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Modern customers have high expectations when it comes to customer service. One survey showed that nearly half of customers expected an email response from businesses in less than four hours. If your average response time is much higher than this, you could be losing out on a lot of business. 

Of course, meeting customer expectations regarding response time is often easier said than done. If your customer support team is struggling to keep up, the good news is that there are some effective ways to shorten your response times without having to hire a team of new employees.

In this blog, we'll discuss why a fast response time is such a vital component of great customer service and go over seven proven methods you can use to achieve a faster response to customer service emails and messages. 

What is a good customer service response time?

When a customer reaches out to you, you should aim for a first response time of one hour for emails, 15 minutes for social media messages, 40 seconds for SMS messages, and even less than that for live chat messages.

Why response times are important for customer service teams 

No matter what product or service you happen to be selling, creating a positive customer experience is an essential ingredient in the recipe for long-term success. While there is a lot that goes into creating a great experience for your customers, prompt customer service goes a long way. 

Here are a few of the reasons why achieving fast response times is such an important goal for your customer service department: 

1) Customers continue to demand faster responses 

More and more customers have come to expect near real-time access to companies across multiple channels. One Hubspot survey showed that 90% of customers rate an “immediate” response as important or very important when they have a customer service question. 

Furthermore, 60% of people who needed support defined "immediate" as 10 minutes or less. If your company isn’t responding to customer queries at least this fast, you risk falling short of expectations your competitors may be meeting. 

2) Poor response times reflect negatively on your company 

Fair or not, poor response times can hurt your brand image. Encouraging brand loyalty and return customers is a vital goal for any business, and poor response times can make this goal all the more difficult to reach. 

Keep in mind that customers expect fast response times since so many companies today can meet those expectations. If your company isn't keeping up with the customer service offered by the competition, it could damage your brand reputation among existing customers. 

3) Faster responses that lead to quicker resolutions can increase revenue

There are plenty of scenarios where responding to a customer query within a short time frame can lead to your business making more money. If a customer has a question about your product, for example, responding quickly before they move on to another product could lead to a sale you might not otherwise make. 

If a customer needs to return a product, prompt customer service could encourage them to exchange the product for another product or store credit rather than becoming frustrated and demanding a cash return. In instances such as these, fast response times that lead to quick resolutions can directly translate to more or retained revenue. 

4) Quick responses can boost customer satisfaction

Good customer service doesn't mean that you always have to solve a customer's issue on the first response. In many cases, simply acknowledging their email and letting them know that you’re working on a solution is enough to keep customers temporarily satisfied and buy your customer service team some time. 

Unless the issue is immediately resolvable, your goal in an initial response should be to acknowledge the customer's problem, let them know that you’ve assigned their ticket to a representative, and provide them with a time frame for when they can expect a resolution. 

Sending out an initial response that covers these bases can keep customers satisfied and patient while your team members work on their follow-up. 

Related: How To Measure Net Promoter Score (NPS)

5) Slow response times might increase your workload

Achieving fast response times may seem like a lot of work. Many times, though, slow responses can end up increasing the workload of your customer support team. If you don't respond quickly enough to a customer that needs assistance, they may end up contacting your company multiple times through multiple channels. 

This can lead to numerous support tickets being created for a single issue, bogging down your team and creating unnecessary confusion that could have otherwise been avoided if you had responded to the customer's initial query promptly. This is another reason it’s helpful to keep your average first response time as low as possible. 

How to reduce customer service response times

For all of the reasons listed above, responding to customer service emails in the shortest amount of time possible is ideal. Thankfully, there are many different methods you can use to speed up your response times across all your support channels that don't require huge investments or shifts.

1) Make sure you're measuring first response times 

Before you can test out solutions, determine what your average response time currently is (if you don’t already know). First response time is a crucial customer service metric to evaluate your team's impact because it affects revenue-related metrics like churn and retention rates.

To calculate the average first response time, all you have to do is add up all of your first response times for a given period then divide that number by the number of resolved tickets during that time.

Once you've determined what your average first response time is, you can then set goals for improvement and continue to measure your progress. Gorgias provides you with many analytic tools that allow you to track key customer service metrics, including average response time. By leveraging tools such as these, you can easily analyze your customer support team's efforts and set achievable benchmarks for more improvement.

Related: Customer Service ROI: How to Measure and Improve

2) Take advantage of customer service software

Responding to every customer email manually is a monumental task. If you’re still solely relying on traditional methods of responding to customer queries, achieving fast response times is going to be nearly impossible. Fortunately, there’s a wide variety of customer service software on the market today that can take a lot of the heavy lifting out of your workflows.

For example, help desk software allows your team members to see and reply to customer queries from any channel — like social media, ecommerce stores, WhatsApp, and SMS — from a single centralized dashboard. You can organize them based on factors such as the date and time received, priority, subject matter, and some other categories.

Customer service software also automates time-consuming tasks, like sending initial responses to customer emails. This is just a snapshot of the ways these platforms can help your team reduce your response times. We highly recommend leveraging software to optimize your customer support process. 

Related: Learn how Gorgias' support performance and live agent performance dashboards can help you measure

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3) Utilize customer service automation for 24/7 service 

We touched on it briefly, but customer service automation can free up your customer support team significantly during business hours. It provides customers with immediate, automated responses that you can personalize to make sound as friendly as a manual response. These small measures free up your team to focus on more complicated and pressing tasks.

That’s not all. Setting up an auto-responder allows you to send customers an all-important first response any time you like. There’s no need for a live representative, and a quick response could prevent another ticket or message from piling up to deal with in the morning. Most software lets you automate responses and send them via email, chatbot, app notification, text and more. 

Recommended reading: Ecommerce Customer Support Best Practices

4) Use scripts and email templates 

Having your customer service team type out a custom response to every new email they receive from a customer is inefficient. In addition to using an auto-responder to send out an automated first response, one simple way to speed up your reply time is to make use of scripts and email templates. 

To build your scripts, start by identifying common questions and issues that your support team encounters most frequently. You can then create helpful boilerplate answers with blank spots to plug in customer details using your software or other tools. 

One pro tip is to look back at positive customer feedback or five-star interactions to get ideas. See which answers made customers feel heard and satisfied while also solving their issues quickly. For live customer support channels such as phone calls or live chat, you can create scripts for each FAQ that representatives can follow. 

Leveraging scripts and email templates ensures that your team members aren't having to type out the same response over and over again to commonly asked questions, enabling them to provide service in a more efficient and timely manner. 

5) Create a system to categorize and segment priority tickets 

Some customer support tickets should take higher priority than others. A customer that’s reporting a fraudulent purchase with their debit card needs a quicker response than someone who’s asking if there are any discounts they can use.

• Start by prioritizing tickets that have been open the longest. These are the customers who may be growing impatient, or even angry enough not to shop or work with your business again.
• From there, you’ll want to prioritize the most complicated or resource-intensive tickets. This helps your team get a head start on the tickets that could end up taking a lot of time to resolve. 

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

If you’re making use of email templates, a single rep may be able to clear an entire batch of tickets in seconds or minutes.  

6) Offer multichannel customer support options 

Every channel where you communicate with customers — from your main phone line and website to messaging platforms like social media and live chat support — should include customer support options. Having multichannel customer support options offers a couple of advantages.  

For one, it makes it easy for customers to reach out and engage with your company wherever they are. You may be serving customers across demographics, from Generation Z to baby boomers, all of whom have different communication preferences. The customer’s initial outreach is their first interaction with your customer service experience, and it’s great to start on a note of convenience and ease no matter who the customer is. 

Setting up multichannel customer support options can also give your response teams quicker access to the requests that they receive, allowing them to organize by priority no matter where the request originates.

Recommended reading: Customer Support Metrics

7) Leverage self-service to reduce tickets 

Any time a customer can resolve their issue on their own is a success for your business. Customer self-service support keeps your team’s hands-free and prevents one more support ticket from entering the queue. Here are some useful resources you can provide customers: 

• Company blog
• Product instructions, how-tos, and video tutorials
• FAQ page
• Community forum 
• Dictionaries or glossaries 
• Case studies 
• Knowledge base or help center

Equipped with this information, many customers will be able to answer their questions — and perhaps discover or try something new with your product. As you’re putting these resources together, think about how tech-savvy your audience is and how long they want to spend reading about their issue. 

With Gorgias Automate, you can improve your live chat widget with a self-service flows that let your customers track and manage their orders without any agent interaction. You can also enable a chatbot. Customers can type in their question or comments and the chatbot will pull up your content that matches those keywords. 

All of these tools combine to reduce the number of tickets your support team receives in the first place, which can ultimately result in faster response times for the tickets that do appear. 

Recommended reading on live chat:

• ‍9 Live Chat Support Metrics You Should Follow to Satisfy More Online Shoppers
• The Impact of Live Chat on Sales

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Gorgias helps support teams reduce response times

We’ve covered a variety of ways to roll back your response times, but that’s not all these best practices accomplish. They also optimize your customer service workflow overall, ensuring your customer service interactions are positive and helpful and your team isn’t overloaded or losing time to repetitive, manual tasks. 

At Gorgias, we’re proud to offer a number of different customer service software solutions, from live-chat solutions to chatbot solutions, to email auto-responders. To learn more about how Gorgias can help you speed up your response times in a way that is affordable and hassle-free, book a demo today.

Loyalty programs are widely used amongst e-commerce merchants to grow and maintain market share by improving the number of repeat customers and attracting new ones. These programs come in different formats - from loyalty points to surprise gifts depending on the level of loyalty of each customer - and have proven efficient to help brands build a community of consumers based on the emotional attachment to their identity and values.

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As a customer support helpdesk, Gorgias is focused on providing the best experience for both end-consumers and support agents. Consequently, giving access to the most accurate information about your customers’ loyalty status enables your support team to adapt their answers to customer requests.

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Thus, it seemed only natural that we partner with Smile.io, a rewards platform that has helped over 20,000 merchants reward their most loyal customers for performing profitable actions.

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With Smile, you can create and manage reward programs such as loyalty points, referrals and VIP programs, to build a fruitful relationship with your customers.

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Because Gorgias is appreciated for its ease of use and automation tools, we have decided to build a strong integration with Smile: not only can your support team have easy access to all the necessary data about your customers, but they can also use Smile variables in canned responses (or “macros”) and automation rules.

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• Display your customers’ Smile profiles next to tickets

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• ‍Use Smile variables (loyalty status, points balance, VIP program, referral url) in both your macros and your rules

By integrating your Smile account to Gorgias, you’ll be able to improve yet again not only your customer support but also your customers’ engagement to your brand. Our early adopters of the integration are already thrilled by it!

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"We're loving the Smile integration so far! Having access to the variables in the automation features of Gorgias (macros and rules) is a game-changer, especially now that we're focusing on improving our loyalty program. It would be great if the integration went a little further in the future to enable editing loyalty points!"

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Chris Storey, Founder and CEO at Dinkydoo

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If you're already a Gorgias customer, you can connect Smile directly from your Gorgias account, in the Integrations section. If not, you can create an account here and get started in a few minutes.

On Instagram, the most common types of engagement are likes and comments. For likes, you can’t do much about them, but you can take advantage of Instagram comments to drive more engagement, build relationships with followers, increase customer trust, and even boost conversions. 

If your business has a strong presence on Instagram, you may receive a lot of comments from followers. That means you have a higher chance to turn comments into your advantage. 

But sometimes, it’s easier said than done, right? With a flood of comments every day, you may struggle to respond and manage them effectively.

That’s why this post is for you. You’ll learn several Instagram comment ideas to interact with your followers and some useful tips to monitor comments without losing your mind. 

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9 Instagram comment ideas and tips for ecommerce businesses

1. Respond to comments in a timely manner
2. Speak like a human being
3. Add a touch of humor to your comments
4. Use relevant emojis to make comments eye-catching
5. Say thank you
6. Apologize for customer support issues that come up
7. Ask for followers' emails if necessary
8. Don't delete or hide comments
9. Don't just comment on your own posts

Why You Should Care About Instagram Comments

The average post on Instagram receives 285.48 comments, taking into account posts of highly influential users. Mention found that 26% of Instagram users love to comment on or share personal Instagram Stories.

Why do people comment on others’ posts?

The reasons are many. For example, they want to ask a question, give feedback, share a personal perspective, add to discussions, or interact with a community. Sometimes, they feel so resonated with a story that they want to start a conversation. 

Whatever the reasons, the Instagram comments section gives you a huge opportunity to communicate with your followers and discover potential customers. 

Here are three main reasons why you should create an Instagram comment strategy:

Comments Reflect Engagement

Think this way: if you’ve uploaded a photo and received 20 comments within only five minutes, you probably have a lot of following on Instagram, or your content is very engaging, right? 

The opposite is true as well. If you get a few comments whenever you publish a post despite having a huge following, your engagement rate may be low. In this case, you should probably rethink your Instagram comment strategy. 

Responding to Comments Help Build Brand Trust 

When a customer mentions you on Instagram, a lot of eyes are on you. How you handle that can tell a lot about your social media management and customer service. If you respond to it tactfully, it shows you care about your customers and take control of the situation.

Meanwhile, choosing to shy away and remain silent will lead to people bad-mouthing your brand. And as you might know, words can travel fast. 

By providing great customer service through Instagram comments, you not only retain existing customers but also win new ones. 

Instagram Comments Ideas and Tips

Below are Instagram comment ideas and tips you can apply right away. Note that there is no one-size-fits-all answer – every comment and every situation is different. Use the following as a reference to create the right strategy for your business. 

1. Respond to Comments in a Timely Manner

When customers ask a question, they want an answer instantly. This is true, especially if the question is about product availability, price, or shipping issues. 

Aim to respond to Instagram comments within 24 hours. This way, you can build trust with your followers and leave them a good impression of your business. 

Look at all of Dannijo’s posts, and you can see they respond to comments within minutes, if not seconds. No wonder they have great engagement. 

Using Instagram Quick Replies is a great way to do that. This cool feature allows you to create draft messages for commonly asked questions, like “what is the shipping cost?” or “can I return the item?”

Whenever you want to use those messages, just insert the “quick reply” instead of typing out the same message multiple times. 

You can use Instagram Quick Replies on mobile devices (iPhone and Android). But this feature is only available for Instagram business accounts. So make sure you set up an Instagram business page beforehand. 

2. Speak Like a Human Being

Like other social networks, Instagram is about two-way conversations. But we don’t join Instagram to talk with bots – we want to share, discuss, and speak with humans. We seek real, genuine connections.

That’s why brands must be human when interacting with followers on Instagram. Speak to them like you’re already in a relationship with them, as if you’re good friends. Avoid using a formal and distant tone.  

3. Add a Touch of Humor to Your Comments

You should take customer queries and complaints seriously, but there are times when you can add a bit of humor to entertain a conversation. According to Hootsuite, “entertaining content is one of the top five reasons people follow particular brands or individuals online.”

Think about when you saw an animated GIF on Tumblr or a funny tweet. You couldn’t help but sharing it with your circle, right? That’s why adding a touch of humor to your Instagram comments can be helpful to connect with your audience instantly. 

Make a good joke, and your followers will share it with their followers. Some of those followers will start following you to get more jokes, and your outreach will grow exponentially. More followers, more customers. It’s as simple as that. 

4. Use Relevant Emojis to Make Comments Eye-catching

Emojis aren’t common in Instagram posts, but comments too. More and more brands are responding to their Instagram comments with emojis. 

Emojis are friendly, fun, and engaging. They’re great for humanizing your brand and connect with followers quickly.

A worthy note is that before using emojis, ask yourself if it aligns with the tone of your brand. Make sure you understand the meanings of different emojis so you can use them the right way.

It’s also important to understand whose comment you’re responding to. Just because you see other followers using emojis doesn’t mean everyone is okay with them. Learn more about your target audience to create an emoji marketing strategy that makes sense for your business. 

5. Say Thank-you

A thank-you comment is necessary when someone gives you a compliment or mentions you on Instagram. Something as simple as “Thank you” or “Thanks” or “Glad you like this one” is more than fine. If they called out specifics in their comments, try to respond with a similar level of personalization. Show them your appreciation. 

Another tip is when saying thanks to your followers, try to expand the conversation. If a follower said they were happy with your order, you could ask them why they liked it. Let them know you’re available to support them whenever they need help. 

6. Say Sorry for Customer Service Issues 

If a customer reaches out to your Instagram with a question or a customer service issue, you must respond to them. You should provide that support. 

Here are some helpful tips to handle followers’ complaints on Instagram:

• Keep calm, say sorry, and show your responsibility for the issue
• Answer their questions accurately and promptly
• Be specific and helpful about your solution
• Don’t overpromise unless you’re 100% sure that you can give them what they want
• Come bearing gifts or discounts if necessary 

7. Ask for Followers’ Emails If Necessary 

If a follower’s question is complicated and requires a wordy answer or needs more time to fix, you ask for their email address in the comments and send the full response through email. 

It’s an opportunity for you to impress your follower with the high level of customer service you provide. Ensure you let the follower know you’ll contact them via their email. 

8. Don’t Delete or Hide Comments 

A lot of people will tell you to ignore or delete negative comments on your Instagram posts. But wait… rethink before you do that.

Of course, dealing with difficult customers is never easy, and it only gets more challenging when both of you don’t understand each other or the customers expect more than what you can offer. 

Despite that, it isn’t a smart move to delete comments. Why? Because the difficult customers might do the following:

• Stop buying from you and spread bad words about your business
• Continue speaking negatively about your brand across social media channels 
• Continue commenting negatively on your posts until you block them or remove them from your community 

With all that being said, it’s obvious that you should come up with a strategy to handle negative comments, instead of just deleting them. 

A good tactic is to reply to those comments or direct message commenters with an apology. Then, ask for more information about why they made that statement. Explain you need this information to figure out the best solution for them. 

If the person continues to be an issue after you’ve attempted to resolve the matter, try to move the conversation to a private space (like an email) or block them when necessary.

It seems a lot of work, but keep practicing that. It’ll help improve your brand’s online presence and make people remember your excellent customer service. 

9. Don’t Just Comment on Your Own Posts 

If you just start using Instagram for your business, commenting on other posts is a good idea. Doing that will help you identify your target audience, understand what they need, expand your brand awareness, and drive engagement to your Instagram profile. 

You can comment on your followers’ posts, influencers’, or the posts of brands that are relevant to your niche. 

If you’re struggling with identifying who you should start interacting with, look at your recent collaboration or co-marketing projects. Then, start engaging with them. 

How to Manage Instagram Comments Effectively

Have you ever glanced at your (hundreds of) Instagram notifications and feel tired of replying to your followers’ comments? You see many comments on some much older posts and don’t know which one to start with. AGRH. You get lost. 

If you’re in this situation, the first thing you should do is set a specific time to handle Instagram comments. Give yourself windows of time when you’re pleased to respond to those messages. Doing that can help you remove distractions, maintain concentration, and increase productivity. 

The second tactic is to use an all-in-one customer service tool like Gorgias. 

Think this way: Your customers aren’t on Instagram only. They may also follow your business on Twitter and Facebook. Some of them may prefer connecting with you via email, SMS, or phone call. Others might often visit your website and find it convenient to chat with you via chat box. 

That’s where tools like Gorgias (and other social media apps that integrate with your Shopify store) come in handy.

Gorgias' social media features allows you to centralize all customer requests and comments across channels into a single dashboard. You can easily manage every customer interaction on Instagram (for instance: Instagram comments, Instagram ads comments, Instagram mentions), emails, and other messages – using only Gorgias is enough to deliver an exceptional omnichannel customer experience.

Gorgias also helps streamline your team collaboration. When someone comments on your Instagram, a corresponding ticket is automatically created. You can solve the ticket right away using macros, change its status, or assign it to another agent. Everything will be done inside Gorgias without you logging into your Instagram app.

Don’t Ignore Instagram Comments

Take the time to go through Instagram comments and address them. Show your followers that you care about them, appreciate their engagement, and strive to maintain relationships with them. The more you do that, the more your followers want to stick with you and support your business. 

Interested in using Gorgias to monitor Instagram comments and customer inquiries on other channels? Sign up for a Gorgias account today and discover all the premium features our ecommerce ticket management help desk offers. 

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Standing out and building a community of loyal fans is hard, and it’s even harder after the surge online shopping had in 2020. The mammoth amount of competition out there is constantly fighting for even the tiniest slice of ecommerce action.

To gain a competitive edge, brands must put their customers first.

In fact, companies voted customer experience as the most exciting opportunity for businesses over the next year, and it makes sense. Why? It’s because the customer experience drives sales. Research shows that brands with a customer experience mindset drive revenue 4-8% higher than the rest.

When your customers have a bad experience, it can wreak havoc on a brand and dramatically affect the bottom line. The problem is, it can be tricky to improve, especially if you don’t know where to start or what your customers actually want. This is where those customer reviews come into play

Not only do they help bolster customer support best practices, but these powerful assets give you a deep understanding of your customers — something that DTC brands are leveraging to the max. Customer-centric brands like Born Primitive, Beardbrand, Bombas, Tuff Wraps, and WAG are nailing customer experience by tapping into reviews and using them to leverage the buyer journey.

Read on to learn how reviews and UGC are helping brands create a 5-star customer experience. 

Reduce the risk of returns 

A clothing brand isn’t going to know how a jacket sits on every single body type, and they’re certainly not going to include this information in their product descriptions. Unfortunately, this can be a sticking point, especially since online shoppers aren’t able to try on products before they buy. 

This unsurprisingly leads to more returns (while in-store returns are around 8%, online returns hover around 25%).  

There’s a solution though, by strategically using reviews and UGC, brands can provide online shoppers with in-depth insights to help customers get exactly what they’re looking for. This is particularly essential for brands that use reviews with additional product and customer attributes, like shopper size and product color or type. 

Born Primitive does exactly this, sharing customer attributes and photos alongside reviews to help buyers get an idea about how items might look on them. 

Improve products and procedures 

Your products are the crux of your business. 

Fail to get your products right, and you’ll struggle to grow a flourishing business. This is one of the most important customer support tips for Shopify merchants — know thy customer and give them what they want. 

 Brands can fuel product development and internal procedures with customer feedback to continue to optimize the customer experience, all you need to do is listen.

 Using real-life feedback from buyers to improve how they view and buy products, as well as the products themselves, ties into the customer-centric vision that successful DTC brands share. It also shows your customers that you’re an honest, and transparent brand working to give them the best product and best experience.

 Take LSKD, for example. They’re using customer reviews to improve their products and to better align with customer wants and needs. The brand uses Okendo to capture reviews, respond to them, and gather crucial customer feedback. 

In fact, the brand’s popular Rep Tights have been molded over the years by customer feedback to ensure they take on the attributes buyers are looking for. Through reviews, customers are able to share their thoughts on specific product points to fuel development. 

Involving customers in this part of the process creates a community around a brand, and ensures you’re giving customers what they want. 

And think about it: if a brand is giving customers everything you need, why would they go elsewhere? 

Provide personalized and efficient customer support 

Support and customer experience go hand-in-hand. If customer support is good, the customer experience tends to be good too. 

Creating a good customer support experience is all about streamlining responses and separating those easy-to-answer questions from more complex ones. Brands can use reviews to automate commonly asked questions and personalize support based on the type of review a customer has given. 

On a more basic level, reviews help retailers identify customers who might be experiencing problems with their order. This, in turn, allows brands to address and resolve issues by responding to customer reviews, turning the experience from bad to good in a matter of minutes. Which can end up saving a company from hitting a bit of a rough patch, or issue with further customer responses.

Tuff Wraps regularly replies to less-than-stellar reviews with extra information and an email address that customers can use to get in touch with support. This can help customers feel seen and heard and completely turn around what was initially a poor experience. Combining reviews and customer support in this two-pronged approach aligns with the common best practices for customer support on Shopify.  

 If you’re experiencing this issue with customers leaving negative reviews, we’ve got something that might help. With Gorgias’ integration with Okendo, you’re able to diagnose these problems and handle them seamlessly from a single dashboard. By leveraging this integration, merchants gain full visibility on customer reviews and their support history.

Use reviews to carve a better customer experience 

 As many of us know, reviews are key to creating a positive customer experience, especially when they form such a crucial part of the buying journey. Shoppers actively seek out peer reviews before they buy to get a better understanding of a product.

 This is where Okendo can come in again, since it encourages customers to leave reviews complete with visuals and helpful attribute information. You can then use the reviews that come rolling in to glean valuable insights into the customer experience and identify ways to improve your products and the overall experience for your buyers.

Signup to Gorgias and leverage reviews to create a 5-star customer experience.

You might be assuming that there’s really nothing you can do to change this outside of overworking your team, or hiring more people.

This is completely normal, but there’s no need to panic. That’s because with Gorgias you can now integrate Loop in your ecommerce store. In case you’re wondering, Loop is an on-demand portal that allows customers to get the product they want, with less support touchpoints. 

Using Loop, there are many ways you can reduce one of the biggest and more time-consuming support-related requests… returns. Plus, they do this while still giving your customers a seamless experience. 

So, let’s dive in.

What’s the problem?

Did you know that 40% of support tickets are order related, with 5% being about returns? It might not seem like something worth looking into, or too problematic, but it is. 

Though these customers returning items do deserve a great level of customer care (everyone does), it’s not the most valuable way to actually use your support team’s skills. 

Why? Glad you asked.

There’s already a lack of resources

It’s always good to remember that your support team is juggling a lot more than you think because there’s so many different types of requests that come through. One of those requests that takes a lot of time is, you guessed it, return requests. While these are important, they don’t exactly require a human touch since they’re very straightforward and focus heavily on process. 

If your support team isn’t able to address other requests in a timely manner, that could mean losing new customers or returning ones because of those support tickets. 

Luckily, return-requests can be easily automated.

Customers want to control their returns

It may come as a surprise to hear that your customers don’t actually want a high touch support experience for returns from your team. They actually want to be the ones to choose where and when they want to engage with support teams. 

Since customers want a more on-demand experience when it comes to returns and something that happens fast, automation doesn’t hurt in these scenarios since it can be quick. 

What’s the solution? Enter Loop.

Bringing Loop and Gorgias together for a seamless customer experience that saves your team time is like a dream come true. 

But how exactly, can this address the issues we’ve been discussing?

First off, this partnership will allow your support team to use that extra time in valuable ways that make sense and benefit the business. For example, focusing more on new customers, shipping issues and more.

Secondly, it benefits your customers since it allows them to take control of their returns and do things on their own time. This makes it more seamless and makes them feel like the return process is easier than ever. 

Using both Loop and Gorgias together will create a better environment all around, decreasing stress both within your support team and customers so that your team can focus on conversions instead of returns.

Whether you’ve been looking for a way to reduce your support requests related to returns, or if it’s something new on your radar, it’s worth thinking about. Thankfully, you can sign up for a free 7-day trial with Gorgias and add in the Loop integration to see just how much time it can save.

By doing quality assurance on the support side, you’re able to see what’s working, what triggers customers and how to train your team to improve. It’s also a great tool for your team’s personal development as a support agent.

Since it’s time consuming though, everyone wants to find a way to streamline. 

The good news?‍

Klaus can do it, and there’s officially an integration that you can use with your Gorgias account to streamline it. Klaus is a quality review tool that helps you create a perfect customer experience for buyers and potential buyers

So, how does this help with the issues you may be facing with customer support quality assurance?

Let’s dive in.

It’s A Time Saver

As we just talked about earlier, customer assurance can be a time sucker. You may be manually looking at transcripts and organizing everything yourself, but there’s no need to do it this way. You know at Gorgias how much we love saving you time, so here’s how to reduce that with our new Klaus integration.

By pulling conversations automatically from your helpdesk, you can get instant review samples with erases the manually part of copy and pasting transcripts. Using Klaus, there’s also manual filtering options to help you quickly, and seamlessly, find specific cases or keywords you’re looking for.

For example, say you were curious about those tickets that took several responses to solve, or ones that received negative ratings from customers, you can easily pull those up in an instant

Notifications are also automatic when it comes to using Slack or email. By setting up these notifications, you’re able to ensure that none of your support agents misses a piece of their feedback. Thus saving you time, and constant reminders, to ensure that they receive these reviews. 

It’s Efficient

You all know how we love having all our data and information in one place, and Klaus is the same as Gorgias. Their dashboard which allows you to track you team’s performance over time, see the aspects of their communication they may be struggling with and looking into their quality scores (which will get into), really makes things easy. 

This full overview makes things efficient for you to see the overall health of your customer support team for your ecommerce business.

On top of that, reporting efficiencies are really easy. Reporting, no matter the department, tends to take up a lot of time. With Klaus, you can have all your efforts easily viewable in the dashboard. 

Chris Lavoie, Tech Partner Manager
It’s Personalized

No matter the size of your ecommerce business or support team, you’re always going to want to know how each of your members are doing. Using customizable scorecards with Klaus you can create these to add in a rating criteria for a number of different situations (an unlimited about by the way!). 

This is helpful when it comes to working with multiple teams or support channels since it allows you to efficiently track quality in as much detail as you need based on what you’d set the customizable scorecards for.

Klaus also lets you choose between different rating scales. For example, a binary thumbs up/down suit some people, while others would rather use the 3 or 5 point scoring system -- you choose what you prefer!

At Gorgias, we’re continuing to work on partnerships that will make your life easier, and Klaus is one of those that will make the difference in a critical part of your strategy. Haven’t tried Gorgias out yet? Give it a try for 7-days free and see how it can make your life more efficient and simple when it comes to your ecommerce store and customer support.

Your online store, mixed with the e-commerce helpdesk Gorgias, and topped with the quality review tool Klaus - that’s how you cook purr-fect customer experiences for your buyers. 

You don’t even have to write this recipe down because we’re excited to announce that we’ve just released the native Gorgias and Klaus integration! You can now pull your customer conversations from Gorgias seamlessly into Klaus for internal support QA and provide consistent feedback to your agents. 

There’s a number of reasons why Gorgias can be the best solution for your online store. And there’s a lot of sense in using it together with Klaus if you want to provide your customers with top-notch customer care.

Let’s look into the magic that you can unleash with the Gorgias and Klaus integration.

Gorgias for extraordinary e-commerce experiences

If you’re running an online store then you probably already know that e-commerce customer service is not just about helping your users. It’s about converting customers, increasing sales, and growing your business. 

To reap the benefits of having a revenue-driving e-commerce support team, set your team up for success with the right tools. A regular helpdesk may be enough to give timely answers to your online visitors’ questions, but it might not reveal the full potential of each of your customer interactions.

That’s why dedicated ‘e-commerce helpdesks’ are a thing now, and why Gorgias has become so successful in this category. Here’s what sets Gorgias apart from other more generic helpdesk solutions:

• Focus on converting visitors into customers: Give your customers the same kind of personalized service that you would when visiting a physical store. Chat with customers to give recommendations, feedback, and special offers.
• Engage with people before they visit your store: Gorgias allows your agents to respond to people’s questions and comments on your social media ads and posts. Increase your ad effectiveness and sales results in one go.
• Track your support team’s sales results: See which support interactions - in text messages, social media answers, and live chat conversations on your website - lead to sales. Build your sales and support strategies to maximize the results. 

Gorgias also delivers information about the customers’ previous orders and other nifty functionalities that help you turn your customer service team into a sales department - and, as a matter of fact, a very successful one.

But how can you make sure that your customer service agents actually nail every sales opportunity hiding in your support interactions? That’s where Klaus comes in.

Klaus for consistent customer care quality

Klaus is a conversation review and support QA tool dedicated to helping your agents make the most out of every support interaction. It’s a platform for having a systematic insight into your customer conversations, providing consistent feedback to your agents, and gaining control over support performance. 

You can’t improve your support quality if you don’t measure it. And Internal Quality Score - the metric of conversation reviews - does just that. It makes the quality of your customer service quantifiable and allows you to track and compare your team’s performance over time. 

While some smaller teams prefer to manage their internal quality reviews in spreadsheets, companies like Automattic, Wistia, PandaDoc, and Geckoboard, have trusted the manual work behind support QA to Klaus. Here’s why:

• Instant review samples: Klaus pulls conversations automatically in from your helpdesk. That means no manual copy-pasting of ticket data and saves you a good few hours every week.
• Advanced filtering options help you find the specific cases you’re looking for - e.g., those that took several responses to solve, or those that received a negative rating from your customers. 
• Customizable scorecards: Create as many scorecards as you’d like. If you’re working with multiple teams or support channels, you can create a separate rubric for each. Add the rating criteria that makes sense to each particular situation, and track the quality in as much detail as necessary.
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• Klaus also allows you to choose between different rating scales: a binary thumbs up/down suit some teams, while others prefer the 3- or 5-point scoring. The choice is yours. 
• Quality metrics dashboard: Track your team’s performance over time, see which aspect of their communication they are struggling with the most, and zoom into specific agents’ quality scores. You’ve got a full overview of how your team performs against your quality standards.
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• Klaus’ quality dashboard makes reporting ridiculously easy, too. All the efforts you put into training and coaching can now easily be seen reflected in your team’s performance. 
• Automatic notifications: Slack and email notifications make sure that none of your agents ever miss a single piece of their feedback. Learning about their areas of improvement is the only way your team can become better at what they do, so make sure your agents get the feedback they need.

Klaus is a very dynamic and customizable tool and that’s why it works well with all customer service teams. If you want to boost your online store sales results through your support team, make sure you create the respective rating categories, measure your agents’ performance in them, and give regular feedback on how to score higher. 

We’re firm believers of support-driven growth and we’ve written more about building customer loyalty through customer service here. Go forth and prosper!

Gorgias + Klaus join forces

Your e-commerce customer service is running on Gorgias and now you want to start improving your customer service quality and drive more sales with Klaus? Can be done easily. 

Connecting your Gorgias account with Klaus is easy as one-two-three with our native integration seamlessly connecting these software solutions. To set up the connection:

1. Sign in to your Klaus account or create one if you don’t have it already (comes with a 14-day free trial, no strings attached).
2. Connect your Gorgias account with Klaus with the help of your Gorgias’ subdomain (yourcompanyname.gorgias.com) and API key.
3. Create your quality scorecard: define your quality criteria in rating categories and accompany it with a suitable rating scale.
4. Invite your team members to the Klaus party. We’ve already pulled the list of your team members over from your Gorgias account, all you have to do is decide who gets to be the reviewers, agents, and admins of your account.
5. Review your first conversation (and the second, and the third - we know, it’s addictive). Track your team’s progress in the quality dashboard.

There you go, you’ve built yourself a scalable way of assessing your support team’s performance and providing individual feedback to your agents with no unnecessary hassle. 

The Gorgias and Klaus integration can give your customer service such an advantage that it almost sounds unfair. Poor competitors of yours!

Getting control over your support interactions and turning them into your sales reps is an art that not everyone can master. Working with the right tools is a quick shortcut to success.

We’re excited to welcome Gorgias into our extended family connected through our native integrations. Which other integrations would you like to see on our list? Share your thoughts in our online CX community The Quality Tribe.

Every month, our product team holds a casual, conversational event with our customers to demo new features, receive real-time feedback, and host live Q&As. 

Watch the video below or read on for a recap of our latest product updates. 

1. Admins can require Two-Factor Authentication for all users (3:18) 

While Gorgias does a lot to keep your data secure, one of the best ways to add an extra layer of security is to encourage agents to use secure passwords and two-factor authentication (2FA). 

And with our latest update, you can do more than just encourage. Admins can now require agents to set up two-factor authentication. 

1. Admins can require Two-Factor Authentication for all users (3:18) 

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Once an admin toggles the option, all users in your account will have 14 days to set up 2FA. After 14 days, users will need to set it up to access your helpdesk. 

2. Add a contact form in Gorgias Chat for a better CX outside business hours (11:38) 

It can be hard to follow up with chat tickets that were left during off-business hours. Sometimes customers don’t include enough details in their message, making it harder to follow up on the next day. 

Using a contact form in Gorgias Chat, you can capture a customer's email and message in a short conversational way. The contact form is designed to collect more information without disrupting the conversational experience, so you can easily follow up and help via email when you log back into Gorgias. 

The contact form prompts your web visitors to select a subject (to help you triage tickets faster), and then provide more details about their issue so your agents know what they’re trying to solve. Last, it collects the shopper’s email address so you know who to follow-up with and where to reach them. All of this information will be collected in a single ticket in your helpdesk. 

Read this help center article to learn how to enable the contact form in your Gorgias chat. 

3. Create sub-categories in Help Center (19:55) 

Create multiple levels of categories to help your shoppers navigate to improve help center organization and find help content for related issues more easily. 

These new categories also give your team more options when creating a Help Center, so you can organize FAQs in whatever way makes sense for your brand. 

4. New Managed Rules (For Automation Add-on Subscribers) (21:30) 

Rules are a powerful feature that let Gorgias users automatically organize, tag, and reply to tickets. Thousands of Gorgias customers have adopted rules in their customer support workflow to save time and allow themselves to provide faster and higher quality service. Focusing on the common inquiries like WISMO, we’ve built Managed Rules to optimize time for Automate subscribers. 

Managed Rules are pre-built automations developed by the Gorgias team and include some of the most common and helpful automations. They need no code, no setup. Install them from the Rule Library and you’re good to go! If we improve the Rule, it will automatically update in your helpdesk, no action from you required.

Customer Q&A (24:44) 

Tune into the above timestamp if you want the full 25 minutes of customer questions and answers from our product team. Here were a few of the highlights!

With only two weeks left in Q2, which of the planned releases on the public roadmap will actually launch? (25:44)

Some features listed in Q2 of our public roadmap will indeed be released in Q2, while others will spill into Q3 (or later). We’re proud to provide transparency with our public roadmap, but please understand that it’s subject to change throughout the quarter. We do our best to update our roadmap frequently but can’t always do so right away.

Although we can’t promise to release any of these features in Q2, a few features we plan to release sooner than later include:

• FAQ article recommendations in chat
• Create a Chat report in help desk statistics
• Display agents phone availability state

Our team is actively prioritizing the roadmap for Q3 right now. Check back soon to see the latest plan! 

Will you be improving the returns and cancellations workflow for the Help center? We use Loop, but can’t integrate our self-service return portal with our new Help Center. (33:40)

This is a limitation we’re definitely aware of, and are exploring options. The long-term solution is to build better integrations with Loop and other top returns platforms. If this is a feature you’d like to see, please submit the request here. 

When will the option to convert phone calls to SMS be available? (45:15)

We’re hoping to release more features around that at the start of 2023. Today if you receive a phone call, you can always reply to that ticket via SMS. In the future, we’ll focus on helping you deflect the phone call entirely and prioritize SMS instead. 

Join us for the next monthly product event

Thanks for checking out the recap of our June customer product event. We hold these events once as a month as a way to share the latest releases and connect with our customers in real-time. It’s a favorite – from both customers, and the Gorgias team. 

If you’d like to sign up for the next one to attend live, you can register here. We’d love to have you join us! 

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Like any major topic in your company, your compensation policy should reflect your organizational values.

At Gorgias, we created a compensation calculator that reflected ours, setting salaries across the organization based on 3 key principles:

1. Compensation should be based on data
2. Compensation should reflect everyone’s ownership, meaning everyone should have equity
3. Compensation should be transparent

Since the beginning, we applied the first two: Each of our employees was granted data-driven stock options that beat the market average.

However, we were challenged internally: Our team members asked how much they would make if they switched teams or if they got promoted.

This led to the implementation of our third key principle, as we shared the compensation calculator with everyone at Gorgias and beyond: See the calculator here.

This was not a small challenge. We’re sharing our process in hopes that we can help other companies arrive at equitable, transparent compensation practices.

We built our compensation calculator using four key indicators

First, let’s get back to how we built the tool. We had to decide which criteria we wanted to take into account. Based on research articles and benchmarks on what other companies did before, we decided that our compensation model would be based on 4 factors: position, level, location, and strategic orientation.

If we had to sum it up all briefly, our formula looks like this:

Average of Data (for the position at defined percentile & Level) x Location index

Position

This is the job title someone has in the company. It looks simple, but it can be challenging to define! Even if the titles don’t really vary from one company to another, people might have different duties, deal with much bigger clients or have more technical responsibilities. Sometimes your job title or position doesn’t match the existing databases.

For some of these roles, when we thought that our team members were doing more than average in the market, we crossed some databases to get something closer to fairness.

Level

To assess a level we defined specific criteria in our growth plan for each job position. It is, of course, linked to seniority, but that is not the primary factor. When we hire someone, we evaluate their skills using specific challenges and case studies during our interview processes.

Depending on the databases you’ll find beginner, intermediate, expert, which we represent as   L1, L2, L3, etc.We decided to go with six levels from L1 to L6 for individual contributors and six levels in management from team lead to C-level executive.

Location

Our location index is based on the cost of living in a specific city (we rely on Numbeo for instance) and on the average salary for a position we hire (we use Glassdoor). Some cities are better providers of specific talents. By combining them, we get a more accurate location index.

When we are missing data for a specific city, we use the nearest one where we have data available.

Our reference is San Francisco, where the location index equals 1, meaning it’s basically the most expensive city in terms of hiring. For others, we have an index that can vary from 0.29 (Belgrade, Serbia) to 0.56 (Paris, France) to 0.65 (Toronto, Canada) etc. We now have 50+ locations in our salary calculator — a necessary consideration for our quickly growing, global team of full-time employees and contractors.

Strategic orientation

We rely on our strategic orientation to select which percentile we want to use in our databases. When we started Gorgias we were using the 50th percentile. As we grew (and raisedfunds), we wanted to be 100% sure that we were hiring the best people to build the best possible company.  

High quality talent can be expensive (but not as expensive as making the wrong hires)! Obviously, we can’t pay everyone at the top of the market and align with big players like Google, but we can do our best to get close.

Since having the best product is our priority we pay our engineering and product team at the 90th percentile, meaning their pay is in the top 10% of the industry. We pay other teams at the 60th percentile.

Some other companies take into account additional criteria, such as company seniority. We believe seniority should reflect in equity, rather than in salary. If you apply seniority in the company index on salaries, eventually some of your team members will be inconsistent with the market. Those employees may stay in your company only because they won’t be able to find the same salary elsewhere.

By crossing several databases, we arrived at a more accurate dataset

 Data is at the heart of our company DNA.

Where should you find your data? Data is everywhere! What matters most is the quality.

We look for the most relevant data on the market. If the database is not robust enough, we look elsewhere. So far we have managed to rely on several of them: Opencomp, Optionimpact, Figures.hr, and Pave are some major datasets we use for compensation. We’re curious and always looking for more. We’ll soon dig into Carta, Eon, and Levels. The more data we get, the more confident we are about the offers we make to our team.

Once we have the data, we apply our location index. It applies to both salaries and equity.

To build our equity package, we use the compensation and we then apply a “team” multiplier and a “level” multiplier. Those multipliers rely on data, of course. We’re using the same databases mentioned above and also on Rewarding Talent documentation for Europe.

Internal communication is key

As we mentioned above, once our tool was robust enough, we shared it internally.

To be honest, checking and checking again took longer than expected. But we all agreed that we’d rather release it to good reactions than rush it and create fear. We postponed the release for one month to check and double-check the results..

For the most effective release, we decided to do two things:

1. We shared it with one team at a time. This was done to anticipate the flow of questions, though we didn’t receive that many.
2. We shared it with a lot of humility. . Even if we checked the data many times, we could have missed something, or there could have been something that lacked consistency. We asked everyone to stress-test it and to provide feedback.

Overall, the reactions have been great. People loved the transparency and we got solid feedback.

We released the new calculator in September 2021, and overall we’re really happy with the response. We also had positive feedback from the update this month.

Let’s see how it goes with time.

Next step: sharing it with the rest of the industry

Let’s be humble here: It’s only the beginning. It’s a Google Sheet. Of course, we’ll need to iterate on it. 

In the meantime, you can check out the calculator here.

So far we’ve made plans to review the whole grid every year. However, now that it’s public within the teams, we can collect feedback and potentially make some changes. Everyone can add comments as they notice potential issues.

The next step for us is to share it online with everyone, on our website, so that candidates can have a vision of what we offer. We hope we’ll attract more talent thanks to this level of transparency and the value of our compensation packages