and more. With Gorgias Automate, you can also empower customers to track, cancel, and modify orders without waiting on an agent:

To share support even when agents aren’t online.  

“We’re not online right now, but we’d love to help! We’ll send you an email answering your question. In the meantime, check out our handy Help Center to see if you can find an answer to your question there.”

💡Tip: You can set up a Rule in Gorgias that automatically lets the customer know you’re offline, plus an estimate on when you’ll be back. Here’s what this kind of Rule looks like:

"Can I help you with anything else?"

This phrase is a great way to make sure that a customer's concerns have been fully addressed before ending a conversation with them. However, it's important to use this phrase carefully. If a customer doesn't feel that their initial problem has been resolved yet, asking if you can help them with anything else is likely to only make them more frustrated. 

Examples of when to use it

At the end of a conversation to make sure you answered all of their questions. 

“Do you have any other questions, or can I help with anything else before we end our chat?”

As a way to upsell happy customers. 

“Can I help you find anything else for your holiday celebration?”

5 customer service words and phrases to avoid

In many ways, knowing what not to say is just as important as knowing what to say. Avoid these five phrases to lessen the possibility of frustrating customers further and painting your brand in a negative light.

“I don't understand.”

You never want to tell a customer that you don't understand their problem. In situations where an agent is having trouble following a customer's concerns, asking for clarification is always better.

What to say instead

• “Let me see if I'm understanding your issue, and correct me if I get anything wrong…”
• “Can you walk me through the problem again?”
• “If I'm not mistaken, the problem seems to be that…”

“Calm down.”

Telling an upset customer to calm down is likely to have the exact opposite effect. While it's sometimes necessary to calm a customer down before an interaction can continue, there are better ways to go about it.

What to say instead

• “I understand your frustration, and I'm happy to help.”
• “I'm sorry that you are experiencing this issue. Let me fix this for you right away.”

“That's impossible.”

While there are certainly cases where it isn't possible to fulfill a customer's request, it's important to approach these instances carefully. You don't want to make customers feel that you are unwilling to help, which is what telling them that something is impossible often conveys.

What to say instead

• “I'm afraid this issue might be out of my control, but let me double-check on…”
• “I'm really sorry about this, and I wish that we could solve this for you. Instead, let’s…”
• “This is a peculiar problem that you're describing. Do you mind if I ask you a few more questions about it?”

“I guess…”

Your demeanor should come across as prepared and confident, and language like“I guess,” “I suppose,” and “I'm not sure” doesn’t show customers that they’re in good hands.

What to say instead

• “I believe that what we are dealing with is…”
• “Based on what you've told me, the problem most likely is…”

“I can't help you.”

Similar to “that's impossible,” telling a customer that you can't help them can make shoppers feel like you’re unwilling to help rather than unable.

What to say instead

• “I understand your frustration, but I'm sorry to say that my hands are tied on this issue."
• “I'm really sorry about this, and I wish that we could solve this for you. Perhaps you could try…”

Gorgias analyzes each customer question, so you can use the right phrases

Knowing why customers contact you (and how they're feeling) is essential to understand how to communicate back to them. And thanks to the power of Gorgias AI, getting inside your customers’ minds to understand exactly what they want to hear is now easier than ever before.

With Gorgias' revolutionary sentiment detection, your support agents get invaluable insights into a customer's sentiments and intentions that they can use to guide the interaction. 

Learn more about how sentiment detection can help you improve your customer support, generate more happy customers, and boost revenue.

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Building an incredible customer support team at your company starts with finding the right people. But once you attract a pool of applicants, distinguishing between an excellent candidate and a so-so one isn’t always simple.

Why does this matter? Research from Harvard Business Review concluded that positive customer experiences can create as much as a 140% spread in how much customers spend at transactional businesses. And a massive part of that customer experience rides on your customer service team.

And for subscription-based businesses, that same study found a 31% spread in churn: quality of the experience was a significant driver of recurring membership and revenue.

This adds up over time, as well. Forbes found a cumulative loss of $75 billion yearly across all businesses pegged to a single source: poor customer service.

So, in the big picture, a great hire in customer service or support makes you more money. A bad one hurts the bottom line, and so much more.

As a hiring manager, it’s never been more important to get the most out of your interviews. The needs of customer service teams are more technically complex than before, with numerous channels for meeting customer needs. Working with an ecommerce helpdesk support partner like Gorgias can ease some of the pressure, but the interview itself remains highly strategic.

Major Traits and Characteristics to Look for in Customer Service Job Interviews

Before we get into specific questions, it’s worth noting that not every candidate has the right disposition for customer service work. Many customer service skills are crucial, and these traits and characteristics rise to the top of the list. As you work through the selection and interview process, look for these elements.

The Interviewee Is Familiar with Your Brand and Tone of Voice

This isn’t an all-out dealbreaker, but interviewees that are already familiar with your brand and tone of voice will assimilate much more quickly into your organization. This is true whether this familiarity is natural (because the candidate is already a fan of your brand) or learned (because the candidate took the time to prepare before the interview).

The Interviewee Has Strong Communication Skills

Your customer service representatives spend all day communicating directly with customers, so you want to hire people with great communication skills for customer service roles. Your customer service team forms the face of your company for many customers, so the ability to communicate clearly about a customer’s problem is essential

Customer service reps will inevitably deal with angry customers as well as difficult customers, so hiring managers should look for candidates that can keep those communication skills up even under pressure.

The best candidates for customer service roles will pair strong communication skills with superior problem-solving ability, as well.

The Interviewee Has the Ability to Communicate Via Specific Service Channels

The days of single-channel customer service departments that existed solely as phone-based call centers are long gone. Most businesses rely on a multichannel customer service strategy that could involve face-to-face assistance, phone communication, or any of a wide range of web-based platforms. Today's agents need to apply customer service best practices to many channels.

A customer service candidate that can speak empathetically and clearly but cannot navigate social media or a customer service platform may not be a good fit for your current needs.

Conversely, you may find candidates that struggle with over-the-phone communication but can tirelessly plow through online tickets with superior skill. 

If your team is large enough to differentiate, both types of candidates could succeed in clearly defined roles.

Still, it’s a good idea to get a sense of which service channels a candidate is likely to succeed in. Do this during the interview if you don’t do it earlier in the process.

17 Customer Support Interview Questions and Answers

If you’re a hiring manager in customer service or customer support, you already know that crafting the perfect customer service job interview questions is difficult. And if you’re an aspiring or current customer service representative, you may be looking for advice on how to answer customer service interview questions.

No matter your role, this list of 17 customer service interview questions and answers will give you some new approaches to the customer service job interview. Consider adding several of these questions to your interview process so you can hone your interview process and get better results.

(And if you’re a job seeker, these sample answers should give you insight into what interviewers might be expecting to hear. Adapt them to fit your situation, of course! You might also benefit from 5 Tips to Find Your Next Job in Support.)

1) How Familiar Are You with Our Brand, Products, and Services?

You don’t have to hire someone with prior knowledge of your brand, but it sure helps. The more the prospect knows about you, the less you have to teach them. So it’s worth asking how familiar the prospective hire is with your brand and what they think about it.

If your interviewee is familiar with your brand, go ahead and ask if they’ve ever interacted with your customer service team. If they have, their answers could be illuminating — about the candidate and about the customer service experience.

Listen for an honest, enthusiastic response. It’s OK if a candidate doesn’t know much about the brand, but finding someone with the skills AND who is a big fan of your brand can lead to the ultimate customer service prospect.

Pro Tip: Watch out for a response in which a candidate wants to change too much: some constructive criticism is healthy, but customer service is not the place from which to spearhead major company-wide change.

Sample Answer

“I’ve been using your [specific product/service] for some time now. I use it to [use case], and my appreciation for your [brand/culture/products] is a big part of why I applied for this job!”

Or

“I hadn’t heard of your company before I saw this job post, but as I began to research the company, I resonated with [product or aspect of mission]. I believe it’s something I can get behind and contribute to!”

2) Have You Ever Worked with the Software We Use?

Customer service is more software-oriented than ever before, and this question does double (maybe triple) duty: first, it tells you the obvious (whether the interviewee is familiar with your software). Second, it also often reveals a candidate’s overall comfort level with software. You’ll usually get a sense in their answer of whether they’re worried about the prospect of learning new software.

Third, assuming your job listing indicated which software solutions you use, this question will reveal how closely the applicant studied the job listing. If they seem confused by the question or don’t know which software solution you’re asking about, that might be a red flag.

As you listen to the applicant’s answer, don’t settle for a blunt “yes.” Follow up with a question or two that will reveal whether the person has actual knowledge of the software. And if the applicant isn’t familiar with your chosen software, listen for confidence about the ability to learn.

Sample Answer

“At my previous company, we used [competitor software solution], and I can tell based on my own research that the two are pretty similar. I’m sure there may be some slight gaps, but I’m eager to learn those differences and get up to speed in [your software solution].”

3) How Long Were You with Your Last Company and Why Did You Leave?

Behavioral interview questions can be powerful because they give you insight into an interviewee’s thought processes and ways of engaging with the world. Length of employment at the previous company is merely factual, but the “why did you leave” portion is deeply behavioral.

Tenure at a previous employer isn’t always important, though a resume filled with a series of three- to six-month gigs could be a red flag. More important is the stated reason for leaving. Did the candidate struggle with a previous manager? Did they leave over scheduling issues (that are likely to be an issue at your company as well)?

To be clear, leaving a previous company isn’t always a bad thing. But the reasons why — and the way the candidate explains those reasons — can teach you a lot about the person’s approach to working on a team.

Sample Answer

“I’m still employed at [current employer], but I see a better future for myself with your company. I’m happy enough at [current employer], but I’m more passionate about your company for [give a reason or two].”

Or

“I worked at [previous employer] for [time period] but had to leave due to [reason]. That said, I know [reason] won’t be an issue here because [explanation].”

4) What Were the Most Common Problems with the Products and Services You Supported in the Past and How Did You Help Solve Them?

This question helps you keep developing a profile of the candidate’s experience. At the most basic level, you want to learn whether they are familiar with the most common customer service questions that your team deals with.

While the key to delivering great customer service is the ability to use problem-solving skills to navigate especially difficult situations, those everyday types of questions make up the bulk of the actual work. Finding an employee that’s already well-versed in your most common customer issues (and who already has good responses to those issues) makes your job a lot easier.

Also, this is another behavioral interview question that can give you deeper insight into what makes a candidate tick. Listen carefully to how the person describes their activity helping various types of customers. You’ll learn at least as much about how the person thinks as how they solved a specific problem.

Sample Answer

“Issues with account logins made up around 15 percent of my customer service interactions at my last job. We had a script to follow for this kind of issue, and I used it when I could. But over time I noticed that many users were getting tripped up on the same problem that wasn’t covered by the script. I helped them resolve it by [x] and recommended we add this step to the script.”

5) Describe a Previous Situation at Work When You Recognized an Emotionally Tense Situation and Were Able to Turn it Around to Delight the Customer.

This is the first of several classic behavior-based questions. You’re listening for soft skills here, those intangibles that differentiate truly excellent customer service reps from the rest.

With this question, you’re looking at conflict resolution skills surrounding customer issues like public complaints or angry customer emails. Does the candidate have a handy example of being able to 

1. Recognize that tensions were high 
2. Defuse the situation enough that the customer left the interaction delighted?

You’re also looking at the ability to follow instructions and think outside the box. You don’t want renegades and mavericks, but you do want folks that can think beyond provided customer support scripts.

Push the interviewee to be specific with their answer to questions like these.

Sample Answer

“Once I dealt with a customer with [stated problem]. I could tell the customer was upset before we ever started talking because of [verbal/written cues]. I kept my cool, sidestepped that anger, and determined that the customer’s core problem was [actual problem]. Once I identified that I made sure to empathize with the customer as I guided them to a solution to [actual problem.”

[Image source: Me.me]

6) Can You Give Examples of Methods You Have Used in the Past to Increase Revenue, Save Time, or Increase Procedural Efficiency at Work?

Hiring for customer service is a delicate balance. You don’t want a cadre of people constantly trying to reinvent the wheel (or, worse, the company itself). And you also don’t want mindless followers. This question helps you gauge a candidate’s ownership mindset.

If they don’t have an answer at all, they might not be thinking enough about the big picture. Conversely, if their answer sounds a little too revolutionary, you’ll be aware that this candidate might need guidance in what’s appropriate.

As the candidate responds, listen for actionable ideas and methods that seem genuinely useful. Vague feedback with no clear outcomes isn’t what you’re looking for here.

Sample Answer

“I noticed we were getting tons of customer support calls about one of the company’s products. The product was fine, but the included instructions left out a crucial step that was leading to the calls. I was able to point this out and escalate it to the proper team, who corrected the instructions for the next printing. In the meantime, I created an email template to help agents respond to customer questions about the issue faster. By getting the instructions fixed, I reduced these calls so the team could focus on more important customer issues.”

7) Aside from Customer Service Positions, Have You Had Any Other Professional Roles That Helped You Build Relevant Skills for the Position You Are Applying For?

Sometimes, the best agents have experience from other roles with complementary skillsets. For example, wait staff at restaurants have a ton of insights about human interactions and communication since they serve people in person for hours on end.

Or, if the company products are highly technical or industry-specific, you’ll benefit from finding customer service reps with relevant tech or industry backgrounds as well.

Find out if your prospect has other experience they can bring to the table. Maybe they can even teach your team a thing or two.

Sample Answer

“I’ve worked for ‘x’ years in foodservice, including ‘y’ years as a server. In those years I developed the ability to read verbal and nonverbal cues. And have found creative ways to meet customer needs. My time in restaurants has prepared me to excel in customer service by giving me a keen sense of customers’ needs, proactive tactics to keep them happy, and multiple strategies for resolving their complaints.”

8) Do You Have Any Formal Education That Pertains to Communication or Communication Technology?

You already know a candidate’s formal education as it is listed on their resume, but this question gives them a chance to expand upon that. Perhaps they took a specific course that’s relevant to this job or additional training certifications that didn’t make it on the resume. 

Give them a chance to explain how some of their formal education enhances their abilities for this job.

This is also a great place to explore whether a candidate has experience in the systems you use, such as these:

• Online helpdesk software
• Email platform
• CRM
• Social media
• Relevant discount and rewards software
• eCommerce platform or CMS

Of course, reliance on formal training varies from company to company. Some brands focus more exclusively on skills and traits. Use your judgment with this question (but make sure you don’t imply that a degree is required unless it is).

Sample Answer

“My degree was in [field], and as a part of my coursework, I took several courses in communication as well as a technology course. In these courses, I learned [two or three high-level lessons], which will help me in this role [explain how].”

9) At Work, What Are Your Three Core Values? For Example Honesty, Trust, Patience, Etc.

You want agents that are hard-working and have excellent time management skills. But you also want a support team filled with healthy people. Learning about workplace morals and values will indicate to you how much of a team player the candidate is or what their ethical point of view looks like.

Sample Answer

“My top three core values in the workplace are [list three]. These core values permeate every aspect of my work: how I interact with customers, how I work with other team members, and more. If you ask [reference at previous employer] about this, I believe you’ll hear that I lived this out there, and I’ll do the same here.”

10) Can You Provide an Example of a Time When You Had to Deny a Customer’s Request? How Did You Handle It?

You want customer service agents that can, in most cases, get your customer what they want. But sometimes customers are wrong, demanding things that can’t be done. An experienced customer service rep will certainly have run into this scenario and learning how they handled it will give you great insight into their abilities.

Were they able to salvage a customer relationship? Show the customer a better way? Or did they just blow up the situation and provide no alternatives?

Sample Answer

“I always do my best to meet customer requests, but of course this isn’t always possible. One time, a customer [describe illegitimate request scenario]. He was convinced I could do this for him, but it was out of scope. However, instead of just flat-out denying him, I was able to guide him to an alternative that was in scope. He didn’t get everything he wanted, but I did keep him as a customer.”

11) As an Agent, What Was the Most Difficult Customer Service Situation You Have Ever Experienced?

For interviewees with previous customer service experience, this question gives you insight into how far they’ve been stretched — as well as their emotional intelligence after the fact.

Look for how serious or difficult the described situation is (compared to what’s typical in your organization), and pay attention to how calmly — or not — the candidate can recount the scenario.

Sample Answer

“In my current/previous position, I’ve had a few encounters in a class all their own. Probably the most challenging one was [describe the scenario]. It was challenging for sure, but I’m glad I went through it because I learned [lesson/insight]. I also really appreciated the support I got from my leadership team throughout the situation.”

12) As a Representative, What Was the Best Customer Service Situation You Have Experienced?

If a candidate has a quality answer to this question, it will likely reveal the sorts of situations that motivate the individual. You should look for excitement, interest, and perhaps even joy as the individual answers this question. And knowing the kinds of situations that motivate an individual can give insight into whether they’ll be a good fit for your team.

Sample Answer

“I once had a customer call in who was incredibly angry, but it was an issue that I knew I could solve. As I worked with the customer to unpack the layers of the issue, I heard her tone gradually soften. By the end of the encounter, I’d not only solved her problem, but I’d also managed to upsell her to a higher tier of service — and she was happy about it!”

13) What Would You Do If You Couldn’t Find the Answer to a Customer’s Question?

The stock answer here is “contact my supervisor,” of course, but see if you can get a little more. What avenues (official and unofficial) would the candidate pursue before escalating to a manager? Will this prospect solve problems independently, or will the individual create an unending cascade of manager escalations?

Sample Answer

“When I didn’t know an answer, I’d quickly search our internal knowledge base/wiki. If I didn’t find the answer there, I might search Google, our company Slack, or a more knowledgeable peer. I tried to minimize the number of escalations since I know that solving the problem myself is always the ideal outcome. But of course, I escalated issues to my manager when needed.”

14) How Would You Handle a Situation Wherein You Knew the Customer Was Wrong?

“The customer is always right” only goes so far. Sometimes the customer is quite wrong, and your customer support teams know this. The real question is what a prospective team member will do when this happens.

This is another question that explores soft skills. There are countless ways to say “you’re wrong” without coming out and saying it. Can the prospect guide a customer to a better understanding without insulting them along the way? That’s the kind of customer service rep you need.

Sample Answer

“I never take a confrontational approach when this happens. Instead, I assume that the customer isn’t willfully wrong, and I try to find a gentle way to guide them to a better understanding. 

If there’s documentation or fine print that the customer missed, I’ll guide them to that information. I might also ask questions to get a better sense of where the customer got the incorrect understanding.”

15) As an Online Shopper, What Was the Best Customer Support Experience You Ever Received from a Brand You Did Not Work For?

Every one of us brings experiences from our personal lives into our professional work, and great customer service reps are no exception. We’ve all been the customer in need of service at some point, and there are great lessons to learn from the good experiences.

A prospect’s answer to this question should demonstrate their insightfulness and awareness. It will also likely reveal more about a person’s priorities in customer service encounters.

Sample Answer

“I had an experience with [company] that impressed me as a customer and gave me some great ideas for how to solve customer challenges in my work. [Describe scenario and lessons learned.]”

16) Describe a Time When You Received Poor Customer Service as a Consumer.

Asking the opposite question gives you similar insights: whatever got under the skin of your interviewee is an aspect of customer service that they’re passionate about. And, of course, having been a frustrated consumer can build empathy when working with other frustrated consumers.

Sample Answer

“I had an encounter with one company where the agents were working from scripts, and it didn’t seem like they took the time to process what I’d said in my complaint. It was deeply frustrating, but I learned from the experience that scripts can only get you so far and that I need to make sure I always understand the customer’s concern before I start trying to solve it.”

17) How Flexible Is Your Schedule and How Many Hours Do You Hope to Work Each Week?

If you’ve gotten to this point and expect that you’ll offer the candidate a job, it’s time to get this crucial information. If your only needs are second shift and the candidate can’t or won’t work it, you need to know now.

Sample Answer

Simply be honest. “I’m looking for full-time work, and normal business hours are my preference. I could work the second shift if necessary, but no overnights. That said, let me know what you’re looking for, and let’s talk about it.”

[Image source: IMC]

Up Your Support Offerings with the Best Ecommerce Customer Service Solution

Getting the right team in place is a crucial component of your customer service strategy and so is giving your new team members the best in ecommerce customer service technology.

Find out why Gorgias is the #1 rated helpdesk for ecommerce merchants. See how Gorgias integrates with Shopify, Magento, and BigCommerce.

And, if you need help with the technology portion of your customer service strategy, schedule a Gorgias demo today.

In customer service, you can find a wide variety of job titles, each with a unique set of key responsibilities — everything from answering phones at a call center to setting up automations, developing strategies for customer retention, and much more.  

If you’re looking for a job in customer service, you’re in the right spot. Customer support can be a great way to transition industries and work your way toward a satisfying and rewarding career. Below, you’ll learn about 7 types of customer service roles, including typical daily duties and qualifications. 

If you’re hiring customer support team members, you can also adapt the job posting templates to help you find talented new employees. Plus, you’ll hear from a couple of top ecommerce brands about why it’s important to give everyone on your team some customer service responsibilities, regardless of their role. 

Customer Service Agent (or Representative)

Customer Service Agents (or Customer Service Representatives) are the most junior role on a customer support team. Support Representatives are customer-facing employees on the frontline. They receive incoming support messages and calls, answer basic questions, and pass along complex or technical questions as needed. 

Of course, even at this stage, Agents can play a major role in helping improve workflows, tagging and organizing incoming support requests, passing along customer feedback, and more. 

If you’re a recent graduate or trying to pivot to a career in customer service, becoming an Agent is a great option. 

Customer Service Representative job description template

We are seeking a dedicated and friendly Customer Service Agent to join our team. In this role, you will be the face of our company, assisting customers with their inquiries, resolving any issues, and ensuring a positive customer experience. 

The ideal candidate will have excellent communication skills, problem-solving abilities, and a passion for delivering exceptional customer service.

Duties and responsibilities

• Provide prompt and efficient responses to customer questions via phone, email, social media, and chat
• Address and resolve customer complaints or concerns in a professional and timely manner
• Maintain a high level of company product knowledge to effectively answer customer queries
• Identify opportunities to upsell or cross-sell products and services to customers
• Collaborate with other team members and departments to ensure customer satisfaction
• Keep accurate records of customer interactions and transactions in the CRM system
• Follow company policies and procedures when handling customer requests and issues
• Continuously strive to improve customer service skills and knowledge through training programs

Qualifications and requirements

• Previous experience in customer service or a related field is preferred
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills, plus active listening skills
• Experience with a helpdesk, CRM software, and other customer service tools
• Ability to multitask and prioritize tasks effectively in a fast-paced environment
• Strong problem-solving and decision-making abilities
• A positive and empathetic attitude toward customers
• Availability to work flexible shifts, including evenings, weekends, and holidays
• High school diploma or equivalent work experience
• Additional certifications in customer service or related fields are a plus

Benefits

• Competitive salary ($40,000 – $55,000)
• Health, dental, and vision insurance
• 401(k) retirement plan
• Paid time off (15 days) plus holidays and sick days
• Ongoing training and development opportunities

How to apply

Interested candidates should submit their resume and cover letter to [email].

How Gorgias supports this role

Gorgias is chock-full of features and automations to help Customer Service Agents offer quick, helpful responses. 

For instance, Gorgias centralizes messages from all communication channels (email support, live chat support, social media support, SMS support, WhatsApp support, and more) into one shared inbox so Agents don’t have to spend all day switching tabs. This helps your team offer omnichannel customer service. 

Also, when Agents are answering incoming support tickets, Gorgias displays customer information (including past conversations and orders) to give Agents all the context they need to answer the question. This also helps Agents offer personalized customer service. 

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Customer Service Specialist (or Level 2 Agent)

Customer Service Specialists have many of the same day-to-day responsibilities as Representatives. The main difference is that Specialists typically have more experience, know more customer service techniques, and can handle more complex, sensitive, and challenging interactions with customers. 

In most teams, tickets get “escalated” to Level 2 Agents (or Specialists) if they’re beyond the skillset of an Agent. Often, Agents get promoted to Specialists once they understand the company’s policies, procedures, and products. It can be a great stepping stone to managing a team.

Customer Service Specialist job description template

We are seeking a Customer Service Specialist to join our team who will respond to customer inquiries by phone call, email, or chat. As a Specialist, you will be responsible for resolving mostly routine customer inquiries with some non-routine, more complex problems. 

The ideal candidate will have excellent communication skills, problem-solving abilities, and a passion for delivering exceptional customer service — including to angry or escalated customers.

Duties and responsibilities

• Provide excellent customer service by responding to customer inquiries by phone, email, social media, SMS, or chat in a friendly and professional manner
• Analyze customer service needs and refer to other service or technical departments for follow up as needed
• Use customer relationship applications or databases to record activities and research product information
• Resolve mostly routine and some non-routine, more complex problems like processing orders and multitasking
• Document customer inquiries and monitor responses for quality assurance purposes
• Proactively engage with customers, identifying opportunities for improvements and suggesting potential solutions
• Stay up-to-date with industry trends and best practices in customer service

Qualifications and requirements

• 1-3 years of related experience preferred, or additional specialized training and/or certification
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills
• Ability to empathize with customers and remain calm and composed in difficult situations
• Strong problem-solving abilities with a focus on finding effective solutions for customers
• Familiarity with CRM systems and other relevant software tools
• Availability to work flexible hours, including evenings and weekends
• High school diploma or equivalent work experience
• Additional education or certification in customer service is a plus

Benefits

• Competitive salary ($45,000 – $60,000)
• Health, dental, and vision insurance
• 401(k) retirement plan
• Paid time off (15 days) plus holidays and sick days
• Ongoing training and development opportunities

How to Apply

To apply, please submit your resume and a cover letter detailing your relevant experience to [email].

How Gorgias supports this role

Gorgias makes escalating tickets to Level 2 agents extremely easy. You can even set Gorgias up to automatically assign angry customers to certain agents — this works because Gorgias scans the sentiment and intent of every incoming ticket, and can assign, tag, and even respond automatically based on what it finds. 

Here’s a visualization to help explain how Gorgias can automatically detect the contents of a ticket, and assign or tag it however works best for your team.

Customer Service Team Lead

The Customer Service Team Lead is directly responsible for managing a team of Agents. As a Team Lead, you’ll spend less (or no) time answering tickets, and more time hiring, onboarding, and training new support agents. ’

In some companies, the Customer Service Team Lead also acts as the Customer Service Manager (which we’ll cover below). But most companies separate the roles: The Team Lead manages the people, while the Manager manages the strategy and business impact. 

Customer Service Team Lead job description template

We are seeking a customer service team lead to join our team. Reporting to the customer service team manager, the Customer Service Team Lead will be responsible for leading Customer Support Agents to provide the highest level of support and service to all internal and external customers. 

The ideal candidate will have experience in team leadership, customer service, and problem-solving, with an understanding of industry best practices.

Duties and responsibilities

• Lead the customer service team to achieve key performance indicators (KPIs) and customer satisfaction goals
• Develop and implement departmental systems, policies, and procedures to maintain a high level of service
• Identify opportunities to enhance internal processes and promote best practices that lead to overall performance improvement and organizational efficiency
• Monitor and evaluate customer feedback to ensure that the team exceeds customer expectations
• Assist with the recruitment and selection of new team members
• Provide onboarding, coaching, and mentoring to new and existing team members
• Conduct regular performance evaluations and provide development plans that encourage employee engagement
• Plan team rotas to ensure adequate coverage at all times
• Administer the Time Management System (TMS), recording holiday and sickness absences
• Support the team in answering customer inquiries by phone, email, or chat
• Monitor and coordinate the post-sales support process, ensuring all orders are reconciled accurately and progressed through the system correctly
• Evaluate trends in customer inquiries and identify ways to improve customer satisfaction and retention
• Collaborate with other departments to handle customer complaints and issues
• Produce written reports when required to do so

Qualifications and requirements

• Proven experience as a customer service team lead or a relevant leadership role (3+ years)
• A minimum of a high school diploma or equivalent; additional education/training in customer service, leadership, or a related field preferred
• Excellent organizational and problem-solving skills, with a focus on finding effective solutions for customers
• Exceptional verbal and written communication abilities and a customer-centric mindset
• Strong interpersonal skills and experience working as part of a team
• Experience with a helpdesk, CRM software, and other customer service tools

Benefits

• Competitive salary ($55,000 – $70,000)
• Health, dental, and vision insurance
• 401(k) retirement plan
• Paid time off (15 days) plus holidays and sick days
• Ongoing training and development opportunities

How to apply

To apply, please submit your resume and a cover letter detailing your relevant experience to [email].

How Gorgias supports this role

Gorgias gives Team Leads a helpful overview of the team’s performance. Specifically, you can see each agent’s essential metrics — like CSAT, response times, resolution time, conversion rate, and more. 

You can use these metrics to evaluate each agent and inform the type of training and coaching each one needs. Speaking of training, Gorgias also offers Gorgias Academy, which features dozens of courses to help teach your agents how to upskill, including how to use the helpdesk. 

Customer Service Manager

Customer Service Managers are responsible for implementing the department’s tools and strategies. Unlike Team Leads, who are responsible for people management and coaching, Customer Service Managers are more responsible for setting up tools and automation, making sure the team is working toward business goals, and generating reports about the state of the department. 

Customer Service Manager job description template

We are seeking a highly motivated and experienced Customer Service Manager to oversee our customer service operations and ensure the highest level of customer satisfaction. The Customer Service Manager will be responsible for leading a team of customer service representatives, implementing effective strategies, and continuously improving customer service processes. 

The ideal candidate will have a strong background in customer service, excellent leadership skills, and a passion for delivering exceptional customer experiences.

Duties and responsibilities

• Lead and manage a team of Customer Service Representatives and Team Leads, providing guidance, training, and support
• Develop and implement customer service standards, policies, and procedures to ensure consistent and high-quality service delivery
• Handle escalated customer inquiries or complaints, resolving issues and ensuring customer satisfaction
• Monitor and analyze customer service metrics, identify areas for improvement, and implement strategies to enhance performance
• Collaborate with other departments to improve customer service processes and optimize customer interactions
• Identify training needs and provide ongoing coaching and development opportunities for the customer service team
• Stay up-to-date with industry trends and best practices in customer service management
• Conduct regular performance evaluations and provide feedback and recognition to team members
• Foster a positive and collaborative work environment, promoting teamwork and employee engagement
• Implement customer feedback mechanisms to gather insights and make data-driven decisions

Qualifications and requirements

• Proven experience in a customer service management role (5+ years)
• Strong leadership skills with the ability to motivate and inspire a team
• Excellent communication skills, both verbal and written
• Strong problem-solving and decision-making abilities
• Proficient in customer service software and CRM systems
• Experience in analyzing customer data and using it to drive improvements
• Excellent organizational and time management skills
• Ability to work well under pressure and meet deadlines
• Customer-centric mindset with a passion for delivering exceptional service
• Bachelor's degree in business administration, communications, or a related field (preferred), or equivalent work experience

Benefits

• Competitive salary ($65,000 – $80,000)
• Health, dental, and vision insurance
• 401(k) retirement plan
• Paid time off (15 days) plus holidays and sick days
• Ongoing training and development opportunities

How to apply

To apply, please submit your resume and a cover letter detailing your relevant experience to [email].

How Gorgias supports this role

Gorgias is full of automations that Customer Service Managers can set up to make their team more efficient and productive. 

For instance, imagine you’re a Customer Service Manager looking for solutions to answer more tickets without hiring additional agents. You could set up Gorgias Automate to let customers answer FAQs, track orders, request returns, and more in the chat widget and Help Center. 

The Manager can also review the performance of these (and other) automations to understand the impact and find areas for improvement.

Technical Support Engineer

Technical Support Engineers provide support to customers experiencing issues with software and other IT equipment. Most Technical Support Engineers are hired for Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) companies or universities, hospitals, and other large companies that need support for technical equipment and issues.

Note: Gorgias is 100% built for ecommerce. You can send images, videos, and other files to solve complex issues, but the tool isn’t built for software companies that need to offer very technical support. Check out our list of the best customer service software if you’re a non-ecommerce company.

Technical Support Engineer job description template

We are seeking a skilled and customer-oriented Technical Support Engineer to join our team. The Technical Support Engineer will be responsible for providing technical assistance and support to our customers, ensuring timely resolution of technical issues, and delivering exceptional customer service. 

The ideal candidate will have a strong technical background, excellent problem-solving skills, and a passion for helping customers.

Duties and responsibilities

• Take ownership of customer issues reported and see problems through to resolution
• Research, diagnose, troubleshoot, and identify solutions to resolve system issues
• Follow standard procedures for proper escalation of unresolved issues to the appropriate internal teams
• Provide enterprise-level technical assistance to customers, including software and hardware support
• Resolve network issues and configure operating systems as needed
• Use remote desktop connections, email, and chat applications to provide immediate support and answer client queries
• Ask customers targeted questions to quickly understand the root cause of the problem
• Track computer system issues through to resolution, within agreed time limits
• Properly escalate unresolved issues to the appropriate internal teams for further investigation and resolution
• Provide prompt and accurate feedback to customers
• Refer to internal databases or external resources to provide accurate technical solutions
• Ensure all customer issues are properly logged and prioritized
• Manage and prioritize multiple open issues at a time
• Follow up with clients to ensure their IT systems are fully functional after troubleshooting
• Prepare accurate and timely reports
• Document technical knowledge by creating notes and manuals
• Maintain positive and professional relationships with clients

Qualifications and requirements

• Proven work experience as a Technical Support Engineer, Desktop Support Engineer, IT Help Desk Technician, or similar role
• Hands-on experience with Windows/Linux/Mac OS environments
• Good understanding of computer systems, mobile devices, and other tech products
• Ability to diagnose and troubleshoot basic technical issues
• Familiarity with remote desktop applications and helpdesk software
• Excellent problem-solving and communication skills
• Ability to provide step-by-step technical help, both written and verbal
• Bachelor's degree in Information Technology, Computer Science, or a relevant field, or equivalent work experience
• Additional certification in Microsoft, Linux, Cisco, or similar technologies is a plus

Benefits

• Competitive salary ($75,000 – $90,000)
• Health, dental, and vision insurance
• 401(k) retirement plan
• Paid time off (15 days) plus holidays and sick days
• Ongoing training and development opportunities

How to apply

To apply, please submit your resume and a cover letter detailing your relevant experience to [email].

Customer Success Manager

Customer Success Managers are responsible for maintaining client relationships. They don’t answer tickets at all — instead, they meet regularly with clients to understand their business goals, help implement solutions, and ensure the client remains happy and satisfied. 

Most Customer Sucess Managers work for Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) companies, agencies, and other kinds of client-based companies. Because Gorgias is built for ecommerce support teams, it’s not recommended for Customer Success Managers. 

Customer Success Manager job description template

Duties and responsibilities

• Establish clear client retention goals and develop strategies to achieve them
• Collaborate with sales and account management teams to onboard new customers and ensure a smooth transition
• Analyze customer data to gain insights and identify opportunities for improving customer experience and increasing revenue
• Conduct product demonstrations and train customers on how to effectively use our products or services
• Upsell additional services and products that align with customer needs and company offerings
• Act as the main point of contact for customer inquiries, concerns, and escalations, and ensure timely resolution
• Regularly engage with customers to check on their satisfaction, gather feedback, and identify areas for improvement
• Create and deliver customer success metrics and reports to internal stakeholders
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams to implement solutions that address customer needs and enhance their experience
• Assist in creating training courses and educational materials to help customers optimize their usage of our products or services
• Monitor customer health metrics and proactively intervene to prevent churn and increase customer loyalty

Qualifications and requirements

• Proven work experience as a Customer Success Manager or similar role
• Strong track record in managing and growing customer accounts
• Exceptional communication and relationship-building skills
• Technical aptitude with the ability to understand and explain complex products or services
• Experience in promoting and delivering value through exceptional customer experiences
• Ability to work independently and collaboratively in a dynamic, fast-paced environment
• Strong problem-solving and analytical skills
• Ability to build and maintain long-term relationships with clients
• Proficient in using CRM software and tools for tracking customer interactions and metrics
• Bachelor's degree in Business Administration, Marketing, or a related field, or equivalent work experience

Benefits

• Competitive salary ($85,000 – $100,000)
• Health, dental, and vision insurance
• 401(k) retirement plan
• Paid time off (15 days) plus holidays and sick days
• Ongoing training and development opportunities

How to apply

To apply, please submit your resume and a cover letter detailing your relevant experience to [email].

Director of Customer Service

The Director of Customer Service oversees the entire department and reports directly to executive leadership. They are responsible for managing the budget, reporting to executive management, and shaping the future of the department. 

Director of Customer Service is the most senior role we’ll cover in this article. But depending on your business’s size and makeup, you could hire additional executive-level roles like Vice President of Customer Experience or Chief Customer Officer (CCO). 

Director of Customer Service job description template

We are seeking a skilled and experienced Director of Customer Service to oversee our company's customer service policies, initiatives, and operations. 

The ideal candidate will possess a deep understanding of customer needs and expectations, a passion for delivering exceptional customer experiences, and a proven track record of managing high-performing customer service teams.

Duties and responsibilities

• Direct and oversee all aspects of the company's customer service policies, initiatives, and operations
• Develop service level standards to improve response times, reduce customer complaints, and increase customer satisfaction
• Establish and implement best practices to improve service delivery quality, efficiency, and effectiveness
• Develop and institute systems to capture and analyze customer feedback, service metrics, and trends
• Manage resource allocation and budgeting to ensure the delivery of world-class customer service across all communication channels
• Align customer service activities with business objectives and support cross-functional initiatives
• Manage and coach customer service staff and enhance their skills delivery for excellent customer service
• Regularly report to top management and inform them of the progress on customer service KPIs and metrics
• Collaborate with other departments to identify areas for improving customer experience
• Maintain up-to-date knowledge of industry trends in customer service management, customer support software and industry software.

Qualifications and requirements

• 7+ years of progressive management experience in customer service, preferably at a leadership level
• Deep knowledge of best practices in customer service experience management
• Proficient in using and managing customer services systems
• Excellent communication, interpersonal, and conflict resolution skills
• Deep understanding of customer needs and expectations
• Excellent problem-solving skills
• Proven track record collaborating with other internal departments
• Bachelor’s degree in Business Administration, Customer Services Management, or related fields, or equivalent work experience

Benefits

• Competitive salary ($95,000 – $110,000)
• Health, dental, and vision insurance
• 401(k) retirement plan
• Paid time off (15 days) plus holidays and sick days
• Ongoing training and development opportunities

How to apply

To apply, please submit your resume and a cover letter detailing your relevant experience to [email].

How Gorgias supports this role

Gorgias features a suite of tools and dashboards that the Director can use to communicate the department’s performance to executive leadership. On top of Agent Performance, which we mentioned above, you can see a variety of other data. 

For example, you can see an overview of your support performance, benchmarked against other support teams in your industry:

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You can also see data about your team’s contribution to revenue, to run and report on experiments like using chat campaigns or live chat to generate sales.

Tip: Get your whole company involved in customer support

While you’re building a dedicated customer service team, consider requiring non-support team members to spend some time answering support tickets — either during onboarding or periodically as ongoing training. This helps non-support members:

• Understand your customers: Customer support speaks directly to customers, and it’s a great way to gain a first-hand understanding of their challenges, preferences, and more. Non-support team members can take these insights back to their own roles. 
• Answer questions during busy seasons: If non-support team members understand customer support best practices and already know how to use your helpdesk, they can step in during Black Friday — Cyber Monday and other busy seasons. 
• Learn the value of good customer support: Often, businesses take customer support for granted. They don’t understand the skill good customer service requires, and they don’t always understand the insights and feedback support conversations can provide. 

If you use Gorgias, you’re in luck. While nearly every other helpdesk charges for additional seats, Gorgias gives you unlimited seats so everyone can make a profile and get involved with support at no extra cost.

Plus, Gorgias is easy for anyone — even non-support folks — to pick up and use. Here’s what a Marketing employee at Chomps, a Gorgias user, says:

“As a non-CX'r, Gorgias has made helping out the CX team so much easier. The platform is intuitive. And because our team has built out many Macros, I can easily answer common questions and concerns. Although I'm not on the platform every day, I can toggle between open and closed tickets if I need to reference an old situation and get up to speed quickly and efficiently.”

Read more about how Chomps uses Gorgias to share customer insights across the whole company. 

Manage all your customer service roles inside Gorgias

Gorgias is a customer service platform built for teams of all sizes. And to accommodate all the different roles and responsibilities, Gorgias lets you select a role for each user, giving them (only) the permissions they need to do their jobs. 

This helps keep everyone focused on their role’s scope, and ensure privacy and security — especially if you outsource customer service and want to limit access to sensitive information. 

User Roles include:

• Observer agent: View customers and tickets and add internal notes.
• Lite agent: Modify (but not delete) customers and tickets and send messages.
• Basic agent: Modify (and delete) customers and tickets and send messages. Delete customers and tickets. 
• Lead agent: Manage customers, tickets, and tags; send messages; and manage the Help Center.
• Admin: Manage everything. 

Want to learn about how Gorgias can help you make your customer service team more efficient and effective? Claim your demo today.

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