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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What should you do if the package is stolen?

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

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

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

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

Information needed to file for a refund

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

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

Popular carriers' refund forms

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Other top shipping apps

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

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

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

5) Update your shipping and package replacement policies

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

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

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

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

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

Ensure the customer provided the correct address

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

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

Enable real-time package tracking

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

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

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

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

Let customers schedule their deliveries

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

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

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

Provide instructions to the delivery driver for safe delivery

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

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

Require a signature or in-person delivery for valuable items

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

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

Improve your customer experience, even after deliveries, with Gorgias

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

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

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

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

Does your business have an ecommerce upselling strategy in place?

If not, you’re leaving money on the table.

Ecommerce upselling involves selling higher quantities and more expensive products to shoppers who are already considering a purchase. And for most ecommerce companies, the bulk of upselling and cross-selling happens when the customer support team interacts with customers who are already on your site or have already purchased an item. One reason is that returning customers spend 67% more than first-time shoppers, according to Bain and Co. Plus, it costs about five times more to acquire a new customer than it does to retain one.

In other words, chasing after new customers is expensive and brings in lower-value sales. Upselling, cross-selling, and customer-experience strategies to keep customers coming back — and spending more and more each time — is more profitable.

Whether you’re just starting to explore upselling or it’s time to retool your current efforts, these 11 best practices can improve your efforts and help you reach greater results.

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What is ecommerce upselling?

Ecommerce upselling is a sales technique of allowing customers to purchase a higher-priced item instead of the item they selected from your ecommerce store, to convince the customer to spend more money. When successful, ecommerce upselling provides additional perceived value to the customer and nets your store a higher sale price (and higher profits). A simple example is a shopper deciding to get an expensive camera after initially coming in for a more basic model.

Ecommerce upselling is the digital equivalent of old-fashioned, in-person upselling. Instead of speaking to an in-store associate, customers get recommendations from pop-ups, customer support agents, and other prompts throughout your website: usually on product pages, in the cart, or at checkout.

Here’s an example. Say you’ve launched an ecommerce venture that sells high-end, organic toothpaste. A customer adds a single tube of toothpaste to their cart and heads to checkout. At the checkout page, you trigger a pop-up that offers:

Buy 3 tubes and save 20%!

Or perhaps:

Try Our Variety Pack, Get One Tube Free!

You could create an endless variety of deals here, but you get the idea: You’re offering customers more (usually with some kind of discount or value proposition) to entice them to spend more and increase your average order value (AOV).

What is ecommerce cross-selling?

Ecommerce cross-selling is a similar sales tactic where you strategically recommend add-ons related to whatever the customer has put in their cart. The goals are the same: higher ticket value, greater sales, and greater customer satisfaction. Instead of upgrading to a fancy camera, a shopper who accepts a cross-selling offer might also buy a roll of film and an extra battery in addition to the basic camera.

If the camera example above doesn't make sense, let’s go back to our toothpaste company. A great example of cross-selling would be something like this:

Got toothpaste? Don’t forget the brushes! Add 3 bamboo brushes for just $5!

For this brand, other great cross-selling opportunities could include floss, electric toothbrush heads (assuming you sell an electric toothbrush), and maybe even night guards. All appeal to health-conscious customers looking for oral hygiene products.

What is the difference between cross-selling and upselling?

Upselling and cross-selling are similar concepts, but the terms aren’t interchangeable.

With upselling, you’re offering the customer more of a product or a better version of a product at a higher price point. If the customer bites, the upsell item replaces the original item in their cart.

For a real-life example of upselling, think of Apple. Each of their products has multiple storage levels, premium versions, and newer models they could (and do) push customers toward.

With cross-selling, you’re offering the customer additional products, usually related items that work in tandem with that original item. Cross-selling opportunities don’t replace the original item but stack on top of it.

For a real-life example of cross-selling, think of Amazon. No matter what you buy — or even look at — you’ll inevitably be shown a “People also bought…” section. It’s usually full of on-topic and useful add-ons, like battery packs or chargers for phones or cables and USB mice for laptops.

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11 quick ecommerce upselling tips to drive more revenue

Whether upselling is new for your ecommerce business or you’re looking to retool your existing upselling strategies, check out these eleven quick tips that can help you drive more revenue more effectively.

1) Use tools specifically built for ecommerce upselling

For small and medium ecommerce businesses, using a tool that’s already done the work of building out support for ecommerce upselling is the single most important step to take.

Dynamic, beautiful, frictionless upselling is prohibitively complex to create on your own, requiring a serious resource outlay for even the largest ecommerce sites. But several ecommerce platforms have already done this hard work and make upselling and cross-selling easy to implement for any vendor using their platform.

Many Shopify stores already take advantage of upselling thanks to the company’s smooth interface enabling the offering. If you’re a current or prospective Shopify user, check out 30+ of the best Shopify apps to boost your performance.

Some of our favorite Shopify apps for upselling include:

• One Click Upsell which automatically gives customers recommendations at checkout in a single click
• In Cart Upsell & Cross Sell which gives shoppers product recommendations on your shopping cart page
• AfterSell Post Purchase Upsell which presents buyers with opportunities to purchase more items throughout the post-purchase experience

Not a Shopify user? We’ve created similar guides for BigCommerce and Magento. Check out the best extensions for BigCommerce or the best extensions for Magento and start powering up your store today!

2) Incentivize your customer support agents to recommend products

Your customer support agents speak to customers more than anyone. They have a huge opportunity to drive sales — up or down, depending on the quality of service — for your brand. 

Here are a few examples of moments when customer support agents can cross-sell or upsell clients:

• When a customer leaves a positive product review, you can offer them a discount for their next purchase as a thank you
• When a customer asks to return an item, you can urge them to opt for an exchange instead (with a different product recommendation they might prefer)
• You can include dynamic product recommendations in your email signatures
• You can give relevant product recommendations to customers lingering on your site via live chat — more on that below

If you use Shopify, Gorgias makes giving great product recommendations easy thanks to our integration with the product picker, which lets agents add product recommendations to tickets without leaving the helpdesk:

Agents will pursue more product upsells and cross-sells with the right incentives, so we encourage larger teams to reward agents for driving revenue. Measuring the amount of revenue generated by customer support is challenging, which is why we built the revenue dashboard in Gorgias, which gives you a breakdown of revenue metrics, such as tickets coveted by each agent or your team’s conversion rate:

3) Show off your best-selling and relevant products

Using products that have already sold well in the past will significantly improve the chances of cross-selling or upselling.

For upselling, this isn’t the place to push your most exclusive, niche products. Focus on popular upgrades instead, ones in the same price range as whatever’s in the customer’s cart. People looking to spend around $20 might be convinced to spend $30 or $35, but they’re unlikely to jump to a $250 item no matter how amazing it is.

For cross-selling, make sure you’re using highly targeted, highly useful products, and make sure they’re already good sellers. If you’re selling whole coffee beans, a hand or electric grinder makes great sense. A nice $50 manual brewer (like a siphon or AeroPress) might make sense too.

But a $999 espresso maker? Not so much. 

Likewise, aim to recommend similar products whenever possible. A related product is anything that compliments the product in the customer’s cart or a product that better satisfies the customer need that drove them to add the original item.

(Pro tip: People shopping for a dozen roses right before Valentine’s Day are never going to go for a bell pepper instead.)

4) Use proactive live chat to suggest products at key points in the customer journey

If you use live chat for customer support, you may be able to start conversations with website browsers proactively. This allows your customer support team to speak when they’re deciding whether — and how much — to purchase. Your customer support team can answer questions that get, recommend products, and offer discounts to drive a sale.

We call these proactive chats “chat campaigns” and recommend designing them around key points of the customer journey. For instance, if a customer spends a lot of time on your website without adding an item to their cart, you can fire a live chat asking whether they need any help finding a product:

Likewise, you can message customers if they add a product to their cart but don’t place a purchase for a few minutes. You can open the door for them to ask any questions that might be stopping them from making a purchase:

Or, to bring it back to cross-selling, you can offer product recommendations and discounts to motivate shoppers to add more items to their carts:

The possibilities of chat campaigns are wide-ranging. If you want to learn more, book a demo and ask about the many ways Gorgias’ live chat can drive sales on your site. Or, if you want to spend more time researching live chat, check out one of these resources:

• Our live chat app page, which shows off some of the key features
• Our list of the best live chat apps for any purpose
• Our list of the best live chat apps specifically for ecommerce
• Our list of the best live chat apps for Shopify
• Our list of top live chat statistics to learn more about the tool's impact
• Our guide to adding live chat to your Shopify store

5) Optimize the post-purchase experience to cross-sell, announce new products, and plug other promotions

Your post-purchase experience is everything that happens after a customer completes a purchase, from the digital receipt they receive to follow-up marketing materials. 

Consider using your purchase confirmations as a place to send out product recommendations, discounts, announcements about new products, subscription offers (“Never run out again!”), or whatever else makes sense for your business model. 

Strict upselling is likely out at this point (they already bought the original item), but you have all sorts of opportunities for convincing that customer to spend more with you during an extended sales session.

You can manually chase after customers post-purchase, but those efforts will be disorganized and time-consuming. Plus, you might run into trouble if you try to cross-sell a customer that’s dissatisfied with their purchase. Klaviyo is one of the best tools on the marketing for email and SMS marketing (plus, it integrates with Gorgias to help you unify your customer support and marketing).

And if you sell subscription-based products, Recharge (and its Gorgias automation) can help you manage your subscription customers and put them on larger plans. 

6) Reduce the number of clicks wherever possible

The best upsells and cross-sells are the ones that feel smooth and simple. You want to keep your upselling tactics subtle, not pushy, and make sure your tech tools and partners enable a smooth and frictionless experience.

All it should take is a click or a tap, maybe two, for the upsell to be completed. Anything more complex than that could start getting in the way and might even drive customers away out of frustration or “move on” syndrome (they move on to another tab or app and never come back).

One approach to one-click upselling is to target customers who have already added items to their cart and even inputted their credit card information. Then, your buyers can click to add the item to their cart directly, rather than having to go to that item’s product page, add it to the cart, and then checkout. It’s kind of like an easy-to-grab candy bar put right next to the checkout counter.

Here’s an example from Little Poppy Co., a brand that smartly tries to upsell shoppers with a subscribe-and-save option during the checkout flow: 

If you use Shopify, One Click Upsell can add this functionality to your store.

7) Offer only two or three product options

Next, make sure you aren’t overwhelming new customers with too many choices. At the point where a customer is ready to put a product from your online store in their cart, they’re already pretty far down the purchase path. Whether you’re cross-selling or upselling, keep your set of upselling options small — no more than three at most.

Why? Because successfully upselling products needs to feel like simply making a better choice — not like going back to square one and comparing a half dozen new options.

Make your upsell offer clear and concise so you can have the best chance of increasing that cart value without frustrating or confusing your users.

8) Offer discounts and specials while upselling

Next up is a crucial upselling strategy: You’ve got to sweeten the pot. Use discounts and specials to motivate your customer to action.

Yes, discounts cut into your bottom line, but their ability to attract customers and increase revenue is undeniable. Simply build the discount into your asking price, and all is well.

Think of it this way: If your customer came to your site intending to purchase a single tube of toothpaste or a pound of coffee or a bucket of protein powder, it’s safe to assume they’re going to be biased toward the thing they meant to buy (in the size they meant to buy it).

You won’t convince many of them to simply buy two or three instead of one just because you asked them to in the checkout process. Most will simply say “no thanks, I only need one” and skip the offer.

What moves hearts and minds (and credit cards) is the perception of value. Offering a discount or free shipping for certain cart values is a great way to make cross-sell offers sweeter. And one of the best upselling techniques is to include a subscribe-and-save option to motivate customers to sign up for repeat purchases from the jump:

9) Target repeat customers

Next up, if your chosen tools and ecommerce platform allow you to make this distinction, focus your cross-selling and upselling efforts on your returning customers, not on new ones.

For one, it’s way easier to sell to an existing customer than to a new one. Customer acquisition costs can be five times as much as customer retention costs, and you don’t want anything scaring off those new customers, including an upsell attempt that feels a little too pushy.

Your repeat customers are also much more likely to have a positive opinion about your business and your ecommerce site. This segment of your market is already primed to like what you have to offer and is much more likely to trust your recommendations based on their previous positive experiences with your brand.

If you use Gorgias, you can integrate with customer loyalty tools like Yotpo or LoyaltyLion, both of which help you identify and nurture customers that love your brand (and who would therefore be good candidates for upsell and cross-sell campaigns.)

When you add these integrations to your Gorgias account, you bring that loyalty data inside your helpdesk, giving your agents the context they need to determine whether to try and sell more to a repeat customer:

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10) Limit offer availability

Whatever recommended products you’re presenting to customers, create a sense of urgency or scarcity by setting a time limit for the discount or special offer. Yes, this can be cheesy, and it might not be right for high-end or prestigious brands. But it’s highly motivating — and highly effective.

The reasons why get into some of the psychology surrounding shopping. Discounts are highly motivating, but savvy shoppers can see through “permanent discounts” well enough that the perception of value starts to disappear. By setting a timer (and displaying it in countdown fashion, if your plugins allow), you send some key messages:

1. The full price is the real price.
2. This discount is special (and so are you)!
3. It’s now or never — if you miss it, you may never get access to this discount again.
4. The timer’s ticking, so you’d better move now; no time to stop and think.

So how long should your offer last? It depends on the nature of your business. Small-dollar retailers might make the window as short as 30 minutes. 48 hours makes sense for many, and one to two weeks can be a good timeframe for larger commitments that might have their own email sequences and funnels.

Instead of limiting availability with timing, you can also opt for a longer-term selling strategy and ask for a customer’s email address instead. That information will let you sell more in the long term:

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11) Always A/B test

Not every offer is a winner. The same goes for headlines, email subjects, and all sorts of elements in the marketing world.

But how can you determine which ones are working and which are falling short? A/B testing.

A/B testing is the process of trying two different sets of wording on a smaller subset of an audience to determine which one lands better.

You see this most often with marketing emails, where two initial test emails are sent to two small subsets of a list. Whichever subject line gets a better open rate wins the day and gets attached to the main email going out to the entire list.

You can apply this concept in numerous spaces. YouTubers A/B test video titles. News organizations do the same with some articles. And you can do it with your upselling offers.

Set up two similar offers (or an identical offer worded two different ways or using two different visual styles) and unleash both on your customer base. After enough customers receive one or the other offer, it’ll become clear which one has the better conversion rate and the best effect on the bottom line.

This is worth the investment: Forrester found that a strong UX can increase conversion rate by 400% over a weak one. That’s a lot of extra tubes of toothpaste!

Of course, you need an ecommerce platform that allows you to implement A/B testing on upselling and cross-selling initiatives, so make sure you have access to that feature through your chosen platform.

Integrate all your upselling tools with Gorgias

By implementing (or refreshing) ecommerce upselling and cross-selling strategies for your ecommerce site, you’ll enjoy a range of benefits, with improved customer experience and higher average cart value sitting at the top of the list. And with the eleven best practices we’ve provided here, you’re now ready to take your upselling efforts to the next level.

Of course, succeeding in ecommerce and upselling requires the right suite of ecommerce tools and partners. Gorgias integrates instantly with more than 150 top ecommerce tools like Shopify, Yotpo, Klaviyo, LoyaltyLion, and so many more.

Ready for a better (and more profitable) helpdesk experience? See what Gorgias can do for you and sign up for free now.

TL;DR:

• Great customer service drives more than just satisfaction — it generates revenue. Retaining customers, increasing order sizes, and gaining referrals are key ways to grow your bottom line through excellent support.
• Customer feedback is a goldmine for improvement. Use insights from support tickets, surveys, and conversations to address common pain points and refine processes.
• Automation and self-service options enhance efficiency. Automate repetitive requests like WISMO and offer self-service resources so agents can focus on complex interactions.‍
• Train agents for deeper product knowledge. Providing agents with comprehensive training ensures they can handle inquiries confidently.

Many customer service guides focus on individual actions: be patient, show empathy, and listen actively. While these customer support tips are valuable, they only scratch the surface. 

The goal of ecommerce customer service isn’t just to please customers. Just like any function of a business, great customer service has to drive revenue — and having positive interactions with customers is just one part of that goal. Excellent customer service can help an online store grow its bottom line revenue through:

• Better customer retention (and more loyal customers)
• Higher average order volume (AOV) from loyal customers
• Better word-of-mouth advertising and referrals from high net promoter score
• More chances to drive sales with new customers through proactive customer service

With that in mind, here are 20 customer support tips for improvements on many levels, from operational changes down to individual agents’ day-to-day.

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Tips for making high-impact changes to your customer experience

For a top-down revamp, focus on high-impact, cost-effective changes that customer support leaders can implement. 

Here are five tips to tackle major customer service challenges and elevate your service experience:

1. Collect and use customer feedback

Customer feedback is the single best resource to improve the overall quality of your product and customer experience. Analyzing customer feedback from support tickets, NPS and CSAT surveys, and face-to-face conversations can surface patterns harming customer satisfaction and opportunities for improvement. 

Consider the following example: if customers frequently ask questions about return policies, you may need to make the policy clearer. Or, if feedback shows frustration with response times, consider implementing real-time support options, such as social media, chat, or SMS. You could also consider using automation and templated responses to resolve common questions quickly.

These direct channels provide immediate answers and reduce wait times for customers who want quick resolutions.

Your customer service team can use feedback to share insights with product, shipping, and other teams—often leading to broader improvements. For example, feedback about shipping issues can guide adjustments in fulfillment, while comments on product quality can drive updates in manufacturing. 

We recommend setting up a system to pass feedback to relevant departments. With Gorgias, you can automatically tag feedback for specific teams, create custom views, and invite team members to access this feedback directly. Plus, with unlimited seats on most Gorgias plans, it’s easy to involve everyone who needs to see it.

2. Automate simple ticket requests such as WISMO to let agents focus on valuable conversations

Automating responses to frequently asked questions, such as “where is my order” (WISMO), has two major benefits. First, it reduces response times by instantly providing answers to common inquiries. Fast, accurate responses to these questions are crucial for reducing customer effort.

Second, automation lets your agents focus on more complex inquiries. Without having to handle repetitive tickets, they can prioritize high-impact conversations that involve troubleshooting or personalized assistance. In practice, this means fewer hours spent on “one-size-fits-all” tickets and more time available to resolve unique customer issues and address inquiries that require customer service skills.

3. Provide self-service options

Most customers prefer to find answers on their own when possible––according to Heretto, customers overwhelmingly prefer self-service solutions as their first point of contact for support.

Options like knowledge bases, detailed FAQ pages, and interactive help centers help customers solve issues independently, without relying on customer service representatives.

Here’s a quick breakdown of effective self-service solutions:

• FAQ pages: Concise answers to frequently asked questions about shipping, return policies, and product details.
• Knowledge bases: Comprehensive guides covering product use, troubleshooting, and company policies.
• Automated chat: Quick responses that guide customers through standard issues, providing an “in-person” feel while freeing up your support team.

Automated chat bridge self-service and hands-on support, offering customers a personalized experience without tying up your team. With Gorgias, you can set up flows in your help center or chat, allowing customers to find answers or track and modify orders—all without waiting for an agent.

Read our complete guide to customer self-service.

4. Train agents to have a strong understanding of your products and processes

Effective customer service skills go beyond soft skills like empathy. Agents need a deep understanding of your product to give accurate advice and solve issues effectively. Similarly, they need to deeply understand customer service techniques and processes (for things like escalation and returns) to give clear, accurate instructions. 

Here’s how you can set your customer service reps up for success:

1. Product knowledge: Agents should have a strong command of product details, features, and common troubleshooting steps. When they know the product inside and out, they can solve customer issues faster and with more confidence.
2. Process knowledge: Every company has unique processes, from returns to issue escalation. Clear instructions help agents navigate these processes smoothly and give customers a streamlined experience.
3. Customer service training: Empathy and positive language are crucial in customer service. An agent who can put themselves in the customer’s shoes, show understanding, and avoid negative language is more likely to resolve issues successfully. For example, phrases like “I understand how this must be frustrating” validate the customer’s experience and demonstrate that the agent is there to help.

When guiding customers—like through checkout—agents must provide accurate information to avoid negative interactions. Macros help standardize responses and reduce human error. 

In training, prioritize product knowledge and create an internal knowledge base for quick reference. It’s also key to train agents on your service tools. Gorgias Academy offers courses and certifications, along with help center documentation for setting up automation and managing accounts. 

Plus, our help center has detailed documentation on how to configure your account, set up new automation, and so much more.

Explore effective ways to organize your customer service team for a more streamlined operation.

5. Track your customer service's impact on your brand's revenue

Exceptional customer service doesn’t just benefit the customer—it can also contribute significantly to revenue. Satisfied customers are more likely to become repeat buyers, and customer loyalty directly impacts long-term revenue. 

In-depth tracking is a challenge, but you can start by seeing how many customers place an order within five days of a customer service interaction and attribute that revenue to customer service.

If you want more suggestions, check out our list of 25 customer support metrics, which walk through revenue-related metrics like customer churn, revenue backlog, and more. 

Tracking this revenue contribution will help you understand the value of great customer service. With revenue statistics, brands can access detailed metrics and analysis regarding how much revenue their customer service team generates. By using Gorgias to analyze support ticket details and identify sales trends, you'll be able to figure out what works and what doesn't and use data to develop a customer service strategy optimized for revenue generation.​​

Explore more about how to drive customer retention through effective customer service.

4 Tips for driving sales through customer service

Customer service is more than damage control—it’s a chance to boost sales and drive revenue. By empowering your team to focus on increasing customer satisfaction, you can turn each interaction into a sales opportunity.

Here are three tips to help you get started:

6. Enable chat at checkout

Around 70% of all online shopping carts get abandoned. While there are many reasons why shoppers abandon shopping carts, questions or issues arising during the checkout process are some of the most common reasons.

Adding Gorgias chat to your checkout page helps prevent this by allowing customers to request help instantly.

With Gorgias, you can also reach out proactively during checkout—offering assistance, reminding customers of free shipping thresholds, or sharing discounts. This approach reduces cart abandonment and boosts average order value through strategic upsells and recommendations.

7. Proactively reach out during the shopping journey

You can boost conversion rates by proactively assisting customers through chat at key points in their journey. For example, if a customer has placed best-selling items in their cart, reaching out with a discount or answering questions could make the difference between a completed purchase and an abandoned cart.

By offering discounts, personalized recommendations, or quick assistance, you can turn an abandoned cart into a completed sale.

With Gorgias, you can automate these interactions through Gorgias Convert. Trigger responses based on customer actions—like adding high-value items or pausing on the checkout page.

Taking proactive approach drives sales and reduces cart abandonment, even when your customer service agents are offline.

3 Tips for boosting agent productivity

Boosting agent productivity speeds up response and resolution times, freeing your team to focus on delivering value. Here are three effective customer service techniques to help eliminate productivity blockers:

8. Encourage regular breaks

Sitting for prolonged periods takes a mental and a physical toll on a person, even if they don't notice it at first. 

Taking brief breaks throughout the day helps agents stay focused and reduces burnout. Something as simple as stepping away for a few minutes or doing light stretches can reset their energy and prepare them to handle the next ticket with a clear mind.

9. Set clear goals

Setting daily and long-term goals provides direction for customer service reps and keeps productivity high.

Setting daily goals keeps agents focused and motivated. These short-term goals might include:

• Resolving unresolved tickets from the previous day
• Addressing urgent requests or flagged issues
• Staying updated on team changes, like new tickets or inventory updates

Setting long-term goals helps reps stay committed to growing and developing their skillset, some goals might include: 

• Building product knowledge and customer service skills
• Providing feedback and support to help the team grow
• Reducing response times for specific inquiries

Encourage agents to discuss any roadblocks openly. By supporting them through challenges, you create a positive environment that helps them achieve their goals without added stress.

10. Prepare your workspace

With remote work becoming the norm––87% of support agents worked from home in 2021 maintaining a clear boundary between work and home life is essential. Creating a dedicated "work corner" helps remote agents stay productive.

Here are some tips to help you set up a workspace optimized for productivity:

• Use natural lighting, a nice comfy chair, and a few decorations to make your workspace more comfortable and inviting.
• Write a task plan for the workday, and then cross out everything you complete. Not only is it satisfying to cross things off the list, but it can motivate you for the day ahead.

3 Tips for avoiding common customer support mistakes

Avoiding common mistakes is just as crucial as following best practices. Here are three frequent support agent pitfalls to watch out for to protect your brand’s reputation and meet customer expectations:

11. Never interrupt customers

One of the most critical rules in customer service is to never interrupt a customer. Your customers may think you don’t want to listen to them and don’t respect them. 

They probably aren't going to be very happy as a result — even if the rep who interrupted does eventually resolve their issue.

12. Use inappropriate language

Words can have a huge impact on people. A customer support team needs to understand the power of words and always use positive language while avoiding phrases that customers could interpret as rude.

Check out our guide to customer service phrases for additional phrases to avoid.

13. Use canned responses strategically

Canned responses speed up replies but can fall flat if overused. The best practice? Personalize each response—adding the customer’s name or tweaking it for the situation can make a big difference.

That way, agents don’t need to recreate the wheel with every response, but it still puts a personal touch on each response; even something as small as including the customer’s name can make a big difference. 

Avoid canned responses if you’re unsure what the customer needs. And if there’s no relevant template, ask a teammate instead of forcing a one-size-fits-all answer.

Check out these 16 email templates to get started. Or, if you use phone support heavily, check out these customer service scripts.

6 Tips for handling angry customers

Handling unhappy customers is one of the toughest but most important parts of support. 

Here are six tips to help your team turn complaints into good customer experiences.

14. Try to always use positive language

Customers may not always have the kindest words for support agents, but it’s essential for your agents to always use positive language themselves — no matter what the customer is saying to them.

For example:

• Instead of “I might be able to help,” say, “I can definitely help with that.”
• Replace “Don’t get angry; I’m going to help you” with “I’m so sorry you’re experiencing this. Let me fix it for you.”

Training agents to use positive language helps build better customer relationships. Creating a library of positive response scripts can also be a valuable resource for your team.

15. Keep your composure

Dealing with angry customers can be challenging, but staying calm is crucial to avoid negative fallout. If emotions take over, customers may share their experience online, potentially deterring future shoppers.

Here are a few tips to keep your cool:

• Address requests from upset customers promptly. Reassure them by involving others if needed.
• Use clear explanations and soft skills. Stay composed to keep the interaction positive.

For more insights, check out our guide to handling angry customer emails.

16. Put yourself in the customer's shoes

Attempting to fully understand a customer's problems first before you try to resolve them can go a long way. 

Empathy is the ability to understand the issue from their perspective. Practicing this often leads to deeper understanding and better solutions.

17. Be transparent about what happened

Brands should take ownership of mistakes rather than cover them up. Be completely transparent about whatever happened, as your customers will likely get agitated if they feel like you're giving them the runaround.

Your customers need to know you’re always going the extra mile to help them resolve whatever issue they’re experiencing. If the problem was from your end, you need to communicate what you’re doing to prevent it from happening again.

18. Practice active listening

No matter the outcome, customers want to feel heard. If agents aren’t truly listening, frustration can grow.

Active listening means fully understanding the customer’s concerns and responding with feedback that shows you’re paying attention. Repeating details of what a customer tells you back to them is one effective way to demonstrate active listening and is sure to help calm a frustrated customer.

19. Thank the customer for bringing this issue to your attention

When an upset customer shares their issue, thank them. Negative feedback is valuable, as it highlights areas for improvement. Showing genuine appreciation reassures customers that you’re committed to solving their problem, which can help diffuse frustration.

With Gorgias and Yotpo, you can track customer reviews to tailor responses or even launch win-back campaigns, like offering a discount. 

Better customer support experience, better customer journey — more revenue generation

Implement a few of these customer support tips and see how much you boost revenue and productivity. Start by giving your customer service reps in-depth product training and automating simple responses that don’t require a human touch. 

Find out how Gorgias' industry-leading customer service tools helped Kirby Allison boost conversions by 23% after automating 30% of tickets. 

To learn more about how Gorgias' cutting-edge customer service and automation features can help you improve customer service at every level, book a demo with Gorgias.

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Inventory management and order fulfillment are often two of the more time-consuming tasks of running a Shopify store. However, the ability to ship orders on time is also key for ecommerce businesses to deliver a great customer experience. 22% of online shoppers will abandon their order if they see that it will take too long to be delivered.

Relying on a third-party fulfillment solution is one way to mitigate the challenges of order fulfillment and provide the speedy fulfillment services that today's customers have come to expect. Of the various fulfillment providers online retailers have available, the Shopify Fulfillment Network is one option to consider for merchants who sell on Shopify.

In this Shopify Fulfillment Network review, we'll cover everything you need to know about outsourcing your order fulfillment responsibilities to Shopify. We'll dive into what the program is and how it works, the biggest benefits it offers to online retailers, comparable alternatives, and a conversation with Supply CEO and co-founder Patrick Coddou on his company's experience with Shopify Fulfillment Network.

Don't have time to read our full review of the Shopify Fulfillment Network? Here’s a summary of our thoughts on the program:

Joining the Shopify Fulfillment Network won't reduce your order fulfillment expenses. As a matter of fact, it will more than likely increase them due to the various fees that Shopify charges as part of the program. However, joining the network will allow you to:

• Save time by completely outsourcing your inventory management and order fulfillment responsibilities
• Offering faster and more reliable fulfillment to customers
• Boost conversion rates by advertising expedited shipping delivery on your website

If you can afford to join the network and don’t have the know-how or in-house capacity to handle fast fulfillment, the SFN. If you’re a small operation and longer shipping times haven’t hurt your purchase rates, then you might consider an alternative fulfillment solution.

What is the Shopify Fulfillment Network?

The Shopify Fulfillment Network (SFN) program is similar to Amazon's FBA (Fulfillment by Amazon). It lets you ship your products in bulk to a single Shopify warehouse, where they are then distributed to a network of fulfillment centers across the United States and Canada.

Along with inventory storage and warehousing services, SFN also offers ecommerce fulfillment services. When a customer orders one of your products, Shopify will pick and pack the product from the nearest fulfillment center and ship it to the customer on your behalf.

This program allows business owners to reduce the tedious tasks associated with ecommerce fulfillment. It also offers additional benefits as well, such as the ability to provide faster shipping and access to powerful analytics for demand forecasting and improved inventory management.

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The launch of Shopify Fulfillment Network: A brief history lesson

In June 2019, Shopify announced that it would be spending $1 billion to launch the Shopify Fulfillment Network. A few months later, in October 2019, this plan was accelerated when Shopify acquired 6 River Systems — a company that produces robotics for warehouse management.

By October 2020, the SFN had increased its shipping volume by 2.5x compared to the first quarter of 2020. One driving factor behind the network's faster-than-expected growth was the increase in online shopping driven by the COVID-19 pandemic. In comments made to the Wall Street Journal, the program director stated that the pandemic pushed the program's development forward by about 10 years.

In 2022, the SFN continues to go through some understandable growing pains. The program continues to add new merchants and fine-tune its services. Today, the network has nine different centers in North America that are all operated by third-party fulfillment partners.

The key benefits of the Shopify Fulfillment Network

Joining the Shopify Fulfillment Network offers merchants plenty of benefits, allowing them to create a fulfillment operation that essentially runs itself. The biggest benefit of outsourcing your order fulfillment is saved time.

As Sergio Tache, CEO of Dossier says, “I shipped everything myself and made a lot of trips to the post office. It was intense and pretty tough. You quickly reach that breaking point, where you cannot do it any longer, and it’s not worth the compromised quality of life.”

Along with saved time, the SFN offers several other noteworthy benefits, including:

Free customizable packaging

One key benefit of the SFN compared to similar networks such as FBA is that the SFN lets you customize your product packaging. This enables you to develop branded packaging for your products to help market your store instead of shipping your packages in Shopify-branded packaging. This gives you greater control over your branding and marketing overall.

Best of all, packaging comes free to SFN merchants. While there is still a fulfillment cost associated with using the FSN (and it might be higher than your current shipping costs — more on that later), paying for packaging is not one of those expenses.

Simplified inventory management

Even if you sell from multiple marketplaces and sales channels, partnering with the Shopify Fulfillment Network makes inventory management a breeze. All you have to do is ship your products in bulk to a single SFN fulfillment center, and Shopify and its partnering third-party logistics companies will take care of the rest. Shopify even provides recommendations for minimum inventory levels, allocation, and when it's time to reorder products.

All these tedious logistics being handled elsewhere can be a huge weight off your shoulders — and a great way to lighten the load on your employees as well.

By simplifying your inventory management responsibilities, joining the SFN can free you up to focus on other tasks and ensure that you don't encounter any inventory management mistakes that lead to out-of-stock products and unhappy customers.

Real-time analytics for demand forecasting

Another way that the Shopify Fulfillment Network helps simplify inventory management and ensure fulfillment success is through insightful real-time analytics that you can use for demand forecasting. Members of the SFN can look forward to having a wealth of customer data at their disposal — data to forecast demand so that your inventory is kept at optimum levels all year long.

Potential same-day fulfillment

One of the biggest benefits of the Shopify Fulfillment Network is the potential for expedited shipping. Thanks to the network's streamlined and automated order fulfillment process and its strategic inventory distribution, the SFN can ship products to most US customers within two days. In many cases, merchants who are members of the SFN can even offer customers same-day fulfillment. This is nearly impossible for most brands — especially smaller brands — that manage fulfillment in-house.

Given current customer expectations, this ability to offer faster shipping is something that could make your products far more appealing to online shoppers. Research by Deloitte indicates that 67% of online shoppers want their items delivered in two days or less.

Customers don’t just want fast shipping, they want free shipping. Learn how to offer free shipping in our guide.

Seamless inventory distribution through machine learning

One of the ways that the Shopify Fulfillment Network can expedite order fulfillment is through an optimized inventory distribution strategy. By distributing products across a network of fulfillment centers that spans the U.S. and Canada, the SFN can ship orders from the fulfillment center closest to the customer for faster delivery times. And faster delivery times lead to greater customer satisfaction.

Shopify doesn't just spread products across these warehouses blindly, though. Instead, the SFN uses machine learning to predict demand and strategically distribute inventory. This is a strategy that large corporations have been using to optimize their supply chains for several years now. Thanks to the SFN, it's a strategy that ecommerce stores of all sizes can now leverage to meet consumers' increasingly short delivery window expectations.

Shopify Fulfillment Network cost

There's no denying the fact that the Shopify Fulfillment Network offers great functionality and a number of considerable benefits. However, these benefits do come at a cost.

There are several different fees that you will incur as a member of the SFN, and these fees will vary depending on factors such as your inventory volume, the number of product returns that are processed, and more. Shopify doesn't provide pricing for most of these fees and instead requires merchants to apply for the program to receive a custom quote.

However, Shopify does include an interactive tool to estimate the domestic fulfillment rate per item, depending on the number and weight of items, on their website:

One of the more substantial fees that you will incur as a member of the SFN is storage fees. Shopify doesn't charge storage fees for products sold within six months of being shipped to an SFN fulfillment center. But if your products sit for longer than six months, you will begin incurring storage fees of $2.25 per cubic foot per month. This makes it essential to develop an inventory management strategy that limits the number of products sitting in storage for long periods.

If you have any additional requirements, such as the need to put together special bundles for the holiday season, you will have to pay a one-time "special projects" fee. This fee is variable depending on the project's scope but can often be substantial.

Is it worth it? A review of the Shopify Fulfillment Network

Now that we've looked at the benefits and costs of the Shopify Fulfillment Network, the question is whether its benefits outweigh its costs. As with the fees themselves, though, the answer to this question will vary from business to business. To help you decide if joining the SFN is the right choice, let's look at a few instances when it is and is not worth the cost.

There comes a point in a company's growth when many business owners have more money available than time. If you are trying to scale your ecommerce store but are too bogged down by day-to-day responsibilities such as order fulfillment, the SFN can be a great way to take a lot of burdens off your shoulders. However, it won't reduce your shipping costs and will likely increase the money you spend on inventory management and order fulfillment rather than reduce these expenses.

Of course, you need to factor the potential revenue-boosting benefits of the SFN into this calculation. Along with freeing you up to grow your company and make it more profitable, the expedited shipping that the SFN allows may also directly boost your sales by making your offerings more appealing to potential customers.

A few other qualifications can easily determine whether or not your business is a good fit for the Shopify Fulfillment Network. For one, you need not apply to the SFN if you are shipping less than 10 orders per day; the program does not accept merchants with lower volumes, and it wouldn't be worth your time even if they did.

The program is also only available to sellers in the U.S. or Canada, and only to companies with under 2,000 unique SKUs.

If you meet all of these qualifications and can justify the fees, joining the SFN can be an excellent way to scale your company without building your own supply chain from the ground up.

ShipBob: A worthy alternative to the Shopify Fulfillment Network

ShipBob is a third-party order fulfillment provider that offers services similar to those of the Shopify Fulfillment Network. Like the SFN, ShipBob enables you to ship your products in bulk to a single ShipBob warehouse, where they are then distributed to fulfillment centers all over the globe.

The "All over the globe" is actually one advantage that ShipBob has over Shopify’s fulfillment services — with ShipBob, you can ship products from 30+ fulfillment centers across six different countries. Ecommerce businesses that sell to a lot of European and Australian customers are therefore likely better off choosing ShipBob than the Shopify Fulfillment Network.

Like SFN, one of ShipBob’s biggest benefits is helping brands of all sizes offer fast shipping — ShipBob even guarantees two-day shipping everywhere in the US.

ShipBob is a 3PL, or a third-party logistics provider. Shopify itself is not a 3PL, it’s a middleman between Shopify stores and other 3PLs and warehouses. This isn’t a bad thing, per se, but it introduces an additional player and potential for disconnect, confusion, and lack of accountability that you wouldn’t have by partnering directly with a 3PL.

As with the SFN, pricing for ShipBob varies depending on your needs, and ShipBob requires you to contact them for a custom pricing quote. This makes it difficult to compare the cost of ShipBob vs. the cost of the SFN in a blog post. However, ShipBob packs quite a bit more value than SFN due to its focus on order fulfillment and maturity. Here are a few of the pros ShipBob has over Shopify’s fulfillment system:

• Integrations with ecommerce platforms other than Shopify, like Magento and BigCommerce
• More control and visibility into order fulfillment than SFN, which outsources to third-party warehouses
• Five more years of experience than SFN, having operated its own fulfillment centers since 2014
• Better customer support: Because Shopify outsources parts of the process to third parties, you risk finding yourself in a situation where the Shopify support team isn’t sure what went wrong
• Additional features to manage your inventory and supply chain management that Shopify has yet to develop
• The ability to work with brands that ship 80,000+ orders a month (whereas SFN maxes out at 6,200 orders/month)
• A deep integration with Gorgias to sync and display historical and real-time fulfillment data in your helpdesk

Learn more about how Gorgias and ShipBob work together to improve your end-to-end customer experience.

How to apply for the Shopify Fulfillment program

Applying for the Shopify Fulfillment Network is a quick and simple process. All you have to do is create a Shopify account, ensure that your business meets the qualifications to join, and apply online by contacting Shopify. You can start the process by clicking “Learn more” on this page.

Once Shopify receives your application, their team will review your business to see if it is a good fit for the SFN. If accepted, Shopify will provide you with a custom quote detailing all the one-time and ongoing fees you will have to pay. If you choose to proceed, you will gain access to the Shopify Fulfillment Network app within your Shopify store.

How Supply was chosen to be in the Shopify Fulfillment Network

To better understand the value of the Shopify Fulfillment Network, we sat down for a discussion with Patrick Coddou — co-founder and CEO of Supply, the personal-grooming ecommerce store. You can listen to our conversation in the last third of this podcast episode:

From what Patrick remembers, Shopify reached out to him about Supply being one of the early adopters of the Fulfillment Network. Since he has long supported Shopify and openly acknowledges that it allowed him to accomplish his dreams, Patrick was excited about the opportunity. He told us that he sees this as another way that Shopify will continue to change people’s lives for the better, and he wanted to be a part of it. He was also interested after hearing all the buzz about Shopify's new program.

So, he said yes (obviously).

He told us that right now it’s still a small program — almost the equivalent of a beta project — and they have strategically dispersed warehouses that are white-labeled for their merchants.

We’re here for it. And so far, Patrick is, too: After months of experiencing it firsthand, he’s still loving it.

Supply's Shopify Fulfillment Center is in Austin, Texas, and across the U.S. there are about three centers in total with approximately 10 or fewer merchants (Note: This is Patrick’s best guess on numbers). As Shopify continues to test and perfect the program, these numbers will undoubtedly increase.

One of the biggest value-adds from the Shopify Fulfillment Network is that the software actually lives in your online store. There’s a fulfillment app, which is how Patrick and the Supply team review their inventory levels, along with other settings that really come in handy.

Though it’s not a very robust software right now, and merchants such as Supply are still waiting on Shopify to work through some of the kinks, there’s a very clear and strong potential here that could help countless ecommerce businesses.

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Optimize your order fulfillment, shipping, and inventory management with Gorgias

Joining the Shopify Fulfillment Network can be an excellent way to streamline your order fulfillment process, speed up your delivery times, and reduce your daily workload. However, it isn't the only order fulfillment solution available today.

At Gorgias, we recognize how important it is to have effective inventory management and order fulfillment. That's why we've designed our comprehensive customer support platform to integrate with numerous inventory management and order fulfillment solutions, including ShipBob, ShipMonk, LateShipment.com, and more.

To learn more about these powerful integrations, check out our full list of shipping and fulfillment integrations.

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Forecasting customer service volume is always a challenge. And fast growth can make forecasting even harder. You’re either reactively processing a huge volume of tickets with too few agents and burning everyone out, or wasting valuable money on a CS team that’s too big.

You should also make adjustments to your team if revenue declines, but it's a best practice not to cut too quickly. Otherwise, you end up in the same spot. 

Forecasting customer service workload does not need to be guesswork. You can forecast customer service volume as a percentage of revenue growth, which is much more predictable than trying to simply “guesstimate” how much workload your team can handle or if you need to staff up.

At HelpFlow.com, we run 24/7 live chat and customer service teams for over 100 stores. We’ve helped brands through huge holiday seasons, new product launches, and even lean downturns and have built an incredibly robust forecasting and KPI process. In this post, I will walk through how to simplify customer service forecasting to make sure you’re able to handle the ups and downs of customer service volume in any situation. 

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A 3-step framework for forecasting customer service volume

Determining whether you need more customer service agents should not be reactive. Don't let your team tell you they need more help. Instead, forecasting should be proactive and based on data, like every other aspect of scaling an ecommerce business.

The challenging part here is figuring out which data in your business can be used to forecast how many agents you need. We’ve simplified this process for clients we run customer service for by using just two inputs: sales transaction volume and ticket volume for a period of time. 

This can be used to calculate your transaction-to-ticket ratio. In short, you can forecast the number of tickets created for every 100 transactions and be extremely confident that this will hold steady as growth in transactions happens. Yes, there are ways to make your customer service process more efficient to lower this ratio, but knowing where it stands now will enable you to forecast ticket volume based on your sales forecast. 

1) Calculate your transaction-to-ticket ratio

Calculating your transaction to ticket ratio is simple. All you need is transaction count for a period of time and ticket volume for the same period of time. To get your transaction count, simply run a quick report in Shopify. The process will be similar in other ecommerce platforms. 

Click on Reports under the Analytics category and select Sales over time.

Highlight the target date range and select the desired group. 

This will generate the data that includes the number of transactions within the specified time frame.

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You can also get this data directly from Google analytics, by using the ecommerce section and seeing transaction volume. This might not be accurate if a significant portion of your transactions are subscriptions that are not tracked in analytics. Still, it will be close enough for now as long as you continue to use this transaction count in future calculations.

How to get transaction count in Google Analytics:

Click on Conversions. Select Ecommerce, and then Overview.

Select the target date range. The transaction count will be generated under the Transactions field.

The next data point you need is ticket volume for the same time period. In Gorgias, you can access this easily by following these steps:

Click Overview under the Statistics menu and select the target date range. Click Apply.

This will generate the data on ticket volume for the specified timeframe.

Once you have transactions and ticket volume for the same time period, simply divide tickets by transactions to calculate your ratio. For example, if you had 1000 transactions for the time and 400 tickets, then your ticket ratio is 40. For every 100 transactions, 40 tickets are created. 

What's a healthy ticket ratio?

We typically see the ticket ratio anywhere from 30% to 50% for stores that haven’t focused on streamlining customer service. 

For stores that have streamlined or use customer support automation in their helpdesk workflow, the ticket ratio normalizes to about 20%. For example, across high-revenue stores in the Gorgias customer data set, there is a 20% ticket ratio.

If you haven’t focused on streamlining customer service and have just been keeping up with growth over months or years at a time, then you’ll probably be surprised at how many orders turn into tickets. It’s definitely a growing ecommerce trend you can use to bring down overtime with operational improvements in your customer service department, but just benchmarking it for now is important to forecast accurately.

2) Use your ratio to project ticket volume

Once you have the transaction-to-ticket ratio, you can forecast customer service ticket volume in a few ways. You can use website traffic, media spend, or revenue projections as the input. Basically, anything that enables you to get a transaction count as an input can be converted into customer service ticket volume using the ticket ratio. 

Here are a few examples:

Let’s say your business is highly driven by paid traffic. If you have a budget set for increased media spend in Q4, you can gauge how many orders this will produce using your cost per acquisition records. For example, if your CPA is $20 and you’re projecting a media spend of $200,000 in November and December, this should produce around 10,000 orders. 

Using a different approach, let’s say you are projecting revenue of $600,000 total for November and December and your average order value is $60. This means you’ll have 10,000 orders. 

Once you have the projected transaction volume, simply use the ratio to convert that into ticket volume. 

For example, if your ticket ratio is 40%, then the 10,000 orders are going to turn into 4000 tickets for your team to handle during November and December.

If you can bring your ticket ratio down to 20%, this cuts the ticket volume and only 2000 tickets. You can see how improving the ticket ratio can have a big impact on the efficiency of your customer service team.

Once you’ve got the forecasted ticket volume, you still need to figure out how many team members are going to be needed to handle the volume.

3) Estimate the number of agents needed based on past capacity

There’s nothing more frustrating as a business owner than having to slow down your sales engine because you can’t keep up with orders or customer service volume. At some point, you can’t just throw more people at the problem. People are a finite resource and it takes time to hire and train competent agents. Don’t let yourself end up in that position as you drive growth.

As part of running an effective customer service operation, you should have benchmarks set on agents’ realistic capacity to handle non-escalated tickets. With this data, you can convert the forecasted ticket volume we calculated above into a forecasted agent headcount to handle that volume.

Let’s assume you don’t have a complete agent capacity benchmark set yet.

To calculate agent capacity per full-time agent, run a report on the total number of tickets resolved per agent over a specific time period. Be sure to focus your analysis on agents that are processing tickets nearly full time, not part-timers that jump in to help.

Simply click on the Agents option under the Statistics menu in your helpdesk.

For each agent, convert this into the number of tickets handled per working day. The specific number will be different for each agent, but running this process will help you see the trends of how many tickets per day a typical agent should be able to handle.

Again, this number will vary a ton depending on your business, your agents, and your customer service operation. 

• We typically see anywhere from 40 to 60 tickets per day per agent as a healthy benchmark
• Across the Gorgias customer dataset, we see an average of 60 tickets per day per agent

Once you know your tickets per day per agent benchmark, you can convert the forecasted ticket volume above into a forecasted agent headcount needed (and start preparing your interview questions).

Let’s say you are projecting 4000 tickets for your team to handle during November and December and you have an agent capacity of 40 tickets per day. You’re going to need 3 agents staffed during November and December to handle this volume. 

40 tickets per agent per day x 5 days per week x 4.3 weeks per month = 860 tickets monthly capacity per agent. 4000 tickets / 2 months / 860 tickets per agent per month = 2.33 agents. Round up to 3 so you have buffer for scenarios that may drive ticket volume up (e.g. delayed shipping, running out of stock, promotions and sales)

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This is a little simplistic since it assumes the tickets come fairly uniformly during that time, but the basic forecasting process here is sound. 

Check out HelpFlow.com's free Customer Service Forecast Calculator (no email address required).

Turn customer service into revenue with HelpFlow.com and Gorgias

The way you handle customer service has a massive impact on sales. Based on Gorgias support performance data across all customers:

• A sub-10 minute response time on tickets increases conversion rate around 10%
• Answering live chat questions in less than 2 minutes increased conversion rate by as much as 50%

Here at HelpFlow.com, we run live chat teams for clients and have seen a massive decline in chat conversion rate when your first response time is over 10 seconds

If your team is overloaded with customer service volume, responding to tickets in <10 minutes is going to be near impossible and answering live chats in seconds is definitely out of the question. You need better customer service tools to transform your efforts into revenue.

Two tools can help:

HelpFlow.com: We provide 24/7 live chat and customer service teams to over 100 ecommerce stores (i.e. our agents answer visitor questions on chat and handle email tickets, 24/7). We handle thousands of tickets per day and have driven over $100M in revenue through customer service channels. If you need help nailing customer service, take a look at our ecommerce customer service teams.

Gorgias: Already have a solid team and want to bulk up your customer service infrastructure? If you’re not already using Gorgias, we can help increase visibility into your agents' performance to help you forecast. Sign up for a free trial today.

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In August 2020, Amy started her job at Gorgias as a Customer Success Manager. Fast forward to today: Amy has held four positions in the company, pioneered two brand-new Gorgias programs, and holds a new position as the Manager of Customer Education.

How is that possible in only two years? What special sauce has she found at Gorgias that keeps her going? And what kind of higher education was the precursor to her professional success?

Read the interview with Amy to learn more about her dynamic career evolution and the support Gorgias provided to make it possible.

What did you do before Gorgias?

My career path is a little unconventional. After finishing school I decided against going to university and launched into full-time work instead, picking up study later in life.

I was fortunate to find a field where adaptability, problem-solving, and experience in customer relationships held high value in junior roles. When I transitioned to tech in my mid-twenties I had six years of hands-on experience which was a huge advantage in the startup space. From there, all of my training has been “on the job.”

I’ve been lucky to work underneath brilliant managers, most of whom were female. They provided me with excellent opportunities to benefit from industry-leading mentorship.

How did you find out about Gorgias and what made you apply to work here?

It is a classic story — I stumbled across a position on LinkedIn. 

After doing the case study the product had me hooked. I saw its potential to help merchants deliver an exceptional customer experience and drive revenue from happy shoppers. From that point, all my eggs were in the Gorgias basket. 

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At that point, Gorgias had just raised a 25M series B funding and had around 75 employees and 5,000+ customers. 

What are the roles you had at Gorgias and how did they change over time?

Back in August 2020 when I initially started in Gorgias, I was a Customer Success Manager. I started when the Success team had half a dozen people wearing many hats.

The CSM role was originally a hybrid position — encompassing both CSM and Onboarding Manager responsibilities. The focus was on managing full-cycle customer relationships: retention, churn, and expansion.

As Gorgias grew, Success roles were split into specialties, and a new department was created to service our non-managed merchants. I transitioned into Scaled Programs, a two-woman team led by Elena Balagush (who we recently welcomed back to the Gorgias family.)

Being a new function there was plenty of trial and error but always support from leadership which was essential to our success.

In this role, I managed merchant relationships using a one-to-many approach and maintained a local book of business. After a few months, I was promoted to senior CSM — a natural progression for anyone at Gorgias who performs well. While continuing the above duties, I took on additional education duties running webinars and creating educational content.

After realizing the value of education, I upskilled in eLearning, content creation, and instructional design. The culminating project was setting up the Gorgias Academy. 

While I built the academy, I needed to prove its impact (one of Gorgias’ values is to maximize your impact, so everyone is accountable for delivering measurable results). I focused on before/after data comparisons to show the substantial impact the academy was having.

After proving the function was valuable, I moved into the Customer Education Specialist role as a one-woman show. 

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From there, the upskilling continued. With incredible guidance and investment from my brilliant manager Elise Kubicki, I was equipped with the tools necessary to make the Customer Education function (CEd) a success.

One of the most valuable strategies I had was connecting with industry leaders. I became an active member in a few CEd communities and leveraged group tips/feedback to guide decisions in lieu of a team. One particular community is called Customer Education Org run by Sumeru Chatterjee. The support from other CEd leaders has been instrumental to my career growth.

After managing a substantial workload and delivering high-quality results consistently, Elise generously promoted me into a management position which I’m thrilled to be in today.

What training and resources did you receive to help you in your new roles? 

Elise, my manager, has been incredible. She led by example and gave me an excellent benchmark for what a manager should look like. She encouraged me to be brave with ideas and trust my intuition and experience. She listened to me pitch new strategies, provided feedback to strengthen my proposals, and gave me the confidence to execute my ideas. 

Without a manager who fostered open communication and responded with encouragement and empathy, I would never have advanced this quickly. 

Gorgias is also committed to getting the right tool for the job. We invest in technology. I could not have performed at the volume or velocity I did without a company that understands the benefit of a solid tech stack.

Elena Balagush was my manager when I was on the Scales Programs team, and she is also amazing. She celebrated my wins and gave me the freedom to go after new, out-of-the-box ideas.

How did you manage growing new functions while keeping up with your old role? 

Honestly, balancing all my responsibilities took a whole lot of time. But Gorgias investing in the right technology is a big factor — if I had to work without the right equipment, I could not have delivered quality content on time. I’m extremely grateful for this. Not enough businesses respect the impact the right tools can make.

The $2,000 learning stipend is also amazing. I managed to do most of my training for free but having funds available gives me the confidence to take on projects that require new skills. I used a portion of it to complete certifications in different areas like SQL.

Gorgias is also full of amazing, collaborative people. Openness with colleagues and genuine interest in sharing skills is not common. It’s one of the things that makes Gorgias an incredible place to work.

How do you think your experience would have been different at another company?

I don’t think many companies would match the level of trust Gorgias had when I was piloting new projects. Beyond that, there are a few factors that other companies struggle with that I feel are important to mention:

When goals aren’t unified across an organization, teams don’t want to help one another

If departments operate in closed silos, they can find themselves striving toward opposing goals. At Gorgias, we are all aware of the major targets and work toward them together. We celebrate wins as a team and take responsibility for setbacks as a team. 

This unity gives us a huge advantage because everyone wants everyone to do well.

Competition between colleagues discourages skill sharing

Healthy competition is good. But too often, leadership uses competition as the primary way to drive results. The notion that only one can win can be archaic and doesn’t motivate all personality types. 

At Gorgias, we have the understanding that if everyone exceeds the target, everyone is eligible to advance their career, be it in a different role or a different team. That’s motivating.

We have a culture of empowerment, enablement, and rapid growth 

At Gorgias, the idea is to hire the best of the best. The result is that everyone is hungry to become a better version of their professional selves, and Gorgias repays that hunger with great career progression, room (and budget) to learn new things, and a healthy collaborative atmosphere.

No one is happy “coasting”

The combination of the enormous amount of work to do and the brightest minds around means you are constantly encouraged to push yourself to deliver great work, fast. We all help each other to upskill and remove bottlenecks that occur when there isn’t enough work to go around.

A lack of honesty breeds anxiety

Not knowing why decisions have been made can plant the seed of doubt in the workforce, causing staff to be in a constant low-level state of panic. Gorgias operates with radical candor, meaning no matter what happens — good or bad, at the individual contributor level or in leadership — we understand why. This alleviates the stress associated with ‘the unknown’ and leaves employees' minds free to be creative and push harder in the right direction.

How can you connect your experience with Gorgias's core values?

To recap, Gorgias’ values are:

• Maximize your impact
• Customer-first
• 100% honest
• Strive for excellence
• Take extreme ownership

The honesty value is a huge benefit to me, personally. I am relaxed knowing leadership is open to hearing feedback from all levels of staff and that blindspots I have will be flagged. I have the confidence to speak my mind and know I will be heard.

Also, I respect how truly customer-first Gorgias is. Every company says they are customer first but I’ve never seen it lived the way it is at Gorgias. At all levels, we have an unprecedented number of conversations with merchants to learn about their challenges and develop new solutions. 

Lastly, my experience hinged on taking extreme ownership. Taking extreme ownership means passing the buck is not an option. This encourages people to think things through and rationalize the why. Knowing I own a project from end to end makes me push harder to deliver work I’m truly proud of.

What other anecdotes have you heard from people at Gorgias with similar career evolutions? 

Elise is amazing (I know I say it a lot but she really is). She started as an Onboarding Manager and is now leading the whole success department — and that’s a mammoth workload. 

She moved from onboarding manager to interim head of success in less than a year. She is now our VP of Success and, gosh, she earned it. She lives and breathes Gorgias' values - it shows in the team she’s chosen, of which I’m honored to be a part.

We also recently welcomed back Elena Balagush, who was my manager before Elise. When staff return to an organization it speaks volumes about the environment.

What is your favorite thing about working at Gorgias?

Does it have to be just one? Here are a few of the standouts:

The support from upper management to try new things and experiment

A great deal of my success at Gorgias is due to supportive management. First, in Success from Chloe Kesler, then in Scaled Programs from Elena Balagush, and in the last 12 months from our outstanding VP of Success Elise Kubicki.

I have a particular soft spot for Elise, as she gave me the skills to develop strategies and concepts of my own but, more importantly, instilled in me the confidence to put them into practice.

The resources to become a better version of my work-self

The Gorgias team, internally, is jam-packed with team members who are experts in their field. This has given many of us a rare opportunity to learn on the job from the industry's best performers.

A culture that encourages the sharing of knowledge

Following on from my earlier point, the collaborative culture at Gorgias is second to none. I have experienced first-hand the way sometimes competitive nature can become engrained at companies with aggressive goals. 

At Gorgias, you won’t find a skerrick of this. Instead, the value of 100% honesty and having a unified goal breeds an undercurrent of genuine camaraderie and a sense of drive to achieve as a collective. 

Knowledge is freely shared across all departments and seniority levels. This flat structure encourages curiosity and discussions between everyone — regardless of role.

If there is one thing you would like to change about the company, what would it be?

That we can’t hire everyone. There isn’t a single tech person I know who wouldn’t benefit from the experience of working here.

Now that you are holding a management position, what are your plans for customer education at Gorgias?

In the future, I’m going to do everything I can to develop a winning Customer Education program and (fingers crossed) position us as industry leaders in this field.

I’d like to see us continue to roll out new initiatives to help our merchants thrive, especially given the difficult landscape at this time.

I’ll continue to learn and grow in the Customer Education space. I still have plenty of areas to work on — I’m just grateful I’m part of an organization that gives me every possible opportunity to do this.

What's next for you at Gorgias (and how is Gorgias helping you get there)?

I’d love to carry on in Customer Education and one day move up into a director position. I’ve got a long way to go but I’m confident Gorgias is the most suitable place for me. 

I couldn’t wish for a better manager, better team, or better organization. Results are rewarded and I’m incredibly proud of not just the growth that we’ve seen but the way we got here — we move fast, we make mistakes, we learn and we adapt. Rinse and repeat. That’s the kind of company I want to be with for life.

Interested in joining Amy and the rest of Gorgias team? Check out our jobs page to learn more about our benefits, interview process, and open roles.

Businesses run on happy customers. Happy customers generate repeat business, share positive reviews, and refer others to your brand. Plus, happy customers are cost-effective. Getting a new customer typically costs more than keeping your current ones around.

Net promoter score (NPS) measures how likely a customer is to recommend your brand to someone else. This metric was invented by Fred Reichheld of Bain & Company in 2003 and is a surprisingly good indicator of a company’s success. Companies with high NPS for their industry grow revenue 2.5 faster than their competition, according to research from Rob Markey, founder of Bain & Company’s Customer & Marketing practice.

Want to evaluate the success of your customer experience, product, and overall business? You should measure NPS. Here is a closer look at NPS, including how to calculate and benchmark your score.

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What is net promoter score (NPS) and what does it measure?

Net promoter score (NPS) is a metric to calculate the quality of your customer experience across every channel based on whether or not your existing customers are likely to recommend your business to someone else.

The net promoter score for your business is essential because it directly reflects how well your business satisfies your customers. It also shows the number of promoters you are creating through your company. It allows you to quantify the sentiment of your customers so you can better serve and satisfy them.

So what, exactly, is NPS measuring? Most directly, it indicates how much of your customer base would recommend your product to others. However, people treat NPS as a metric for brand loyalty, customer satisfaction, overall customer service, and happy customers.

NPS is one of the most common metrics to measure your brand’s customer experience and growth potential. Lumoa, a customer survey company, surveyed customer experience directors. Of the respondents, two-thirds said they prioritize and track NPS.

NPS terms explained

Calculating your NPS score isn’t difficult once you understand the three types of responses: 

• Promoter: A promoter is a customer who responds to the NPS survey question with a nine or a 10. They are highly likely to recommend your business to others. These customers are likely to bring you new customers because of their recommendations. The majority of your referrals will come from these satisfied customers.
• Detractor: A detractor gives a 0 to 6 response on the survey. These are usually unhappy customers who are not likely to recommend you to others. They may even detract from your business by posting bad reviews and warning people to stay away from your brand.
• Passive: A passive responds with a score of 7 or 8. These are part of your customer base and may remain loyal, but they are not happy enough to recommend your business to many people. They do not impact your NPS.

Net promoter score formula + how to calculate

The formula for net promoter score is: Total % of promoters - the total % of detractors = NPS

NPS scores are significant for measuring the overall quality of your customer support and interactions. Fortunately, collecting NPS is relatively straightforward — it all boils down to one simple question:

"On a scale of 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend our product to someone else?"

On this scale, 10 is the highest response: Customers who choose 10 are “extremely likely” to recommend your brand. And 0 is the lowest “not likely at all” response. 

Let’s walk through how to calculate net promoter score step-by-step:

• Separate your survey results into promoters, passives, and detractors. When you ask for customer feedback with the NPS question, their ratings will group them into one of three categories: promoters, passives, and detractors. Go through your responses and categorize them accordingly. 
• Determine what percentage of the total number of responses are promoters and what percentage are detractors. Leave passives aside.
• Subtract the percent of detractors from the percent of promoters. That number, which should range from 1 to 100, is your NPS.

Example of NPS score calculation

Here’s an example: You have a survey that comes back with 60% of the respondents being promoters, 10% of the respondents being detractors, and 30% of the respondents being passives. This is what your NPS calculation would look like:

60% promoters - 10% detractors = 50 NPS

In this scenario, the NPS score is 50. The NPS is always an integer, never a percent.

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Interpreting your NPS results

A perfect NPS would be 100, but you can score as low as -100. A score below zero is considered poor because it means you have more detractors than promoters. Negative scores indicate your business may have a high churn rate and will struggle to grow. A score of 0 to 30 is acceptable, but anything above 30 is best.

Also, your overall NPS is only one piece of the puzzle. Once you know how to collect survey responses and calculate your score, you can drill down to determine which factors impact your score most.

For example, NPS may vary across your products. If so, you can start investigating whether the low-scoring products are low-quality, have misleading marketing, or something else entirely. Likewise, NPS may vary depending on the customer service channel customers use. If so, you may want to bolster your omnichannel customer service offering.

What’s considered a good NPS score?

This is a tricky question to answer. NPS scores range from -100 to 100, so any NPS above zero technically means you have more promoters than detractors. The traditional score breakdown looks like this:

• Scores between 1 and 30 are acceptable.
• Average scores between 31 and 50 mean you’re doing pretty well.
• Between 50 and 70, you’re doing fantastic.
• Scores above 70 are considered beyond amazing — and sometimes unattainable since it would mean that all or nearly all of your respondents are promoters.

In practice, looking at others in your industry is usually better to determine what is good and what isn’t. Pay particular attention to whether or not your business is B2B or B2C, as B2C scores tend to vary much more widely based on the nature of the consumer products industry. 

ClearlyRated’s 2022 NPS Benchmarks for B2B Service Industries illustrates this well, with most B2B service NPS ranging from 23 to 60. In the B2C market, on the other hand, the average NPS ranges from 5 to 62 for 2022.

What’s considered a bad NPS score?

With NPS, the goal is always to have more promoters than detractors. So, like any score above zero is technically positive, any NPS of zero or lower is a negative score regardless of your industry because it means you have more detractors than promoters.

Whether you want to improve a good score or bring a lousy score up to par, it’s usually about providing a better customer experience. If your score is lower than you’d like, it’s time to analyze the customer experience you’re providing to find weak areas that could improve.

NPS benchmarks across industries

Of course, your score doesn’t mean much without context. Retently’s 2023 NPS benchmark provides excellent data on the average NPS across industries:

• Insurance: 74
• Financial services: 71
• Retail: 61
• Ecommerce: 50
• Healthcare: 45
• Communications and media: 29
• Internet software and services: 9

Don’t lose hope if your NPS is lower than the numbers above. Every brand is different, and every brand starts somewhere. The most important project is to continuously improve your NPS, regardless of where you stack up against competitors.

Three ways to collect and calculate net promoter scores at scale

The formula is simple enough, but you might want to create a system to process your score continually. We have three recommendations:

1) Create an Excel or Google Sheets NPS spreadsheet

If you’re comfortable with Excel or Google Sheets, you can set up a spreadsheet to perform your net promoter score calculation. To do this, you will need to follow these steps with the COUNTIF function:

• Define promoters using =COUNTIF(R:R,”>=9″), detractors with =COUNTIF(R:R,”<=6″), and passives with =COUNTIF(R:R,”=7″) +COUNTIF(R:R,”=8″)
• Copy and paste the customer responses into the column, and Excel or Google Sheets will count them for you
• Add the NPS equation into the spreadsheet using this formula: =(Promoters - Detractors)/Responses * 100

Plugging these formulas into your spreadsheet allows you to keep tabs on your NPS in real time, updating it as you need to when new survey responses come in.

2) Use a free NPS calculator tool

If you're not great at using Excel, you can also use free NPS calculator tools online. To use one of these, you only need to count up the customer responses on their surveys and put them in the NPS calculator platform. Many survey tools allow you to export the scores easily.

Some good options for free NPS calculation include:

• Delighted
• Hotjar
• NPS Calculator

3) Use a survey automation tool with NPS capabilities

Before calculating your score, you’ll have to send a survey to customers to collect their responses. Some survey tools have NPS calculations built in.

If you use Gorgias as your customer service platform, you can easily integrate a survey automation tool to collect and calculate responses like:

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

We love and recommend all these tools, but as an example, let’s look at how Delighted and Gorgias work together. Delighted helps you spin up an automated NPS survey — one of many survey templates they offer. Then, you can automatically send out the survey to customer segments on multiple channels via Gorgias:

Source: Delighted

Best practices for NPS effectiveness and accuracy

An accurate NPS score helps you grow your business, overall customer retention, and referrals. An inaccurate NPS may point you in the wrong direction. Accuracy doesn’t just mean you used the formula correctly — it also means you’re measuring the full breadth of your customer base and customer journey.

Below are some best practices to implement to make your NPS as accurate and helpful as possible.

Decide whether you'll use a relationship or transactional survey (or both)

First, the type of survey you use is important. There are two main types to choose between: relationship surveys and transactional surveys.

Relationship surveys try to measure a customer's brand or company loyalty. They ask questions about the overall customer experience and how satisfied the customer is with your company. You will send these to your customer base at specific intervals to help you evaluate the quality of your customer experience and support.

Transactional surveys focus on a particular transaction — for ecommerce, this is usually a purchase. The survey questions focus on that transaction, not the overall customer experience. This type of survey might give you better information about the specific product purchased, though it can also skew up or down if the customer contacted customer support.

Most of the time, you’ll start with relationship surveys. Before you drill down to specific products and transactions, it’s helpful to benchmark your customers’ overall sentiment, loyalty, and promoter status.

If you don’t have a helpdesk, you can use standalone NPS software to collect contact information and send surveys. But suppose you have a helpdesk like Gorgias. In that case, you’ll have an easier time automating your NPS surveys with one of the NPS survey tools listed above because your helpdesk already has customer contact information and can automatically send surveys after purchases or customer service interactions.

Limit the number of questions you include as part of the NPS survey experience

When you decide to contact, you may be tempted to ask as many questions as possible to maximize the insights you receive. We get it; we love customer insight, too. However, response rates for NPS surveys are low, and customers are even less likely to respond to longer surveys.

You’ll have higher response rates if you focus your NPS surveys on two questions:

• On a scale of 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend our product to someone else?
• Tell us why you selected that score

Let customers answer an open-ended question right after they provide their score

As we said above, you should follow up after a respondent gives you their score to understand why they answered that way. Leaving the question as optional won't impact the number of NPS questions you get back, but you may get some critical qualitative data from customers who choose to fill out the open-ended question.

Open-ended questions require more than a "yes" or "no" response. Here are some examples of open-ended questions that work well:

• What disappointed you about your experience?
• How could we improve your experience?
• What do you like the most about our product/service?

Make this question about the customer, using plenty of second-person pronouns, and let them have an open forum to add a response. Use the information you gather to help you improve your customer satisfaction in future interactions.

Just get started and aim for statistically significant sample sizes later on

It's easy to get caught up in details and never actually launch your NPS survey. While you want an effective survey, don’t let perfect get in the way of done. Even if you only have a small amount of data initially, you will have some. NPS surveys are not one-and-done; you can optimize your next survey to get more responses.

Start with the relationship survey and send it to your current customers. Then, after receiving responses, tweak your survey and send it to different customer base segments. Continue tweaking the frequency, wording, and targeting until you get a statistically significant number of survey responses.

Don't wait to start until you have a perfect system — you'll lose valuable data if you do.

Optimize when you send your surveys

Experiment with the timing of your survey to maximize the total number of respondents. We’re unaware of any universal best practice for the time and day of the week to send out NPS surveys. The timing will depend on your specific customer base, so experiment until you find the sweet spot.

Some survey automation tools, like those mentioned above, will send surveys in response to customer actions. For example, a customer could get a survey a few hours (or days) after purchasing or contacting customer support. This is a great way to ensure you target customers who are actively engaged with your brand.

Want to improve your survey response rates? Check out our list of best practices for improving your NPS response rate.

Test your survey before you send it out to customers

Finally, ensure you test your survey in-house before sending it to actual customers. There is nothing worse than a poorly worded, poorly functioning survey. Send a test survey to people within your organization first, and make sure it gets to their inbox and not the spam folder.

What might trigger a spam flag in the invitation email for your survey? Here are some things to avoid:

• All-caps in the subject line
• Too many exclamation points
• Words like "act now," "free," and "urgent matter"
• An image with little text in the email body
• Too many font sizes, colors, and types

Send the invitation email to people in-house and make sure everything works. The email should open, be easy to read, work on multiple browsers and email programs, and make sense to the reader. Take feedback from your team to tweak the email and ensure the survey has the best chance of getting read and responded to once it reaches your customer.

Create a process to handle low NPS scores

The primary purpose of NPS is to give you an overall impression of brand loyalty. Another benefit is to identify — and fix — low-NPS interactions as they happen.

We recommend identifying some of the top reasons for low scores and implementing a system to respond to incoming low scores quickly. In Gorgias, for example, you can set up an automated Rule to automatically create a ticket for incoming NPS scores and assign low NPS scores to a dedicated agent.

As your team grows, you can even dedicate agents to each common issue: damaged products, delayed shipping, etc. Gorgias’ intent detection automatically analyzes tickets to identify the root cause of the problem and, combined with Rules, can send each issue to a specialized agent:

Source: Gorgias

Treat those flagged low scores as priority tickets and establish a suitable solution for each reason. For example, you could send a gift card to customers who receive a late or damaged product.

These conversations may be sensitive and challenging, especially among VIP customers. So, we recommend activating phone support as a last line of defense for customers with a negative experience.

Raising your NPS is one of the revenue-generating tactics from our CX-Driven Growth Playbook, which is based on research of over 10,000+ top ecommerce brands. Check out the playbook for 17 more actionable tips to drive revenue by improving your CX.

Don’t stop at NPS: Also measure customer satisfaction (CSAT) score

Net promoter score is a rich metric, but it’s not the only — nor necessarily the best — way to gauge customer loyalty. One issue is the premise of the survey itself: Just because a customer might promote your brand doesn’t mean they’ll stay loyal. A customer might recommend your product to a friend but choose not to purchase it again because your product is too expensive for them.

We recommend complimenting your NPS efforts by measuring customer satisfaction (CSAT), mainly to gauge the performance of your customer support team. Whereas NPS helps you understand the potential for referral-based growth, CSAT asks about customer loyalty more directly: How satisfied are you with the help you received today?

If you use Gorgias, you can automatically send customer satisfaction surveys after closing a conversation with a customer:

Source: Gorgias

This information will be displayed in future discussions to give the next agent context about this customer’s past experiences with your brand. Plus, you can zoom out to get a sense of CSAT across your entire customer base with the platform’s customer satisfaction dashboard:

Source: Gorgias

Data from our CX-Driven Growth Playbook indicates your CSAT and revenue are linked. For example, raising your CSAT from 4/5 to 4.9/5 can raise your overall revenue by 4%.

Want to better understand your ecommerce business’s overall performance with metrics like conversion rate, acquisition costs, and lifetime value? Check out our guide to ecommerce KPIs.

Want to zoom in on your customer service department’s performance with metrics like NPS, CSAT, and support performance score? Check out our guide to evaluating customer service.

Learn how Gorgias helps ecommerce companies measure and improve key metrics

A good NPS score means your customers are happy and they are spreading the news about your product via word of mouth. Gorgias helps ecommerce brands improve customer experience to drive customer loyalty, referrals, and revenue.

One of our customers, Bagallery, saw their NPS go from 19 to 41 after partnering with Gorgias. Another client, Comme Avant, now maintains a nearly perfect NPS after switching to Gorgias.

And with Gorgias, NPS is only the tip of the iceberg for reporting and analytics. You have access to reporting dashboards like our Support Performance dashboard, which combines many key customer service metrics, and our Live Statistics dashboard, which shows up-to-date information about each agent's performance.

Sign up for a free trial to see Gorgias' powerful tools for reporting, analytics, and omnichannel customer support.