CX Design
Meet Auto QA: Quality Checks Are Here to Stay
TL;DR:
- Manual QA is time-consuming—Auto QA does the heavy lifting. It frees up team leads by automatically reviewing conversations with accuracy and consistency, so they can focus on improving support.
- Auto QA scores 100% of private text conversations, whether handled by a human or AI Agent. It evaluates support quality based on Resolution Completeness, Communication, and Language Proficiency.
- Auto QA supports multiple languages but provides feedback in English. It can assess tickets in any language supported by OpenAI’s GPT-4, ensuring global teams can benefit from automated QA.
- Start with individual meetings before a team-wide rollout of Auto QA. One-on-one conversations help address specific agent concerns and ensure a smooth transition.
Customer satisfaction scores (CSAT) have long been the go-to metric for measuring support quality, with 53% of customer experience leads relying on them. However, CSAT only tells you part of the story.
When customers rate their experience 3 out of 5, what does it really mean? Did they rate the agent’s actions or the company’s policies? Was an agent helpful or inefficient? Did they take unnecessary steps to get to the answer?
Quality assurance checks can fill these gaps, but manual QA is a heavy lift. Team leads often struggle to review more than a small sample of conversations, leaving many issues unchecked.
Auto QA redefines quality assurance for today’s support teams. It transforms QA from a manual task into an automated feedback engine that helps your team deliver excellent support, every single time.
Let's dive into how Auto QA works, how accurate its scoring is, and how you can add it to your support workflow to start improving customer conversations today.
What is Auto QA?
Gorgias Auto QA upgrades the customer service QA process by automatically evaluating 100% of private text conversations, whether handled by a human or AI Agent.
Each message is scored on metrics like Resolution Completeness, Brand Voice, and Accuracy, helping teams fix and address areas of improvement.
With an automated QA process, brands can:
- Save time: Automated quality checks help team leads focus on the most critical tickets.
- Ensure consistency: Both human agents and AI agents are evaluated with a unified, comprehensive quality score.
- Boost performance: Agents can receive targeted coaching to provide more consistent customer experiences.
- Meet customer expectations: Customers benefit from higher-quality support with quicker resolutions and accurate responses.
How Auto QA works
Let's explore a real-life scenario: A customer reaches out about a product issue, seeking troubleshooting help. Here’s how the interaction unfolds:
Customer: "Hi, my device broke, and I bought it less than a month ago. -Kelly"
Support Agent: "Hi Kelly, please send us a photo or a video so we can determine the issue with your device. -Michael"
The ticket is eventually closed, but the customer doesn't leave a CSAT score.
In this case, Auto QA would provide the following insights:
- Communication Score: 3/5. Reason: The agent's wording could benefit from more empathy.
- Resolution Score: "Complete". Reason: The agent effectively addressed the customer's concerns.
How accurate is Auto QA’s scoring?
Auto QA uses a comprehensive scoring system that evaluates conversations on communication proficiency and knowledge accuracy.
To ensure accuracy, Auto QA only scores interactions with at least 250 characters and messages from both agents and customers. It's also smart enough to filter out automated responses, spam, and bot messages.
Auto QA automatically scores three main aspects:
- Resolution Completeness: Did the agent solve everything the customer asked about? This area is scored with a "Complete" or "Incomplete.” For instance, it correctly marks a ticket as "Complete" when a customer resolves their issue or when there's no clear question to address.
- Communication Quality: How well did the agent listen and show empathy? Uses a 1-5 scale, looking at how well your agents acknowledged a customer’s concerns and communicated the solution.
- Language Proficiency: Did the agent communicate properly? Uses a 1-5 scale to check spelling, grammar, and syntax.
For deeper feedback, certain criteria require manual scoring from team leads:
- Accuracy: How accurate was the information provided by the agent?
- Efficiency: How quickly did the agent handle the ticket? How well did they minimize the number of follow-ups?
- Internal Compliance: How closely did the agent follow your team’s internal processes and brand guidelines?
- Brand Voice: How well did the agent use brand vocabulary, greetings, sign-offs, and tone of voice?
How to integrate Auto QA into your workflow
Whether you're just starting with quality checks or transitioning from manual QA, Auto QA can seamlessly fit into your existing processes. Here's how to get started.
1. Set your standards
What does “good” look like for your team? Review Auto QA's scoring system and decide which metrics matter most for your brand, from Resolution Completeness to Brand Voice. This will help you set realistic targets for your team to work toward.
Tip: Start by prioritizing a couple of areas. This could look like prioritizing a 5/5 Resolution Completeness score while deprioritizing Brand Voice. As your team gets comfortable with Auto QA, you can ramp up to improving Brand Voice.
2. Agree on a scoring system
Since some criteria—Accuracy, Efficiency, Internal Compliance, and Brand Voice—require manual scoring, it’s best to agree on how your team will use the scoring scale.
For example, each score from 1 to 5 receives a distinct piece of feedback. Here’s what that would look for the Efficiency criteria:
- 1/5 stars: Excessive back-and-forth that could have been avoided
- 2/5 stars: Resolution took longer than necessary due to poor process
- 3/5 stars: Average handling time with some unnecessary steps
- 4/5 stars: Quick resolution with minimal back-and-forth
- 5/5 stars: One-touch resolution
3. Prepare your agents
Start rolling out Auto QA through individual meetings with agents rather than overwhelming your team with a general training session. One-on-one conversations allow you to better address each agent's specific questions and concerns. Make sure to cover the following:
- Explain that Auto QA is meant to help make conversations consistent, not police agents
- Explain the scoring criteria and what each score means
- Highlight which criteria agents should prioritize
If regular one-on-one meetings aren't part of your routine, consider introducing Auto QA during your weekly team meetings or through a dedicated training session. Just remember to leave plenty of time for questions and walk through multiple examples to ensure everyone is comfortable with the system.
4. Establish a review schedule
To solidify QA checks, create a simple routine for reviewing Auto QA insights with the Auto QA Report (navigate to Statistics > Auto QA).
- Weekly: Do a quick check of automated scores.
- Monthly: Analyze trends and patterns across conversations.
- Quarterly: Review and adjust quality benchmarks.
5. Act on insights
Once you’ve collected a substantial amount of Auto QA data, there are a few follow-up actions you can take to continue having high-quality conversations:
- Set the example by sharing high-scoring conversations in your team meetings.
- Coach agents individually by reviewing their tickets together. Celebrate high-scoring conversations and provide targeted feedback on areas for improvement. This immediate, personalized approach helps agents grow faster than general training sessions.
- Increase product and policy knowledge by refining internal guidelines on brand voice, escalation processes, and more.
Remember, Auto QA works alongside your existing processes—it doesn't replace them. Start small, focus on the metrics that matter most to your team, and scale up as you get comfortable with Auto QA.
Brands are excited about the power of Auto QA
We invited leading ecommerce brands to beta test Auto QA, and their feedback highlights how it's transforming quality assurance across support teams of all sizes.
amika's support team values the complete visibility beyond CSAT: "Auto QA dramatically widens the volume of tickets we can review," they share. "A 5-point scale only tells you so much, and relying on consumers providing feedback limits what you're able to learn from."
Peachybbies' CX team enjoys real-time improvement: "Being able to give real-time feedback is pivotal, especially during peak times," their team explains. "Auto QA catches pretty much everything I'd want a human QA agent to catch."
OSEA Malibu's managers discovered operational insights: "It helps managers understand when a macro or process is leading to incomplete conversations versus when an agent made a mistake," their support lead shares.
Bring quality into every conversation with Auto QA
By prioritizing QA, your team can identify potential problems early, reduce errors, and improve overall performance, leading to a smoother, more reliable experience for customers––and your CX team.
In the long run, brands focusing on QA can gain a competitive edge. Book a demo now to see what Auto QA can do for you.
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There are tons of CX metrics you could be tracking. But where you spend your time is crucial as a customer experience leader.
According to recent data, these are the top five CX metrics for you to prioritize and improve on in 2025.
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Why CX metrics are essential for success
Not tracking CX metrics is like putting a loaf of bread in the oven but leaving baking time to chance. Without a set timer, you could end up with an underbaked bowl of dough or a burnt mess. Unless you have a sixth sense, it’s going to be really challenging to end up with something good.
In the same vein, metrics provide clear parameters for success. Meet or exceed them and your team is doing well; fall short and you’ll be better equipped to identify pain points and solve them.
Here are a few additional reasons why setting customer support metrics is key to success.
- Measure success and ROI. By tracking KPIs like resolution time, first response time, and CSAT, you can gauge the health of your customer support program and potentially justify investments in CX initiatives in the future.
- Identify customer and team pain points. Metrics help uncover areas where customers or your team is struggling. For example, high resolution times or low CSAT scores signal friction in the experience that you can address.
- Create accountability within your team. When everyone on your team understands what success looks like, it aligns efforts and keeps everyone focused on shared goals.
- Prioritize resources. Metrics guide CX leaders on where to allocate resources—for example, leveraging AI and automation to tackle repetitive tickets when ticket volume adds up or resolution times are getting high.
- Get proactive. Metrics reveal trends in customer behavior which can help you predict customer needs and make proactive adjustments in your CX strategy. By monitoring customer sentiment and acting on feedback, CX leaders can create more personalized and positive experiences.
Tip 💡: AI and automation can be valuable sidekicks as you look to optimize and improve on metrics. That’s especially true for busy periods: in 2024, 70% of CX leaders relied on AI and automation during peak seasons.
Resolution time should be your main focus for 2025
Customers are done with being patient. One study found that two thirds of respondents valued speed to reply just as much as product price.
A recent survey we ran found the same thing.
In our 2024 customer expectations survey, we asked CX leads and agents which metric they used to track success. Here’s what they said:
- Resolution Time (71%)
- First Response Time (59%)
- CSAT (53%)
- Revenue or Sales Impact (41%)
- Ticket Volume (41%)
Resolution time is going to be a key differentiator for your team this year. It should be your primary focus when it comes to optimizing different facets of your customer service strategy.
Top 5 CX metrics for 2025 & how to improve them with AI
1) Resolution time
Resolution time is the average time it takes to resolve a customer request from start to finish.
How do you calculate resolution time?
To calculate resolution time, you’ll take the total resolution time within a set period and divide it by the total number of customer interactions your team tackled within that same time frame.
Average resolution time = Total resolution time in a defined period / Total number of customer interactions resolved in that period
How to use AI & automation to improve it
According to a 2023 study from Statista, 70% of support leaders noted that the customer support metrics that AI had the greatest positive effect on was resolution time.
You can use automation tools to send Macros to answer common questions, or leverage AI to interact as an agent via email or chat. The instant nature of these tools means that customers won’t have to wait in a queue for your team to get to them.
For example, Wildride implemented Gorgias's AI Agent to manage an influx of 1,000 tickets per week. After AI Agent took over 33% of email inquiries, the team saw a 24% decrease in resolution time. That allowed the team to focus on more complex issues, streamline their support process, and make their customers happier.
2) First Response Time (FRT)
First response time is the length of time it takes for a customer service team to send the initial reply to a customer inquiry.
How do you calculate first response time?
To calculate average first response time, take the total amount of time it took for your team to respond to initial customer requests and divide by the total number of tickets within a set time frame.
How to use AI & automation to improve it
Your team is busy––when they’re not tackling repetitive questions, they’re helping customers with complicated or high-effort requests. All of that work is going to bog down your FRT, especially during more buzzy periods like sales, new releases, or over the holidays.
By using AI to jump in to handle those more routine requests, you can significantly reduce your FRT and give your team time back to tackle more heavy-lift needs.
For example, AI Agent helped Glamnetic achieve a 91% improvement in first response time during Black Friday Cyber Monday (BFCM) 2024. They got FRT down from their pre-AI Agent time of eight minutes to 40 seconds.
Here’s what that looked like in practice:
3) Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)
CSAT scores show how satisfied customers are with a product, service, or interaction, typically gathered through surveys.
How is CSAT calculated?
CSAT is calculated via a five-point rating scale survey sent to customers after a support interaction, where one is the worst experience and five is the best. While it can be calculated in different ways, at Gorgias the average of all survey responses is your CSAT score.
How to use AI & automation to improve it
When customers reach out for support, they’re expecting a fast response––regardless if they have an issue or are contemplating their next purchase.
That’s why using automation or AI tools to provide that lightning quick response, even if it directs shoppers to a self-service resource, can be extremely effective in raising CSAT scores. These responses could be sent by an AI agent that responds like a human agent would or an automated Macro built to fire off pre-crafted templates to common questions.
In luxury golf brand VESSEL’s case, customers felt that the AI responses were helpful and seemed on-par with the level of support they’d expect from a human agent.
“Our customers expect almost immediate responses, and so being able to automate that, even if it's not necessarily the exact answer that they're looking for, but being able to send over information to give them the reassurance that we're looking into it or trying to find an answer, whatever it may be, that's been a huge help to our team,” says Lauren Reams, the Customer Experience Manager at VESSEL.
4) Revenue or sales impact
The direct or indirect effect of customer service or business activities on generating sales or revenue.
How do you calculate it?
There are different ways to calculate revenue generated and the sales impact of customer support, and quantifying the indirect impact can be difficult. But generally, the formula looks like this:
ROI = [ (Money earned - Money spent) / Money spent ] x 100
Resource: How to measure & improve customer service ROI
How to use AI & automation to improve it
Leveraging AI and automation can provide significant cost savings because it acts as an additional agent who can tackle repetitive questions, translating to money saved on the time it would take for human agents to manually answer those questions.
The results are tangible: by automating 48% of inquiries, Dr. Bronner's saved $5,248 in the first month, and $100K in the first year.
Jonas Paul Eyewear saw revenue influenced by AI Agent as well: the team tracked $600 of sales revenue directly to the tool after it effectively answered pre-sales support questions from shoppers.
5) Ticket volume
Ticket volume is the total number of customer service inquiries that a team receives over a specific period of time.
How do you calculate it?
The customer support tool you use will be able to calculate ticket volume for you, as it’s the total number of tickets that have come in within a set amount of time. If you don’t use a CX platform yet and are still using something like Gmail or Excel, you’ll perform this count manually.
How to use AI & automation to improve it
Set rules to trigger automated responses to common questions, or ask an AI agent to completely take them off your team’s plate.
Arcade Belts, for example, saw a 50% reduction in ticket volume by using Gorgias’s AI Agent.
How to get buy in to improve your CX program
Tracking CX metrics is valuable for more than just gauging your program's effectiveness. The more you improve upon your CX metrics, the more you can leverage them to prove your support function’s value within your company.
- Tie CX to revenue. Show how improvements in customer satisfaction or repeat purchase rates directly impact revenue growth.
- Show industry benchmarks. Compare your team’s stats to competitors or industry averages to demonstrate how well your support strategy is working.
- Demonstrate your team’s impact on sales and retention. Use the metrics you’ve collected to show support’s impact on converting customers asking pre-sales questions and getting repeat customers.
- Ask to expand your team’s budget. Pitch acquiring additional buy in and resources by presenting revenue generated, costs saved through tools like AI and automation, and happy customers created.
How to use metrics to evaluate AI performanceIf you want to transform customer experience for the long term, the AI tools you use should never be “set it and forget it” solutions. Just as you do with your human agents, you can use metrics to evaluate your AI agent to make sure it’s performing well. If you use Gorgias, you’ll find these metrics under the AI Agent dashboard.
To review AI Agent’s performance:
It’s also easy to retrain your AI's performance by adjusting settings like Guidance, refining the internal documents it draws from, setting up brand voice, or creating a Handover topic list to escalate certain types of tickets to human agents.
Start tracking top CX metrics
Whether you’re new to being a CX leader or you’re a seasoned pro, tracking and improving on your CX metrics will help your team stand out among the rest. A key way to improve them is to leverage AI and Automation tools, and Gorgias is here to help you do it.
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TL;DR:
- AI Agent on Chat automates up to 50% of chat conversations. It ensures customers get fast, context-aware answers, product recommendations, and seamless handovers to human agents when needed.
- AI Agent goes beyond automated tools like Flows and article recommendations. Unlike pre-set FAQ flows or suggested Help Center articles, AI Agent can handle complex inquiries like modifying orders and providing personalized product recommendations.
- Setting up AI Agent on Chat is quick. Brands can activate AI Agent with a few clicks, improving efficiency during peak seasons and reducing the need for follow-ups.
- Updating AI Agent’s knowledge and behavior ensures the best customer experience. Businesses should refine their Help Center, set Guidance instructions, personalize AI Agent’s tone, and test responses before going live.
It’s clear that shoppers want answers fast—chat accounts for 20% of all customer support tickets.
The appeal is obvious: Chat is an easy-to-access customer service channel for quick questions and a convenient and subtle way to cross-sell complementary products.
But without the right chat tool, brands risk losing these valuable opportunities.
Introducing AI Agent on Chat, a conversational AI assistant that can automate up to 50% of chat conversations. This new feature upgrades chat by combining agent knowledge with superhuman efficiency and response times.
Now, customers can guarantee personalized interactions at any point of the shopping journey—whether they’re looking for a quick answer or a tailored recommendation.
With AI powering every interaction, one-to-one conversations become a seamless part of every customer experience.
Why Chat is better with AI Agent
Before AI Agent, customers reaching out through chat outside business hours had two options: following pre-set Flows (automated FAQ conversations) or browsing through suggested Help Center articles.
These features are great for quick answers to basic questions, but AI Agent takes support to the next level by handling more complex needs like modifying orders or offering personalized product recommendations.
With AI Agent in Chat, customers enjoy dynamic, real-time conversations available on multiple channels. AI Agent generates personalized responses that match exactly what customers ask for, automating 50% of chat interactions so agents get time back to upsell, create stronger relationships, and craft better experiences.
Related: How to optimize your Help Center for AI Agent
The key features of AI Agent on Chat
Upgrade your chat support from a basic Q&A tool into an intelligent assistant that handles customer inquiries 24/7. Here's how AI Agent makes that possible:
Real-time conversations
AI Agent responds within 15 seconds or less, offering fast responses that result in frictionless conversations. Unlike traditional chatbots, AI Agent also adapts to your brand’s unique tone of voice to enhance the customer experience and assure shoppers their questions will be taken care of.
24/7 availability
Today’s shoppers expect instant responses regardless of time zone or business hours. AI Agent on Chat means customers get the help they need, when they need it. This availability leads to higher customer satisfaction and fewer abandoned carts.
Instant product recommendations
AI Agent understands context and customer intent. Whether a shopper needs help finding the right product size or changes their mind and wants to compare features, AI Agent customizes its recommendations for each person.
Intelligent handovers
Some conversations, like technical issues or complaints, need a human touch. AI Agent recognizes these situations and smoothly transfers them to the right agent.
Using Handover topics, you can choose which types of inquiries should go straight to human agents. Then, if AI Agent lacks the confidence to provide an answer or can’t locate relevant knowledge in its database, it automatically escalates the conversation.
Read more: Handover rules
Why enable AI Agent in Chat now?
Based on Hiver’s 2024 study, 62% of customers prefer live chat to other support channels. With AI Agent in Chat, agents can cut down average response times while customers get the answers they need in one conversation with zero wait times or follow-ups.
Easy setup
AI Agent on Chat is ready to use in a few clicks. Simply connect your Shopify store and Chat widget to AI Agent, and you’re ready to resolve questions asked by visitors and loyal customers faster than you ever have.
Capture the growing demand for live support
Chat is often a customer’s first touchpoint with your brand, whether they’ve just discovered your brand or are on their third order. Meet customer expectations by being available with AI Agent on Chat. The faster you can ease their concerns, the faster they can head to checkout.
Maximize team efficiency
AI Agent makes scaling support effortless, especially during peak seasons like Black Friday. While it handles repetitive support tickets like order status and shipping questions, your team can focus on high-priority tasks like requests from VIP customers.
Eliminate the need for follow-ups
Drawing from knowledge sources like your Help Center and policy pages means AI Agent can often resolve inquiries within one conversation. No more unnecessary back-and-forths. Quick resolutions = happier and more loyal customers.
How to activate AI Agent on Chat
Ready to get started? Here’s how to activate AI Agent on Chat:
- Click Automate in the top left menu.
- Select your store from the sidebar, then click on AI Agent.
- In the Settings tab, under Chat Settings, select one or more Chat from the dropdown menu.
- Toggle Enable AI Agent on Chat on.
- Select Save Changes at the bottom of the page.
Already use AI Agent for email? No need to set up Guidance and Handover topics all over again—AI Agent will behave the same way in Chat.
Best practices for setting up AI Agent on Chat
Get the most out of AI Agent on Chat by following these best practices.
1. Prepare and optimize your knowledge base
The Help Center is AI Agent’s brain. This customer knowledge database is the key to AI Agent’s accurate and on-brand responses. To ensure your AI Agent is as trained as your human agents, include important topics in your Help Center like shipping, returns, cancellations, and account management.
No articles yet? No problem! Gorgias has 20+ article templates for you to use and modify. Or, even better, check out the AI Library for AI-generated articles based on your customer tickets.
2. Set restrictions with Guidance
AI tools perform best when you set limitations. A Guidance is the main way to control AI Agent’s behavior. It is a set of written instructions that outline how AI Agent should interact with customers, handle certain requests, and more.
We recommend publishing a Guidance on the top five questions you receive from customers.
Tip: AI Agent prioritizes Guidance above Help Center articles. Unlike Help Center articles, the content in your Guidance will not be customer-facing.
3. Personalize AI Agent's voice
The beauty of AI Agent is its ability to speak like one of your agents. Select from Friendly, Professional, or Sophisticated presets—or create a custom tone that aligns with your brand.
Need help finding your brand voice? Here are seven brand voice examples.
4. Test AI Agent’s responses before going live
Use test scenarios to see how AI Agent responds to common customer questions, such as order status, shipping questions, and return policies. To cover all your bases, test AI Agent as both a new and returning customer to make sure it delivers accurate responses no matter the customer's need.
5. Improve AI Agent’s behavior
AI Agent becomes smarter as it learns from you. Like a human agent, give your AI Agent feedback on its responses, from how it speaks, which topics it escalates, and what actions it takes in certain scenarios.
There are multiple ways to give AI Agent feedback on a ticket:
- Mark AI Agent’s message or any of the resources it used as correct or incorrect.
- Suggest that AI Agent use a different resource if a better or more correct piece of knowledge exists.
- Report an issue to the Gorgias Product team.
Coming soon: Actions on Chat
Soon, AI Agent will be able to perform actions like accessing Shopify order details and executing third-party app actions, such as updating shipping addresses and order cancellations, directly in Chat.
Excited to deliver an elevated chat experience? Book a demo now to experience the power of AI Agent on Chat.
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Featured articles
The Gorgias & Shopify Integration: 8 Features Your Support Team Will Love
Managing customer support as a Shopify store owner can feel like juggling too many tools at once.
Constantly switching tabs to look up orders, update customer information, or track returns wastes valuable time. Plus, it prevents your team from focusing on what really matters––delivering quick, personalized customer service.
Gorgias’s Shopify integration solves this. It keeps all your Shopify data in one place, so your team spends less time toggling tabs and more time helping customers. The result? Faster responses, better service, and more revenue.
Below, we break down the eight key capabilities of this integration, each paired with practical use cases to showcase its real-world value.
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1. View Shopify data in tickets
What it does: Shopify order data is displayed directly within support tickets, allowing agents to view essential details like order status, customer information, and transaction history without leaving the helpdesk.
Use case: An agent handling a “Where’s my order?” request can instantly check tracking information and update the customer.
The fashion retailer Princess Polly improved their customer experience team’s efficiency by using Gorgias's deep integration with Shopify. Agents can view and update customer and order data directly within Gorgias, eliminating the need to switch between multiple tabs.
Taking a streamlined approach led to a 40% increase in efficiency, an 80% decrease in resolution time, and a 95% decrease in first response time.
2. Perform Shopify Actions
What it does: Agents can update Shopify order and customer data with Shopify Actions right in Gorgias.
Key features:
- Create a new order: Add existing products or custom items, apply discounts, modify quantities, add notes and tags, and choose to charge taxes. Then set the order as Paid or Pending and email the invoice to the customer.
- Duplicate an order: Replicate an existing order and make adjustments as needed.
- Cancel/refund an order: Cancel or refund orders by setting quantities to refund, specifying shipping amounts to refund, providing reasons for cancellation, restocking items, and notifying the customer.
- Edit shipping address: Update the shipping address for an order.
- Insert product links: Add product links or product cards from tickets so customers can add the product to their cart quickly.
- Display the customer’s cart: View the exact items the customer has in their cart at the moment they reach out via Chat.
Use case: Agents can perform Shopify actions directly from Gorgias, such as adding products, applying discounts, updating quantities, or issuing refunds.
3. Embed customer-specific Shopify data in Macros
What it does: Create templated responses called Macros with dynamic Shopify variables to automatically incorporate customer-specific information.
Key features:
- Dynamic variables: Macros can include variables that pull real-time data from Shopify, such as order status, tracking numbers, and customer details.
- Automated actions: Beyond inserting dynamic content, Macros can perform actions like tagging tickets, setting statuses, or assigning conversations to specific agents. The automation streamlines workflows and ensures consistent handling of similar inquiries.
Use case: A customer inquires about their order. With one click, the agent uses a Macro that pulls in the order status and expected delivery date, creating a faster and more personalized response.
Take Try The World, a gourmet subscription service, needed a robust Shopify integration to handle an increasing volume of customer inquiries. By switching to Gorgias, they gained the ability to unify conversations and embed Shopify data directly into Macros. Now, agents could quickly generate personalized responses that included order details, tracking links, and customer-specific information.
Try the World’s support team’s efficiency skyrocketed, enabling them to handle 120 tickets per day, up from 80, and reduce response times to just one business day.
4. Provide product information with Macros
What it does: Macros with embedded Shopify data let agents quickly and accurately share pre-sale information like product links, stock availability, and discount codes, helping to convert prospective customers into buyers.
Key features:
- Dynamic Shopify variables in Macros: Agents can use dynamic variables to pull real-time product information.
- Pre-built responses for common questions: Macros can include templated responses tailored for pre-sale inquiries, such as providing direct links to products or applying discount codes.
Use case: A customer asks if a specific product is available in their size and color. The agent can apply a Macro that automatically pulls the product's inventory details and includes a discount code, sending a response like this:
“Hi {{ticket.customer.firstname}},
Great news! The product {{ticket.customer.integrations.shopify.products[0].title}} is currently in stock in the size and color you’re looking for. You can check it out here: [Product Link]. Use the code WELCOME10 at checkout for 10% off your first order! Let me know if you have any other questions!”
How it helps:
- Eliminates manual search and typing for agents.
- Ensures accurate, real-time product information for customers.
- Improves the likelihood of converting inquiries into sales.
5. Enable self-serve order management in Chat
What it does: Using Gorgias’s chat widget, customers can track orders or manage their purchases on their own with no agent assistance needed.
Key feature:
- Order management automation: Customers can access real-time order information, including status updates and tracking details, through the chat interface. This automation reduces the volume of live chat inquiries by up to 30%.
Use case: A customer wants to check the status of their recent purchase. By accessing the Chat widget on your website, they can enter their email and order number and receive instant updates on their order's progress, including shipping and delivery information, without waiting for an agent's response.
How it helps:
- Automates routine inquiries and frees up your support team to handle more complex issues.
- Enhances customer satisfaction thanks to immediate responses.
- Reduces the need for multiple communication channels, consolidating support interactions in one place.
6. Use Shopify variables in Rules
What it does: Rules paired with Shopify variables can automate various support tasks, such as identifying specific customer segments or tagging tickets, to boost efficiency and consistency.
Key features:
- Automated tagging: Rules can automatically tag tickets based on specific Shopify data. For instance, you can set up a Rule to tag tickets from customers with high order counts or significant total spending as "VIP."
- Prioritization of tickets: Rules can prioritize tickets that meet certain criteria, such as high-value orders or repeat customers.
Use case: A customer with a history of substantial purchases contacts support. A rule detects that the customer's total spending exceeds a predefined threshold and automatically tags the ticket as "VIP."
This tag can then trigger other workflows, such as assigning the ticket to a senior support agent or escalating its priority.
How it helps:
- Improves customer experience by prioritizing high-value customers.
- Maintains consistent service quality.
7. Track revenue with reporting
What it does: Gorgias offers comprehensive reporting that allows you to measure how your support interactions influence sales.
Key features:
- Tickets converted: Tracks the number of support tickets that led to a sale within five days of the ticket's creation.
- Conversion rate: Calculates the percentage of created tickets that resulted in sales, helping you assess the effectiveness of your support team's interactions.
- Total sales from support: Sums the revenue generated from orders associated with converted tickets, accounting for refunds and order adjustments to provide accurate figures.
These metrics are accessible under Statistics → Support Performance → Revenue in your Gorgias dashboard. You can filter the data by integration, ticket channel, tags, or specific time periods to gain detailed insights.
Use case: By analyzing Revenue Statistics, you can identify which support channels or agents are most effective in driving sales. For example, if live chat interactions have a higher conversion rate, you might allocate more resources to that channel.
Additionally, recognizing top-performing agents can inform training programs to elevate overall team performance.
For example, One Block Down, a Milan-based streetwear brand, struggled to manage a growing volume of customer inquiries across multiple platforms. By integrating Gorgias with Shopify, they centralized all customer interactions into a single platform, giving agents instant access to crucial information like order history and returns directly within tickets.
The setup allowed the team to measure the direct impact of their support efforts on revenue.
The result? An impressive 1,000% increase in support-generated revenue and a 1-hour average first response time. By connecting the dots between customer service and sales performance, One Block Down demonstrated how proactive, data-driven support can directly influence the bottom line.
How it helps:
- Quantifies the revenue generated from support interactions.
- Faster team optimization with data-driven insights.
- Understanding the correlation between support interactions and sales can help refine customer service strategies.
8. AI Agent integration
What it does: AI Agent automates Shopify actions like canceling orders, editing order details, and reshipping items.
Key features:
- Cancel Shopify order: AI Agent can automatically cancel unfulfilled orders upon customer request, restocking the items and issuing a full refund. A confirmation email is sent to the customer once the cancellation is complete.
- Edit order shipping address: When a customer needs to update their shipping address, AI Agent verifies if the order is unfulfilled, confirms the new address with the customer, and updates it in Shopify accordingly.
- Replace order item: AI Agent facilitates item replacements in orders by confirming the item to be removed and the new item to be added, checking stock availability, adjusting payments if necessary, and sending an updated order confirmation to the customer.
- Reship order for free: In cases where an order is lost in transit or arrives damaged, AI Agent can duplicate and resend the order at no additional charge.
- Remove order item: If a customer decides to remove an item from their order, AI Agent can handle the removal, restock the item in Shopify, process the refund for the removed item, and notify the customer of the updated order details.
Use case: A customer realizes they've entered an incorrect shipping address shortly after placing an order. They contact support, and AI Agent promptly verifies that the order is unfulfilled, confirms the correct address with the customer, updates the shipping information in Shopify, and sends a confirmation email—all without human intervention.
How it helps:
- Automating routine order management tasks reduces the workload on human agents.
- Quick and accurate responses to order modification requests lead to a better customer experience.
- Automated processes ensure consistency and accuracy in handling order changes, reducing the likelihood of human error.
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Introducing Conversational AI: The Smartest Way to Handle Chat, Actions, QA, and Insights
Today, we’re announcing our deeper investment in conversational AI for ecommerce.
"Since day one, Gorgias has been dedicated to helping ecommerce brands deliver exceptional customer experiences. We started with a helpdesk to centralize support, then introduced AI Agent to instantly resolve support questions,” says Romain Lapeyre, CEO of Gorgias.
“Now, we're taking the next leap forward with an AI Agent that powers the entire customer journey—anticipating buyer needs, boosting sales, and automating high-quality support. Today, I'm happy to announce Gorgias as the Conversational AI platform for ecommerce.”
Gorgias’s Conversational AI platform will let teams provide fast, scalable, and cost-effective support while helping them drive revenue growth. From automatic order changes and refunds to product recommendations and cross-sells, brands will be able to flawlessly combine their support and sales efforts.
The end result is an AI-powered customer journey where every customer interaction feels complete, personal, and connected, both before and after purchase.
Questions in Chat, resolved in seconds
Last year, we introduced AI Agent for email.
Some brands call their AI Agent Lisa, some call it Wally, and most treat it like a real member of the team. But this reliable support sidekick was only available to answer customers on email—until now.
Get ready for instant responses that tackle support inquiries of all sizes. Now, your customers can enjoy fast responses that keep their shopping experience as smooth as possible.
On top of improving first response times, AI Agent can play an even more critical role in unblocking sales, suggesting products, and driving upsells and cross-sells.
With responses sent in 15 seconds or less, brands can delight customers with near-instant resolutions.
Let your AI Agent take action
Actions let AI Agent perform customer requests on behalf of your support team. This includes changing shipping addresses, fetching fulfillment status, canceling orders, adding discounts, and more.
You can use a library of pre-configured Actions for popular apps like Shopify, Rebuy, Loop, and more. And you don’t need any technical skills to set them up.
With almost half of queries requiring some kind of update, Actions is your go-to for complete resolutions so you can get more accomplished.
Quality built into every support ticket
Quality checks have traditionally been manual, time-consuming, and inconsistent. Our brand new Auto QA feature changes that by automatically scoring 100% of conversations on resolution completeness and communication quality—whether from a human or AI agent.
With Auto QA, team leads can:
- Scale quality consistently and easily. Both human and AI agents follow the same quality standards, allowing for consistent, high-quality customer experiences.
- Coach smarter. Use real-time QA ratings in tickets to give agents targeted feedback.
- Track team performance. The dashboard highlights metrics by agent, showing what’s working and where to improve.
Gain clarity on your AI Agent’s impact
Support teams should be in complete control of their AI. That’s why the AI Agent Report and AI Agent Insights were created—to help you know exactly how your AI Agent is performing and contributing to your customer service operations.
The AI Agent Report provides full visibility into AI Agent’s performance, covering metrics like First Response Time, CSAT, and one-touch ticket resolutions. Fully integrated into your Support Performance Statistics dashboard, the report includes:
- The percentage of tickets automated by AI Agent
- The number of tickets closed by AI Agent
- Success rates for one-touch resolutions
- How satisfied customers are with AI Agent’s responses
AI Agent Insights takes it a step further. It analyzes AI Agent’s performance data and provides you with a dashboard of recommendations, including potential automation opportunities, popular ticket intents to optimize, and knowledge base improvements.
Meet your new AI sales assistant
Soon, we’ll be expanding our AI capabilities with the launch of AI Agent for Sales, a tool designed to assist customers on their shopping journey.
AI Agent for Sales helps brands boost their sales capabilities through smart product recommendations, on-page checkout assistance, and personalized conversations. Now it's easier to reduce cart abandonment, suggest complementary products to boost average order value, and overcome pre-sale objections.
This new tool will bridge the gap between marketing and CX, ensuring brands can scale personalized interactions 24/7 without increasing headcount.
Looking ahead with conversational AI
As we continue to innovate with conversational AI, our focus remains on helping you succeed.
By combining smarter tools with valuable insights, we’re creating opportunities for you to put your customers first and build deeper connections at every touchpoint.
Join us as we pave a new way for the future of ecommerce.
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AI Quality Assurance: The New Standard for Customer Support QA
TL;DR:
- The landscape of QA is moving from manual to AI-powered, where AI can analyze every customer interaction, uncover patterns, and suggest data-driven changes at scale.
- Automating QA allows ticket reviews to be routine. This means customers will always receive high-quality support.
- Every customer interaction is reviewed with AI QA — not just a sample. This gives support leaders full visibility into performance and service quality.
- AI QA saves time and improves agent and AI Agent feedback. By automating ticket reviews, agents receive instant, unbiased feedback, and leaders can focus on big-picture CX improvements.
This year, 71% of customer experience (CX) leaders are using AI and automation to handle the holiday shopping season. These tools, including AI agents and email autoresponders, speed up tasks like responding to customers and updating orders.
But answering tickets isn't enough. Responses must also be high-quality, whether from humans or AI. And while customer satisfaction (CSAT) is the standard measure of how successful these interactions are, they have major limits.
CSAT scores don’t tell the full story about whether agents were helpful or if they used on-brand language. These gray areas in quality lead to missed sales, higher return rates, and frustrated customers during peak periods.
AI quality assurance (QA) is changing that. In this article, we’ll see what QA looks like today, how AI can simplify the process, and how CX teams can use tools like Auto QA to improve quality across all conversations.
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Traditional customer support QA is falling by the wayside
Today, QA in customer support is a largely manual responsibility. Customer conversations are reviewed by CX team leads to ensure customer satisfaction and identify areas for agent coaching. Team leads evaluate agent responses against a checklist of best practices, including the proper use of language, product knowledge, consistency, and helpfulness.
However, reviewing tickets takes a long time.
QA is important, but it's hard to prioritize when customers are actively waiting for help with refunds, urgent order edits, or negative reviews. And when CX teams are under-resourced and short-staffed, it’s easy to put QA on the back burner.
What’s more, as AI plays a bigger role in responding to customers, quality assurance must evolve to ensure the quality of AI-generated responses, not just human responses.
Over time, the lack of QA in CX can hold back support teams for three reasons:
- Delayed feedback makes it harder for agents and AI tools to improve.
- Leaders have less time to train agents and refine workflows.
- Inconsistent service risks losing customer trust and loyalty.
What is AI-powered QA in CX?
AI-powered quality assurance (QA) uses AI to automate the process of reviewing customer interactions for resolution completeness, communication, language proficiency, and more.
Instead of team leads spending hours manually sifting through tickets, AI takes over and evaluates how well tickets were resolved by agents.
Shifting this traditionally manual work to an automated process pulls teams out of the weeds and into more beneficial work like speaking to customers and upselling.
With AI QA, routine ticket reviews are not just an optional part of your customer service strategy, they become a permanent part of it. The road to greater customer trust, resolution times, and stronger product knowledge becomes easier.
Read more: Why your strategy needs customer service quality assurance
Why choose AI-powered QA over manual QA?
Manual QA is like trying to review a handful of tickets during a flood of new customer requests. Team leads can only focus on a small sample, leaving most interactions unchecked. Without complete visibility, creating a standard across all interactions is challenging.
Now, switch over to AI QA. You don’t have to choose between QA duty or answering tickets — QA checks are automatically done. You’ll still need to monitor AI’s performance, but now there’s more time to focus on creating strategies that improve the customer experience.
Here’s how AI QA and manual QA measure up to each other:
7 benefits of using AI quality assurance in CX
AI quality assurance helps CX leaders move beyond manual reviews by offering fast, thorough insights into performance and customer needs. Here are seven key benefits it brings to your team.
1. Improved visibility into customer interactions
AI QA reviews every ticket, giving CX leaders a complete view of agent performance and customer trends. Nothing slips through the cracks, so you can act on real data each and every single time.
What the team wins: Key areas to focus on to improve the customer experience.
What the customer wins: A consistent support experience where their concerns are fully addressed.
2. Instantly identify major customer pain points
Only a third of customers highly trust businesses, and without QA checks in place, that trust only deteriorates.
AI QA feedback can highlight confusing policies or common product issues that lead to unhappy customers. With instant feedback, teams can quickly make changes and create better, consistent customer experiences.
What the team wins: Faster fixes for recurring issues.
What the customer wins: A smoother, frustration-free experience.
3. Faster identification of process gaps
Agents can receive feedback that instantly highlights gaps in workflows or unclear escalation steps. This is an efficient way to resolve issues within the wider team before they become more significant problems.
What the team wins: Process issues are solved quickly.
What the customer wins: Faster resolutions with little to no delays.
4. Standardized scoring for AI and human agents
AI QA evaluates both AI Agent and human agent interactions using the same criteria. This creates a level playing field and ensures all customer interactions meet the same quality standards.
What the team wins: Fair evaluations for both AI and human responses.
What the customer wins: High-quality support, no matter who handles the ticket.
5. More time for coaching and training
With less time spent on manual reviews, leaders can dedicate more energy to team development. Training sessions guided by AI insights help agents improve quickly and ensure the team delivers support that aligns with protocols.
What the team wins: More focused skill-building based on data.
What the customer wins: Clearer and more accurate support.
6. Drives continuous knowledge for the entire team
AI QA is helpful for showing agents which areas they need more training on, whether it's being better about using brand voice or polishing up on product knowledge. This leads to better support processes and stronger product understanding across the team.
What the team wins: Better support tactics and product expertise.
What the customer wins: Faster resolutions due to knowledgeable agents.
7. Enhanced customer experience through consistently high-quality support
Since all tickets are reviewed, teams can feel confident they’re delivering high-quality support on a regular basis. Customers get clear, helpful answers, while agents gain insights from every ticket with AI feedback.
What the team wins: Consistent support performance.
What the customer wins: Reliable support they can trust.
How accurate is AI QA?
AI QA analyzes tickets using predefined categories to evaluate how complete and helpful agent responses are. Let’s take a closer look at how it maintains accurate ticket reviews with an AI QA tool like Gorgias’s Auto QA.
It measures multiple metrics
Auto QA evaluates tickets based on three key areas: Resolution Completeness, Communication, and Language Proficiency.
For Resolution Completeness, it checks if all customer concerns were fully addressed. For example, if an agent resolves only one of two issues raised, the ticket is marked incomplete. Tickets where customers resolve issues on their own or don’t respond to follow-ups can still be graded as complete if handled appropriately.
Communication quality is scored on a scale of 1 to 5, assessing clarity, professionalism, and tone. Agents earn higher scores when they provide clear solutions and remain positive throughout the interaction.
Finally, Language Proficiency evaluates whether an agent displayed high proficiency in the language of the conversation. The score considers how well spelling, grammar, and syntax were employed.
Teams can improve AI with their own feedback
Auto QA isn’t set in stone. Team leads can expand on AI-generated feedback by adding their comments. For example, if a resolution is graded as ‘Incomplete,’ a team lead can explain why and provide additional context. This helps clarify the evaluation for the agent and also helps the AI model improve over time.
How to get started with AI quality assurance using Auto QA
Ready to bring the benefits of AI QA to your team? Here’s how to get started with Auto QA:
- Audit your current QA process to identify gaps. How do you currently review tickets? Pinpoint areas where manual QA falls short, such as inconsistent feedback or missed interactions.
- Pilot Auto QA with a small team. Introduce Auto QA to a small group of agents to test its impact. This allows you to find out how the new QA process fits into your workflow and how it affects agent performance.
- Use AI insights to refine processes. Analyze the feedback Auto QA provides to identify process gaps or recurring issues. Use these insights to update your workflow, improve training, and address root causes of customer pain points.
- Gradually scale adoption across the team. Once the pilot is successful, roll out Auto QA to more agents. Make sure everyone is trained on how to use its insights and integrate the tool into daily operations.
- Monitor and provide feedback to improve AI accuracy. Review Auto QA’s evaluations to ensure accuracy. Add manual feedback as needed to fine-tune its scoring on future tickets.
- Measure the impact on performance and satisfaction. Track key metrics like ticket close rates, resolution times, and customer satisfaction scores. Use this data to understand how Auto QA transforms your QA process and drives better results.
Make high-quality responses a standard with Auto QA
AI QA isn’t just about automating ticket reviews — it empowers CX leaders to focus on what truly matters: training and improving processes.
Leave spot-checking and inconsistent application of policies and brand voice in the past. As a built-in feature of Gorgias Automate, Auto QA makes high-quality customer interactions your brand’s standard.
Book a demo now.
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Further reading
Hiring for Customer Service: A 6-Step Framework to Recruit Top Agents
When you say the word “growth,” most brand leaders think of customer acquisition, paid ads, or the newest marketing trend — probably something about TikTok influencers. And while acquiring customers is important, we know that truly sustainable growth comes from loyal customers, organic referrals, reviews, and repeat buyers — all of which stem from your customer experience. And at the core of that customer experience is your customer service team.
Your customer service agents spend more time interacting with customers than any other department, including marketing and sales. They manage VIP customers, repair at-risk relationships, and have the opportunity to chat with customers at make-or-break moments (like right before a sale). In other words, your brand’s growth hinges on the quality of your customer service team.
We can’t offer any algorithms or magical software to find and hire talented agents. Hiring takes time, experience, and a strategic approach. That last part — a strategic approach to hiring — is what I’m here to provide.
At HelpFlow.com, we run 24/7 live chat and customer service teams for over 100 brands. We’ve hired hundreds of customer service agents successfully and built scalable, robust customer service operations that provide great customer experiences and drive growth for brands we work with.
In this post, I’ll walk through the framework we use step-by-step. My goal is to help you or your hiring managers simplify your customer service hiring process, find high-impact customer service professionals, and transform your brand’s customer service from a frustrating cost center to a seamless and scalable revenue driver.
But first, what’s really at stake here?
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Bad customer service will kill your brand
If you are like most ecommerce brands, you hire customer service reps when your team needs additional support to keep up with tickets. This purely reactive approach means your support team will always be buried in tickets or onboarding new team members. The constant scramble means they’ll never have the bandwidth to think strategically, improve processes, or work on higher-impact initiatives to help the business.
Here’s the snowball effect we often see. First, your agents become overworked with an ever-growing number of tickets to process each day. This endless sprint to keep up contributes to extremely high turnover in the customer service industry. According to Harvard Business Review, CS reps typically last a job for about a year.
As agents start to burn out and fall behind, customer service experience quality suffers. Customers feel frustrated with slow response times and often disappointed with incomplete or ineffective solutions from junior agents hired just a few months before. A downtrend in customer satisfaction is common with brands as they start to scale.
Eventually, a poorly run customer service operation starts to have a direct effect on sales. First-time shoppers give low NPS scores and never develop brand loyalty. Customer complaints start to appear, scaring off potential customers, and referrals dry up.
As the quality of service goes down, the cost of customer service goes up because you have to spend more time hiring and training customer service representatives that won’t be productive for weeks, if not months. Replacing an employee typically costs 1.5-2x their annual salary when you factor in all the costs, according to Gallup.
The business sees these poor results and high costs, and refuses to invest in the department, which leaves them even more under-resourced. The cycle continues.
Great hiring processes can accelerate growth
A great customer service team (that’s not over-worked and under-resourced) will stop this vicious cycle. But beyond answering customer inquiries and managing ticket load, they’ll systematically improve your brand’s customer experience and, by extension, growth engine.
An excellent customer service team will create replace the vicious cycle with a positive one by:
- Improving your shopping experience by collecting customer feedback, building self-service resources, and studying data for high-impact opportunities
- Intercepting new visitors with proactive support to raise the conversion rate
- Helping customers who have unsatisfactory experiences, winning some of them back
- Encouraging happy customers to purchase more, leave reviews, refer new customers, and remain loyal to your brand
Ready to learn how to fill your customer service positions with agents who will make an impact? Let’s get into it. Here’s our 6-step framework to hire the best customer service teams around.
1) Assess your customer service hiring needs
The first step to hiring great customer service reps is to shift from a reactive hiring process to a proactive one. When you hire reactively, you tend to rush hiring and training to get a body in a seat processing tickets as quickly as possible. Of course, this leads to low-quality interactions and dings to brand perception. By proactively forecasting customer service needs, you’ll have time to run a more thorough hiring process to find and hire the ideal candidate.
Here is a quick overview of how to forecast customer service volume:
- Identify the percentage of orders that typically turn into support tickets. For example, if you historically get about 20 tickets for every 100 orders then you can forecast that 20% of your future orders will turn into tickets.
- Use the traction to ticket ratio to forecast how many tickets you expect to receive in the future, based on your sales forecast for the upcoming quarter or another time period.
- Use the agent ticket capacity per day, accounting for PTO and sick leave, to determine how many agents you need to process that upcoming ticket volume. Account for ramp-up time for new team members.
Forecasting will help you predict your future needs and shift to a more proactive approach. Remember to give yourself enough time to conduct a thorough hiring process and onboarding program. If you anticipate needing two new agents in Q4, start collecting applications by early Q3.
Forecasting is just one strategy to understand when you should hire. Here are a few additional signals that could mean your team is understaffed:
- Declining metrics: Each week, you should check on important metrics that measure your customer service management such as first response time, handle time, and customer satisfaction. If you start to see these metrics decline, it could mean your team can’t keep up with ticket volume and needs additional support.
- Team morale: As part of your customer service team meeting cadence, you should have regular team huddles, manager-led 1:1s, and anonymous climate surveys. Managers should work to foster trust and open dialogue so agents can share their stress. Don’t be afraid to ask them directly about their workload. If agents start to report challenges, especially if the concern comes up across multiple agents, you may need to staff up.
You may find that you need additional support, but you may not need to hire people full-time to solve the problem. You may be able to support your core team with other solutions such as:
- Efficiency improvements: If you’re like most brands, you’ve frankensteined together a customer service process, piece by piece. Consider doing a workflow audit to identify opportunities to improve the team’s workflow with process improvements, email templates, and customer self-service options.
- Changes to coverage schedules: You may have the right amount of agents, but simply have a schedule that leads to ticket buildup. For example, if everyone is staffed M-F, response and resolution times will suffer over the weekend. Look into your hour-to-hour ticket volume, especially on conversational channels like live chat and phone, and schedule agents whenever you have peaks in incoming tickets.
- High-quality outsourced help: Hiring full-time employees is cumbersome and expensive, and sometimes more than you need. By working with a high-quality outsourced team, you can bridge the gap to have additional agents on a custom schedule or just for a season of high volume.
- Overtime opportunities: If your agents are currently salaried, you could change them to an hourly model so they can earn overtime during busy weeks. Don’t make this decision without consulting the agents. They might be enthusiastic, but they might also dislike that your solution for being understaffed involves working more hours.
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That said, you may conclude that you need to hire new agents. Here’s how to do it well.
2) Create a target hire persona for the role
Before you start your search, I recommend taking some time to understand your hiring needs and describe your ideal candidate.
First, take stock of:
- Everything the customer support team does today
- Everything the team wants to do but doesn’t have the bandwidth for
- Everything the team currently does that could be phased out with process improvement or recalibration of ownership
Once that’s done, you’ll be better prepared to understand:
- What existing roles need to be filled or staffed up
- What new roles need to be developed
- What type of skills would match each of those needs — this is where your target persona comes into play
A target persona is a tool we developed to build clarity around your jobs to be done, the skills needed to accomplish those jobs, the type of person who would succeed in this role, and how you’ll measure that person’s success.
The value is similar to an ideal customer profile (ICP) for sales and marketing. By defining the core qualities you need ahead of time, you can create a sharper job description, distribute the job posting in more targeted channels, and decrease the time it takes to find the right person.
What to include in a target hire persona
Below are the key sections to include in a target hire persona:
Mission:
- What is the purpose of this position in your organization?
- Why does it exist?
- What will the role focus on?
- Why are you hiring this person now?
Outcomes:
- How will you measure this person’s success?
- How will you keep this person accountable to the mission described above?
- Use specific, clear, and quantifiable outcomes to answer both questions above.
Competencies:
- What experiences and qualifications should this person have?
- What attributes and customer service skills will help this person succeed? (For example, is it more important to be organized or empathetic for your specific needs?
Culture fit:
- Separate from the role, what are the specific attributes that make someone a culture fit for your team?
- These will vary depending on the company, but it’s very important to define these so that you can screen otherwise qualified applicants if they aren’t a culture fit.
Customer service agent target hire persona example
We put together a full customer service agent target hire persona example that you can access and modify for your own needs. Consider revising the mission and outcomes slightly to match your needs, and adjust the target experience for your specific company.
Have questions? Feel free to reach out!
3) Create a job posting that sells (and market it)
Once you have a target hire persona completed, it’s time to start marketing- yes, I said marketing, just like how you grow your business.
Typically, when someone is hiring they simply put together a job description, post it on a few job boards, and work with the applicants that come in. This is especially true for customer service hires, which are unfortunately seen as low-value.
This approach leads to a small number of low-quality applicants. The kinds of A-players you’re looking for aren’t scouring job boards and responding to basic job postings — they’re likely crushing it at their current role.
Here’s how to create and distribute a job posting that reaches the right people and convinces them to apply:
Sell the role in the job posting
Remember, hiring is a two-way street. You have to impress the candidate just as much as they have to impress you. Don’t just publish a list of duties and requirements on a job posting website with an application link. Instead, sell the role (and the company) by using parts of the target hire persona above:
Clearly explain the company’s current position, mission, and goals. Share a bit of the journey you’ve been on so far and the successes you’ve had. The right candidate will be excited about your particular growth stage and the opportunity to help you with the next leg of the journey.
Also, dedicate some space to selling your team and unique company culture. This doesn’t need to be all rainbows and unicorns: great candidates know building a great company takes hard work. But they should be able to get an understanding of your company’s unique values, priorities, and ways of working. Describe and share examples about how your teams collaborate, the level of autonomy, accountability, coaching, and support they can expect, and the general vibe of a day-in-the-life of your team.
Finally, paint a very clear picture of what success looks like by sharing the outcomes and target metrics. This will ensure the applicants understand what you want to accomplish before your first conversation. Clear success metrics will also attract goal-driven people with an “I can do that” attitude.
This may seem like a lot of work, but you’ll save time by getting higher-quality candidates quickly, and in the long run, having to rehire due to rushing into a bad hire.
How to drive a lot of quality applicants
An enticing job description gets you halfway to an inbox full of strong applications. Now, you have to get that job description seen by a lot of high-quality candidates.
Remember, great team members don’t typically spend their days scouring job boards to find a new job. You need to catch their attention in other ways to spark their interest in jumping ship and joining your brand.
Here are multiple ways to drive a lot of great applicants for your role:
Publish on multiple job boards. For example, if you are working with a remote team, consider publishing on WeWorkRemotely or Remote.co. If you are hiring locally, leverage a few different job boards such as Indeed.com or ZipRecruiter.com to get the best coverage. LinkedIn is also a good option for both local and remote hires. If possible, make the extra investment to make a premium or boosted posting. And, especially if you are in a challenging niche, consider specialized job boards and communities. The Support Driven Slack community, for example, has a job board for ecommerce community service positions.
Another best practice is to share the role with your network. Send a few messages to peers who may know someone fit for the role and publish the posting on your social media. Also, encourage your team to do the same — they’ll be working with this new hire, after all. Again, don’t just copy/paste the link. Sell the role to attract the best candidates.
Finally, involve your customers in the recruitment process. One of your customers may want the job or know someone else who could be a good fit. Customers who love and use your products have a great head start: they’re familiar with your brand, your shopping experience, and the benefits of your products. And since customer service skills can be transferred from many other types of roles, your customer base may have more qualified candidates than you expect.
4) Screen applicants async to avoid wasting time
A great job description effectively shared means you’ll have a steady stream of applicants. You might feel overwhelmed with the workload of screening applicants to find the right hire. And rightfully so: Applicant screening can turn into a lot of work if you do it with typical in-depth reviews of each applicant and blocking out time for interviews.
Interviews are important, and we’ll explain how to hold a customer service interview below (including interview questions to use). But first, here’s how to effectively screen the large number of applicants you’ll receive to find the best possible hires.
Quiz them on the job posting
Screening starts by gauging how well applicants read through the details of the job posting. If they’re not willing to spend the time reading and following the instructions on the job posting, odds are they won’t be detail-oriented in the role.
By asking a simple question or making a request deep within the content of the job posting, you can quickly screen whether applicants read it. For example, you can ask applicants to start their cover letter with, “ready to rock!’“ This way, you can skip over anyone that didn’t catch and follow the instruction.
Optional: Assign a micro take-home assignment
At HelpFlow.com, we skip take-home assignments because our hiring process is so thorough. However, since customer support agents spend most of their days writing, you may choose to request a short writing sample at this stage.
If you opt to include this step, consider keeping the writing sample very short — something applicants can complete in 10-15 minutes. However, be aware that more up-front work from your candidates means:
- You’ll spend more time reviewing applications
- You may lose some qualified job seekers due to a too-strenuous application process — but they likely wouldn’t be the most committed hire
Send them a common customer question or one of your most common customer problems. Give them resources like a knowledge base article and your policies so they have all the necessary information. At this stage, you’re looking for their ability to communicate clearly and empathetically.
Request a brief video questionnaire
Rather than jumping straight to an interview, send a brief questionnaire to the applicant so they can tell you more about their experience in a short video message. There are tools such as Spark Hire that make this easy. But a simple list of questions and instructions to send a response using a screencast tool like Loom is just as easy.
For the questionnaire, you should ask open-ended questions to get a sense of how their experience and capabilities fit your needs. You might also choose to include a fun, get-to-know-you question to get a better sense of their personality.
Asking why they think they are the best fit for the role is a good starting point, as it gives them the ability to provide more context than they typically would in a text response. Also, this gives you the ability to compare their experience to the target hire persona. The way someone answers this question typically makes clear if they’re a fit at a high level.
Consider asking questions like:
- Why do you think you’re the best fit for this role?
- What are you looking for in your next role?
- How are you looking to grow and learn?
- What’s a mistake you made and learned from?
- How would your friends and family describe you?
- If you could have any superpower, what would it be?
In their video response, you’ll see their communication skills, confidence, and personality — without having to schedule dozens or hundreds of 30-minute meetings.
5) Conduct two interviews to assess fit and experience
Interviews can be time-consuming. They take time to schedule and conduct, especially if you put too many people through the entire interview process. Multiple rounds of screening ensure you only invest time in the most promising candidates.
Ideally, your job posting results in hundreds of applicants. Your first screening (described above) gets you down to about a dozen, max. The first interview we’re about to describe gets you down to the single digits — about four or five. Then, you’ll only have to deeply interview those four or five candidates to find your new hire(s).
1) A quick interview to assess skills and mindset
This first interview is a brief (20- or 30-minute) phone call to learn more about each applicant's skill set, goals, and mindset. Skills aren’t the only prerequisite for success: True rock stars have a growth mindset and will look at this opportunity as the next step in a passionate career.
At the beginning of this interview, we like to build up the candidate’s confidence by saying something like, “We had ### applicants and you’ve made it this far, so you’re definitely a strong person for this role. We’re confident you’ll be successful regardless of whether you work for us or get scooped up by someone else.”
Then, you’re ready to start asking questions.
Questions to understand their goals and mindset
- What does success look like for you a year from now?
- What do you want to accomplish in this role?
- What specific achievements will make you feel the most successful?
These questions should feel familiar, and that’s because they should roughly align with the mission and outcomes you chose in the target hire persona. Of course, candidates didn’t read that document so it’s unfair to expect perfect alignment. But they will help you understand which applicants are the best fit for your needs.
For example, if your target hire persona was a systems thinker who can help with problem-solving and organization across your team, you might look for answers about strong processes and great teamwork. Alternatively, if you’re looking for a brilliant customer-facing agent, you might seek answers related to empathy and customer advocacy.
Also, a lack of clear, focused goals at this stage is a red flag. If someone answers vaguely or responds with a variation of “I just want a good customer service job and your company seems great,” then they’re not going to be a rock star on your team.
Questions to understand skillset
Skills are a difficult thing to discuss. If the candidate prepared well, they’ll likely know what skills you need for the role based on the job posting and find ways to weave those skills into their answers. They may also have completed courses or customer service certifications that indicate what they can do, but it's important to go beyond that and get a sense of real-world applications of these skills.We like to ask a series of questions that force candidates to reflect on their skills in a slightly different way. Here’s how we get there:
- We’re going to talk to a few people you’ve worked with at the end of the application process, should you make it that far. What’s a role you succeeded in, and who was your boss in that role? If we talk to them later in the interview process, how do you think they’ll describe you? What parts of the job would they say you excelled at?
Again, you’re looking for clear answers and alignment with your target hire persona.
Second, gauge which parts of the job they’re least skilled and excited about. Here’s how we might get at this answer:
- Now I want to understand the opposite. What are some things that boss would say you’re not great at? Or maybe, what are some things you’re capable of doing but don’t love?
To make this question a bit less intimidating, we usually share an example. We’ve often used the example, “I’m able to whip up some graphic designs for our website and they look pretty good. But graphic design is something I just hate doing. It’s a tedious process and I would rather have a marketing person handle that if at all possible, so I can focus on my strengths.”
This question allows the candidate to essentially complain about select aspects of the role. You’re not looking to trick someone into disqualifying themselves from the running. However, you are trying to avoid a situation in which you hire someone to spend all week doing something they’d rather avoid.
Once they answer, consider asking follow-up questions to get more examples and context.
Questions to understand teamwork and self-awareness
- How would past supervisors rate you on a scale of 1-10?
- How would your peers rate you on a scale of 1-10?
These questions are quick and help you understand whether their previous answers were honest and self-aware.
Ask them for the name of two previous bosses and two previous colleagues. Explain that you won’t reach out to those people yet, but might if you extend an offer.
Once they give you names, ask how each person would rate them on a scale of 1-10 — insist on a single number for each. You’re looking for lots of 8s and 9s. If you see a trend of 7 or lower, that could indicate this person has — and may have oversold themselves when discussing their skillset earlier in the interview. Also, 10s across the board show a lack of self-awareness and growth mindset.
By the end of this interview, you’ll have a solid understanding of whether each candidate’s skills and mindset fit your needs. Move the best candidates onto the final interview, thank the rest for their time, and invite them to re-apply for future roles — after all, each role should have a specific target hire persona, and they might just fit your next opening a bit better. To thank them for their time, you can also refer them to anyone else in your network that’s hiring.
2) A deep-dive interview to know you have a great hire
Each candidate that makes it to this final interview should be a pretty great fit for the role. Some companies might go straight to a job offer at this stage, but the risk of bringing on the wrong new hire still exists.
The deep-dive interview will last two hours. Two hours might seem like a big investment. But two hours is nothing compared to investing two or three months into a candidate before realizing you need to start the hiring process over because they’re not a great fit.
A deep-dive interview gives you a crystal-clear understanding of each candidate’s entire career history, their ability to communicate clearly and effectively in a long-format meeting, and their personality. After this conversation, you’ll have zero doubts about which candidate is your rock star.
Here’s how the deep-dive interview works.
Set up a two-hour conversational interview with a small panel
When you invite the candidate to this meeting, be clear about:
- The goal of the meeting
- The format of the meeting
- The list of attendees
If you give the candidate some context behind such a long meeting, they can approach the interview with more preparation and less anxious energy.
As far as the list of attendees, you can make a decision based on your team’s makeup and availability. If possible, we recommend inviting the hiring manager, a senior manager, and a peer to introduce the interviewee to the team they’ll work with (and vice versa). However, you can also run the interview solo if that works better for your team.
Once you assemble the panel and schedule the interview, the long-form interview itself is quite straightforward and formulaic. Here’s what it looks like:
Discuss every full-time position the candidate has had, in chronological order
Start from the beginning of the candidate’s resume and discuss each and every full-time role in their job history. For early parts of their career (or jobs that are not related to your open role) you can move quickly through these questions. But it is important to discuss each role.
By digging into every single part of the candidate’s career with a standard set of questions, you will get a clear overview of how they’ve performed and what makes them tick.
Ask the same set of questions for each position
What makes this interview process effective and simple is that you ask the same questions for each role. This gives the interview a conversational flow that produces powerful insights. Here are the questions:
- What were you hired to do? This gives you an idea of the mission and outcomes they were hired to accomplish
- What accomplishments are you most proud of? This helps you understand whether they accomplished those goals and what they value in terms of achievement
- What were the low points of the role? This helps show the candidate’s self-awareness and growth mindset, and gives you a chance to spot red-flag trends — that said, recognize every job naturally has high and low points
- Who was your boss? What was it like working with them? This gives you context for your reference call later on and tells you how the candidate likes to be managed
Together, these answers give you a good idea of their specific experience in customer service roles, their experience with handling a helpdesk and the challenges of customer service, and some insight into their soft skills that a shorter interview could never provide.
Don’t bother with a take-home assignment for these qualified candidates
Many companies will assign a test assignment this late in the process to do a final check on the skillset and quality of candidates. We don’t recommend a test assignment — especially at this point — because assignments are too simple to game and sometimes give candidates a bad impression of your company because you asked them to do “free work.”
If you want to use an assignment, keep it short and earlier in the process. But at this point in the process, the deep-dive interview will give you much richer information. Specifically, it helps you understand what the candidate will actually be like on your team before you invest in onboarding and two or three months of work.
6) Use reference checks to get more context and certainty
Most people treat reference checks as a way to make sure the candidate told the truth on their resume and during the hiring process. That can be part of the process, but the greater value of reference checks is to get even deeper context into the candidate’s skills and work style.
Here’s how to approach reference calls:
- Use the deep-dive interview to decide who to contact. If the candidate mentioned a particularly important or interesting relationship, success, or challenge, make a note to call their boss in that position to get more information.
- Chat with references for 5-10 minutes. These conversations should be informal and conversation — you want the major takeaways about what it’s like to work with this person.
- Give the reference person context. Start on a positive note, explaining that you’re hiring for a customer support role and the candidate in question seems like a great fit.
- Ask high-level, open-ended questions. Questions like “Is what they said true?” limit the conversation. Instead, ask questions like “What was it like working with this person?” or “What kind of role would this person excel in?”
- Ask about strengths. For example, ask “What’s a project this person absolutely crushed? What responsibilities did they nail every time?” Ideally, the answers align with the candidate’s self-reported skills and strengths.
- Ask about challenges. For example, say, “They mentioned [the challenge] at your company. How did they handle that challenge?”. Then, open it up: “What are some other areas of improvement for them?” By framing this positively as improvements, you’ll get more direct feedback about the candidate's rough spots.
Each call takes fewer than 10 minutes but gives you valuable insight into the highs and lows of working with this person. Again, similar to the deep-dive interview, you’re looking for patterns across reference calls more than any single answer. If the candidate’s answers line up with the answers you get during the reference checks, the candidate has high self-awareness and emotional intelligence — both important qualities in customer service.
By the time you go through the entire process with multiple candidates, you’ll be certain about the best fit(s) for your open role(s). And once you’ve run this interview process a few times, it will become much more efficient and much less daunting.
Bonus: How to choose a start date and win over unsure candidates
As we mentioned earlier in this guide, hiring is a two-way street. You have to win a candidate over just as much as they have to win you over. Once you choose a candidate, here’s how to give yourself the best chance for an accepted offer and a successful start.
Tips for sending an offer letter they’ll want to sign
If all went well, the candidate should be thrilled that you offer them the job. However, they may be considering other offers and it never hurts to demonstrate that you’re a thoughtful employer that’s genuinely excited about working with them.
First, consider giving them a call before sending the offer letter. Most candidates will appreciate hearing the enthusiasm in your voice and getting the news directly from the hiring manager, who they spent the entire process getting to know. Plus, you have the opportunity to get a verbal yes.
When you send the letter, give them a sign-by date. This gives them some parameters, adds a bit of urgency to the decision, and helps you develop a contingency plan with other top candidates in case your top choice declines the offer.
Last, consider asking everyone involved in the interview process to send a personal note to the candidate, especially if the candidate is on the fence. The candidate will end up working with these people, so an authentic and personalized note expressing excitement could make the difference between an acceptance and a declined offer.
Choose a start date that works for candidates and your business
Throughout the interview process, you should clarify when the candidates hope to start. Once you make the offer, don’t be afraid to encourage them to take a week or two off before starting the new job — they’ll appreciate the time off, plus it’s a signal that your company takes preventative measures against employee burnout. And if you’ve moved away from reactive hiring, this shouldn’t be too big of a hassle for your team.
Last, if you’re hiring multiple agents, work to start them on the same day. This way, you can onboard in cohorts, giving each new hire a buddy for support and companionship. Plus, you’ll save time by giving each training session once instead of multiple times for each hire.
Master Hiring Customer Service Agents with HelpFlow.com and Gorgias
The hiring process isn’t about filling seats, it’s about building a team that strengthens morale, tackles challenges, and ultimately drives your brand forward. While it’s definitely possible to hire agents more quickly, quicker isn’t always better. A single bad experience with a customer service agent can cost you customers and damage brand equity. A team of bad hires can kill the future of your entire company.
If you rush the hiring process, problems during onboarding, new-hire retention plummets, and the top talent you had before these bad hires start to leave. It’s better to invest time upfront to ensure you only hire A-player team members.
Want help scaling your customer support team with agents who can provide an amazing customer experience and work with larger company goals in mind? HelpFlow runs customer service teams for over 100 brands and can help you level up your customer service operation. Check out our Gorgias Premier Partner profile and contact us today to learn more.
And if you’re struggling to streamline the workflow of your team and turn customer service into a profit center, check out Gorgias — the customer service platform built for ecommerce. Sign up for a free trial today.
The 10 Best Social Media Apps for Shopify
According to data from Kepios, there are a total of 4.62 billion social media users in the world as of January 2022 — accounting for well over half of the earth's population. In other words, if you want to go where your customers are as a Shopify store owner, social media platforms are mission-critical.
Social media may be a great opportunity but it isn't exactly low-hanging fruit. Social media is complex and time-consuming. Even seasoned digital marketing professionals can get bogged down by tedious tasks, low-return initiatives, and frustrating obstacles when it comes to marketing products to potential customers on social media.
The good news is that utilizing the right Shopify social media apps can go a long way toward making your social media marketing campaigns more efficient and effective. To help you choose the ideal apps for your social media marketing and social media customer service needs, let's take a look at the 10 most powerful social media apps currently available on the Shopify app store.
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1) Outfy - Automate Social Media by Outfy
With Outfy, store owners are able to automate much of the work that goes into managing social media profiles by curating, scheduling, and publishing posts automatically. In addition to its convenient automation features, Outfy also enables you to easily create high-quality collages, videos, and GIFs to promote your products and boost brand awareness on social media.
Shopify rating ⭐4.8 (1214)
Price: From $15/month
Key features
- Provides a range of customizable promotional post templates
- Auto-generates and publishes promotional posts based on a number of predefined settings
- Makes it easy to turn your product pictures into collages, videos, and animated GIFs
- Hashtag research for helping you select the most effective hashtags for your promotional posts to reach your target audience
What users think of this app
- Exceptional for auto-generating social media posts
- Easy to set up and use
- Hashtag research tools make it easy to select the ideal hashtags for promotional posts
Related: Our guide to customer service automation — set repeatable, low-impact tasks to autopilot.
2) Chatdesk - Email & FB Support by Chatdesk
According to data from Microsoft, 90% of Americans use customer service as a factor in deciding whether or not to do business with a company. With Chatdesk, you are able to outsource your customer support responsibilities to a team of hand-chosen customer support agents who are already fans of your brand. In addition to providing 24/7 live chat and email support, Chatdesk customer support agents also respond to all social media comments, mentions, and direct messages in real-time.
Shopify rating ⭐5.0 (14)
Price: Free plan available
Key features
- Customer support agents are hired and trained on your behalf, and Chatdesk makes an effort to hire agents who are already "superfans" of your brand
- Social media integration for responding to comments, messages, and mentions across all major social media networks
- Provides 24/7 support options to your customers
What users think of this app
- Reliable U.S.-based customer support agents
- Social media integrations are ideal for turning social media platforms into additional customer support channels.
- Exceptional for driving conversions with pre-purchase chat conversations
For Gorgias customers, learn more about our Chatdesk integration here.
3) Facebook Messenger Marketing by ShopMessage
Facebook Messenger Marketing is a Shopify app by ShopMessage that allows you to create automated Facebook Messenger marketing flows. These flows are triggered based on a wide range of customer actions, such as cart abandonment and first-time purchases from new customers. This app also offers customizable opt-in popups designed to help you grow your Facebook Messenger subscriber list and shareable links that will direct to a FB Messenger marketing flow when clicked.
Shopify rating ⭐4.3 (129)
Price: $9/month
Key features
- Messenger Menu feature provides customers with a concierge-like experience by giving them on-demand access to targeted product recommendations, support links, or interactive FAQs
- A guaranteed minimum ROI in your first paid month or you receive a full refund
- Create Facebook ads that direct to FB Messenger marketing flows
What users think of this app
- Excellent customer support
- Targeted product recommendations boost conversion rates
- Series for important revenue-driving initiatives like lowering cart abandonment and upselling at checkout
For Gorgias customers, learn more about our ShopMessage integration here.
4) Octane AI: Quiz Growth Tools by Octane AI
According to data from DemandGen, interactive content elicits twice as much engagement as static content. Interactive content such as surveys and quizzes in particular can be especially useful for providing ecommerce store owners with zero-party data on their customers.
With Octane AI, you can create customizable surveys for your Shopify store, which you can use to learn what your customers like and dislike about their experience with your brand and products. Octane AI also gives you the ability to create customizable quizzes that you can use to provide customers with targeted product information and recommend new products. Best of all, quizzes and surveys created using Octane AI are easily shareable across all social platforms.
Shopify rating ⭐4.8 (200)
Price: From $50/month
Key features
- Octane AI popup gives personalized product recommendations, which users can access and add to their carts
- Integrates with Klaviyo to target your SMS and email marketing campaigns based on data collected using Octane AI
- Dynamic quiz functionality lets you display different questions and Octane AI popup styles based on the demographics of the customer viewing them
What users think of this app
- Product recommendation quizzes lead to increased sales
- Quizzes are customizable and easy to create
- Collects valuable zero-party data
For Gorgias customers, learn more about our Octane AI integration here.
5) Recart: SMS & Messenger by Recart
Recart is an SMS, email, and FB Messenger marketing tool that lets you create popup opt-ins for growing your email list. It also offers a variety of automated flows and templates that you can use to make your FB Messenger marketing strategy more efficient. Additionally, Recart provides built-in SMS stats and a real-time dashboard for you to track your campaigns.
Source: Recart
Shopify rating ⭐4.8 (5506)
Price: Free plan available
Key features
- Edit templates with a no-code, drag-and-drop editor
- Personalize your campaigns with condition splits
- Integrate the tool with others, such as Klaviyo, Gorgias, and Drip
What users think of this app
- Excellent for growing subscriber lists
- Abandoned cart recovery flows are highly effective
- Lots of useful integrations
For Gorgias customers, learn more about our Recart integration here.
6) 20+ Promotional Sales Tools by Zotabox
Zotabox is a platform that offers over 20 different useful sales tools, including customizable banners, countdown timers, social sharing buttons, customizable forms, and push notifications. Whatever you might need to make your social media marketing efforts a success, there's a high likelihood that you'll find what you're looking for on Zotabox.
Shopify rating ⭐4.8 (469)
Price: From $12.99/month
Key features
- Embed videos on your website
- Add customizable forms and live chat windows to your site
- Source and display Facebook and Google reviews on your site
What users think of this app
- Excellent triggering options for popups
- Lots of useful solutions in one package
- All of the tools are highly customizable
Related: How to transform live chat into your a top sales tool.
7) Instafeed: Instagram Feed by Mintt Studio
Instafeed is an app that displays your Instagram feed on your website. Instafeed also enables you to tag products in your Instagram posts in order to create a shoppable Instagram feed.
Shopify rating ⭐4.9 (1183)
Price: Free plan available
Key features
- Display Instagram content in an on-site widget for social proof through user-generated content (UGC)
- Expand the reach of your Instagram profile to your store visitors
- Turn your Instagram profile into a social commerce channel via the option to tag products in Instagram posts
What users think of this app
- Improves the visual appeal of a Shopify store
- Great for converting Instagram into an additional sales channel
- Easy to set up and customize
Related: Our guide to Instagram for customer service.
8) Facebook Channel by Shopify
Facebook Channel is an app by Shopify that automatically syncs products from your store to your Facebook account, making it easy to sell and promote products on Facebook. Facebook Channel also allows you to easily create a variety of Facebook Ads campaigns, including audience-building campaigns and dynamic retargeting campaigns.
Shopify rating ⭐3.5 (3785)
Price: Free to install, additional charges apply
Key features
- Tag products in Facebook or Instagram posts
- Create a custom storefront for your Facebook Shop
- Access a variety of templates for setting up Facebook advertising campaigns
What users think of this app
- Seamless integration with Shopify
- One of the easiest ways to get a Facebook store up and running
- Makes it easier to set up effective Facebook advertising campaigns
Related: Our guide to Facebook Messenger for customer service.
9) Minta Automated Social Videos by Minta Technology
With Minta Technology, Shopify store owners can construct professional social videos and design image posts using a variety of attractive pre-built templates. Minta Technology also gives you the option to schedule social media posts for automatic publishing.
Shopify rating ⭐4.8 (520)
Price: Free plan available
Key features
- Embed videos on your product pages
- Schedule posts up to two months in advance with the content scheduler
- Create fully-branded images and videos for social posts with ease
What users think of this app
- Saves a lot of time otherwise spent scheduling and publishing posts
- Makes bland social media posts much more unique and eye-catching
- An impressive variety of templates to choose from
Related: Our guide to product photography to set customer expectations and boost sales.
10) Gorgias - Live Chat & Helpdesk
Gorgias is an all-in-one customer service helpdesk platform for Shopify stores. Gorgias offers a range of features designed to help you improve your online store’s quality of customer support, while simultaneously reducing your customer support team's workload.
But what makes Gorgias such an excellent social media Shopify app is the fact that Gorgias integrates with Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. This allows your customer support agents to respond to messages and mentions across all social media channels from a single, user-friendly dashboard.
Shopify rating ⭐4.4 (533)
Price: From $10/month
Using Shopify Inbox? Compare Gorgias vs. Shopify Inbox.
Key features
- Connect your social logins with your helpdesk: Generate a customer support ticket anytime someone messages your brand, replies to a post, or creates a post mentioning your brand on WhatsApp, Facebook, or Instagram
- Live chat windows that can be easily transitioned to an email
- Automated Rules and templated Macros to improve your customer service quality and speed
What users think of this app
- One-click integrations with your social media accounts and other ecommerce tools (for marketing, shipping, customer reviews, referrals, and more)
- Automate tedious customer support tasks to save time for your customer support staff and maximize their impact
- Very helpful for prioritizing customer inquiries to ensure that the most important inquiries receive the fastest possible response
- Excellent customer support to help you set up the tool and optimize your Rules, Views, and Macros
- Convenient to have messages from all social channels (Facebook Messenger and comments, Instagram DMs and comments, and WhatsApp conversations) in one place
Related: The best customer service software on the market.
Gorgias lets you manage all of your Shopify social media apps, minus the headache
Choosing the right social media apps for your ecommerce tech stack can provide you with a number of powerful capabilities, from the ability to automatically publish posts across numerous social networks to the ability to turn your social media profiles into convenient customer support channels.
At Gorgias, we are committed to helping our clients make the most of their chosen social media apps by ensuring that Gorgias is capable of integrating with a variety of popular Shopify apps, including Recart, Octane AI, ShopMessage, ChatDesk, and beyond. To learn more about Gorgias's powerful integrations, be sure to check out our social media app integration page.
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Ecommerce Community Management: What Is It and Why Does It Matter?
Some customers will arrive on your website, place an order, and move on with their lives. But ideally, given the outsize returns of returning customers, your shoppers also have the option of joining a strong community where they can:
- Provide feedback that guides product development
- See how other customers use your products
- Engage with relevant (non-sales) content
- Stay up to date with your brand’s promotions and releases
- Become a fully-fledged brand advocates
Thanks to these customer engagement tactics, a community can lead to better word-of-mouth marketing, referrals, and repeat purchases. According to Gorgias research of over 10,000 ecommerce brands, community building can boost a brand’s revenue by an estimated 6%.
In this article, we’ll take a deep dive into all things customer community management: what it entails, the benefits of community marketing at your company, steps you can follow to create a community management strategy, and tips and tricks to use once you’re in the thick of community management.
What is customer community management?
Customer community management is the ongoing process of building and maintaining an authentic social network among your customers, staff members, and partners. You can host communities in various places: your brand's social media channels, dedicated online forums, or in person at networking events or brand get-togethers.
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Two examples of great community management from ecommerce brands include 310 Nutrition and Kitsch.
310 Nutrition sells meal replacement shakes and has a significant member base through their private 310 Nutrition Community Facebook group. There are over 400,000 members that engage in discussions related to the brand but also discuss nutrition and weight loss. It’s a place for like-minded individuals who share a similar goal of becoming healthier:
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Beauty accessory and hair care brand Kitsch utilizes a slightly different community management strategy through TikTok. Kitsch has over 45,000 followers on TikTok and focuses on educating about their products, debuting new products, and running giveaways for their loyal fans. The brand does a great job at keeping its TikTok videos authentic and educational, rather than feeling like a salesroom floor:
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The many benefits of a sound customer community management strategy
In addition to boosting revenue, a community management strategy can increase customer engagement and happiness, serve as an additional channel for customer service, and provide a platform for your most loyal customers to share their thoughts. And that's just the tip of the iceberg.
So, what other benefits can solid community management offer?
Increases customer engagement and customer satisfaction
If your brand can run an effective customer community management strategy, you’ll start to see an increase in customer engagement as well as customer satisfaction. The more your brand's presence overlaps with where your customers are — especially online — the more you can boost engagement. For example, if you provide valuable content on Instagram and engage with people in the comment section, your audience will see your brand as authentic and committed to customers.
In turn, if customers engage with your brand, they will be more satisfied and will likely return as customers again and again. Even more, for 43% of customers, good customer service breeds more loyal repeat customers — and more brand champions ultimately means more revenue for your brand, thanks to the value of referrals, product reviews, and repeat purchases.
These benefits come at a much lower cost than paid customer acquisition strategies, which require huge investments for customers who might only place one order with your brand — if that.
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Related: Our guide to improving customer satisfaction (CSAT) scores, one of the most important metrics for long-term brand growth.
Becomes another convenient and efficient customer service channel
Online community management can also open additional customer service channels for your customers that are more convenient than contacting a call center, using your site’s live chat support, or sending an email. In the community management realm, this could be chatting with a service rep via direct message (DM) on Instagram or troubleshooting an issue on a public Facebook group forum.
Related: Our guide on customer support in ecommerce.
Provides quality feedback about products or services from your most loyal customers
Feedback is vital to your brand’s success, so additional spaces for customers to share feedback can be extremely valuable. You can even encourage customer feedback about products if your community management strategy includes online forums or social media pages like LinkedIn and Facebook.
However, there is some risk in asking for feedback in such a public setting. If you'd rather ease into it, you could create a survey that only shows the results to you and your team. Offer something to customers for their time — such as a gift card or entry to a raffle — to incentivize them to participate.
Collecting customer feedback doesn't need to have a complicated format. For example, furniture brand Sabai uses Instagram polls to gauge customer interest in new product designs:
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This kind of customer research is a great way to stoke community engagement and mitigate future customer complaints.
Creates more opportunities for upselling and cross-selling
Community management strategies can be effective sales or upselling channels because they give you the chance to educate customers (and let customers educate one another) about how different or additional products can help their needs.
On top of straightforward product recommendations, you can practice upselling by sharing influencer or user-generated content marketing about new or premium products. Again, the goal isn’t to plug your products directly but incorporate them into content your community might like to see.
A great example of this is Glamnetic’s TikTok about the do’s and don’ts of eyebrow makeup, which features numerous Glamnetic products:
Related: Our guide to ecommerce upselling and cross-selling for higher average order values (AOVs).
Encourages customers to become your best brand ambassadors
Lastly, a benefit of community management is the ability to create brand ambassadors. You can do this organically by engaging with customers with large followings on social media, but you can also do it more strategically through brand ambassador programs.
Brand ambassadors provide a type of advocacy that no paid ads could ever achieve. They convince their friends and followers to try your brand, then those friends and followers convince their friends and followers to try your brand, and the cycle continues. This is also a great way to create social proof, or reviews and testimonials you can attach to product pages and your website.
One ecommerce brand that uses this tactic effectively is athleisure company Fabletics. The brand prides itself on being an inclusive, quality, affordable alternative to other high-end athleisure brands like Lululemon. Thus, Fabletics reflects this in their brand ambassador program, where they encourage real people to apply as influencers regardless of their status. In addition, they also work with celebrity influencers who have a passion for health and fitness, such as Kevin Hart and Maddie Ziegler.
Jaxxon, another brand that creates a community around a niche — chain jewelry for main — capitalizes on brand ambassadors who share content on their own social networks.
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A step-by-step guide for creating a customer community management strategy
So, now you have a better understanding of why customer community management has the potential to increase your brand's revenue. But how can you create a community that gets results? Here are six steps to building a customer community management strategy that works for your unique brand.
1) Research social media community management platforms
The first step in developing a community management strategy is to do your research.. Think about where your current customers frequent most when online and where your target audience is. For most brands, the easiest place to gather a group of people will be whichever social media platform you already use the most, whether that’s Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, or another platform. However, if you’re trying to launch a more :
- Discord: A robust platform that lets you host channels, forums, private messages, multimedia sharing, and more
- Reddit: A platform known for authenticity and impressive crowd moderation — be wary of Reddit’s anti-marketing guidelines, though
- Slack: Mostly known for business teams, Slack can also host customer communities
- Thinkific: A community platform that also offers great functionality for educational courses
- Mighty Networks: The top-rated community marketing platform on G2
- Tribe Platform: A community platform best known for its high degree of customization
- A forum native to your website: If you want, you can also try and build community functionality directly on your website
2) Create goals regarding what kind of outcome you’re looking for with your brand community
Next, you’ll want to create goals that align with the outcomes you hope to see from the strategy. Your goals could be tied to revenue, customer service effectiveness, brand awareness, and public relations. Some example goals may include:
- Higher customer retention
- Lower contact rate for your customer service center due to customers finding answers themselves in your online communities
- Increased interest in a new product or renewed interest in an old product
- Better public perception of your brand
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3) Get to know your audience
Though you likely have a solid idea of who your audience is at this point, you’ll want to continue getting to know your audience on the platforms you identified in step 1. You may realize you need a slightly different approach when applying your community management plan to TikTok versus a Facebook forum, for example. Though your audience may be similar in both places, folks expect quick, educational, and entertaining videos on TikTok. In contrast, they may want longer-winded discussions with other customers about your brand’s products on a Facebook forum.
One way to stoke community engagement is to try and spark interactions. For National Baking Day, for example, chocolate brand Montezuma’s requested community members’ best recipes instead of just sharing recipes themselves:
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Related: Learn how Montezuma’s saves five hours a week and answers customer questions faster with Gorgias.
4) Craft valuable and thought-provoking content
Building off step 3, you’ll want to set up a plan to create valuable and thought-provoking content to ensure your customers come back to the online communities you are building. The type of content you create for your community management strategy should align with your overall brand image, tone, and voice.
For example, let's say you're an ecommerce brand that sells sustainable mid-century furniture. Your community-based digital marketing strategy should include educational content that gives insight into your brand's sustainability: Where your products are made, how you source your materials, what your labor practices are, etc. In addition, you also want to create beautiful imagery (photos and videos) that showcase your brand’s furniture in real peoples’ homes.
For example, fashion brand Princess Polly (and their community members) create outfit inspiration videos that would be independently interesting, regardless of whether you bought the clothes through the brand. Of course, someone watching might also love a particular garment and head to the website:
Related: Learn how Princess Polly helps customers 95% faster with Gorgias.
5) Use tools to measure success and track customer insights
In addition to the actual content that makes up your customer community management strategy, you’ll want to identify ways to measure the success of your program and track insights from your customers. One way to streamline this step is to find a tool that does what you need automatically. We'll highlight a few awesome insight tools below. Keep in mind that a great tool may require more financial investment upfront, but it will save you tons of time in the long run and should eventually pay for itself.
Powerful community management tools to explore
- Gorgias: As an all-in-one customer support solution, Gorgias can be an excellent choice for your customer service team to keep up with both current customers and future customers alike through email, social media, and chat.
- Keyhole: Keeping an eye on what is being said about your brand at any given moment can be a whole job by itself. Using a social listening tool like Keyhole can simplify this process by aggregating all mentions of your brand on social media. You can even keep an eye on your competition this way, which can help keep your brand’s strategy fresh and engaging.
- Tweetdeck: If your brand has a Twitter-heavy strategy, Tweetdeck could assist your team with keeping an eye on specific feeds, hashtags, lists, and even managing your own tweets and messages. The tool also allows for data-driven insights.
- Grytics: If part of your community management strategy relies on running a specific group or online community, such as a private Facebook group, Grytics could help organize your insights, engagement, and overall performance.
6) Assign a community manager to help your community flourish
The last step in creating your customer community management strategy is assigning a community manager. A dedicated community manager on your team will help execute your strategy and ensure the communities you’re building are supported and continue to grow.
A community manager is similar to a social media manager, but there is one major difference. A social media manager typically posts and supports a brand from the inside. This usually means posting from a brand’s social media accounts. On the other hand, a community manager posts as a brand ambassador under their own accounts, not the brand's. The community manager will develop the community as a part of the community. A community manager can also be seen as a brand advocate.
A great community manager would manage your brand’s community with a seriousness that doesn’t jeopardize the brand but also a friendly and personable attitude to keep customers engaged. Specific tasks of a good community manager could include:
- Ensuring customers' questions are answered
- Moderating conflict within the community
- Enforcing terms of service (TOS) policies
- Keeping the community a positive place for customers to interact
Tips and tricks for community management
As you finalize your customer community management strategy and start executing it, here are some best practices to keep in mind to make it as successful as possible.
Always provide a link back to your website
A link to your brand’s website is never a bad idea because each link out there increases the chance of someone in the community going to your website, clicking around, and making a purchase. Even if your community manager can provide an answer with one sentence of text, try to find somewhere to link to on your website, such as an FAQ page.
Check out how Branch’s Help Center links back to the US (and Canada) store at the top of the portal:
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Stay consistent with the company branding tone while responding to customers
Customers and even to-be customers come to know certain brands based on their tone. And even if you are new to community management, you can quickly become known if you create a unique brand voice and tone in online spaces and stick to it.
One great way to achieve this is with the help of template responses, which we at Gorgias call Macros. With Macros, you can create and maintain a library of templates for frequently asked questions. But unlike most templates, Macros include variables that automatically populate with information like [Customer name] or [Tracking number of last order]. These Macros accelerate your customer service representatives’s workflows without sacrificing personalization or quality:
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Create community guidelines and enforce them
Nobody wants to be the Rule Police, but community guidelines in online spaces are vital for mature, inclusive, and productive discourse. Successful community guidelines will also protect your brand if someone on a forum, for example, starts to get out of hand. Additionally, share your brand’s privacy and data protection standards with community members. 52% of social media users rate their privacy and data protection as highly important, so be sure to let them know how you protect their data.
Ask questions, encourage users to share wins/questions, and find other ways to stoke engagement
Remember that the community isn’t just a place for you to make announcements and sell your own products. Find meaningful ways to get people to talk to one another, share insights, and participate in the discussion.
Always respond to community members in a reasonable time frame
As part of your strategy, be sure to decide on what you and the rest of your team believe to be a reasonable time frame to respond to community members. If a community manager doesn’t respond to a community member’s question for several days, the likelihood of that member using the forum again is unlikely.
Keep content engaging
Even if you are on a forum that uses mostly blocks of text, think of ways to keep the content engaging, such as incorporating photos, videos, infographics, and even podcasts (if applicable).
One company you can look to as a model for great content creation is Casper, an ecommerce brand specializing in mattresses and pillows. Beyond its diverse content on various social media platforms, the brand has the Sleep Channel on YouTube, which includes a 12-part series that features sleep meditations and bedtime stories.
Give back to your community
Lastly, it’s vital to dedicate part of your brand’s community management strategy to give back to your community. This can ensure your brand keeps growing and supports brand loyalty among customers. Ways to give back could include things like hosting contests, giveaways, highlighting user-generated content, and providing other incentives to expand the community.
3 great examples of customer communities
We’ve covered a few examples of great customer communities above, but here are three more that we see as the gold standard.
310 Nutrition’s Facebook Community focuses on education
Though we mentioned 310 Nutrition earlier, the brand is a perfect example of how to run a strong online community focused on education. The fitness and weight-loss brand provides tons of content in its private Facebook group from brand ambassadors who work for 310 nutrition and are experts in the industry, such as trainers and nutritionists.
The brand shares high-quality videos and articles with tips and tricks to encourage community members to stay motivated on their health journey. 310 Nutrition’s Facebook community also provides members exclusive promotions. All of these strategies help 310 Nutrition’s Facebook group attract new members regularly.
Annmarie Skin Care encourages emotional connections
Skincare brand, Annmarie Skin Care, combines its loyalty program (called the Wild & Beautiful Collective) with an exclusive Facebook group only open to loyalty-program members. Connecting a loyalty program to a closed online community can be a great way to give an exclusive benefit to loyal customers without investing too much overhead. In the community, loyal customers get exclusive content, access to the Annmarie team, and promotions.
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Oracle offers multiple communities for its powerful software
Even outside of the ecommerce world, online customer communities can be extremely beneficial. Oracle, for example, has different communities to bring together peers who use Oracle products and experts to help navigate the brand’s complex offerings.
Without this kind of interactive community, new and prospective Oracle customers might be confused about the company’s benefits and use cases. The community helps them learn those things without having to talk to a sales agent:
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Build a smooth, profitable customer experience with Gorgias
Creating online communities for your customers can take your brand one step closer to improving the overall customer experience. Online community management gives customers a better shopping experience, more avenues to answer their questions, and boosts your company's revenue in the process.
Efficient, helpful customer service and self-service resources like those offered at Gorgias can help you further your community management goals. Sign up and see how our platform can help streamline customer service interactions, automate repetitive tasks so your team members can focus on connecting with customers, and provide customer data to keep you and your team on track. Book my demo.
Ecommerce Shipping: Creating a Shipping and Fulfillment Strategy
Whether you’re a small business owner or part of a large ecommerce business, you know that shipping and fulfillment are a significant component of your brand. And you’re here reading this because you want to craft a stronger shipping and fulfillment strategy.
We’ll get to that soon enough, but first, take a minute to think like a consumer. Take off your business-leader hat and put on your internet-shopper hat.
Got the right hat on? OK, good. Now think about your last experience as an ecommerce customer.
How did you approach your last purchase? Did you purchase from the absolute cheapest source, some obscure company you’ve never heard of? Or did you stick to brands and platforms you already know — ones you know you can trust to deliver?
If you’re like most ecommerce customers, you picked something reliable. Because we all know that price is important — but getting what we need when we need it is even more important.
And that’s exactly why it’s crucial for your business to create an ecommerce shipping and fulfillment strategy that works well for you and your customers.
What is ecommerce shipping?
Ecommerce shipping is the process of getting products purchased through an ecommerce storefront or platform from wherever they are to the customer’s specified delivery address. It is a multifaceted, complex process with many touchpoints, dependencies, and moving parts, and its core goal is a crucial one: getting the items people bought delivered to them accurately and on time.
Because of the myriad complexities involved in ecommerce shipping, many companies rely on external partners for some or all of their shipping and fulfillment needs. And all companies, once they reach a certain point of growth, rely on some combination of software and apps to keep shipping, fulfillment, and inventory running smoothly.
How your shipping strategy impacts your bottom line
To the uninitiated, shipping seems like a commodity good, something to spend as little focus and resources on as possible so that teams can stay focused on the real work of the business.
But experience and real-world statistics say otherwise.
A cohesive and realistic shipping strategy is highly valuable to any company that ships products to people because it is part and parcel with your brand image. ShipStation’s second annual national consumer study found that 84% of ecommerce shoppers identified package delivery as the touchpoint that “stands out most in the ecommerce customer experience.”
In other words, get people the stuff they bought quickly, accurately, and with good communication, and you’re telling them something about your brand and company health. Fail to do so, and you’re still sending them strong messages — just not the messages you want them to receive.
While your brand image matters, shipping strategy affects your bottom line more directly too. An even higher percentage of consumers in that same study — 92% — declared that they decide between vendors based on whether they can know their order will arrive when expected.
Your communication about shipping during the customer journey matters, too. While online shopping, customers hate few things more than having to pay extra for shipping, especially if it’s unexpected until they pull their credit card out at checkout — and put it away when they see a high shipping cost.
Most customers would even prefer an increase in product prices over having to pay for shipping, according to a study from Wharton. In fact, unexpectedly high shipping prices are one of the main reasons for cart abandonment, according to a study from the Baymard Institute:
If you’re regularly failing to deliver when promised, customers will take their business elsewhere.
How your ecommerce shipping process connects to the rest of your business
Your shipping process isn’t a self-contained unit. It has the potential to affect numerous other aspects of your business. Not only that, the reverse is also true: Other departments and facets of your operations can also affect your ability to ship well.
Here’s just a partial list of the sorts of departments and functions that tie into most businesses’ shipping processes:
- Inventory management and stock: Stockouts and misplaced items affect shipping ability
- Customer service interactions: Can customer support agents see shipping status? Can your shipping strategy reliably achieve what they promise?
- Refund and return policies (and the teams that execute those policies)
- Partnering with shipping fulfillment companies or third-party logistics (3PL): Do they reliably meet expectations? Can you get the data you need from them?
Shipping methods that online stores are offering customers
There are multiple shipping methods used today, and not every option is right for every business. It’s a good idea to evaluate the shipping methods available for your business’s products and settle in on the methods that make the most sense given your audience, products, margins, and current logistics abilities.
That said, most consumers expect fast, transparent, and often free shipping on most goods. As many as 77% have abandoned a shopping cart completely because they didn’t find the available shipping options to be satisfactory.
Here are five popular shipping methods in ecommerce that you might consider implementing for your business.
Two-day shipping
Thanks to Amazon Prime, two-day shipping is the gold standard within ecommerce. If you don’t offer it and a competitor (even Amazon itself) sells something similar with two-day shipping available, you could miss out on sales.
Pro: Can be a driver of sales and is widely available through 3PL and shipping fulfillment vendors
Con: Can be too resource-intensive for smaller ecommerce businesses
Same-day delivery
Same-day delivery ships products and puts packages on doorsteps the same day that customers click “buy.” It’s a truly premium offering and a great way to differentiate from the competition, but it usually requires significant scale and investment to pull off.
Pro: Consumers love receiving their order the same day
Con: Same-day delivery highly dependent on the customer’s location and limited to select major cities, and the infrastructure and resource costs can be significant
Overnight or expedited shipping
Overnight or expedited shipping has gone by numerous names: Next-day air and one-day shipping are two of the most prominent. It’s faster than two-day but slower than same-day, and it usually comes with a (sometimes hefty) surcharge for fast delivery.
Some companies (and carriers) use the term “expedited shipping” to refer to something faster than standard shipping but not as fast as express or overnight. If two-day (or faster) isn’t possible or isn’t the norm for your industry, you can differentiate yourself by offering a premium service, such as expedited delivery process or overnight shipping (or both).
Pro: Gives consumers more control over delivery timeframes and allows sellers to pass the additional costs on to the buyer
Con: Can add complexity and ambiguity (How fast is “expedited?”) to your ecommerce shipping strategy, and when customers pay more, their expectations shoot up dramatically.
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International shipping
International shipping is a requirement if you’re a U.S. ecommerce firm that wants to ship directly to non-US customers. The same is true if you’re located on another continent and want to start shipping to overseas (including US) customers.
Pro: International shipping is the only way to reach international customers if you don’t have globally distributed warehouses.
Con: Can add an immense level of complexity and cost, leading most to rely on a global fulfillment partner
Eco-friendly shipping
Eco-friendly shipping refers primarily to the packaging elements a company uses both to package and ship a customer’s order. Instead of plastic and foam, ecommerce businesses can choose biodegradable and compostable materials to fill boxes and to package products.
As far as the shipping itself, there isn’t a clear eco-friendly choice. All shipping has a carbon footprint, though carbon offsets are available for companies committed to leaving the smallest possible footprint.
Pro: Eco-friendly choices care for the planet and signal to eco-conscious customers that a brand is deeply committed to protecting natural resources.
Con: Eco-friendly packing materials carry a cost premium, and a major eco-friendly carrier does not exist.
For example, Hive advertises its carbon-neutral shipping (which makes paid shipping easier to bear for some customers) and gives customers the option to also request an envelope to recycle certain packaging materials:
How to calculate the true cost of shipping
One challenge ecommerce stores face is understanding the real cost of shipping their products, as well as the true cost implications of faster shipping speeds.
This is especially an issue for SMBs because the calculations for upgrading a fulfillment process are complex and, usually, expensive.
Make sure you consider these four factors as you calculate shipping costs on an item.
Dimensional weight
Dimensional weight is a calculation that determines shipping cost based on the physical dimensions of a parcel rather than its actual weight. Trucks and cargo planes have a finite amount of cubic yardage, so dimensional size (or package size) is often as or more important than actual pounds or kilograms.
Many carriers consider both dimensional weight and actual weight of items and charge your business for whichever is greater.
Dimensional weight concerns are one reason to be as efficient as possible in terms of box size. Using the smallest box possible to ship an item safely is one way to minimize shipping costs.
Shipping carrier
Consumers tend to think of last-mile shipping companies like FedEx and UPS as generally interchangeable, but businesses know that this isn’t always the case. The cost to ship products varies across the — one might be the cost-effective option for small, local deliveries but more expensive for international orders.
Additionally, certain industries with unique needs may need to consider specialized or niche carriers. While these may be able to deliver a higher level of service or a specific service the big guys don’t offer, costs will generally be higher.
It’s a good practice to evaluate from time to time the available carriers for your shipping needs to make sure you’re still getting the best possible service and rates.
Check out these shipping calculators to understand the speed and cost of top shipping companies:
Shipping distance
Shipping distance is another element that consumers don’t tend to realize (at least until they sell something on eBay or Etsy). Most major carriers divide the country (or the globe) into various shipping zones. The farther the distance between the origin and destination, the more you’ll generally pay.
Pirate Ship has a great, interactive tool to show USPS’s variable shipping zones, which change depending on where you’re shipping from, impacting the total shipping cost. Here are shipping zones for a business in San Fransico, CA, for example:
Product handling and loading
Handling is an area that’s easy for smaller businesses to overlook when calculating costs. This factor refers to the resource costs of physically finding a product in the warehouse and then picking and packing that product. Businesses face time and labor costs for this work, and this operating expense must be considered as a part of ecommerce fulfillment.
How to structure your ecommerce shipping costs: 3 options
Your business’s shipping costs are inconsistent and variable. If nothing else, your true cost varies based on how far an item has to travel. So how do you decide how to handle shipping with your customers?
These three basic solutions cover the range of options, and each has its own strengths and weaknesses.
Charge a flat rate
First up is flat-rate shipping. In this model, you charge all domestic customers a set flat rate for shipping the same goods. The rate might scale based on the order value or some other metric, but customers in San Diego and Pittsburgh will pay the same rate — no matter what the true cost is to your business.
Businesses with relatively small items or whose catalog entries are all roughly similar in size tend to choose this method. Coffee and tea ecommerce vendors are a great use case: Consumer orders are almost always relatively small, so internal shipping rates are a bit more stable.
Pro: Calculating rates is simple, and repeat customers appreciate transparent, predictable shipping charges.
Con: Flat-rate gets too complicated if your product catalog is large or varied, and you’ll likely lose money some of the time.
Charge a variable rate based on the market
Variable rate shipping calculates the real shipping cost of a specific order (real-time carrier rates) and then passes that cost along to the customer. Some ecommerce platforms include this functionality: It’s a part of Shopify’s Advanced plan, for example.
Note that variable rate shipping doesn’t tend to account for your own handling costs.
Numerous Shopify vendors use this method to cover their shipping costs, as do most B2B sellers and wholesalers that charge for shipping.
Pro: This method is the most “fair” to your business since you’re directly passing along real costs to your customers.
Con: Especially on the consumer front, customers don’t like being surprised by shipping costs — and they aren’t accustomed to seeing the real cost. When you pass along higher shipping costs, you can fail to live up to customer expectations and risk increasing cart abandonments.
If you offer variable shipping rates, consider including a shipping calculator on your site to set customer expectations early. Native Union, a tech accessory brand, lets customers input their zip code to estimate shipping costs and delivery times before they reach the checkout page. This is a great strategy to manage customer expectations, show off fast delivery options, and reduce cart abandonment (by avoiding unexpectedly high shipping costs at checkout):
Offer free shipping
Free shipping is one more option you should consider. Of course, anyone in ecommerce already knows that “free shipping” isn’t really free, yet it’s what customers in many industries are looking for.
Free shipping doesn’t have to be across the board. You can set an order minimum for free shipping, as Amazon and countless clothing retailers have done. Here’s an example of how Woxer advertises free shipping for qualifying orders on their website’s top banner as well as their cart dropdown:
When you choose free shipping, you still have to determine how to account for those costs. You have three options here:
- Build shipping costs into retail prices (customer pays)
- Eat shipping costs using your profit margin (you pay)
- Build only part of shipping cost into retail prices (both pay)
Pro: Free shipping drives sales, increases customer satisfaction, and incentivizes customers to stick with you (even when they’re still secretly paying the cost via higher retail price).
Con: Usually requires raising selling price or cuts into a business’s margins
Choosing a shipping carrier
Choosing the right shipping carrier for your business requires evaluating what each of the available carriers offers you, along with how your product catalog lands in terms of how they calculate shipping charges.
Each carrier uses its own unique fee structure, and all will offer you a shipping cost calculator to help you understand what your costs would be.
While factors can vary considerably based on the parameters of your products, here are a few general considerations for the big four:
USPS: Often the cheapest for ground shipping but not usually the fastest, the United States Postal Service already has an immense last-mile delivery architecture in place.
DHL: With a specialization in international shipping, DHL is the preferred choice for many businesses that ship primarily overseas.
FedEx: A carrier that excels at both national and international shipping, FedEx offers a range of shipping services. Small businesses should look into the FedEx Small Business program for offers and incentives.
UPS: The iconic brown trucks get the job done as well, both nationally and internationally, with a range of competitive delivery options. Like FedEx, UPS offers a range of services for startups and small businesses, including integrations with ecommerce platforms.
Choosing packaging materials for your ecommerce product
Choosing the right packaging materials for your ecommerce product has numerous effects on your company’s bottom line. The packaging itself costs money, and your choice in packaging can affect carrier rates as well. Consider these factors as you choose packaging materials:
- Protection: Can the item be damaged in transit? Is it sufficiently cushioned or otherwise protected to prevent this? What materials will you use to protect fragile products?
- Material: Cardboard, Styrofoam, plastics, and more eco-friendly materials are all available. What’s the right balance of durability, sustainability, and cost for your business?
- Size: Most shipping costs are based either on size or weight, so choose packaging that’s as compact as possible (while still providing the necessary protection).
- Branding: Should your product stand out through custom, branded packaging? Is the boost to buzz and customer loyalty worth the added expense?
Ecommerce businesses tend to make two very similar mistakes in packaging: choosing too large or too small of a box. Go too large, and you incur higher shipping costs due to dimensional weight. But go too small, and there isn’t enough room to cushion or protect your products.
We love stationary brand Ohh Deer’s packaging, which is 100% recycled and doesn’t come with the plastic sleeves traditionally found in greeting cards. Plus, it’s extremely adorable and branded — great for customer delight:
Providing shipping security for you and your customers
Shipping security is one more area to consider in your overall shipping strategy. Strategic work here can protect your business and allay your customers’ fears.
Provide tracking visibility for customers’ shipments
In today’s ecommerce environment, customers want to be able to track where their shipment is and know exactly when it will be arriving. Basic tracking information is usually available through your carrier partner, but you can take things even further with proactive and branded shipping notifications using some of the integrations we’ll show you in the next section.
And if you use Gorgias, you can make tracking numbers and order status available via self-service order management. In your live chat support widget, your customers can track a recent order, modify order details, report issues, and more. Here’s what the feature looks like in a live chat widget:
Related: Learn how to provide order tracking to your customers.
Understand the role of shipping insurance
When you opt for shipping insurance, you’ll be reimbursed for items that get lost, stolen, or damaged during the shipping process. Shipping insurance can provide your business with a sense of security especially if you’re shipping high-value items or items that can break easily. Here are some of the main use cases for shipping insurance:
Of course, shipping insurance can add significant cost. It also doesn’t directly affect your customers’ experience (they will expect a replacement product whether you’re reimbursed or not) but it can save costs for you.
Most businesses opt for shipping insurance only when shipping expensive, fragile, or easily stolen items.
Related: Learn how to deal with lost packages in ecommerce.
Create a returns program and handle returns logistics
Not every ecommerce sale is going to work out. Customers may simply not like what they got. And defects and product failures happen to every company, no matter how tight your quality control.
For these reasons, you need a clear plan for how you’ll handle returns (and reduce the number of return requests you receive). If you don’t put a plan in place, you can expect a whole lot more customer service tickets (and angry customers).
Here are a few pitfalls to avoid as you craft your returns policies:
- Unclear or buried return policy
- Manual internal system for processing returns
- Offering free returns without accounting for cost or volume
Related: Get 10 best practices for handlind ecommerce returns.
Our recommended ecommerce shipping integrations, apps, and tools
Ecommerce shipping can be complex, but the right set of integrations, apps, and tools, can greatly simplify the process — and it can expand your capabilities and service offerings too.
Below, we’ll show you some of the best shipping integrations we’ve found for the Big Three ecommerce platforms: Shopify, BigCommerce, and Magento 2. And while you’re at it, check out Gorgias’ own collection of shipping and fulfillment apps for the Gorgias platform.
One quick note before we dive in: Some of these recommendations will repeat, and that’s intentional. If a world-class tool is available on multiple ecommerce platforms and works well on each one, we want you to know about it!
Shipping integrations for Shopify stores
Below, we’ll cover three of the best shipping-specific integrations for Shopify stores. Some of these also showed up in our broader Best Magento Extensions article. Feel free to give that a read if you’re looking for more apps, integrations, and functions beyond just shipping and fulfillment.
Shopify Fulfillment Network
Shopify Fulfillment Network is a relatively new service offered by Shopify, wherein stores on the platform send products to a third-part fulfillment center, contracted by Shopify, while manages and streamlines the rest of the shipping and delivery process. Consolidating fulfillment and shipping usually means stores can offer faster delivery times to more locations. However, Shopify Fulfillment Network is not cheap and remove a degree of control you have over such a core part of your brand’s customer experience.
Check out our complete review of Shopify Fulfillment Network here.
ShipBob
ShipBob is a global logistics platform or third-party logistics (3PL) provider catering to the order fulfillment needs of direct-to-consumer (D2C) brands. If you’re looking for an end-to-end ecommerce shipping solution, ShipBob is a contender.
ShipBob maintains its own network of warehouses in strategic locations and is known for its reliable fulfillment services. The company empowers D2C brands to offer same-day shipping and two-day delivery. It also allows brands to customize their shipping presentation with custom inserts and packaging.
If you’re a D2C brand selling through Shopify and you’re looking for a 3PL partner, ShipBob is worth serious consideration.
In addition to being one of the best Shopify apps, this app is also one of the best on BigCommerce, and it’s a Gorgias preferred partner.
Read our head-to-head comparison of Shopify Fulfillment Network vs. ShipBob.
ShipStation
ShipStation is a cloud-based order management and shipping software solution that helps ecommerce businesses power their own logistics efforts. Order processing, inventory management, shipping label creation, and customer communication are all part of ShipStation.
ShipStation connects online businesses with carriers, marketplaces, and channels in powerful ways, and it can give you access to preferred pricing with numerous carriers.
The app’s Shopify integration helps you automate aspects of the shipping and label creation process and simplify international shipping.
If your goal is to keep logistics in house (rather than use a 3PL partner), ShipStation is ideal software to help you control costs and increase efficiency.
In addition to being one of the best Shopify apps, this app is also one of the best on BigCommerce and Magento 2.
Order Printer
Order Printer is a Shopify exclusive that allows businesses to create invoices, receipts, refunds, and packing slips all from a simple one-screen interface. These reports and invoices are rendered as PDFs, which can be automatically sent out to customers via email.
With Order Printer, you can process multiple orders or print requests in bulk and automate attaching those PDFs to emails. It works with the Shopify POS so your sales agents can send off these documents while working in person with customers.
Order Printer is a Shopify exclusive not available on BigCommerce or Magento 2.
Shipping integrations for BigCommerce stores
These are our top three shipping-specific integrations in the BigCommerce app store.
ShipBob
ShipBob is a global logistics platform or third-party logistics (3PL) firm catering to the order fulfillment needs of direct-to-consumer (D2C) online retail brands.
ShipBob maintains its own network of warehouses in strategic locations and is known for its reliable fulfillment services. The company empowers D2C brands to offer same-day shipping and two-day delivery. It also allows brands to customize their shipping presentation with custom inserts and packaging.
If you’re a D2C brand selling via BigCommerce and you’re looking for a 3PL partner, ShipBob is worth serious consideration.
In addition to being one of the best Shopify apps, this app is also one of the best on BigCommerce.
ShipStation
ShipStation is a cloud-based order management and shipping software solution that helps ecommerce businesses power their own logistics efforts. Order processing, inventory management, label creation, and customer communication are all a part of ShipStation.
ShipStation connects businesses with carriers, marketplaces, and channels in powerful ways, and it can give you access to preferred pricing with numerous carriers.
The app’s BigCommerce integration helps you automate aspects of the shipping and label creation process and simplify international shipping.
If your goal is to keep logistics in house (rather than use a 3PL partner), ShipStation is the ideal software to help you control costs and increase efficiency.
In addition to being one of the best BigCommerce apps, this app is also one of the best on Shopify and Magento 2.
AfterShip
As the name suggests, AfterShip takes care of everything that happens after you ship your product. It offers automated shipment tracking, notifications, and branded updates so that you — not your carrier — control the information flow and customer communication.
BigCommerce’s AfterShip app also includes Returns Center, an interactive returns portal.
In addition to being one of the best BigCommerce apps, AfterShip also offers more limited app integrations for both Shopify and Magento 2. Aftership also integrates well with Gorgias.
Shipping integrations for Magento 2 stores
Below, we’ll cover three of the best shipping-specific integrations for Magento 2 stores. Some of these also showed up in our broader Best Shopify Apps article. Feel free to give that a read if you’re looking for more apps, integrations, and functions beyond just shipping and fulfillment.
ShipStation
ShipStation is a cloud-based order management and shipping software solution that helps ecommerce businesses power their own logistics efforts. Order processing, inventory management, label creation, and customer communication are all a part of ShipStation.
ShipStation connects businesses with carriers, marketplaces, and channels in powerful ways, and it can give you access to preferred pricing with numerous carriers.
The app’s Magento 2 integration helps you automate aspects of the shipping and label creation process and simplify international shipping.
If your goal is to keep logistics in house (rather than use a 3PL partner), ShipStation is the ideal software to help you control costs and increase efficiency.
In addition to being one of the best Magento 2 apps, this app is also one of the best on BigCommerce and Shopify.
Easyship
Easyship is a powerful cloud-based shipping platform that’s highly scalable and easy to implement. Customers use it to optimize their shipping efforts and gain access to pre-negotiated shipping rates with hundreds of global couriers.
Easyship is a great tool for giving your customers visibility and choice in shipping, and it’s a simple way for companies to go global.
In addition to being one of the best Magento 2 apps, this app is also one of the best on BigCommerce and Shopify.
Mageworx Shipping Suite
The Mageworx Shipping Suite Ultimate is a heavyweight Magento 2 extension that covers all aspects of your shipping needs. Configure complex shipping rules, define shipping rates and methods, and customize everything to your heart’s content.
Mageworx is powerful, but not simple to use. It’s best for larger ecommerce businesses with existing in-house resources dedicated to shipping and fulfillment.
The Mageworx Shipping Suite is a Magento 2 exclusive, though Shopify offers a lighter-weight Free shipping & Promo bars integration.
Related: Review our roundup of the best shipping software for ecommerce.
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Manage your ecommerce business’s shipping and customer service with Gorgias
Shipping and fulfillment are complex parts of your business. So is customer service, and the intersection of the two areas is where many customer satisfaction battles are won — or lost.
For the best customer impact, ecommerce businesses need a solution that lets them control customer inquiries like tracking, returns, the status of an order, and more from a single unified interface.
Gorgias is the customer service and support platform built specifically for ecommerce. With Gorgias, you can track and follow through on every customer inquiry in one place, with rich customer history and powerful tools to surface the information you need, when you need it.
Learn more on how Gorgias integrates with the ecommerce platform you’re already using:
Customer Delight Is A Losing Strategy in Ecommerce: Here’s What’s Better
Most ecommerce businesses understand that offering great products at a reasonable price isn’t enough. We know that customer experience is key to gaining long-term loyal customers, obtaining reviews and referrals, and growing in the long term. But too many brands believe that a great customer experience means surprising and delighting customers.
Frankly, handwritten notes and freebies don’t make for a great customer experience or a winning strategy. That’s not why customers reach out to your brand, nor is it what drives customer retention. They reach out to support for quick, helpful, effortless experiences; this is what makes top-notch customer service so important. Then (and only then) should you put the cherry on top with surprising, delightful extras.
Why “surprise and delight” is not a viable customer service strategy
Top-notch customer support is like an ice cream sundae, and efforts to thrill customers are the sprinkles and cherries on top. Sprinkles and cherries are great, but they don’t make for a satisfying sundae on their own.
Customers won’t be that amused if you make them wait on hold for 45 minutes and greet them with lighthearted jokes. Likewise, you’ll make a customer feel frustrated if you spend your budget on freebies but ignore implementing customer feedback about the product.
More than anything, customers who contact a brand's customer service team want their problems solved quickly and well. Fast, helpful, low-effort experiences are the base of your sundae, and any extra efforts to delight the customer are sure to fall flat if you can't do that.
Customer service interactions tend to drive disloyalty, not loyalty
According to Emplifi, 49% of consumers have left a brand in the past year due to a poor customer experience. Also, according to The Effortless Experience, an influential customer service book by best-selling author Matthew Dixon, customer service interactions are 4x more likely to drive customer disloyalty than they are to drive customer loyalty.
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If 20% of support interactions leave customers delighted and 80% leave customers frustrated, your greatest opportunity is to reduce frustration, not chase after hard-to-achieve delight.
Ecommerce customer delight isn’t linked to loyalty (and it’s expensive)
The Effortless Experience also reveals that going “above and beyond” isn’t even what drives that 20% of loyalty-building interactions. While companies assume exceeding customer expectations generate superfans, customers are generally just as satisfied when companies simply meet their expectations.
And 80% of companies who use customer delight as a strategy say they spend heavily on providing this delight: More overhead from giveaways, VIP kickbacks, refunds, and policy exceptions. Given that these delightful experiences don’t correlate to customer loyalty, this is not money well spent.
Support’s biggest impact is to mitigate disloyalty by reducing customer effort
If we zoom into what drives customers away, the most common issue is a high degree of effort — not a lack of gifts or delightful conversations. Common reasons for high-effort experiences include:
- Multiple contacts to resolve an issue
- Repeating information
- Getting transferred between channels
The negative impact of these high-effort experiences is staggering. According to The Effortless Experience, a whopping 96% of customers who had high-effort experiences feel disloyal to those companies afterward.
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To put it simply, most companies are trying to go “above and beyond” before they effectively provide the baseline of customer service, which is a helpful and low-effort experience.
How to minimize customer effort: The better version of surprise and delight
The key to customer retention is reducing customer effort. 94% of customers intend to purchase after a low-effort experience compared to a slim 4% after high-effort experiences, making it an essential part of a best-in-class customer experience. Lowering customer effort involves designing an intuitive user experience, decreasing the number of steps required to complete tasks, improving reply and response times (along with other key customer support metrics), and using forward resolution in support.
Here are five more quick wins to reduce customer effort in ecommerce:
1) Offer self-service functionality on your website
88% of customers expect your online store to offer some kind of self-service. Self-service resources could be as simple as a frequently-asked questions (FAQ) page or more interactive functionality to manage orders without having to reach out to customer support.
For merchants using Gorgias, you can set up a Help Center that does both in just a few clicks. Customers can read articles about your brand and shipping policy, and check their delivery status (which they do an average of 4.6 times for every order) instantaneously.
Here’s a great example of self-service order management on Steve Madden’s Help Center:
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Learn more about self-service order management with Gorgias.
2) List answers to pre-sales questions in a help center
Once you have an FAQ page or customer knowledge base, one type of question to proactively answer is pre-sales questions. These are questions potential customers have while mulling over a purchase in their heads before hitting “Place order” at checkout:
- Is it the right size for me?
- Is it compatible with products I already own?
- Can I return it if I’m dissatisfied?
- Will it arrive before the holidays?
If customers have to reach out and wait for an answer, they might just abandon the purchase and look for another online retailer that better addresses their questions. At least, that’s the case for the 63% of customers who attempt to solve issues via self-service support before reaching out.
So, don’t delay in making clear sizing guides, shipping policies, returns policies, and other self-service information that your customers need to confidently make a purchase.
3) Use forward resolution in customer support to avoid unnecessary follow-ups
Forward resolution is the practice of solving anticipated issues for customers before the customer even thinks to ask.
Let’s look at a real-world example: A customer inquires about shipping times to their local region. The support agent can see they have items in their cart that are on pre-order and, while answering the customer’s question about shipping time, also tells them that pre-order items are sent separately and that they can track delivery status through self-service. The agent has answered the initial question and forward-resolved two potential issues — reducing effort for the customer.
If you can, audit multi-touch tickets from the past few months to understand which questions tend to have natural follow-ups you can proactively answer. Then, add that follow-up information to your templates, or Macros if you use Gorgias, to improve your customer experience.
Here’s a Macro that not only answer’s a customer question about the location of an order, but lets them know when that order will be shipped:
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Learn more about resolution time from Gorgias’s Director of Customer Support.
4) Know more, ask less
One of the most damaging mistakes is making customers repeat themselves. Agents need that information to do their jobs well, but asking a customer to repeat their story at every juncture is a surefire way to damage a valuable customer relationship.
Instead, give customer service representatives all the customer context they need from the jump. Gorgias’s customer sidebar gives agents valuable context like purchase and communication history (from Shopify or BigCommerce), reviews information, cart data, social media engagement, and much more so customers don’t need to constantly retell their story.
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5) Make your support more convenient with automation and omnichannel
90% of customers say an “immediate” response is important, and 78% of customers prefer a variety of support channels to get in contact with customer support.
To answer questions faster, consider using a customer support platform with automation features to help your team move faster and automatically respond to repetitive customer questions. Gorgias’ automated system can help you prioritize customer service requests, tag the appropriate agent, and close no-response tickets so you spend less time on admin work. And, with the help of pre-written Macros, automated Rules, and chatbot-like self-service flows, you can send instant, personalized responses to questions like, “Where is my order?”
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Additionally, explore expanding to an omnichannel or multichannel ecommerce customer service strategy, which gives customers more touchpoints for your brand. Customers value the convenience of texting your brand, calling your brand, and hearing from you on social media. If you’re only available via email, you will likely lose customers due to high effort.
Read our guide to omnichannel customer service or check out our unified helpdesk to learn more.
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6 ways to delight ecommerce customers (once they have a low-effort experience)
Don’t get us wrong, customers usually enjoy an extra bit of pizazz or a freebie. And those sprinkles can even boost your brand’s conversion rate in the short term and boost customer loyalty in the long term — as long as they’re not associated with a high-effort experience.
Take a look at the following customer delight strategies and consider adopting them only once you’ve developed a low-effort customer experience as a foundation.
1) Offer free shipping (the new normal for customer satisfaction)
According to a 2021 survey, 66% of customers expect free shipping with every online purchase. This means that free shipping is often more of an expectation than a bonus — thanks, Amazon. Nevertheless, offering free shipping to your customers can still be a great way to encourage customer delight in many cases.
Customers love the word "free," even if the money that they are saving is only a few dollars. In fact, many stores can raise their product pricing slightly to make up for shipping costs and still see a boost in conversion rate from offering free shipping.
If you can’t offer free shipping to every customer, setting qualifying amounts is a good way to delight customers with free shipping while also driving higher average order values.
Woxer is one ecommerce brand that offers free shipping on all domestic orders and some international orders. Plus — another best practice — Woxer makes this information easily accessible as a Quick Response in their live chat widget.
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2) Launch a customer referral program
Creating a customer referral portal or program offers dual benefits. For one, it helps your brand attract new customers by encouraging them to refer their friends, family, and colleagues through word-of-mouth advertising. Along with introducing your brand to new potential customers, referral programs can also be a great way to blow away your customers: Everyone loves the opportunity to earn discounts and rewards!
If your ecommerce company has a strong net promoter score (NPS), you’re positioned to launch a referral program, capitalize on that goodwill, and delight your customers. If you want to start a referral marketing program, check out tools like Extole which systematically reward customers who bring you business via word of mouth.
3) Post user-generated content on social media
Recognition is its own reward, and a shout-out on social media is something most customers enjoy. Highlighting customers who use your products, positive customer reviews, and other delightful interactions allow you to celebrate customers and add social proof to your social media profile. It also reduces the number of content marketing materials you need to produce on your own.
Marine Layer's Instagram is full of customer shout-outs and other user-generated content that your brand may be able to pull inspiration from:
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4) Use loyalty programs to reward VIP customers
Like a referral program, a loyalty program rewards customers for repeat purchases and continued brand loyalty. If your customer experience is already smooth enough to bring in repeat customers, delighting those superfans with rewards is a strong strategy.
If you already use Gorgias, you can integrate loyalty platforms like LoyaltyLion to make the customer experience even more seamless. For example, esmi Skin Minerals uses Gorgias and its integration with Loyalty Lion to bring loyalty data into Gorgias and provide even more personalized, automated service to shoppers. Thanks to this powerful integration, esmi achieved a 58% boost in brand loyalty program enrollment and a 2X increase in average loyalty program member spend.
5) Celebrate customer milestones for loyal customers
Even if you don’t have an official loyalty program, you can celebrate your VIP customers at key milestones like birthdays or the anniversary of their first purchase. On top of sharing some warm and fuzzies (and maybe free product), one benefit of this kind of celebration is to potentially get a shoutout from customers on social media for your surprise.
Check out our CX Growth Playbook to learn how to implement this tip with Zapier, plus read about 18 other tactics to drive growth through customer experience.
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6) Optimize proactive customer service across the customer journey
One way to delight customers is to move beyond purely reactive customer service, which requires customers to reach out to get help. With proactive customer service, a combination of directly reaching out to customers and creating self-service resources, you can help more potential customers, reduce cart abandonment, and improve your brand’s customer experience.
Proactive customer support could include self-service resources, like those described above. It also includes non-intrusive chat campaigns, which let you automatically reach out to customers who display certain behaviors to offer support. For example, you could reach out to customers who linger on a product page to ask if they have questions about the product or need a recommendation on sizing.
Here’s what Ohh Deer, an online retailer that sells delightful stationery, says about chat campaigns:
“With chat campaigns, the goal is to remove any customer equivocation and get the customer to the product they really want.”
– Alex Turner, Customer Experience Manager at Ohh Deer
Learn how Ohh Deer drives $12,500 each quarter through Gorgias chat.
Delight and retain your ecommerce customers with low-effort support
The key to great customer service isn’t some sparkly delight. It’s efficient, convenient, and helpful support that customers can access in a variety of ways.
With Gorgias, ecommerce brands can access the tools and integrations they need to automate time-consuming tasks, provide instant answers, and reduce the number of times customers have to write in and wait for your customer support team’s answer. Through our platform, your customer support team becomes more than just a team to answer customer questions — it becomes a revenue-generating machine.
Book a demo to see how Gorgias can help your ecommerce brand.
Announcement: New Features and Changes to Our Pricing and Plans
Today, we’re announcing pricing updates for our Pro, Advanced, and Enterprise customers, along with customers using our Automate product. We’re also introducing a voice & SMS add-on that will allow you to communicate with customers on even more channels, enabling brands to continue providing the best customer support for their loyal customers.
This follows our recent announcement of a $10 monthly starter plan (50 tickets), which makes our platform more accessible to all merchants.
Over the past few years, we’ve proudly shipped many new features to serve our mission: empowering all merchants to deliver an exceptional customer experience that drives revenue.
Now, with Gorgias, you can:
- Interact with customers on more channels, including DMs and comments on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook — plus voice, SMS, and native help centers
- Sell more products with chat improvements (including native Shopify product links) and revenue statistics
- Work more efficiently with ticket auto-assign, improved Shopify actions, and live statistics that keep your team on track
- Integrate with your favorite tools, including the most advanced Klaviyo integration on the market and 80+ other integrations since mid-2019
Here’s a snapshot of the new pricing, which will go into effect in the next few months and empower further innovation on our product:
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What is changing with our prices and plans
Here's an outline of everything that's changing:
Pricing increases for Pro, Advanced, and Enterprise plans:
Pricing is changing for Merchants on the Pro, Advanced, and Enterprise plans.
Updated pricing
- Pro: $360/month or $3,600/year
- Advanced: $900/month or $9,000/year
- Enterprise: Contact us
Billable ticket limit decreases
We’re also updating the billable ticket limit for Basic and Advanced plans to better reflect the number of tickets merchants of this size typically see each month:
Updated billable ticket limit:
- Basic: 300 tickets/month
- Advanced: 5,000 tickets/month
Doubling down on Automate
Automate includes several valuable features that allow you to automate up to 25% of total customer interactions. This means you’ll spend more time driving revenue through high-quality support and less time handling repetitive tickets, such as where is my order (WISMO) interactions.
Some of the features only available in Automate include:
We initially launched Automate with introductory pricing in late 2021. We had great feedback from early adopters, especially after improving features like updated Quick Response Flows and Self-Service Flows. Now that Automate is delivering on its promise, we're ending our introductory pricing for the add-on and the full price will be reflected for all add-on subscribers.
Here is the updated Automate pricing:
Updated pricing
- Basic: $30/month or $300/year
- Pro: $180/month or $1,800/year
- Advanced: $450/month or $4,500/year
- Enterprise: Contact us
Legacy Self-Service features added to Automate
Furthermore, some of our legacy customers currently have access to a smaller set of automation features, separate from Automate. We will discontinue support for those legacy automation features for monthly users by December 31st, 2022. For users on annual plans, we will honor their legacy features until their renewal date. We encourage all customers to explore Automate, which provides a superior automation experience.
Automate overages increasing
As part of this pricing update, overages for accounts with Automate will be increased to account for the cost increase for the account. This will help us avoid pricing anomalies and keep things fair for customers across the board.
New features for some of our earliest customers
Currently, some of our oldest customers are on plans that we no longer support. We will migrate customers to the plan that most closely matches their current billable ticket count. This migration will also grant access to a suite of new features that were unavailable on those legacy plans:
- Managing Instagram DMs in Gorgias
- Agent Statistics
- Customizable Help Center
- Any additional upcoming product releases
We’re introducing a $10 plan for merchants that are getting started
We’ve heard from merchants who just launched their stores that they need a way to chat with customers on their website and host help center articles that proactively answer common customer questions. So we introduced a $10 plan with up to 50 tickets, that includes most of the features available to other Gorgias users. We’re excited to serve more small businesses with this new plan.
When are these changes happening?
For our customers paying monthly, these changes will come into effect two billing cycles from today (September 21, 2022). Your plan and price will change by November or December 2022, depending on when you first signed up for Gorgias.
For our annual customers, we will update your plan and prices in 2023 on your billing renewal date. Any annual customers renewing before the end of 2022 will keep their existing prices and features for another year, until 2023.
Why are we updating pricing?
Our product has grown and evolved significantly in the past three years since we last updated pricing in mid-2019. In order to continue on this trajectory, we plan to heavily invest in our product to bring even more value to our ecommerce merchants, growing their businesses.
Here are the biggest recent areas of growth for Gorgias:
Interact with customers on more channels
As a merchant, you understand the importance of showing up where your customers are. We have made great strides in this arena to bring you to all of the places your customers are expecting you to be, all in your single Gorgias feed.
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Our social media channels have evolved to best-in-class status, allowing you to interact with customers in all of the different ways they might reach out. Whether you’re responding to comments on your ads to increase return on ad spend or handling angry customers that slide into your DMs, we have you covered on major social networks.
And when you want to help customers help themselves, we now have a robust help center to answer all of their top questions without human attention. You can even upgrade your help center with self-service features like order tracking.
Sell more products
Your customer experience should drive revenue — happy customers are the best fuel for growth.
This belief is at the center of Gorgias’ philosophy and guides our product development. As a result, the Gorgias platform has gotten much better at driving revenue for our customers, resulting in $1.1 billion in support-driven revenue in 2021 alone.
Want to learn more? Read our CX growth playbook to drive 44% more revenue through customer experience.
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Our chat improvements and native Shopify product links turn your agents into sales reps, and our revenue statistics show just how much impact your team has had.
And this is going to be one of our biggest areas of focus going forward, so expect lots of new features like refined chat campaigns, one-time discount codes, and advanced sales analytics.
We’re even building a full-featured Revenue Add-on to help you increase your revenue impact. More on that in our Series C announcement.
Work more efficiently
Gorgias is built around the unique needs of ecommerce merchants, and we’ve designed the tool to be the fastest platform for ecommerce customer service teams right out of the box.
Agent and team efficiency have been areas where our platform has seen some of the most improvement over the past few years.
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We have Macro suggestions and a Rule library, now, to get you started fast and make sure you’re never at a loss for words. And you can make all the necessary edits to a given Shopify order without leaving the Gorgias platform.
Plus, our advanced dashboards keep your whole team on track and show the impact of your process improvements in real time.
When you spend less time on repetitive tasks and tickets, you can spend more time with the tickets that matter to your business — the ones that actually require human attention.
Integrate your favorite tools
In 2019, we had just started to connect with your favorite ecommerce apps.
Now, Gorgias is your command hub for the entire customer experience, integrating data from all of your favorite apps to make it all more actionable. That’s a major way we help you make better decisions and provide a world-class experience for your customers.
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Our Klaviyo integration has been upgraded to enable even more advanced functionality, and we have also added 80 other integrations that upgrade your support process.
And we’re not done yet — with a host of new integrations coming soon, we’re going to keep bringing more insight to your first-party customer data — across all of the different platforms you use.
Questions? Reach out to our team
We understand you may have further questions about which changes will impact you. For further clarity, please check the emails associated with your account for a more detailed breakdown of the specific changes that apply to your account. You may also reach out to our support team or connect with your Customer Success Manager for additional details.
Our mission continues to be helping merchants deliver an exceptional customer experience. We believe this is how you’ll build long-lasting relationships with your customers to maximize retention and grow your business.
Ecommerce Product Reviews: 6 Benefits and How To Get Them
As an online shopper, you don’t typically take products at face value. You’ll only turn over your money if you feel like you can trust what the brand is offering, and product reviews are probably part of your decision-making process when considering a purchase.
Your ecommerce customers think the same way. They use product reviews to determine your product's true value and whether it’s worth buying. Product reviews are the heavyweights in the ring of online shopping, and this article explains how you can leverage them to get more sales and generate more revenue.
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Why are product reviews an important lever for ecommerce?
Product reviews are a powerful source of social proof, which builds trust and confidence in your brand. Adding reviews to your product pages can result in an estimated revenue lift of 1.5%, according to Gorgias’ data of over 10,000 ecommerce stores. This is possible because product reviews stand as testimonials for uncertain shoppers — perhaps more convincing than any sales or marketing you can create yourself.
Plus, reviews increase traffic to your product page through SEO. Google My Business and search engines pick up keywords that customers use in their reviews and, with enough reviews, your page will show up on as a result for organic searches of those keywords. Also, getting more eyes on your product increases product awareness — and ultimately, conversions.
But not all reviews are good. There’s a delicate balance between good and bad reviews, and both of them have an impact on your bottom line.
The impact of good product reviews
- Bright Local’s Consumer Review Survey shows that 94% of consumers are more likely to use a business because of positive reviews
- 79% of consumers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations by family and friends
- 70% of consumers use rating filters when searching for businesses: they filter for businesses with 4-star ratings or higher
- Five-star reviews are suspicious to consumers on their own and shoppers find a mixture of positive and negative reviews more trustworthy
The impact of bad product reviews
- Bad reviews turn customers away: 94% of consumers have avoided businesses with bad reviews, and 53% of consumers expect businesses to respond to negative reviews within a week.
- Only 19% of consumers would use a business with a fewer-than-3-star rating.
How to get product reviews on your ecommerce website
If you use an ecommerce platform to power your ecommerce website, it’s easy to turn on the setting to let users leave reviews. Here are some links to help you get started if you use Shopify, BigCommerce, or Magento:
- Shopify’s Product Reviews app
- BigCommerce’s product reviews setting
- Magento’s native commerce review app
If you use another ecommerce platform, you’ll likely be able to find a setting or app to activate review functionality.
But just because customers can leave reviews doesn’t mean they will. Here are some tips to get more ecommerce product reviews.
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6 simple ways to drive more positive reviews for your products
The business impact of positive product reviews is undeniable. Below, we’ve described six ways to increase your chances of getting positive reviews from customers.
1) Have a pleasant post-purchase experience and ask directly in an email
The post-purchase experience is where you transform new customers into your brand’s biggest fans. This is particularly important since customer experience is the top factor driving online consumers' loyalty. An amazing post-purchase experience leaves customers confident that orders are being delivered and provides answers to their most pressing questions. It's also an opportunity for your brand to provide meaningful resources that help them use your products in the best possible ways.
Each confirmation email you send to a customer allows you to position your brand as an expert. But that’s not all: You can use this email to ask customers to leave a review and provide feedback on their experience. Both requests help you better understand how close you are to meeting your customer's needs and make adjustments as necessary.
Here’s a great, branded example of a review request email from Fly By Jing:
2) Incentivize customers to fill out reviews by offering discounts or freebies
Providing incentives increases the number of reviews a company is likely to receive. This is great, but there can be a downside: Incentives can sometimes influence customers to leave positive reviews even if their experiences with your products aren’t necessarily positive. This might sound great, but you want to be sure that you're striving for honest positive feedback.
Incentives can be a great tool, but don’t overuse them since they can skew a review's honesty. Remember, honest insights are the ones that will help your ecommerce brand improve.
Anthropologie recently offered customers a 20%-off coupon for leaving a review:
3) Automate your “ask for reviews” process for easy reviewing
Automating the “ask for reviews” process allows you to get reviews from customers at exactly the right time. An “ask for review” automation could be as simple as emailing a rating scale that allows customers to rate their most recent experience with your brand. The trick is to send that message at just the right time.
Dmitry Dragilev, Founder of JustReachOut, reveals that automating the company’s review collection process tripled its rate of positive reviews. Automations helped them send review requests immediately after interacting with customers.
Several tools can help you automate the review collection process. Boast and JungleScout are two of the most popular options for ecommerce stores. You can also use Zapier to create automations specific to your preferred tools.
4) Make sure to target satisfied customers and to ask nicely for a review
Dragilev also mentions that one of the mistakes he and his team made was asking for a review after every customer support call. This resulted in only 10% of the reviews being positive. Also, they didn’t know whether the customers they were targeting had recently engaged with the product since they only sent out their review emails on Mondays.
It was only after automating sending review request emails to customers who were satisfied with the resolution to their support request that the number of positive reviews increased. The lesson here is that targeting satisfied customers leads to more positive reviews.
5) Make the review process as simple as possible
A simple review process reduces friction and increases the chances of getting a response to your review request. You can simplify the review process by:
- Offering multiple ways for customers to review your brand
- Providing access to the review form on platforms your customers frequently use
- Asking minimal questions — no more than three, and ideally one
- Making the questions easy to answer (e.g., an emoji scale as a way for customers to express how they feel about their experience rather than having them respond to an open-ended question)
Here’s a great, minimal review request from Book of the Month:
6) Use social media channels to request product reviews
Social media channels are where your customers likely hang out the most. This is why your ecommerce social media strategy should include requesting reviews. The beauty of social media is that there are many ways for you to both ask your customers for reviews and showcase what they have to say about your brand. For instance, you could create a competition based on user-generated content (UGC) that shows how real customers use your product and what they genuinely think about it.
The most powerful review sites to consider
It’s important to consider where you gather reviews from. Here are four of the most common avenues for ecommerce brands to consider:
Your own ecommerce site
Imagine you’re searching for an affordable wedding dress online. You see a gorgeous dress you adore but you’re a bit skeptical since you aren’t able to see and feel the dress in person. Worse yet — you can’t even try it on. The next thing you do is scroll down to the reviews. How else will you know what to expect from this dress? To your dismay, there aren’t any reviews! You have two choices — trust your gut and buy the dress blindly or find another dress that has reviews.
Chances are you’ll choose option two and you aren’t alone. 98% of consumers read online reviews before purchasing products. Reviews turn potential customers from skeptics into eager purchasers. Some ecommerce brands do this better than others. Parade’s review section went a step further, allowing reviewers to mark whether or not a clothing item runs big/small, is comfortable, and is good or bad quality. As an apparel retailer, this gives their shoppers valuable information they need to make a purchase decision.
Social media sites
According to a report by GWI, 77% of internet users turn to social networks when looking for information about brands. Also, 16% of internet users discover brands through posts or reviews from expert bloggers, and 23% of internet users discover brands through recommendations or comments on social media. The bottom line is that social media supports brand awareness, so you’re missing out if you don't leverage the social media sites relevant to your audience.
GWI recommends using Instagram for more direct sales since Instagram users are more open to commercial posts. If you’re ready to make Instagram influencer marketing part of your marketing strategy, check out our guide.
Online marketplaces
Online shoppers turn to popular online marketplaces when searching for products. Amazon, Etsy, and eBay are three of the most popular. Amazon is the largest online marketplace, accounting for 37.8% of the ecommerce market as of June 2022. On Amazon, product reviews and sales influence rankings. This means that the better your reviews, the higher up they appear in product search results, so it’s important to keep your average review as high as possible. The same is true for Etsy and eBay.
Here’s what Sol de Janeiro’s Amazon reviews look like:
Search engines
Billions of people use Google, Bing, and other search engines to find products. SEO-friendly product descriptions are one way to ensure your products show up in search engines. But product reviews also make you more visible on the search engine results pages (SERPs) since reviewers often use keywords that help with rankings. The more reviews you have, the greater your chances of being discovered in SERPs.
Review sites for your industry
Four review sites are responsible for 88% of all reviews — Google, Yelp, Facebook, and Tripadvisor. It would be wise to invest in your reviews on these popular channels, but boosting your presence on industry-specific review sites is also a good idea. These hyper-specific review sites help you reach a targeted audience, thus increasing your conversion rate.
How to get the most value out of your ecommerce product reviews
Getting reviews is great, but you’ll need to dig a little deeper if you want to glean actionable insights from them. Here are eight tips to help you get the most out of your customer reviews.
Add reviews to your product pages
As previously mentioned, adding reviews to your product pages can help increase revenue through more conversions, making this a great move for your ecommerce business. This isn’t surprising since reviews help build trust and attract buyers to your website, so adding reviews directly to product pages can help seal the deal once the customer lands on your site.
Loop Earplugs has product reviews at the bottom of each product page, plus they curate testimonials pulled from reviews to support their on-page marketing:
Use white-label review management software
Review management software offers the most streamlined way to manage your online reputation. Any review management software you choose should be able to collect and deliver data from the review sources that matter most to your business in the most accurate, timely, and reliable manner. Some of the best options on the market include Grade.us and Podium.
Turn your best reviews into SEO-friendly web and social media content
Reviews are great for understanding the needs and interests of customers. When an awesome review comes through, highlight it on your brand's social media channels to showcase customer satisfaction and attract further attention. Ultimately, reviews from existing satisfied customers will help attract even more customers: It's social proof at its finest.
Allow people to leave photos and videos in reviews
One of the first things some customers do when looking at reviews is search for the images and videos that show the product in action. Product pictures and written reviews say one thing but seeing products in real, unedited photos and videos takes the experience to another level. It’s easier to make a purchase decision when customers reveal a product's good, bad, and ugly in a visual format.
Steve Madden lets buyers upload images to their reviews, which helps browsers see what the clothes look like on other people:
Address negative reviews head-on and explain what went wrong
The research doesn’t lie — 89% of consumers are more likely to use a business that responds to all of its online reviews, not just the good reviews. Research by Podium provides a possible explanation: 56% of consumers believe a response from a business changes their perspectives because these responses offer insights into how responsive, responsible, and caring a business is.
These stats may seem contradictory since so many consumers say a negative review convinced them to avoid a business, as we discussed earlier. But ignoring negative reviews altogether results in more people turning away from your business. This is precisely what you’re trying to avoid: Negative reviews are a natural part of the process, so don’t hide from them. Embrace them, respond to them, and try your best to resolve the issues expressed by the customer.
Use feedback from reviews to improve your product and customer experience
Product reviews help you learn more about what your business is doing right and wrong. Customer feedback surveys are great, but only a small fraction of your customers complete them. More customers are likely to leave non-incentivized reviews that share honest perspectives about their experiences. Use their unfiltered responses to fine-tune your product and customer experience so that you attract future purchases.
Thank reviewers with a discount to keep them coming back
A discount incentive can be a great way to get more reviews. But, as previously mentioned, incentives can influence reviewers to leave positive reviews even when their experiences weren’t entirely positive. So, you can give discounts as review incentives occasionally but try not to make this practice a habit. Otherwise, your reviews may be skewed in favor of your brand.
Let users sort reviews to find the information they need
Customers use various filters to find reviews, but the most common review filter is review recency. Research by Power Reviews shows that 97% of consumers consider review recency to be important when considering a purchase. In fact, the survey reveals that 64% of consumers say they’re more likely to buy a product with fewer, more recent reviews than a product with a higher volume of reviews published three or more months ago.
So, allowing customers to sort and see the most recent reviews is critical. Keep your reviews current — more customers are likely to trust your brand that way.
Woxer is a great example of an online store that provides a variety of review filters. You can pull up reviews that mention color, size, material, feel, comfort, and more. You can also use the sort feature to sort the reviews by rating or only show reviews with images:
Turn browsers into happy, repeat shoppers with Gorgias
Product reviews attract new customers and help with customer retention. This is why your product review strategy should focus on encouraging customers to leave authentic reviews, extracting customer feedback so you can improve your product, and responding to all reviews across platforms so you can build trust and resolve issues proactively.
Gorgias is here to help your brand offer world-class customer support. Book a demo to understand how 10,000+ brands use our platform to drive revenue by making customers happy.
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