Manual QA is time-consuming—Auto QA does the heavy lifting. It frees up team leads by automatically reviewing conversations with accuracy and consistency, so they can focus on improving support.
Auto QA scores 100% of private text conversations, whether handled by a human or AI Agent. It evaluates support quality based on Resolution Completeness, Communication, and Language Proficiency.
Auto QA supports multiple languages but provides feedback in English. It can assess tickets in any language supported by OpenAI’s GPT-4, ensuring global teams can benefit from automated QA.
Start with individual meetings before a team-wide rollout of Auto QA. One-on-one conversations help address specific agent concerns and ensure a smooth transition.
Customer satisfaction scores (CSAT) have long been the go-to metric for measuring support quality, with 53% of customer experience leads relying on them. However, CSAT only tells you part of the story.
When customers rate their experience 3 out of 5, what does it really mean? Did they rate the agent’s actions or the company’s policies? Was an agent helpful or inefficient? Did they take unnecessary steps to get to the answer?
Quality assurance checks can fill these gaps, but manual QA is a heavy lift. Team leads often struggle to review more than a small sample of conversations, leaving many issues unchecked.
Auto QA redefines quality assurance for today’s support teams. It transforms QA from a manual task into an automated feedback engine that helps your team deliver excellent support, every single time.
Let's dive into how Auto QA works, how accurate its scoring is, and how you can add it to your support workflow to start improving customer conversations today.
What is Auto QA?
Gorgias Auto QA upgrades the customer service QA process by automatically evaluating 100% of private text conversations, whether handled by a human or AI Agent.
Each message is scored on metrics like Resolution Completeness, Brand Voice, and Accuracy, helping teams fix and address areas of improvement.
With an automated QA process, brands can:
Save time: Automated quality checks help team leads focus on the most critical tickets.
Ensure consistency: Both human agents and AI agents are evaluated with a unified, comprehensive quality score.
Boost performance: Agents can receive targeted coaching to provide more consistent customer experiences.
Meet customer expectations: Customers benefit from higher-quality support with quicker resolutions and accurate responses.
How Auto QA works
Let's explore a real-life scenario: A customer reaches out about a product issue, seeking troubleshooting help. Here’s how the interaction unfolds:
Customer: "Hi, my device broke, and I bought it less than a month ago. -Kelly"
Support Agent: "Hi Kelly, please send us a photo or a video so we can determine the issue with your device. -Michael"
The ticket is eventually closed, but the customer doesn't leave a CSAT score.
In this case, Auto QA would provide the following insights:
Communication Score: 3/5. Reason: The agent's wording could benefit from more empathy.
Resolution Score: "Complete". Reason: The agent effectively addressed the customer's concerns.
Access Auto QA right within the ticket view. Find it on the right-hand side of customer conversations.
How accurate is Auto QA’s scoring?
Auto QA uses a comprehensive scoring system that evaluates conversations on communication proficiency and knowledge accuracy.
To ensure accuracy, Auto QA only scores interactions with at least 250 characters and messages from both agents and customers. It's also smart enough to filter out automated responses, spam, and bot messages.
Auto QA automatically scores three main aspects:
Resolution Completeness: Did the agent solve everything the customer asked about? This area is scored with a "Complete" or "Incomplete.” For instance, it correctly marks a ticket as "Complete" when a customer resolves their issue or when there's no clear question to address.
Communication Quality: How well did the agent listen and show empathy? Uses a 1-5 scale, looking at how well your agents acknowledged a customer’s concerns and communicated the solution.
Language Proficiency: Did the agent communicate properly? Uses a 1-5 scale to check spelling, grammar, and syntax.
For deeper feedback, certain criteria require manual scoring from team leads:
Accuracy: How accurate was the information provided by the agent?
Efficiency: How quickly did the agent handle the ticket? How well did they minimize the number of follow-ups?
Internal Compliance: How closely did the agent follow your team’s internal processes and brand guidelines?
Brand Voice: How well did the agent use brand vocabulary, greetings, sign-offs, and tone of voice?
Improve Auto QA scoring by clicking the triangle to expand each category and entering feedback into the textbox.
How to integrate Auto QA into your workflow
Whether you're just starting with quality checks or transitioning from manual QA, Auto QA can seamlessly fit into your existing processes. Here's how to get started.
1. Set your standards
What does “good” look like for your team? Review Auto QA's scoring system and decide which metrics matter most for your brand, from Resolution Completeness to Brand Voice. This will help you set realistic targets for your team to work toward.
Tip: Start by prioritizing a couple of areas. This could look like prioritizing a 5/5 Resolution Completeness score while deprioritizing Brand Voice. As your team gets comfortable with Auto QA, you can ramp up to improving Brand Voice.
2. Agree on a scoring system
Since some criteria—Accuracy, Efficiency, Internal Compliance, and Brand Voice—require manual scoring, it’s best to agree on how your team will use the scoring scale.
For example, each score from 1 to 5 receives a distinct piece of feedback. Here’s what that would look for the Efficiency criteria:
1/5 stars: Excessive back-and-forth that could have been avoided
2/5 stars: Resolution took longer than necessary due to poor process
3/5 stars: Average handling time with some unnecessary steps
4/5 stars: Quick resolution with minimal back-and-forth
5/5 stars: One-touch resolution
3. Prepare your agents
Start rolling out Auto QA through individual meetings with agents rather than overwhelming your team with a general training session. One-on-one conversations allow you to better address each agent's specific questions and concerns. Make sure to cover the following:
Explain that Auto QA is meant to help make conversations consistent, not police agents
Explain the scoring criteria and what each score means
Highlight which criteria agents should prioritize
If regular one-on-one meetings aren't part of your routine, consider introducing Auto QA during your weekly team meetings or through a dedicated training session. Just remember to leave plenty of time for questions and walk through multiple examples to ensure everyone is comfortable with the system.
4. Establish a review schedule
To solidify QA checks, create a simple routine for reviewing Auto QA insights with the Auto QA Report (navigate to Statistics > Auto QA).
Weekly: Do a quick check of automated scores.
Monthly: Analyze trends and patterns across conversations.
Quarterly: Review and adjust quality benchmarks.
Monitor the number of tickets Auto QA has reviewed, your average resolution completeness rate, and your communication score.
5. Act on insights
Once you’ve collected a substantial amount of Auto QA data, there are a few follow-up actions you can take to continue having high-quality conversations:
Set the example by sharing high-scoring conversations in your team meetings.
Coach agents individually by reviewing their tickets together. Celebrate high-scoring conversations and provide targeted feedback on areas for improvement. This immediate, personalized approach helps agents grow faster than general training sessions.
Increase product and policy knowledge by refining internal guidelines on brand voice, escalation processes, and more.
Remember, Auto QA works alongside your existing processes—it doesn't replace them. Start small, focus on the metrics that matter most to your team, and scale up as you get comfortable with Auto QA.
Brands are excited about the power of Auto QA
We invited leading ecommerce brands to beta test Auto QA, and their feedback highlights how it's transforming quality assurance across support teams of all sizes.
amika's support team values the complete visibility beyond CSAT: "Auto QA dramatically widens the volume of tickets we can review," they share. "A 5-point scale only tells you so much, and relying on consumers providing feedback limits what you're able to learn from."
Peachybbies' CX team enjoys real-time improvement: "Being able to give real-time feedback is pivotal, especially during peak times," their team explains. "Auto QA catches pretty much everything I'd want a human QA agent to catch."
OSEA Malibu's managers discovered operational insights: "It helps managers understand when a macro or process is leading to incomplete conversations versus when an agent made a mistake," their support lead shares.
Bring quality into every conversation with Auto QA
By prioritizing QA, your team can identify potential problems early, reduce errors, and improve overall performance, leading to a smoother, more reliable experience for customers––and your CX team.
In the long run, brands focusing on QA can gain a competitive edge. Book a demo now to see what Auto QA can do for you.
There are tons of CX metrics you could be tracking. But where you spend your time is crucial as a customer experience leader.
According to recent data, these are the top five CX metrics for you to prioritize and improve on in 2025.
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Why CX metrics are essential for success
Not tracking CX metrics is like putting a loaf of bread in the oven but leaving baking time to chance. Without a set timer, you could end up with an underbaked bowl of dough or a burnt mess. Unless you have a sixth sense, it’s going to be really challenging to end up with something good.
In the same vein, metrics provide clear parameters for success. Meet or exceed them and your team is doing well; fall short and you’ll be better equipped to identify pain points and solve them.
Measure success and ROI. By tracking KPIs like resolution time, first response time, and CSAT, you can gauge the health of your customer support program and potentially justify investments in CX initiatives in the future.
Identify customer and team pain points. Metrics help uncover areas where customers or your team is struggling. For example, high resolution times or low CSAT scores signal friction in the experience that you can address.
Create accountability within your team. When everyone on your team understands what success looks like, it aligns efforts and keeps everyone focused on shared goals.
Prioritize resources. Metrics guide CX leaders on where to allocate resources—for example, leveraging AI and automation to tackle repetitive tickets when ticket volume adds up or resolution times are getting high.
Get proactive. Metrics reveal trends in customer behavior which can help you predict customer needs and make proactive adjustments in your CX strategy. By monitoring customer sentiment and acting on feedback, CX leaders can create more personalized and positive experiences.
Tip 💡: AI and automation can be valuable sidekicks as you look to optimize and improve on metrics. That’s especially true for busy periods: in 2024, 70% of CX leaders relied on AI and automation during peak seasons.
70% of CX teams use AI and automation to handle support inquiries during the holiday season. Gorgias
Resolution time should be your main focus for 2025
In our 2024 customer expectations survey, we asked CX leads and agents which metric they used to track success. Here’s what they said:
Resolution Time (71%)
First Response Time (59%)
CSAT (53%)
Revenue or Sales Impact (41%)
Ticket Volume (41%)
Resolution time is going to be a key differentiator for your team this year. It should be your primary focus when it comes to optimizing different facets of your customer service strategy.
71% of CX teams used resolution time to measure success during the holiday season in 2024. Gorgias Customer Expectations Survey
Top 5 CX metrics for 2025 & how to improve them with AI
1) Resolution time
Resolution time is the average time it takes to resolve a customer request from start to finish.
How do you calculate resolution time?
To calculate resolution time, you’ll take the total resolution time within a set period and divide it by the total number of customer interactions your team tackled within that same time frame.
Average resolution time = Total resolution time in a defined period / Total number of customer interactions resolved in that period
How to use AI & automation to improve it
According to a 2023 study from Statista, 70% of support leaders noted that the customer support metrics that AI had the greatest positive effect on was resolution time.
You can use automation tools to send Macros to answer common questions, or leverage AI to interact as an agent via email or chat. The instant nature of these tools means that customers won’t have to wait in a queue for your team to get to them.
For example, Wildride implemented Gorgias's AI Agent to manage an influx of 1,000 tickets per week. After AI Agent took over 33% of email inquiries, the team saw a 24% decrease in resolution time. That allowed the team to focus on more complex issues, streamline their support process, and make their customers happier.
2) First Response Time (FRT)
First response time is the length of time it takes for a customer service team to send the initial reply to a customer inquiry.
How do you calculate first response time?
To calculate average first response time, take the total amount of time it took for your team to respond to initial customer requests and divide by the total number of tickets within a set time frame.
How to use AI & automation to improve it
Your team is busy––when they’re not tackling repetitive questions, they’re helping customers with complicated or high-effort requests. All of that work is going to bog down your FRT, especially during more buzzy periods like sales, new releases, or over the holidays.
By using AI to jump in to handle those more routine requests, you can significantly reduce your FRT and give your team time back to tackle more heavy-lift needs.
For example, AI Agent helped Glamnetic achieve a 91% improvement in first response time during Black Friday Cyber Monday (BFCM) 2024. They got FRT down from their pre-AI Agent time of eight minutes to 40 seconds.
Here’s what that looked like in practice:
AI Agent helped Glamnetic reduce first response time by tackling repetitive tickets like change of address requests. Gorgias
3) Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)
CSAT scores show how satisfied customers are with a product, service, or interaction, typically gathered through surveys.
How is CSAT calculated?
CSAT is calculated via a five-point rating scale survey sent to customers after a support interaction, where one is the worst experience and five is the best. While it can be calculated in different ways, at Gorgias the average of all survey responses is your CSAT score.
How to use AI & automation to improve it
When customers reach out for support, they’re expecting a fast response––regardless if they have an issue or are contemplating their next purchase.
That’s why using automation or AI tools to provide that lightning quick response, even if it directs shoppers to a self-service resource, can be extremely effective in raising CSAT scores. These responses could be sent by an AI agent that responds like a human agent would or an automated Macro built to fire off pre-crafted templates to common questions.
In luxury golf brand VESSEL’s case, customers felt that the AI responses were helpful and seemed on-par with the level of support they’d expect from a human agent.
“Our customers expect almost immediate responses, and so being able to automate that, even if it's not necessarily the exact answer that they're looking for, but being able to send over information to give them the reassurance that we're looking into it or trying to find an answer, whatever it may be, that's been a huge help to our team,” says Lauren Reams, the Customer Experience Manager at VESSEL.
4) Revenue or sales impact
The direct or indirect effect of customer service or business activities on generating sales or revenue.
How do you calculate it?
There are different ways to calculate revenue generated and the sales impact of customer support, and quantifying the indirect impact can be difficult. But generally, the formula looks like this:
ROI = [ (Money earned - Money spent) / Money spent ] x 100
Leveraging AI and automation can provide significant cost savings because it acts as an additional agent who can tackle repetitive questions, translating to money saved on the time it would take for human agents to manually answer those questions.
The results are tangible: by automating 48% of inquiries, Dr. Bronner's saved $5,248 in the first month, and $100K in the first year.
Jonas Paul Eyewear saw revenue influenced by AI Agent as well: the team tracked $600 of sales revenue directly to the tool after it effectively answered pre-sales support questions from shoppers.
AI Agent supports pre-sales questions by offering detailed responses, like which glasses would work best for a customer’s 8 year old son. Gorgias
5) Ticket volume
Ticket volume is the total number of customer service inquiries that a team receives over a specific period of time.
How do you calculate it?
The customer support tool you use will be able to calculate ticket volume for you, as it’s the total number of tickets that have come in within a set amount of time. If you don’t use a CX platform yet and are still using something like Gmail or Excel, you’ll perform this count manually.
How to use AI & automation to improve it
Set rules to trigger automated responses to common questions, or ask an AI agent to completely take them off your team’s plate.
Arcade Belts, for example, saw a 50% reduction in ticket volume by using Gorgias’s AI Agent.
How to get buy in to improve your CX program
Tracking CX metrics is valuable for more than just gauging your program's effectiveness. The more you improve upon your CX metrics, the more you can leverage them to prove your support function’s value within your company.
Tie CX to revenue. Show how improvements in customer satisfaction or repeat purchase rates directly impact revenue growth.
Show industry benchmarks. Compare your team’s stats to competitors or industry averages to demonstrate how well your support strategy is working.
Demonstrate your team’s impact on sales and retention. Use the metrics you’ve collected to show support’s impact on converting customers asking pre-sales questions and getting repeat customers.
Ask to expand your team’s budget. Pitch acquiring additional buy in and resources by presenting revenue generated, costs saved through tools like AI and automation, and happy customers created.
How to use metrics to evaluate AI performanceIf you want to transform customer experience for the long term, the AI tools you use should never be “set it and forget it” solutions. Just as you do with your human agents, you can use metrics to evaluate your AI agent to make sure it’s performing well. If you use Gorgias, you’ll find these metrics under the AI Agent dashboard.
Review AI Agent’s performance within the Statistics view. Gorgias If you’d like to change the metrics you see here, select “Edit Columns.”
Navigate to the ‘Performance’ section to switch out the metrics you track for AI Agent. Gorgias
It’s also easy to retrain your AI's performance by adjusting settings like Guidance, refining the internal documents it draws from, setting up brand voice, or creating a Handover topic list to escalate certain types of tickets to human agents.
Start tracking top CX metrics
Whether you’re new to being a CX leader or you’re a seasoned pro, tracking and improving on your CX metrics will help your team stand out among the rest. A key way to improve them is to leverage AI and Automation tools, and Gorgias is here to help you do it.
AI Agent on Chat automates up to 50% of chat conversations. It ensures customers get fast, context-aware answers, product recommendations, and seamless handovers to human agents when needed.
AI Agent goes beyond automated tools like Flows and article recommendations. Unlike pre-set FAQ flows or suggested Help Center articles, AI Agent can handle complex inquiries like modifying orders and providing personalized product recommendations.
Setting up AI Agent on Chat is quick. Brands can activate AI Agent with a few clicks, improving efficiency during peak seasons and reducing the need for follow-ups.
Updating AI Agent’s knowledge and behavior ensures the best customer experience. Businesses should refine their Help Center, set Guidance instructions, personalize AI Agent’s tone, and test responses before going live.
It’s clear that shoppers want answers fast—chat accounts for 20% of all customer support tickets.
The appeal is obvious: Chat is an easy-to-access customer service channel for quick questions and a convenient and subtle way to cross-sell complementary products.
But without the right chat tool, brands risk losing these valuable opportunities.
Introducing AI Agent on Chat, a conversational AI assistant that can automate up to 50% of chat conversations. This new feature upgrades chat by combining agent knowledge with superhuman efficiency and response times.
Now, customers can guarantee personalized interactions at any point of the shopping journey—whether they’re looking for a quick answer or a tailored recommendation.
With AI powering every interaction, one-to-one conversations become a seamless part of every customer experience.
Why Chat is better with AI Agent
Before AI Agent, customers reaching out through chat outside business hours had two options: following pre-set Flows (automated FAQ conversations) or browsing through suggested Help Center articles.
These features are great for quick answers to basic questions, but AI Agent takes support to the next level by handling more complex needs like modifying orders or offering personalized product recommendations.
With AI Agent in Chat, customers enjoy dynamic, real-time conversations available on multiple channels. AI Agent generates personalized responses that match exactly what customers ask for, automating 50% of chat interactions so agents get time back to upsell, create stronger relationships, and craft better experiences.
Upgrade your chat support from a basic Q&A tool into an intelligent assistant that handles customer inquiries 24/7. Here's how AI Agent makes that possible:
Real-time conversations
AI Agent responds within 15 seconds or less, offering fast responses that result in frictionless conversations. Unlike traditional chatbots, AI Agent also adapts to your brand’s unique tone of voice to enhance the customer experience and assure shoppers their questions will be taken care of.
AI Agent is context-aware and uses information from its knowledge sources to respond to customers in real time.
24/7 availability
Today’s shoppers expect instant responses regardless of time zone or business hours. AI Agent on Chat means customers get the help they need, when they need it. This availability leads to higher customer satisfaction and fewer abandoned carts.
Instant product recommendations
AI Agent understands context and customer intent. Whether a shopper needs help finding the right product size or changes their mind and wants to compare features, AI Agent customizes its recommendations for each person.
Intelligent handovers
Some conversations, like technical issues or complaints, need a human touch. AI Agent recognizes these situations and smoothly transfers them to the right agent.
Using Handover topics, you can choose which types of inquiries should go straight to human agents. Then, if AI Agent lacks the confidence to provide an answer or can’t locate relevant knowledge in its database, it automatically escalates the conversation.
Based on Hiver’s 2024 study, 62% of customers prefer live chat to other support channels. With AI Agent in Chat, agents can cut down average response times while customers get the answers they need in one conversation with zero wait times or follow-ups.
Easy setup
AI Agent on Chat is ready to use in a few clicks. Simply connect your Shopify store and Chat widget to AI Agent, and you’re ready to resolve questions asked by visitors and loyal customers faster than you ever have.
Capture the growing demand for live support
Chat is often a customer’s first touchpoint with your brand, whether they’ve just discovered your brand or are on their third order. Meet customer expectations by being available with AI Agent on Chat. The faster you can ease their concerns, the faster they can head to checkout.
Maximize team efficiency
AI Agent makes scaling support effortless, especially during peak seasons like Black Friday. While it handles repetitive support tickets like order status and shipping questions, your team can focus on high-priority tasks like requests from VIP customers.
Onboard, Automate, Observe, and Coach AI Agent to flawlessly integrate it into your team.
Eliminate the need for follow-ups
Drawing from knowledge sources like your Help Center and policy pages means AI Agent can often resolve inquiries within one conversation. No more unnecessary back-and-forths. Quick resolutions = happier and more loyal customers.
How to activate AI Agent on Chat
Ready to get started? Here’s how to activate AI Agent on Chat:
Click Automate in the top left menu.
Select your store from the sidebar, then click on AI Agent.
In the Settings tab, under Chat Settings, select one or more Chat from the dropdown menu.
Toggle Enable AI Agent on Chat on.
Select Save Changes at the bottom of the page.
Already use AI Agent for email? No need to set up Guidance and Handover topics all over again—AI Agent will behave the same way in Chat.
Best practices for setting up AI Agent on Chat
Get the most out of AI Agent on Chat by following these best practices.
1. Prepare and optimize your knowledge base
The Help Center is AI Agent’s brain. This customer knowledge database is the key to AI Agent’s accurate and on-brand responses. To ensure your AI Agent is as trained as your human agents, include important topics in your Help Center like shipping, returns, cancellations, and account management.
No articles yet? No problem! Gorgias has 20+ article templates for you to use and modify. Or, even better, check out the AI Library for AI-generated articles based on your customer tickets.
The AI Library recommends pre-written articles based on what your customers ask you.
2. Set restrictions with Guidance
AI tools perform best when you set limitations. A Guidance is the main way to control AI Agent’s behavior. It is a set of written instructions that outline how AI Agent should interact with customers, handle certain requests, and more.
We recommend publishing a Guidance on the top five questions you receive from customers.
Tip: AI Agent prioritizes Guidance above Help Center articles. Unlike Help Center articles, the content in your Guidance will not be customer-facing.
Access premade Guidance templates or make your own customer Guidance for AI Agent.
3. Personalize AI Agent's voice
The beauty of AI Agent is its ability to speak like one of your agents. Select from Friendly, Professional, or Sophisticated presets—or create a custom tone that aligns with your brand.
AI Agent’s tone of voice can be altered with preset voices or custom instructions.
Use test scenarios to see how AI Agent responds to common customer questions, such as order status, shipping questions, and return policies. To cover all your bases, test AI Agent as both a new and returning customer to make sure it delivers accurate responses no matter the customer's need.
Test AI Agent’s responses to ensure accurate answers.
5. Improve AI Agent’s behavior
AI Agent becomes smarter as it learns from you. Like a human agent, give your AI Agent feedback on its responses, from how it speaks, which topics it escalates, and what actions it takes in certain scenarios.
There are multiple ways to give AI Agent feedback on a ticket:
Mark AI Agent’s message or any of the resources it used as correct or incorrect.
Suggest that AI Agent use a different resource if a better or more correct piece of knowledge exists.
Report an issue to the Gorgias Product team.
AI Agent’s answers improve as you provide feedback.
Coming soon: Actions on Chat
Soon, AI Agent will be able to perform actions like accessing Shopify order details and executing third-party app actions, such as updating shipping addresses and order cancellations, directly in Chat.
Excited to deliver an elevated chat experience? Book a demo now to experience the power of AI Agent on Chat.
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See how Gorgias’s Shopify integration makes customer support easier—fewer tabs, faster replies, happier customers, and more revenue.
By Holly Stanley
0 min read . By Holly Stanley
Managing customer support as a Shopify store owner can feel like juggling too many tools at once.
Constantly switching tabs to look up orders, update customer information, or track returns wastes valuable time. Plus, it prevents your team from focusing on what really matters––delivering quick, personalized customer service.
Gorgias’s Shopify integration solves this. It keeps all your Shopify data in one place, so your team spends less time toggling tabs and more time helping customers. The result? Faster responses, better service, and more revenue.
Below, we break down the eight key capabilities of this integration, each paired with practical use cases to showcase its real-world value.
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1. View Shopify data in tickets
What it does: Shopify order data is displayed directly within support tickets, allowing agents to view essential details like order status, customer information, and transaction history without leaving the helpdesk.
Use case: An agent handling a “Where’s my order?” request can instantly check tracking information and update the customer.
The fashion retailer Princess Polly improved their customer experience team’s efficiency by using Gorgias's deep integration with Shopify. Agents can view and update customer and order data directly within Gorgias, eliminating the need to switch between multiple tabs.
Taking a streamlined approach led to a 40% increase in efficiency, an 80% decrease in resolution time, and a 95% decrease in first response time.
Customer order data, including their shipping address and product details, can be found directly in the ticket.
2. Perform Shopify Actions
What it does: Agents can update Shopify order and customer data with Shopify Actions right in Gorgias.
Key features:
Create a new order: Add existing products or custom items, apply discounts, modify quantities, add notes and tags, and choose to charge taxes. Then set the order as Paid or Pending and email the invoice to the customer.
Duplicate an order: Replicate an existing order and make adjustments as needed.
Cancel/refund an order: Cancel or refund orders by setting quantities to refund, specifying shipping amounts to refund, providing reasons for cancellation, restocking items, and notifying the customer.
Edit shipping address: Update the shipping address for an order.
Insert product links: Add product links or product cards from tickets so customers can add the product to their cart quickly.
Display the customer’s cart: View the exact items the customer has in their cart at the moment they reach out via Chat.
Use case: Agents can perform Shopify actions directly from Gorgias, such as adding products, applying discounts, updating quantities, or issuing refunds.
Agents can perform Shopify Actions like duplicate an order directly from Gorgias.
3. Embed customer-specific Shopify data in Macros
What it does: Create templated responses called Macros with dynamic Shopify variables to automatically incorporate customer-specific information.
Key features:
Dynamic variables: Macros can include variables that pull real-time data from Shopify, such as order status, tracking numbers, and customer details.
Automated actions: Beyond inserting dynamic content, Macros can perform actions like tagging tickets, setting statuses, or assigning conversations to specific agents. The automation streamlines workflows and ensures consistent handling of similar inquiries.
Use case: A customer inquires about their order. With one click, the agent uses a Macro that pulls in the order status and expected delivery date, creating a faster and more personalized response.
Take Try The World, a gourmet subscription service, needed a robust Shopify integration to handle an increasing volume of customer inquiries. By switching to Gorgias, they gained the ability to unify conversations and embed Shopify data directly into Macros. Now, agents could quickly generate personalized responses that included order details, tracking links, and customer-specific information.
Try the World’s support team’s efficiency skyrocketed, enabling them to handle 120 tickets per day, up from 80, and reduce response times to just one business day.
Shopify data lets agents create Macros, templated responses with personalized data.
4. Provide product information with Macros
What it does: Macros with embedded Shopify data let agents quickly and accurately share pre-sale information like product links, stock availability, and discount codes, helping to convert prospective customers into buyers.
Key features:
Dynamic Shopify variables in Macros: Agents can use dynamic variables to pull real-time product information.
Pre-built responses for common questions: Macros can include templated responses tailored for pre-sale inquiries, such as providing direct links to products or applying discount codes.
Use case: A customer asks if a specific product is available in their size and color. The agent can apply a Macro that automatically pulls the product's inventory details and includes a discount code, sending a response like this:
“Hi {{ticket.customer.firstname}}, Great news! The product {{ticket.customer.integrations.shopify.products[0].title}} is currently in stock in the size and color you’re looking for. You can check it out here: [Product Link]. Use the code WELCOME10 at checkout for 10% off your first order! Let me know if you have any other questions!”
How it helps:
Eliminates manual search and typing for agents.
Ensures accurate, real-time product information for customers.
Improves the likelihood of converting inquiries into sales.
5. Enable self-serve order management in Chat
What it does: Using Gorgias’s chat widget, customers can track orders or manage their purchases on their own with no agent assistance needed.
Key feature:
Order management automation: Customers can access real-time order information, including status updates and tracking details, through the chat interface. This automation reduces the volume of live chat inquiries by up to 30%.
Use case: A customer wants to check the status of their recent purchase. By accessing the Chat widget on your website, they can enter their email and order number and receive instant updates on their order's progress, including shipping and delivery information, without waiting for an agent's response.
How it helps:
Automates routine inquiries and frees up your support team to handle more complex issues.
Enhances customer satisfaction thanks to immediate responses.
Reduces the need for multiple communication channels, consolidating support interactions in one place.
6. Use Shopify variables in Rules
What it does:Rules paired with Shopify variables can automate various support tasks, such as identifying specific customer segments or tagging tickets, to boost efficiency and consistency.
Key features:
Automated tagging: Rules can automatically tag tickets based on specific Shopify data. For instance, you can set up a Rule to tag tickets from customers with high order counts or significant total spending as "VIP."
Prioritization of tickets: Rules can prioritize tickets that meet certain criteria, such as high-value orders or repeat customers.
Use case: A customer with a history of substantial purchases contacts support. A rule detects that the customer's total spending exceeds a predefined threshold and automatically tags the ticket as "VIP."
This tag can then trigger other workflows, such as assigning the ticket to a senior support agent or escalating its priority.
How it helps:
Improves customer experience by prioritizing high-value customers.
Maintains consistent service quality.
Rules let you identify VIP customers using Shopify variables.
7. Track revenue with reporting
What it does: Gorgias offers comprehensive reporting that allows you to measure how your support interactions influence sales.
Key features:
Tickets converted: Tracks the number of support tickets that led to a sale within five days of the ticket's creation.
Conversion rate: Calculates the percentage of created tickets that resulted in sales, helping you assess the effectiveness of your support team's interactions.
Total sales from support: Sums the revenue generated from orders associated with converted tickets, accounting for refunds and order adjustments to provide accurate figures.
These metrics are accessible under Statistics → Support Performance → Revenue in your Gorgias dashboard. You can filter the data by integration, ticket channel, tags, or specific time periods to gain detailed insights.
Use case: By analyzing Revenue Statistics, you can identify which support channels or agents are most effective in driving sales. For example, if live chat interactions have a higher conversion rate, you might allocate more resources to that channel.
Additionally, recognizing top-performing agents can inform training programs to elevate overall team performance.
For example, One Block Down, a Milan-based streetwear brand, struggled to manage a growing volume of customer inquiries across multiple platforms. By integrating Gorgias with Shopify, they centralized all customer interactions into a single platform, giving agents instant access to crucial information like order history and returns directly within tickets.
The setup allowed the team to measure the direct impact of their support efforts on revenue.
The result? An impressive 1,000% increase in support-generated revenue and a 1-hour average first response time. By connecting the dots between customer service and sales performance, One Block Down demonstrated how proactive, data-driven support can directly influence the bottom line.
How it helps:
Quantifies the revenue generated from support interactions.
Faster team optimization with data-driven insights.
Understanding the correlation between support interactions and sales can help refine customer service strategies.
Revenue Statistics highlight which support channels and agents are best at generating sales.
8. AI Agent integration
What it does:AI Agent automates Shopify actions like canceling orders, editing order details, and reshipping items.
Key features:
Cancel Shopify order: AI Agent can automatically cancel unfulfilled orders upon customer request, restocking the items and issuing a full refund. A confirmation email is sent to the customer once the cancellation is complete.
Edit order shipping address: When a customer needs to update their shipping address, AI Agent verifies if the order is unfulfilled, confirms the new address with the customer, and updates it in Shopify accordingly.
Replace order item: AI Agent facilitates item replacements in orders by confirming the item to be removed and the new item to be added, checking stock availability, adjusting payments if necessary, and sending an updated order confirmation to the customer.
Reship order for free: In cases where an order is lost in transit or arrives damaged, AI Agent can duplicate and resend the order at no additional charge.
Remove order item: If a customer decides to remove an item from their order, AI Agent can handle the removal, restock the item in Shopify, process the refund for the removed item, and notify the customer of the updated order details.
Use case: A customer realizes they've entered an incorrect shipping address shortly after placing an order. They contact support, and AI Agent promptly verifies that the order is unfulfilled, confirms the correct address with the customer, updates the shipping information in Shopify, and sends a confirmation email—all without human intervention.
How it helps:
Automating routine order management tasks reduces the workload on human agents.
Quick and accurate responses to order modification requests lead to a better customer experience.
Automated processes ensure consistency and accuracy in handling order changes, reducing the likelihood of human error.
Using Gorgias’s AI Agent you can customize multiple Shopify actions with Gorgias.
"Since day one, Gorgias has been dedicated to helping ecommerce brands deliver exceptional customer experiences. We started with a helpdesk to centralize support, then introduced AI Agent to instantly resolve support questions,” says Romain Lapeyre, CEO of Gorgias.
“Now, we're taking the next leap forward with an AI Agent that powers the entire customer journey—anticipating buyer needs, boosting sales, and automating high-quality support. Today, I'm happy to announce Gorgias as the Conversational AI platform for ecommerce.”
Gorgias’s Conversational AI platform will let teams provide fast, scalable, and cost-effective support while helping them drive revenue growth. From automatic order changes and refunds to product recommendations and cross-sells, brands will be able to flawlessly combine their support and sales efforts.
The end result is an AI-powered customer journey where every customer interaction feels complete, personal, and connected, both before and after purchase.
Questions in Chat, resolved in seconds
Last year, we introduced AI Agent for email.
Some brands call their AI Agent Lisa, some call it Wally, and most treat it like a real member of the team. But this reliable support sidekick was only available to answer customers on email—until now.
Get ready for instant responses that tackle support inquiries of all sizes. Now, your customers can enjoy fast responses that keep their shopping experience as smooth as possible.
On top of improving first response times, AI Agent can play an even more critical role in unblocking sales, suggesting products, and driving upsells and cross-sells.
With responses sent in 15 seconds or less, brands can delight customers with near-instant resolutions.
AI Agent can autonomously respond to customers on email and chat.
Let your AI Agent take action
Actions let AI Agent perform customer requests on behalf of your support team. This includes changing shipping addresses, fetching fulfillment status, canceling orders, adding discounts, and more.
You can use a library of pre-configured Actions for popular apps like Shopify, Rebuy, Loop, and more. And you don’t need any technical skills to set them up.
With almost half of queries requiring some kind of update, Actions is your go-to for complete resolutions so you can get more accomplished.
AI Agent can perform actions on ecommerce apps, right from the Gorgias platform.
Quality built into every support ticket
Quality checks have traditionally been manual, time-consuming, and inconsistent. Our brand new Auto QA feature changes that by automatically scoring 100% of conversations on resolution completeness and communication quality—whether from a human or AI agent.
With Auto QA, team leads can:
Scale quality consistently and easily. Both human and AI agents follow the same quality standards, allowing for consistent, high-quality customer experiences.
Coach smarter. Use real-time QA ratings in tickets to give agents targeted feedback.
Track team performance. The dashboard highlights metrics by agent, showing what’s working and where to improve.
Receive automatic QA checks on all customer conversations with Auto QA.
Gain clarity on your AI Agent’s impact
Support teams should be in complete control of their AI. That’s why the AI Agent Report and AI Agent Insights were created—to help you know exactly how your AI Agent is performing and contributing to your customer service operations.
The AI Agent Report provides full visibility into AI Agent’s performance, covering metrics like First Response Time, CSAT, and one-touch ticket resolutions. Fully integrated into your Support Performance Statistics dashboard, the report includes:
The percentage of tickets automated by AI Agent
The number of tickets closed by AI Agent
Success rates for one-touch resolutions
How satisfied customers are with AI Agent’s responses
Monitor AI Agent’s performance with a glimpse into metrics like automation rate, closed tickets, and customer satisfaction.
AI Agent Insights takes it a step further. It analyzes AI Agent’s performance data and provides you with a dashboard of recommendations, including potential automation opportunities, popular ticket intents to optimize, and knowledge base improvements.
Find out which areas of your support workflow could benefit from automation with AI Insights.
Meet your new AI sales assistant
Soon, we’ll be expanding our AI capabilities with the launch of AI Agent for Sales, a tool designed to assist customers on their shopping journey.
AI Agent for Sales helps brands boost their sales capabilities through smart product recommendations, on-page checkout assistance, and personalized conversations. Now it's easier to reduce cart abandonment, suggest complementary products to boost average order value, and overcome pre-sale objections.
This new tool will bridge the gap between marketing and CX, ensuring brands can scale personalized interactions 24/7 without increasing headcount.
AI Agent for Sales is coming to chat soon.
Looking ahead with conversational AI
As we continue to innovate with conversational AI, our focus remains on helping you succeed.
By combining smarter tools with valuable insights, we’re creating opportunities for you to put your customers first and build deeper connections at every touchpoint.
Join us as we pave a new way for the future of ecommerce.
Help your CX team deliver better service with AI quality assurance for fair feedback and consistent customer support.
By Christelle Agustin
0 min read . By Christelle Agustin
TL;DR:
The landscape of QA is moving from manual to AI-powered, where AI can analyze every customer interaction, uncover patterns, and suggest data-driven changes at scale.
Automating QA allows ticket reviews to be routine. This means customers will always receive high-quality support.
Every customer interaction is reviewed with AI QA — not just a sample. This gives support leaders full visibility into performance and service quality.
AI QA saves time and improves agent and AI Agent feedback. By automating ticket reviews, agents receive instant, unbiased feedback, and leaders can focus on big-picture CX improvements.
But answering tickets isn't enough. Responses must also be high-quality, whether from humans or AI. And while customer satisfaction (CSAT) is the standard measure of how successful these interactions are, they have major limits.
CSAT scores don’t tell the full story about whether agents were helpful or if they used on-brand language. These gray areas in quality lead to missed sales, higher return rates, and frustrated customers during peak periods.
AI quality assurance (QA) is changing that. In this article, we’ll see what QA looks like today, how AI can simplify the process, and how CX teams can use tools like Auto QA to improve quality across all conversations.
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Traditional customer support QA is falling by the wayside
Today, QA in customer support is a largely manual responsibility. Customer conversations are reviewed by CX team leads to ensure customer satisfaction and identify areas for agent coaching. Team leads evaluate agent responses against a checklist of best practices, including the proper use of language, product knowledge, consistency, and helpfulness.
However, reviewing tickets takes a long time.
QA is important, but it's hard to prioritize when customers are actively waiting for help with refunds, urgent order edits, or negative reviews. And when CX teams are under-resourced and short-staffed, it’s easy to put QA on the back burner.
What’s more, as AI plays a bigger role in responding to customers, quality assurance must evolve to ensure the quality of AI-generated responses, not just human responses.
Over time, the lack of QA in CX can hold back support teams for three reasons:
Delayed feedback makes it harder for agents and AI tools to improve.
Leaders have less time to train agents and refine workflows.
Inconsistent service risks losing customer trust and loyalty.
What is AI-powered QA in CX?
AI-powered quality assurance (QA) uses AI to automate the process of reviewing customer interactions for resolution completeness, communication, language proficiency, and more.
Instead of team leads spending hours manually sifting through tickets, AI takes over and evaluates how well tickets were resolved by agents.
Shifting this traditionally manual work to an automated process pulls teams out of the weeds and into more beneficial work like speaking to customers and upselling.
Manual QA is prone to inconsistent checks and fewer tickets reviewed compared to AI-powered QA.
With AI QA, routine ticket reviews are not just an optional part of your customer service strategy, they become a permanent part of it. The road to greater customer trust, resolution times, and stronger product knowledge becomes easier.
Manual QA is like trying to review a handful of tickets during a flood of new customer requests. Team leads can only focus on a small sample, leaving most interactions unchecked. Without complete visibility, creating a standard across all interactions is challenging.
Now, switch over to AI QA. You don’t have to choose between QA duty or answering tickets — QA checks are automatically done. You’ll still need to monitor AI’s performance, but now there’s more time to focus on creating strategies that improve the customer experience.
Here’s how AI QA and manual QA measure up to each other:
Feature
AI QA
Manual QA
Number of Tickets Reviewed
All tickets are reviewed automatically.
Only a small sample of tickets can be reviewed.
Speed of Reviews
Reviews are completed instantly after responses.
Reviews are time-consuming and delayed.
Consistency
Feedback is consistent and unbiased across all tickets.
Feedback varies depending on the reviewer.
Scalability
Scales, regardless of ticket volume.
Struggles to keep up with high ticket volumes.
Agent Feedback
Provides instant, actionable feedback for every resolved ticket.
Feedback is delayed and limited to a few cases.
Leader Advantage
Frees up leaders to train the team and improve workflows.
Disadvantageous, as leaders spend most time manually reviewing tickets.
7 benefits of using AI quality assurance in CX
AI quality assurance helps CX leaders move beyond manual reviews by offering fast, thorough insights into performance and customer needs. Here are seven key benefits it brings to your team.
1. Improved visibility into customer interactions
AI QA reviews every ticket, giving CX leaders a complete view of agent performance and customer trends. Nothing slips through the cracks, so you can act on real data each and every single time.
What the team wins: Key areas to focus on to improve the customer experience.
What the customer wins: A consistent support experience where their concerns are fully addressed.
AI QA feedback can highlight confusing policies or common product issues that lead to unhappy customers. With instant feedback, teams can quickly make changes and create better, consistent customer experiences.
What the team wins: Faster fixes for recurring issues.
What the customer wins: A smoother, frustration-free experience.
3. Faster identification of process gaps
Agents can receive feedback that instantly highlights gaps in workflows or unclear escalation steps. This is an efficient way to resolve issues within the wider team before they become more significant problems.
What the team wins: Process issues are solved quickly.
What the customer wins: Faster resolutions with little to no delays.
4. Standardized scoring for AI and human agents
AI QA evaluates both AI Agent and human agent interactions using the same criteria. This creates a level playing field and ensures all customer interactions meet the same quality standards.
What the team wins: Fair evaluations for both AI and human responses.
What the customer wins: High-quality support, no matter who handles the ticket.
5. More time for coaching and training
With less time spent on manual reviews, leaders can dedicate more energy to team development. Training sessions guided by AI insights help agents improve quickly and ensure the team delivers support that aligns with protocols.
What the team wins: More focused skill-building based on data.
What the customer wins: Clearer and more accurate support.
6. Drives continuous knowledge for the entire team
AI QA is helpful for showing agents which areas they need more training on, whether it's being better about using brand voice or polishing up on product knowledge. This leads to better support processes and stronger product understanding across the team.
What the team wins: Better support tactics and product expertise.
What the customer wins: Faster resolutions due to knowledgeable agents.
7. Enhanced customer experience through consistently high-quality support
Since all tickets are reviewed, teams can feel confident they’re delivering high-quality support on a regular basis. Customers get clear, helpful answers, while agents gain insights from every ticket with AI feedback.
What the team wins: Consistent support performance.
What the customer wins: Reliable support they can trust.
How accurate is AI QA?
AI QA analyzes tickets using predefined categories to evaluate how complete and helpful agent responses are. Let’s take a closer look at how it maintains accurate ticket reviews with an AI QA tool like Gorgias’s Auto QA.
It measures multiple metrics
Auto QA evaluates tickets based on three key areas: Resolution Completeness, Communication, and Language Proficiency.
For Resolution Completeness, it checks if all customer concerns were fully addressed. For example, if an agent resolves only one of two issues raised, the ticket is marked incomplete. Tickets where customers resolve issues on their own or don’t respond to follow-ups can still be graded as complete if handled appropriately.
Communication quality is scored on a scale of 1 to 5, assessing clarity, professionalism, and tone. Agents earn higher scores when they provide clear solutions and remain positive throughout the interaction.
Finally, Language Proficiency evaluates whether an agent displayed high proficiency in the language of the conversation. The score considers how well spelling, grammar, and syntax were employed.
Gorgias’s Auto QA scores agent responses based on communication and completeness.
Teams can improve AI with their own feedback
Auto QA isn’t set in stone. Team leads can expand on AI-generated feedback by adding their comments. For example, if a resolution is graded as ‘Incomplete,’ a team lead can explain why and provide additional context. This helps clarify the evaluation for the agent and also helps the AI model improve over time.
How to get started with AI quality assurance using Auto QA
Ready to bring the benefits of AI QA to your team? Here’s how to get started with Auto QA:
Audit your current QA process to identify gaps. How do you currently review tickets? Pinpoint areas where manual QA falls short, such as inconsistent feedback or missed interactions.
Pilot Auto QA with a small team. Introduce Auto QA to a small group of agents to test its impact. This allows you to find out how the new QA process fits into your workflow and how it affects agent performance.
Use AI insights to refine processes. Analyze the feedback Auto QA provides to identify process gaps or recurring issues. Use these insights to update your workflow, improve training, and address root causes of customer pain points.
Gradually scale adoption across the team. Once the pilot is successful, roll out Auto QA to more agents. Make sure everyone is trained on how to use its insights and integrate the tool into daily operations.
Monitor and provide feedback to improve AI accuracy. Review Auto QA’s evaluations to ensure accuracy. Add manual feedback as needed to fine-tune its scoring on future tickets.
Measure the impact on performance and satisfaction. Track key metrics like ticket close rates, resolution times, and customer satisfaction scores. Use this data to understand how Auto QA transforms your QA process and drives better results.
Make high-quality responses a standard with Auto QA
AI QA isn’t just about automating ticket reviews — it empowers CX leaders to focus on what truly matters: training and improving processes.
Leave spot-checking and inconsistent application of policies and brand voice in the past. As a built-in feature of Gorgias Automate, Auto QA makes high-quality customer interactions your brand’s standard.
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.
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?
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:
Issue an extra paid day off to the top performing team member
Reward the team with a free lunch after hitting a goal
Create an internal team Slack channel to celebrate wins
Give out cash bonuses
Offer flex time to your customer service teams
Create a customer service team member of the month incentive
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:
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:
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:
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.
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:
As part of an omnichannel approach to meet customers where they are
To manage brand reputation and resolve public comments privately
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Branch
If you’re interested in setting up a self-service customer service page, consider working with an ecommerce helpdesk platform like Gorgias.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Nike
This post is a truly stunning example of responding quickly in the public eye but directing the customer to a DM in order to understand their situation in more detail.
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.
GoPro
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.
Starbucks
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:
Wayfair
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:
Xbox
Xbox
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.
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:
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
Use your data to prioritize changes
Offer free shipping (or low-cost) shippin
Create a rewards program and offer discount codes
Use proactive live chat to guide customers through checkout
Offer as many payment options as possible
Simplify your checkout process
Ditch the mandatory account registration form
Use exit-intent pop-ups to catch shoppers before they leave
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.
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:
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Decide on an order tracking tool
Integrate your order tracking tool with your ecommerce platform
Configure your tracking app’s settings
Let automation do its thing
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
Respond to your most loyal customers first
Tag repeat customers as high-priority tickets
Automate simple requests wherever possible
Mark tickets with urgent pre-sale activity as high priority
Prioritize messaging channels
Deprioritize (or auto-close) no-reply tickets
Bump up customer service requests where customers are threatening to leave a negative review
Mark any incoming tickets about recent orders as first-priority
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
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.
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.
“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
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
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.
NPS surveys: Great to measure overall brand loyalty
CSAT surveys: Great to measure post-interaction sentiment
Long-format feedback surveys or interviews: Great for in-depth feedback
Social media exploratory surveys: Great to get quick feedback from many followers
Exploratory interviews: Great to understand a specific customer’s needs and preferences
Usability tests: Great for website optimization
Microsurvey pop-ups: Great to get many answers to one question at a time
On-site activity (Google Analytics or other website analytics)
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.
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:
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:
Sabai
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.
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:
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.
Google Analytics
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.
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.
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:
Dr. Squatch
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
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.
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.
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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:
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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:
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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.
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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:
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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:
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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:
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.
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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
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:
Policy: e.g. your company doesn’t accept returns
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.
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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.
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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!