CX Design
Why Your Strategy Needs Customer Service Quality Assurance
TL;DR:
- Manual QA is time-consuming and inconsistent. Reviewing conversations manually makes it difficult to ensure uniform quality across agents and touchpoints.
- Automating QA saves time and improves accuracy. Automation ensures all tickets are reviewed with the same quality, freeing up agent time to create stronger customer connections.
- QA helps teams continuously improve. It enables better agent training and brings forth actionable feedback to exceed customer expectations.
- Implement QA one step at a time. Begin by setting KPIs, introducing small changes, and investing in automation tools to streamline and measure success effectively.
Forrester’s 2024 Customer Experience Index reports that 39% of brands’ customer experience (CX) quality has declined over the past year.
It can be challenging to get a full understanding of how your team –– and AI, if you use it –– are truly performing.
This is true even with metrics like CSAT.
“A 5-point scale only tells you and your agents so much, and relying on consumers providing feedback further limits what you’re able to look at and learn from,” says Kayla Oberlin, Senior Manager of Customer Experience at amika.
Quality Assurance (QA) is becoming a more crucial component of a customer experience strategy, especially one that prioritizes customer happiness.
We’ll cover the importance of customer service QA, best practices, tools, and tips to implement QA effectively.
🗺️ This article at-a-glance
- What is QA (Quality Assurance) in CX?
- Why QA is critical for customer experience
- Best practices for implementing QA in CX
- Challenges
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What is QA (Quality Assurance) in CX?
In the CX context, QA (Quality Assurance) refers to reviewing customer conversations to improve your support team’s performance and enhance customer satisfaction. QA ensures a consistent and satisfying customer journey across touchpoints, including your website, support channels, and social media.
Common QA pain points for CX teams
Aside from accuracy issues, a manual quality assurance process is:
- Time-consuming: Manual conversation reviews are slow and labor-intensive.
- Limited visibility: It’s difficult to get a clear, scalable view of team and AI performance.
- Inconsistent: Maintaining uniform quality across customer service teams can be tough.
- Resource allocation: Difficulty in ensuring the right skills, training, and resources are in place.
- CSAT limitations: Negative scores often reflect policies, not agent performance.
The solution isn’t for CX teams to skip the QA process altogether but to automate it.
According to research from McKinsey, “A largely automated QA process could achieve more than 90 percent accuracy — compared to 70 to 80 percent accuracy through manual scoring — and savings of more than 50 percent in QA costs.”
With an automated QA process, brands can:
- Save time: Automated quality checks help support agents to focus on the most critical tickets.
- Ensure consistency: Both human agents and AI agents are evaluated with a unified, comprehensive QA score.
- Boost performance: Agents receive targeted coaching to provide more consistent customer experiences.
- Meet customer expectations: Customers benefit from higher-quality support with quicker resolutions and accurate responses.
Why QA is critical for customer experience
According to Statista, 94% of customers are more likely to purchase again after receiving top-notch support. Quality assurance ensures that every customer gets the same experience, and provides agents with the feedback to learn and stay on-brand with each resolution.
At its core, QA:
- Prevents errors
- Ensures consistency
- Builds trust with customers
- Helps with personalization
- Aids in better coaching and training
- Offers opportunities for continuous improvement
Prevent errors
Addressing errors early is important, as even small mistakes can harm customer trust and create lasting negative impressions. QA tools can prevent mistakes because of better coaching and training. This can stop misinformation in its tracks –– and from escalating into bigger problems down the line.
Ensure consistency
QA makes sure that all customer touchpoints, like calls, emails, live chat, and even AI responses, are handled with the same level of care. This is especially helpful when training new team members, introducing new products or policies, or during high-traffic periods.
Build trust
Consistent and reliable experiences build customer trust and loyalty. If you were to reach out to a brand and have an amazing experience the first time but a bad experience the next, you’d probably question which experience was the norm.
Top-notch experiences that happen time and time again tell your customers that you’ll always be there to help. This can boost repeat sales and even referrals: According to Statista, 82% of customers recommend a brand after a great experience.
Personalize experiences
Aside from increasing happiness and making customers feel heard and appreciated, personalized support also affects your bottom line. Statista notes that 80% of businesses found that providing personalized customer experiences led to increased spending for consumers.
Aids in better coaching and training
With QA, teams are able to rate and review all tickets instead of spot-checking. This provides them with a:
- Quicker turnaround on coaching opportunities
- Wider volume of tickets they can review, learn from, and use for training
- Better understanding of when a Macro or a process is leading to incomplete or unhelpful conversations
- Bigger opportunity for constructive feedback and flow improvements that are based on real responses and not frustrations with brand policies
Continuously improve
Whether it’s lowering resolution times, introducing a knowledge base, or adding an AI agent to your team, making continuous improvements will help you stay ahead of the competition.
Implementing a QA program (especially if you can automate it) is one of those additions that provides you with the refinements you need on a resolution-to-resolution level.
Best practices for implementing QA in CX
QA best practices include:
- Establish a baseline for metrics and KPIs
- Monitor and evaluate regularly
- Implement automation tools
- Collect customer feedback
Establish a baseline for metrics and KPIs
As you set out to integrate a Quality Assurance process into your CX program, first establish benchmarks for various metrics and KPIs. These benchmarks help track and evaluate the performance of QA as you implement it.
If you don’t already track customer support metrics, CSAT, first response time (FRT), resolution time, and net promoter score (NPS) are great ones to start with.
💡Tip: If you use Gorgias, you’ll find your current support performance statistics in the Statistics menu. Make sure that you can see back at least six months. Then, compare an equal time frame for post-QA implementation.
Monitor and evaluate regularly
While it might sound a bit “meta” to monitor your quality assurance (which is already monitoring your support responses), it’s still worth noting.
Ensure that your QA process works smoothly, helps your metrics rather than hurts them, and provides actual helpful feedback to your agents.
Implement automation tools
The simplest way to maintain your support quality standards is to use an automated QA tool. Automating the QA process lets CX teams get deeper insights into agent strengths and areas for improvement, and captures deeper insights than a CSAT score could.
Collect customer feedback
Understanding how customers feel will allow you to fine-tune your processes and ensure you’re delivering a consistent and high-quality experience. Here are a few ways to collect feedback:
- Surveys and reviews - Post-interaction surveys or direct reviews provide real-time feedback on what customers think of their experience.
- Social listening and real-time feedback - Monitoring online reviews, social media mentions, and customer comments offers insight into how your customers are feeling that might not be captured through formal surveys.
Challenges of adding QA
Lack of resources, ineffective training, poor communication between team members, not having the right tools, and doing everything manually are some of the challenges you can encounter when adding a QA process.
Here are a couple of solutions we recommend:
- Start with phased rollouts. Rather than rolling out a QA process across your whole team, let more seasoned agents experiment with it first to give you feedback and make tweaks.
- Make incremental improvements. Changing an entire CX process at once to include QA can be overwhelming. We recommend making small changes (like starting to send CSAT surveys if you don’t already) one at a time. These changes will allow you to better measure what’s really working.
- Invest in better technology. A manual QA process can be more time-consuming than helpful. Look for an automated QA tool that’s already integrated into your helpdesk. It will allow you to measure AI and agent responses equally, while also measuring results from a handy dashboard.
Ensure customer experience meets quality standards
By prioritizing QA, your team can identify potential problems early, reduce errors, and improve overall performance, leading to a smoother, more reliable experience for customers –– and your CX team.
In the long run, brands that focus on QA can gain a competitive edge, building stronger relationships with customers and driving sustainable growth. Book a demo now.
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TL;DR:
- AI Agent reduces workload and prevents burnout for CX teams. It handles routine queries and allows your human agents to focus on providing a higher level of service where it's needed most.
- AI Agent is secure and compliant with industry standards. Gorgias uses a zero data retention policy and follows strict security regulations, including SOC 2 Type II certification.
- AI Agent delivers personalized, on-brand responses. Custom Guidance and data from sources like Shopify allow AI Agent to maintain brand consistency while providing tailored customer interactions.
- Real-world success stories show tangible results with AI Agent. Brands like Psycho Bunny and Baby Gold have seen significant improvements in response times and resolution rates by implementing AI Agent.
AI changes the way CX teams operate. But we firmly believe that it’s a good thing.
It will help you improve your team’s workload, say goodbye to burnout, and create a more consistent and speedy experience for your customers.
Here’s the process we recommend for pitching Gorgias’s AI Agent to your boss, complete with an FAQ section for quick answers.
Jump to a section:
- Start with the benefits
- Outline the data & security safeguards in place
- Highlight its brand accuracy and personalization
- Share success stories
- Set expectations
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Start with the benefits
Gorgias views AI as an extension of CX teams, and that’s how many of our customers see AI Agent as well. Baby Gold calls theirs Michelle, Psycho Bunny calls theirs Lisa.
These autonomous agents allow your human agents to focus on more complex and nuanced issues, providing a higher level of service where your customers need it most.
Here are some other things that make AI Agent a great addition to your team:
- ⏰ 24/7 availability: AI Agent operates around the clock, ensuring that customer inquiries are addressed promptly at any time, including weekends and holidays.
- 🏔️ Scalability: AI Agent can handle a high volume of inquiries simultaneously without any decrease in performance. This scalability is particularly valuable during peak times like BFCM.
- 🚀 Efficiency and speed: AI Agent can process and respond to queries much faster than human agents, leading to quicker resolutions and improved customer satisfaction.
- 🦎Adaptability: AI Agent can quickly adapt to new information, products, or changes in policies immediately – all you have to do is add them to your knowledge docs and to the Guidance you set.
- 🦾 Full control: You stay in full control of how AI Agent behaves in specific scenarios. Give AI Agent custom Guidance to ensure that each interaction with your customers reflects your brand’s values, policies and tone.
📚 Further reading: Our AI Approach: Onboard, Automate, Observe, and Coach
Outline the data & security safeguards in place
Rest assured that AI Agent and Gorgias operate under a zero data retention (ZDR) policy. Once data is used, it isn’t stored.
We’re SOC 2 Type II Certified and follow strict regulations in regards to data security.
You can view the terms that cover the data we collect and how we use Artificial Intelligence by reading Our Master Service Agreement (MSA) and Data Processing Agreement (DPA).
🎯 Resource: How AI Agent works & gathers data
Highlight its brand accuracy and personalization
AI Agent provides consistent, accurate, and on-brand responses based on the information in your Help Center, Shopify order data, Macros, handover instructions, and the actual custom Guidance you set for it.
It might just surprise you with just how specialized it can get.
“Sometimes agents forget personal details to call out when communicating with our customers, like birthdays or weddings,” says Sindi Melgar, the Customer Service Manager at Baby Gold.
“But I noticed on a few different occasions where AI Agent (ours is named Michelle) is highlighting these things and is saying, ‘Congratulations on your wedding!’ Just the tone of voice that Michelle is able to adopt is definitely on brand for us.”
Ensure certain topics are handed over or excluded
When you set up AI Agent, you’ll also let it know the types of topics you’d like it not to answer.
AI Agent automatically hands over tickets to your team whenever it lacks confidence in an answer or detects an angry customer.
But you can also use handover rules to choose how AI Agent behaves when it passes tickets to your human team, and add specific topics that it should always hand over to your team.
🎯 Resource: Customize how AI Agent behaves
Provide feedback on responses
Don’t like something AI Agent said? Or, did you love an answer it gave?
It’s easy to let AI Agent know by telling it you liked the response, saying it should have pulled from a different resource, or reporting an issue.
🎯 Resource: How to coach AI Agent and give feedback
Prioritize your team’s docs
AI Agent uses your Shopify order data, Macros, your brand’s webpages, as well as your Help Center to give your customers accurate and on-brand responses. It also prioritizes any Guidance that you set.
🎯 Resource: Why having a quality knowledge base is essential to using AI for CX
Share success stories
We wouldn’t expect you to onboard a new tool without some actual statistics and reviews. Below, browse three success stories and the fantastic metrics that AI Agent helped their teams achieve.
After just one month of implementing AI Agent, the team at VESSEL not only increased the number of emails automated via AI Agent by 20%, but reduced first response time to 58 seconds and saw their resolution time decrease to one minute and six seconds.
When Baby Gold implemented AI Agent, they achieved a 49-second first response time, a one-minute and four-second resolution time, and answered 1,361 tickets. They also quadrupled their email automation rate.
Psycho Bunny saw a 99.8% faster first response time, 99.4% faster resolution time, and 26% of tickets resolved by AI Agent.
“Our customer support KPIs are already fantastic: we're already leading in the industry,” said Tosha Moyer, Senior Customer Experience Manager at Psycho Bunny.
“To improve on that, we need AI — it’s not physically or financially possible with human agents alone.”
Set expectations
AI Agent isn’t going to find lost packages, pick up the phone, or fix damaged products. While this might seem obvious, it’s important to understand AI Agent’s core capabilities, as we want this to be an exciting and useful addition to your team.
“AI Agent does a great job of efficiently handling returns and exchanges, and split shipment tracking info,” shares Tosha Moyer. “The overall tone is good and some of its responses are really excellent.”
Below, find the top use cases for AI Agent, as well as the specific actions you can configure for it within Gorgias.
AI Agent use cases
These are the top AI Agent use cases that we recommend:
- Where is my order? (WISMO) inquiries
- Product-related questions
- Returns
- Order issues
- Cancellations
- Discounts (including BFCM)
- Customer feedback
- Account management
- Collaboration requests
The specific actions you currently can configure for AI Agent include:
- Cancel an order in Shopify
- Edit a shipping address in Shopify
- Send Loop Returns portal deep link
- Send return shipping status from Loop Returns
- Cancel a subscription in Recharge
With more to come! And to quiet any worries, it’s worth mentioning that AI Agent will not perform any actions without you configuring or activating them first.
Enhance your brand reputation and build trust
Offering fast, accurate, and 24/7 support can significantly enhance your brand reputation and build customer trust, which can translate into higher customer loyalty and increased revenue.
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TL;DR:
- AI Agent adapts to your brand's unique tone of voice. Choose from three default voice options (Friendly, Professional, and Sophisticated), or create countless types of tone with the Custom option.
- Aligning AI with your brand voice builds consistency. A consistent tone in customer interactions helps build trust and brand loyalty.
- Specify what AI Agent can and can’t say. Like your human agents, tell AI Agent your brand do’s and don’ts. From going all out with fun and emoji-filled replies to avoiding certain words, use custom instructions to make AI Agent sound distinctly on-brand.
People are only able to identify AI-generated content 46.9% of the time. That’s less than half the time!
In the ecommerce customer service industry, this is just one reason teams are getting more comfortable with using AI.
Better language processing abilities mean AI can be a better extension of CX teams, relieving agents of repetitive questions, like where is my order?, while speaking in a way that’s familiar and delightful to customers.
Upholding a strong brand voice should be one of your top priorities in CX. With Gorgias’s AI Agent, you can choose AI Agent’s exact tone of voice, from sophisticated to fun. Below, check out seven AI Agent brand voice examples from real customer conversations.
“We’ve had customers respond to the AI thinking they were speaking to a real person. That’s how elevated the response was from AI.”
—Emily McEnany, Senior CX Manager at Dr. Bronner’s
What is Tone of Voice?
Tone of Voice refers to how AI Agent communicates with your customers. In Gorgias, you can select from three pre-built tone options:
- Friendly
- Professional
- Sophisticated
Or, you can create a custom tone, keeping your brand guidelines, style guide, and target audience in mind.
Note: AI Agent and Tone of Voice are only available to Gorgias Automate subscribers.
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7 Tone of Voice Examples for AI Agent to Match Your Brand's Style
Explore how effectively AI Agent adapts to seven distinct tones in the examples below. First, we’ll show you what a preset AI Agent tone option sounds like, then we’ll move on to six examples using custom instructions.
Feel free to copy and paste our provided instructions to set up your AI Agent with the custom tone of your choice, or, even better, take some inspiration to create your own.
1. Friendly
A friendly AI Agent is the go-to for most CX teams. A Friendly tone of voice is outgoing and welcomes inquiries with enthusiasm. If you were to imagine the model support agent, they would speak like this.
The Friendly tone of voice is available by default in AI Agent’s settings.
How it looks in action
Here’s how an AI Agent with a Friendly tone of voice responds to a customer asking for samples and coupons:
2. Direct and brief
Now, we move away from AI Agent’s default Tone of Voice options and toward the vast possibilities of the Custom option.
If you prefer your AI Agent get to the point in as few words as possible, create a Custom tone of voice that breaks up text into separate lines, limits paragraphs to two to three sentences, and keeps responses short.
💡 Tip: Access a custom tone of voice by going to Automate > AI Agent > Settings > Tone of Voice > Custom. A text field will appear where you can write your instructions.
Tone of voice instructions:
Acknowledge the customer's feelings by briefly repeating their initial concern(s). Break text up, don’t send entire paragraphs, and keep responses short and easy to read. Keep interactions brief but filled with empathy. We are not long-winded. Keep an informative tone while remaining professional, clear, and easy for customers to follow. Insert links where needed. Don't use too many adjectives when expressing empathy. Never tell the customer to email support or contact our customer service team.
How it looks in action
Here’s how an AI Agent with a direct and brief tone of voice responds to a customer who wants to cancel their order:
3. Fun (with lots of emojis! 🤗)
Who says support agents can’t have personality? Bring some fun into your conversations by creating a custom tone of voice that allows your AI Agent to use emojis and exclamation points.
Tone of voice instructions:
Greet with first name only. Acknowledge the customer's feelings by repeating their initial concern(s). Be concise and provide shorter responses, try to keep your responses to a few sentences. Use a warm, positive, and engaging—like chatting with a helpful, considerate friend. Sign off with "Best Regards". Avoid jokes or comments related to sensitive topics. Make the customer feel like a friend. You can include approved emojis for a personal touch and exclamation points. Approved emojis to use: 💞🫶✨🥰💖🎀💓💘🥳💗💕💯 You should recognize and celebrate personal milestones mentioned by customers, making the interaction feel more personal. After the customer's initial message, there's no need to restate their issue in follow-up responses.
How it looks in action
Here’s how an AI Agent with a fun tone of voice responds to a customer asking about exchanging their damaged product:
4. Comforting
Customer support often gets a bad rep. Customers anticipate long response times and unpleasant interactions. Flip customer expectations by giving your AI Agent a calming and comforting voice that can instantly fix negative experiences.
💡 Tip: Brands in the wellness and baby industry would do well to use a comforting tone of voice for their AI Agent.
Tone of voice instructions:
Our brand embodies the role of a nurturing parent, promoting happiness, growth, and well-being while creating moments of joy and inspiration. Stay genuine and reflect childlike wonder without being overly sentimental. We maintain a positive and supportive tone, offering a safe, comforting space. Avoid admitting fault or apologizing. Be shorter in replies. Do not offer replacements. Do not give out phone numbers.
How it looks in action
Here’s how an AI Agent with a comforting tone of voice responds to a customer asking about exchanging their damaged product:
5. Bro-y
Give your AI Agent a laid-back, “we’ve got your back” vibe that feels like chatting with a buddy. This tone keeps things casual, approachable, and like you’re ready to tackle any issue together.
Tone of voice instructions:
Sound like a gym bro. Speak casually and friendly. Be eager to help. However, do not go overboard with puns or stereotypical phrases. You may use the following emojis: 🤙💪🏋️ End responses with "Stay awesome,"
How it looks in action
Here’s how an AI Agent with a bro-y tone of voice responds to a customer asking about glove sizing:
6. Punny
If your brand isn’t afraid to lean into humor and puns, this tone will definitely connect with your audience. Let your AI Agent use wit and clever wordplay to keep conversations lighthearted and customers smiling at their screens.
Tone of voice instructions:
Speak in bee and honey puns and use colorful emojis. Use at least one emoji per message. Keep your messages brief. Sign off with a different pun in every conversation. If a customer is upset or needs urgent help, avoid puns.
How it looks in action
Here’s how an AI Agent with a punny tone of voice responds to a customer asking about suit sizes:
7. Bonus: Robotic
In all of our examples, AI Agent responses can easily be mistaken for one of your human agents. But if, for any reason, you want to change that by making your AI Agent sound robotic — it’s possible.
Tone of voice instructions:
Sound like a robot. Make robot sounds and puns. Use short, direct, and easy-to-read sentences.
How it looks in action
Here’s how an AI Agent with a robotic tone of voice responds to a customer asking about exchanging their damaged product:
Say it how you want with AI Agent
Like a chameleon, AI Agent adapts to your brand voice. Whether it’s friendly, professional, or a custom tone, you can be sure that every interaction aligns with your brand’s identity.
With AI Agent on your side, you have the power to make each conversation feel authentic. Take it from Psycho Bunny’s Senior Customer Experience Manager Tosha Moyer who says, “The overall tone is good, and its responses are really excellent.”
Ready to see AI Agent’s excellence for yourself? Book a demo and discover how AI Agent can be a permanent part of your team.
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Featured articles
How to Leverage Tools to Manage a High Volume of Sales on TikTok Shop
TikTok Shop generated 68.1% of gross market value sales across all social media platforms in 2024 and $3.8 billion in sales in 2023. Clearly, it’s becoming a massive channel with abundant opportunities for sellers.
To effectively harness TikTok Shop, however, brands with high-volume sales need to understand the specific challenges they will face when launching on the social platform.
Many of these are operational, like maintaining an accurate inventory list between platforms, supporting customers efficiently, and fulfilling a large number of orders.
When used together, AfterShip Feed and Gorgias can help you overcome these operational hurdles and start selling on TikTok Shop sooner.
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Streamline order management & customer support on TikTok Shop
TikTok Shop is the commerce-enabled side of TikTok, where brands and creators can list their products for sale. Shoppers then make a purchase through shoppable (in-feed) videos, live shopping, or product showcases. The app aims to provide a “frictionless checkout experience,” enabling shoppers to engage with their favorite accounts and add-to-cart in a flash.
While setting up a TikTok Shop is relatively simple, if you already run an ecommerce store that does a high volume of sales, adding TikTok Shop as an additional channel will be a little more complex. Thankfully, tools like AfterShip Feed and Gorgias can help you solve many operational issues and provide the same best-in-class customer experience on TikTok Shop as you do on your other channels..
Here’s a highlight reel on how you can implement both tools to improve efficiency and customer satisfaction, tackling issues like fulfillment or customer support inquiries from the same customers on different channels.
Centralize customer support with Gorgias
800+ Gorgias customers currently use the TikTok Shop integration. It’s quick and easy to connect. With it, you can:
Manage all customer interactions in one place
Coordinating customer support across different channels can be a pain. With Gorgias, however, you’ll be able to manage inquiries more efficiently and handle all shoppers’ messages by responding to TikTok Shop inquiries directly from Gorgias using text, images, and videos.
Additionally, you can address order-related issues and manage cancellations, returns, and refunds from TikTok Shop in the same Gorgias dashboard you use for your existing channels.
Automate ticket creation
Leverage Gorgias’s automated ticket creation to reduce First Response Time (FRT) and ensure that you don’t miss a single customer inquiry from TikTok Shop. Save time by handling repetitive tasks (like order status updates) with automation.
Enhance customers’ experience
Enabling the Gorgias TikTok Shop integration will allow you to maintain better control over communication and provide a consistent customer experience. Customers shopping via TikTok Shop will benefit from quicker responses, improving overall satisfaction and boosting brand loyalty.
Simplify operations with AfterShip Feed
AfterShip Feed is a reliable TikTok Shop management tool with 1,800 customers. It auto-syncs products, inventory, and orders between TikTok Shop and ecommerce platforms.
Partner AfterShip Feed with TikTok Shop to:
List on TikTok Shop more efficiently
AfterShip Feed makes listing high volumes of products on TikTok Shop easier through bulk uploads and editing, enabling you to update up to 10,000 SKUs at once.
It uses AI to add key product details and keep your product listings accurate and consistent. Tools like category templates and product ID generation make it even easier to list your full catalog.
Safeguard your revenue
AfterShip Feed has several features that will help you avoid lost revenue, especially during busy times like BFCM.
Inventory threshold
Inventory threshold helps you determine the minimum amount of inventory you need to have on hand to avoid selling out or buying too much. You can also set a fixed amount of inventory aside for TikTok Shop.
Price rules
Price rules help you set the ideal prices for each item you sell to protect your profit margins.
Fulfillment hold
A fulfillment hold stops an order at the fulfillment stage to ensure sufficient funds on the customer side, sufficient stock on yours—or to solve another issue behind the scenes. TikTok Shop has a standard 1-hour fulfillment hold, which can cause issues with inventory syncing on your main ecommerce platform.
Streamline order management
AfterShip Feed supports multiple fulfillment methods and integrates with many returns solutions. Sync orders from TikTok Shop with your existing fulfillment systems, ensuring timely and accurate deliveries. You can sync up to 24,000 orders to Shopify per hour.
Other features include order ID, shipping method, and product-SKU mapping.
Which are the top-grossing TikTok Shop industries?
Two industries in particular see massive sales from TikTok Shop: beauty and personal care, and womenswear and underwear. According to a 2024 report from Statista, the beauty category saw over 370 million sales and women’s fashion 284 million sales in 2023.
The beauty category alone has generated almost $2.5 billion in GMV, while the womenswear category has seen $1.39 billion.
If your brand belongs to one of these categories, including Gorgias and AfterShip Feed in your TikTok Shop toolkit could be a great fit for you.
Gorgias and AfterShip create better experiences
Pairing Gorgias and AfterShip Feed will help you deliver a fantastic customer experience and grow your business on TikTok Shop.
A Complete Guide to Black Friday Ecommerce in 2024
Black Friday is the strongest revenue-generating day of the year for retailers, with $9.8 billion in sales reported in 2023, according to a report by Adobe. For online merchants, the revenue potential is even sweeter, with the online shopping period extended into Cyber Monday.
But, it takes a coordinated effort by customer support, sales, and marketing to encourage a shopper to click “checkout.” Without a solid ecommerce strategy, many online retailers will miss out on the Black Friday - Cyber Monday rush.
Whether you’re looking to optimize your existing strategy or starting from scratch, we’ve got you covered. This guide will help you make the most out of your BFCM ecommerce strategy with a clear list of steps (in chronological order) to help you prepare.
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What is Black Friday - Cyber Monday?
Black Friday - Cyber Monday — also referred to as BFCM — are two back-to-back sales days that bring in a ton of revenue for both in-store and ecommerce retailers in the US. The Black Friday - Cyber Monday shopping window also kick-starts holiday shopping from Thanksgiving day through the new year.
Why you need to prepare for BFCM now
BFCM isn’t just about one big day of revenue generation. It’s a crucial period for online retailers to capture new customers and convince them to keep shopping through the end of the year and beyond.
In-person BFCM experiences are out, and ecommerce is in
Shopper sentiment is shifting away from physical experiences. Online transactions are up by 13% year-over-year, according to research from Criteo. So, you probably won’t see consumers camping out in front of physical stores on Black Friday, but those same shoppers still want to find an excellent ecommerce deal.
Consumers are eager to spend despite concerns about inflation
After BFCM in 2023, research from Nielsen found the desire for a good deal caused 57% of shoppers to stay on budget and 18% of shoppers to spend more than they planned in the year prior.
Brand familiarity matters
Shoppers, Gen Z in particular, are more likely to make a purchase with a brand they’re familiar with. So, ensure your marketing tactics are firing well before BFCM will help folks get to know you before the holiday sales season starts.
Get proactive rather than reactive
When you make a plan early, you give your business more time to craft a great marketing campaign. Plus, you give your team time to figure out how to manage customer service on Black Friday for these high-traffic days.
Considering Black Friday - Cyber Monday is the busiest ecommerce sales event of the year, prepare as early as possible to get a leg-up and stay on top of Black Friday trends.
Related reading: Why proactive customer service is essential for growing your business
Pre-Black Friday preparation: What to do before the holiday
Preparing for Black Friday — and building a strong ecommerce strategy — goes well beyond ironing out a limited-time deal.
Tactics like updating key policies, building out customer self-service options, and marketing early will help you be successful.
1. Update key policies on your website before BFCM
Displaying clear-cut and easy-to-find policies on your website makes a huge difference to the customer experience. It sets the customer up for success and cultivates a positive sentiment with your brand.
To prepare for the best Black Friday-Cyber Monday possible, we recommend updating these key policies (and your Help Center) with BFCM-related information.
✅ Tip: A tool like Gorgias’s AI Agent learns from your policies to know how to respond to certain topics and escalate tickets. And we know that more automated tickets leads to a lighter workload for your agents. It makes a compelling case for keeping your policies up-to-date.
“The anxiety for customers during BFCM is real,” says Lauren Reams, Customer Experience Manager at VESSEL. “This year, we are planning on leveraging AI Agent to help us get ahead of the most common questions. AI Agent has been so seamless, so we’re confident that it will help us handle the busy season without needing to bring in additional agents.”
Returns and exchanges
BCFM is a popular time for consumers to buy holiday gifts, which means you could see an influx in returns or exchanges.
✅ Tips: Use return management apps like Loop Returns to provide customers with a self-service return portal to process their returns. Take that idea one step further by using AI Agent Actions to send your Loop Returns link or return shipping status automatically.
Integrate Loop Returns with Gorgias and enable customers to initiate their own returns.
Shipping and fulfillment
Customers expect purchases, especially if they’re buying gifts for upcoming holidays, to arrive on time and quickly (you’re competing with fast shipping speeds from retail giants like Amazon).
If those gifts don’t arrive in time, you’re going to face a lot of angry customers.
✅ Tip: Use your shipping and fulfillment policy to be crystal clear about when you ship orders, how long orders typically arrive, and how customers can look up their order status. AI Agent can perform Shopify Actions, such as editing the order's shipping address. Having this automated means agents do not have to do manual work.
Lost packages
All those Black Friday - Cyber Monday sales equal a ton of packages in transit. You can expect a few to go missing.
When that happens, your customers need to know what happens next.
Make sure you’re clear with your team and customers upfront if you are willing to cover damages (either with refunds or credits). This will help your agents handle the process quickly and consistently. Plus, it gives your customers the peace of mind that accidents won’t put them out.
✅ Tip: Include a policy about damaged items in your FAQs so your customers know what to expect in case anything goes wrong with their order.
Related reading: FAQ Page Template & Tips (+ Free Shopify FAQ Generator)
Automate self-service options
If you’re on Gorgias, Automate includes Flows, Order Management, and Article Recommendations. These different automations can help you deflect up to 30% of tickets, freeing your agents up for higher-value conversations.
Set up Flows to automatically answer common customer questions specific to Black Friday - Cyber Monday related to:
- Shipping policy: Will my items arrive by the holidays?
- Get a gift recommendation: Can you help me find a gift for a friend?
- Return policy: Can I return a gifted item?
- BFCM discounts: Do you offer any holiday discounts?
Related reading: Offer more self-serve options with Flows: 10 use cases & best practices
2. Reduce strain on your customer service team
It turns out that many customer support inquiries your team receives are repetitive.
“If you force agents to respond to every question manually — no matter how small — you're only limiting the time they can spend on tickets that actually need human attention,” says Gorgias Director of Support, Bri Christiano.
That’s why we built Automate at Gorgias: It deflects your most repetitive tickets — up to 30% of your overall ticket volume — so you can focus on the tickets that grow your business.
Tech product retailer Nomad leaned into Gorgias’s automation to support customer service interactions. Not only did the online retailer gain a streamlined way to manage customer feedback, they also reduced response time by 70%.
Customer story: How Nomad uses automation to reduce their response time and resolution time by over 70%
3. Build a marketing campaign to tap into social commerce
Social commerce is on the rise among consumers worldwide.
Deloitte estimates about one-third of shoppers in the US made a purchase through a social media app in 2021. That number is estimated to be even higher for those who were influenced to buy a product after seeing it on social media.
You don’t necessarily have to sell directly through Instagram, but you can leverage your social channels to generate brand awareness.
The need for social-focused customer support is exactly why online retailer MNML turned to Gorgias. The company found that their shoppers turned more and more to social media for answers to their shopping-related questions.
Ultimately, the company leveled up their customer support on social media to connect with potential buyers.
Get started with these ideas:
Partner with influencers to generate brand awareness
Don’t partner with influencers for the sake of it. Instead, think about it like building a relationship with someone who fits your brand ideals and can cross-sell your products to their audience.
To do this, focus less on influencers with millions of followers on Instagram and TikTok. Instead, look for micro-influencers (or creators with less than 100,000 followers) with audiences that match your brand personas.
Create content that focuses on your store’s Black Friday deals
Once you’ve figured out the Black Friday sales your store will offer, you must ensure people know about them.
Craft content for your social media channels that highlight your deals. Since social media primarily focuses on visuals, start by collecting photos, videos, or illustrations of your products. Then, draft copy for captions, think through the best hashtags, and hand over creative briefs to your design team to build any assets you might need.
Put a little money behind your most successful organic social media posts
The weeks or months leading up to BFCM are prime time to talk about your brand’s Black Friday promotions. Use social media analytics to see which published posts are performing best across your channels.
Turn those high-performing posts into ads on social media by boosting them with a little money. Even with a small budget, you can use social ads to grab even more eyeballs — and potentially bring more people to your website.
A few other ideas to consider:
- Prompt your customers to sign up for an SMS reminder or push notification on their smartphones or mobile devices.
- Give early sale access to email subscribers, incentivizing customers to build a deeper relationship with your brand.
- Pin the sale date and deal information at the top of your social media profiles, especially Instagram.
How to maximize revenue during BFCM in 2 steps
Imagine Black Friday - Cyber Monday is here. Even better, imagine you’ve got a ton of website traffic full of eager browsers. You need a plan to keep those browsers engaged.
One major step you can take to boost your conversion rate and potential revenue is to increase communication touchpoints and focus on recovering abandoned carts.
1. Increase customer touchpoints to keep shoppers engaged
Throughout any customer’s journey, there are many opportunities to interact with your brand. One moment might be finding out about your BFCM sale on social media, signing up for emails to get early access, or browsing the best deals before heading to checkout.
The more you interact with customers along the way, the more you can keep them engaged — and personalized interactions increase your chances of converting a first-time shopper into a repeat customer.
Gorgias’s Convert is a CRO tool that easily personalizes interactions at multiple points throughout a customer journey. Convert offers several ways to increase touchpoints and boost overall engagement:
- AI-powered cross-sell campaigns to offer product recommendations.
- Up-sell campaigns to showcase higher-priced items.
- Share timely discounts, free shipping, or valuable product insights.
- Offer 1:1 support with a smooth hand-off to Gorgias Live Chat.
- Leverage Shopify browsing data to offer product recommendations.
- Set up onsite campaigns without any coding.
Another way to build in more touch points is to use automated chat campaigns that pop up and engage with your customers at crucial moments. Chat widgets are a small addition to any homepage, landing page, or product page that immediately lets customers know where to go for help.
2. Reduce abandoned carts
Cart abandonment is a major source of lost retail sales for any ecommerce business, considering about 70% of online carts are abandoned.
You can easily target customers who have opted into an email list or receive SMS messages from your brand. Design emails or text messages designed to trigger if a cart is abandoned.
Include copy that builds a sense of urgency to drive customers back to their shopping carts to “buy now” before the deal is over.
There’s even a chance to use re-engagement to increase your average order value by upselling once that customer returns to your site.
How to retain new customers you get during BFCM
Repeat customers are valuable — like, really valuable.
According to Gorgias research, returning customers make up about 21% of a brand’s customer base but generate 44% of that same brand’s revenue.
Your brand should re-engage with anyone who shops on your website during the BFCM rush. Those same people could become returning customers who give your shop a revenue boost during the rest of the holiday season.
1. Offer a discount for next time
The perfect moment to re-engage a customer starts at checkout. When someone makes a purchase through your online store, offer them an immediate discount that goes toward their next purchase.
At CX Connect LA 2024, Ron Shah, CEO of Obvi, shared his brand’s strategy for offering discounts to generate revenue. Ron knew implementing AI to support Obvi’s two-person customer support team was necessary to help the brand grow without eliminating the need for his human agents.
“The time saved by AI handled a lot of the redundant work our agents were doing, which meant we could turn them into part-time sales agents. We also gave them a code to help them prevent a refund from happening or upsell somebody. It created a completely new shift in their mindset. They realized, ‘Oh wow, you're not just taking something away from me (with AI) — you're actually elevating my opportunity.’”
✅ Tip: You can increase the touchpoints to re-engage with an existing customer by building a reminder email that triggers one week after their initial transaction. That way, you not only stay at the top of their inbox, you also stay top of mind.
2. Invite customers to join a loyalty program
Loyalty programs are a tried-and-true method to build engaged, returning customers.
In a recent survey, Yotpo found that over half of surveyed consumers agreed a loyalty program would encourage them to purchase more from a brand.
If you already offer a loyalty program, make sure new customers know about how to get the VIP experience with your store. Build awareness touchpoints into your loyalty program marketing strategy. You can also prompt buyers to become loyal customers after they make their first purchase.
3. Continue to improve your customer experience strategy
A successful, positive, and repeatable customer experience doesn’t end after midnight on Cyber Monday. It’s a road rather than a destination.
Consumer habits are always changing, and your support teams must be prepared to handle customer requests.
One way to anticipate your customer’s pain points is to look at customer feedback.
Reviews and social media activity is a great place to start. You might also consider putting a more formal customer sentiment strategy in place, with a CSAT survey to collect direct feedback from customers.
This feedback helps your team prioritize what needs to improve so you’re not left reaching in the dark.
Give your ecommerce strategy a boost this holiday shopping season
The name of the game this Black Friday - Cyber Monday isn’t just to get a ton of online sales; it’s to set up your ecommerce site for a successful holiday shopping season.
Success could look like:
- A reduction in BFCM returns or exchanges
- Having the perfect amount of inventory
- Seeing higher-than-average sustained engagement on your social channels
If you want to move the meter, focus on a strong Black Friday marketing strategy that starts now.
Gorgias is designed with ecommerce merchants in mind. Find out how Gorgias’s time-saving automations and convenient platform can help you create successful customer experiences.
Claim your demo today, or sign up to try Gorgias.
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Building Customer Loyalty Through Effective Post-Purchase Support and Automation in Ecommerce
Let's talk about something that often gets overlooked in ecommerce: what happens after someone hits that "Place Order" button. You might think the hard part's over once you've made the sale, but here's the thing the post-purchase experience can make or break your relationship with customers.
In today's competitive online marketplace, those relationships are everything — especially considering that loyal customers spend an average of 67% more per purchase than new customers.
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The importance of post-purchase support and automation in ecommerce
Providing an excellent post-purchase customer experience can turn one-time customers into loyal advocates who are more likely to make repeat purchases and recommend your brand to others.
It's all about the customer experience
When someone buys from your store, they're not just getting a product — they're starting a relationship with your brand.
A great post-purchase experience shows customers you actually care about their satisfaction beyond just making the sale. 90% of U.S. customers say that an immediate customer service response is "important" or "very important.”
When you nail this part, something magical happens: one-time shoppers transform into passionate advocates who not only come back for more but can't help telling others about their amazing experience with your brand.
Having accessible support and an efficient and easy returns process may make the difference between a happy customer and an unsatisfied one.
Building trust that lasts
Trust is everything in online shopping. When customers feel supported after making a purchase, they're much more likely to give you the benefit of the doubt if something goes wrong down the line.
It's like building a friendship: every positive interaction adds another layer of trust. And that trust translates directly into repeat business and glowing recommendations.
The post-purchase support experience makes a huge difference in building that trust. In fact, 96% of customers say excellent customer service builds trust.
Keeping your return rates down
Great post-purchase support can actually help reduce your return rates. By addressing concerns quickly and providing clear information upfront, you can prevent many returns before they happen.
This can save you money on shipping and restocking and create a smoother experience that keeps customers happy and your business healthy.
Making processes more efficient
Automation eliminates manual tasks, freeing up your team to focus on more strategic initiatives. By automating repetitive tasks, you can improve efficiency and productivity, allowing your team to focus on more value-added activities.
You can automate everything from customer support to returns and exchanges to your order tracking and more. Besides meeting customers' straightforward needs, automation allows you to focus your team's energy on solving bigger problems and strengthening customer relationships.
Accuracy, guaranteed
Automation helps ensure consistency across all your post-purchase processes.
When customers know they can count on a reliable experience every time they shop with you, it builds confidence in your brand.
Plus, fewer mistakes mean happier customers and less time spent fixing problems.
Creating better customer experiences
Speed matters in today's world, and automation helps you deliver faster, more personalized responses to customer needs.
Whether it's instant order updates or quick responses to questions, automation helps you meet and exceed customer expectations. The result? More satisfied customers who feel valued and understood.
How to automate the post-purchase experience for better loyalty
Here are some ways to automate the post-purchase experience:
Automate your returns and exchanges process
Streamline the returns process with automated return labels, tracking, and updates. Use ReturnGO to automate this process, saving time and reducing manual errors. With automated returns, you can provide a hassle-free experience for customers, encouraging them to return to your store in the future.
Automated returns can help to improve the customer experience by making the returns process easier and more convenient. 65% of customers say the speed and ease of refunds affect where they choose to shop.
By automating tasks such as generating return labels and tracking packages, you can reduce the time and effort required for customers to return items.
Think about it from their perspective — if returning an item is hassle-free, they'll feel more confident buying from you in the future. It's like having a safety net that makes customers more comfortable taking chances on new products.
Centralize customer support
In today's fast-paced world, customers expect quick and efficient support. Using a customer experience platform like Gorgias, you can manage all your customer support tickets in one place, making it easier to provide fast, accurate help when people need it.
By centralizing your post-purchase support, you can manage support tickets more efficiently, respond to customer inquiries quickly, and provide the most up-to-date information. This centralized approach can hugely improve response times.
Keep customers in the loop
Nobody likes being left in the dark about their order. Automated post-purchase notifications keep your customers informed every step of the way - from order confirmation to delivery and returns. Using tools like ReturnGO, you can send personalized updates that make customers feel looked after. This is essential for building customer loyalty.
Keeping customers informed about their orders can help reduce customer anxiety. When customers know what to expect, they’re less likely to worry about their purchase and are more likely to keep buying from you again and again.
Create an integrated workflow
To truly streamline your post-purchase customer service, if you connect your returns management system with your customer support system, you really bring all of the pieces of a puzzle together.
When these two systems are in sync, you can create a smooth workflow that makes things easier for both your team and your customers.
By automating tasks like creating support tickets and processing returns, you can save time and create a more reliable, efficient system that helps you serve customers better. No more jumping back and forth between systems to check on a return when a customer reaches out about it.
The ReturnGO-Gorgias integration makes this happen seamlessly, with features like:
- Automatic ticket generation: When a customer requests a return, a support ticket is automatically created on Gorgias, saving you time and preventing errors.
- Real-time updates: Return request information is automatically updated from ReturnGO to Gorgias, so your team always has the latest details right there.
- Centralized system: No more digging through multiple systems. This means your support agents always have access to the most up-to-date information and respond quickly and efficiently to customers.
- Smart widget: The ReturnGO-Gorgias integration includes a widget embedded in your Gorgias dashboard, for managing RMAs directly from within Gorgias. This widget enables your team to:
- View RMA information: See all the relevant details about a return, including the customer's information, the items being returned, and the reason for the return.
- Take actions on the RMA: Easily approve or reject a return request directly from Gorgias.
The ReturnGO-Gorgias integration makes it easy for your team to manage returns and communicate with customers without having to jump between systems to hunt for information.
The path to lasting customer loyalty
So, there you have it! In the world of online shopping, how you handle the after-purchase experience can be just as important as making the sale in the first place.
By automating your post-purchase process, you can create a seamless and satisfying customer experience.
Tools like ReturnGO and Gorgias can help you create the kind of experience that builds customer loyalty.
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Further reading
8 Amazing Live Chat Apps for Customer Support
Today’s brands know the mission-critical value of customer service — especially fast, persnoalized service. And few customer service channels are more effective that live chat apps, especially when it comes to online shopping.
Along with improving the customer experience, live chat apps can also help reduce repetitive support tickets and your customer support team’s workload. It also serves as a revenue-generating channel for ecommerce businesses — one that not many are tapping into (yet).
To help you start taking advantage of all the benefits of a good live chat solution, we'll explore what to look for in a live chat provider and cover the eight best live chat apps available today.
8 best live chat software for customer support
If you would like to start offering customer support via real-time chat conversations, you can't go wrong with the live chat tools below.
We included ratings from Capterra next to each live chat’s names, plus the number of reviews for the app.
1) Gorgias: 4.6 ⭐(488 reviews)
Gorgias is an all-in-one customer support platform that offers a fast-loading live chat widget in addition to a wide range of other customer support tools.
Given that 38% of customers report say they’re more likely to purchase a product if they offer live chat support, live chat can be an excellent way to drive sales and increase revenue (in addition to improving your customer support, of course).
Gorgias’ live chat solution offers unique self-service features, like:
- Quick Answer Flows that automatically answer the most common customer questions
- Order Management Flows that let customers track, return, and cancel orders without waiting on an agent — that’s right, no more WISMO tickets
Plus, for small teams and round-the-clock coverage, Gorgias’ live chat service includes a contact form that customers see when you’re offline. They can still send their message and receive a follow up message via email.
Key features
- Centralized customer support helpdesk and ticketing system
- Omnichannel customer service
- Helpful customer support metrics like first response time and resolution time
- Fast-loading live chat feature that won't slow down your website
- Seamless integrations with a variety of ecommerce tools, includin an open API
- Automated workflows for creating canned responses to common customer questions
- An advanced knowledge base for FAQS and customer self-service
- Chat campaigns (when customers get popup chat invitations proactively) to help boost sales with live chat
- Works for Shopify, Magento, and BigCommerce
Pros
- Advanced automations and self-service features
- Customer data is displayed next to the live chat ticket, leading to better personalization and customer engagement
- Easy to install, set up, and use — perfect for small businesses
Cons
- Can’t get a standalone live chat app
- Some reported issues with mobile app for iOS and Android users
- No way to pause your subscription when undergoing integrations or updating your website
2) HubSpot Live Chat: 4.4 ⭐(1,659 reviews)
Since 2006, HubSpot has provided ecommerce stores with some of the best tools available — and HubSpot Live Chat is yet another excellent offering. With HubSpot Live Chat, you can easily install a chat button on your ecommerce store. When customers contact you, agents can reply via an integrated messaging service like Slack or Facebook Messenger.
HubSpot Live Chat also allows you to create automated templates and AI-powered chatbots for responding to common questions. Easily route customer inquiries to other support channels such as email or phone, create targeted, customizable welcome messages for different pages on your site, and automatically save your chat messages/chat history for future reference.
Key features
- Customizable live chat widgets
- Offers a no-code chatbot builder
- Live chat support agents can access data from HubSpot’s CRM to guide customer conversations and get the full context about the customer while chatting
Pros
- Free to download and use for unlimited chats
- Seamless plugin with other HubSpot tools
- No coding required to customize live chat widget
Cons
- Limited number of features compared to other live chat solutions
- Bots are not as advanced as some competitors’; don’t use artificial intelligence or natural language processing
- Only good “if you go all in” on the larger Hubspot Service Hub, according to one reviewer — better for teams who are already embedded in the HubSpot ecosystem
3) LiveChat: 4.5 ⭐(745 reviews)
LiveChat is a live chat solution for both sales and customer support. It allows customers to contact a live representative via chat when they have a question or issue, and lets sales agents proactively contact website visitors during the buying process. Along with enabling live chat support via a chat box, SMS, email, Facebook Messenger, and more, LiveChat also enables you to create AI chatbots for sales and for responding to common customer inquiries.
Key features
- AI chatbots to greet customers and quickly route chats based on their response
- Automatic visitor segmentation based on the pages that they visit for targeted, personalized messaging
- Message sneak peek allows agents to see what a customer is typing for faster responses
Pros
- Offers 200+ integrations with other ecommerce tools and platforms
- Provides detailed reporting and analytics
- Features an intuitive and easy to navigate user experience (UX)
Cons
- Pricing plans are somewhat on the costly side
- Reported glitches within the notification system
- Difficult to install and set up
4) Pure Chat: 4.3 ⭐(204 reviews)
If you are looking for a straightforward and affordable live chat solution, Pure Chat is a great option. With Pure Chat, you can look forward to unlimited chats, a user-friendly dashboard, and a chat widget that is easy to customize. Pure Chat might not offer the range of features in more expensive live chat apps, but it does offer everything you need to start offering live chat support.
Key features
- Excellent chat widget customization options
- Unlimited chat history transcript storage
- Real-time analytics and visitor tracking
Pros
- Takes a matter of minutes to set up and is easy to use
- Affordable, flat-rate pricing
- iOS and Android mobile apps
Cons
- Only capable of supporting up to 10 live chat reps
- Limited features and integrations compared to more comprehensive live chat solutions
- Does not allow you to attach documents or images to a chat conversation
📚Recommended reading: Our list of email marketing automation campaigns every ecommerce business should consider.
5) LiveHelpNow: 4.2 ⭐ (145 reviews)
LiveHelpNow offers feature-rich live chat tools for both customer support and lead generation. With LiveHelpNow, you get features like SMS and text-to-chat, detailed reporting, customizable proactive chat triggers, conversion tracking, and much more.
Key features
- Automatically translates over 100 different languages
- Auto chat tagging to simplify organizing customer interactions
- View chat transcripts in real-time and send agents messages that are visible only to the agent
Pros
- Free training and implementation support
- Provides AI tools such as canned response recommendations to speed up response times and reduce agent error
- Offers a long list of useful integrations
Cons
- Chatbots only available as a paid add-on
- Somewhat prone to bugs and glitches
- UI is a little messy and confusing
6) Olark: 4.3 ⭐(221 reviews)
Olark offers everything you could want out of a live chat app, including a highly customizable chat widget, automation rules for both sales and customer support workflows, a transcript archive, and detailed live chat analytics. In addition to an impressive list of features that come included with Olark's base plan, the app also offers additional "PowerUps" such as automatic language translation, visitor insights, and visitor co-browsing that allows agents to see a customer's screen.
Key features
- Custom chatbox forms for collecting information from customers before they connect with a live representative
- Real-time analytics for chat volume, customer satisfaction, and support agent activity
- Live chat automation rules for automatically greeting customers, sending messages based on customer behavior, routing customer queries to the right department, and more
Pros
- Chat transcripts are easy to search and navigate
- Offers 25 different integrations
- Easy to set up and use
Cons
- Additional costs to remove Olark branding from your chat box
- Does not provide AI chatbots
- Automation features are limited
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7) Chatlio: 4.3 ⭐(85 reviews)
If you are already using Slack to communicate with your team members, Chatlio is a great way to use Slack as a means for communicating with your customers as well. Once you install Chatlio on your website, visitors can connect with support agents via a live chat window and support agents can then manage and respond to these messages directly from their Slack dashboard. Chatlio doesn't offer the extensive list of features and tools provided by many apps on our list, but it is affordable and easy to use — especially if you and your team are already comfortable using Slack.
Key features
- Fully customizable chat widget
- Triggers for proactively engaging customers
- A user-friendly live chat support dashboard complete with helpful analytics
Pros
- Affordable flat-rate pricing
- Effortless to install and set up
- Offers lots of customization options
Cons
- No chatbots and limited automation features
- Heavily dependent on its integration with Slack
- Pricey given its limited features
📚Recommended reading: Our guide to conversion rate optimization built in partnership with Swanky, a leading ecommerce conversion rate agency.
8) LiveAgent: 4.5 ⭐(1,424 reviews)
Established in 2006, LiveAgent was one of the first live chat solutions for ecommerce to hit the market and is still renowned today as an app that is feature-rich and easy to use. With a LiveAgent subscription, you can look forward to proactive chat invitations with lots of customization options, chat analytics and customer tracking features, an unlimited number of customizable chat widgets, and an easy-to-navigate chat history database.
Key features
- Fast-loading, customizable, and reliable chat widgets
- Allows you to create canned responses for swift resolutions to common customer inquiries
- Website monitoring for tracking both customer and support agent activity
Pros
- Offers a free plan that includes one chat button and a limited yet useful list of features
- Great customer support that is available 24/7
- Easy to install and use
Cons
- Limited automation and chat routing features
- Doesn't offer as many integrations as comparable apps
- Mobile app UI is a little clunky
Still want more suggestions? Check out our list of the best live chat apps for Shopify or, if you don't use Shopify, the best live chat apps for ecommerce.
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What features should you look for in a live chat app?
There are a lot of different apps that enable you to install a chat box or chat widget for your website visitors. There are even a number of free live chat apps available for download.
However, not all live chat solutions are created equally. Before you go to the trouble and expense of installing a live chat app on your ecommerce website, make sure that it meets the following criteria:
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Easy to set up and use for all your team members
One of the biggest benefits of live chat support is the fact it can make life easier for your support agents. If a live chat solution is overly complex and difficult to use, this defeats its purpose.
Check out an app's reviews to see what other users say about its ease of use, and be sure to choose an app that makes life easier for your team members — not harder. Websites like G2 and Capterra offer a ton of details about thousands of business apps, including real customer reviews.
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When weighing your options, reviews will also give you insights about how much technical know-how is needed to set it up.
- Is coding required?
- Will you need help from your IT team to roll it out to all your agents?
- Can setupand troubleshooting be handled within your customer service department?
Make sure that whatever you choose is reasonable and realistic for your organization.
📚Recommended reading: How to add live chat to your Shopify store.
Integrates smoothly with other tools
The best live chat apps can integrate with the rest of your tech stack, providing powerful new capabilities. For example, a live chat app that integrates with a larger helpdesk that’s connected to SMS, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, and Instagram allows you to offer live support to customers on social media.
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Likewise, a live chat app that integrates with other, non-support tools . For example, ecommerce stores should choose a live chat app that integrates with their:
- Ecommerce platform (like Shopify, BigCommerce, and Magento)
- Marketing tools (like Attentive and Klaviyo)
- Fulfillment and returns tools (like ShipBob and Loop)
- Loyalty tools (like LoyaltyLion and Yotpo)
Related: 150+ of the best tools for ecommerce.
Has a transparent pricing model
Before you purchase live chat software, make sure that you fully understand its pricing model. In some cases, it may seem that a subscription to a live chat app is highly affordable — until you read the fine print and get hit with hidden fees or a buggy free version with no support.
Most of the apps on this list range in pricing from about $10 per month to $50 per month.
However, every platform does things a little differently — some charge per user per month, some charge a flat rate, others may even charge per ticket. Determine what your organization deems “affordable” and keep this figure in mind as you compare tools.
📚Recommended reading: Live chat vs. chatbots — what’s the right combination?
Offers reliable, accessible customer support
Live chat apps are designed to enhance customer support, but it's important for the companies behind those apps to offer excellent customer support themselves.
There are plenty of instances where your live chat app might not work like it should; whether it's difficulties installing the app, getting it to integrate with another tool, or any number of other issues. In these cases, you want reliable, fast support — so it's important to prioritize apps that offer it.
Live chat seamlessly with Gorgias
According to a 2021 survey, 65% of customers have higher expectations for customer service today than they did three to five years ago. Beyond improving customer satisfaction, live chat widgets can also serve as a powerful sales tool. They enable you to proactively contact customers and guide them through the buying process, increasing revenue along the way.
Gorgias is the customer service platform built for ecommerce, and our live chat is only the tip of the iceberg. Watch the video to learn more about how Gorgias can help you improve CX and unlock a whole new channel of revenue: Happy customers.
At Gorgias, our live chat solutions are perfectly suited for both customer support and lead generation. We help your organization be proactive about support, leading to happier customers and more revenue — get started today.
22 Live Chat Statistics You Need To Know in 2023
How many times have you left an online store, mid-purchase, after trying and failing to find the answers you needed?
According to Baymard Institute, about two-thirds of carts end up abandoned. Luckily, live chat can help convert those customers — providing well-time customer service at the height of buying intent.
Companies that leverage live-chat tools on their websites provide a stronger customer experience, maximize the efficiency of their customer support agents and see bigger gains in revenue and customer retention.
Plus, it has exploded in popularity recently and continues to grow. Even if you don’t have live chat enabled on your website, there’s a good chance your competitors are in the 85% of companies projected to be using it in 2022.
In this article, we’ve listed 22 live chat and chatbot statistics that show just how beneficial these tools can be for your company and customer support team.
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1) 86% of live chat tickets end with a satisfied customer
Recent live chat statistics from the Gorgias platform demonstrate that the majority of customers are satisfied with their live chat experiences for support. In fact, we found 86% of live chat conversations on the Gorgias platform end with a 4- or 5-star CSAT rating. There are a number of issues that can arise with any type of digital customer communication method, but based on these statistics, it’s fair to say that live chat offers a clear path to customer satisfaction.
Source: Gorgias
2) 79% of businesses say offering live chat features has positively impacted sales, revenue, and customer loyalty
This data point drives home the win-win nature of live chat for companies and customers. If your company is going to invest in new technology and take the time to train your customer support team in how to use it, you’ll want to make sure it’s worth it.
If you’re still not convinced: In 2021, brands using the Gorgias chat widget generated an average of $38,702 from conversations involving chat.
Sources: ltvplus
3) Adding live chat to your website can improve conversions by 12%
Converting website visitors to customers is key to any successful ecommerce business, so most companies will do whatever they need to in order to boost their chances of a conversion. Recent statistics show that adding live chat can increase conversion rates by 12%. This data also tells us that visitors who chat via live chat are 2.8 times more likely to convert than those who do not engage in this form of communication.
This is much more attainable when you combine automation and a human touch in your chat strategy. (Not sure of the difference? Read our post on live chat vs chatbots.)
Source: ltvplus
4) Organizations that used chatbots in 2019 saved an average of $300,000
Leveraging chat tools on your company’s website can help save your company money on staffing and the costs of high churn, and can improve overall customer experience — which often leads to customers spending more money while on your site.
Source: Intercom
Keep reading with our list of 60+ customer service statistics you should use to inform your team’s support strategy.
5) Approximately 66% of customers expect an immediate response to their inquiries
Nearly two-thirds of buyers report that they expect an immediate response from a support team (“immediate” is defined as within 10 minutes). This may be partially because many customers are used to old-fashioned phone support, which usually results in an immediate solution to the problem.
This statistic should also tell you that when your customer success team is providing live chat support, they should either respond immediately, or set up an automated message that is sent immediately that states when a team member will be available to assist them.
With some live chat products, you can also provide a self-service solution. We have found that it can deflect up to 30% of tickets and provide your customers with immediate responses at any hour. You can see an example of the Gorgias self-service chat below.
Source: HubSpot
6) Most problems on live chat are resolved in 42 seconds
Speed doesn’t mean much for live chat customer service if the issues aren’t ultimately resolved. The good news is that a recent industry assessment shows that most customer issues brought to a company via live chat are resolved in less than one minute, once the agent gets to the ticket.
At the end of the day, your customers want to know they can rely on you and your team to help them out in a reasonable amount of time — especially if the issue is simple and straightforward.
Source: SnapEngage
7) 42% of customers prefer real-time online chat as their communication method
There’s no question that real-time support via chat is taking over traditional phone support. But it’s not just phone support that is losing to live chat — there are other forms of digital communication that are no longer preferred among customers. Only 23% of customers report preferring email communication for support, and 16% report social media (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc.) and forums as their preferred mode of support communication.
If a customer has a question, they’re more likely to visit your company’s website and try to engage with a live chat agent. But the real takeaway here is that different customers have different support needs.
It’s important to choose a solution that unifies your support operation across all channels, so you can meet customers where they are without keeping 15 different tabs open.
Source: SuperOffice
8) 29% of customers report that scripted live chat experiences are the most annoying
Most people can agree that talking to a robot with scripted responses can be a negative and even entirely unhelpful experience. Furthermore, 38% of companies agree that their customers are most annoyed by scripted responses on live chat.
At Gorgias, we have found shoppers are less bothered by self-service features if they are fast and, more importantly, helpful in getting them to the right agent more quickly. But if you’ve ever typed “I need an agent” five times in a row in a live chat window, you know firsthand that those experiences can be rare.
Source: ltvplus
9) 69% of companies use canned responses in their live chat service
As we discussed earlier, many customers are still turned off by auto-scripted chat bots. Even though many companies agree with this notion, more than two-thirds of companies continue to use canned responses in their live chat services.
It is important to recognize that there is a distinction between a bot that provides automated responses, and a live customer service agent who refers to a script. Your customer support agents should be able to bring in their own personalities and styles when chatting with customers, but it’s not necessary to reinvent the wheel for each response.
For example, a script at Disney might look like this:
The above script is called a Macro, and it’s an example of how we strike this balance at Gorgias. Agents can use Macros to quickly respond in a way that is personalized and in line with your company’s voice. This allows for a warmer, more natural support experience. Plus, all the information is pulled in automatically.
Source: Forbes
10) People who spend more online are more loyal to companies that offer live chat
When the pandemic started, online shopping increased dramatically. A household can easily spend $250 per month online — especially if they’re ordering groceries or items they would have normally bought in person.
Statistics show that, out of consumers who spend between $250 and $500 a month online, 63% are more loyal to companies that have live chat services. They are also more likely to be repeat customers.
Live chat services can help customers feel seen and heard, so regular customers feel comforted knowing that someone from your customer success team is one message away. This level of service will keep them coming back time and time again.
Source: Kayako
11) 38% of consumers are more likely to buy from a company if they offer live chat support
Even if customers don’t necessarily take advantage of your live chat support feature, over one-third of consumers report they are more likely to make a purchase from an online retailer if they simply have live chat support as an option. Live chat can help show customers that your company is available for any question they have, and that the company cares about their experience.
Source: Kayako
12) More than 30% of customers expect live chat on your website
To further support the fact that many customers in today’s retail landscape prefer live chat, close to one-third say that they expect to see a live chat option on a company’s website. Similarly, almost 50% of mobile device users visiting your website expect to see a live chat option. To ignore live chat is to ignore a large portion of your customers’ expectations, leading to a poor ecommerce shopping experience and ultimately, less revenue.
Source: Forrester through TechJury
Have Shopify? Learn how to add a live chat to your store.
13) By 2022, about 85% of businesses will use some form of live chat support
Recent data shows that by 2022, the majority of businesses are expected to incorporate some form of live chat experiences to their websites or mobile apps.
In addition to the statistical benefits of live chat, other benefits include an overall increase in customer satisfaction rate, better customer experience with personalized interactions, and fewer costs while providing simultaneous support to multiple customers.
Source: Software Advice
Keep your business ahead of the curve: Read about 8 must-know customer service trends for 2022.
14) More companies use live chat for sales than for customer support
Live chat is most commonly used among B2C businesses for customer support and to further enhance the customer experience. According to recent data, more companies use live chat for sales than support. Among B2B companies, 85% are using live chat mainly for sales and 66% are using it mainly for support. Among B2C companies, 74% are using live chat for sales more, while 67% are using it mainly for support.
Source: FinancesOnline
Drive more sales with these 9 tips for ecommerce upselling.
15) The global live chat software market is set to hit $987 million by 2023
Perhaps one of the most important statistics on this list, the global live chat software market is set to grow at unprecedented rates over the next year. The live chat software market is also registering a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 7.5% from 2017 to 2023.
As a business leader or owner, this is excellent news for your company because it means that you will have multiple options for live chat products. All live chat software is not created equal, so researching companies and asking questions to make sure a product can meet the unique needs of your business is key.
For example, you should consider:
- Website performance and loading time
- Front-end customization options
- The ability to use templated replies (we call them Macros)
- How easy it is to integrate other tools
- Availability options, if you don’t offer 24/7 support
Source: Allied Market Research
Related: Get our in-depth list of the best live chat apps for Shopify.
16) 95% of customers value high-quality support over speed with live chat
Research shows that almost all customers (95%) value higher quality support over speed when it comes to live chat apps. This isn’t to say that customers are content with long average wait times. Rather, it reveals that consumers prefer slower, more personalized live chat support when it leads to higher quality service.
Luckily, with a combination of live chat and a chatbot, you don’t have to compromise between speed and customer experience.
Source: Finances Online
17) Most customers prefer live chat because of the shorter wait times and added convenience
Among the reasons customers prefer live chat over any other form of customer communication are the lack of wait times (34%) and the increased convenience (26.9%). The data also shows us that customers appreciate that they can privately engage with a brand, express their concerns, and receive quick solutions to their issues.
In this case, live chat is a critical tool for building trust with your customer base and establishing long-term customer relationships.
Source: SoftwareAdvice
18) Online chatting with a human provides the quickest solutions
The time spent talking to a customer service agent is often cited as a reason customers prefer live chat over other customer communication options. In one study, chatting online with a human came in first place for the shortest chat duration, resolving an issue in just 24 minutes. This is compared to email (157 minutes), social media messaging (58 minutes), and online chat with a bot (27 minutes).
Source: TopBots
19) When initiating a live chat, 40% of consumers are skeptical they’ll receive help promptly
Although customers prefer live chat sessions over email, phone, and social media support, two-fifths of them lack faith that they’ll get the support they need in a reasonable amount of time.
While this lack of confidence isn’t ideal, it provides an opportunity for you and your customer success team to prove to your customers that your company’s live chat is fast and helpful. This is also a key reason many of our customers use self-service features in their live chat experiences.
Building trust with your customers turns them into lifelong customers, helps with your company’s ecommerce churn rate and lead generation, and can ultimately boost your customer success team's morale as they successfully resolve tickets.
Source: Kayako
20) Millennials prefer live chat for customer service over every other communication channel
When it comes to younger generations, speed and convenience are priorities. Among millennials specifically, live chat tools are the preferred method of communication when contacting a company.
According to a report by Software Advice, the top reason they prefer live chat is because it can dramatically decrease holding time. Even more, 71% of those surveyed between 16 and 24 years old think the customer experience could be drastically improved with quicker response times. That percentage drops only slightly (65%) for those between the ages of 25 and 34.
Source: Comm100
21) 29% of customers say they’ve shared a positive live chat experience with friends
As much as marketing and sales have gone digital, there’s still something extremely powerful about word of mouth. People are more likely to share positive customer service experiences over “just okay” experiences. Among younger generations like millennials and Generation Z, talking among friends and sharing experiences about online retailers is the norm.
Online shopping experiences have become even more widely discussed since the coronavirus pandemic began in 2020, as many people have defaulted to shopping online instead of making trips to brick-and-mortar stores.
Source: Kayako
22) 58% of millennials want access to brands anytime, anywhere
Following up on how millennial customers prefer to communicate with brands, more than half expect to be able to engage with a brand whenever they choose.
To be available to them across all platforms, you need to ensure your live chat integrates into a customer support solution that can bring those channels into your dashboard. Otherwise, you’ll be clicking back and forth between different windows for every new ticket.
It may seem easier to just make them come to your preferred channels, but overlooking the preferences of millennials and Gen Z can negatively affect your business as their buying power grows.
Source: Comm100
Gorgias brings live chat to ecommerce businesses
Now that you’ve explored the latest data on chat tools, you can see why a live chat tool is a worthy addition to any ecommerce business. But as we mentioned earlier, all live chat solutions are not created equal. I
Gorgias live chat integrates into our leading platform for ecommerce customer support. You can handle live chat tickets alongside those from email, phone, and social media to more easily serve your online customers. You can even proactively reach out to customers to resolve more issues and boost sales. Then automate your most repetitive inquiries to make time for the conversations that matter to your business.
Our tool was specifically built to work seamlessly with major ecommerce platforms like Shopify, Magento, and BigCommerce, and our integrations go deeper than any other platform. Sign up today to see how our chat tools can help your business grow.
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11 Live Chat Software Options for Ecommerce Shops in 2023
66% of customers report preferring live chat over any other customer support channel, and 79% of businesses say live chat improves their customer experience and overall revenue.
But the question stands: What’s the best live chat software for ecommerce? Every live chat service has its pros and cons, and your choice could greatly affect your site’s customer experience, cart abandonment, and conversion rates.
In this article, we'll take a look at the most important features to look for in a live chat solution before diving into the top 11 live chat software apps on the market today, including pricing and ratings from G2.
Features your live chat software should have
There are plenty of live chat solutions available, but not all of them are created equal. To choose the best chat widget for your ecommerce website, be sure to select a solution that includes the following features:
- Automation and dynamic templates: You should be able to automate a variety of daily tasks, like greeting customers, gathering names and product info, or sending follow-up surveys. Automated chatbots, for example, can initiate live chats with customers that meet certain criteria. Look for Macros, or templated messages and replies, to help your live chat agents work quickly and efficiently.
- Proactive capabilities: Live chat is useful for more than just receiving incoming queries. The right tool will let you reach out to customers, including with automation, to offer support and discounts codes at key moments in the customer journey. This is one of the biggest ways live chat can help your team boost sales.
- Real-time analytics: Live chat support solutions that offer real-time analytics enable you to gauge the performance of your customer support reps via metrics such as first response time, wait time, and customer satisfaction ratings.
- Branding customization: The ability to add customized branding elements to your chat window, such as your company logo or tagline, can give your ecommerce website a more memorable and professional touch.
- Multiple integrations: The best live chat apps are able to integrate with other apps on your store such as social media messaging apps and delivery tracking apps for a more interconnected and seamless customer service experience. The most important is your ecommerce platform: Your choice may depend on whether you use Shopify, BigCommerce, WordPress, Woocommerce.
- Part of a comprehensive customer service platform: Many live chat solutions are packaged as part of a larger customer service platform that includes features such as phone support and a help desk with a ticketing system. If you’d like to provide your customers with plenty of support options and optimize your CS team’s internal workflows, look for all-in-one platforms.
- File and screenshot sharing: The ability to share images, video, screenshots, and other files, like user guides or receipts, can make the process of assisting a customer via live chat faster and more efficient.
- Multiple pricing plans: A variety of premium plans and free plans, so the app is affordable but grows alongside your brand.
- Audio and/or visual notifications: Audio and/or visual notifications can be used to notify customers when an agent has submitted a response, prompting them to navigate back to the live chat window if they have opened another window during the chat or have otherwise become distracted.
- Chatbots and live chat options (and the ability to switch between them): By integrating both chatbots and live chat into your ecommerce store, you can automatically resolve most issues while still giving customers the option to connect with a live agent for more complex issues. Having chatbots on your website also allows you to offer 24/7 customer support, and 64% of customers say that 24/7 support is the best feature of chatbots.
On the topic of chatbots, take extra time to evaluate whether an app’s chatbot enhances or diminishes your customer experience:
Related: Our list of 150+ high-value ecommerce apps.
The best live chat software for ecommerce stores
Now that we've covered some of the most important features to look for in a live chat solution, let's take a look at 11 of the best live chat apps and the standout features that set these solutions apart from the competition.
1) Gorgias: 4.6 ⭐ (488 reviews)
Gorgias is a feature-rich helpdesk platform for ecommerce businesses which includes live chat, chatbots, a self-service portal, ticketing system, omnichannel customer support, and data analytics. Its live chat solution offers an impressive range of automation features, macros, and rules designed to streamline and personalize the customer support process for your customers and support agents.
For example, Gorgias offers the ability to create and automate responses to frequently asked customer questions (FAQs) like, "Where is my order?" This allows you to automatically resolve up to 30% of customer support tickets. You can also fine-tune your customer service strategy based on the accurate and insightful data analytics.
Standout Ecommerce Features
- Connect to leading ecommerce platforms like Shopify, BigCommerce, and Magento and display extensive customer data next to each ticket
- Offer automated order management and frequently asked questions in the live chat widget
- Set up chat campaigns that pop up and greet visitors with a page-specific message, letting your customer service team act like a proactive sales team
- Create custom auto-responses, templates, and macros that allow for swift responses to frequently asked questions
- Easily track support agent metrics such as ticket volume, first response time, and resolutions time
- A responsive mobile app for support on the go
Pricing
Pricing for Gorgias includes multiple tiers. Starter plans start at $10/mo. Gorgias also offers a customizable Enterprise plan for clients handling more than 5,000 tickets per month.
Who It's Best For
With a wide range of plans to choose from and affordable pricing, Gorgias is an excellent solution for both small to medium-sized ecommerce businesses and larger brands. The live chat app works seamlessly with Shopify, BigCommerce, and Magento.
Since Gorgias's live chat solution is just one feature in a large customer support ecosystem, it’s also an excellent option for anyone who wants to purchase a fully featured customer service solution.
2) LiveChat: 4.5 ⭐ (745 reviews)
LiveChat is one of the more popular and well-rounded live chat support options. This application offers key live chat features, like branding and customization; automatic notifications whenever a customer wants to chat, tags, file-sharing; and archive capabilities. LiveChat also offers an integrations store where you can find helpful plugins for your chat window.
Standout Ecommerce Features
- Add tags to chat conversations for improved sorting and analytics
- Push longer conversations and more complex issues to a customer support ticket
- Request feedback from customers in the form of a survey response at the conclusion of their live chat
- Share files such as screenshots and documents between customers and support agents
- Add integrations, add-ons, and APIs into your chat window from LiveChat's integrations store
Pricing
LiveChat starts at $16 per month per agent billed annually for the Starter plan and moves up to $50 per month per agent billed annually for the Business plan. LiveChat also offers a customizable Enterprise plan.
Who It's Best For
The per-agent fee structure may not be cost effective for businesses with medium or large customer support teams. If you’re looking for a well-rounded live chat solution and can justify paying a minimum of $16 per month per agent, then LiveChat is a good option to consider.
Explore our Gorgias vs. LiveChat comparison to see how these two platforms stack up.
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3) Intercom: 4.4 ⭐ (2,471 reviews)
Intercom is a customer communications platform that offers support, engagement, and marketing tools, including live chat. Intercom’s Messenger tool allows businesses to set up chatbots that target specific audience segments and easily route tickets that require human help to the appropriate channels.
Standout Ecommerce Features
- See conversations across all channels in a single inbox
- Trigger automatic chat messages when customers meet certain criteria
- Direct customers to your knowledge base or self-service center using chatbots or apps
- Automatically route more complex tickets to a live chat agent
- Integrate Intercom with 300+ different tools and platforms, including Salesforce, Slack, and Hubspot
Pricing
Intercom splits its platform into three different tools and plans — Conversational Support, Conversational Customer Engagement, and Conversational Marketing — each of which requires you to sign up for a demo or contact Intercom for pricing. The all-in one Starter plan made for “very small businesses” starts at $67 per month billed annually.
Who It's Best For
Intercom targets all business sizes, from early-stage to enterprise, and discusses use cases for ecommerce, finance, education, and healthcare industries.
4) Drift: 4.4 ⭐ (790 reviews)
Like most live chat solutions, Drift offers both automated chatbots as well as live chat functionality. What really sets Drift apart is its focus on B2B and SaaS organizations and its data-driven approach to customer support.
Drift’s Visitor Intelligence software combines data from your business software (CRM, sales and marketing tools, etc) and databases like Clearbit and Crunchbase to identify web visitors and better personalize interactions. Drift also offers chatbots powered by AI and machine learning to replicate the behaviors and performance of your most effective sales and customer service reps.
Standout Ecommerce Features
- Connect customers using AI-powered chatbots that that tailor their conversations depending on the web visitor
- Eliminate forms for high-value buyers and direct them to the right rep or account manager
- Automatically collect and analyze rich data on leads and customers who visit your site
- Create templates that enable swift response to commonly asked questions
- Integrate the Drift platform with a wide range of other tools and platforms
Pricing
Drift offers three different plans — Premium, Advanced, and Enterprise — but requires that you contact them for pricing details.
Who It's Best For
Drift is primarily designed for B2B companies and ecommerce stores, though the company does offer a plan designed specifically for startups as well. It could be a great solution for anyone who wants to utilize the functionalities of AI and machine learning for live chat customer engagement.
5) Tawk.to: 4.6 ⭐(166 reviews)
Tawk.to is a solution focused only on live chat customer support and claims to be the most widely used live chat software in the world. With Tawk.to, you won't get more advanced features such as AI chatbots. Instead, what you'll get is a straightforward live chat window that allows customers who visit your site to seamlessly connect with a chat agent.
Tawk.to certainly isn't as comprehensive as the other solutions on our list. However, it stands out because it’s completely free to download and use. This makes it a great option for anyone who wants to test the waters of live chat for their customer support team without any upfront investment.
Standout Ecommerce Features
- Integrate a live chat solution into your ecommerce store completely free of charge
- Answer chats from your Android or iOS mobile device with a clean mobile app
- Create response “shortcuts” (canned messages) and direct customers to the built-in knowledge base
- Hire third-party chat agents at a rate of $1 per hour for additional support
- Collect basic performance analytics and monitor web visitors in real time
Pricing
Tawk.to is free to download and use. However, if you’d like to remove the "Powered by Tawk.to" branding from the product, you'll need to pay $19 per month. Tawk.to also offers you the ability to outsource your live chat support to third-party agents at a rate of $1 per hour.
Who It's Best For
As a free-to-use solution, Tawk.to is ideal for smaller companies that want to offer basic live chat support without having to purchase a costly subscription. For larger companies, though, a more comprehensive and advanced solution is likely a better choice.
6) Freshdesk: 4.4 ⭐ (2,691 reviews)
Freshdesk, formerly known as Freshchat, is a solution that offers chatbots in addition to the ability to connect customers with a live support agent. It's a simple, no-/low-code solution that provides just about everything you could want out of a live chat application, including automated chat routing, chat transcripts, the ability to share files, the ability to create tickets from chats, and beyond.
Standout Ecommerce Features
- Automatically route customers from a chatbot to a live support agent
- Integrate with over 1,000 pre-delivered marketing and customer support tools from the Freshdesk Marketplace
- Share files and screens between customers and support agents
- Trigger messages or email campaigns based on customer-specific behavior
Pricing
Freshdesk offers plans that range from completely free to use to $69 per agent per month billed annually depending on the number of agents you employ and the specific features that you are looking to purchase.
Who It's Best For
The free-to-use version of Freshdesk is ideal for smaller businesses that want to affordably test out live chat customer support, while Freshdesk's paid plans can be great for larger companies that handle more tickets on a regular basis.
7) Zendesk Chat: 4.3 ⭐ (5,388 reviews)
Zendesk is a live chat solution that’s free to use if you only have one agent speaking with customers. It comes with all the other live chat features you expect from a comprehensive platform, including multichannel support, custom triggers, and the ability to track and monitor visitors on your site.
Standout Ecommerce Features
- Respond to customer support tickets via web, phone, email, SMS, and social media messaging from a single dashboard
- Automatically route customers to helpful resources or the appropriate agent via AI-powered triggers
- Quickly and easily integrate Zendesk with common ecommerce platforms such as Magento, Shopify, and BigCommerce.
Pricing
Zendesk offers several different plans that range from free to $59 per agent per month.
Who It's Best For
If you only have one agent handling live chat customer support tickets then Zendesk is a great solution to consider since you will be able to access all of its features free of charge. Zendesk is also a great live chat option for Shopify store owners since its Shopify extension is well-polished according to user reviews.
8) Olark: 4.3 ⭐ (221 reviews)
Olark is another "just the basics" live chat support tool that is ideal for smaller companies with a limited number of support agents. With that said, Olark does offer some nice features, including triggered messaging, custom pre-chat forms, and offline messaging.
Standout Ecommerce Features
- Present customers with pre-chat forms that allow you to collect important information and get context before matching them with a live agent
- Automatically send suggestions or special offers based on specific triggers
- Offer customers an offline messaging option and follow up at a later time
Pricing
Olark is free to use provided you only have a single agent and don't handle more than 20 live chat tickets per month. For the full-featured product, you will need to pay $29 per month per agent. Olark also offers an enterprise-level option called Olark Pro that features variable pricing.
Who It's Best For
The free-to-use version of Olark is a good choice for especially small stores that only employ a single live chat support agent. While the paid version of Olark does offer some useful features for larger companies, there are better choices available for the cost.
9) Tidio: 4.7 ⭐ (1,314 reviews)
Tidio is a live chat and chatbot software that includes an impressive range of features in its free-to-use version. While you will have to pay extra for key features such as chatbot templates and live visitor monitoring, the broad toolset that Tido offers free of charge (inlcuidng unlimited chats) makes it a solid option for businesses that need to stretch their budget as far as possible.
Standout Ecommerce Features
- Set automated messages targeting website visitors based on their activity
- Store visitor info such as tags, locations, and preferences
- Create email responses for offline queries
- Create chatbot templates
Pricing
Tidio is free to download and use. However, you will have to pay extra for any premium features such as the ability to create chatbot templates and the ability to monitor the visitors on your site.
Who It's Best For
As one of the more capable free-to-use live chat solutions, Tidio is one of the better options for anyone who wants to offer live chat support without having to pay a subscription fee.
10) Zoho SalesIQ: 4.4 ⭐ (241 reviews)
Zoho SalesIQ is a customer engagement tool aimed at marketing, sales, lead generation, and support teams which also has live chat. The platform includes custom chatbots, advanced monitoring and reports, and the ability to easily switch between live chat and other key support channels. The centralized dashboard lets you track the performance of your live agents with ease.
Standout Ecommerce Features
- Create canned replies to frequently asked questions
- Route live chat sessions to a phone call
- Integrate with a variety of other customer support tools, including your website's help desk
- Monitor the performance of your support agents via a convenient, centralized dashboard
Pricing
The base version of Zoho SalesIQ is free to download and use. There are also paid versions of Zoho SalesIQ that offer additional features, and these paid versions range from $7 per month per agent billed annually to $20 per month per agent billed annually.
Who It's Best For
Zoho SalesIQ markets its solution to “every type of business,” including finance, ecommerce, travel, real estate, education, and restaurants. The free version holds onto core features and the paid versions are relatively affordable compared to other all-in-one platforms. It’s a great choice for startups and small businesses that are looking to get a lot of customer support tools for minimal cost.
11) LivePerson: 3.7 ⭐(66 reviews)
LivePerson is an AI-powered communication platform designed to help businesses and government organizations optimize their audience experience. The Conversational Cloud provides a command center to answer questions and engage customers via live chat, as well as help customers on their preferred channels.
Standout Ecommerce Features
- Automate many customer interactions on your online store using LivePerson's Conversational AI
- Connect customers with a live chat agent via a range of messaging platforms, including Facebook Messenger, SMS, WhatsApp and Twitter Direct Messages
- Construct conversation flows for your chatbots to follow
- Convert inbound calls to messaging conversations
Pricing
LivePerson requires that you contact their company for a pricing quote.
Who It's Best For
LivePerson currently markets its solution to companies in industries such as retail, banking, travel, real estate, insurance, DeFi, government, education, and automotive.
Still looking for the right live chat app? Check out our list of the best live chat apps in general, not just for ecommerce.
The best ecommerce live chat is the one built for ecommerce
At Gorgias, we’re proud to offer one of the most comprehensive and feature-rich customer support platforms available today — built specifically for ecommerce stores like yours. While all of these solutions offer great chat boxes, only one makes design decisions based on conversations with ecommerce brands and integrates with all the ecommerce tools you already use.
With Gorgias, you can look forward to AI-powered chatbots, live chat and conversational support, in addition to an ecommerce help desk and ticketing system. Send out automated updates and messages, automate common customer support tasks, and much more.
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Learn more about Gorgias for Shopify stores, Gorgias for Magento stores, or Gorgias for BigCommerce stores to see how you can benefit.
How to Leverage the Power of Live Chat for Sales
Ecommerce brands like yours usually turn to live chat for customer support. Your team is ready to answer, lightning fast, when a customer asks where their order is or how to request an exchange. This is great practice: Most customers expect some type of live chat and fast responses.
But that’s just the tip of the iceberg — live chat is a great sales tool, too. Check out these live chat sales statistics:
- 79% of businesses say that implementing live chat positively impacted their revenue and customer loyalty
- Live chat can boost your conversion rate by 12%
- 38% of customers are more likely to buy if your site has live chat
Live chat boosts sales because it connects shoppers to your team while they’re browsing your site, exactly when they’re on the fence about a purchase. It lets potential customers get answers to pre-sales questions and make a confident purchase. It also lets you highlight promotions and free shipping, offer discounts, collect customer email addresses, and upsell shoppers.
Let’s dive into each of those reasons (and more) to help you understand why live chat is your new sales machine.
How live chat helps drive revenue
At its most basic, live chat drives revenue by allowing your customers to reach out to your brand with very little effort. From there, you can answer pre-sales questions and highlight incentives that unblock purchases.
Here’s what that looks like with some specific examples:
1) Gives shoppers the information they need to make a purchase
Imagine you’re trying to buy a new toy for your child from an international store. You’ve found information about domestic shipping but can’t find out whether they ship outside the country (and whether it’ll arrive by your child’s birthday). You look for the answer on the product page, the checkout page, an FAQ page — nothing.
While we recommend putting detailed shipping information in multiple locations on your site, live chat is that crucial last line of defense for these kinds of pre-sales questions before customers decide to just open up Amazon, where they know they’ll get it within two days.
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Shipping information is just the beginning. Customers turn to live chat to answer pre-sales questions of all kinds. Questions will vary depending on your industry, but could include:
- When should I expect to get my order if I buy it today?
- What size leggings should I get?
- Are your snack bars safe for peanut allergies?
- Is your deodorant 100% vegan?
- Do you have any special deals if I buy more than one item?
- Is your return window longer during the holidays?
- Can you make this item in a custom color?
Jewelry brand Jaxxon does a great job of answering many of these kinds of questions in their chat widget with self-service features we’ll describe in more detail below).
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Once you answer pre-sales questions, you can use live chat conversations to:
- Offer discounts to shoppers
- Highlight that you offer free shipping for orders over $100 to boost average order value (AOV)
- Recommend better or superior products for the customer’s needs
- Much, much more.
📚 Recommended reading: Learn how Jaxxon boosted overall revenue by 46% with self-service in live chat.
2) Engages customers during the shopping process
When customers are on your website, they’re one short step away from placing an order. If they need to get ahold of you and their only option is to leave your website and compose a new email, you’re disrupting the flow of shopping, adding devastating effort to your sales process.
Having live chat on your site for quick questions and customer support makes shopping on your site easier, faster, and less effortful — all elements of a great customer experience, right on the page.
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You give customers the fast, personalized help they need without letting them wander away from your site and abandoning their cart. They don’t even need to hunt down your contact page or dig for your email address. The live chat button is right there, on the page.
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Engaging a shopper at the right time can be make-or-break for your business. Learn how CROSSNET closed a $450,000 sale using Gorgias live chat.
3) Captures emails for future marketing campaigns
With live chat tools such as Gorgias, you can give customers a contact form so they can still send a message when no agents are online.
This accomplishes two things:
- It helps your customer service team follow up and answer the question (via email) as soon as they get back online. The faster you can provide a helpful answer, the more likely they are to check out rather than abandoning their cart.
- It gives you customer contact information which you can add to your email marketing list, so you can send them new sale announcements, discounts, and other marketing and promotional materials.
The email capture feature on Gorgias live chat allows us to collect new email addresses on a daily basis! This is highly convenient and helps us drive sales.
— Danny Taing, Founder & CEO
📚 Recommended reading: Learn how Topicals boosted sales by 78% through pre-sales customer conversations.
4) Offers self-service features for shoppers
Inviting a slew of new questions and messages may turn you off — especially if you’re a smaller brand trying to minimize the size and cost of your support team. That’s why some live chat software like Gorgias offers self-service functionality: to answer a bulk of shopper questions without any agent interaction.
Most live chat tools use chatbots to automate live chat interactions. But speaking to a robot that’s pretending to be human is a deceiving (and often frustrating):
Instead, we find that most ecommerce brands (and shoppers) prefer interactive self-service, where you can pre-load frequently asked questions that shoppers click for an instant answer:
This way, key pre-sales information is available for shoppers without a torrent of tickets flooding your inbox. That said, we’ve observed that these Quick Response Flows filter out tons of repetitive questions and lead to more complex questions that require a human agent. More on that in the following section.
5) Boosts brand affinity
Not all interactions should be automated. Live chat conversations — even those that begin with self-service — open the door to more genuine, delightful conversations where your support agent can offer personalized support and show off your brand’s most appealing benefits (even if the customer didn’t explicitly ask).
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ALOHAS, a sustainable fashion brand, is a great example of this. Their unique on-demand model prompts many questions about shipping time, so they created a Quick Response Flow about their shipping policy. When customers click, they get a soft sell on the program:
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If the customer is still confused, needs more information about the program, or wants advice from the sales associate, they just have to click “No, I need more help” to connect with a human agent.
Since launching Automate (which includes Quick Response Flows) three months ago, we have doubled the revenue from customer support and we’re on our way to triple the revenue we get from chat.
— Annalisa Micalizzi, Manager of Global Customer Service at ALOHAS
6) Allows you to reach out to customers proactively
With certain live chat tools, you can create automatic chat campaigns to proactively reach out to customers shopping on your site. This kind of customer engagement is like a friendly member of your sales team asking if shoppers in a brick-and-mortar store need help. But it is much less intrusive than a pop-up.
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You can use chat campaigns to:
- Welcome customers to your store
- Ask customers if they need help
- Remind them about free shipping
- Share a new product launch
- Direct shoppers to your best sellers
- Much more
With Gorgias, you can even link these proactive chat campaigns to specific pages and customer browsing behavior.n This way, you’re sending the right message to the right person at the right time to increase positive interactions and conversion rate.
For example, pet food brand Franklin set up a chat campaign on each of their products for sensitive animals to ask shoppers if they have any questions about their pets’ unique needs:
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This is a great example of how proactive outreach can transform your brand into a trusted, helpful shopping partner. Conversations that educate shoppers and help them find the perfect product are great for building shopper confidence on their first purchase as well as long-term loyalty.
7 best practices for using live chat for sales
Now that we understand some of the big-picture ways live chat can boost online sales, let’s look at some tips to keep in mind while implementing live chat for sales:
1) Be available when your customers need it
Availability is where live chat shines. Customers can type their problems into the chat box and get answers from your team in seconds. Spend time understanding when your customers shop and staff your live chat accordingly.
Most online shopping occurs between 8 p.m. and 9 p.m., with another peak on Wednesdays and Thursdays from 10 a.m. to 11 a.m. However, that might not be true for your store and these shopping windows don't account for time zones.
Use tools like Lucky Orange and DeepMine to study your site’s unique traffic and sales patterns and base your staffing around your unique customer behavior.
If you can't staff your live chat 24/7, Gorgias live chat offers a variety of tools — including autoresponders, contact forms, self-service flows, and more — to keep servicing your customers, even when you’re offline for the night.
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2) Collect customer insights with live chat
Live chat is great to solve individual customer issues, but you can take note of patterns and pain points in customer feedback to make larger-impact improvements to your product and customer experience (CX).
For example, if customers regularly reach out with questions about shipping, you might want to create clearer and more visible shipping policies or FAQs. Consider creating Macros that agents can use to ask follow-up questions to understand what confused or frustrated customers.
📚 Recommended reading: Learn how Chomps, a better-for-you snack brand, uses Gorgias to analyze tickets and improve their product and CX.
3) Set up automatic greetings to reduce first-response time
You may not be able to immediately answer every single live chat ticket, even when you’re online. If that’s the case, give your agents some buffer time by creating an automated initial prompt that boosts your first-response times.
This way, shoppers that message your brand will know their message was received, and hopefully wait a few extra moments before giving up on the hope of contacting you. This buys your team members a few seconds to pull up the chat request and respond.
Here’s what a rule to automatically send this kind of message could look like:
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4) Streamline the checkout page, including scaling back on proactive chat
We all know a streamlined checkout process is key to driving purchases and reducing cart abandonment. It’s worth paying attention to when 70% of customers abandon their carts before completing the checkout process.
While live chat might seem like a great way to push customers over the finish line, we recommend holding off on any proactive chats at this point in the shopping journey. If customers have made it this far, it's best to eliminate distractions.
At the very least, set your chat campaign to wait for at least 60 seconds. That way, you’re not barraging them with too many distractions the moment they land on the checkout page.
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5) Continue chat conversations after the live chat ends
We've already covered that live chat is an excellent lead generation and qualification tool. With that in mind, don’t waste the opportunity to do some follow-up after a live chat session ends — the real value of your customers comes from repeat purchases, after all, and this is what makes customer service so important for growth.
Here are some ideas and tips to keep the conversation going:
- Send a customer satisfaction (CSAT) survey, which you can do automatically with Gorgias. This shows customers you value their feedback and lets you collect key insights right after each interaction.
- Add customers to automated mailing lists if you collected their email with a contact form (but make it easy for them to opt-out).
- In any future conversations (that they or you start), refer back to your conversation in live chat, especially if the issue is related. A CRM-like helpdesk like Gorgias that displays a customer's order and interaction history makes this very easy.
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6) Make personalized product suggestions
One of the best ways to use live chat to boost sales is to offer customers personalized product recommendations during live chat sessions.
When you instruct your customer support agents to function as sales reps and seek out upsell and cross-sell opportunities during live chat conversations, you can boost metrics like your conversion rate and average order value (AOV).
You can even include links to products in your store that display visually in the live chat conversation:
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7) Use dashboards to learn what's working and optimize
One of the biggest benefits of Gorgias' live chat solution is that it comes with detailed dashboards that include a wide range of insights and analytics, from the performance and speed of your support team to the revenue you’re earning.
Track sales-related metrics — like revenue growth and the type of tickets that converted the most — and for helpful insights at scale. You can also see how much time and money live chat is saving your team by monitoring key CS performance metrics like first response time, resolution time, and closed tickets by day or agent.
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All seven of the strategies we've covered to drive sales with live chat can be optimized and prioritized based on how they perform. To do this, you need to be able to measure your key live chat metrics and adjust accordingly.
Optimizing your live chat support strategy for maximum sales is much easier with a dashboard that provides real-time insights at both the macro and micro levels.
📚 Recommended reading: Our VP of Success and Support’s guide to customer support return-on-investment (ROI).
Common live chat mishaps to avoid
Live chat offers a wealth of benefits when employed correctly, but there are a few common mistakes to avoid:
Implementing the wrong live chat tool
Not all live chat apps are created equal. If you want to leverage live chat to its full potential, choosing a tool that offers the right features and functionality for your specific business is important.
For example, some tools may have a chatbot that’s too simplistic or requires a heavy amount of coding or additional fee to set up custom chat messages, triggers, or automatic replies. Others may require you to choose between a chatbot and live chat (we think they work best together — here’s why.)
With Gorgias, ecommerce stores can:
- Create fast-loading live chat widgets.
- Offer live chat support across various messaging platforms, including SMS and Facebook Messenger.
- Create automated responses to common customer questions.
- Automatically collect and organize customer insights.
Learn more about how many ecommerce stores use Gorgias to increase their sales through live chat.
Failing to transfer to a live agent
Canned responses are great for reducing your team's workload and striking while the iron is hot but it’s important to know when to provide more personalized (human) responses. This might be for VIP customers, for customers with a very specific question that isn't fully answered by your templated response, and more.
With Gorgias, you can utilize advanced intent and sentiment detection features to pinpoint what a customer is asking so that you never mishandle their request. Gorgias also makes it easy to transfer live chat tickets to other agents so customers can always get the help they need.
Losing support tickets, responding late, or providing incorrect information
If you want to offer your customers live chat support, developing a well-organized system for prioritizing live chat tickets is essential. Without the right system in place, issues such as lost tickets, late responses, and inaccurate information are bound to occur.
Thankfully, Gorgias makes it easy to organize and manage live chat support tickets and enables you to create a comprehensive knowledge base.
Use intent and sentiment analysis and rules to automatically label, prioritize, and assign tickets to the right agent. Gorgias' views let you see all open tickets at once, so nothing falls through the cracks. Plus, since Rules helps you skip manual ticket triaging and routing, fewer tickets will get lost or delayed.
Interrupting the purchase journey with intrusive live chat
We've already discussed how ecommerce businesses can use live chat to reduce cart abandonment — and how it's vital not to interrupt the purchasing process. You can keep an eye on this by tracking your conversion rates on pages where you implement live chat. If your conversion rates go down, you might be overdoing live chat and turning customers away.
While live chat is powerful, more isn't always better. Prioritize a smooth, pleasant shopping experience over the opportunity for a few more sales. You don't want to appear spam-happy.
Ensuring that your live chat strategy actually benefits your checkout process is also key: If installing a live chat widget on your checkout page leads to fewer conversions, it may be necessary to rethink your approach to pre-sale customer support.
Turn your live chat into a sales machine with Gorgias
Live chat is a fantastic tool that will greatly impact your revenue. It can help you close the gap in the buyer journey, converting more people from window shoppers to new (and repeat) customers.
Gorgias is the best live chat and help desk ticketing system for ecommerce stores, and is just the tool you need to start boosting sales and growing your revenue.
Sign up for a Gorgias account or book your demo to start boosting your CX and sales with live chat.
What’s New With Gorgias – May 2022 Product Updates
Each month, our product team holds a casual, conversational event with our customers to demo new features, receive real-time feedback, and answer live Q&As.
Watch the video recap here, or read on for a recap of the latest releases.
1. SMS is officially live for all accounts (3:10)
With this new channel, you can receive and respond to SMS and MMS messages within Gorgias. This makes it easy for your customers to communicate with your store while they’re on the go, and easy for your agents to provide fast, conversational support.
We’re releasing SMS this quarter as a free trial for every customer on every plan. Conversations will count toward your plan’s ticket count, but there are no additional charges for minutes, usage, phone numbers, etc. In the coming months, we’ll be assessing the best way to provide Voice and SMS so we can continue to innovate and build powerful new features for these channels.
2. SMS Pro-tip: Create a Gorgias Rule to set up a double opt-in (11:55)
If you want customers to consent to receive SMS messages before your agents actually reply, you can do this with a simple Rule in Gorgias. Here’s what it would look like:
Read this article for four more Gorgias Rules to help automate SMS.
3. Agents will now receive browser notifications when a ticket is assigned to them (14:55)
This is especially great for anyone who gets tickets assigned to them, but may not be looking at Gorgias throughout their entire workday. (Think managers, social media collaborators, etc.)
To see these notifications, you may need to adjust your browser and/or computer settings. You can see an example for Chrome + Mac in our official Product Update.
4. Quick response flows in self-service got a revamp (21:48)
Quick response flows bring in a critical component to self-service, creating more ways to engage with shoppers who visit your store online. We designed quick response flows with the guidance that 60% of the time, customers use chat to ask pre-purchase questions. Most successful merchants leverage their FAQ content to prompt conversation with quick response flows that result in generating revenue, trust and loyalty.
If you haven’t yet activated quick response flows, you’re in for a treat. With this revamp, you can now easily manipulate every step of the experience for quick response flows from self-service settings. Immediately under the Quick Response Flows tab, you can write in any question and answer you prefer and hit save. There is no other place or screen you’d need to navigate. Using the preview on the right, you can reassure the quality of the experience you want to create for your customers.
If customers click on a quick response flow and find the information they need, this will not count towards your monthly ticket volume.
If they click on a quick response flow and select “No, I need more help” option, it will create a ticket for an agent to address.
Best practices
It’s amazing when our merchants start using a feature and take it to the next level. We’ve seen some of the best practices to include creating unique tags for each quick response flow created (e.g. Quick_Response_Flow_1), then adding a corresponding view in Tickets. This way, you can track closely the conversations prompted by quick response flows and dedicate a select group of agents who are trained to expand on the subject and help your customers become fans. For more on this subject, check out Quick Response Flows help doc here.
Customer Q&A (26:50)
Tune into that timestamp if you want the full 25 minutes of customer-led questions and answers from our product team. Here were a few of the highlights!
Gorgias Phone vs Aircall: What are the differences? What’s the timeline for improvement for Gorgias Voice? (32:40)
Gorgias phone is an easy way to add a basic phone line to your store. If you’re looking for advanced, full call center features, our partners like Aircall or RingCentral may be a better solution for you.
For example, their phone-specific statistics are more in-depth than ours, but the ability to create a phone number and answer it in the Gorgias helpdesk is naturally easier with Gorgias.
Our long-term vision for Gorgias Phone is not to fully compete with apps like Aircall, but rather to invest in ecommerce-specific solutions so you can provide the best voice support to your shoppers.
What’s up with WhatsApp? (37:50)
It’s our next new channel, coming Q3! We have access to the API and are ready to start building at the end of the quarter. (Just need to polish up a few existing channel bugs first.)
Any plans to integrate with Shopify Blogs? (43:15)
Not yet, but we’d love to hear more feedback about this if it’s something you’re interested in! Submit this idea on our Product Roadmap to help us prioritize it.
Join us for the next monthly product event
That completes our recap of our May customer product event. We hold these events once as a month as a way to review the latest releases and connect with our customers in real-time. It’s a favorite – from both customers, and the Gorgias team.
If you’d like to sign up for the next one to attend live, you can register here. We’d love to have you join us!
13 Live Chat Support Metrics to Measure and Improve Your Chat Strategy
If you’re using a live chat for your ecommerce business — to support customers, drive sales, or both — you already know it’s a powerful tool.
That tool is made even mightier with analytics and reporting. Stores that don’t track support metrics for live can only take educated guesses to answer questions like:
- When should we staff live chat? How many agents do we need at any given time?
- How does live chat support performance compare against other channels?
- How does live chat compare to other pop-ups in terms of conversion rates?
Below, we’ll cover key live chat metrics that go beyond your response and resolution times. You’ll also get finer insights about how your chat strategy boosts your bottom line.
Don’t have live chat yet? Check out our list of the best live chat software (or, the best chat apps for Shopify or BigCommerce).
What do online shoppers expect from live chat?
Before you look into analytics and reporting for your live chat operations, it’s good to get a baseline of how customers expect live chat to fit into the customer experience.
Here are some statistics that highlight what your shoppers expect from your live chat support operations.
- 42% of customers want a response within 60 minutes on social media (Convince & Convert).
- Customers expect a response within 45 seconds for live chat (Com100).
- 53% of customers are willing to wait only three minutes to talk to an agent on the phone (BizFluent).
People want to get things done as quickly as possible. Ultimately, it’s best to start where you are and work on improving internally. But, when you know how you stack up to the competition, it can help.
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Next, take a look at the key performance indicators (KPIs) you should follow.
📚 Read more:
- 25 Customer Support Metrics To Measure Your Team’s Impact & How to Calculate
- 22 Live Chat Statistics You Need To Know in 2022
The Live Chat Support Metrics You Need to Follow
To get a complete understanding of where you stand and where your customer support team can improve live chat efforts, here are the metrics you should follow (in no particular order).
1) Contact rate
Your contact rate is the percentage of active customers that reach out to you via your chat strategy on any given day, month, year, or other period of time.
Contact rate is tricky: If customers are messaging you with pre-sales questions, that’s a good thing. They’re deep in the consideration phase and need information about sizing, returns, or shipping to make a purchase.
But if people are messaging you with post-sales questions (like “Where is my order?” or WISMO) then you have a problem. A high number of these chats indicates some part of your customer support information is unclear or confusing.
Remember that avoidable customer support interactions — not counting pre-sales interactions, which are more like a sales consult — are actually 4x more likely to drive customer disloyalty than customer loyalty. A low rate indicates that customers are able to find everything they need without your help.
How to measure contact rate
The formula for determining your contact rate is to divide the number of customers who reach out via live chat in a time period, such as month, by the total number of customers. Then multiply by 100.
For example, if you had 500 customers in December, and 153 of them reached out for help via live chat, your contact rate would be 30.6%.
If you use a helpdesk like Gorgias, you can see contact rate broken down by channel, agent, and more right within the platform.
Tips to improve contact rate
Analyzing why customers contact you via live chat will help you reduce your contact rate.
For example, most customer inquiries tend to be about shipping and tracking. If you’re getting many questions about your shipping policies, that indicates you haven’t made this information clear and easy to find on your website.
Another solution is to add self-service options to your chat widget for frequently asked questions, such as shipping info, parcel tracking, and order cancellation. You can add these as buttons or as automated chatbot replies.
📚 Read more:
- Customer Service Messaging: Tips and Templates for SMS + Conversational Channels
- Playbook: How Berkey Filters Drove Customer Adoption of a New SMS Support Channel
2) First-response time
Your first-response time (FRT) is also called your average wait time — essentially how long it takes to reply to a new chat from a customer. Specifically, it’s the response to the very first chat message from a customer.
Customers have high expectations when using a chat widget. According to Klipfolio, users expect a response via chat within 90 seconds, compared to 24 hours for email. That’s fast! But that’s why customers prefer chat when it’s available.
Your first interaction with a customer is a crucial time to secure their trust and loyalty with a fast response. Faster responses mean a higher customer satisfaction (CSAT) score, which we’ll discuss further in depth later on.
Your first-response time should become shorter over time. When you see a decrease in first-response time without a spike in website traffic, it is a cause for concern and should be looked into.
How to measure FRT
Your first-response time can be calculated by determining how long it took to respond to every first chat message within a time period, then dividing by the number of messages.
For example, if it took 74,000 seconds to respond to 800 tickets in September, the first-time response rate was 92.5 seconds, on average.
Thankfully, a helpdesk such as Gorgias can provide this number to you.
Tips to improve first-response time
Improving your first-response time requires you to have support agents available if your live chat is set to active.
Make sure to set your business hours in your chat widget. This way, after-hours customer inquiries will be converted to an emailed ticket. Appearing offline also sets customer expectations, letting them know a response won’t come until the next day.
Keep an eye on those metrics to determine if there are particular days, hours, or seasons when incoming chats rise and more support employees need to be on hand.
3) Average response time
While the first-response time is all about that initial chat message, your average response time is how long it takes to respond to any and all incoming chat messages.
That first-response time benchmark of 90 seconds still applies here — you don’t want your customer to get a quick first response and then grow frustrated as responses take longer.
How to measure average response time
To calculate this, add up the total time your team has taken to respond to requests during a specific time period, then divide by the number of responses sent during that same time period.
For example, if your team spent 72,800 seconds responding to 800 messages, that’s an average chat response time of 91 seconds.
Again, Gorgias’ metrics can provide this number for you.
Tips to improve average response time
This is another opportunity for self-service options and chatbots to shine.
Gorgias’ Automation Add-on allows you to add self-service order management options and quick response flows to your chat widget, giving customers instant answers to their questions or options for tracking or canceling orders.
4) Resolution Time
The resolution time is how long it takes for a customer’s issue to be resolved after they first reach out via chat. This is also called the average resolution time (ART) or average handle time.
This includes the entire chat duration, starting when they send that first message, and ending when they’re satisfied their concern is addressed.
Use this metric to determine how long it typically takes to solve your customers’ problems. Like first-responses, they want a resolution as quickly as possible.
Similar to first-response time, customers expect a quicker resolution when they start a chat session then when they reach out via email.
How to measure resolution time
The average resolution time is calculated by dividing the total duration of all chat conversations in a given time period, divided by the number of customers.
You can also see this number in your Gorgias help desk metrics.
Historical view of average resolution time
Tips to improve resolution time
You can use automation to speed response and therefore resolution times.
Study your incoming messages to determine frequently asked questions and create templated responses (or Macros, in Gorgias) and then create automated Rules to respond to tickets.
In Gorgias, these templated responses can be sent quickly and efficiently, and can even pull in personalized customer information like names, order numbers, and tracking info.
5) First-contact resolution rate
Also called the first-contact resolution (FCR) rate looks at how many incoming chat sessions are resolved with a single reply. These are also called one-touch tickets.
Solving issues with a single reply is the best-case scenario with incoming chat requests. As we mentioned earlier, high-effort customer support interactions drive disloyalty, so keeping these interactions short and sweet will increase customer satisfaction.
How to measure first contact resolution
The FCR rate is calculated by finding the total number of chats resolved with a single reply, and dividing it by the total number of incoming chats that were eligible to be resolved with a single reply.
Tips to improve first contact resolution
In addition to automation and self-service options we’ve already discussed, this is a KPI where it’s worth digging into your chat history.
If a chat session took more than one response to be resolved, ask yourself:
- Is there a way you can speed up the process for next time?
- Is there a new automation you can add?
- Could you practice forward-resolution by proactively answering common follow-up questions in the first response?
Complex issues will inevitably take several responses to solve, but aim to streamline as many common chat requests as possible.
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6) Customer satisfaction (CSAT) score
While a little more complicated to calculate, your customer satisfaction (CSAT) score is the ultimate measure of the impact your customer service is having.
The customer satisfaction score measures how a customer feels about your store’s customer support. Was it quick? Was it low-effort? Was your customer service team helpful? It’s estimated that businesses lose $75 million every year due to poor customer service, so keeping customers satisfied is no longer optional.
By contrast, happy customers lead to conversions and repeat business. Gorgias analyzed over 10,000 businesses and found that raising CSAT score by just one point — from 4 to 4.9 — lifts overall revenue by 4%.
According to Retently, the average CSAT score for ecommerce businesses is 75. Customer satisfaction rate can also be expressed as a number from 1 to 5, 5 being the best.
How to measure CSAT
To get your CSAT score, you need to survey customers who have interacted with you via chat. This can be done with a survey tool, or with Gorgias.
Ask customers who used your chat: “On a scale from 1 to 5, how satisfied are you with your experience today?” Then, add up how many gave a rating of 4/5 or 5/5 and divide that by the total number of responses. Multiply by 100 to get your CSAT score.
Using Gorgias, customers are asked to rate their experience, showing you a CSAT store in your dashboard out of five. We recommend our customers, all of whom are ecommerce merchants, aim for a CSAT score of 4.8.
Tips to improve CSAT score
Using Gorgias, you can review all chat ratings as all customers are given a post-chat survey. You can use this to examine common themes for any interactions scored below 4 stars. What issues keep coming up? Do particular products result in lower scores than others?
You can also follow-up with customers who gave a low score to further investigate what went wrong with these detractors.
Issues that can impact your CSAT score — and that you can work on improving — include:
- Long wait times for responses
- Multiple messages needing to be sent
- Long resolution times
📚 Read more:
- 9 Ways To Improve Your CSAT Score and Response Rate
- Evaluating Your Customer Service Program: Why, Challenges, and KPIs That Matter
7) Customer effort score
This is a complement to your CSAT as well as NPS (net promoter scores). The customer effort score measures how much effort a customer felt like they had to put in to resolve their issue.
This score should be as low as possible. Ideally, you want customers to find your customer service to be effortless, breezy, and efficient. High effort interactions will in turn hurt your CSAT and your revenue.
According to The Effortless Experience, 96% of customers who had a high-effort customer service experience feel disloyal to the company after.
How to measure customer effort score
Similar to your CSAT score, customer effort can be measured with a survey that asks customers to rate how easy their experience was on a scale of 1 to 5.
Find the percentage that said “very easy” and then subtract the percentage that said “very hard.” This will give you a score of between -100 and 100.
Tips to improve customer effort score
The more messages a customer has to send via your live chat, the more effort it will take on their part to resolve the issue.
Using automation, increasing response times, and aiming for one-ticket resolutions will improve your customer effort score.
📚 Read more: Customer Delight Is A Losing Strategy in Ecommerce: Here’s What’s Better
8) Conversion rate
Is your customer service chat tool actually leading to more sales, also known as conversions? Are you successfully turning chat requests into sales?
Chat is a great way to contribute to your conversion rate optimization (CRO) strategy since you talk with customers while they’re still on your store (and hopefully contemplating a purchase).
Pre-sale information given via chat, like finding the right size or inquiring about your return policy, have a high chance of leading to a sale.
How to measure conversion rate
The conversion rate is calculated by total sales after a customer support interaction divided by total number of tickets.
The Gorgias dashboard shows you how many tickets led to sales within five days, which reveals your conversion ratio. Apply a channel filter for live chat to show how many of these were the result of a live chat session,
As well, Gorgias shows you the hard numbers of your total sales numbers that came from a support interaction.
Tips to improve conversion rate
The best way to improve conversion rate from chat is to reach out to more customer shopping in real-time with chat campaigns. These automated pop-up conversations can be used to ask whether website visitors need help, know how to qualify for free shipping, or offer a discount.
Research shows that people who use live chat are 3X more likely to complete their purchase before leaving a website.
9)Total sales
How much money is being generated via live chat support? This is simply your total sales made from customers who used your live chat.
How to measure total sales
While you could calculate this manually, in Gorgias statistics you can filter your sales by channel, segmenting only those sales made after a customer used live chat.
Tips to improve total sales
Like your CSAT score, your total sales are a reflection of your overall ability to quickly meet customers’ needs via chat.
Compare individual sales with either very high or very low totals and look for patterns. Do more responses lead to a higher or lower total? Does answering FAQs have an impact? These are important questions that become much easier to answer when you can see the total sales over a given period, agent, channel, request type, and so on.
📚 Read more: Customer Service ROI: How To Measure and Improve Value
10) Automation rate
This is a measure of how many customers are getting help via chat using automated options like self-service order management and quick response flows.
These can be created in the Gorgias chat widget by adding buttons for customers to get information like tracking, or answers to FAQs, without a live agent needing to respond.
For example, luxury jeweler Jaxxon’s chat widget contains the following self-service options for a proactive customer service approach.
By using automated responses, Jaxxon reduced live chat volume by 17% while lifting on-site conversion rate by 6%.
How to measure automation rate
Gorgias Statistics lets you see how many customers use the automated options you have set up in the chat service.
Tips to improve automation rate
Set your chat widget up for success by reviewing incoming tickets to determine which common inquiries can be satisfied with either self-service order management or quick answer flows.
11) Template usage
Templated responses in live chat save your support agents time and, of course, give quicker responses to customers.
At Gorgias, these pre-written responses are called Macros. They are similar to custom fields and they can help automate some of your communication within your live chat support operations.
Preparing Marcos for use in live chat will improve your average response time, resolution time, and lead to more one-touch tickets.
How to measure template usage
In Gorgias Statistics, you can see how often Macros are used in responses to customers.
Tips to improve template usage
Monitoring which types of responses take the most amount of time for agents to resolve will help you create new templates for them to use. On the flip side, seeing a template is used very frequently could point to shortcomings elsewhere.
For example, if you notice that the shipping macro seems to be over-used, you can link out to shipping details and/or update your shipping policy page to make the information easier for customers to find. Then, you may not need to reply to as many tickets in the future.
12) Chat campaign responses
Your chat widget can do so much more than track orders. With Gorgias’ live chat, you can set up campaigns that deliver customized messages for different scenarios.
For example you can set up chat automated chat messages that:
- Offer a product-specific offers or discounts
- Give a link to a style quiz
- Spark conversation around specific products
- Offer a personal, virtual stylist
- Prevent cart abandonment
For example, here’s a chat campaign from Jaxxon to recommend “VIP level support.”
It’s great to try new things with your chat widget but you should always be mindful to measure and evaluate their results.
How to measure chat campaign responses
The best way to track responses to your campaigns is to set up an auto-tag in the Gorgias help desk to see how many people respond when prompted with a campaign message.
Here’s how Jaxxon could set up auto-tagging for the above campaign:
Tips to improve campaign responses
All chat campaigns should be tracked with performance metrics to determine if they were successful, how they can be improved on next time, and if you need to do further A/B testing.
In the Gorgias dashboard, you can:
- Track overall revenue generated by a campaign
- Measure increase in sales for products targeted with a chat campaign
- Track the usage of promo codes
You can also include a UTM link to track clicks.
13) Missed chats
The whole point of live chat is to provide immediate customer service in real-time. Missing a chat has a deep impact on that customers’ satisfaction so you need to keep a keen eye on missed messages in the chat queue and use them to inform your customer service strategy.
How to measure missed chats
Simply review your incoming chats on a regular basis, even daily, to see if any incoming chat sessions didn’t receive a response. Keep track of this number and see if you can get it to the ideal number: zero.
Tips to improve missed messages
As we discussed before, it’s vital to set your business hours in your live chat. For after-hours, include a contact form so that even if you’re not online at the time, a ticket is created.
If you notice you’re missing a lot of chat messages at a particular time of day, or day of the week, that’s an indication to rethink your live chat agent staffing schedule.
You should also pay attention to each individual agent and if they’re missing tickets. That could mean there’s a need for additional training to improve agent performance.
Never stop optimizing
What’s up with your ecommerce live chat support operations? If you don’t know, you can never optimize your processes.
A live chat will only drive sales if it’s being used in a way that best supports both your business and your customers. Keeping a close eye on all the above data will allow you to finetune your live chat performance.
Remember, satisfied customers are loyal customers, and loyal customers are ones that will come back again and again.
Gorgias puts this important data at your fingertips. Our customers can see everything they need to nurture outstanding customer support strategies. Sign up for your free trial today and experience the difference.
Live Statistics for teams who want to perform
Do you switch multiple screens and views to understand what’s going on with your team? If you do, we’re happy to report that there is now a shortcut. 🪄 Live Statistics on Gorgias is your destination to get a quick overview of ticket volume, agent activity and active channels in real-time.
Where is it?
It’s up top! Once you navigate to Statistics, you will see Live Statistics conveniently placed at the top. Click on Overview to see a snapshot of all customer support activity over all channels and agents.
Ok, what am I looking at?
In Live Overview, you will see the number of Agents Online and offline. Next to these, you will find the numbers of Open Tickets in two sections (to indicate whether they’re assigned or unassigned).
Pro tip: Hover over the tooltip to see a quick list of the actual agents who are online and offline. ⬇️
Consider the number of Agents Online compared to Open Tickets
Say it’s late afternoon and you’re seeing a spike in open tickets. In Live Overview, you read 60 Open Tickets, and only 2 Agents Online. → 30 tickets per person 😱
With this information, you can immediately make decisions and take action on how to handle the higher volume your team is experiencing. For example, you may consider:
• Going to Live Agents Statistics to see the number of Chat tickets
• Creating a macro and a rule for your Chat customers who are waiting for longer than 1 minute ⌛️
• Creating a macro and a rule to set expectations around the delay
• Check internally to see if there is a problem with your delivery ops
• Stepping in to answer tickets with the Urgent tag
Knowing exactly what’s going on as it happens live, later observing fluctuations in First Response Time or Resolution Time won’t catch you by surprise. You can make a better assessment on your team’s performance by being fully aware of the circumstances around your metrics.
In Live Statistics, we simplify and organize information so you can be fully aware without needing to contact your team personally or be physically there.
Monitor Support Volume live
In Live Overview, you will see a nice graph to inform you on the hourly Support Volume. Use this graph to see how your team is responding to inquiries as they emerge.
Looking at this graph, you can quickly grasp the volume you’re getting by the number of Tickets Created, Tickets Replied and Tickets Closed separately, but on the same timeline so you can compare.
Observe when Tickets Created see a spike, compare it to Tickets Replied
When do you receive the bulk of inquiries? Does it happen before business hours?
You can see above an example where a lot of customers decided to contact the support team throughout the night. As a manager, you can monitor to see if this is a consistent pattern over time, and develop strategies on the support and operations side to improve experience. Looking at this graph, and seeing this type of pattern, you may want to ask:
• Are these tickets urgent? Are we properly auto-tagging to identify urgency?
• Are my agents ready to tackle this ticket volume at the beginning of their shift?
• Are these tickets auto-assigned?
• If these inquiries are urgent, should we set autoresponders?
• Is it worth getting additional staffing or how can I leverage self-service?
Monitoring the Support Volume graph, you can start to detect patterns that are connected to the entire customer experience. Anticipating problems or delays before they can occur, you can take measures to improve CSAT despite the predicaments due to international shipping challenges or a mix-up on a batch of orders etc. You can use the visibility and insights from Live Statistics to inform your overall operations.
Live means real-time
Live Statistics is designed to inform you on an hourly basis. It gathers the right metrics and combines them strategically so you can get the right information and react quickly without being there.
All metrics in Live Statistics reflect your current day from 12:00 am to 11:59 pm in your time zone. If you need to change the time zone, you can easily do this in Business Hours under Settings.
Who is working?
In Live Agents, you will see whether each team member is currently online or offline, indicated by a green dot if they’re online - 💪 working away, or an orange dot indicating that 💤 they’re offline.
Pro Tip: Hover over these dots to see when they signed in (on the green dot), and when they were last seen that day (on the orange dot).
Live Agents Statistics will show you the exact amount of time each team member has been online in hours and minutes (e.g. 2h 6m). On this table, you will also see the number of Tickets Closed and Messages Sent. The ability to see this exact combination of data per agent will really help you monitor your team’s efficiency and know which agents to coach to improve performance.
Have all of your team use this, so everyone can self-check 🩺 and have their sense of achievement for the day based on data - 😉 not just feelings. Reviewing Live Statistics as a team, you can collaborate to come up with effective strategies to reduce the rate of messages sent per ticket closed.
Who is working on what?
Located in the far right column, Open Tickets 🤩 feature makes Live Statistics whole. This is where you can clearly see who’s working on what. You can see the total number of open tickets currently being helped by each team member. Placed immediately next to this number is the breakdown by channel.
You can read above how Jenny has 15 open tickets, with 3 from Chat, 7 from Email, 3 from Facebook and 2 from Instagram.
Click on this number to see just exactly what Jenny’s working on. Each of the numbers provided under Open Tickets, the total and by channel, is clickable and it will bring you to a readily filtered view where you can take a closer look at what your agent has at hand.
This experience will help you review your team’s activity in microscopic detail as you desire, without needing to interfere or navigate to different Views.
Help your team on the spot
Check out the full combination of Online Time, Tickets Closed, Messages Sent and Open Tickets. Let’s bring back Jenny and look closer to see that she has 3 Tickets Closed, 12 Messages Sent and 15 Open Tickets. Under Online Time, it reads 6h 12m so she is approaching the end of her shift.
Right away, we can notice that she’s approaching the end of her shift with a lot (15) more tickets to go. There’s no need to get alarmed, but it’s better to take a quick look at what’s going on. Clicking on the number listed under Open Tickets, we can easily review the tickets she’s working on. Taking a quick look at her tickets, we notice a shipping problem on multiple orders - all large items shipping internationally with a third party. Knowing Jenny’s not familiar with third party shipping, we can remove these tickets from Jenny’s queue and make sure that we mark our calendar to train her on this topic before BFCM hits. ✅
All of these features in Live Statistics, Overview and Agents are designed to give you full visibility and control so you can take timely action to remove stress from work and from your team. 😅
Still waiting to give it a try? Go to Live Statistics now ➡️
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