Creating a unique and satisfying customer experience is a crucial objective for brands across all industries. You’re probably already aware that most customers (95%, according to a Microsoft study) rank customer experience as important when it comes to brand choice and brand loyalty.

Most brands rely on customer satisfaction scores (CSAT) as the go-to metric for evaluating the customer experience. However, the problem with CSAT is that it's a lagging indicator of customer sentiment. Customers give you a CSAT score after an interaction. So, if your CSAT is low, you've likely already frustrated a new or loyal customer by the time you realize there is a problem.

Thankfully, tracking additional customer satisfaction metrics can go a long way toward filling the gap and ensuring that you can keep a finger on the pulse of your customer base. Below, we'll explore the best customer satisfaction metrics to track so that you can optimize your customer support services and overall customer journey — before your customer loyalty takes a hit.

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12 customer satisfaction metrics to better understand sentiment

Along with CSAT and NPS, you can use numerous other metrics to gauge customer satisfaction. If you want to create a holistic picture of how happy customers are with your brand to inform your customer service management efforts, here are the 12 metrics that you should track and analyze.

1) Customer effort score (CES)

CES tells you how much effort your customers have to put in to get answers to their questions or resolve their support issues. 

By tracking this metric, you can identify high-effort customer experiences like long wait times when customers contact your call center or confusing responses from your support team. This gives you a great starting point so that you can address these obstacles that are inevitably harming customer satisfaction.

Customer effort is an extremely important indicator for the quality brand’s customer experience. Plus, it’s directly connected to your bottom line. 96% of high-effort experience drive customer disloyalty, according to The Effortless Experience. 

Formula for calculating CES

To measure CES, you will need to send customers CES surveys. These surveys ask customers to rate on a scale of one to ten how much effort they had to exert to get an answer to their question. To calculate your overall CES score, you will need to divide the total sum of all responses by the total number of all responses. 

CES = Total sum of responses / Total number of responses

2) Customer health score (CHS)

CHS is a metric largely employed by customer success teams to determine whether a customer is "healthy" or "at risk." 

This enables customer success teams to identify customers who are at risk of leaving the company so that you can make efforts to retain them. 

Unlike other customer satisfaction metrics, this metric is measured on a customer-by-customer basis rather than the average score of your entire customer base. This enables brands to utilize CHS to boost customer retention one customer at a time.

Formula for calculating CHS

There is no set formula for calculating CHS, and brands utilize a broad range of criteria to evaluate the health of individual customers. These criteria can also vary dramatically from industry to industry and even company to company. 

But for ecommerce stores, here are a few important factors to consider when determining whether a customer is healthy or at risk: 

• Customer survey results
• Contact rate with your support team
• Number of closed and open support tickets
• Social media involvement
• Email engagement rate

Especially for larger brands, we recommend creating a standard formula to measure customer health, and periodically measuring each customer (especially VIP customers) to proactively prevent customer churn. 

3) Customer lifetime value (CLTV)

The primary point of reducing churn and improving customer loyalty is to increase your average customer lifetime value. 

Attracting new customers is difficult and expensive, and when you succeed at bringing a new customer into the fold, you want them to spend as much money with your brand as possible. 

Lifetime value can indicate customer satisfaction because satisfied customers tend to spend more with companies they’re satisfied with. Continued spending and repeat purchases are a surer sign on satisfaction than any star rating could provide. 

Formula for calculating CLTV

CLTV =  Average purchase value x Average purchase frequency x Average customer lifespan

4) Customer churn rate (CCR)

Customer churn rate is the rate at which customers leave your company. For subscription-based online businesses, ecommerce churn rate is the rate at which people cancel subscriptions. For non-subscription-based companies, you can define churn as shoppers who fail to place a repeat order within some time frame (likely between one and six months, depending on your products and industry).

If your churn rate exceeds industry benchmarks, it almost certainly spells issues with your customer experience. 

Reducing churn goes hand in hand with improving customer loyalty (and thus boosting revenue via higher customer lifetime values). If you can keep a handle on churn rate, you’ll have concrete evidence about how customer satisfaction is impacting your repeat business.

Formula for calculating CCR

CCR is calculated over a specific period. To calculate your churn rate for a given period of time, you can use this formula: 

CCR  = (Number of customers at the beginning of the time period - Number of customers at the end of the time period) / Number of customers at the beginning of the time period

5) Internal quality score (IQS)

IQS measures the quality of each of your support team's tickets, according to your own internal standards. For instance, you may define a good ticket as a ticket that resolves the customer's issues, reflects your brand voice and values, and is responded to promptly. A bad ticket might be any ticket that falls short of these standards.

If you’re like most brand, your IQS will revolve around four main elements:

• Speed: Did the agent respond within the terms of your service-level agreement (SLA)?
• Correctness: Did the agent’s response adhere to your company’s relevant policies?
• Helpfulness: Did the agent full address the customer’s question (and practice forward resolution)?
• Friendliness: Did the agent maintain a positive tone and use the powerful phrases that adhere to your company’s style guide?

With an IQS, you can proactively identify where your customer support agents are currently improving satisfaction (or degrading it). 

Formula for calculating IQS

We don’t have a clear calculation for IQS because each brand’s is different. However, we recommend using a simple rubric, where a ticket gets a point for meeting each item on the rubric. 

This way, you can simply compare the quality of each ticket (or the average quality of each agent’s tickets). You’ll also get valuable information about the missing elements of each ticket, which can inform your customer service training.

6) First response time (FRT)

One thing that is sure to generate a lot of unhappy customers is making them wait a long time for answers to their questions. 90% of customers rate an immediate response as "important" or "very important" when they have a customer service question. 

Therefore, attempting to reduce your FRT is one of the first steps to take on the road to optimizing customer satisfaction. This starts with tracking your average FRT and comparing it against industry benchmarks.

Formula for calculating FRT

Depending on your helpdesk, you may never need to manually calculate first-reply time. For example, with Gorgias, you get first-response time broken down by agent, time period, ticket type, and more:

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To calculate your support team's average FRT, you can use this formula: 

FRT = Total first response times during the time period / Total number of resolved tickets during the time period 

📚Recommended reading: 7 tips to improve your customer service response times. 

7) Resolution time

It's important to respond to customer support tickets as fast as possible, but not all tickets can be resolved in a single response. 

While customers who have received an initial response to their ticket tend to have a little more patience when waiting for a resolution, that patience will only stretch so far. This makes it important to calculate and improve your average resolution time and FRT.

Formula for calculating resolution time

Just like first-response time, average resolution time isn’t normally something brands should spend time calculating. That’s why Gorgias users can see resolution time broken down by agent, time period, ticket type, and more:

Average resolution time = Total resolution times during the time period / Total number of resolved tickets during the time period 

8) First-contact resolution

While it's true that you can't resolve every ticket with a single response, it's still a great objective for support teams to strive for. Resolving a customer's issue in a single response typically means that the customer received swift and satisfactory assistance that required minimal effort on their part. Therefore, working to boost your first-contact resolution rate is sure to improve customer satisfaction.

Formula for calculating first-contact resolution

To get an accurate evaluation of your first-contact resolution rate, you should only consider tickets that are possible to resolve in a single response. Once you've identified the criteria for tickets that are FCR-eligible, you can use this formula to calculate your FCR rate: 

FCR = Number of support issues resolved on first contact / Total number of FCR-eligible support tickets

9) Self-service resolution rate

Enabling customers to resolve issues on their own without needing to contact your support team offers numerous benefits — like reducing agent workload and freeing them up to focus on more complex tickets. 

Additionally, it provides customers with helpful self-service options, which improves customer satisfaction by ensuring that customers can quickly find the answers they need. 

But to evaluate how effective your self-service options actually are, you'll need to track your self-service resolution rate. This metric tells you the rate at which customers can resolve issues on their own and can be used to gauge and improve the quality of your self-service resources, like your FAQ pages and Help Center.

Formula for calculating self-service resolution rate

Depending on your helpdesk, you may never need to manually calculate self-service resolution rate. With Gorgias, for example, you get detailed information about the usage of self-service resources on your site:

That said, you can calculate your self-service resolution rate using this formula: 

Self-service resolution rate = Number of sessions that customers initiate with your brand's knowledge base or other self-help resources / Number of support tickets your support team handles over the same period of time

📚Interested in helping your customers help themselves for a low-effort experience? Check out our VP of Success's guide to customer self-service.

10) Support performance score

Support performance score (created by Gorgias) is a metric that encapsulates the three most important elements of great customer service: speed, helpfulness, and customer satisfaction. 

To achieve this, the support performance score combines average first response time, average resolution time, and CSAT into a score that is on a scale of 1-5. 

Tracking this metric provides support teams with a comprehensive overview of their performance quality.

Formula for calculating support performance score

Support performance score is calculated using a series of FRT, CSAT, and resolution time thresholds. To reach the next rating level, you must meet each category's threshold. Here is an example of what these thresholds look like for FRT:

• Level 1 (poor): 13+ hours
• Level 2 (lagging): 12 hours
• Level 3 (fair): 6 hours
• Level 4 (strong): 1 hour
• Level 5 (exceptional) 10 minutes

11) Customer satisfaction score (CSAT)

Customer satisfaction (CSAT) is the go-to customer support metric to understand customer sentiment around your brand and customer experience. Don’t get us wrong: We believe CSAT is one of the most important metrics. However, CSAT only gets measured after customers have a good or bad experience, making it a lagging indicator of customer sentiment.  

You can determine your CSAT score using customer satisfaction surveys. The survey questions should ask customers to rate their satisfaction with your company by choosing from one of four responses: very unsatisfied, unsatisfied, neutral, satisfied, and very satisfied. 

The ratio of customers who were either satisfied or very satisfied compared to the total number of customers who were unsatisfied or very unsatisfied is your brand's CSAT score.

While CSAT is certainly an important metric for ecommerce brands to measure and utilize, it isn't the end-all, be-all of tracking customer satisfaction. Brands that only track CSAT can encounter several limitations that can make it difficult to turn customer satisfaction results into business growth.

12) Net promoter score (NPS)

Net promoter score (NPS) is a metric that tells you how likely customers are to recommend your brand to friends, family members, and colleagues. If you want to improve your word-of-mouth advertising and start generating more referrals, NPS is the metric you will need to optimize.

Your NPS score can also provide insight into the overall satisfaction of your customer base. 

For one, NPS isn't quite as subjective and one-dimensional as CSAT, since it asks customers to rate their willingness to recommend your company on a scale of 0-10 rather than asking them a single question about their satisfaction. 

NPS is also more a measure of a customer's long-term satisfaction with your company, while CSAT surveys typically gauge a customer's short-term satisfaction with your product or service.

How to calculate NPS

NPS surveys gather feedback on how likely customers are to recommend your brand on a scale of 0-10. Customers who rate you at 0-6 are considered detractors; customers who rate 7-8 are passives, and customers who rate 9-10 are your promoters. 

To calculate NPS, you will need to calculate your promoters and detractors as percentages of your total number of survey responses. Then, subtract the percentage of detractors from the percentage of promoters. 

So, if you got 100 responses with 40 promoters and 30 detractors (the rest being passives), here's what your calculation would look like:

NPS = 40% promoters - 30% detractors

NPS = 10

Why CSAT isn't the only metric you need to measure customer satisfaction

‍CSAT is a vital benchmark for analyzing your brand's number of satisfied customers. However, here are the three most important reasons why CSAT alone is not enough:

CSAT is a lagging indicator

We've already mentioned that the CSAT score doesn't indicate an issue with the overall experience at your company until it's already too late, when you've already provided a poor experience to customers. 

This is an especially pressing issue when you consider that nearly a quarter of customers will switch to a competitor after a bad experience. Their CSAT results can help you improve the experience for future customers — but ideally, you don’t have to lose customers to get this information. 

Ideally, your set of metrics to understand customer satisfaction include ones that don't require angry customers to tell you that your customer experience could be improved.

CSAT is one-dimensional

CSAT tells you the ratio of customers who are satisfied with your brand compared to the number of unhappy customers, but it doesn't tell you anything about why your customer satisfaction levels are what they are.

Most CSAT surveys have a comment box, but customers rarely take the time to fill these out — especially with any meaningful level of detail. 

A more well-rounded collection of metrics will help you better pinpoint the reason for high or low satisfaction, without solely depending on an optional comment box. 

CSAT is subjective

Asking customers a single question about whether they are satisfied with their experience will yield highly subjective responses. 

For instance, a specific issue might cause one customer to state they are "very unsatisfied," while the same issue might prompt another customer to respond with "neutral." 

Plus, customers may complete the survey while annoyed, emotional, or tired — all of which could inflate (or minimze) the importance of an issue, skewing the insights. 

For these reasons, CSAT offers the most value when used in tandem with other important customer satisfaction metrics — and the first of these important metrics is net promoter score (NPS).

How to improve customer satisfaction by collecting (and using) customer feedback

Metrics such as CSAT, NPS, and CES are all forms of customer feedback that ecommerce merchants can use to improve customer satisfaction. But along with tracking these metrics, gathering more in-depth customer feedback can be highly helpful for informing your customer satisfaction efforts.

A few of the ways that ecommerce brands can go about collecting and utilizing valuable customer feedback include:

• Audit low-scoring tickets to look for themes.
• Reach out to low-scoring customers for in-depth feedback.
• Reduce ticket volume with automation and self-service to free agents to solve complex tickets.
• Activate instant messaging channels like SMS and live chat.

📚Recommended reading: Our Director of Support’s guide to implementing customer feedback into your product and customer experience. 

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Analyze customer satisfaction from all angles with Gorgias' dashboards

There are numerous metrics that support teams need to track to evaluate and improve customer satisfaction. Thankfully, Gorgias' best-in-class customer support platform makes tracking these metrics easier than ever before. With Gorgias' dashboards, you can:

• Automatically track key support performance metrics such as FTR and resolution rate
• Access revenue statistics to see how customer support is impacting your company's bottom line
• Live statistics that allow you to monitor agent performance in real-time
• Send customers automated customer satisfaction surveys

To get started utilizing these powerful tools to track and improve customer satisfaction, sign up for Gorgias today!

Anyone who recognizes that ecommerce customers have high expectations these days also recognizes that fast shipping is part of what keeps those customers happy. We’ve seen non-essential items on Amazon be delayed because of COVID-19, and that’s cause quite a bit of grumbling from both customers and ecommerce businesses. While guaranteeing fast shipping to your customers is definitely a good thing--16% of people have abandoned a shopping cart if the estimated delivery time is too slow--it’s a double-edged sword. Your customers will love getting their order in one or two business days, but it can also be cripplingly expensive. 

The solution is complicated. If shipping faster costs more, do you pass the cost along to your customers? Do you let it eat into your profit margin? Believe it or not, there are other options. Is it possible to  have your cake and eat it too? Yes, but you’ll need a crash course in logistics if you’re going to find affordable ecommerce shipping. Let’s dive in! 

1. Implement zone skipping 

If you’ve ever had to ship your inventory cross-country and had the accompanying jaw-drop when you discovered how expensive that was going to be, you’ve encountered shipping zones before. The further you ship your products, the more it’s going to cost -- obviously -- so how do you get around it?

The answer is zone skipping. To skip zones, you need to store your inventory strategically so that you can choose which location to ship from (and pick the closest one). For example, if you get an order from a customer in Los Angeles and you have inventory stored in Miami and Las Vegas, you’ll want to send them that product from Vegas to save a bunch of money on shipping (and ensure that the order gets to them speedily).

Whether you store and manage your own inventory or rely on a national fulfillment network of warehouses, zone skipping is a smart money saving solution. For example, you’ll probably keep some inventory in a warehouse in Miami, have a location in Pennsylvania to hit the northeast, maybe one in St. Louis for the midwest, and one in Las Vegas to cover the west coast. 

2. Consider dimensional weight

Shipping carriers don’t just measure the weight of your packages in pounds and ounces anymore - if this is news to you, this could be a major opportunity to decrease your costs. When a carrier determines the cost of shipping, they charge you the greater of the two weights - dimensional and actual. Actual weight is just what it sounds like, but dimensional weight measures the size of your package. The bigger it is, the more it costs to ship, even if it’s as light as a feather. It makes affordable ecommerce shipping tough for businesses with large or bulky packages, because they always get charged the dimensional weight.

The good news is if your dimensional weight is greater than your actual weight, you can decrease the size of the package to save money. The more you can minimize the volume of your package the more you can save. Think about how to streamline your packaging experience, whether it’s removing unnecessary infill, using boxes that are more specifically fit for your inventory, or getting rid of any bulky extras that you’re throwing in. Making any one of those changes, even if it seems small, can add up to be huge over time.

3. Determine whether to ship flat-rate or not 

For something that claims to simplify the costs of shipping, it is a lot more complicated than it seems at first glance. However, offering flat rate shipping has the potential to save you money, so let’s go over what kinds of businesses can save big with flat rates.

Each carrier has its own flat rate shipping system, so it’s well worth your time to check out a full explainer of flat rate shipping. However, it boils down to a few specific instances in which flat shipping could help you save big. 

The first is if your products are small, but heavy - this means you’re getting hefty shipping charges due to the actual weight of the product, and shipping in a flat rate box that doesn’t charge by weight could save you a lot. The second is if you ship from coast to coast frequently - for example, if you have a warehouse on the east coast but a lot of your orders come from the west coast. When you ship with UPS or USPS, the flat rate shipping charge doesn’t change depending on distance, so you’d likely save big there. It could also be a good choice if you need to charge your customers a flat rate, or if you fulfill your orders yourself (and then you could take advantage of the convenience).

If you don’t fall into the above categories, though, stay away from flat shipping. It will likely cost you more in the end.

4. Offer bulk rate shipping discounts 

Buy more, pay less. That’s the dream, right? It is when you can manage to get a bulk rate discount from your shipping carrier. If you’re selling a high volume of products and you haven’t looked into getting a bulk discount, you need to get on that ASAP. However, it can be kind of confusing to figure out how to get that discount, as it’s not exactly something that the shipping carriers freely advertise.

There are a few ways you can try to get discounts for more affordable ecommerce shipping from carriers. If you’re a small business and you’re fulfilling everything yourself, you’re most likely to get bulk rates by using a platform like ShipStation or Shippo. They’ll let you compare prices and figure out the cheapest way to ship your items as quickly as possible, and they’re able to take advantage of bulk rate discounts by negotiating with carriers on behalf of all of their clients. Shopify offers a very similar service through their own platform, called Shopify Shipping.

However, unless you’re an enterprise-scale company, the chances are good that the best rates are going to come if you partner with a 3PL fulfillment company. They typically ship a huge volume of packages and are thus able to negotiate a discounted rate - without you having to do as much work.

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5. Beef up your last mile options

The last mile - metaphorically speaking, anyway - is the last step between the warehouse and the customer. This last step can sometimes take the longest. If you’ve ever tracked a package on its way to your house, you may have noticed the significant gap of time between it being out for delivery and actually being delivered. That’s because this step is complicated and relies on a lot of different cogs spinning together as one machine. It can depend on the third party you work with, how busy they are, where their facility is located, what courier they use, and many other factors that are completely out of your control.

As you can imagine, cutting down on the time and cost spent in the last mile is critical. But how can you do it?

First, don’t be afraid to A/B test different courier services to see which one does better. Something like a drone delivery service, while very cool, is probably way too expensive. But trying different companies can help you find that sweet spot between costly and quick. While Fedex and UPS frequently outsource to USPS for the last mile because of their coverage, other options have popped up in the last few years. Just like Uber Eats or Lyft, drivers contract with companies and use their car to complete deliveries - in this case, getting your package to the customer’s door.

You can also consider a pick-up option, which cuts out that last mile entirely. Make the customer come to you! If you have brick-and-mortar stores, setting up in-store pickup is an easy choice. If not, you may even want to consider participating in something like the UPS Access Point program.

6. Encourage larger average order sizes

In general, the more items you can ship in the same box, the more you can save on shipping. And when you’re saving on shipping, you can give some of those savings back by offering upgraded fast shipping or free shipping. But how?

A common way to encourage larger order sizes is to offer free shipping once they hit a certain minimum (like $50). However, you can try a new take on that, which is to offer upgraded shipping once they hit the minimum, which will reward them for ordering more by getting it to them faster. To set your minimum, look at your average order amount and set it a bit higher than that, which should bring your overall average order amount up over time. To do a trial run, try doing a customer appreciation campaign with upgraded shipping at your new minimum to gauge the popularity.

Another option is to sell in kits or in bulk when you can. By packaging best-selling or complementary products together you can easily increase the size of the order (and it’s an easy upsell for your customer as well). Ultimately, the more items you can fit in one shipment, the cheaper it will be to get it there quickly. This is a great way to balance affordable ecommerce shipping with fast shipping speeds.

7. Minimize the weight of your product and/or packaging

Hot take: no one cares about your inserts. Not-so-hot take: the unboxing experience is a crucial part of the impression you make on your customer. Both are true; how?

It’s true that unboxing is a big part of your image, and it takes on a life of its own on social media. The problem is that when companies think of unboxing, they think the more the better - and that’s not necessarily true. Practically, those materials take up valuable space and weight in the box, leading to marginal increases in shipping cost that become significant at scale. They also take longer to assemble, and all of the inserts you throw in will be tossed in the recycling bin (or the garbage) eventually, even if they do bring in an extra lead or two. It’s not worth it.

What is worth it is designing smart. Your unboxing experience doesn’t have to be over the top and filled to the brim with extras - a smart, thoughtful experience is just as meaningful for your customers, and packaging trends are moving that way as well. Consider talking to a package design company to see how you can really wow with design and ditch the inserts, or think about how using less can actually be more effective (like moving towards a more environmentally-friendly image). 

8. Restrict where you offer fast shipping

Lastly, fast shipping does not have to be an all-or-nothing game. With the U.S. being the size that it is, at a certain point, you’re going to have to make some exceptions to where you can get to quickly. Just ask anyone in Alaska or Hawaii-- they’ll be the first to tell you that it takes ages for shipments to arrive. Finding fast and affordable ecommerce shipping for the entire U.S. is going to be pretty difficult, especially if you’re not working for a 3PL, so you’re going to have to make some sacrifices. Sorry Alaska and Hawaii.

To make conditional fast shipping work for you, you can set parameters that will allow you to offer fast shipping where it is reasonable and affordable to you. This could be within major urban zones, or areas within a certain radius of the warehouse(s) that store your inventory. You can consider shipping to more remote areas, or places a certain distance outside of your core shipping radius, to be like shipping outside the lower 48. Even if you can’t offer fast shipping to all of your customers, you can at least increase your conversion rate where you do offer it without breaking the bank.

Related: Our list of the 12 best shipping softwares for ecommerce.

Final thoughts

Fast shipping and low costs are a balancing act. With customers expecting everything faster than ever (and freer than ever) it can feel overwhelming to try to make everyone happy. In reality, you’re going to be best served by cutting your own shipping costs as much as you can, and taking advantage of any deals you can get by using special services. Hope that cake tastes good!

And if you want to learn more about ecommerce shipping, check out our list of essential best practices.

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There are now over 85 incredible integrations in the Gorgias App Store with the tools that power your ecommerce store. While each app is unique, together these integrations can help your agents work more efficiently to provide excellent service to your customers. 

Take a look at the newest additions so far from 2022. 

In the first half of the year, we’ve launched 15 new integrations for your Gorgias helpdesk: 

1. Klaviyo (updated!)
2. Gorgias SMS
3. Thankful AI
4. Netsuite
5. Okendo
6. Narvar
7. Skio
8. Via Software
9. Clyde
10. Smartrr
11. ShipMonk
12. Annex Cloud
13. Daton
14. Shogun Frontend
15. Gobot
16. Shop2app

Read on to learn how you can use these tools to help manage your store, and visit the Gorgias App Store to activate them today!

Klaviyo (updated early 2022)

Klaviyo is an email and SMS marketing automation platform built for ecommerce. Gorgias was the first helpdesk to connect to Klaviyo SMS, allowing your brand to create seamless conversations between your marketing campaigns, shoppers, and support team.

With the updated Klaviyo integration, you can: 

• Automatically create tickets in Gorgias from replies to Klaviyo SMS campaigns
• Reply to Klaviyo SMS messages in the same place as every other customer conversation, with all the context of your ecommerce integrations
• Create contact lists in Klaviyo based on support events in Gorgias

This integration helps you streamline customer interactions and create higher-converting marketing campaigns. To learn more, go to the Gorgias App Store. 

Gorgias SMS

We recently released Gorgias SMS, an easy way for your brand to offer this convenient and conversational communication channel. It’s one of the fastest-growing support channels for ecommerce brands, and one of the most reliable for customers to contact you on (since it’s not dependent on internet access). 

With Gorgias SMS, you can: 

• Talk to customers on their (since they likely always have their phone on them) 
• View order information in the same window as SMS tickets
• Easily send photos back and forth with customers

Click here to learn more about Gorgias SMS, available with all plans. 

Thankful AI

Thankful AI is a platform dedicated to helping you deliver better support for the post-purchase needs of your customers. The AI is tailored specifically for retail and ecommerce businesses, so you don’t have to worry about a disjointed experience. 

With this integration, the Thankful AI agent can: 

• Triage and route tickets to real agents
• Tag tickets in Gorgias 
• Respond to tickets across all written channels

This frees up your agents to focus on more meaningful conversations with customers. Visit the Gorgias App Store to learn more about the Thankful integration. 

NetSuite

NetSuite is a cloud ERP including financials, CRM, and ecommerce. It helps brand work more efficiently, take control of inventory and fulfillment, and bring all your tools together in a unified business management suite. ​​

Sync NetSuite data into Gorgias to give your agents important customer & order information in a single tab. 

With this integration, you can: 

• Add over 60 NetSuite fields to a widget in the Gorgias Customer Sidebar.
• Sync customer information from NetSuite into Gorgias.
• Sync order information & shipping details from NetSuite into Gorgias.
• Sync RMA information from NetSuite into Gorgias.
• View the last 10 orders that have been created or modified.

This helps your agents have all the context they need next to every conversation they have. Visit the Gorgias App Store to learn more. 

Okendo

Okendo is a customer marketing platform and an Official Google Reviews partner that helps brands capture and showcase high-impact social proof such as product ratings & reviews, customer photos & videos, and Q&A messageboards.

With this integration, you can: 

• Automatically create tickets in Gorgias for Okendo product reviews
• Easily respond to every customer who leaves a review
• Add an Okendo widget to the Gorgias Customer Sidebar for customer loyalty insights next to every ticket

Visit the Gorgias App Store to learn more about our Okendo integration. 

Narvar

Link Narvar Return & Exchanges for Shopify with Gorgias to automate returns management and get rich insights that help you save costs and improve operations.

With this integration, you can: 

• ‍Create flexible return policies. Deploy tailored returns flows, policies, and fees for different products or customer segments to offer a differentiated experience.‍
• Retain revenue with recommended exchanges. Convert up to 45% of refunds to exchanges by recommending exchanges of same or different value to customers right within the returns flow.‍
• Bring customers back by incentivizing store credit. Add a credit bonus to store credit refunds based on specific exchange rules that will incentivize customers to keep shopping in your store.

To learn more about our Narvar integration, visit the Gorgias App Store. 

Skio

Skio helps brands on Shopify sell subscriptions. With this integration, you can add a Skio widget to your Customer Sidebar in Gorgias. This gives your agents insights into customer subscriptions right in the helpdesk without having to switch tabs. 

With this integration, you can: 

• View Skio customer information in the Gorgias Customer Sidebar
• Quickly click out to Skio right from Gorgias if needed
• Respond to subscription questions from one central location 

To learn more about our Skio integration, visit the Gorgias App Store. 

Via Software

Via is a mobile commerce (SMS marketing) platform for ecommerce businesses. Send personalized messages to your customers for increased revenue and customer satisfaction. 

With this integration, you can: 

• Automatically create tickets in Gorgias based on customer replies to Via SMS
• Respond to Via SMS messages directly from the Gorgias helpdesk
• View the entire conversation, including replies from Gorgias, in the Via platform

Visit the Gorgias App Store to learn more. 

Clyde

With Clyde and Gorgias working together, you can create a seamless and positive support experience by syncing all warranty data inside your Gorgias account. Stay focused and close tickets faster by viewing Clyde contracts and claims information in the same window you use to talk to customers.

With this integration, you can: 

• See the full picture of every customer
• Find open warranty claims in a flash
• Turn your support center into a profit center

Manage warranty requests & find claims information in one tool. Head to the Gorgias App Store to learn more. 

Smartrr

Smartrr is a seamless, full-service subscription solution. Paired with Gorgias, you can equip your team with the best customer service tools in one convenient location to increase customer satisfaction and drive customer loyalty. 

With this integration, you can: 

• Sync subscription data from Smartrr in Gorgias
• Help agents stay focused in a single tab 
• Provide better, faster support for subscription questions

To learn more about our Smartrr integration, go to the Gorgias App Store. 

ShipMonk 

ShipMonk is an order fulfillment platform for eCommerce businesses ready to scale.  They offer technology-driven fulfillment solutions that enable business founders to devote more time to the things that matter most in their businesses.

With this integration you'll be able to:

• Pull order fulfillment data and tracking information from ShipMonk to Gorgias
• Access specific orders in ShipMonk directly from the Customer Sidebar in Gorgias

Learm more about the ShipMonk integration in the Gorgias App Store. 

Annex Cloud

Annex Cloud is a cloud-based customer loyalty platform for enterprises. They provide integrated loyalty, engagement, and retention solutions across a range of program types like paid memberships, incentives, and more. 

With this integration, you can: 

• Sync customer’s loyalty data across tools
• Show loyalty information of a customer when opening a new or existing ticket

Click here to learn more about our Annex Cloud integration. 

Daton

Daton can replicate Gorgias data to your data warehouse in minutes, freeing up your analysts to focus on generating important business insights instead of extracting data.  

With this integration, you can sync information from Gorgias to your data warehouse like:

• Customers
• Jobs
• Users
• Tickets

To learn more about Daton, visit the listing in the Gorgias App Store. 

Shogun Frontend

Shogun is a headless ecommerce platform built for merchants. Convert more with richer merchandising and sub-second store speed. The Gorgias integration allows merchants to add chat capabilities to their Shogun-powered shops. 

With Gorgias chat on your Shogun Frontend, you can: 

• Promote your products and provide order details, all connected to your ecommerce platform
• Create chat campaigns to proactively message customers while they’re shopping live on your site
• Have agents answer live chats or create customizable, automated flows to free up agents for the most important conversations

Click here to learn more about our integration with Shogun Frontend.

Gobot

Gobot helps fast-growing Shopify stores convert more shoppers and reduce support burden with beautiful guided selling quizzes and AI-powered support chatbots.

With this integration, you can: 

• Sync recommendation data from Gobot into Gorgias so reps can respond and address questions via chat or email. 
• Collect post-purchase survey data and automatically connect select customers with questions/feedback to support reps in Gorgias.
• Automate repetitive customer support inquiries with Gobot’s AI Support Automation and seamlessly transition to Gorgias live chat or email support for those who require human assistance.

Visit the Gobot listing in the Gorgias App Store to learn more. 

Shop2app

Shop2app is a mobile app builder. It’s designed for local delivery, national delivery, and in-store pickup, and also makes it easy to manage subscriptions and send push notifications to customers. 

With this integration, you can: 

• Automatically create tickets in Gorgias when customers contact a merchant from their mobile app.
• Allow customers to initiate a support ticket directly from past orders within the mobile app.

Visit the Shop2app listing in the Gorgias App Store to learn more. 

Supercharge Gorgias, your CX command center

The Gorgias App Store features 85+ high-quality integrations with other leading ecommerce tools. By connecting the apps that power your store, you can give your agents the context they need to provide remarkable customer service from a single workspace. (No more switching tabs!) 

To add any of these apps to your helpdesk, go to Settings > Integrations or visit the Gorgias App Store. 

We've released a new version of the Chrome Extension, with sharing features and a new navigation bar. We hope you'll love it!

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Share templates inside the extension

Before, the only way to share templates with your teammates was to login on Gorgias.io.

If you're on the startup plan, when you create a template, you can choose who has access to it: either only you, specific people, or your entire team.

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The account management section is now available in the extension, under settings.

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New navigation

Tags are now available on the left. It's easier to manage hundreds of templates with them.
You can also navigate through your private & shared templates. Shared templates include templates shared with specific people or with everyone.

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We hope you'll enjoy this new version of our Chrome Extension. As usual, your feedback & questions are welcome!

One of the key advantages of using Gorgias is to provide a unified support experience to your customers across all channels. A few months ago, some of our customers asked us to build a phone integration. Traditional helpdesk integrations simply log calls as tickets. We wanted to go one step further and associate the phone call with the right customer.

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Today, we're excited to announce we've partnered with Aircall to build this integration.

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Aircall arms small-to-medium sized business (SMBs) with a phone system built for modern business. With zero hardware to manage, dozens of integration options to explore, and the ability to add local numbers in more than 40 countries, support teams can easily provide phone support in minutes.

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Here are the benefits of this new integration:

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• When a customer calls your company in Aircall, it creates a ticket in Gorgias and automatically matches it with the corresponding Shopify customer. This way, your staff can edit orders while they are on the phone with the customer.
• Your team sees all previous interactions they had with each customer, under their timeline.
• Get omni-channel statistics. Gorgias stats include Aircall phone data. For instance, you can monitor if you're getting more return requests over the phone or through Facebook Messenger.

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If you're already a Gorgias customer, head to your account and go to Integrations to connect Aircall. If not, you can create an account here and get started in a few minutes.

Facebook Messenger is becoming a new marketing channels for brands. They use it as a way to build personal relationships with customers and to drive higher conversion than traditional email marketing.

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Today, we're excited to announce our newest integration: Octane AI.

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The challenge with Messenger marketing

When a brand launches a marketing campaigns on Messenger, it typically leads to insane conversion rates. That's why the trend is on the rise.

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Another consequence is that a lot of customers respond to promotional Messenger communication. This generates a spike of support requests, that your support team has to deal with.

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Our integration with Octane AI lets you handle this support spike directly in Gorgias. Your agents have context about the customer: they see the conversation history before the Messenger conversation (did the customer email you last night?), and allow you to take action, like editing or refunding an order

What you can do with the integration

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• Respond to requests from customers, to make sure none of them falls through the cracks
• See the order data from Shopify next to your Messenger conversations
• Automatically respond to common questions, such as "where is my order"

Customers are already using Octane AI and Gorgias. Here's what Live Love Polish has to say about the Octane AI and Gorgias integration:

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“We’re really thrilled that Gorgias and Octane AI came together to make the customer service experience over Messenger even better for our customers. Accessible customer service is central to what we do at Live Love Polish. Answering customer questions via Messenger has made our customers happier.”

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Do you want to give this a shot? If you use both tools, just connect your Facebook page to your Gorgias account and see the magic happen. If not, create a Gorgias account, or sign up for Octane AI.

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Do you have questions? Just hit the chat bubble, our team would love to tell you more about the integration!

Eli Weiss, OLIPOP’s CX team. OLIPOP is a drink that is a healthier alternative to soda and has taken the beverage industry by a storm. It has achieved great accomplishments such as generating $10,000 of sales, without any discounts, in less than 15 minutes and has over 2,500 subscribers, making up 35% of their business. Working at the frontlines of customer experience, Weiss emphasizes that a good customer service team is the key to a successful business and he imparts two important takeaways in the podcast. Subscribe to Hello Gorgias on Apple, or listen below.

It's also worth nothing that we're able to get results like these, because of our integration with Postscript for SMS marketing.

Want to try Gorgias? Use Eli's special link, and we'll send you a free case of OLIPOP.

As a special bonus, anyone who listen's to Eli's podcast episode and does a trial of Gorgias using his special link will receive a free 12 pack variety case of OLIPOP.

‍Leverage Your Customers as A Marketing Channel

Customers want to feel like they are an important part of a brand – that they are helping to build the company and that they are not just going through a revolving door. They want to know that they are cared for and not just seen as a walking and talking wallet. By adding a little bit of individuality in each message, even by doing something as simple as referring to them by their first name in an email, it shows the care and consideration that the customer service team has for their clients. Although problems such as shipping estimates and an unsatisfactory drink flavour are out of the team’s control, the customer’s satisfaction is. After all, it is five to ten times easier and cheaper to retain an existing customer than it is to acquire a new one, so it is essential to keep the client base happy.

Asides from making them feel like they are an important part of the company, it is also essential to develop a long-term relationship with them and SMS is a perfect tool to do so. A lot of brands have started to abuse SMS, sending out marketing messages so frequently and without any personal touch that it pushes interested parties away. SMS is an intimate tool, allowing companies to jump into a person’s cellphone, so when it is taken for granted, customers tend to leave. Brands should not always think about the fastest way to make money and bring in customers because, in the end, it can do the exact opposite. By growing at a slower but steady pace, people will begin to follow. They will appreciate the freedom and flexibility and remember this in the long-term.

Create A Solid, But Flexible, Macro for Your Customers

At the end of the day, everyone is human – especially the customers. They may seem like just another order or a small percentage of the total revenue, but no one wants to be viewed as a ticket number or a computer. It is important to view everyone as an individual and by making each message personal and different for each customer, it demonstrates exactly that. Rather than sending an email that simply says, “here is your refund”, make it unique by acknowledging that the customer is heard and felt. Therefore, while it is good to have a solid macro, it is also important to make it flexible for the team to adjust it.

This also applies to macros for negative experiences. Just as it is important to keep the customers happy, the CX team needs to be content as well. When employees are not valued, they become burnt out, exhausted, and contribute to a high turnover rate. They will not interact with the customers in the way that the company needs so having a macro that they can refer to, it allows for interactions to flow the way they are supposed to. Furthermore, it saves their mental health by letting them take a step back.

The Overall Lesson Of Human Support

Customer service is built on empathy and integrity. A long-term relationship with a client base is impossible if they are not treated properly, but it is also impossible if the customer service team does not get the proper support that they need.  Just as marketing needs a large budget for the brand to be successful, customer service needs one as well to thrive. Weiss has seen this experience first-hand and cannot emphasize enough how important it is to remember that everyone behind a computer screen is still a human being.

To speak to Weiss and hear about his enthusiasm for his customers and Gorgias, he can be reached via Twitter at @eliweisss.

If your store leverages Instagram to drive sales, you know it’s important to engage with every member of your community whether they’re commenting on your posts, engaging with your Story, or sending you a message. 

Over 4,000 teams on Gorgias have been using our Instagram integration to respond to (or automate responses to) mentions, comments, and ad comments. Earlier this summer, some customers were able to also start receiving and responding to Instagram messages (but it was limited to accounts with between 1,000-100,000 followers). 

Today, we’re excited to share that there’s no longer a follower requirement to use Instagram messaging! ‍

Every Gorgias customer (with a non-legacy plan) can manage Instagram messages (including Story mentions) directly from your helpdesk, allowing you to engage with your shoppers quickly and efficiently so you never miss a conversation. ‍

Plus you’ll also be able to reply to comments with a message, giving your team the option to turn a public conversation into a 1-1 chat. 

Customers who were able to start using this feature early have already replied to over 300,000 messages and Story mentions. In fact, about 2% of tickets in Gorgias are Instagram messages! 

It’s clear our customers love using Instagram to engage with their communities and drive sales, which is why we’re so excited to open this channel up for all of our merchants regardless of their follower count.

Related: Our list of the best social media apps for Shopify. ‍

To get started, you’ll need to make sure you have the "Allow Access to Messages" setting active in Instagram.

You can do this In Instagram Business Messenger by going to Settings → Privacy → Messages and setting the toggle to active. 

Once that’s done, go to the Integrations tab in your Gorgias helpdesk and select “Facebook, Messenger & Instagram.” 

Click the green “Reconnect” button to refresh your settings, and then you’ll be able to enable “Instagram Direct Messages” in the checkboxes. 

This will connect Messages and Story mentions to Gorgias, allowing you to reply directly from the helpdesk and see previous conversation history (so your agents have all the information they need right in one place). 

The following video will show you how to get started, along with some common troubleshooting tips. 

If you’re managing a lot of customer support conversations on Instagram, it may be helpful to set up views for each type of interaction. For example, you could have a view for Instagram comments, another for Instagram Messages, and a third for Instagram ad comments. 

You can also use Rules and Macros in Gorgias to reply even faster (or automate conversations entirely!) in order to free up your agents to focus on more important conversations. 

Here are a few ideas to get you started!‍

1. Create a Macro sending a message to say “Thanks for the mention!” ‍

If you have customers that love to tag your brand or products in their own posts, an easy way to continue building brand loyalty is to send a quick “thank you.” To save your agents time, you can create a Macro they can re-use anytime you get a Message that you’ve been mentioned in someone’s story or post. 

2. Adding tags to track Instagram Story mentions‍

If you want to track how often your brand is mentioned in Instagram Stories, you can tag tickets that come in from the Messages channel with “Mentioned you” in the message body. 

By creating a Rule to do this, you can automate this process so it doesn’t add any extra time or steps into your agents workflow, but gives you powerful insights. 

3. Creating a Rule to auto-reply to Instagram messages outside of business hours 

If you don’t want to reply to messages 24/7, it may be helpful to create an auto-response to set some expectations outside of your business hours. 

You can easily do this with a Rule, and even encourage your followers to go somewhere else in the meantime, such as your website, a specific landing page, or even a partner account!

Hopefully this gives you some inspiration on how you can start using Gorgias to engage with your Instagram community without increasing the workload on your support agents. And if you're interested in messaging customers directly, check out our social media and SMS features. With social media for customer service, you can interact with customers on platforms like Instagram or Facebook. And with SMS for customer service, you can enable texting for your most on-the-go customers.

Related: Lean how Gorgias customer Berkey Filters launched SMS and drove incredible customer adoption to this new, faster channel.

To start simplifying management of your messages, comments, and mentions, get started with Gorgias and add the Instagram integration today!