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And the Margin that Customer Service Impacts Your Net Profit.

In, The State of the Ecommerce Customer Service Industry Report for 2019, we found that a surprising 79% of respondents do not know the cost of a support ticket on the company.

This is quite scary, as this metric helps define the overall profitability of the product, and set reinvestment schedules for the growth of your company.

If costs overtake margin, you lose money with every sale.

While the Gorgias mission is to turn customer service from a cost center into a revenue generator, we do need to acknowledge the raw costs of customer support in order to bake it into our calculation of margin.

What metrics are we going to cover:

• Cost per support ticket.
• Cost per order.
• Cost per revenue.

Why should you track these metric?

• It helps baseline your opportunity for growth and profitability.
• You can make concerted efforts to lower your cost with customer service improvements.
• You can track indicators that something is going wrong with your business, and may require extra attention from the Head of Ecommerce or COO.
• You can hold your head of customer service accountable for staying within appropriate margins, and incentivize them accordingly.

Now, let’s get into it…

Step 1: Calculate your Cost Per Ticket

Here’s the data you need to collect:

Total cost of customer service. This includes technology, employees, managers, office space, equipment, travel… Everything. This should be easy to calculate if your accounting department is doing their job; they should be able to just hand you over a number. A monthly breakdown of the trailing 12 months is best.

Tickets per month. This can be found in your Gorgias dashboard under “Statistics.

Be sure to set the dates to match appropriately:

Now that we have these two numbers, we can get an understanding of our cost per support ticket.

Simply divide: In this example, we’ve got 1651 tickets in December. We spent ~$4500 on customer service. Therefore each ticket costs us $2.73.

Knowing your average cost per ticket helps you understand the time and value behind resolving customer inquiries. If this number goes up, then you’re inquiries are getting more complex - its either taking more time or more people to answer the same number of questions.

If you ever see this number spike, it’s likely due to a flaw in your product design. Immediately begin looking for commonalities among tickets, inspecting your inventory, and trying to get to the root of the problem before you make even more customers unhappy.

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Step 2: Calculate Your Support Cost Per Order

Next up, you need to know your support cost per order, in order to bake customer support into your margin.

Here’s the data you need to collect:

• ‍Orders per month.

To find this, simply log in to your Shopify dashboard, go to Orders, and add in a couple filters:

You can then “select all” and it will tell you the count of orders. For additional accuracy, you may want completed orders, not including refunds or other issues.

For our example month, we placed 2621 orders. That gives us a cost per order of $1.73

According to our Ecommerce Customer Service data, we estimate that small stores will see 88 support tickets per 100 orders, or roughly 1.1 support tickets for every $100 in revenue.

While large stores, with over $500k revenue/month, will see only 56 support tickets per month and .4 support tickets per every $100 in revenue.

How does your support cost per order compare with these benchmarks? Let us know in the comments below.

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Calculate Your Cost Per Revenue

Sometimes it's helpful to calculate your cost per revenue as well, which is simply grabbing your net sales number from Shopify and dividing by tickets.

Data you need to collect:

Revenue.

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Step 3: Consult with COO / Head of Ecommerce

You were previously calculating your margin without including the cost of support…

Even though support drives customer satisfaction, retention, and, in some cases, sales, it also has a clear impact on margin.

How does this new metric affect your COGS? Your margin?

If your average order value is $50, with a $13 margin, you now have only a $11.27 margin.

How does that affect your advertising objectives?

How does it affect your ability to invest into product research?

What can you do to improve your cost per order?

A lot. Mostly, this is called: ticket mitigation.

Here’s some of the more common opportunities:

• Updating your FAQ page.
• Improving your product detail pages.
• Video explainers.
• Onboarding videos.
• Educational retargeting campaigns,
• Stricter / more clear checkout processes.
• Improved notification emails to users.
• Faster shipping.
• Implementing new channels like SMS, on-site chat, or phone.

Final Thoughts

When you hire a new support agent, or manager, you will see your costs go up.

This is the nature of business: you’re investing in a new hire with the expectation that there will be more demand for them to fulfil.

You’re job, as an operations manager, head of Ecommerce, or COO, is to make sure those costs don’t get out of control while you look to scale your business.

Figure out what margins are acceptable to you and invest in growth cautiously. We’ve seen all too many companies fail because they oversupply and hit stretches of low demand.

That being said, if the business has healthy cashflow, and reasonable growth, I’d invest more in customer service before upping my ad budget.

It takes time to onboard new agents, and if you don’t have someone matching that demand, you’re creating unhappy customers, which is a surefire way to eat your margins even faster.

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

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

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

Why is customer feedback important?

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

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

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

Here are a few examples:

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

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

9 customer feedback methods to learn about your customers

Feedback is a broad term: 

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

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

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

1) NPS surveys: Great to measure overall brand loyalty

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

6) Usability tests: Great for website optimization

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 Read more about live chat campaigns here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How to organize and implement customer feedback from customer service conversations

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2) Use Tags to label customer feedback 

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

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

3) Create views that organize tagged tickets

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

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

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

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

4) Lean on NLP to help you automate tagging

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

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

All of this essentially says the following:

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

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

5) Invite your team members to your customer service platform

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

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

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

6) Have recurring feedback digestion sessions

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

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

7) Remember to act on insights, not feedback

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Collect actionable customer feedback with Gorgias

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

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

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

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When customers order products from your ecommerce store, they expect the products to arrive on time and intact. Even if your shipping carrier is at fault for a lost package, customers will associate the issue with your store and the drop in customer satisfaction will ultimately impact your revenue. 

Unfortunately, 15% of all online orders shipped to urban areas fail to reach their destination due to either logistics issues or package theft. Many of the processes in your store's supply chain are probably out of your control, but there are things that you can do to prevent missing packages and salvage the customer relationship. 

We put together a step-by-step guide for how ecommerce businesses can deal with lost packages, as well as five tips that you can use to help ensure smooth and on-time package delivery.

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A step-by-step guide on how to deal with lost packages

Lost packages aren't typically the shipper's fault, but — fair or not — your customers will still look to you to make it right. Here are the steps that business owners should take when dealing with lost packages in order to ensure customer satisfaction:

1) Determine if your package was truly lost or if it was stolen

When a customer's package doesn't arrive, all that you know at first is that the package is missing. In most cases, the package has been lost or delivered to the wrong address. Sometimes, however, packages go missing because they are stolen. "Porch pirates," or people who steal packages from another person's porch, have become increasingly common with the growing popularity of online shopping. However, there are also rare cases when packages are also stolen in transit.

Here’s a breakdown of some of the top reasons for lost packages:

Contacting the shipping company is the best way to determine if a package was lost or stolen. If the carrier marks the package as being delivered to the correct address, but the customer never got it, chances are it was stolen.

What should you do if the package is stolen?

Stolen packages are tricky because the only person truly at fault is the thief who took them. Carriers don't typically offer reimbursement for stolen packages (except under rare, specific circumstances). This means that you will need to carry shipping insurance through a service such as Route if you want to be able to reimburse your customers for stolen packages — without the costs coming out of your own pocket.

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2) If the package was lost, file a refund or insurance claim

While carriers won't usually reimburse damaged or stolen packages, they are typically willing to reimburse lost packages. Along with recovering the cost of the item, you can also receive reimbursement for any shipping costs that you paid.

Filing these refund claims may be a bit of a hassle, but they have a high success rate, given that lost packages reflect poorly on a carrier. If you can determine that a package never arrived to the customer, usually due to a lack of updates from the carrier, filing a claim with the carrier is your best course of action.

Information needed to file for a refund

The exact information and documentation you must provide when filing a refund/insurance claim will vary from carrier to carrier. However, you will typically need to provide information such as:

• Package details such as the package's weight and tracking number
• Contact details for the package's recipient
• Credit card information used to purchase the package
• Receipts or invoices showing the value of the package
• Photos of damage to package or goods (if applicable)
• A repair estimate (if applicable)

Popular carriers' refund forms

Most carriers offer refund forms and portals that make it easy for shippers to file claims. Here are the links to the refund forms from popular delivery services:

• FedEx refund form
• DHL refund form
• UPS refund form
• USPS refund form

3) Replace lost packages to improve CX and lift revenue in the long term

Even if lost packages aren’t your fault, there's a good chance that your customers won't see it that way. In fact, 32% of customers say that they would be reluctant to order again from an online retailer following a failed delivery. This is especially true given the precedent large retailers like Amazon have set with no-questions-asked refund policies.

Replacing lost packages is no doubt an expense and a hassle, especially if the value of the item is high. But the value of the item may be small compared to a customer’s lifetime value (CLV) if you replace the lost item and retain a loyal customer. When you consider that repeat customers generate 300% more revenue than first-time customers, it's easy to see how prioritizing customer satisfaction can be more profitable in the long run.

Again, the right insurance policy can ensure that the cost of the items is covered if they are damaged, stolen, or lost. Filing a refund/insurance claim with your carrier is another way to seek reimbursement so that you can reimburse the customer. Even if it means eating the cost yourself, replacing lost packages still tends to be a more beneficial approach for ecommerce businesses.

If you want to improve customer experience further, check out our guide on how to offer free shipping to your customers.

4) Consider using a tool such as EasyShip for secure shipping

EasyShip is an ecommerce shipping platform that helps merchants print shipping labels, access discounted shipping rates, and provide customers with real-time tracking notifications. This ability to easily track the location and status of packages and provide that information to your customers can often go a long way toward reducing the frequency of missing packages.

Shipping tools such as EasyShip also help mitigate lost packages by streamlining your order fulfillment process. EasyShip and comparable apps help eliminate errors on your end (such as incorrect delivery addresses that could lead to missing shipments) by making it easy for customers to choose their preferred delivery service for each order.

Other top shipping apps

EasyShip is an excellent tool to consider if you want to improve your order fulfillment process and provide customers with real-time tracking notifications. However, several other shipping apps offer comparable features and capabilities:

• ShipBob: Upgrade your fulfillment provide with the leading end-to-end fulfillment provider
• Shipup: Offer your customers a branded, flexible post-purchase experience
• ShippingChimp: Automate your shipping notifications to improve customer experience
• AfterShip: Improve shipping tracking for your online business
• Wonderment: Reduce “Where is my order?” tickets with shipping notifications

To learn more about creating an ecommerce shipping and fulfillment strategy empowered by cutting-edge order fulfillment tools, be sure to check out our ecommerce shipping guide: Creating a Shipping and Fulfillment Strategy.

5) Update your shipping and package replacement policies

No matter what your policy for replacing lost, damaged, or stolen packages happens to be, it's important to keep your customers in the loop. If you offer a generous refund/return policy, making sure that customers see it can boost customer confidence and may even improve your store's conversion rate. Or, if you aren't in a position to replace or refund missing packages, letting customers know ahead of time can set expectations upfront. This way, they aren't frustrated by finding out that they won't be reimbursed after the fact.

To ensure that customers know your policy for replacing or refunding missing packages, publish this information on your FAQ page or help center. You may also consider sending a link to this policy in your post-purchase email flow for even more visibility.

Here’s a great example of a reader-friendly shipping policy from Branch, well organized and easily accessible on their Gorgias-built Help Center:

Helpful tips to ensure that your package is delivered on time and intact

Ecommerce businesses need to have a plan and policies for dealing with missing packages, but there are also steps that you can take to prevent your packages from ever going missing in the first place. Here are five tips for how ecommerce stores can prevent lost, stolen, and damaged packages:

Ensure the customer provided the correct address

Incorrect delivery information is a common cause of lost packages. While you'd like to think that customers can enter their addresses correctly, this isn't always the case. Thankfully, many shipping apps include address verification tools that allow you to at least ensure that the delivery address you have on file is a properly-formatted address that actually exists. These tools will sometimes be able to correct minor formatting issues automatically. You can contact the customer to clarify if there are bigger problems with the address.

Using shipping apps to verify addresses and streamline your order fulfillment process can also help prevent errors on your end, such as typos when entering an address.

Enable real-time package tracking

Sixty-nine percent of customers say that the ability to track their order is one of their top three considerations when purchasing a product online. Along with helping your store meet these customer expectations, offering real-time tracking notifications to your customers can also help prevent lost and stolen packages.

Real-time tracking provides visibility that can prevent packages from being delivered to the wrong address or lost along the way. Tracking notifications also enable customers to make sure that they or someone else is home when the package arrives so that it isn't stolen.

Most carriers will provide a tracking number to forward to your customers in a post-purchase email. However, you can improve the customer experience even further by offering your own tracking portal. Shipping apps such as LateShipment.com and some of the others that we mentioned allow you to create branded tracking portals and shipping notifications that your customers are sure to appreciate:

And if you use Gorgias, you can integrate with tools like LateShipment.com to see order status and tracking information within your help desk, so you can quickly — or automatically — answer customer questions about order status, whether they come through social media, texting, email, or another channel.

Let customers schedule their deliveries

Letting customers schedule deliveries won't prevent packages from getting lost in transit, but it can help prevent them from being stolen. The vast majority of package theft occurs after the package has been delivered. If the customer can choose a delivery time when they’re home, then porch pirates have less opportunity to steal it.

Your ecommerce platform likely has add-ons that let your customers choose their delivery date and time, although it may be limited to local deliveries only. If you use Shopify, check out the following tools to see if they could fit your needs:

• Delivery Date Pro
• Order Delivery Date Manager
• On Time Delivery Date

Provide instructions to the delivery driver for safe delivery

Along with using proper packaging, one way to prevent damaged items is to provide your carrier with instructions on how they should handle packages. If you are shipping fragile items, this should be communicated to your carrier so that they can properly mark the package.

It's also sometimes necessary to provide additional instructions to your carrier to ensure that a package goes to the correct address. If the customer provides any additional shipping instructions during checkout (such as where to leave the package, gate codes, etc.), then your team should pass this information on to the carrier, too.

Require a signature or in-person delivery for valuable items

If the product is especially valuable, you may want to consider requiring a signature upon receipt of the package. Requiring a signature (which guarantees in-person delivery) offers a couple of protections to both you and the customer. For one, it guarantees that the package will not be stolen after delivery. It also prevents the customer from fraudulently claiming they never received the package. Lastly, requiring a signature upon delivery allows customers to inspect the package and ensure there is no obvious damage before they sign for it.

It probably isn't necessary to go to these lengths for every ecommerce product. But if the item you are shipping is worth several hundred dollars or more, it's probably worth (strongly) considering. Most customers will have no problem signing for high-value items — and will likely even prefer it.

Improve your customer experience, even after deliveries, with Gorgias

As an ecommerce store, dealing with missing packages correctly is one of the many elements of developing a great customer experience. At Gorgias, we help ecommerce stores create a post-purchase experience optimized for customer satisfaction.

Gorgias helps you educate your customers about your refund/replacement policies for missing packages, give real-time updates about the status of their order, and provide helpful support in case something goes wrong. Better customer service leads to a better customer experience, helping you build a loyal customer base — and boosting your revenue in the process.

As the world's leading customer support platform, Gorgias also provides all of the tools and features your support team needs to offer the swift, helpful support that customers expect when their packages are missing. With our platform, your team also benefits from several deep integrations with many of the market's top shipping and fulfillment apps.

See for yourself how Gorgias improves the customer experience, from browsing to post-purchase, by booking a demo today.

Most customers are loyal to brands because they know what level of service they can expect. As a result, providing an above-average customer experience is key to increase repeat in sales.

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It’s relatively easy to provide great support when you get started with your store: your team gets a few dozens of support requests a day, and they respond to them almost instantly. The thing is, this level of service is very hard to maintain as you scale. Response time usually drops, and most brands start using standardized macros to keep up with the pace, which is a poor customer experience.

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Your sales have increased, good. Now, you need to get your customer support up to speed

Source: Gorgias customers during the Thanksgiving peak

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At Gorgias, we’ve been chatting with 400 stores over the past year, and we’ve seen a lot of them working on crossing this “chasm”.

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This post shares learning on how you can build a customer support organization that will scale with your business, and provide best-in-class customer service, which will drive customer retention.

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Step 1: Run an audit of your support organization

A good place to start is to list the most common reasons customers are contacting you about. Go ahead and manually classify 200 tickets from your support inbox. This should take you about an hour. You can build categories from scratch, or use this spreadsheet of the most common requests for e-commerce companies we built.

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Now, you should be able to understand what problems are causing the most pain to customers.

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If a specific type of request is above 10% of requests, then it’s a good candidate for optimization. For instance, if you’re getting a lot of “where is my order” questions, here are a few things you can do to deflect those:

• Add a tracking section for customers to track their package on your site. Aftership can help here.
• Send updates to customers about issues with delivery, through SMS or email.

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Now that you have a good understanding of the reasons customers are contacting you for, you can map the customer journey, and identify what actions your agents need to take to respond to tickets.

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Later, you can use this for training purposes, and to identify optimization opportunities.

At Piper, we basically studied the whole customer journey and tried to identify all reasons why someone could contact us (based on previous history). This helped us quickly identify where customers were "blocked"

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Finally, let’s analyze the efficiency of your team. Of course, every business is different, but you can use this table to figure out how efficient your agents are compared to other stores. A good metric to track it is ticket closed per month. Just make sure that satisfaction remains consistent.

Related: Learn more about the impact of live chat on sales. And see how Gorgias live chat can help you turn more browsers into buyers with chat campaigns.

Step 2: Figure out how you can improve the customer experience

Now, let’s work on creating “wow moments” for your customers. If you manage to exceed customers expectations when they contact you, you’re most likely to increase their loyalty and have them refer your store to their friends.

Here are a few ways you can create “wow moments”.

Make it easy for customers to contact you

You should be where your customers are. For example, if you have a Facebook page with a large audience, consider it as a real customer support channel. The point is, you should provide the same level of assistance across all support channels that your customer will use.

Also, don't be afraid to contact customers first, especially when they have items in their shopping cart. Offering help or a discount code at the right time could make the difference between a sale and an abandoned cart.

Example: providing high quality support on Facebook
70% of customers consider Facebook as a live chat support. To maximize customer satisfaction, your response time should be no more than 1 min. You’ll then be listed as a very responsive page, which will encourage your customers to respond.

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You can also leverage public posts to build relationship with your customers. Another easy way to facilitate customer communication is to remove the need for customers to repeat themselves. On your support platform, make sure your merge Facebook conversations with email tickets. This way, if the customer switches channel, your team will have access to the context of what the customer said before.

Related: Check out our trends and best practices for customer support.

Personalize every interaction with customer support

You should leverage every data point you have about the customer to personalize the way you communicate with them:
For how long they have been a customer
Their order preference
Their location
The days of the “we value your business” are over.

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Always go an extra mile for your customers. If the customer asks for the status of their order, don’t respond only with the tracking number. Go get the order status on UPS so the customer doesn’t have to do it themselves when they’ll receive your email in the subway with poor network connection.

Another good thing to do is to use a specific tone with your customer, that matches the brand image you want to convey.

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If you’re into gifs, you can use them to build a brand tone your own set of gifs, designed for your own brand, and use them in your support emails. You can hire an illustrator on Upwork for that, or build them yourself.

Related: Tips to respond to angry customer emails.

Step 3: Give your team the “ironman suit” for support

Now that you know the level of support you aim at giving your customers, and you know what actions your agents need to take to get the delivery info, create an RMAs, etc., you can start optimizing the process for them.

Display rich customer profiles for your agents

To personalize messages, your agents need to have access to customer data. You can leverage the standard Shopify integration from your help desk as a starting point.

Though, it can be relevant to connect other data points to your help desk:

• Display fulfillment data. Shippo is great for that
• Inventory data: Stitch, display inventory to the reps
• NPS responses
• Responses to last promotions

If you’re on Zendesk, enabling the Shopify integration is a good start: it shows how much the customer has spent, and the past orders.

Some Gorgias customers have pretty advanced widgets that display data from Shopify, Stitch & Shipstation. This way, all the customer information is available.

Empower your reps to perform actions from support conversations

You can create custom widgets for your help desk, so that your agents can trigger actions from your help desk. Here are the most helpful actions:

• Create a coupon
• Place a replacement order
• Cancelling an order
• Create an RMA

This is a bit more tricky to implement. You need to build a custom app with buttons that will trigger actions - there are some good tutorials for Zendesk, Freshdesk & Help Scout. At Gorgias, we’ve built integrations with Stitch, Shipstation to embed these actions in the product, and enable you to add your own.

Other 3rd party apps like Chargedesk enable you to refund customers in one click.

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Step 4: Track your progress

Our goal here is to improve the customer experience to drive sales. A good way to track the efficiency of your support work is to compare the behavior of customers that have been in contact with customer support from those who have not.

Shopify helps you easily to this. You can create an integration between your help desk and Shopify to tag customers who reach out to support, using the Shopify API. Say you add a “customer_support” tag to them.

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Then, you can use Shopify statistics to monitor how the cohort of customers who have been in touch with your support team behaves, and assess the impact of your efforts with customer support.

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Another way to proceed is to tag orders that generated a support tickets. This way, if you work on improving delivery notifications, you can monitor the impact.

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Final thoughts

Building a scalable support team that provides an amazing customer experience takes time.

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Try to test different “wow moments”, iterate on the way you personalize messages, on the tone you’re using, and always track your progress. Among the teams we surveyed, several mentioned they managed to increase sales repeat by 30% after implementing these tactics.

Want to learn more about how customer support can improve your conversion rate and lead to more purchases? Check out our guides to ecommerce upselling and Shopify abandoned cart recovery.

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

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

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What is customer service ticket prioritization?

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

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

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

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

Low-priority ticket requests

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

 Low-priority tickets include:

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

Medium-priority ticket requests

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

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

High-priority ticket requests

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

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

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

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Best practices for prioritizing customer service requests

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

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

1) Respond to your most loyal customers first

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

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

How Gorgias can help you respond to VIP customers

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

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

2) Tag repeat customers as high-priority tickets

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

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

How Gorgias can help identify repeat customers

3) Automate simple requests wherever possible

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

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

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

How Gorgias can help you automate answers to simple requests

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How Gorgias can help tag pre-sales tickets

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

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

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

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

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

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

How Gorgias helps you automatically tag tickets from specific channels

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

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

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

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

How Gorgias can auto-close no-reply tickets

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

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

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

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

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

How Gorgias helps you stop angry customers from leaving reviews

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

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

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

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

How Gorgias helps you find tickets about recent orders

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

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

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

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

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

How Gorgias helps with prioritizing service tickets

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How Gorgias helps your team respond to all tickets quickly

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

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

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

Automate ticket prioritization with Gorgias

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

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

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

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

Free shipping has become so ubiquitous in ecommerce that shoppers now expect it. 

According to a survey conducted by Forbes, 77% of respondents abandoned their cart because they were unhappy with the shipping options. 84% made a purchase because it qualified for free shipping. 

Free shipping isn’t always an option for ecommerce stores though, especially for those with small margins or where shipping is expensive for every order. 

These are the best strategies for how to offer free shipping, even if you’re unsure it’s something your business can afford. 

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Is offering free shipping in ecommerce worth the cost?

Free shipping has become a key differentiator in a very crowded ecommerce ecosystem, with 75% of customers now expecting it on all orders. 

Offering free shipping can drive more revenue for your business, encourage repeat business, decrease cart abandonment, and even pull customers away from your competition. 

Let’s be clear: Offering free shipping for all products is not sustainable for most businesses. But free shipping is not all-or-nothing. Below, explore why providing free shipping in some capacity is worth the expense for your business. 

Encourage customers to become repeat buyers

One survey found that 90% of consumers consider free shipping to be the primary factor driving them to shop with online retailers more frequently. And, according to Gorgias, repeat shoppers generate 300% more revenue than first-time shoppers, on average.

When customers are online shopping, they remember easy experiences, which includes not having to pay for shipping when they find something they love. A stress-free experience (without unpleasant surprises at checkout) creates loyal customers who want to shop with your business long term. 

📚 Recommended reading: Learn why customer experience is a largely untapped revenue stream for most ecommerce brands. 

Incentivize higher average order volume (AOV)

On top of that, some free shipping models encourage customers to place larger orders, generating more revenue per customer.

Take the minimum order value model (what you might call the Amazon not-Prime model), where shipping only becomes free once the cart reaches a certain subtotal. Depending on which study you prefer, at least 84% — and perhaps as many as 93% of customers — have added items to their cart to qualify for free shipping, increasing average transaction value and potentially total revenue per customer.

Sway customers away from competitors

When you offer free shipping and a competitor doesn’t, that single difference can pull new customers your way — and away from the competition. When 90% of consumers consider free shipping their top incentive and a full 60% of them expect free shipping no matter what, offering it is a huge differentiator for your customer base. 

📚Recommended reading: 7 Strategies for Creating a Customer-Centric Post-Purchase Experience

Decrease cart abandonment

One firm determined the overall rate of cart abandonment in ecommerce stores is north of 75%, and unexpected charges (including shipping charges) at checkout are the top culprit.

In other words, providing free shipping — and keeping other unexpected fees out of the checkout process — will reduce cart abandonment and increase conversion rate for typical ecommerce businesses.

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Is your online store ready to offer free shipping?

Making the decision to implement free shipping isn’t always as simple as flipping a switch. It takes careful planning and even more careful execution. Consider the following factors to help you understand the cost of free shipping for your business and decide if it’s the right move for you.  

Understand how much shipping costs your ecommerce business

The demand for free shipping has changed the way that small businesses choose to operate. For example, writer Amanda Mull at The Atlantic reveals how free shipping priorities (and algorithms favoring the vendors who offer it) have hurt numerous small business owners on Etsy. 

If you’re operating on razor-thin margins and you’re already struggling to be price-competitive, pivoting to an always-free shipping model might not be feasible. Even if your margins are healthy, for many smaller ecommerce retailers, blanket free shipping isn’t sustainable or feasible—nor are the extra costs that come with it.

Next steps: How to calculate shipping costs for your business 

On a spreadsheet, compile the shipping costs for every product you sell — from the smallest and lightest to the largest and bulkiest — to all four corners of the US (if you’re a US-based store) and anywhere you ship internationally. 

This cost will differ based on your preferred shipping carrier, too. Compare rates between FedEx, UPS, and USPS to see who has the most affordable option — we’ve linked shipping calculators for each above. Once you have these numbers, calculate your average shipping cost. Then, multiply it by the average number of orders you get in one month. 

You’ll also want to look at your best-selling items and calculate how much it costs to ship them, as you’ll likely be sending these out more often than other items in your catalog. 

Don’t worry about exact numbers here. The goal is to get a ballpark number to compare with your monthly revenue. If your estimated shipping costs will put you in the red, free shipping may not be the best option (even with the bump in orders). If this is the case, consider qualified or flat-rate shipping instead — more on both below. 

📚 Recommended reading: Our list of shipping best practices for ecommerce businesses.

Consider flat-rate shipping instead

Offering a flat-rate shipping charge is one way to give customers a low-cost shipping option without absorbing the entire cost yourself. 

Even if you can’t afford free shipping, charging one flat shipping cost for all orders on your site incentivizes larger orders. And, if you can keep the flat rate low, it can convince customers who just want to make a small order to convert. 

Set up flat rate shipping in Shopify

Setting up flat rate shipping is quick and easy if you use Shopify: Here’s how to do it.

Determine your free shipping limit

Most brands can’t support universally-free shipping. That’s why a qualified free shipping option based on factors like order size or location is such a good option. 

The most straightforward way to offer qualified free shipping is to set a minimum order amount. But in terms of your bottom line, this minimum threshold needs to be high enough that you aren’t losing money on most transactions.

Here’s a formula for calculating your free shipping threshold:

Free shipping threshold = (Average shipping cost per order / gross profit margin percentage as a decimal) + average value of an order

Free shipping threshold = ($10 / .30) + $50

Free shipping threshold = $83.33

The result you get from this formula is the average amount at which free shipping won’t create a loss for you.

Now in some cases that figure will be too high to be all that relevant. “Free shipping on orders $350+” can make sense for some retailers, but not those with an average ticket of $50.

Fit Small Business gives additional formulas for calculating a minimum threshold that still operates at a loss. 

Consider free shipping for returns

Customers hate paying for return shipping. If you can afford it, letting shoppers return an item for free is a great way to avoid driving them away. It also can create repeat business, low-effort experiences, and encourage loyalty. 

Of course, free returns leave you vulnerable to expensive spammers and order spikes. So, tighten up your return policy and try to incentivize exchanges over returns to protect lost revenue.

Find other ecommerce differentiators besides free shipping

Ecommerce is a wide field, and your business is competing for only a small slice of the market. Look for differentiators with lower cost pressures and high levels of impact that may be unique to your industry or market.

Free shipping isn’t the only thing that matters. Fast delivery also makes a difference in many industries and markets. Can you outmaneuver your competition by offering next-day shipping, even at a premium price? Perhaps your customers will be willing to pay for faster service if it isn’t available elsewhere.

Here are a few other areas you might explore in search of other ecommerce differentiators:

• Unique services
• Ecosystem effects (think Apple: “Our products all work better together, so stick with us across our catalog”)
• Value-adds (freebies, discounts on future orders, etc.)
• Multiple shipping and delivery options, including fast or flat rate
• Eco-friendly shipping or packaging approaches

Similarly, you may not be able to prioritize free shipping until you figure out other logistics like inventory management, order management, order fulfillment, order tracking, and returns management.

How to offer free shipping on a budget

If you’re ready to put together your free shipping strategy, use these tips to craft a program that’s enticing to online shoppers without destroying your bottom line.

1) Increase product prices to absorb the cost of shipping

According to research from the Baymard Institute, 48% of shoppers abandoned their cart because the extra costs were too high. People like the transparency of seeing one price without getting surprised by additional fees at checkout. 

Speaking generally, most customers would prefer to pay $50 for an item that ships free than spend $45 on the same item, only to discover an additional $5 charge for shipping in their shopping carts. Even though you’re passing shipping costs onto the customer in other ways, you still give buyers the perception of lower costs overall. 

Consider raising your prices to include shipping costs to limit surprises at checkout and increase transparency. 

2) Offer a “free shipping for orders over” model to incentivize higher AOVs

Offering free shipping when a customer reaches a minimum price threshold can be a powerful strategy for raising ticket value.

Customers will frequently add more items to reach that threshold, increasing average order value (AOV), overall revenue, and your business’s order volume as a whole.

To make it easy for customers to see how close they are to free shipping, add an app to your ecommerce store (like the Essential Free Shipping Bar for Shopify stores) that shows progress visually. For example, Gorgias customer OLIPOP makes it easy for folks to see how many more packs of soda they need to purchase to get free shipping. 

This is also a great way to build upselling into your strategy. When customers are looking for additional items to meet the free shipping threshold, consider showing items that pair well at checkout. This automation is easy to add via the app store if you’re on Shopify, and you can see how OLIPOP sneaks in suggestions in the screenshot above.  

If you’re going to offer completely free shipping, make sure you use it as a marketing tool and make it very clear to shoppers. For example, Woxer uses a banner at the top of its site to announce that it offers free shipping across the US no matter the order total.

A cohesive and realistic shipping strategy is highly valuable to any company that ships products to people because it is part of your brand image.

📚 Recommended reading: Our guide to creating an ecommerce shipping and fulfillment strategy. 

3) Offer subscription-based products to increase LTV

In a survey conducted by Salesforce for CFO, more than half of survey respondents said that 40% of their revenue was made up of subscriptions. 

A subscription format is powerful because it ensures repeat purchases and raises the overall lifetime value (LTV) of customers who opt in. If you choose to become part of the subscription economy, you could choose to offer free shipping on subscriber orders only. That way you limit the amount of free shipping you give, and further incentivize shoppers to sign up for a subscription. 

4) Limit free shipping to certain items, customers, or locations

Stores with wide product catalogs that include many low-dollar items may not be able to offer blanket free shipping. But, you can limit free shipping to certain high-dollar product categories, select items within those categories, people who live within a certain distance, or VIP customers.

Here are a few approaches you can use to limit free shipping: 

• Shoppers must reach a designated spend threshold
• Free shipping is limited to members (like Amazon Prime or Madewell Insider) 
• Free shipping is limited to shoppers with a certain number of points in a loyalty program (a service like LoyaltyLion can help you manage this) 
• Shipping costs are location based (For example, US only if your store is located there) 
• Products that cost over a certain dollar amount automatically qualify 

5) Partner with a third-party logistics company to offer free (sometimes two-day) shipping at scale

Partnering with a third-party logistics company allows you to split inventory across multiple fulfillment centers throughout the nation. That means they’ll end up closer to customers’ homes, which reduces shipping costs because of location proximity, and means that you can offer faster shipping for less cost. 

ShipBob is a great option for this, as they’re a trusted global fulfillment company.  

Take care of your shoppers with the Gorgias + ShipBob integration. Sync shipping data with your helpdesk, reduce tab-shuffling, and help you improve customer experience during fulfillment. 

6) Optimize your packaging for cost

Shipping fees are calculated based on item weight, size, speed, and distance to destination. And the size and weight of your packaging contribute to that cost. Cutting down on the dimensions of your packaging where possible and using lighter-weight mailers can lower the cost of each package. 

📚Recommended reading: 8 Tips to Minimize Shipping Costs and Maintain Quick Delivery

7) Create a limited-time free shipping offer

There’s nothing quite as powerful as a ticking timer, whether it’s a 15% off coupon that’s only good for the next hour or a sale that only lasts for the weekend. Discounts are powerful, but free shipping can be just as enticing.

Consider adding free shipping promotions to existing promotional events such as holiday sales, store anniversary sales, Black Friday and Cyber Monday, and other seasonal events pertinent to your industry and market.

Time-limited holiday sales can be effective, but they also tend to be some of your busiest sales windows in any given year. If you could use some additional help with your logistics this upcoming Black Friday and Cyber Monday, check out our complete guide to BFCM logistics.

📚Recommended reading: The 12 Best Shipping Software Tools for Ecommerce Stores

Provide world-class customer service with Gorgias

Free shipping is often one key to a world-class customer experience in ecommerce. But whatever you choose to do with your shipping policies, you absolutely must pair it with world-class customer service and support. Customers will appreciate your free shipping, but they’ll love you (and show it through repeat business) when you outpace the competition in terms of customer service.

Gorgias is an all-in-one customer service and helpdesk platform built for ecommerce businesses like yours. It integrates with a variety of different apps, like LoyaltyLion, Attentive, and Klaviyo. We operate at the speed of ecommerce, empowering you to serve and scale like never before. We also offer support for logistics like free shipping and order management, largely thanks to our many ecommerce integrations.

Ready to see what Gorgias can do? Get started for free right now!

Responding to customer complaints can be challenging. It’s hard to diffuse a situation when a customer is already roaring mad. 

Investing in acquiring new customers is anywhere from 5 to 25 times more expensive than campaigns aimed at customer retention. 

So, diffusing the situation is always worth the effort. 

Depending on the reason for the customer complaint, you can offer free swag and coupons to keep them calm and have them falling in love with your brand all over again.

There are some instances, however, where the customer is just plain wrong, and you shouldn’t give into them. In this post, we explore both sides of the coin and give you specific guidance on how to deal with customer complaints. 

Common categories of customer complaints

Why do customers complain in the first place? It’s usually because they’ve been let down in some way. 

Their expectations were not met.

Maybe they incorrectly read your return policy, or they thought the product’s color was going to be more vibrant, based on the image online. (A clear return policy can help here. Check out our free return policy template for help.)

When you’re first presented with a frustrated customer, it’s important to put yourself in their shoes and determine what let them down, so you can respond more empathetically.

Here are some common issues:

Website or order issues

A customer might be frustrated when your website glitches. There are so many different things that can go wrong:

• Product page has incorrect information
• Page or website isn’t loading
• There are errors with checkout page form fields
• The order confirmation page won’t load
• An item suddenly goes out of stock and the order can’t be processed
• The cart can’t be easily edited
  

The list goes on.

Customers who are faced with tech issues can easily become very frustrated. And without a fast response and resolution, they’re likely to bounce from the site. 

Because ecommerce companies offer products for website visitors to browse, this industry has some low bounce rates. But website glitches will certainly cause higher-than-desired bounce rates and consequently lower sales.

Product concerns

You might also get customer complaints about your products. Typically, a customer would complain after they bought and received the product and it didn’t meet their expectations. 

But you could get a website visitor in your chat software who is complaining before they’ve even bought the product. 

They might be trolling you after seeing a social media ad. It happens.

The majority of product-related complaints will be legitimate, however, so make sure that you not only help the customer with a refund or other solution, but that you also pass on the feedback to your manager.

Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning

- Bill Gates

Refund issues

Refunds and reimbursements are another big category when it comes to negative comments and chat messages from customers. 

The customer might be angry that they can’t return a clearance item, that the refund window has passed, or that they have to pay for return shipping. 

Delivery delays

Maybe the product isn’t the problem. Sometimes delivery speeds can lead to customer complaints.

Customers might complain if the item is received later than they expected, or even if they knew that there would be a delay when ordering, but are still annoyed by it. 

How to respond to customer complaints

So now that we know some common types of customer complaints, let’s figure out what to do about them. 

Top channels for handling customer support

Today, customer service and support questions happen across a variety of channels. A customer service best practice is to respond to the customer using the channel they contact you on:

• Original social media post - If they have complained visibly on social media from their own account, you should consider commenting on that post from your brand’s main profile or the brand’s support profile (if you have a separate one) if they have tagged you. Say something polite and simple such as “We’re sorry that your order didn’t get received on time and that our support team didn’t help. Please email us and we’ll make sure the refund is processed correctly this time.” 
  

• Social media comment on your brand’s post - You should reply to every negative comment that someone writes on your branded social media posts. Respond to their concern, and then attempt to take the conversation to email or chat.
  

• Chat support - Live chat is now the top support channel based on consumer preference. That means that most customer complaints will be received on that customer service channel. And that’s great news, because this is a private conversation between you and the customer, so you can address the issue right away without having to move the conversation to a different channel. 

• Email - Some customers still prefer to contact businesses via email. Because people don’t respond to their email right away, this can delay resolution and cause further frustration. You can use an email response to prompt the customer to initiate a chat when they have time, so that the issue can be resolved live. Check out our email templates to help your team start responding to email complaints more effectively.
  

• Phone - Many ecommerce companies don’t offer phone support because of the cost, particularly when they serve multiple markets and languages. However, call support is a great channel for handling frustrated customers because you can speak directly to them, diffuse their anger with a calm voice, and resolve the issue quickly.

Templates for responding to customer complaints

Customer relationship management is ever-evolving, so make sure that you are improving your scripts and increasing your capacity for empathy. Your customer service team should be made up of people who genuinely care about your customers and want to help.

Here are some different customer service scripts you can use for customer complaint responses.

To move a conversation off of social media:

Thank you for voicing this concern. We want to help fix this issue as soon as possible. Can you please email us at support@email.com or start a chat on our website? 

To apologize for bad customer service:‍

I’m sorry that you didn’t get the support you needed when you chatted with our team. I want to take care of this issue personally. We’ll also make sure this doesn’t happen again and train our team to do better. Please email me at manager@email.com.

To handle delivery errors:

I apologize that you didn’t receive this order by the expected date. I want to help make this right. Click here to track your order: {{las_order_tracking_url}}.
To thank you for your patience, here’s a $10 coupon off your next order. 

Pro tip:

Provide personalized support easily by using customer variables like the last order id and tracking URL into your answer templates. Simply connect your ecommerce platform and your Gorgias helpdesk to unlock this feature.

For long, unexpected delivery delays:

You’re right, you should have received the order by now. I can ship you a replacement, and if you receive the original, please refuse the package or send it back to us if you’re not at home to refuse it.

To handle frustration about known delivery delays:

From increased demand (which we’re so grateful for!) our order fulfillment timelines have gotten a lot slower lately. We’re sorry for that. But good new, your order is on the way!
Click here to track your order: {{las_order_tracking_url}}.
We can’t wait to hear how you enjoy it, so please let us know. 

To respond to refund requests far outside the policy window:

Unfortunately, it is too far past the return window for us to process this return. Per our policy, returns can be processed up to 45 days. While I can’t process this return, I can offer you a $10 coupon off of your next purchase. 

Related: Check out our return and refund policy template generator.

To respond to refund requests slightly outside the policy window:

While it is past the return window, you’re only a couple days past, so I can process your return. I will create your printable return label, as our returns portal won’t allow you to initiate the return process on your own because of the timing. Would you like me to send the printable return label to the email address used for this order or a different email address?‍

To respond to refund requests for non returnable products:

Unfortunately, this item can’t be returned, as per our return policy. We can’t process returns for clearance items. However, I can offer you 20% off your next order. Would you like this one time coupon code?

To hand the conversation over to a manager:

I understand that you’re frustrated. I can’t help further with this situation, but I can get you in touch with a manager who might be able to help with your request. Would you prefer that she get in touch with you via email or phone?

When to escalate customer complaints to management

For the most part, you’ll need to stick with your company’s policy and not give in to angry customers, but sometimes you might need to bend.

For example, if a customer demands a refund for something outside of policy and refuses to give up on that demand, you might want to just get them in touch with the manager.

The manager or business owner might decide to allow the return, rather than to have this angry customer complain about the business online.

Essentially, you should try to handle issues yourself within policy. If a customer is asking for something outside of policy and is very demanding and angry, that’s when you should escalate the case.

You’ll have to rely on your customer service skills and intuition to help you make the right call.

When to offer special gifts and coupons (and what to give)

Should you offer gifts and bonuses to customers?

Only do so when the company is at fault. You might give a coupon code for a certain amount off their next order, or a percentage discount. Or, you might allow them to choose any product under a certain amount and you ship it to them free of charge. 

Here are some reasons when it would be appropriate to offer a special coupon or free gift:

• The order was delivered very late
• The customer tried repeatedly to create the order despite many website errors
• The wrong product was received
• The product drastically undermet expectations
• A customer support representative provided terrible service
  

You shouldn’t offer special gifts or coupons or free products when a customer is bullying you, though. Don’t do it just because someone is extremely frustrated. Instead, just try to resolve their issue as best you can.

When to stick with your policies and when to bend the rules

Here’s a great quote from an ecommerce store founder about the need to sometimes let the customer be right, even when they’re not:

Our biggest mistake was not giving into crazy customers and my lesson was that it’s better to lose a little money than to be right.
For example, we’ve had instances when the customer didn’t follow a certain refund policy and still wanted a refund. Sometimes it’s better to play nice and not follow your refund policy as angry crazy customers can make you lose a lot more money. With social media at everyone’s disposal you have to be very careful.

- Alex Iconn, founder of Luxy Hair

Read the full story Luxy Hair on Shopify blog pos.

How to use automation wisely to speed up response times and reduce frustration

The faster you respond, the better the customer experience. Quick response times reduce frustration because your customer doesn’t have to feel like they’re waiting around for you.

If a customer is already upset with your company, and they have to wait a long time for a response, they might be even angrier.

The good news is that you can use Gorgias to automatically prioritize customers with negative sentiments in their messages. We can detect their frustration and make sure they hop to the front of the line. 

You can also use Gorgias to create automated responses that handle simple issues. For example, if someone says “My order hasn’t been received yet” your chat bot can reply “I’m sorry! What is the order number?” 

This way, the customer can grab the order number while a human agent is joining the chat. 

With Gorgias, rules can be used to set up automations, add tags to support messages, and prioritize certain customers. Here’s how to use rules:

Responding to customer complaints isn’t always easy. But when you make it your mission to empathize with your customers and deepen their relationship with your brand, you’ll be in the right mindset to reply.

Gorgias helps online merchants grow through exceptional customer service. Check out our platform.

Every year, businesses lose a total of $75 billion due to poor customer service. To prevent bad experiences with support from limiting your company’s growth, you need to prioritize improving customer satisfaction with a fast, low-effort, and helpful customer experience. 

Most brands would agree that customer satisfaction is important, but few realize just how much interactions with customer support matter for your revenue. In our analysis of over 10,000 online businesses, we found that raising CSAT score by just one point — from 4 to 4.9 — lifts overall revenue by 4%. 

In this article, we’ll dive deep into a metric that tells you a lot about your company’s customer experience and revenue potential: customer satisfaction score (CSAT). We’ll offer nine strategies to help you measure and boost your CSAT score, and share some tips to get more customers to rate their satisfaction so you have the best data to work with.

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The most important ways to improve CSAT scores and response rates

If you're looking for a quick summary, you've found it! Here are the top ways to raise CSAT and response rates:

• Review CSAT scores under four and look for common themes
• Reach out to low-scoring customers and ask them follow up questions
• Automate repetitive tasks to free up time for agents to help with more complex or unique questions
• Look for opportunities to improve the product experience and customer journey beyond the agent level
• Automate CSAT surveys after positive customer service interactions
• Personalize your CSAT email or incentivize longer CSAT responses

What is customer satisfaction (CSAT) score?

Customer satisfaction (CSAT) score is a customer support metric that measures how a customer feels after an interaction with your brand’s customer support. Brands measure CSAT by sending out customer satisfaction surveys as a follow-up to customer service interactions. The survey simply asks customers to rate the interaction on a scale from 1 to 5, 1 being the worst and 5 being the best.

While customers rate the interactions between 1 and 5, many company’s run scores through a formula that will spit out an overall CSAT score somewhere between 0 and 100. However, we at Gorgias keep CSAT simple and just average all CSAT responses for an overall score from 1-5. Our recommended goal for CSAT is 4.8.

On top of the numeric score, CSAT surveys also usually include a field for customers to explain why they chose that rating. This qualitative feedback is a hugely important benefit of measuring CSAT because they help you understand your customer support’s strengths and weaknesses.

CSAT Formula

One way to calculate your overall CSAT score is to divide the number of respondents who rated their interaction as 4/5 or 5/5 by your total number of CSAT survey responses. Then, multiply by 100. The number you are left with is your company's overall CSAT score.

For example, if you have 500 CSAT responses and 400 of those responses are positive (4/5 or 5/5), then your CSAT score is 400/500 x 100 = 80.

However, you can also keep things simple by taking the average of all your CSAT responses and using that as your CSAT score. That’s what we do at Gorgias: If a company’s CSAT responses are 50% 4 and 50% 5, their overall CSAT score is 4.5.

What’s a good benchmark for CSAT score?

The average CSAT score varies from industry to industry, but here’s a general breakdown of CSAT score by industry:

• Consulting: 85
• Healthcare: 79
• Ecommerce: 74
• Digital marketing agencies: 67
• B2B software and SaaS: 65
• Education: 47
• Consumer services: 20
• Communication and media: 16

As mentioned, we at Gorgias simply average all CSAT responses to result in a score from 1-5. We recommend our customers, all of whom are ecommerce merchants, aim for a CSAT score of 4.8.

That said, if your CSAT score doesn’t line up with your industry, don’t be discouraged. Every brand starts somewhere. Rather than focusing on your industry’s benchmarks, focus on the changes you can make to improve your CSAT score one point at a time, month after month. You might even see your CSAT score shoot up when you start collecting more responses or start tweaking your customer service offerings. 

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9 strategies to improve CSAT score fast

The main point in tracking your CSAT score is to look for ways to improve it. If you would like to start creating more satisfied customers, here are nine effective tips to try:

1. Audit CSAT scores under 4/5 and look for common themes
2. Use natural language processing (NLP) to find common themes in CSAT feedback
3. Reach out to low-scoring customers for deeper feedback
4. Create a system to measure ticket quality objectively
5. Bolster your customer service training and resources around problem areas
6. Automate repetitive tickets to free up more time for agents
7. Look for opportunities to improve the product experience and customer journey beyond the agent level
8. Implement customer service best practices like omnichannel, proactive, and self-service support
9. Activate instant messaging channels like live chat, social media DMs, and SMS

1) Audit CSAT scores under 4/5 and look for common themes

Positive CSAT survey responses are great, but negative responses tend to offer the most value. Auditing CSAT responses lower than 4/5 can help you identify common themes and issues harming customer satisfaction.

If you use Gorgias, you can go to Statistics > Satisfaction to see every single ticket in chronological order and investigate tickets four stars and under:

Jot down common themes that pop up and tally up the number of tickets that mention those issues: Wait times, unclear answers, and unresolved product issues are all common offenders. Issues with lots of tallies are likely to be high-impact opportunities for improvement. For instance, if long wait times are a common theme in your negative CSAT responses, then you know what your support team will need to do in order to improve customer satisfaction — find ways to reduce wait times.

2) Use natural language processing (NLP) to find common themes in CSAT feedback

As your brand grows and receives more tickets, analyzing every single low-scoring CSAT response may not be possible. If you don’t have an internal team to help you analyze large amount of data, a thematic analysis tool that uses natural language processing (NLP) can quickly scan all your tickets and look for common themes.

Here’s how the process works:

• Download all your CSAT scores — if you use Gorgias, you’ll find a CSV download button in your Satisfaction dashboard
• Run your downloaded file through a thematic analysis tool like Thematic
• Watch the tool turn a mountain of scattered responses into a list of common keywords, pain points, and themes 
• Study those themes to gain important insight into your customers’ needs

Just like we described above, these themes help you isolate one or two areas to work on at a time, which is the most strategic way to improve your CSAT score.

3) Reach out to low-scoring customers for deeper feedback

CSAT surveys are great for forming a general idea of a customer's satisfaction level, but they don't always tell you everything you need to know. Even with the open-ended field, you may not get much detail about why customers pick a certain rating. In cases where customers give your company a low CSAT score, reaching out to them to get detailed feedback could reveal more about how you can prevent low scores in the future.

4) Create a system to measure ticket quality objectively

One issue that may cause lower CSAT scores is poor or inconsistent responses coming from your team. Creating a detailed rubric that breaks down what a quality ticket response looks like can provide both a valuable template for your agents and a more comprehensive system for objectively measuring ticket quality. By aligning your team’s efforts around this kind of rubric, you’ll be much closer to providing satisfying responses to all customer inquiries. 

In the rubric, you can include aspects like response time, accuracy (with company policy), alignment with brand voice and tone, and anything else you believe contributes to a great customer service interaction for your brand. 

While the purpose of the rubric is to help agents create responses that get high satisfaction scores, that may not always be the case. For example, if your brand voice is very punny and whimsical, a response with lots of puns will score high on the rubric. However, that ticket might not be clear enough to be satisfying for the customers. If you notice that interactions score high on your rubric but low on CSAT, then you may need to update the rubric.

5) Bolster your customer service training and resources around problem areas

Once you use CSAT surveys to identify areas with room for improvement, it's time to put that data into action. Bolstering your customer service training and resources can help you eliminate specific issues harming the customer experience and improve your CSAT score.

Creating an internal knowledge base so that agents have easy access to the information they need to assist customers can be one effective way to bolster the quality of your customer support. Providing your agents with templated responses is another way to ensure that every customer interaction is satisfactory and on brand.

6) Automate repetitive tickets to free up more time for agents

When agents have more time to give each support ticket their undivided attention and A+ effort, customer satisfaction is bound to improve. But chances are that most tickets that your company receives don't actually need an in-depth response from a live agent. And if those repetitive tickets take up too much time, agents won’t be able to take the time to give a high-quality response when it’s needed.

Support tickets such as "where is my order?" inquiries, common product questions, and other repetitive tickets take time and resources away from more complex tickets requiring a more detailed and personalized response. 

By using Gorgias to create automated responses to these repetitive tickets, you can free up time in your support team's daily schedule so that they can put more focus and effort into high-value or complex tickets. Specifically, you can use:

• Variable Macros to create high-quality, personalized templates
• Automated Rules to fire responses and trigger actions like “Refund order”
• Self-Service Flows to let customers find answers and modify orders themselves 

7) Look for opportunities to improve the product experience and customer journey beyond the agent level

Customer satisfaction doesn't begin with customer support, and it doesn't end there, either. Along with boosting customer satisfaction by improving your customer support quality, you can also improve your CSAT score by searching for opportunities to improve the customer experience beyond the agent level.

This can include: 

• Improving the quality of your product
• Creating clearer product descriptions to set expectations
• Improving your product photography
• Improving your shipping speed and reliability
• Offering free shipping to qualifying customers
• Creating a more helpful post-purchase experience
• A wide range of other opportunities to create a more satisfying customer journey

Of course, your support team will need to pass along customer feedback with ideas to improve the product and customer experience. Check out our post on collecting and sharing customer feedback for tips.

8) Implement customer service best practices like omnichannel, proactive, and self-service support

Meeting customer expectations regarding customer support is one crucial key to high CSAT scores. Consider incorporating customer support best practices like the following three suggestions to meet those customer expectations.

Omnichannel support is the strategy of creating and uniting customer touchpoints on many channels: email, social media, SMS texting, and more. An omnichannel approach gives you more chances to meet customers where they’re at. Plus, with a helpdesk that combines all of these channels, you can easily manage incoming messages without having to spend half your day switching between windows.

Customer self-service is any tool or resource that helps customers answer questions without having to reach out to an agent — resources like FAQ pages and knowledge bases, self-service flows, or chatbots. 88% of customers expect self-service resources because they are fast and low-effort. Fortunately, self-service resources also reduce the number of repetitive tickets your agents receive on a day-to-day basis. 

Proactive customer service is a strategy to reach out to customers before they think to reach out to support. Common self-service tactics include live chat campaigns that ask customers if they need help while browsing your site or welcoming customers with a DM when they follow your social media profiles. Proactive customer support gives you more opportunities to answer customer questions, offer discounts that boost your conversion rate, or find new ways to make happy customers.

9) Activate instant messaging channels like live chat, social media DMs, and SMS

Slow response times are another common customer support issue that can harm customer satisfaction. If you notice that long wait times are a recurring complaint in your low-scoring CSAT responses, introducing touchpoints that allow fast, one-to-one interactions can lower your response times (and hopefully, by extension, your CSAT score). 

The most effective of these conversational channels include live chat, social media DMs, and SMS texting. These real-time support channels enable your agents to quickly handle multiple tickets at a time, without hours of delay, which is common in emails. 

If you have the bandwidth to keep up with these channels, they can dramatically improve response times and resolution times. That said, be sure you’ve hired enough agents to respond to requests on these live channels within the first few minutes to keep your customer experience great.

Tips to improve CSAT survey response rate

CSAT survey responses are valuable, and collecting as many of them as possible is important. However, customers aren't always going to jump at the opportunity to fill out a survey. To improve your CSAT survey response rate and start collecting more valuable customer feedback, here are a few effective tips:

1. Automate CSAT surveys after customer service interactions
2. Send CSAT surveys while the interaction is still fresh
3. Keep CSAT surveys simple — at least 90% of the time
4. Make the survey visual
5. Personalize your CSAT survey email
6. Give incentives for CSAT responses

1) Automate CSAT surveys after customer service interactions

You should send out a CSAT survey following every customer interaction. One great way to ensure that every customer is sent a survey without further burdening your support team is to send these surveys out automatically.

With Gorgias, you can create CSAT surveys that send automatically following every customer service interaction, ensuring that every customer gets the opportunity to leave feedback.

2) Send CSAT surveys while the interaction is still fresh

Customers are more likely to respond to a CSAT survey when the interaction is still fresh on their minds. It is typically best to send out CSAT surveys immediately following a customer interaction.

The only exception is if you have a particularly complicated product, like a piece of software that the customer needs to set up. That’s because the customer might still need to configure something before they know whether or not your support team effectively addressed the pain point. But for most products, the sooner the better.

3) Keep CSAT surveys simple — at least 90% of the time

While detailed feedback is great, most of your customers won't be willing to answer dozens of survey questions. It's usually best to keep your CSAT surveys short and simple. A single question that asks customers to rank their satisfaction on a scale of 1 to 5, along with an optional form for providing more detailed feedback, is the tried-and-true best format for CSAT surveys.

With that said, there are certainly times when you will want to reach out to customers for more detailed feedback. We've already mentioned how reaching out to low-scoring customers can be a great way to identify issues and take another stab at satisfying them. However, it's best to use these long-form surveys and feedback requests as a follow-up to low-scoring CSAT survey responses instead of the initial survey.

4) Make the survey visual

Making it fun and interesting for customers to fill out your CSAT surveys can go a long way toward boosting your response rate. One simple way to make your surveys more appealing is to include visually engaging elements such as buttons, images, and stars:

5) Personalize your CSAT survey email

Something as simple as including the customer's name in your CSAT survey email can add a professional touch to these emails and help ensure that customers don't mistake them for spam. Referencing the ticket number in question is another effective practice for personalizing CSAT survey emails.

6) Give incentives for CSAT responses (or long-form feedback)

It might not be sustainable long term, but offering incentives such as discount codes or gift cards for CSAT responses can certainly improve your CSAT response rate. If you can't afford to offer incentives for every CSAT response, offering incentives for customers to complete your more long-form feedback surveys can effectively gather more detailed customer feedback.

Why is keeping track of your CSAT score important?

We recommend all brands measure customer satisfaction and use CSAT scores as a key performance indicator (KPI) for the customer support team. That’s true whether you have a large in-house support crew, outsource to a call center, or are a one-person business. Regardless, keeping tabs on your customer satisfaction will pay off. Here’s why:

It’s a leading indicator of customer loyalty and revenue growth

According to Shopify data, even small ecommerce companies with less than four employees spend between $21 to $533 on average to acquire a new customer, depending on the industry. So if your strategy is too focused on customer acquisition — and not customer retention — you’re building a ship with a hole. In other words, you’ll leak revenue from existing customer churn and sink under ocean-sized acquisition costs.

A high CSAT score indicates you don’t have a hole in your ship: Your customer loyalty is high and you’ll stay afloat at a much lower cost. And the best way to keep customer loyalty high is to deliver a customer experience that satisfies your customers. 

In our CX Growth Playbook, which analyzed data from over 10,000 ecommerce merchants, we also found that raising your CSAT from 4 to 4.9 could raise overall revenue by 4%, thanks to the number of repeat purchases that follow high CSAT responses.

It measures the quality of your customer experience

Customer experience is complex and multi-dimensional. Everything, from the quality of your website’s FAQ page to the email customers receive after a purchase, stacks up into a customer experience that’s either satisfying or frustrating. 

Tracking CSAT scores is one of your best bets to measure the overall quality of your customer support experience. And measuring the quality of your customer support experience is the first step to identifying where you excel and where you have an opportunity to better satisfy customer needs.

It correlates to other customer service KPIs like FRT and AHT

CSAT scores tend to directly correlate with other important customer service KPIs such as first-response time (FRT), average handle time (AHT), average reply times, and resolution times. Tracking all of these KPIs gives you a fuller picture of your customer support experience. 

For example, if your CSAT score and resolution times start to fall but your response times are high, the takeaway is that your support team needs to focus on quality responses, not just fast ones. Low CSAT scores and resolution times indicate that your responses — even if they’re near-instant — aren’t solving customer needs. For example, a cause of this might agents blindly applying canned responses, or Macros, without updating information or making it relevant for the customer.

It helps you identify areas to train your customer service team

Tracking customer satisfaction can help you pinpoint the root cause of issues harming the customer experience, whether that’s slow responses, low-quality responses, or some other aspect of the customer experience that customers find dissatisfying.  For example, while auditing, you might find that many customers are upset about a discount code not applying at checkout. Only once you realize it’s a pattern might you realize that you’ve been communicating the wrong discount code to customers.

By measuring your CSAT and digging into themes across qualitative responses, you may be able to triangulate issues that need customer service training or new resources like a knowledge base. Plus, with the right helpdesk, you may be able to see CSAT broken down by a customer service agent so you can see which agents need additional training or quality assurance.

It surfaces customer feedback you can share with other teams

Above, we explained how you can use the customer feedback from CSAT surveys to improve your customer support service quality. However, you can also use it to improve other areas of your business, too. For example, your team can pass feedback regarding the product itself to your product development team. Similarly, feedback regarding your website can be routed to your marketing or software development team.

Don't use CSAT as your end-all-be-all customer satisfaction metric

CSAT is an insightful metric for customer support teams to track, but it doesn't tell the whole story about customer satisfaction. For example, you could have a high CSAT but never get to 10% of your tickets — those customers would not be satisfied but never get the chance to fill out a survey. Similarly, CSAT may give you a skewed sample population if only your most engaged and happy customers respond to your survey requests.

For that reason, keep an eye on other signals of customer satisfaction, like social media mentions and customer referrals. Other important metrics to track include net promoter score (NPS), first-response time (FRT), average handle time (AHT), and customer effort score (CES).

Gorgias developed a new metric called support performance score, which is our best shot at creating a single north-star metric that measures the overall quality of your support. Support performance score combines CSAT, first-response time, and resolution time to estimate how fast, helpful, and satisfying your support is. If you use Gorgias, you’ll find your support performance score in your Statistics dashboard:

By tracking multiple customer support and customer satisfaction metrics, you can form a comprehensive view of how satisfied customers are with your company and better identify areas where there is room for improvement.

Boost your CSAT score — and revenue — with Gorgias

Improving your ecommerce store's CSAT score can improve customer retention, boost referrals, limit negative reviews, and provide a wide range of other business-boosting benefits. 

From freeing up your team via automated responses to repetitive tickets to speeding up first-response times via SMS and live chat support, Gorgias enables you to move faster, make more happy customers, and grow your store. 

Our platform also offers tools for collecting and analyzing customer feedback automatically so that the valuable information you need to improve your customer experience further is always at your fingertips. See how our customer, Ohh Deer, uses Gorgias' live chat to maintain a 4.95 CSAT score (and generate $50,000 in revenue annually.)

Get started with Gorgias now to see how our industry-leading customer support platform can help you track and improve your CSAT score.