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Your customer service team's performance can have a major impact on the customer experience and the overall success of your brand. Like any employee, though, customer service agents sometimes need motivation and direction to achieve the best results.‍

65% of customers have higher expectations for customer support than they did three to five years ago, so offering incentives designed to improve agent performance is now more important than ever. And as customer experience continues to have a larger impact on overall revenue, ensuring agent performance aligns with company goals is mission-critical.

We put together this guide to help you develop an employee incentive program with incentive ideas to boost employee morale, employee satisfaction, and overall performance. We also chatted with Caela Castillo, Director of Customer Experience at men’s jewelry retailer Jaxxon, and share some best practices from her team’s incentive program.

Why are customer support incentives important for your team?

According to Gorgias data from over 10,000 merchants, launching a customer service employee incentive program can lift overall revenue by 1%.

There are a couple of reasons why incentive plans for customer support teams can offer this degree of value. The first and most obvious benefit of these programs is that they are proven to boost agent performance: Properly structured incentive programs can improve employee performance by as much as 44%.

Customer support incentive programs are especially beneficial when you can align your incentive programs with company goals and channel that performance boost toward the areas that matter most.

Along with improving agent performance, customer support incentive programs can also improve employee retention. The cost of replacing an employee is typically one-half to two times the employee's annual salary, and employee recognition programs can help mitigate turnaround and boost retention.

Here’s what Caela says about the impact of customer support incentives at Jaxxon:

Agents love having these goals because it keeps morale high, allows them to show off their performance, and comes with a prize if they hit their goals! We do switch things up often so that the agents don't feel like they have to hit certain goals only when a prize is attached and we have yet to see those scores decline.

7 great ways to incentivize customer support

The final step in designing an incentive program is choosing the rewards you will provide to your team and individual agents when they reach company goals. The sky's the limit here, and there's a lot of room to create creative goals that will best motivate your agents.

To help you get started choosing the rewards for your incentive program, here are a few great ideas for how to incentivize customer support agents:

1. Issue an extra paid day off to the top performing team member
2. Reward the team with a free lunch after hitting a goal
3. Create an internal team Slack channel to celebrate wins
4. Give out cash bonuses
5. Offer flex time to your customer service teams
6. Create a customer service team member of the month incentive
7. Award top performers with company swag or other gifts

1) Issue an extra paid day off to the top performing team member

Issuing rewards to the top performing team member during a given period encourages healthy competition that inspires agents to do their best work. Extra paid time off is an especially great incentive for companies without budget for monetary compensation.

Why we love this idea

Issuing an extra paid day off to your top performing team member recognizes the individual efforts of the agents that contribute the most to your company. Those kinds of results deserve to be recognized, and everyone loves paid time off! The biggest benefit of this incentive, though, is that it encourages (healthy) competition. In many cases, the friendly competition and desire to be the top performer will be even bigger motivators than the reward itself.

 2) Reward the team with a free lunch after hitting a goal

Along with rewarding individual performance, it's also important to reward team-wide performance in order to encourage teamwork and collaboration. Treating your support team to a free lunch (or a gift card for a local restaurant for remote teams) is a simple and affordable way to reward your entire team for reaching a team-wide goal.

Why we love this idea

Treating your support team to lunch lets you reward your entire team in one easy, relatively affordable event. It also encourages more team bonding and provides your team with an opportunity to celebrate their accomplishments.

3) Create an internal team Slack channel to celebrate wins

Slack is a great platform for project management and team communication, but you can use it to celebrate accomplishments, too. By creating an internal Slack channel to announce and celebrate individual and team-wide accomplishments, you can ensure that all your agents feel recognized for their hard work.

Why we love this idea

Recognition alone is sometimes all it takes to motivate an employee — and recondition is free. Setting up an internal Slack channel to celebrate wins provides a medium for recognizing agent performance and allows agents to celebrate together, further encouraging team bonding.

Here at Gorgias, have a #wins channel for informal praise and use Lattice to give employees official recognition:

4) Give out cash bonuses

It might not be the most original or creative incentive, but that doesn't mean it's not effective. No matter who it is that you are rewarding, you can rest assured that they are going to appreciate a cash bonus. Offering bonuses when agents meet individual goals or even team-wide bonuses for team goals is guaranteed to provide your agents with a strong source of motivation.

Why we love this idea

Cash is king, and few things will incentivize an employee more than cash bonuses. Cash bonuses are also the most straightforward type of reward and don't require extra effort or planning.

5) Offer flex time to your customer service teams

The ability to set their own hours is something that employees have come to value more and more, so offering flex time to your support agents can be a great incentive. You can offer this incentive as a one-time reward (for example, letting an agent set their own hours for one week after reaching a goal), or you can provide agents who continually meet their objectives with the option to set their own hours on an ongoing basis.

Why we love this idea

This is another simple and affordable way to provide support reps with a desirable incentive. Best of all, offering flex time may actually improve your team's performance on its own; according to a 2021 Gartner survey, 43% of employees say that having flexible working hours helps them achieve greater productivity.

6) Create a customer service team member of the month incentive

There's a reason why "employee of the month" programs are so popular. Recognizing the top performer on your support team each month won't cost your company anything, and it'll promote healthy competition within your team.

Why we love this idea

Again, recognition alone is often the best reward and most powerful source of motivation. By making something of a spectacle out of recognizing your top performers (company announcement, plaque, etc.), you can incentivize your support team with minimal effort and expense.

7) Award top performers with company swag or other gifts

Cash is great, but there's still something special about receiving a physical gift. Offering company swag, such as branded t-shirts, pens, and coffee mugs, to top performers is one great option to consider (if your company has swag to offer). Letting employees choose their own gifts from a catalog of available options is another commonly employed method of rewarding employees with physical gifts.

Consider an employee gifting platform like Guusto to recognize employees with a wide variety of gifts. And with Guusto, a dollar of every gift goes toward providing clean drinking water for someone in need:

Why we love this idea

Gifts are often valued more by the receiver than their monetary value. As a bonus, rewarding your top performers with company swag means that they will be promoting your brand everywhere that they take their new gifts.

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How to design a customer service incentive program

If you would like to design an incentive program that will reward your team's hard work and provide them with intrinsic motivation to offer the best customer service possible, here are the six steps that you should follow:

1) Identify a core company goal based on demonstrated problem

One benefit of customer service incentive programs is providing recognition and improving employee engagement and satisfaction. However, the biggest benefit of such programs is that you can use them to steer support teams toward accomplishing key company goals.

Before you can create a program that will incentivize your whole team to work toward important company goals, you first need to define what those goals are. Attracting new customers, generating referrals, and improving customer loyalty or customer retention rates are just a few measurable goals you can build your incentive program around. 

One best practice is to design your goals around a demonstrated problem. For instance, if your resolution times are longer than you'd like them to be, creating an incentive program to reward helpful response times may improve customer satisfaction.

Don’t be afraid to think outside the box here. Most customer service teams will default to metrics like first-response time, which is a great option. But as you develop your program further, remember that customer support has a large impact across the customer journey. Don’t be afraid to think about goals related to on-site conversion rate, proactive conversations with customers, conversations on public social media channels, educational content in your knowledge base, and beyond.

For example, Gorgias incentives employees to refer friends and former colleagues to improve our hiring effort. If you are in the midst of customer service hiring, consider using a program like Trusty for employee referrals:

2) Search for a customer service metric that has room for improvement (and aligns with the company goal)

Goals are only beneficial if they are measurable. You can't hand out performance-based awards unless you can keep score, which requires you to identify and track measurable customer service metrics. So once you have an overall company goal in mind, do some digging to see which metric will have the biggest impact:

Customer satisfaction score (CSAT), response and resolution times, net promoter score (NPS), and retention rates are a few of the measurable customer service metrics that you can use to evaluate the performance of individual agents and the performance of your whole team. By pinpointing metrics that align with the company goals you set for your incentive program, you can create a data-based system for measuring and rewarding agent performance that will encourage progress toward essential company objectives.

Here are a couple of examples of the kinds of customer support metrics Caela’s team lowered with incentives: 

We used to have Live Chat FRT around 45 seconds. With this program, we have brought it down to under 30s even hitting 15s. With phone answer times our goal used to be 80% answered within 30s and now it's 90% answered within 15s.

3) Consider individual and team-wide rewards programs

Individual and team-wide incentives both have their place in a customer service incentive program. Team-wide incentives encourage teamwork and collaboration and can focus your entire team's efforts toward a common goal. Meanwhile, individual incentives encourage personal responsibility and individual agent performance and ensure that each agent is recognized for their contributions.

As you create your incentive program, developing a rewards system that encourages individual and team-wide performance will deliver the best results.

Here’s how Caela thinks about individual vs. team goals:

We have both individual and team goals. We switch these up month to month or depending on what we want to focus on. I have seen more success with team goals because it keeps everyone motivated and encourages them to hold each other accountable. Team goals are hit almost consistently every month. When we do individual goals, we typically have an 80% success rate.

4) Set up a system to track your metrics in real time

We've already mentioned the importance of choosing measurable metrics that are aligned with company goals. In many cases, actually measuring those metrics on an ongoing basis is easier said than done.

Helpdesk software such as Gorgias makes tracking key customer service metrics in real time easier than ever before. With Gorgias, you can access detailed metrics and analytics about individual agent performance and team-wide performance — metrics that you can use to form the scoring system for your incentive program. 

With a unified dashboard that clearly showcases key metrics regarding revenue generation, customer satisfaction, response times, and much more, Gorgias makes it easy for ecommerce stores to track the performance of their support teams in real-time.

We mostly use Support Performance: Overview, Agents, and Revenue to track those goals. But, we also use Self-Service and occasionally tags. (I’m interested to learn how to use these more efficiently and explore the Macros and Intents stats as well).

Here’s a glance at the Overview of Support Performance Statistics in Gorgias, which you can filter by agent, period of time, channel, and much more:

Gorgias also has other analytics views, including a Revenue Statistics view (which we’ll cover below) and a Customer Satisfaction view to track improvements in CSAT over time:

5) Create a policy and announce your new incentive program

Like any new program, your customer service policy will only succeed once employees understand how to participate. To get started, keep the program as simple as possible. Simple perks — Jaxxon offers Amazon gift cards, for example — for simple improvements. 

If you have a human resources department, consider consulting them to make the policy airtight. Otherwise, here’s a template to get you started:

Purpose: [Company name] is launching a customer service incentive program to make strides toward two company goals: improving employee engagement and customer experience. The program provides monetary bonuses to team members who meet team goals set at the beginning of each quarter. We understand that our customer service team is a large contributor to loyal customers and company revenue, and are thrilled to have a formal employee recognition program to reward these important efforts. 

Incentive structure:

• The Director of Customer Support sets individual and team goals at the beginning of each quarter
• Each agent’s level (L1, L2, L3) determines their individual goal for the quarter
• The team
• Individuals who meet their goal qualify for an individual reward (e.g. $100 Amazon gift card)
• If the team meets the goal, all agents will receive a team reward (e.g. $25 Amazon gift card)

Eligibility:

• Only full-time employees of [Company name] are eligible for incentives
• Part-time and outsourced call-center agents do not qualify for the program
• Employees eligible for other company incentive programs do not qualify for the program
• Employees on performance improvement plans (PiPs) do not qualify for the program

Procedure to claim rewards:

• Agents do not need to reach out to redeem rewards: the Director of Customer Support will distribute rewards by the 15th of the following month
• If you do not receive your reward by the 15th, reach out to the Director of Customer Support to resolve the issue

6) Revisit your chosen metrics often and tweak them as needed

Incentive programs are at their best when they are dynamic, continually adapting to meet new goals and address new challenges. By tracking customer support metrics in real time using Gorgias' helpdesk software, you can easily revisit the metrics you chose for your incentive program and adjust the program's goals as needed.

Ideally, your customer support incentive program will enable you to improve key customer support metrics and move on to new goals as previous goals are met. However, there may also be cases where you determine that a metric might not be the best one to base your program around, and you need to change it. In either case, continually tracking customer support metrics and tweaking your incentive program enables you to keep the program aligned with company goals as your company scales and new challenges and opportunities arise.

Why customer support incentives are a great way to drive revenue

One of the best metrics to base your customer support incentive program on is revenue generation. While customer support teams are often viewed as problem-solvers, the reality is that your customer support team can greatly impact your ecommerce store's bottom line in a lot of ways. Generating referrals, promoting customer loyalty, reducing cart abandonment, and driving conversions via upsells and personalized product recommendations are just a few ways that excellent customer support can create revenue for ecommerce stores.

Most brands have trouble understanding the amount of revenue customer support brings in, which is why we developed the Revenue Statistics dashboard in Gorgias. You can see real-time metrics like the conversion rate of customer support conversation and the total sales driven by support:

To learn more about how great customer support can drive revenue for ecommerce stores, check out Gorgias' CX-Driven Growth Playbook.

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Track and reward customer support performance with Gorgias

Creating an incentive program for your customer support team is one of the best ways to motivate team members and focus their efforts toward company goals. But to create an incentive program around measurable, impactful metrics, you need the right tools by your side. 

With Gorgias' industry-leading helpdesk, you can track key support metrics like revenue generation, referrals, customer satisfaction, response time, and much more. Find out how we helped our customers transform their customer support teams into revenue-generating machines, and book a demo to see what we can do for your team.

Your social media presence serves many purposes, from creating a brand image to testing out new product ideas. And whatever type of social media posts your brand creates, one thing is certain: people are going to reach out to you there.   

Using social media as a support channel can be unwieldy and time consuming for ill-equipped teams. Customer inquiries pop up in many different places, like in the comments on your paid ads, in direct messages, or as comments on your posts. The tricky part is keeping up with the customer service issues that arise while still maintaining a positive, engaging presence. 

However, the benefits of social media customer service outweigh the negatives, especially with the right tools and approach. 

Below, learn how to leverage your social media channels for customer support in ways that stand out to your customers and support your team. 

What is social media customer service and how can it benefit your shop?

Social media customer service is when brands answer support queries through one or more social media platform. Support tickets often come in through direct messages (DMs) or as comments on paid ads or organic posts. This differs from social media marketing, as it’s a largely reactive type of engagement.   

How social media is used in customer service

Service interactions on social media usually happen:

1. As part of an omnichannel approach to meet customers where they are
2. To manage brand reputation and resolve public comments privately
3. To offer support in the format and on the channels people like to use 

1) As part of an omnichannel approach to meet customers where they are

Social media can be used as a way to further connect with your customers and potential customers in the spaces they’re already active in. When teams answer support across different channels that seamlessly connect, that’s part of an omnichannel customer service approach. And, according to research from Shopify, 58% of people claimed that their purchase decision was influenced by getting support on their preferred channel.  

2) To manage brand reputation and resolve public comments privately 

Beyond answering direct messages from customers on social media platforms, maintaining a brand presence on social media helps you keep tabs on mentions of your brand, as well as engage and provide customer support via comments or threads. 

Showing customers that your brand is available whenever they have an inquiry builds trust. In fact, 69% of Facebook users in the U.S. who message businesses report that it makes them feel more confident about the brand, according to Meta for Business.  

In addition, social media is a public form where anyone can view comments, whether they’re positive or negative. Everyone who looks at your brand’s social page will be able to take a look at what people are saying. Because of this, it can define what people think of you and change your brand’s perception. 

These customer queries get the most eyes on them by far as compared to a one-on-one channel like email, direct messages, interacting with a chatbot, or making a phone call.  

3) To offer support in the format and on the channels people like to use 

Not everyone wants to make a phone call when they need help. 

Shoppers are more likely to actually reach out to you if they can do it on a channel they like, as opposed to not reaching out and just being upset and posting about that publicly, telling their friends, or simply never purchasing from you again.  

📚Recommended reading: Should you delegate social media to your customer support team?

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Differences between social media customer service and traditional methods

It’s (sometimes) public

Customer support via social media differs from traditional email or phone support because it’s public, so your customer support team members’ responses are on display for others to see. 

While emails, phone calls, or direct messages are handled privately, Instagram comments, public tweets, or Facebook comments are public to your entire audience. The way your support team handles these customer interactions could influence your future sales and brand perception.  

High-volume requests across many channels can get lost

Customer service requests on social media can get out of hand quickly because they can come in through many different channels in many different ways. If your team isn’t using some level of automation or a tool to capture each query, it’s easy to lose comments and ignore upset customers who really need support. 

Each social media platform is different 

To provide excellent customer service on social media, your social media customer support reps have to consider the nuances of each social media platform as well. Depending on your brand, you may use LinkedIn, TikTok, or even Snapchat for customer service. Below, we focus on three of the most common social media channels.

Facebook (and Facebook Messenger)

According to research by the Pew Research Center, Facebook is the second most popular social media channel with 69% of US adults saying that they use it. The research center also found that Facebook is popular with all different demographics, so chances are you’ll find some of your target audience there. Because Facebook is such a large platform, it’s important that you have some sort of presence there. 

📚Recommended reading: Best practices for using Facebook Messenger for customer service

Twitter 

When answering customer questions on Twitter, opt for speed. Twitter is built on the idea of immediacy and short-form in-the-moment takes. According to a study conducted by Twitter, one in four people Tweet at a brand because they want a faster response. 

Note: Gorgias no longer supports Twitter interactions. But you can manage Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, SMS, and WhatsApp posts from within Gorgias.

Instagram 

Instagram has pivoted into a shopping platform. People are scrolling through family photos just as much as they’re shopping for items and discovering new ecommerce stores. According to Shopify’s Future of Commerce report, 30% of US internet users now make purchases without leaving the social platform they’re on. Now, Instagram claims that half of users use Instagram Shopping to make a purchase weekly. 

These shoppers need to be able to get support in-app because they want to make purchases without exiting the app as well. If your business doesn’t offer support on Instagram, you could lose sales. 

📚Recommended reading: 9 Tips to Improve Customer Service on Instagram

5 strategies to improve your social media customer care

There are four major strategies you can implement in order to use your social media customer service channels in the most successful ways possible. 

1) Have genuine conversations with your customers 

As mentioned above, social media is casual and customers will reach out on social media instead of a traditional method because they want a genuine answer without the formalness of an email. Use Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, or even WhatsApp to build relationships with your customers by having engaging conversations.

When a customer feels that your brand is being genuine they are more likely to trust you, become a loyal customer, and write a review or recommend your brand to their family and friends. This can lead to more new customers because 60% of consumers believe customer reviews are trustworthy, according to HubSpot Research. Even more, SuperOffice finds that 86% of customers are ready to pay more if it means they get a better customer experience. What all of this means is that building relationships with each and every customer will lead to the further success of your brand. 

📚Recommended reading: The Ultimate Guide to Personalized Customer Service

2) Move conversations into direct messages  

When you’re replying quickly to a lot of questions, it's sometimes easy to forget that you’re essentially in a public forum. Make sure you have systems in place to prevent customers’ personal information like phone numbers, shipping addresses, or order numbers from being viewed by the whole internet. Additionally, in the event of more complicated issues, you can comment publicly and ask the customer to private message (DM) you to help them resolve their issue. This shows that your brand is responsive to customer comments, but also that you value your customers’ privacy.

If you’re using a helpdesk like Gorgias, you can send and receive DMs on Instagram, WhatsApp, and Facebook Messenger from right within your helpdesk. You can create a template, called a Macro in Gorgias, for moving public social media conversations to DMs.

📚Recommended reading: Your Live Chat Support Guide: Benefits, Best Practices, and Helpful Tools

3) Share self-service style content

Another great use for your brand’s social media account is sharing self-service content. Oftentimes, customers ask the same questions over and over again. To help them get their questions answered quickly and efficiently, it can be beneficial to track which questions are very common and put together a document or self-service page to direct them to. 

Information that can be common to include in this type of document is contact information, return policy information, shipping information, and location information if your brand has brick-and-mortar locations. This proactive information also helps keep customer support freed up for the more complicated, in-depth customer inquiries coming through social media. 

Consider sharing your most popular FAQ page on social media

Though it can be extremely beneficial to direct customers on social media to a separate webpage that allows for self-service options, consider sharing your most popular FAQs on social channels. This will create more ease of use for customers and potentially get their questions answered even quicker. 

4) Create a handle specifically for customer service support

Depending on the size of your business, it may be a good idea to consider creating separate social media handles dedicated to customer support. This can be especially helpful for customers who have specific support needs. You can cross-promote your two different social pages on both accounts for ease of use. This way customers will be able to identify where to go for the quickest answer. In the event that a customer contacts the wrong social media account, it is important that a customer service rep responds to them from the correct account. This way, they’ll know where to reach out in the future. 

This practice can also be beneficial for your internal teams, if you have two different teams within your organization managing social media. For example, your marketing team may be running ads and posting content, while your customer success team is sifting through comments and messages to tend to customers’ needs. Having two separate accounts can make it way easier on your internal teams, as well as keep everything more organized.  

5) Reply quickly to exceed customer expectations

As mentioned previously, quick responses are vital to a great customer service experience. This is especially true in the context of social customer service. Social media moves extremely fast, and customers expect speedy replies. 

The longer a customer service agent waits to reply, the less likely the customer will be satisfied with the support you provide. However, it can be a tricky balance to respond quickly (which you can measure with metrics like average response time and resolution time) while also maintaining quality (which you can measure with metrics like customer satisfaction or net promoter score). 

If you’re first starting out with customer service on social media, it may be helpful to understand what your customer base expects. To do this, you can consider asking them to fill out surveys. Surveys can also be used to continuously track customer satisfaction. 

📚 Recommeded reading: Our list of the most important customer support metrics to track.

Pro tip: Aim to respond within 15 minutes (if possible)

This can be difficult outside of business hours, but if you have customer care team members who already work at night or on the weekends, this could help immensely. You can also dedicate space in your social profile’s bio to business hours and typical response times. This is a great way to manage expectations if you have a smaller team or are in an extremely busy time period. 

How Gorgias helps ecommerce stores offer helpful, efficient customer service on social media

When it comes to support, social media management gets challenging quickly. Even though your marketing team could attempt to keep up with comments or messages that require support, as your brand grows, it’ll only get harder. 

A helpdesk like Gorgias has functionality that helps you to keep track of all social support mentions in one place, lets you create pre-written templates for common questions, and can even automate responses or like and hide posts on your behalf. It helps create workflow automations for your team to deal with high amounts of volume. 

What can you respond to from within Gorgias?

Before you implement a helpdesk like Gorgias, you’ll likely want to let your social team research what kind of responses do and don’t work for your target audience, and then start getting good results. Then, that’s where Gorgias comes in: Take those learnings, manufacture efficiency with Gorgias, and pass the support side of the channel onto your support team to set channels more on autopilot. 

Here’s what you can respond to on each channel from Gorgias’s central platform. 

• Facebook and messenger: Respond to comments, ad comments, mentions where you’re tagged, and direct messages.  
• Instagram: Respond to Instagram messages, comments, ad comments, and mentions from posts and Stories. 
• WhatsApp: Respond to WhatsApp messages and calls.

Leverage autoresponses 

Especially on paid ads, sometimes there are just too many comments for a small team to manage without letting support quality falter.

Gorgias lets you autorespond to posts based on sentiment, so you can like promoter posts or auto hide angry or inappropriate comments. Auto-liking shows engagement without spending tons of time on going through each post on every channel daily.  

This has helped themed party apparel brand Shinesty increase revenue. “The Facebook ad commenting has been very interesting,” says CX Manager Cody Szymanski. “People have been converting right there thanks to a simple social interaction.”

See all customer interactions in one central place 

“Having quick access to the side bar is super convenient and helps us turn our support agents into sales people. For instance, if a potential customer asks a question about sizing, the agent can quickly have a look at their previous order info,” the team at MNML shared. 

This way, you can also see the customer’s entire history, including order info, past support interactions, and comments on social channels. 

Create Macros for common social interactions

Most likely, you’ll start to see the same questions or comments come in across social channels. Gorgias lets you create Macros, or templates, for the most common customer service messages you get on social media. This saves time for your support team and gets resolutions to your customers faster. 

Like a Facebook comment, send a shipping status in a private Instagram message, or answer questions on Instagram – all from Gorgias’s centralized helpdesk.

Essential tools for social media customer service

Now that you have some solid social media customer service strategies, the next step is to understand how to streamline the process through social media customer service tools. Below we’ll cover how Gorgias, Chatdesk, Gatsby, ShopMessage, and Octane AI could help your brand. 

Use Gorgias for efficient customer support

Gorgias is an all-in-one customer service platform built specifically for ecommerce brands that seamlessly integrates with your entire stack (Shopify and Shopify Plus, BigCommerce, and Magento). 

Through the platform, you can manage all of your organization’s customer service channels in real time, from live chat to email to social media. When it comes to social media specifically, there are many integrations Gorgias has that can allow your team to transition to social media customer service while keeping sales flowing and without slowing down support. 

Learn more about how ‎Gorgias can help you manage social media customer service with ease.

Chatdesk

Chatdesk is a social media monitoring app that allows your customer support team members to manage social moderation across Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok. It also integrates with email and chat.

Gorgias’ Chatdesk integration could be perfect for your brand if you strive to respond quickly — and around the clock — to all your Facebook comments, Instagram comments, DMs, and more. The app even allows for in-depth response personalization for your U.S.-based super fans.

Related: Our list of the best social media integrations for Shopify.

Gatsby

The next tool within Gorgias that will help your brand with social media customer care is Gatsby. Gatsby is a type of social listening app that allows your customer success team to view and track insights specifically on Instagram when responding to tickets, as well as track mentions and engagement for your brand. This tool can also be used to automate ecommerce influencer workflows

Here’s how it could work for you: With Gorgias and Gatsby integration, the tools can help you identify influential fans among your customer base. So, if someone is reaching out to support, you’ll be able to see if they are of “influencer status” thus, taking into account how they should be prioritized. This information can also be extremely valuable if you’re running customer engagement or customer satisfaction surveys.

ShopMessage

If your organization is heavy on Facebook Messenger — or if you’re hoping to expand in that area — ShopMessage could be a worthwhile tool you can integrate within your already-existing Gorgias platform. This tool sends messages to customers that can drive sales. It can contact customers via Facebook Messenger about things like abandoned carts, browser abandonment, welcome communications, upsells, shipping notifications, and custom Messenger menus. 

ShopMessage also has the capabilities to help your customer success team with Facebook Messenger Marketing by making it simple to set up automatic, personalized messages to your customers. 

Octane AI

Octane AI works as a messenger bot platform to help you and your team automate your brand’s conversations on social media channels. It works like this: When a customer sends a message to your brand via social media, Octane AI will automatically create an open ticket in Gorgias.

This means it’s simpler than ever to respond to your customers as quickly as possible. Having all your messages from various social networks in one place will also help prevent any from slipping through the cracks, thus creating an amazing customer experience.

Learn more about how Gorgias and Octane AI integrate.

Real-life examples of social media customer service

Finally, to complete your understanding of social media customer service, we’ve rounded up some real-life examples of companies using social media for customer service. We hope these leaders of industry can inspire your future strategies. 

Graza 

Trendy squeezable olive oil shop Graza has become the choice for influencers filming content in their kitchens. The fun bottles are filled with liquid gold: high quality olive oil for sizzling and drizzling. With 24k followers on Instagram, the brand is growing, and its audience is highly engaged. 

Recently, the brand ran a big promotion — but a loyal customer missed out because they had made a big order before the sale started. Graza responded to their comment, asked them to send in a DM, and implied that they would honor the promotion on that order. 

Graza uses Gorgias to help manage their social media interactions at scale. 

Nike

Nike currently has 9 million followers on its main Twitter page, @Nike, and about 202,000 followers on its customer service Twitter page, @NikeService. Nike is a perfect example of a brand utilizing both types of social media accounts to its advantage. For example, the brand often receives complaints from upset customers on its main Twitter account, but responds to the customer with its @NikeService account. 

Here’s an example of a recent Twitter exchange where Nike handled a negative comment from an unhappy customer with ease and professionalism. 

GoPro

Technology company known for its action cameras, GoPro is another great example of solid social media customer service. The brand doesn’t have dedicated customer service accounts on social media, but is highly active and quick to respond to customers posing questions in the comments on their Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook pages. 

For technology companies especially, it’s highly beneficial to have customer success reps who can answer customer questions with precision and accuracy. However, regardless of the industry your company is in, quality should always be a priority when responding to customers on social media. This also helps signal to other customers that you take your social media seriously, thus making others feel more comfortable to reach out there if they have a question or concern. 

Here’s one recent example of an in-depth response to a vague GoPro customer inquiry. 

Starbucks

Beyond staying on top of customer inquiries and troubleshooting on social media, the opportunity social media presents when it comes to building customer loyalty and brand identity can’t be overstated. Starbucks is a great example of a brand that is doing just this. The company has a distinct voice on all of its social media pages (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok) as it interacts with customers on a daily basis. Even something as simple as a heart emoji on Instagram comments, or a quick, sweet encouragement when a customer comments about how much they love a signature Starbucks creation can do a lot to create a brand that customers want to interact with. This also helps customers feel more connected to the brand. 

Starbucks also takes this approach further when it comes to responding to customer suggestions. For example, the Facebook post below shows a concerned customer sharing their ideas about creating more accessible Starbucks stores after the brand shared a post about its commitment to inclusivity and accessibility. Starbucks responds promptly and thanks the customer along with more information about how the company is sticking to its inclusivity and accessibility goals. 

Wayfair

Online home decor and furniture retailer Wayfair is another brand with standout social media customer service chops. Though the brand doesn’t have separate customer service social media channels, it is constantly keeping up with customer comments. Wayfair currently has 78,000 followers on Twitter, over 7 million likes on Facebook, and 1.7 million followers on Instagram. 

Through its social channels, the company displays another great way to interact with customers on social media about its products. Because the brand sells home goods, many social posts are interior design photos featuring their furniture, which elicits a lot of customer questions about which pieces are which, and where they can purchase them. Wayfair does a great job of responding to customers’ product questions with clear and concise information. Take a look at one example below:

Xbox

Lastly, we want to highlight the video game console company Xbox. The worldwide success of the company means there are also a lot of customers who have questions and want their voices heard. Xbox does a great job responding to customer complaints and questions via Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, however, the brand also makes it a point to have some fun with their responses, too — further connecting with customers on a personal level. 

It can be really challenging for massive brands to show personality and remind customers that there are people behind the scenes who actually care and like to have fun, but social media is the perfect channel to make this fact known. The brand recently launched a marketing campaign featuring actor Andre Braugher where he is promoting Xbox’s new All Access monthly subscription service. The video was posted to all of Xbox’s social channels, and the brand took the opportunity to connect with customers in the comments.

Here are a few snapshots of how they are doing it:

Enhance your social media customer service with Gorgias 

From troubleshooting customer issues and answering their questions to simply showing off your brand's personality, social media customer service can be an extremely effective avenue to explore to boost your company’s customer experience quality.

Jumping into social media customer service for the first time can be exciting but also a lot of work, so to help make the process a bit easier, we recommend checking out Gorgias for an all-in-one solution for your customer service team that also has standout live chat tools and amazing integrations.

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Learn more about Gorgias and how you can get started.arn more about Gorgias and how you can get started.

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As an ecommerce store owner, the prospect of losing 70% of your sales probably makes your heart drop. But according to the Baymard Institute, that’s exactly what’s happening: 69.82% of online carts are abandoned.

Even with the ecommerce shopping cart best practices in place, brands of all sizes struggle to get customers to place an order. The good news is that a handful of tweaks to your site’s user experience can greatly reduce cart abandonment. 

Below, we’ll dive into some actionable solutions — ranging from offering free shipping to simplifying your checkout process — to lower your abandonment rates and boost your sales. 

What is Shopify cart abandonment?

Shopify cart abandonment occurs when a customer who’s online shopping on a Shopify store adds items to their cart but leaves the website before making the purchase. Ecommerce businesses that track cart abandonment do so by determining the rate of customers who add items to their cart against the rate of purchases.

How to calculate your cart abandonment rate

The formula to calculate your cart abandonment rate is:

[Completed purchases / Carts created] x 100 = Cart abandonment rate

Online shopping is a bit like browsing a shopping mall because you can browse a wide variety of stores without much buying intent. You may carry a few items around the store while you consider buying them, but you may put them down on a shelf and leave for another store — especially if the store associate doesn’t catch you in time to close the sale.

Shopify cart abandonment represents the online version of that lack of commitment — with even less commitment because online shoppers can get distracted by a text message or leave your store without moving an inch. Fortunately, you can tweak your Shopify store to reduce cart abandonment, just like the in-store associate. 

But before we share the steps you can take, let's explore the frequency and impact of the overall Shopify cart abandonment problem.

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9 strategies for decreasing Shopify cart abandonment

1. Use your data to prioritize changes
2. Offer free shipping (or low-cost) shippin
3. Create a rewards program and offer discount codes
4. Use proactive live chat to guide customers through checkout
5. Offer as many payment options as possible
6. Simplify your checkout process 
7. Ditch the mandatory account registration form
8. Use exit-intent pop-ups to catch shoppers before they leave
9. Use push notifications, SMS, and abandoned cart emails to recover abandoned carts

Reducing shopping cart abandonment is one of the most effective ecommerce growth tactics. Rather than spending tons on ads to get new audiences to your site, you’re instead maximizing the value of the visitors you already get. (And what’s the point of more visitors if they don’t end up placing orders?) 

Here are nine of our best tips for reducing cart abandonment to grow your ecommerce business. 

1) Use your data to prioritize changes

You could pick one of the tactics below and cross your fingers that it improves your cart abandonment rates. But you’ll see much better results by using your store’s data to come up with a strategy based on the highest potential impact for your unique store. 

Dig into your cart abandonment data to strategize where you can make the most impactful changes. Specifically, you’ll want to pull data like:

• Date and time of cart abandonment
• Total abandoned order amount
• Items abandoned
• Shopper information (e.g. new vs. repeat)

With information like this, you can better identify trends that can affect other areas of your ecommerce strategy. For example, if you notice that the majority of your carts are abandoned before the winter holidays, you may want to consider running a Black Friday promotion. Alternatively, you may also learn that your abandoned carts:

• Usually contain the same item, indicating you might want to revisit that item’s pricing or the product page 
• Don’t meet your threshold for free shipping, indicating you might want to lower that threshold
• Are from first-time shoppers, indicating you may need more social proof like testimonials and positive reviews to boost new shopper confidence

2) Offer free shipping (or low-cost) shipping

As we mentioned above, unexpected taxes, fees, and shipping costs are the most common reasons shoppers abandon carts. For context, 82% of shoppers say they’d rather have free shipping than expedited shipping. And shoppers are used to free and fast shipping because of services like Amazon Prime, so it’s becoming an even bigger disadvantage to require paid shipping.

For some ecommerce stores, especially new or small ones, free shipping for the entire site catalog isn’t always a sustainable option. So instead, offer free shipping for carts that meet a free shipping threshold. 

Check out our article on how to offer free shipping for more information.

Once you have a compelling shipping offer, use it as a marketing tool. Mention your free shipping in website banners, on checkout pages, and even on product pages. Look how Jaxxon, a luxury men’s chain retailer, clearly lets the shopper know how much they’ll have to spend to unlock free shipping right from the product page:

3) Create a rewards program and offer discount codes

Rewards, timely discount codes, and other incentives can push customers over the edge to make a purchase. 

Parade, a DTC underwear brand known for its referral programs, uses a refer-a-friend program to get discount codes into the hands of people who haven’t yet shopped at your store. This is particularly smart because first-time shoppers tend to be the most hesitant (and therefore abandon the most carts). But the discount code and social proof from the referring friend work together to push shoppers toward a purchase:

Discount codes and referral programs available to everyone will likely reduce cart abandonment but you should target customers with items in their cart (or customers who recently abandoned a cart) for the greatest impact. Live chat can help you target customers still shopping while exit-intent pop-ups and follow-up SMS or email can help with customers who already left your site. We’ll cover both strategies below.

4) Use proactive live chat to guide customers through checkout

Incorporate live chat, including proactive chat campaigns, as a way to help your customers during the checkout process and boost sales. A whopping 79% of stores that have live chat enabled report its positive impact on their sales and customer experience.

Every store should enable live chat for support because it’s such a fast, appealing option for customers, especially when they’re actively considering a purchase. Say that a customer isn’t placing an order because they’re not sure whether a small or medium size would fit. If you have a visible (but not intrusive) live chat option in your ecommerce store, the customer can quickly type in their question and ideally have a resolution from your support team or chatbot in minutes:​

With certain live chat apps, you can also take a more proactive approach to drive sales through your live chat widget. You can automatically reach out to certain customers (like shoppers hovering on the checkout page for more than a minute, or shoppers with a certain amount of merchandise in their cart) to ask if they have questions, offer discount codes, or remind them that you offer free shipping if they reach a certain amount (to drive upsells).

With Gorgias’ live chat campaigns feature, you can customize your greetings — the below example gives a friendly welcome to people who visit a specific product page:

5) Offer as many payment options as possible

One simple way to reduce cart abandonment is to offer as many payment options as possible. If customers make it to your checkout page only to find they have limited options to pay — especially if those options require them to divulge personal information — they are more likely to abandon the purchase. 

If you have a Shopify store, you can use Shopify Payments to easily accept a wide variety of payment options like credit cards, Apple Pay, and Google Pay without any third-party fees. If you don’t have Shopify Payments enabled, you’ll still be able to use major payment providers (like Paypal) to accept payments, but you may be stuck with limited payment options and fees.

6) Simplify your checkout process 

Reducing friction throughout your checkout process is another way to reduce abandoned checkouts. Get rid of unnecessary forms, fields, and questions that may turn your customers away from your store. Likewise, create large checkout buttons that make it obvious how to complete a purchase with the fewer clicks possible. If you’re still creating your store, you may want to try finding a Shopify theme with a streamlined checkout page. 

One tip to optimize your checkout process is to include a Buy Now button on the product page itself. This streamlines the buying process and gives shoppers fewer off-ramps away from your website. Check out CROSSNET’s clear button guiding users to make a purchase — not just add items to a cart that will later get abandoned: 

7) Ditch the mandatory account registration form

This is technically an additional tip to simplify your checkout process, but it’s impactful enough to warrant its own section. While you want customers to create an account for future marketing opportunities, forcing shoppers to create an account in order to place an order halts momentum during the checkout process and turns people off from your store. 

Instead, offer a guest checkout option with the choice to make an account for easier purchases next time they come to your store. Or, to make checkout even easier, consider adding one of Shopify’s dynamic checkout buttons. With an express checkout option like Amazon Pay, customers can complete a purchase without even typing out their billing and shipping information by retrieving that information from another service.

Check out CROSSNET’s store, which offers multiple express checkout options:

8) Use exit-intent pop-ups to catch shoppers before they leave

Making your checkout experience simple is a great start, but some customers may need one final push to place an order. Exit-intent pop-ups, or pop-ups that appear when a customer attempts to leave your store, can be the last-minute nudge (or discount code) that convinces customers to place an order.

You can add a pop-up to your Shopify store through a Shopify app like Privy or Pop-Up Window. However, practice caution with any sort of pop-up. Some customers will get frustrated if pop-ups interrupt their browsing experience, so make sure you provide value with each pop-up and keep a close eye on your purchase data to ensure they don’t hurt your store’s performance.

Check out our guide to Shopify pop-ups for more information. 

9) Use push notifications, SMS, and abandoned cart emails to recover abandoned carts

Personalized push notifications can also be a helpful follow-up tool to help customers return to their carts. Push notifications give the customer a visual of the products still in the cart with clear calls to action. This helps remind customers that they still have unpurchased items waiting to be checked out. 

SMS and email are other great options to reach customers even if they don’t return to your store. You can even create a full SMS or email campaign with an automated workflow that triggers emails to customers after a certain amount of time has passed, or after they revisit your website.

Check out this example of a cart recovery email from Braxley Bands, which is a great example of how you can recover carts with humor and attitude — or whatever your brand voice may be.

10) Consider retargeted ads to remind customers about what they left behind

Another technique you can consider to help bring customers back to their carts in your online store is retargeted ads. Retargeting allows you to get ads in front of customers who visited your website and gave you their information — but didn’t purchase an item. 

Most retargeted ads appear in the shopper’s social media feeds in the days after the abandoned checkout. They typically feature an image of the abandoned product, a new-and-improved discount, and a clear call to action (CTA) to purchase the item. 

Take a look at this example of a retargeted Facebook ad from Pact Apparel:

While retargeted ads work better than most ads, they still have a clickthrough rate of only .7%, so they may cost more than they provide in terms of recovered purchases.

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8 tools that help decrease Shopify cart abandonment

To limit shopping cart abandonment and encourage customers to make their purchases, you might need the help of some additional apps and tools.

1) Gorgias

A better overall customer experience can significantly lower your business’s cart abandonment rate. Why? Customers depend on things like an FAQ page, clear returns policies, and customer support to gain the information and trust they need to make a purchase.

Gorgias is a customer service platform specifically designed to help ecommerce merchants boost revenue through customer experience. Some of the features that help Shopify stores reduce cart abandonment include:

• Live chat: For proactive chat campaigns and targeted discounts, when customers are hovering on a checkout page or have items in their cart for a certain number of minutes 

• Shipping and returns integrations: Lets you offer free/easy shipping, and promise returns if the customer isn’t happy
• SMS and email: On top of being great support channels, you can use SMS and email marketing campaigns to remind and incentivize shoppers to complete an abandoned purchase

Sign up for a demo of Gorgias to see how we can help you reduce cart abandonment rates, improve customer experience, and drive revenue.

2) Recart

Recart is an app specifically designed to help you recover sales from cart abandonment. It uses Facebook Messenger to send out push notifications on social media to your customers. It can send out reminders for abandoned carts and order-related messages like shipping notifications and receipts, and has pre-written templates for messages to help you save time and optimize your ecommerce cart recovery processes.

See how Gorgias integrates with Recart.

3) LoyaltyLion

LoyaltyLion is a loyalty-building tool that helps you stand out from your competitors and offer great benefits and rewards to your customers. When a customer is happy with your brand and knows that checking out leads to great rewards down the line, they are much less likely to abandon their carts and instead will return due to the positive experience and relationship you have established with them.

See how Gorgias integrates with LoyaltyLion. 

4) Smile

Smile is an app and platform that helps with customer retention. It gives points and rewards to customers that invite others to join them and sign up for your ecommerce rewards program. This helps to increase your customer retention rates and expand your ecommerce business’s customer lifetime value. You can also use Smile to nurture your customers and encourage them to engage with your rewards program.

See how Gorgias integrates with Smile.

5) Bulk Discount Code Generator

Bulk Discount Code Generator allows you to save time and effort while reducing coupon abuse. You can generate reliable discount codes and coupon codes to use with orders on your ecommerce site without difficulty. You can then use those codes in pop-ups, email sequences, win-back strategies, loyalty programs, and more.

6) PushOwl

PushOwl is a push notification app that directly sends push notifications to mobile devices or desktops. You can quickly get out short, punchy messages that readers can easily consume and respond to. PushOwl is also a great tool with functionality for gathering important data and information from users and is especially effective for mobile shoppers, which are responsible for the highest rate of abandonment per platform.

7) Omnisend

Omnisend is a complete marketing app for Shopify. It offers advanced segmentation, pre-built automated emails and workflows, email templates, drag-and-drop editors, email list-building capabilities, and powerful analytics. In addition to all of this, Omnisend also has SMS marketing and push notification tools that you can use to create a sense of urgency for your abandoned carts with limited-time deals and time-sensitive rewards. You can also use A/B testing on your email subject lines and track open rates for your cart abandonment emails. Omnisend takes a lot of the work out of using Shopify and increases checkout purchases.

See how Gorgias integrates with Omnisend. 

8) Privy

Privy is an ecommerce marketing platform that helps ecommerce store owners increase their store’s conversion rates. The platform offers SMS, email marketing, and pop-ups to stop customers before they leave without making a purchase (or draw them back if they’ve already left).

Must-know cart abandonment statistics

Cart abandonment is a major issue that affects most ecommerce businesses. As we mentioned above, nearly 70% of all carts are abandoned. 

The type of device your customers are shopping on can play into your company’s cart abandonment rate. According to the study linked above, the average cart abandonment rate per device is:

• Desktop: 69.75% 
• Smartphone: 85.65% 
• Tablet: 80.74%

The time of year impacts cart abandonment as well. For example, the surge in people shopping online during Black Friday and Cyber Monday typically results in a higher cart abandonment rate due to the higher number of shoppers. 

Some people who abandon their carts do eventually come back to buy the items. Statista’s 2021 study of U.K. shoppers uncovers the following interesting information about consumers’ post-abandonment behavior:

• 31% return at a later date to purchase on the same website
• 26% purchase the item online from a different retailer or ecommerce business
• 23% weren’t looking to purchase and didn't return to buy
• 8% go to a physical store for an item

In order to know where the majority of your customers fit into these numbers, it’s important for you to first understand why your customers are abandoning their carts and leaving your ecommerce site before they can checkout.

Top reasons shoppers leave items in their cart

Understanding why customers leave your checkout page in the first place is key to reducing your number of abandoned shopping carts. According to Baymard Institute, there are five top reasons why online shoppers abandon their carts without making a purchase:

1. Extra costs too high (48%): Shipping costs can be a major turnoff to customers, along with other fees like taxes and handling charges. These types of extra fees can sometimes be almost as expensive as the item or items themselves. This can turn away customers and cause them to abandon their carts.
2. An account is required (24%): Customers simply want to buy their items and avoid friction or irritation at checkout. Forcing people to create an account and give out their personal information can seem like too high a price to pay for the items in the cart.
3. Delivery too slow (22%): Today’s customers expect expediency when it comes to deliveries. With so many huge ecommerce stores offering next-day or same-day delivery, you can expect to lose potential customers if your shipping takes longer than a few days. 
4. Don’t trust the site (18%): Customers today are rightly concerned about problems like digital theft and identity fraud. If a site appears untrustworthy, many customers will get cold feet and abandon their carts when credit card information or other personal information is required at checkout.
5. The checkout process is too long or complicated (17%): Long forms with many different fields and requests for information are another turnoff for customers at checkout. 

Gorgias helps you put a stop to cart abandonment by providing world-class customer support

Despite how frustrating cart abandonment is, there are solutions to help guide your customers to complete your checkout process and boost your bottom line. Take a look at how Gorgias customer, Lillie’s Q, was able to increase total sales by 166% with cart-saving support:

“Gorgias' chat allows us to respond to our customers in real time. We can answer customers' questions about a product and how to place an order without them leaving the site or abandoning their cart. We have seen a 75% increase in direct sales as a result of this quick communication.” - Nicole Mann, Marketing Director

Gorgias is an ecommerce helpdesk platform that turns your customer service team into a revenue-generating machine. With Gorgias, you can create an exceptional customer experience that not only encourages your customers to check out, but to come back to your ecommerce business for future purchases. To learn more, check out our case study of three businesses that increased sales with live chat or sign up for Gorgias today.

66% of customers report preferring live chat over any other customer support channel, and 79% of businesses say live chat improves their customer experience and overall revenue. 

But the question stands: What’s the best live chat software for ecommerce? Every live chat service has its pros and cons, and your choice could greatly affect your site’s customer experience, cart abandonment, and conversion rates. 

In this article, we'll take a look at the most important features to look for in a live chat solution before diving into the top 11 live chat software apps on the market today, including pricing and ratings from G2.

Features your live chat software should have

There are plenty of live chat solutions available, but not all of them are created equal. To choose the best chat widget for your ecommerce website, be sure to select a solution that includes the following features:

• Automation and dynamic templates: You should be able to automate a variety of daily tasks, like greeting customers, gathering names and product info, or sending follow-up surveys. Automated chatbots, for example, can initiate live chats with customers that meet certain criteria. Look for Macros, or templated messages and replies, to help your live chat agents work quickly and efficiently. 
• Proactive capabilities: Live chat is useful for more than just receiving incoming queries. The right tool will let you reach out to customers, including with automation, to offer support and discounts codes at key moments in the customer journey. This is one of the biggest ways live chat can help your team boost sales.
• Real-time analytics: Live chat support solutions that offer real-time analytics enable you to gauge the performance of your customer support reps via metrics such as first response time, wait time, and customer satisfaction ratings. 
• Branding customization: The ability to add customized branding elements to your chat window, such as your company logo or tagline, can give your ecommerce website a more memorable and professional touch.
• Multiple integrations: The best live chat apps are able to integrate with other apps on your store such as social media messaging apps and delivery tracking apps for a more interconnected and seamless customer service experience. The most important is your ecommerce platform: Your choice may depend on whether you use Shopify, BigCommerce, WordPress, Woocommerce.
• Part of a comprehensive customer service platform: Many live chat solutions are packaged as part of a larger customer service platform that includes features such as phone support and a help desk with a ticketing system. If you’d like to provide your customers with plenty of support options and optimize your CS team’s internal workflows, look for all-in-one platforms.
• File and screenshot sharing: The ability to share images, video, screenshots, and other files, like user guides or receipts, can make the process of assisting a customer via live chat faster and more efficient. 
• Multiple pricing plans: A variety of premium plans and free plans, so the app is affordable but grows alongside your brand. 
• Audio and/or visual notifications: Audio and/or visual notifications can be used to notify customers when an agent has submitted a response, prompting them to navigate back to the live chat window if they have opened another window during the chat or have otherwise become distracted.
• Chatbots and live chat options (and the ability to switch between them): By integrating both chatbots and live chat into your ecommerce store, you can automatically resolve most issues while still giving customers the option to connect with a live agent for more complex issues. Having chatbots on your website also allows you to offer 24/7 customer support, and 64% of customers say that 24/7 support is the best feature of chatbots.

On the topic of chatbots, take extra time to evaluate whether an app’s chatbot enhances or diminishes your customer experience:

Related: Our list of 150+ high-value ecommerce apps. 

The best live chat software for ecommerce stores

Now that we've covered some of the most important features to look for in a live chat solution, let's take a look at 11 of the best live chat apps and the standout features that set these solutions apart from the competition.

1) Gorgias: 4.6 ⭐ (488 reviews)

Gorgias is a feature-rich helpdesk platform for ecommerce businesses which includes live chat, chatbots, a self-service portal, ticketing system, omnichannel customer support, and data analytics. Its live chat solution offers an impressive range of automation features, macros, and rules designed to streamline and personalize the customer support process for your customers and support agents. 

For example, Gorgias offers the ability to create and automate responses to frequently asked customer questions (FAQs) like, "Where is my order?" This allows you to automatically resolve up to 30% of customer support tickets. You can also fine-tune your customer service strategy based on the accurate and insightful data analytics. 

Standout Ecommerce Features

• Connect to leading ecommerce platforms like Shopify, BigCommerce, and Magento and display extensive customer data next to each ticket
• Offer automated order management and frequently asked questions in the live chat widget
• Set up chat campaigns that pop up and greet visitors with a page-specific message, letting your customer service team act like a proactive sales team
• Create custom auto-responses, templates, and macros that allow for swift responses to frequently asked questions
• Easily track support agent metrics such as ticket volume, first response time, and resolutions time
• A responsive mobile app for support on the go

Pricing

Pricing for Gorgias includes multiple tiers. Starter plans start at $10/mo. Gorgias also offers a customizable Enterprise plan for clients handling more than 5,000 tickets per month.

Who It's Best For

With a wide range of plans to choose from and affordable pricing, Gorgias is an excellent solution for both small to medium-sized ecommerce businesses and larger brands. The live chat app works seamlessly with Shopify, BigCommerce, and Magento.

Since Gorgias's live chat solution is just one feature in a large customer support ecosystem, it’s also an excellent option for anyone who wants to purchase a fully featured customer service solution. 

2) LiveChat: 4.5 ⭐ (745 reviews)

LiveChat is one of the more popular and well-rounded live chat support options. This application offers key live chat features, like branding and customization; automatic notifications whenever a customer wants to chat, tags, file-sharing; and archive capabilities. LiveChat also offers an integrations store where you can find helpful plugins for your chat window.

Standout Ecommerce Features

• Add tags to chat conversations for improved sorting and analytics
• Push longer conversations and more complex issues to a customer support ticket
• Request feedback from customers in the form of a survey response at the conclusion of their live chat
• Share files such as screenshots and documents between customers and support agents
• Add integrations, add-ons, and APIs into your chat window from LiveChat's integrations store

Pricing

LiveChat starts at $16 per month per agent billed annually for the Starter plan and moves up to $50 per month per agent billed annually for the Business plan. LiveChat also offers a customizable Enterprise plan.

Who It's Best For

The per-agent fee structure may not be cost effective for businesses with medium or large customer support teams. If you’re looking for a well-rounded live chat solution and can justify paying a minimum of  $16 per month per agent, then LiveChat is a good option to consider.

Explore our Gorgias vs. LiveChat comparison to see how these two platforms stack up. 

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3) Intercom: 4.4 ​​⭐ (2,471 reviews)

Intercom is a customer communications platform that offers support, engagement, and marketing tools, including live chat. Intercom’s Messenger tool allows businesses to set up chatbots that target specific audience segments and easily route tickets that require human help to the appropriate channels. 

Standout Ecommerce Features

• See conversations across all channels in a single inbox 
• Trigger automatic chat messages when customers meet certain criteria
• Direct customers to your knowledge base or self-service center using chatbots or apps 
• Automatically route more complex tickets to a live chat agent
• Integrate Intercom with 300+ different tools and platforms, including Salesforce, Slack, and Hubspot

Pricing

Intercom splits its platform into three different tools and plans — Conversational Support, Conversational Customer Engagement, and Conversational Marketing — each of which requires you to sign up for a demo or contact Intercom for pricing. The all-in one Starter plan made for “very small businesses” starts at $67 per month billed annually. 

Who It's Best For

Intercom targets all business sizes, from early-stage to enterprise, and discusses use cases for ecommerce, finance, education, and healthcare industries. 

4) Drift: 4.4 ⭐ (790 reviews)

Like most live chat solutions, Drift offers both automated chatbots as well as live chat functionality. What really sets Drift apart is its focus on B2B and SaaS organizations and its data-driven approach to customer support. 

Drift’s Visitor Intelligence software combines data from your business software (CRM, sales and marketing tools, etc) and databases like Clearbit and Crunchbase to identify web visitors and better personalize interactions. Drift also offers chatbots powered by AI and machine learning to replicate the behaviors and performance of your most effective sales and customer service reps.

Standout Ecommerce Features

• Connect customers using AI-powered chatbots that that tailor their conversations depending on the web visitor 
• Eliminate forms for high-value buyers and direct them to the right rep or account manager
• Automatically collect and analyze rich data on leads and customers who visit your site 
• Create templates that enable swift response to commonly asked questions
• Integrate the Drift platform with a wide range of other tools and platforms

Pricing

Drift offers three different plans — Premium, Advanced, and Enterprise — but requires that you contact them for pricing details.

Who It's Best For

Drift is primarily designed for B2B companies and ecommerce stores, though the company does offer a plan designed specifically for startups as well. It could be a great solution for anyone who wants to utilize the functionalities of AI and machine learning for live chat customer engagement. 

5) Tawk.to: 4.6 ⭐(166 reviews)

Tawk.to is a solution focused only on live chat customer support and claims to be the most widely used live chat software in the world. With Tawk.to, you won't get more advanced features such as AI chatbots. Instead, what you'll get is a straightforward live chat window that allows customers who visit your site to seamlessly connect with a chat agent. 

Tawk.to certainly isn't as comprehensive as the other solutions on our list. However, it stands out because it’s completely free to download and use. This makes it a great option for anyone who wants to test the waters of live chat for their customer support team without any upfront investment.

Standout Ecommerce Features

• Integrate a live chat solution into your ecommerce store completely free of charge
• Answer chats from your Android or iOS mobile device with a clean mobile app
• Create response “shortcuts” (canned messages) and direct customers to the built-in knowledge base
• Hire third-party chat agents at a rate of $1 per hour for additional support
• Collect basic performance analytics and monitor web visitors in real time 

Pricing

Tawk.to is free to download and use. However, if you’d like to remove the "Powered by Tawk.to" branding from the product, you'll need to pay $19 per month. Tawk.to also offers you the ability to outsource your live chat support to third-party agents at a rate of $1 per hour.

Who It's Best For

As a free-to-use solution, Tawk.to is ideal for smaller companies that want to offer basic live chat support without having to purchase a costly subscription. For larger companies, though, a more comprehensive and advanced solution is likely a better choice.

6) Freshdesk: 4.4 ⭐ (2,691 reviews)

Freshdesk, formerly known as Freshchat, is a solution that offers chatbots in addition to the ability to connect customers with a live support agent. It's a simple, no-/low-code solution that provides just about everything you could want out of a live chat application, including automated chat routing, chat transcripts, the ability to share files, the ability to create tickets from chats, and beyond.

Standout Ecommerce Features

• Automatically route customers from a chatbot to a live support agent
• Integrate with over 1,000 pre-delivered marketing and customer support tools from the Freshdesk Marketplace
• Share files and screens between customers and support agents
• Trigger messages or email campaigns based on customer-specific behavior

Pricing

Freshdesk offers plans that range from completely free to use to $69 per agent per month billed annually depending on the number of agents you employ and the specific features that you are looking to purchase.

Who It's Best For

The free-to-use version of Freshdesk is ideal for smaller businesses that want to affordably test out live chat customer support, while Freshdesk's paid plans can be great for larger companies that handle more tickets on a regular basis.

7) Zendesk Chat: 4.3 ⭐ (5,388 reviews)

Zendesk is a live chat solution that’s free to use if you only have one agent speaking with customers. It comes with all the other live chat features you expect from a comprehensive platform, including multichannel support, custom triggers, and the ability to track and monitor visitors on your site.

Standout Ecommerce Features

• Respond to customer support tickets via web, phone, email, SMS, and social media messaging from a single dashboard
• Automatically route customers to helpful resources or the appropriate agent via AI-powered triggers
• Quickly and easily integrate Zendesk with common ecommerce platforms such as Magento, Shopify, and BigCommerce.

Pricing

Zendesk offers several different plans that range from free to $59 per agent per month.

Who It's Best For

If you only have one agent handling live chat customer support tickets then Zendesk is a great solution to consider since you will be able to access all of its features free of charge. Zendesk is also a great live chat option for Shopify store owners since its Shopify extension is well-polished according to user reviews.

8) Olark: 4.3 ⭐ (221 reviews)

Olark is another "just the basics" live chat support tool that is ideal for smaller companies with a limited number of support agents. With that said, Olark does offer some nice features, including triggered messaging, custom pre-chat forms, and offline messaging.

Standout Ecommerce Features

• Present customers with pre-chat forms that allow you to collect important information and get context before matching them with a live agent
• Automatically send suggestions or special offers based on specific triggers
• Offer customers an offline messaging option and follow up at a later time 

Pricing

Olark is free to use provided you only have a single agent and don't handle more than 20 live chat tickets per month. For the full-featured product, you will need to pay $29 per month per agent. Olark also offers an enterprise-level option called Olark Pro that features variable pricing.

Who It's Best For

The free-to-use version of Olark is a good choice for especially small stores that only employ a single live chat support agent. While the paid version of Olark does offer some useful features for larger companies, there are better choices available for the cost.

9) Tidio: 4.7 ⭐ (1,314 reviews)

Tidio is a live chat and chatbot software that includes an impressive range of features in its free-to-use version. While you will have to pay extra for key features such as chatbot templates and live visitor monitoring, the broad toolset that Tido offers free of charge (inlcuidng unlimited chats) makes it a solid option for businesses that need to stretch their budget as far as possible.

Standout Ecommerce Features

• Set automated messages targeting website visitors based on their activity
• Store visitor info such as tags, locations, and preferences
• Create email responses for offline queries
• Create chatbot templates

Pricing

Tidio is free to download and use. However, you will have to pay extra for any premium features such as the ability to create chatbot templates and the ability to monitor the visitors on your site.

Who It's Best For

As one of the more capable free-to-use live chat solutions, Tidio is one of the better options for anyone who wants to offer live chat support without having to pay a subscription fee.

10) Zoho SalesIQ: 4.4 ⭐ (241 reviews)

Zoho SalesIQ is a customer engagement tool aimed at marketing, sales, lead generation, and support teams which also has live chat. The platform includes custom chatbots, advanced monitoring and reports, and the ability to easily switch between live chat and other key support channels. The centralized dashboard lets you track the performance of your live agents with ease. 

Standout Ecommerce Features

• Create canned replies to frequently asked questions
• Route live chat sessions to a phone call
• Integrate with a variety of other customer support tools, including your website's help desk
• Monitor the performance of your support agents via a convenient, centralized dashboard

Pricing

The base version of Zoho SalesIQ is free to download and use. There are also paid versions of Zoho SalesIQ that offer additional features, and these paid versions range from $7 per month per agent billed annually to $20 per month per agent billed annually.

Who It's Best For

Zoho SalesIQ markets its solution to “every type of business,” including finance, ecommerce, travel, real estate, education, and restaurants. The free version holds onto core features and the paid versions are relatively affordable compared to other all-in-one platforms. It’s a great choice for startups and small businesses that are looking to get a lot of customer support tools for minimal cost.

11) LivePerson: 3.7 ⭐(66 reviews)

LivePerson is an AI-powered communication platform designed to help businesses and government organizations optimize their audience experience. The Conversational Cloud provides a command center to answer questions and engage customers via live chat, as well as help customers on their preferred channels. 

Standout Ecommerce Features

• Automate many customer interactions on your online store using LivePerson's Conversational AI
• Connect customers with a live chat agent via a range of messaging platforms, including Facebook Messenger, SMS, WhatsApp and Twitter Direct Messages
• Construct conversation flows for your chatbots to follow
• Convert inbound calls to messaging conversations 

Pricing

LivePerson requires that you contact their company for a pricing quote.

Who It's Best For

LivePerson currently markets its solution to companies in industries such as retail, banking, travel, real estate, insurance, DeFi, government, education, and automotive.

Still looking for the right live chat app? Check out our list of the best live chat apps in general, not just for ecommerce.

The best ecommerce live chat is the one built for ecommerce

At Gorgias, we’re proud to offer one of the most comprehensive and feature-rich customer support platforms available today — built specifically for ecommerce stores like yours. While all of these solutions offer great chat boxes, only one makes design decisions based on conversations with ecommerce brands and integrates with all the ecommerce tools you already use.

With Gorgias, you can look forward to AI-powered chatbots, live chat and conversational support, in addition to an ecommerce help desk and ticketing system. Send out automated updates and messages, automate common customer support tasks, and much more.

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Learn more about Gorgias for Shopify stores, Gorgias for Magento stores, or Gorgias for BigCommerce stores to see how you can benefit.

TL;DR:

• Improve your customer experience with real-time order tracking. This will benefit your customers and brand by increasing their sense of security, creating customer loyalty, and reducing returns. 
• Integrate your order tracking system with your Helpdesk. Choose a solution like Aftership, ShipBb, ShipStation, or others that integrate with your CX platform. This lets you link shipping data with your customer data for faster response and resolution times. 
• Make tracking information accessible with self-service options. Ensure your shipping information is easy for customers to find through email and SMS notifications. You can also add order management Flows in your chat or Help Center.
• Deflect repetitive WISMO tickets with automation. Let your AI Agent answer repetitive “Where is my order?” requests so your agents can focus on revenue-generating tickets. 

The competition to provide customer satisfaction in ecommerce today is fierce. Now, shoppers demand free shipping on every order and expect lightning-fast order processing and fulfillment. What once were “nice to haves” have become necessary for growth and success. 

Customers expect quick delivery times and no shipping feels, and their order tracking expectations are just as high. Shoppers want to see an order's status and location at any given time, from purchase to doorstep. Even better are real-time alerts like SMS or email notifications at each point in an order’s journey.

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Below, discover the benefits of tracking customer orders. Learn why you should consider implementing an order tracking tool for your business. 

Why your online store should track customer order status

Huge ecommerce vendors like Amazon have trained customers to track their online orders thoroughly. From the order processing stage to when a delivery person from FedEx, UPS, or USPS leaves it at their door. In other words, expectations are high. 

Offering real-time tracking data for purchases benefits both your customer and your business in five distinct ways.

Gives shoppers and business owners a sense of security

Once customers place an online order, waiting for it to arrive can be both exciting and stressful. Questions like, “Will it get here on time?” or “Is it ever coming?” become more intense if customers can’t check the delivery status themselves in real time. Plus, as a business, you can follow along to ensure that orders are getting where they need to go. 

DHL's 2024 Delivery and Returns Report shows 43% of shoppers agree that real-time tracking improves their delivery experience. 60% of global shoppers even said that delivery speed was not as important as end-to-end tracking.

Allows customers to plan ahead

Consumers need to know that an order is on its way and when it will arrive for reasons beyond curiosity. For example, if a product is expensive, customers won’t want it to sit on their front porch all day. If customers have to sign for a package, they might have to work from home to accept it. In these instances, status updates are crucial.

According to research from Verte, 91% of consumers actively track their packages. 39% track them once a day and 19% track packages multiple times daily. Shoppers also want these updates to be convenient, with 38% preferring package updates via SMS over email. 

Customers can maintain constant contact with their order at home and on the go via a mobile device. This gives them the transparency they need to plan ahead for a fun unboxing or an essential item they can’t live without. 

Builds customer loyalty 

The customer experience you provide on your ecommerce platform is essential to business growth. Providing shoppers tracking information, email updates, and delivery dates can help create a positive view of your brand. This builds a better customer experience and encourages loyalty and retention.

Research from Voxware shows that 69% of customers are less likely to shop with a retailer again if their package didn’t arrive within two days of the promised date. 16% of customers even said they would stop shopping with a brand if they received an incorrect delivery once. 

New customers appreciate seamless experiences and are more likely to make repeat purchases from businesses that offer them. Creating a cycle of repeat purchases will help your business grow. Encouraging loyalty through an easy-to-use order tracking tool gives you a significant advantage.

Recommended reading: 9 Revenue-Driving Ecommerce Shipping Best Practices

Frees up your customer service team (by deflecting WISMO tickets with automation)

Many ecommerce companies are looking for ways to alleviate customer service workloads and reduce time handling simple requests. Providing real-time order tracking is one of those ways since customers no longer need to ask, “Where is my order (WISMO)?” This question accounts for 16% of tickets for the average ecommerce store, according to Gorgias data.

Instead of reaching out to check their order status, tracking systems proactively send email or SMS notifications or provide access to a portal where customers can see progress in real time. This solution streamlines the process and reduces ticket volumes, increasing productivity. Your support team will have more time to handle complex issues and customers will get a better experience.

With tools like Gorgias’s AI Agent and Flows, you can automate customer order tracking through SMS, email, or chat. Or, create a self-service portal where customers can use their purchase order number to access their order status. We’ll cover both of these more in a later section. 

“Chat used to be a support tool for repetitive questions and problem-solving, but now Automate takes care of that for us. Within a month of launching, our manual live chat tickets decreased 17%.” 

—Caela Castillo, Director of Customer Experience at Jaxxon

Recommended reading: Offer More Self-Serve Options with Flows: 10 Use Cases & Best Practices

Lowers the number of returns you can expect 

People often return items because they arrive late and the customer no longer wants or needs them. With detailed order tracking and a simple returns policy, customers can better expect when their product will arrive. This makes it less likely that they will return the package when it finally gets to them. And, as you might expect, reducing returns positively impacts your business’s revenue.

Recommended reading: Ecommerce Returns: 10 Best Practices for Taking Your Online Store to the Next Level

Why ecommerce businesses should think twice before building a custom order tracking system 

Using a customer order tracking system has many advantages. We recommend using a pre-built solution because maintaining a manual tracking system is time-consuming. Find our recommendations below.

A custom-built tracking page may require more data entry than necessary. Manual processes open your system up to human error and eat up productivity.

Manual systems require extensive set-up

If you try to provide order tracking yourself, you’ll save in the short term but spend plenty of time and money building and maintaining a system to send tracking information. 

Once you successfully sync your tracking components, you'll need to create different templates that collect or communicate information to your customers. For example, you might build a form that collects order information like a customer’s name, address, phone number, and credit card details. Or, write a pre-written email that you can use to send out shipment notifications for each step of the order process. 

You can also create template responses for common questions. For example, you can answer, “Where is my order?” and provide tracking information and updates on shipment and delivery. 

You need seamless integrations to avoid tab-shuffling

For an order tracking system to work properly, all of your tools must "talk" to each other. This includes information from your manufacturers, website, helpdesk, social media commerce, SMS, inventory management software, and shipping carriers. If they don't, a bottleneck occurs, or they fail to communicate information at all. The result is that your customer can't access their order status, which causes frustration and has them turning to your customer support team.

How to set up order tracking: Let customers see the status of shipments in real time

If you manually record and send order tracking information in an Excel document, you probably feel frustrated. 

One of the most common incoming questions customer support teams get is, “Where is my order? (WISMO)”. The best way to mitigate those messages is by implementing a self-service system that automates shipping tracking notifications.

1. Decide on an order tracking tool
2. Integrate your order tracking tool with your ecommerce platform
3. Configure your tracking app’s settings
4. Let automation do its thing
5. Integrate your order tracking software with your helpdesk

This creates a better overall customer experience by providing transparency and reducing stress or frustration. Customers see exactly where their orders are at any point in time. You’ll also be available for customers when they’re most engaged. 

Here’s how to implement one. 

1) Decide on an order tracking tool 

First, you’ll choose an order tracking tool like ShipBob, ShipStation, or AfterShip — we will discuss each in more detail below. These tools take order information like tracking numbers and shipment status and automate customer notifications. Many order tracking apps integrate with different ecommerce systems like Shopify, BigCommerce, Magento, 3DCart, or WooCommerce. So, you’ll need to make sure that the tool you choose integrates well with your ecommerce system. 

As an example, we’ll walk through setting up order tracking with AfterShip on a Shopify store. 

2) Integrate your order tracking tool with your ecommerce platform 

This is usually quick and easy, depending on the tool. You can add AfterShip to your Shopify store by visiting the Shopify App Store. You can navigate here from the Apps section on the sidebar of your store’s dashboard. Then, click “Customize your store” and search for the AfterShip app. 

Or, you can sign up for an AfterShip account, visit the apps section, search for Shopify, and add it that way. Either way, visit the integrated app section on your Shopify/AfterShip account to make sure that the installation succeeded. 

3) Configure your tracking app’s settings

Now, you’ll want to make sure your courier mapping, import settings, and tracking page settings are good to go. You can access these from your AfterShip account’s app page — here’s AfterShip’s help doc to assist with setup. 

• Courier mapping: Add all the shipping couriers you use so that AfterShip’s automation can pick them up. 
• Import settings: Choose your order fulfillment timeframe and select the timeframe you’d like AfterShip to pull orders from. 
• Tracking page settings: Choose the tracking page you’d like to use (in the case you had created multiple in AfterShip). 

4) Let automation do its thing 

Now that you have AfterShip set up, it will sync every three hours. It pulls shipping information from any new orders via a shopping cart, CSV file, or marketplace. You can also opt for AfterShip to send out automatic notifications via email or SMS at each milestone in the shipping process. 

5) Integrate your order tracking software with your CX platform

Create a seamless experience for your customers and support team by integrating your order tracking tool with your helpdesk and automation tools. By linking all shipping data and tracking information, you can get resolutions to customers faster and access all necessary information in one place. 

Why is this helpful? Well, you give customers multiple opportunities to find their order tracking information within seconds. Whether customers take advantage of your self-service order tracking options or ask your support team about their order status, all the information is readily available. Without the integration, you’ll have to switch tabs and copy/paste order information like tracking number, shipping address, and estimated delivery date. 

With an integration, that information automatically populates. Take a look at the image below.

On the left is a Macro, or template, sent by a customer service agent. It has variables that automatically pull tracking information from the integration. On the right is the personalized message the shopper receives.   

Setup is as simple as creating a connection between the two platforms so that they can talk to each other. To understand this better, check out the step-by-step guide. It shows how to set up the integration between AfterShip and Gorgias.

“With all the Gorgias integrations, my team doesn't need to jump between tools. This has helped us dramatically improve customer satisfaction.”

— Amanda, Director of Operations at Darn Good Yarn

Make tracking information easily accessible

Once you have your automated order tracking system set up, you’re not quite off the hook yet. Many customers choose to receive email and SMS notifications. However, some may ignore these messages or lose the tracking link. This will lead them to still visit your website or support inbox to check the status of their order.

That’s why we recommend making customer order tracking available in the following places:

Order confirmation emails

Whenever a customer places an order, they should get an order confirmation message with their receipt. This should also include any additional information they need between that moment and the arrival of their new item. This includes a prominent tracking number and a link to the order tracking portal, whether that’s with a service like AfterShip or directly on your carrier’s website. 

If your fulfillment process doesn’t let you send this information right away, consider adding a shipping confirmation email to your post-purchase experience flow.

If you don’t currently send order (or shipping) confirmation emails, this guide (for Shopify users) will help you set one up.

Embedded in the chat widget

While the primary function of the chat widget is to connect with customer support agents in a conversational way, some live chat apps like Gorgias allow you to embed buttons shoppers can click to track their orders. In Gorgias, this is called a self-service order management flow.

Self-service order tracking in chat is possible natively in Gorgias, no integration required. 

Here’s how order management Flows works for customers:

Self-service order management is convenient for customers. It also serves as a last layer of protection for your customer support inbox. When a customer opens the chat widget to send a question, they can see the status of their order much faster than an agent can tell them.

Embedded in your Help Center (or FAQ)

If you have an FAQ page or a larger knowledge base (which we call a Help Center), you can also embed order tracking here. 

Standalone self-service order tracking in the Help Center is possible natively in Gorgias, no integration required.

Much like order tracking in a chat widget, this feature lets customers track their order with just a few clicks. All available right where they’d find other help content:

Direct customers here by linking to your Help Center at the bottom of your customer support and automated emails. Or add it in your email signature, for easy clicking.

“Since launching Automation Add-on (quick response Flows) three months ago, we have doubled the revenue from customer support. We’re on our way to triple the revenue we get from chat.”

— Annalisa Micalizzi, Manager of Global Customer Service at ALOHAS 

Automated responses through AI Agent 

If customers bypass all the tracking notifications in their inbox and your self-service order management options, you still have one more automation option at your disposal. Gorgias Automate users can introduce AI Agent to handle those WISMO requests without the need for agent intervention. 

You can set up one comprehensive Guidance to detect a customer’s current order status and give them an update. This gives customers nearly instant response times. Plus, your support agents have more time to handle complex tickets than rather than focusing on repetitive tickets. 

Here is an example of how AI Agent assists a customer with their order tracking inquiry: 

The best customer order tracking app options for ecommerce stores

There are several great choices on the market for customer order tracking systems. Depending on your needs and the ecommerce platform you use, choose from options that are both scalable and flexible.

Start with customer support software that acts as your central hub.

A powerful customer service team is the building block of a successful order management system. Helpdesks like Gorgias help centralize the communication of tracking requests via apps in one place. From there, customer service teams can respond/automate responses related to tracking and order statuses. These tools optimize the response time and increase the instances of a positive customer experience.

Gorgias integrates with a ton of popular ecommerce tools, making it a great single-view hub. A few of the most popular integrations are NetSuite, Reveal, Tolstoy, Magento, ChannelReply, and Shopify.

Apps that help automate customer order tracking for Shopify and BigCommerce

Choosing the best tools to automate your customer order tracking can be overwhelming. But with so many options, you’ll end up with an order tracking system that works exactly how you need it to. Here are some of the best order tracking providers to create track customer purchases.

ShipBob

ShipBob is a global logistics platform that provides online companies with best-in-class order fulfillment. It powers ecommerce brands to ensure customers receive fast and affordable shipping. With reliable fulfillment services and connected technology that powers its fulfillment network, ShipBob improve transit times, shipping costs, and the customer delivery experience.

Check out this app in the Shopify App Store or the BigCommerce App Store. And if you use Gorgias, check out our integration with ShipBob.

AfterShip

With its seven notification triggers, easy-to-use email editor, and filter tracking tools, AfterShip helps online businesses communicate transparently with customers. It also helps you monitor delivery issues so you can address them before they become problems that could damage your customer experience.

Check out this app in the Shopify App Store and the BigCommerce App Store. And if you use Gorgias, check out our integration with AfterShip.

ShipStation

ShipStation helps you save time and money and sell more, by comparing rates and delivery times for all your carriers in one place. This ensures you offer the fastest, most cost-effective shipping for your customers. The app automates almost every facet of your shipping process. ShipStation offers intuitive dashboards and seamless interfaces for an optimal workflow.

Review this app's complete offerings in the Shopify App Store and the BigCommerce App Store. 

Extensions that help automate customer order tracking info for Magento 2

Below, check out three recommended order tracking extensions that integrate with Magento 2. 

ShipStation

ShipStation is highly scalable and provides everything you need for order management in one location. It integrates with Magento 2, as well as Shopify and BigCommerce. 

See if ShipStation is right for your ecommerce business in the Magento Marketplace.

Easyship

Whether you ship 50 or 50,000 orders a month, Easyship can help you lower shipping costs and increase conversion rates. Use this extension to manage your post-purchase process in the most efficient way for your business.

Read more about Easyship in the Magento Marketplace.

Recommended reading: Our list of the best shipping software for ecommerce.

Mageworx

The Mageworx Order Editor extension lets you edit customer errors. Quickly fix any mistakes customers make during checkout like incorrect street numbers, phone numbers, names, shipping, or billing details. You can also add or remove products, change pricing, and add coupons after an order has been placed. This saves your customer support team from having to cancel the order and start it again from the beginning.

Learn more about Mageworx in the Magento Marketplace.

Centralize your order status tracking and customer support management with Gorgias

Leverage automation to facilitate easy order tracking, status updates, and real-time delivery information for your customers. Committing to an end-to-end order tracking system lets you cut costs, increase productivity, and foster customer retention.

Gorgias is a robust and comprehensive ecommerce help desk and automation solution. It can help you deflect repetitive tickets so your team can spend more time on higher-value conversations. 

Reach out today to learn how we integrate with your order status tracking system.

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Keeping your customer support response time as low as possible is a key part of meeting customer expectations and providing a great customer experience. But as your brand grows, it's just not realistic to respond to every ticket the second it rolls in. This makes developing a system to quickly assign priority levels to support tickets an essential strategy for every customer service team to implement.

To help you develop a support ticket prioritization process that will support your business goals, let's take a look at why it's important to prioritize customer requests. Then we'll dive into nine best practices that your support team can use to strategically categorize the support tickets that it receives.

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What is customer service ticket prioritization?

Rather than responding to customer requests on a first-come-first-serve basis, ticket prioritization is the process of evaluating all incoming tickets to identify the most urgent. Once you prioritize tickets, you can triage — or assign — priority tickets so your team can respond to tickets that have the biggest impact on your company's revenue before moving on to low-priority tickets.

When prioritizing customer service requests, you should keep a few things in mind:

• Is the request time-sensitive? If so, consider making those tickets a higher priority. Non-urgent tickets, like a general question about your business, shouldn’t be the first in your queue to answer. 
• Is the request on a live channel? If so, answer those tickets first. Customers naturally expect more time between emails than they do if they’re using a conversational channel like SMS or live chat to talk to your brand.
• Is the request a pre-sales question? If so, that should be a high-priority ticket because your customer service team could make the difference between making or losing that sale.
• Is the request automatable? If so, it should be low priority — at least for your human agents. Invest in self-service resources, like a help center or automated responses, so you can deflect these tickets that don’t need to take up your team’s time.
• Is the customer VIP? If so, consider bumping up that ticket’s priority. Return customers generate 300% more revenue than first-time customers, according to our data, so don't delay when a regular customer reaches out.

Let’s take a closer look at the types of tickets that make for low, medium, and high-priority tickets.

Low-priority ticket requests

Low-priority tickets are issues that are not time-sensitive, escalated, or in the way of a potential sale. They are frequently asked questions that you could automate with your helpdesk software  — more on that later — or general feedback that you can pass to the rest of the team for long-term improvements to the product or customer experience. If you can’t deflect these tickets with automation, they can live in your support backlog for a few hours (or even a day or two) while you handle more urgent tickets. 

 Low-priority tickets include:

• Non-urgent customer needs like a request for a return label
• Frequently-asked questions like questions about your refund policy
• Automatable questions like customers asking about their order status
• Tickets with customer feedback should be answered and shared with the larger team, but are not time-sensitive

Medium-priority ticket requests

Medium-priority tickets require some type of product support from a human agent, not a chatbot or auto-response. However, they may not need your immediate attention, either because the ticket isn’t time-sensitive or the customer isn’t VIP.

• Tickets about the customer’s account, such as a customer having issues updating a shipping address
• Questions about recent orders like helping resolve a lost shipment or investigating why a discount didn’t go through
• Tickets on slower channels like email, where customers expect a bit of latency between responses

High-priority ticket requests

High-priority ticket requests include conversations with VIP customers, conversations on live channels, and questions that might enable a sale. Your team has a small window of time to answer these questions, so bump them to the top of the queue. 

• Tickets from VIP customers because repeat customers contribute 300% more revenue than first-time customers and you can’t risk losing customer loyalty
• Escalated customers, especially if it’s a customer threatening to leave a bad review
• Conversations on messaging channels, such as SMS or live chat, for which customers expect immediate responses
• Pre-sale questions like someone asking for a recommendation for a gift or clarification about sizing
• Tickets in which a customer is threatening to leave a negative review are high-priority because negative customer review can deter other potential customers from your brand
• Questions placed shortly after an order, like a customer asking to change the product or update their shipping address before the order’s fulfilled

By breaking down tickets into these four categories for your reps, you can ensure that the tickets that will have the biggest impact on your company receive the swiftest attention.

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Best practices for prioritizing customer service requests

Prioritizing support requests is a key part of creating a customer journey optimized for maximum revenue. If you want to start using a ticket prioritization process that will boost both customer satisfaction and your bottom line, we've got nine proven best practices below:

1. Respond to your most loyal customers first
2. Tag repeat customers as high-priority tickets
3. Automate simple requests wherever possible
4. Mark tickets with urgent pre-sale activity as high priority
5. Prioritize messaging channels
6. Deprioritize (or auto-close) no-reply tickets
7. Bump up customer service requests where customers are threatening to leave a negative review
8. Mark any incoming tickets about recent orders as first-priority
9. Respond as quickly as possible (regardless of ticket prioritization)

1) Respond to your most loyal customers first

As we mentioned earlier, repeat customers generate 300% more revenue than first-time shoppers. VIP customers are even more valuable than your average repeat customer because they recommend your brand to their friends and leave positive reviews, both of which are highly valuable growth tactics for your brand.

Make sure these VIP customers are your highest priority to prevent customer churn, which is costly for your bottom line. 

How Gorgias can help you respond to VIP customers

With Gorgias’ Rules, you can automatically tag tickets coming from customers who spend a certain amount or make a certain number of purchases within a certain time frame. Here’s a Rule that automatically tags tickets from customers who spend $100 or more within your store: 

Then, you can create a high-priority view that automatically gathers all tickets with the tag “VIP customer” that your team can prioritize.

2) Tag repeat customers as high-priority tickets

Building on the previous section, it's a good idea to prioritize any tickets from repeat customers. Although repeat customers only make up 21% of the customer base for most brands, they contribute 42% of overall revenue. Based on our data, your repeat customers will, on average, contribute 300% more revenue than first-time customers over their entire lifespan. 

So, even if a customer has only purchased one item before, jump on any future requests because you might have the chance to improve customer retention.

How Gorgias can help identify repeat customers

3) Automate simple requests wherever possible

Low-priority tickets might not be as important as others, but they still demand a timely response. If your customer service team has to spend a lot of time responding to common, repetitive requests, they might not have time to give high-priority tickets the attention they deserve.

Thankfully, tools such as Gorgias can enable you to respond to common support requests automatically so that your reps can spend their time focusing on higher priority tickets. With Gorgias, you can create canned responses, called Macros, and automatically send them with automation Rules to a wide range of common customer requests, including "Where is my order?" requests, questions about product variants, pricing, and sizing, questions about returns, etc. Gorgias also provides self-service tools such as a comprehensive knowledge base and chatbots to help reduce your team's workload.

Responding to these common customer requests via automation and self-service options offers numerous benefits. For one, it provides an immediate response and resolution to what is likely a large percentage of your tickets. It also eliminates a huge burden from your support team's workflow, giving them more time to focus on complex requests and high-priority tickets.

How Gorgias can help you automate answers to simple requests

With Gorgias, you can fire (still helpful) pre-written responses to customers who ask simple questions, such as questions about the status of their order. 

When we mention this to some customer support professionals, they get nervous because they don’t want to offer low-quality automated support. And we agree, that’s not the goal. Gorgias’ automated responses are especially helpful because our templated Macros are dynamic – more on that below. Plus, we only recommend automating repetitive tickets that don’t actually need a human touch. Plus, automating these tickets frees up your agents to provide human support on tickets that need it most.

First, you’ll create a Macro, or a templated response, with dynamic fields that pull customer data directly from your Shopify, Magento, or BigCommerce store. You can pull order numbers, order statuses, and more.

Then, you’ll create Rules that automatically fire the appropriate Macro when customers ask an automatable question. Here’s a rule that gives customers their order number when they ask:

4) Mark tickets with urgent pre-sale activity as high priority

Seventy percent of all ecommerce shopping carts are abandoned before the customer completes their purchase. Of all the metrics that keep online store owners up at night, this one is near the top.

Good customer support, however, can go a long way toward reducing your cart abandonment rate. While there are several reasons why customers abandon their cart, questions or issues arising during checkout are a couple of the most common. Therefore, quickly addressing these questions and concerns can substantially boost your store's conversion rate.

Best of all, you don't even have to wait for the customer to contact you first. With Gorgias live chat, you can flag customers with best-selling items on their cart or customers lingering on the checkout page and contact them proactively to see if they need any assistance. But regardless of who contacts who first, pre-sale tickets should be marked as first-priority tickets.

How Gorgias can help tag pre-sales tickets

Depending on your brand, you may already start to recognize which tickets indicate a customer is close to making a purchase. If you sell footwear apparel, for example, this could look like customers asking whether they should buy a size 11 or 12 if they usually wear 11.5. With Gorgias, you can create Rules that automatically detect such questions and add tags to help you prioritize.

Here’s a rule that automatically tags any tickets asking about product sizing with “pre-sale” and sends a macro response that links the customer to your size chart:

5) Prioritize messaging channels (like live chat, SMS, and Instagram or Facebook messages)

One of the biggest reasons why live chat and other messaging support channels such as SMS and social media messaging applications have become so popular with consumers is because they offer swift support.

A customer who contacts your support team via one of these channels will expect a much faster response than a customer who sends you an email. This is why it's important to treat these messages more like phone calls you've put on hold than emails you haven't responded to yet.

While the exact categorization that these tickets fall under will depend on other factors (such as the customer they come from and the nature of their requests), customer service professionals should inherently give tickets from instant messaging channels a higher priority than email requests.

How Gorgias helps you automatically tag tickets from specific channels

As your team grows, you may dedicate agents to specific channels based on preference, competence, or the level of complexity you tend to see coming through one channel or another. For instance, you may assign a more general agent to SMS while an agent with more advanced product knowledge can handle in-depth questions over email. 

Here’s a Rule in Gorgias that will automatically tag all incoming tickets in your SMS channel. You can then send all tickets with this tag to one agent’s dedicated view so they never have to go searching for tickets and can just focus on providing fast, high-quality answers.

6) Deprioritize (or auto-close) no-reply tickets

Customer support is a two-way street and requires back-and-forth communication in order to reach a resolution. If a customer isn't responding to your rep's messages, it's okay to go ahead and deprioritize that ticket or close it out completely. Likewise, your helpdesk might be turning spam messages or social media comments that don’t need a response into tickets.

How Gorgias can auto-close no-reply tickets

Using Gorgias to set up a rule that will auto-close no reply tickets is one great way to prevent these tickets from wasting your support team's time.

Here’s a rule that automatically detects comments on your Instagram ads and posts. Your customer service team shouldn’t ignore social media comments as a practice, of course. However, you might activate this rule after an Instagram giveaway if you’re experiencing an influx of unwanted tickets. 

7) Bump up customer service requests where customers are threatening to leave a negative review

Few things damage your brand image and online presence more than negative customer reviews. If a customer mentions that they are considering leaving a bad review of your company, you should automatically bump their ticket to a higher priority.

In fact, you may want to bump up tickets from any upset or angry customer. With Gorgias' intent and sentiment detection features, you can automatically detect when a customer is upset and bump their ticket up to a higher priority level. Gorgias can also detect keywords that allow you to prioritize tickets from customers threatening a negative review.

How Gorgias helps you stop angry customers from leaving reviews

With Gorgias’ intent detection, you can automatically detect tickets with threatening, negative, or offensive sentiments in their tickets. You can also scan all tickets for words similar to “review” or “warn” (as in, “I’m going to warn my friends to stay away). The rule below scans all tickets from Facebook and Instagram comments for those words and tones, automatically tags them as negative comments, and escalates them by tagging “level 2”:

8) Mark any incoming tickets about recent orders as first-priority

If a customer submits an order and immediately sends a support request, they likely input the wrong address or purchased the incorrect item(s). If you can catch that request before you package and ship the item, you’ll save yourself the cost of shipping the product and handling the return or the exchange. Plus, you’ll save the customer from the negative experience of having to wait for an item they didn’t want in the first place, or having their item sent to the wrong address.

So, develop a system to flag any support requests coming from customers who placed an order within the last two hours. 

How Gorgias helps you find tickets about recent orders

This is one example where Gorgias’ deep integration with Shopify is a huge asset. Gorgias’ Rules can analyze customer data and identify when a ticket is from a customer who placed an order within the last couple of days. The rule below does just that, and adds the tag “Urger Order Edit” to let your customer support team know they need to act before the order fulfillment team sends an incorrect order.

9) Respond as quickly as possible (regardless of ticket prioritization)

Forty-six percent of customers expect companies to respond to support requests in less than four hours, while 12% expect a response time of 12 minutes or less. To meet these ever-increasing customer expectations, you will need to keep your response time as low as possible for all types of tickets.

Using automation to instantly respond to common customer questions is the best way to speed up your response times. Along with providing an instant resolution and response to a significant chunk of the support requests your team gets, leveraging automation can also reduce your support team's workload so that higher priority, more hands-on tickets receive a faster response as well.

Once you develop a system for prioritizing tickets, you can create or refine your service-level agreements (SLAs) to reflect how fast your team strives to answer tickets based on question type, customer type, and channel. You may need to think about your staffing schedule to make sure you have agents ready during peak hours, especially for live channels like SMS and live chat.

How Gorgias helps with prioritizing service tickets

As your brand grows, prioritization without support from a helpdesk becomes nearly impossible. You could staff someone to field all incoming messages in your email inbox and social media accounts and manually triage, or label tickets with priority and send them to the right agent. But it’s much more time- and cost-efficient to use a tool that can streamline the process with the help of automation. 

With advanced intent and sentiment detection features, Gorgias can analyze each incoming ticket based on natural language processing (NLP). Gorgias then allows you to create Rules that determine the ticket's priority level (among so many other things) and assign it to a specific agent by sorting it into agent-specific Views. This way, your team can focus on resolving important tickets rather than figuring out what that order is first.

Here’s how Gorgias processes the language on an incoming ticket and applies a rule to automatically take action – in this case, add a tag to cancel that person’s order:

From there, you can create a View that puts tickets with priority tags in a specific queue. Or, depending on your team’s setup, you can assign certain agents to handle different views, so every agent can focus on a certain channel, priority level, product line, or type of customer.

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Gorgias also enables you to automatically respond to common customer questions and repetitive issues that make up a bulk of your support team's workload (like WISMO, or “Where is my order?” tickets), freeing team members up to spend more time focusing on higher-priority tickets. Never miss a ticket, never take too long on an urgent ticket, and never waste time clicking and dragging tickets to different agent views or manually labeling tickets. 

Love Your Melon, an apparel brand that uses Gorgias, used to have an average first-response time of around 10 minutes before using Gorgias because they were swamped with tickets. With Gorgias’ automatic responses, they are now able to instantly answer 25% of their tickets with helpful automated responses, freeing agents up to handle more complex questions in the queue. Check out our full customer story on Love Your Melon:

“The level of automation provided by Gorgias, like the Rules that can auto-close tickets, has been proven successful. Love Your Melon team has increased their productivity and efficiency thanks to Gorgias.”
- BerniDe Kolar, Customer Service Director at Love Your Melon

How Gorgias helps your team respond to all tickets quickly

Gorgias is full of features to help your tickets provide fast, helpful answers to customers across all customer service channels. Intent detection, Macros, and Rules — all described in detail above — help deflect low-impact tickets, get tickets in front of the right agent, and provide templated responses so agents don’t have to write messages from scratch. 

On top of that, Gorgias can help you create self-service resources (like FAQ pages and help centers, chatbots, and self-service flows) to help customers help themselves, eliminating any wait time associated with reaching out to agents and reducing the volume of tickets your team receives. 

Last, Gorgias’s integrations with ecommerce platforms (Shopify, Magento, and BigCommerce) and other top-rated ecommerce tools mean your customer service team won’t lose time throughout the day shuffling through tabs to copy/paste information between disconnected tools. You can see a customer’s entire order and conversation history in the sidebar, modify orders from within the helpdesk, and share data with 85+ tools you already use like Klaviyo, Attentive, and ShipBob.

Automate ticket prioritization with Gorgias

Prioritizing support tickets enables you to deliver the swiftest and highest quality service to tickets that will have the biggest impact on your business. And, with Gorgias, this otherwise tedious process can be completely automated.

Find out how our customer, Comme Avant, uses Gorgias Tags to save time and easily manage 7,500 tickets a month with a very small team.

“Using Gorgias helps us save some precious time, the time we can use to manage our business. It is beneficial, especially when you receive a lot of messages every day.”
- Sophie Lauret, Co-Founder of Comme Avant

Ready to learn how Gorgias can help empower your ecommerce success? Take a look at our tools and resources to help grow your store to new heights.

Whether you’re a brand-new store or an established enterprise, customer feedback is like gold for your brand. Customers have high expectations for your brand’s products, values, and customer service. And without any feedback from customers, you’re making guesses about those expectations. 

However, collecting customer feedback is a challenge for many brands. Customers are difficult to get ahold of and, even when you get high-quality feedback, disseminating the information across your company often gets deprioritized. 

Below, I list nine methods to gather customer feedback. Then, I deep dive into a step-by-step process for turning customer service conversations into actionable feedback that your entire team can access and implement. 

Why is customer feedback important?

Customer feedback is your brand's most valuable resource for shaping your products and the overall customer experience. An excellent customer experience is key to customer loyalty and any ecommerce store's success: 58% of consumers are willing to spend more money when they have a good experience with a brand. 

In other words, collecting and acting on customer feedback is a great way to understand what will keep customers around. And the importance of customer retention cannot be understated, especially given the value that loyal customers provide from referrals, reviews, and repeat purchases:

The insights you get from customer feedback can inform your roadmap for improving every aspect of a customer's experience with your brand, from your products to your customer support. Even your brand's marketing efforts can improve based on the insights that customer feedback provides. 

Here are a few examples:

• Feedback like “I didn’t want to buy it because I didn’t know if I’d be able to return it” could motivate you to make your brand’s returns policy more visible
• Feedback like “I didn’t like how the product felt” means you may need to revamp your product photography and descriptions 
• Feedback like, “I called customer support but they didn’t have an answer for me” is a sign to put effort into improving customer service 
• Feedback like, “It arrived late and damaged” is a sign to invest time in improving your shipping process

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So, how do you start collecting that feedback? Here are nine customer feedback methods:

9 customer feedback methods to learn about your customers

Feedback is a broad term: 

• You can collect qualitative (thematic) or quantitative (numerical) customer feedback
• You can collect customer feedback that helps you improve what you’re currently doing or feedback to help you decide where to go next
• You can collect deep customer feedback from a small sample size or shallow feedback from a large sample

All types of feedback have their own benefits and use cases, and most brands collect a variety of types of feedback to help them make all kinds of decisions. So, here are nine ways to gather customer feedback, suitable for a broad range of uses.

1. NPS surveys: Great to measure overall brand loyalty
2. CSAT surveys: Great to measure post-interaction sentiment
3. Long-format feedback surveys or interviews: Great for in-depth feedback
4. Social media exploratory surveys: Great to get quick feedback from many followers
5. Exploratory interviews: Great to understand a specific customer’s needs and preferences
6. Usability tests: Great for website optimization
7. Microsurvey pop-ups: Great to get many answers to one question at a time
8. On-site activity (Google Analytics or other website analytics)
9. Your company's helpdesk: Great to scale customer feedback collection

1) NPS surveys: Great to measure overall brand loyalty

Net promoter score (NPS) is a metric that tells you how likely a customer is to recommend a brand to a friend, family member, or colleague. As a result, NPS surveys typically consist of just this single question. Most often, an NPS survey will ask a customer to choose how likely they are to recommend your brand on a rating scale of 0-10. NPS questionnaires should typically be sent out following transactions or customer interactions but can also be sent periodically to your entire customer base.

NPS is also a great metric to understand whether you’re selling to the right people — whether you have product-market fit. For example, a brand that sells protein powder might see high NPS from athletes but low NPS from parents. That feedback might indicate the brand should focus its marketing efforts on the powder’s health benefits rather than the taste.‍

Want to learn more about net promoter score? Check out our comprehensive guide to measuring and improving NPS.

You can send NPS surveys manually, or use a tool to automate the process. If you’re interested in tools, check out any of the following tools, all of which integrate with Gorgias to bring NPS survey data into your helpdesk:

• Simplesat and Gorgias
• Delighted and Gorgias
• Reveal by Omniconvert and Gorgias
• Retently and Gorgias

Struggling to get enough NPS survey responses? See our guide on NPS survey best practices.

2) CSAT surveys: Great to measure post-interaction sentiment

Customer satisfaction score (CSAT) is a metric that gauges overall customer satisfaction with a brand and is one of the most important feedback metrics for ecommerce brands to track. Specifically, CSAT is a leading metric for customer support teams to understand the quality of service they provide.

Like NPS surveys, customer satisfaction surveys tend to consist of a single question asking customers to rate their satisfaction with a brand. CSAT surveys should be sent following a transaction or customer interaction but can also be sent out periodically to your entire customer base.

If you use customer service software like Gorgias, you can automate these surveys, too. With just a few clicks, you can program Gorgias to send a satisfaction survey as soon as (or a few hours after) a customer support conversation is completely closed:

Want to learn more about CSAT scores? Check out my guide to improving CSAT scores — and how that can boost your brand’s overall revenue by 4%.

3) Long-format feedback surveys or interviews: Great for in-depth feedback

The two feedback methods we've covered so far are single-question surveys designed to encourage high response rates by making it as simple as possible for the respondent to complete the survey. 

But sometimes, it can be valuable to collect more in-depth feedback. Long surveys and interviews with open-ended questions give customers the freedom to provide more detailed, actionable feedback than numerical ratings and yes or no responses. They also let you ask follow-up questions to get to the root of a customer’s perspective. 

Consider long-form surveys when you’re looking to deeply understand how a customer might feel about a new initiative. For example, if your product team is beta testing a new product, you’ll want to understand all angles of their feedback:

• How does the product feel to touch, hold, and use?
• How much would you expect to pay for something like this?
• What’s the most exciting element of this new product for you?
• What would you change about this product?

You can send these long-format surveys and interview invitations following transactions and customer interactions. Given their lower response rate, it's often best to send these long-form surveys and interview requests to your entire customer base to cast a wide net. Additionally, since these surveys take customers’ time, you might have more success by offering incentives (like a discount or gift card) for their time.

Tools like Typeform and SurveyMonkey are great for these kinds of custom email surveys. They offer automation features and templates you can easily tweak to get started.

4) Social media exploratory surveys: Great to get quick feedback from many followers

Whereas many customer feedback surveys are focused on collecting statistical data, exploratory surveys are more focused on ideas. Open-ended questions are common in these online surveys, allowing customers to expound on things you might not have thought to ask about directly. Feature requests on Instagram are one example of exploratory surveys where brands ask customers what new features they are most excited to see in a new product.

For example, furniture brand Sabai uses Instagram polls to gauge customer interest in new product designs:

This is a great way to get a snapshot of whether customers (and potential customers) would be interested in a new product.

5) Exploratory interviews: Great to understand a specific customer’s needs and preferences

Exploratory interviews have the same objective as exploratory surveys but entail having a direct conversation with the respondents rather than asking them to fill out a form. Again, many customers will be more willing to provide elaborate responses when speaking in real time (though this isn't always the case). However, exploratory interviews are time-consuming for your team and — unlike surveys — there's no way to automate them.

A great use of exploratory interviews is to get holistic feedback from someone who matches your ideal customer profile (ICP). If you can identify a buyer who represents the type of person you want to attract to your store, buy that person a coffee and sit down to chat about why they choose to shop at your business, what would make them stay with your business, and what would cause them to leave. You can translate those insights into your upcoming marketing campaigns, product launches, and overall brand vision.

6) Usability tests: Great for website optimization

Usability tests are a form of user testing designed to help brands gather feedback on their products' functionality. These tests often occur in a focus group setting, with brands observing users as they engage with a product or website and asking them questions along the way.

If you sell software, usability tests are a great way to understand the user experience (UX) of your product. If you’re an ecommerce brand, you can use usability tests to understand how shoppers navigate your website. For example, usability tests can help you optimize product categorization: You can ask users to find a product — say, you’re best-selling men’s watch — starting from the home page. Then, you can see their behavior to understand how they might interpret your product categories and go about finding the item.

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If you want to try usability testing, you can screen share with a customer and have them narrate their thought process. For more robust usability testing, try a feedback tool like Hotjar.

7) Microsurvey pop-ups: Great to get many answers to one question at a time

Microsurveys are usually in-app or on-website surveys that automatically pop up based on a visitor's actions. Exit intent pop-ups, or pop-ups that appear when a visitor attempts to navigate away from the site is a (rather intrusive) example. For customer feedback, you can use pop-ups to ask. 

You might set up one of these pop-ups to ask customers how they found your site, what type of product they’d like to see next, or whether they have questions about the product they’re viewing. 

Sprig and Sleeknote are two examples of tools that you can use to build these automatic survey notifications into your site or app. Alternatively, you can trigger a chat campaign to proactively send a short survey question in your site’s live chat widget for a less-intrusive experience:

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 Read more about live chat campaigns here.

8) On-site activity (Google Analytics or other website analytics): Great for qualitative data about customer behavior

You don't always have to reach out to customers directly to gather customer feedback: Every action a customer takes on your website is a point of data you can use to highlight valuable insights. With website analytics tools such as Google Analytics, you can track and analyze all of your ecommerce store's on-site activity. 

Bounce rate, cart abandonment rate, average time on page, traffic sources, and devices used are just a few of the on-site activity metrics that can tell you a lot about your visitors and their experience with your brand's website.

If your goal is to raise conversion rates, Google Analytics (or another on-site behavior tool) will be valuable.

9) Your company's helpdesk: Great to scale customer feedback collection

If your customer support team utilizes a helpdesk such as Gorgias, then your team is already gathering a lot of customer data and feedback without even realizing it. By tagging and organizing support tickets based on customer intent and sentiment, Gorgias enables you to analyze your tickets to spot recurring trends and themes. 

You can glean many valuable insights by taking a deeper look at your support tickets, and a high-quality helpdesk makes it easy to analyze the wealth of customer feedback your support team is passively collecting.

Below, we’ll dive deep into how your team can turn helpdesk tickets into actionable, sharable feedback for the entire company:

How to organize and implement customer feedback from customer service conversations

Before you start investing in new tools and time-consuming interviews, I recommend looking for high-value feedback in your helpdesk, since you likely already have a pile of tickets to analyze. 

Here’s an in-depth process for turning customer support conversations into an organized library of feedback you can easily share with the rest of the company:

1) Charge your customer service team with being the voice of customer feedback across the company

Your customer service representatives hear from customers more than anyone else at your company — if those conversations stay siloed, you’re not taking advantage of your best source of customer feedback. I recommend making your customer service team accountable for collecting and organizing customer feedback and distributing insights across the company. 

Your customer service team’s day-to-day interactions are already an untapped source of high-value feedback. Here’s an example: If your customer service team experiences a spike in return requests, they can ask for more information from customers.

• If customers say the products arrived late, the customer support team can notify the shipping and fulfillment teams
• If customers say the product didn’t match their expectations based on the product description and photos, customer support can notify the website marketing team
• If unhappy customers complain about how the product looked or felt, customer support can notify the product development team

While negative feedback is generally where you’ll learn about opportunities to improve the product, the customer service team can also share positive feedback to confirm teams are heading in the right direction. Also, agents can share positive feedback with the marketing team to use as product testimonials, and encourage happy customers to leave online reviews. 

Of course, asking the team to share insights is easier said than done. The steps below explain how your team can develop and maintain an efficient process with a helpdesk like Gorgias. 

2) Use Tags to label customer feedback 

If you’re just getting started with sharing customer insights, you might forward messages from customers to an appropriate team member as they come up. But one-off messages get lost and deprioritized in the shuffle. For the sake of organization and longevity, use ticket tagging in your helpdesk to create an organized customer feedback library. 

Here’s a great example from an apparel brand that uses Gorgias. They have tags for feedback about how the product fits. While a smaller brand might just use the tag “feedback-sizing,” this larger brand has more granular tags, like tight waistband (6tightwb) loose waistband (6loosewb), and rides up (6ridesup):

3) Create views that organize tagged tickets

Now that you’ve tagged tickets, you’re set to organize them into views that only show tickets with relevant tags. This way, when a team member logs into the helpdesk, they can click a view called something like “Marketing team” and get a curated collection of tickets.

We do this ourselves here at Gorgias. While the customer support team is our first line of defense for incoming tickets, we have views for most teams. The support squad can tag tickets to send them to each team’s view, which lets all of our team track customer feedback and also jump in on conversations that require specialized input.

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The brand mentioned earlier does this as well. They created a View that consolidates all tickets with feedback about the product’s fit, which they pass along to the team that maintains their on-site sizing guide:

If you use Gorgias, you can also get a macro-level view of tags in the Statistics section. The view shows how many tickets have each tag in a given period and changes over time. One great use case of this is to see if a fix inspired by customer feedback was effective — if the fix properly addressed the problem, contact rate and ticket count should go down:

4) Lean on NLP to help you automate tagging

Adding a tag manually only takes an extra moment for your customer service team, but extra moments add up. That’s one reason advanced helpdesks like Gorgias use natural language processing (NLP): to auto-tag tickets based on customer intent without any manual work.

To do this, you have to set up a Rule, or an automation, which is based on logic. At its most simple, the logic is “If a ticket contains anything related to X, tag with Y.” NLP is how Gorgias understands whether the ticket contains anything related to X. Here’s an example:

All of this essentially says the following:

• If a ticket’s related to shipping status, tag it with “Order status”
• If a ticket contains a cancellation request, tag it with “Order cancel”
• If a ticket contains a refund request, tag it with “Refund request”

Auto-tagging has several use cases, but you can easily set up Rules that auto-tag messages containing stock issues, product issues, or damaged orders to notify the relevant team.

5) Invite your team members to your customer service platform

So, you’ve set up your tagging system and built unique views with tickets containing valuable feedback for each team. Now, you need to find a way to get those teams into the helpdesk.

This is one of the main advantages of Gorgias’ unique pricing strategy, which gives you unlimited seats. Whereas most helpdesks base pricing around the number of agents who have access to the platform, we understand the immense value of giving your entire team access to customer conversations.

Want more information? Check out our help doc on adding users, creating teams within Gorgias, and managing permissions.

6) Have recurring feedback digestion sessions

While a curated view is great, most teams benefit from recurring feedback digestion sessions, wherein they sit down to go through their unique view to learn from customer feedback. If possible, do this at least once a month.

During these sessions, focus on isolating just a few concrete takeaways. Of course, you’ll likely have more feedback than you can take action on. Focus on themes that pop up most often, quick wins, and feedback that tends to drive customers away from your brand entirely.

7) Remember to act on insights, not feedback

As you analyze customer feedback and put it into action, it's important to search out the insights within and act on those instead of just acting on the feedback itself.

Let's say, for example, that an online clothing store is receiving a lot of customer complaints that your hats are too small. The customer feedback might be that your hats are too small and should be larger. However, you have the best insight into your business. 

The deeper insight might be that your product’s sizes are unclear — instead of Small, Medium, and Large, you could use a numerical system based on the circumference those sizes fit. Alternatively, it may mean that a sizing guide unique to your store could prevent people from accidentally ordering a size that won’t fit. 

Bonus: Use onboarding quizzes to turn customer feedback into personalized product recommendations

According to research from Yieldify, 75% of customers state that they are more likely to purchase from brands that offer personalized online experiences, and creating personalized experiences is one of the best uses of customer feedback.

Providing customers with a survey as part of the onboarding experience that is designed to gather information on their interests, desires, and needs can enable you to offer personalized content from the very start of the customer journey. Note that this doesn't mean that you have to provide an experience that is personalized to each individual customer: Beyond basic personalization such as calling them by name, that simply isn't feasible. Instead, you can use a customer onboarding survey to segment your new customers into buckets based on their responses. This way, every customer gets content that matches their needs and interests without you having to tailor the experience to each customer.

For example, men’s soap brand Dr. Squatch has a quiz that asks customers for some information about themselves and offers a product recommendation in return:

Collect actionable customer feedback with Gorgias

Collecting customer feedback and analyzing it for insights can provide your ecommerce store with an invaluable roadmap for improving every aspect of the customer experience. With Gorgias, you automate both the process of collecting customer feedback and the process of analyzing it. This way, Gorgias allows you to gather the most actionable insights with the least amount of manual work for your support team:

• Auto-tagging tickets to collect and organize customer feedback
• Sending CSAT surveys automatically following each customer interaction
• Enabling NPS survey automation via integrations with partners such as Simplesat, Omniconvert, and Delighted

Sign up for Gorgias to provide your support team with all of these powerful tools and more!

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Most companies don’t think about customer support in terms of return on investment (ROI) — only marketing and sales. But during my time as the VP of Success & Support at Gorgias, I've had plenty of opportunities to see the ROI of good customer service firsthand.

I remember working with a company that significantly increased conversion, average order value (AOV), and repeat purchase rate simply by adding a phone contact option — enough to pay back the $1.2 million initial investment, and then some. 

Here’s another way to put it: 90% of shoppers consider customer service when deciding whether to do business with a company, so your customer service has a strong ROI, whether or not you’re aware. It’s up to you whether that ROI is positive or negative.

To help maximize the value of your brand’s customer service, let's discuss everything you need to know about the ROI of customer service. Below, I'll explain why it's important to measure customer service ROI, how to perform customer service ROI calculations, and some tried-and-true best practices to see an ROI boost from your customer service experience.

Why is it important to measure ROI in customer service?

It's always important to measure the return of any investment you make in your company, and customer service is no exception. Measuring the ROI, or return on investment, of your customer service team allows you to determine what works well and what doesn't, helping you continually improve the quality of your customer support — which boosts its impact on your company's bottom line.

Measuring your customer service also helps you with forecasting. By understanding your current situation, you can better predict the staff, resources, bandwidth, and impact any change could potentially make on your customer service program.

The relationship between customer service ROI and business growth

To start, great customer service improves customer retention, which is an especially important avenue for growth, especially considering the cost to acquire new customers has increased by 60% in recent years. 

Unlike customer acquisition, repeat business is somewhat organic. Data around average ecommerce customer retention rates is sparse because rates vary so much by industry. For instance, a company that sells bags of coffee will see far higher repeat purchase rates than a company that sells coffee machines, which are usually a one-time purchase. 

That said, most blogs agree the average rate is around 20-30%. But regardless of your baseline, that percentage can grow if you provide amazing customer service. 

In addition to helping you retain the customers you already have, great customer service can also improve your company's net promoter score (NPS). This means that your existing customers are more likely to recommend your company to their friends and colleagues. 

Of course, ROI isn’t just about output — a strong ROI means maximizing revenue while minimizing spend. Implementing the right customer service tools and processes can actually lower your customer support spending, lifting ROI by reducing your company's expenses.

The formula for calculating ROI in customer service

To calculate your customer service program's ROI, you need to consider how much you're spending versus how much revenue you bring in as a direct result. The formula is pretty simple:

ROI = [ (Money earned - Money spent) / Money spent ] x 100

In practice, say that you spend $10,000 on your customer support program, including the cost of your team and tools. In turn, you make $15,000. Your ROI would be 50%. Here's what the calculation looks like:

ROI = [ ($15,000 - $10,000) / $10,000 ] x 100

ROI = 50%

That said, the above formula is rather rudimentary and doesn’t represent the nuances of customer service ROI. Specifically, it assumes that you can easily track the revenue generated by your customer service inputs. But you already know it’s not that easy. Below, I go a step deeper to help you understand the value of your brand’s customer service — value that you might not currently be claiming.

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4 expert ways to measure the value of customer service

Along with using the formula I covered above, there several other useful ways to go about calculating customer service ROI and evaluating its impact, including:

1) Provide a survey to measure your CSAT score

Customer satisfaction (CSAT) functions as a proxy for lifetime value (LFT). Each incremental increase in CSAT represents a higher likelihood of customers coming back to your brand and buying more.

You can gather this kind of customer feedback with a simple post-interaction CSAT survey. Most helpdesks have built-in survey features. I recommend you use them to gain invaluable data about your customers' experience — and your customer support team's performance.

After a customer service interaction, ask customers to rate their experience on a scale of 1 to 5 (with 1 being a horrible experience and 5 being an exceptional experience). You can then divide the total number of satisfied responses (ratings of 4 or 5) by the total number of responses and multiply that number by 100. 

CSAT = (Total number of satisfied responses (4 or 5 rating) / Total number of responses) x 100

Your CSAT score will be a whole number between 0 and 100 — the higher, the better. This is an essential metric to keep an eye on as you experience customer service challenges and experiment with new tools and strategies.

Any customer service platform worth its salt should highlight your live CSAT score for easy tracking, with additional details for context. Here's what that would look like in the Gorgias platform:

2) Identify your repeat customers

There's no better way to evaluate customer satisfaction than looking at the number of repeat customers your business attracts. Excellent customer service is your best lever to reduce churn, improve your customer retention rate, increase your company's repeat customers — all different ways to describe the same benefit. 

Repeat customers are a great indicator that your customer service program is doing well, so it's essential to consider them during your ROI evaluation.

3) Improve your net promoter score (NPS)

Along with helping you retain the customers that you've already brought on board, good customer service can also help you attract more new customers by improving your net promoter score (NPS). NPS is a measure of how likely a customer is to recommend a company to someone else — consider NPS a type of word-of-mouth marketing generated by a great customer experience.

Calculating your NPS is easy if you're already collecting customer feedback. In your post-interaction survey, include a question like, "On a scale of 1-10, how likely are you to recommend us to a friend?" From this feedback, pull out the following information:

• Total number of responses
• Number of promoters (people who give you scores of 9 or 10) and their percentage of the total responses
• Number of detractors (people who give scores of 1-6) and their percentage of the total responses

Then, calculate your NPS with this formula:

NPS = Percentage of promoters - Percentage of detractors 

Your NPS score will range from -100 to 100.

If you currently use Gorgias, consider using any of our NPS calculator integrations for an even easier experience:

• Simplesat and Gorgias
• Delighted and Gorgias
• Reveal by Omniconvert and Gorgias‍

4) Evaluate sentiment and intent

Sentiment analysis uses machine learning to evaluate the overall sentiment of datasets. Analyzing your customer service data to see if your customers' overall sentiment is positive, negative, or neutral is a quick and simple way to get a broad sense of your customer service quality at scale.

Intent analysis also uses machine learning to understand the underlying request of an incoming message. While most other customer service platforms rely on keywords, Gorgias’s intent analysis understands when a customer submits a common request (like asking for order status or updating shipping address) regardless of whether they use one of your pre-selected keywords. The platform automatically handles the ticket, whether that means auto-responding with a Macro or assigning the ticket to a specialized agent with a Rule.

These features are possible because Gorgias is built specifically for ecommerce, meaning we have an incredibly high and untainted volume of ecommerce support tickets which we use to train our algorithms for your online store. 

5 best practices to improve customer service ROI

The entire point of calculating the ROI of customer service is identifying opportunities to boost the value that your customer service agents can deliver to the company. Here are five best practices that you can implement to improve customer service ROI:

1) Provide training or education for your team members

Your company's customer service reps are the cornerstone of your customer service efforts. To maximize customer satisfaction, provide your team members with the training and education they need to perform at their best.

If you use Gorgias, consider having your agents complete a Gorgias Academy Course, which provide certifications for customer service agents using Gorgias.

2) Use customer feedback to create new policies and procedures

Post-experience surveys aren’t just for measuring satisfaction. Open-ended questions allow customers to communicate why they loved their experience or — perhaps more importantly — why they didn’t. Comb through those responses to find areas of opportunity for your customer experience. 

Most feedback will fall into two categories:

1. Policy: e.g. your company doesn’t accept returns
2. Experience: e.g. the customer had to jump through a bunch of hoops to resolve their issue

Take note of patterns in customer feedback to guide you toward the most high-impact opportunities. You may not be able to act today, but this qualitative feedback is gold as you set your long-term roadmap. 

3) Give rewards to team members who provide exceptional customer service

I remember working with a company that went out of its way to reward customer service agents with high customer satisfaction rates. At our Support All Hands, people would read tickets with exceptional support out loud. For example, one customer with a particular sense of humor wrote in old English, so our agent responded in old English to solve his issue. The customer wrote back, "[your brand] just gets me," and proceeded to come back again and again. The Agent got recognized as the go-to for clever replies, and it boosted morale on the floor. 

While rewards such as this may seem trivial, everyone loves being recognized for their hard work. Even something as simple as a few words of appreciation can go a long way toward boosting your customer service team's morale and performance.

4) Consider developing an omnichannel customer service strategy

If contacting a call center is the only customer service option you provide to your customers, you are probably missing out on many opportunities to make your customer service more convenient and accessible. Omnichannel customer service turns communication channels such as SMS, social media, email, and live chat into customer support channels, making it as easy and convenient as possible for customers to reach out to your company for assistance. 

At Stitch Fix, we found that simply adding phone instilled more trust for our target demographic. We saw significant increases in AOV, repeat purchase rate, and conversion. We found that phone made more sense for specific instances and actually saved expenses when it came to billing and urgent issues (like an address change) because we would either get notified faster or reduce tons of back and forth. Overall, the additional channel netted Stitch Fix $1.2 million. 

Remember that every time a customer reaches out for help is an opportunity to create a positive experience. Be sure that your omnichannel support strategy is convenient and consistent, so customers can expect the same support quality no matter what communication channel they choose.

5) Lean on customer self-service

Customer self-service options such as knowledge bases, FAQ pages, and automation like AI chatbots can improve your customer service ROI in two key ways. For one, self-service options can reduce your customer service expenses by eliminating many customer support tickets you’d otherwise pay a human agent to handle. 

In addition to reducing expenses, lowering your support ticket volume can also free up your team to spend more time focusing on complex customer issues that require more personalized service. 

Common issues companies face with customer service ROI

Over the years, I've encountered several common issues while helping companies improve their customer service ROI. Hopefully, examining these common issues will help your company avoid making the same mistakes.

Over-reliance on vanity metrics

Many companies look at the wrong data when evaluating their customer service quality. Rather than looking at the number of support requests your team receives, it's much more enlightening to consider your CSAT score and compare customers who report the best and worst experiences. 

Evaluating the differences between these two groups can tell you much more about what's working well and what isn't than looking at customers who write in versus those who don't.

A false assumption that customer support is an expense, not a growth opportunity

Far too many companies put too much emphasis on lowering customer service costs and not enough emphasis on improving customer satisfaction. While lowering expenses is an integral part of maximizing customer service ROI, offering fast first response times and high-quality service is even more critical in the long run.

When you consider the rising cost of acquiring customers, it puts the cost of investing in your support to retain customers into perspective. Industry standard says the cost of acquiring a customer costs (at minimum) 5 times more than the cost of retaining one. A customer who gives you a ⅕ CSAT probably won’t come back — if it would have cost you $5 extra to make sure they were delighted, you now have to spend $25 to win a new customer instead. 

Reluctance to invest in a scalable customer service organization

Providing excellent customer service is easy when support tickets are few and far between. But as companies grow and ticket volume increases, a more strategic and efficient approach to customer service is often required. Usually, this means investing in tools and processes. 

But again, if companies view customer support as a cost center, the impact of customer support is limited. (Which makes leaders reluctant to invest in tools and processes. Which limits the impact. You see the cycle.)

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How to present customer service ROI to company leaders

Before you can achieve an optimal customer service ROI, you'll first need to convince your company's management team that customer service is a worthwhile investment. To this end, you can highlight several key metrics when proposing your customer service ROI strategy, including:

• Percent of revenue on the expense side
• Cost per ticket
• Cost per order

By comparing these metrics against metrics such as NPS, CSAT, and churn rates, you can present a compelling argument for investing in customer service. Thankfully, Gorgias makes it easier than ever to demonstrate the importance of customer service ROI by providing you with access to a wealth of customer service data, including revenue statistics — all of which you can customize and quickly pull from your Gorgias dashboard.

Boost your business's customer service ROI with Gorgias

If you are looking for a simple solution to optimize your company's customer service ROI, Gorgias' industry-leading customer service platform is a great option. 

With Gorgias, you can easily develop an omnichannel customer service strategy that enables you to offer customer service via social media, SMS, email, live chat, and numerous other channels. You can also implement self-service options to improve convenience, reduce ticket volume, access insightful customer service analytics, and more. 

To see how our powerful customer service solutions can dramatically boost your business's customer service ROI, be sure to sign up for Gorgias today!