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Some hold up the net promoter score (NPS) as the holy grail of KPIs. While we won’t go so far as to declare it the most important metric of all, we will say that it is one of a few that is absolutely crucial to your brand and customer success.

That’s because you can learn a lot about customers when you dig into NPS feedback. What keeps customers happy, what upsets them, how you can boost retention, how to slow down churn — you name it, NPS can become a valuable feedback loop that reveals insights into all of these things and more.

That’s why we’ve created this guide. Read below to learn how to improve response rates to create a better, more accurate net promoter score.

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NPS formula and calculations

If you’re unfamiliar with net promoter scores, we have a detailed explainer on how to calculate NPS that will tell you everything you need to know. But for now, let’s have a quick refresher. 

It all starts with asking your customers a simple question: On a scale of 0-10, how likely are they to recommend your offerings to a friend?

From there, collect these numbers:

• Promoters: People with scores of 9 and 10 who are likely to recommend you.
• Passives: People who gave 7 and 8 scores — not necessarily unhappy, just not happy enough to actively promote for you.
• Detractors: People who gave answers between 0 and 6. These people range from those unlikely to recommend you to those who will actively detract from you via word of mouth, bad reviews, or negative social media posts.

Calculating your NPS is easy. Determine the percentage of promoters and detractors from the total number of responses. Then, subtract the detractor percentage from the promoter percentage for your score. So if you have 70% promoters minus 10% detractors, your NPS is 60.

11 best practices to improve response rates in NPS surveys

Before making business decisions based on your NPS, you need the best possible dataset to work with. That means improving response rates to NPS survey questions creates a larger sample size — and below, we’ll show you the best ways to do that.

1) Choose when to send surveys: Lifecycle-based, transaction-based, and pulse checks

There are three great cadences to send out your NPS surveys:

Lifecycle-based surveys

These should trigger at certain moments of the customer’s lifecycle. They’re a great way to get customer feedback at key points of the customer journey. 

This way, you can easily triangulate high-impact changes — for example, if NPS goes way up after customers receive an email with set-up instructions, consider making that information available earlier. 

Other examples include:

• 30 days after signing up
• A year after signing up
• After a certain onboarding step 

Transactional NPS surveys

A transactional NPS survey gets triggered by set customer interactions. Much like the lifecycle surveys above, this helps you collect customer feedback and take a temperature check where it matters most. In this case, after key customer touchpoints:

• In ecommerce, this will most likely be after a purchase or a subscription renewal 
• In the SaaS world, it could trigger after a customer installs a new feature 

Pulse-check surveys

Pulse checks are a bit different in that they survey your whole customer base all at once. You can use NPS surveys to gauge customer sentiment following a company rebrand, after a push to get new customer referrals, and so on. 

Especially while conducting lots of customer research to ensure product-market fit, conduct pulse-check surveys with some level of regularity to maintain a healthy feedback look. Many companies do pulse checks twice yearly just to get a sense of customer sentiment across the entire customer base.

2) Only ask one question in NPS surveys (most of the time)

Where NPS surveys are concerned, less is more. The longer your survey, the lower the chances are that people will hang around to finish it. Sticking to one question can improve your response rate — and you want a great response rate because larger sample sizes will create a more accurate NPS.

So, what's a good survey response rate? There is no one clear answer because response rates can differ between channels (email surveys versus telephone or in-app surveys, for example) or based on how engaged your customers are with your brand.

However, good response rates can generally vary between 5% and 30%. If your response rate shoots up to 50% or more, you’re doing extremely well — and your customers are highly engaged.

While you want to keep your surveys brief, nothing says you can’t follow up with particular customers individually. In fact, you absolutely should follow up with customers who offer particularly interesting responses in your survey’s feedback section. Send out a more in-depth survey or schedule a 1:1 interview to discover the reasons behind their responses.

Here’s a great example of a one-question survey sent with NPS survey tool Delighted, plus a follow-up question made possible by Delighted’s integration with Gorgias:

When to use multi-question surveys

There are a couple of limited cases when you can send out multi-question surveys:

• When you need deeper feedback on specific new products
• To get in-depth feedback from loyal customers who are willing to spend more time answering questions

Use these longer surveys judiciously to collect highly targeted information — and strive to keep them as brief as possible.

3) Always, always, always A/B test your surveys

A/B testing is a common marketing technique that has users compare multiple pieces of content to determine which pieces perform best. You can — and absolutely should — use A/B tests for your surveys, too. Doing so will help you optimize surveys to get the best response rate.

When you’re designing an A/B test, consider testing for the following:

• Email subject lines: (“Let us know what you think!” vs. “We want to hear from you!”)
• Number of questions (single-question vs. multi-question surveys)
• Delivery channel (email, in-app, after-purchase pop-up, etc.)
• Best time of day (morning, end of day, etc.)
• Best stage of the customer lifecycle (one day, week, or month after purchase)
• Testing by customer segments (repeat customers vs. first-time shoppers)
• Best time to test after an interaction (so the interaction still feels fresh)

Those tests will get you started, but feel free to add more as you spot areas to potentially improve.

4) Make your NPS surveys visual and brand-friendly

The first step to creating an attractive survey is to add visuals. Don’t rely on people typing in answers to questions. Use graphical buttons instead. Be sure to use your company’s logo in the design, and introduce your brand’s colors through borders and other elements.

Make it brand-friendly, too — whatever that means for your brand. If your brand gives off a sleek, posh vibe, then your net promoter score survey should do the same.

Rather than building these emails from scratch, consider using an NPS survey software with convenient templates. There are many great options, but we recommend Delighted — especially given its integration with Gorgias:

Delighted does a great job of letting you brand the survey (using your logo and colors) without over-crowding the email and distracting the survey-taker from the main purpose of the email: Choosing an NPS score. 

5) Consider offering a reward for filling out NPS surveys

Free swag is an excellent motivator, and so are discounts. Offer a little something extra in exchange for NPS survey responses, and you’ll likely see your response rate shoot up dramatically.

What can you offer? The sky's the limit. Create swag bags to send out to respondents or offer a limited-time promotional item. You can also offer digital gift cards or discounts, too.

The only issue with offering rewards is that it may not be sustainable. One great way to work around this is to set up a drawing or raffle, so that survey respondents have a chance at winning something awesome. It’ll be more affordable for your brand — and an attractive enough offer that more customers will leave feedback in exchange for a chance at the prize.

6) Add a comment box for customers to explain their numerical answer

NPS survey best practices include always making sure there is a comment box below the numerical survey question. Some customers won’t leave a comment, but some will. Use these comments to understand why your happy customers are so delighted with your offerings and why unhappy customers are less than thrilled with the experience you’ve offered.

If you use an NPS tool like Delighted, you can opt in to include an optional “Tell us more” box:

7) Look deeper into your NPS and customer data to get the most valuable insights

Your NPS score is a valuable tool, but it will only get you so far. It’s essentially a measurement of how “loud” your promoters are compared to the detractors. Focusing too much on the relative volume of each group can be misleading.

For example, you may be tempted to invest a lot of time into rescuing your detractors, but think about this: Maybe the problem isn’t that your detractors are unhappy. Maybe they were never the right target market in the first place.

That’s why you need to dig deeper into the data behind your NPS score. You might find interesting patterns, like nearly all of your detractors live abroad or a huge percentage of your promoters bought the same product. That suggests perhaps you need an audience from closer to home.

• Dive into demographic patterns on Shopify or whatever ecommerce platform you use to learn about the characteristics that make up promoter, passive, and detractor groups.
• Keep track of feedback from comment boxes. Do detractors routinely mention shipping delays? Now you know where to start on improvements.
• Send out follow-ups to members of each group to see if you can learn more about the factors that drove their initial response.

8) Always send a follow-up message to thank customers who filled out the survey

Thank-yous are a fantastic way to build goodwill and customer loyalty. This step doesn’t have to be anything complicated, either. In fact, the CRM tools or survey templates you use to generate surveys should automate the thank-you process — either as a final screen of the survey or a separate email.

Ideally, your survey should pop up with a quick statement of thanks once the survey has been completed. Make sure to personalize the message — but keep it brief to ensure that it’s both seen and appreciated.

This is how a thank you message will appear if sent with Delighted:

Less ideal — but still acceptable — is to send a follow-up email to say thank you. The problem with this method is that people aren’t always appreciative of inbox clutter — plus, there’s a chance customers may delete the email unread.

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

Worried that your survey isn’t optimized to its fullest? Or that your customer base is too small to generate meaningful results? Set those fears aside and launch your NPS survey anyway.

The truth is, even small brands can get a lot out of comparatively few NPS responses. A/B testing your survey to optimize it is important — and it’s also something you can do to improve as you work through the process.

Now, if you’re a super small B2B brand with only a handful of customers, or a brand that is just starting, NPS scores may not be all that worthwhile. Instead, you may need to roll up your sleeves and dive in to ask for feedback the old-fashioned way: with phone calls or messages directly to your point of contact.

10) Test your survey before sending it to customers

We’ve talked about the importance of A/B testing — but what about regular beta testing? It’s an easy and crucial step that ensures an easy-to-use survey tool for your customers. 

Just have a handful of people at your company so they can click all the buttons and check various features. Request feedback on the design, and be sure to load the survey on mobile and desktop platforms, too.

Testing the technical aspects of your survey is especially important if you have any sort of automatic personalization. If you use a tool like Retently, for example, send a few test emails to different recipients to make sure the personalization is accurate:

💡Tip: If you use Retnetly, you can integrate with Gorgias to follow up with customers — like winning back unhappy customers or inviting happy customers to a referral or loyalty program. 

11) Think beyond the surface of the results

Up above, we mentioned that sometimes you learn important things about your target market based on your detractors — and that’s why you should always look beyond the NPS score itself. Do a deep dive on your detractors to really analyze what is happening. Examine demographic information and pay close attention to any comments they leave.

For example, do you have a large group of detractors who love your product but are unhappy with customer support or your website experience? This might indicate that your customer service team needs additional training or managerial support, which is a straightforward fix to raise your score. Or what if all of your detractors share certain characteristics, like age, income level, and geographical region? It could mean that this subset isn’t your product’s target market, and you’ll be better off re-targeting your product.

Find out how Gorgias helps ecommerce brands increase their KPIs

Ready to boost your NPS? Gorgias makes it easy. It’s customer support software specifically designed for ecommerce, built to integrate with the ecommerce tools (like NPS email software) you already use. 

On top of NPS, you can facilitate follow-up questions, automate thank-you emails, and get a real-time view of other statistics like customer satisfaction (CSAT), average response times, and resolution times.

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To learn more, sign up here and check out everything Gorgias offers.

Excellent customer service experiences depend on giving customers convenient paths to contact support agents on whichever channel best suits them. This is possible with an omnichannel customer service strategy,  where businesses seamlessly manage customer interactions on multiple communication channels: email, social media, SMS, voice, and so on. 

According to Shopify’s 2022 Future of Commerce report, 58% of customers say that being able to get customer support on their preferred channel influenced their purchase decision. An omnichannel approach satisfied this need and more by retaining customer data across channels and using it to personalize every interaction, even if a customer has never used that channel before.

Below, learn why an omnichannel approach to customer engagement can produce more revenue for your business, increase loyalty, and provide an overall better experience.

What is omnichannel customer service?

Omnichannel customer service is when a business offers multiple options for customer support that seamlessly connect across different channels.

For example, providing unified customer support via messaging channels like SMS or live chat, phone calls, and social media apps is an omnichannel approach to customer service. In addition to providing your customers with multiple touchpoints for contacting customer service agents, self-service support resources such as a knowledge base, an FAQ page, and automated chatbots can also serve as valuable elements of an omnichannel customer service strategy.

Why you should offer an omnichannel customer experience

Thanks to the benefits listed below, the popularity of omnichannel customer service is rapidly increasing. Customer expectations regarding omnichannel customer service have been on the rise lately as well, with 78% of customers reporting that they prefer to choose from a variety of engagement channels for support, according to data from Salesforce. 

The same Salesforce report also shows that 40% of customers won't do business with a company if they can’t use their preferred channels. Meeting customer expectations and creating a customer-centric experience can lead to better growth, which in turn creates more revenue for your business. 

That’s true for the team at messenger bag shop Timbuk2. "Increased customer support should go hand in hand with revenue growth,” says Joseph Piazza, Senior Customer Experience Manager. “We want to turn customer experience into a profit center."

Below, explore some of the main benefits of of incorporating an omnichannel approach into your customer service strategy.

Support your customers where they are

Omnichannel customer service allows customers to contact your support team using the channels that they are already most comfortable with. This encourages better customer relationships since shoppers won’t have to compromise on how they like to communicate. 

Take a look at how Berkey Filters, a leading water filtration brand, lets customers know about their fastest support channels at the top of their contact-us page:

Requiring customers to contact your company via email or phone may not seem like too big of an ask, but remember that for every customer who contacts your brand for support, there are likely several others who will decide that those options are too much of a hassle. They might prefer Instagram or Twitter or would rather send in a quick text message. That creates a leaky bucket for your team — you might miss out on answering the question that makes the sale, or resolving a frustration that keeps someone from making another purchase. 

Implementing an omnichannel customer service strategy makes getting support more convenient and accessible for your customers. And, it increases the chance that they’ll actually reach out so that you can turn around their experience.  

📚Recommended reading: Learn how to incorporate social media into your customer service strategy.

Resolve your customers' needs faster

According to data from HubSpot, 90% of customers rate immediate responses as “important” or “very important” when they have a customer service question. 

When you make it more convenient for customers to find the answers that they need, you reduce wait times and resolve your customers' needs much faster. Resolving customer issues as quickly as possible is a vital objective for any company that hopes to optimize customer satisfaction. 

If you hope to meet these customer expectations, your entire customer service process needs to be an efficient and streamlined experience. Offering support across multiple communication channels — complemented by automation and templates — is an effective step toward accomplishing this goal.

📚Recommended reading: Our Director of Support’s guide to lowering resolution time.

Increase customer loyalty

Customers take time to contact a brand's contact center when they are experiencing an issue, either before or after a purchase. If their issue is not resolved in a timely and effective manner, customers could decide not to purchase from you again. 

Making it as simple and convenient as possible for customers to contact your company allows you to resolve customer issues much faster, and increases the likelihood that customers with issues will contact you in the first place. 

Stationery shop Ohh Deer tracks the revenue it generates from positive customer experiences using Gorgias. The brand boasts a 4.95 CSAT score and tracks $12,500 of revenue generated from chat each quarter.  "When you make sales thanks to your good service, customers will come back and recommend you,” says Alex Turner, the brand’s Customer Experience Manager. “That's revenue-generating." 

Good service can go a long way towards boosting customer satisfaction and ultimately customer loyalty because customers know that if they have a problem, you will be able to quickly resolve it. 

📚Recommended reading: Want to get a gauge of your brand’s customer loyalty? Learn how to calculate (and improve) net promoter score (NPS) and customer satisfaction (CSAT).

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Reduce customer churn rates

Boosting customer loyalty also means reducing customer churn rates. When you can provide a streamlined and satisfactory experience to customers who are having issues with your products or services, it’s less likely that those issues will cost you the customer. 

According to The Effortless Experience, 96% of customers who have high-effort experiences feel disloyal to those companies afterward. Having to navigate away from social media and compose an email, only to be told that you actually have to pick up the phone and repeat your issue is the definition of a high-effort experience.

If the support process is seamless for the customer, their experience will be positive — and positive customer experience reduces churn. For subscription-based businesses, this means canceling their subscription. For non-subscription-based businesses, this means not returning to place additional purchases. 

An omnichannel customer service strategy can be an exceptional tool for helping you turn customer issues into satisfactory outcomes, boosting customer retention in the process.

📚Recommended reading: Dealing with angry or frustrated customers? Check out our guide to dealing with angry customers over email.

Differentiate your brand from the competition

There's no denying the fact that ecommerce store owners are currently experiencing more than their fair share of challenges — and customer retention, not acquisition, is the best way to stand out. 

Between stiff competition from ecommerce giants like Walmart and Amazon, and mounting global supply chain challenges, drawing in enough customers to pay the bills has never been harder. 

The price of paid advertising has also skyrocketed recently, leaving many ecommerce brands at a disadvantage when it comes to bringing in new customers through paid channels. For example, Meta’s cost per click for paid ads increased by 61% from the previous year. 

Many brands still operate in silos, where a support conversation via email and purchase history don’t show up in a customer’s lifetime profile. This makes omnichannel customer support a great way to step up the overall experience, where new shoppers feel comfortable making a purchase and returning shoppers are excited to come back for more.  

And remember: While the cost of ads and customer acquisition skyrockets, happy customers generate 300% more revenue than first-time shoppers. So, while other brands are overspending on new customers they struggle to retain, you’ll come out on top by focusing on providing an excellent customer experience that keeps customers coming back.

Create a smoother customer journey 

Customers want the ability to get the support they need where and when they want it, at any stage of the relationship they have with a company. 

This creates a better user experience, one that is more focused on the benefits to the customer than on the benefits to the business. That’s the main difference between omnichannel and multichannel support. Multichannel support focuses on using multiple channels for marketing or support. Omnichannel seeks to meet customers where they are, provide a positive, seamless customer journey, and support people at all stages of the customer lifecycle.   

How to leverage the unique benefits for each channel

Each customer service channel has benefits of its own. Providing multiple channels — and a seamless experience switching from one channel to the next — lets customers choose what best works for them. 

Self-service

‍88% of customers want a self-service portal so that they can answer their own questions. Self-service resources like FAQ pages or knowledge centers are great for customer convenience, as they provide immediate answers to common questions. 

Email

There’s a reason that 95% of customer service teams rely on email for support. A preferred channel for many, its versatile features, ticketing system, and the ability to integrate with simple automation makes it a tool that works for small and large teams.

Phone

Some people still prefer to talk on the phone to get support. Phone conversations help to fully resolve an issue in a way that text or email support can’t. Plus, having a phone line for people to call builds trust in your business, even if customers choose a different channel.

Live chat

Using live chat support can increase customer conversions by 12%. It’s as much of a conversion tool as it is a support tool. Live chat encourages shoppers to ask any questions they have that are preventing them from making a purchase. For support, it offers immediate assistance for a quick resolution time. 

SMS text messages

‍46% of Americans spend 5-6 hours on their mobile devices each day. Offering SMS or text support meets customers where they already are, which creates an easier experience for them.   

Social media

‍Time spent on social media is at an all-time high. Worldwide, the average person spends 147 minutes on social media each day. Because people already spend so much time on social, allowing them to get support there creates a much easier, streamlined experience. Shoppers can respond to a story to ask questions about products, comment a question on a post, tweet at a brand, or reach out via DM, a space that’s usually monitored by brands daily. 

Mobile app

‍If your business has a mobile app, in-app support reduces the need for customers to switch back and forth between platforms

In-person

In-store support is great for personal connection, makes exchanges much easier, and allows customers to get an instant refund rather than waiting for an item to ship back. It also eliminates return shipping costs and can increase store revenue by bringing people back to take a look at what’s currently in stock. 

5 tips for building world-class omnichannel customer service

The benefits of omnichannel customer service make it a stand-out customer support best practice. To help you get started, here are five tips for building world-class omnichannel customer service.

1) Use customer data to know your target audience(s) inside and out

Customer data is the fuel that powers better customer service. When you know your target audience inside and out, you can fine-tune messaging across different digital channels to provide support. 

To offer a consistent experience across multiple channels, you must keep customer data front and center for whichever agent responds to the question. Customer data includes everything from each customer’s name, shipping address, past orders, past conversations, loyalty points, reviews, and more. With the right tool, this data will carry from one channel to the next, ensuring your customers never have to repeat themselves:

This customer data gives your agents the insights they need to provide a more personalized experience to the customers that they assist. Plus, you can set up automation workflows — like chatbots and automatic responses — that use this data to provide instant, personalized support. We’ll discuss this more in step four below.

✅ Next steps: Get familiar with the customer data that you have and make it as easy as possible for your agents to access. Ideally, it’s part of a helpdesk so your agents don’t have to switch tabs while answering tickets. But a customer relationship management (CRM) tool or even a spreadsheet could work — anything to avoid asking customers to repeat themselves. 

📚 Recommended reading: Want to measure key customer support metrics? Read our guides on measuring NPS, CSAT, and customer service ROI. Or, check out our list of customer support metrics every brand should track.

2) Understand the strengths of each customer support channel

Before you can begin offering efficient customer service across multiple digital channels, you first need to get familiar with how each one of those channels works, how they can work together, and the best way to utilize each channel. 

For instance, you may decide that routing customers with more complex issues from live chat to a call center is the best way to use these two channels in tandem. Whatever system you decide to implement, a thorough understanding of how to use the various channels in your omnichannel customer service strategy — both individually and as part of your overall support network — is key to creating effective omnichannel support.

Keep in mind that forcing customers to switch channels isn’t ideal. However, in certain circumstances, your best bet at finding a quick resolution is asking customers to jump on the phone or send an email with more details and images.

✅ Next steps: Check out our Director of Support’s guide to prioritizing customer support requests based on channel, urgency, and customer status. This is a great first step to developing a strategic approach to a multi-channel support operation.

3) Centralize all your conversations using a unified customer support platform 

One of the only drawbacks of omnichannel customer service is the fact that requiring support agents to bounce between multiple apps (email, Facebook, Instagram, and so on) to respond to notifications on each channel. Thankfully, customer support software solutions (also called helpdesks) such as Gorgias can help. A customer service platform like Gorgias has functionality that can:

Centralize customer support conversations. Centralize conversations across numerous platforms and social media messaging apps into a single, user-friendly dashboard. Centralizing your customer interactions into one dashboard makes it easy for your customer service agents to switch between messaging platforms. This can boost agent productivity and ultimately improve the quality of your omnichannel customer support services.

Reduce tab-shuffling. Pick a helpdesk that pulls customer data from your ecommerce platform (like Shopify, BigCommerce, or Magento) so you can see customer data, modify orders, and suggest products without leaving the helpdesk. For you or your customer service agents, this means that they don’t have to pull up multiple tabs to help out one customer, which would involve shuffling between sites like Gmail, Instagram, and Shopify, for example. 

Unify customer data across channels. Customers want to be able to start a live chat conversation with support and have the agent be able to see their past conversation history, purchases, and even chats they’ve had on other channels, like email or via text. Gorgias includes a customer sidebar, which shows customer data and metrics across integrated channels like SMS, email, and social media, and tools like Klaviyo and Yotpo. 

Use automation to streamline processes. Built-in automation can help you deflect and prioritize tickets, offer immediate responses to frequently asked questions, or pop up to share proactive support or find upselling opportunities. 

✅ Next steps: Check out the best customer service software on the market, or sign up for a free trial of Gorgias.  

Note: Gorgias no longer supports Twitter interactions, but you can still use Gorgias for Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp.

4) Leverage automation to improve response time and lighten the workload for your team

Tools designed to automate tedious customer service tasks are a huge help. Automated customer support workflow builders enable you to create canned responses to common questions such as, "where is my order?" and "do you ship internationally?" 

Leveraging artificial intelligence can help you determine customer intent and provide accurate, personalized responses. The benefits of these automation tools are two-fold. They allow you to speed up your response and resolution times, and also help to reduce the burden on your support team by automatically resolving a large percentage of customer issues — which would have otherwise required a manual response. 

✅ Next steps: If you don’t have one already, sign up for a helpdesk that comes with automation. Automated workflow builders such as the one offered by Gorgias can connect with a wide range of messaging platforms, letting you create canned responses across numerous customer support channels.

5) Offer self-service options 

Self-service resources such as FAQ pages, automated chatbots, and knowledge base pages can allow customers to quickly find the answer to common questions without having to create a support ticket. While some might not consider these support channels, because they don’t involve conversations with support report reps, they are extremely important elements of the customer experience.

According to data from Microsoft, 66% of customers try self-service options before they decide to contact a brand's customer service team. Further, the same report finds that 88% of customers expect brands to have an online self-service portal.

While it is certainly important to provide customers with plenty of different channels for getting in touch with your customer service agents, self-service channels can be a valuable element of omnichannel customer service as well. Self-support resources make it easy for customers to find answers to common issues — even when all your reps are offline — while also reducing your team's support ticket volume.

Self-service is a wide-ranging umbrella, including resources like the following.

1) Self-service menus where customers can track, return, and cancel orders, as well as get answers to common questions without having to contact an agent and wait for a response:

2) Knowledge bases, also known as Help Centers, where customers can access an organized library of support articles and manage their order without contacting an agent:

3) Customer communities where customers can see conversations with other customers and read informative blog posts related to their products and issues

✅ Next steps: Using the data you have from past customer questions, pain points, and conversations, identify your frequently asked questions and create an FAQ page to answer them. You should also link your shipping, return, and exchange policies, as well as links to the additional channels where you offer support.

Once you have your FAQ page, monitor usage and consider upgrading to more robust self-service options like those described above.

Gorgias makes omnichannel customer service possible with a few clicks

As the customer service platform built specifically for ecommerce stores, Gorgias offers everything you need to implement omnichannel customer service with just a few clicks, including:

• Centralized customer support dashboard for connecting multiple customer service channels under a single, easy-to-use platform
• Powerful integrations with a wide range of messaging platforms, including fast-loading live chat widgets for offering real-time live chat support directly from your website
• AI-powered automated workflow builder for creating canned responses to common customer service questions

Take a look at how Gorgias helps you offer omnichannel customer service in the video below:

If you would like to see for yourself how Gorgias empowers ecommerce brands to offer exceptional omnichannel customer service, sign up for Gorgias today.

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2020 has seen two crisises so far. Because of the global pandemic, millions of people lost their jobs. We've responded with a plan to offer free credits to businesses that struggle.

George Floyd's death is showed us again how deep racism still is in the US and around the world. Gorgias is committed to supporting members of the Black community against racism, prejudice, and hate.

We're actively taking measures to make a difference now, and tomorrow:

1. We're donating $10K to local non-profits that support minorities in the Bay Area and in Charlotte. We were profitable for the first time in May and this is 100% of our profits.
2. We're proactively sourcing diverse candidates for our hiring needs and we remain committed to making sure everyone gets an unbiased chance through the interview process.

We realize this is only a small contribution to a big problem, but change has to start somewhere. We see lots of businesses take action so we hope the sum of all these initiatives will lead to long lasting change.

For the past 4 years, we've been building Gorgias with Alex and our amazing team. Both of us are automation nerds and our initial idea was to automatically respond to simple support questions. Over the last 2 years, we've been focusing heavily on helping Shopify merchants manage all their customer service in one place. We've grown from 0 to 2000 customers, including fast-growing brands like Rothys, MVMT and Steve Madden.

Today, we're raising a $14M series A to transform customer service into a profit center using conversational commerce.

I'm not a fan of celebrating fundraising events too much, as it's more of a promise than an achievement in itself, but I want to take advantage of this milestone to reflect on what we've learned:

The direct-to-consumer revolution has only started

Over the last 10 years, Amazon has reached an impressive 50% market share in eCommerce. They were able to do it thanks to 3 key pillars: customer experience, logistics and pricing. As a result, they grew 10x in the last 10 years.

However, as we've been building Gorgias, we've witnessed a second trend that has been quieter until last year: brands are going direct to consumers. It happened because of two key factors. One, millennials want to buy from brands they can relate with. For instance, Rothy's makes shoes out of recycled plastic bottles. Two, brands want to build an experience that they control. That's why Nike decided to pull out from Amazon last week.

This direct-to-consumer shift actually started around 2013. Around that time, Shopify started empowering more and more entrepreneurs to launch their own brand online. Ad costs on Facebook, Instagram and Google were relatively low, which allowed for lots of eCommerce entrepreneurial success stories like MVMT Watches.

As more and more brands launched, competition on ad buying has become fierce. The new battleground is no longer Cost of Acquisition but Lifetime Value.

Lots of merchants using Gorgias are now focusing on building a brand. They create differentiated products, they want to interact directly with their customers over online communities like the 310 Nutrition Facebook group with 300,000 members.

Brands are bringing Main Street back, and want to offer a real alternative to Amazon. Apps like Shopify (storefront and soon fulfillment), Klaviyo (email marketing), Yotpo (reviews) and us too at Gorgias have been working on empowering merchants to build large scale and independent businesses.

The future of customer service: use customer service to sell

Here's how we want to help merchants with customer service. The pillar value proposition of Gorgias has been to allow to provide the best customer experience through a 360 degree view of the customer. Agents can respond to chats, emails, Instagram comments while seeing previous conversations, and order data. This way, customers get assistance faster. Everyone wins.

Though, we think there's a larger opportunity for merchants. As a visitor is going to browse a online store during Black Friday, some objections are going to pop up in their mind. Is this shoe the right size? Will it fit?

In 2020, we want to empower merchants to grow through conversational commerce. Support teams can now leverage all the context they have about the customer to guide them toward the buying journey.

One of the challenges here is that support teams are already under a lot of pressure during the holiday season. People wonder if their order will arrive on time for Christmas, or how they can return this gift that was not the right size. That's why we're also focusing on automating the first response to these questions. This way, agents have more time to assist visitors with their purchase.

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We're super grateful to the whole team that has joined the adventure, it's been a hell of a ride from the first customer to the 2000th. Jason has been incredibly helpful as our main investor so far. Today we're excited to welcome Auren, Tod and Jeff from Flex Capital, along with François from Alven, Andrew from Klaviyo as part of the team.

At each stage of the journey, there's a new product-market fit to find and new challenges ahead, this fundraising is the beginning of this new chapter to generate more sales through conversational commerce.

PS: if you run an eCommerce store, give Gorgias a try and let me know whats you think

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Gone are the days when a customer places an order online without considering order fulfillment. They want free shipping, two-day shipping, and live order tracking — and that’s just table stakes.

Big ecommerce brands and marketplaces, especially Amazon Prime, have trained customers to expect their orders will arrive as soon as the next day and with absolutely no hassle. That creates challenges for small and medium businesses now tasked with achieving similar results.

Your ecommerce business may not have the resources for next-day delivery, but having online orders arrive quickly and smoothly is non-negotiable. Slow or frustrating order fulfillment can easily trigger a product return or a negative review, and will likely prevent a customer from turning into a repeat customer.

Even small brands can optimize their order fulfillment process, from taking in and storing inventory to taking return requests, and deliver great results every time.

What is order fulfillment?

Order fulfillment is the sequence of steps that starts after a customer places an online order, and ends when your customer receives their order. It includes order intake, order picking, assembling, packing, shipping, and order tracking. 

Some companies include post-delivery communications in this category, while others put that communication into another category, like customer support or onboarding.

All organizations rely on some third-party assistance within the order fulfillment process — even if you’re a solo business owner who handles most of the order fulfillment process in house (like inventory storage and order processing), you use a delivery carrier like FedEx or USPS to drop off packages. 

Other businesses lean on more outsourced fulfillment solutions to manage warehousing and ship orders, such as a dropshipping partner or third-party logistics (3PL) operation. Self-fulfillment is quite time-consuming for stores with high volumes of orders, so you’ll likely outsource more of the order fulfillment process as you grow. 

Common challenges of order fulfillment

Companies frequently run into several common hurdles when building an ecommerce fulfillment strategy, especially as they grow and scale. Processing more customer orders is a good thing, but only when businesses can keep up with customer expectations around their fulfillment needs. 

Do any of these order fulfillment challenges sound familiar to your business?

• Poor inventory management: Frequently being out of stock (or, worse, selling items you don’t have in stock) hampers your sales potential and harms the customer experience.
• Low shipping quality: When you hand packages off to a shipping carrier, much of the shipping process is out of your hands. Yet, customers still blame you when items don’t arrive or show up damaged.
• Too much stock: Keeping too much stock on hand affects storage and carrying costs, and you can end up stuck with unsellable items that have gone out of style, out of season, or otherwise become unpopular.
• Supply chain breakdown: When one or more links in your supply chain are unable to keep up with demand for inventory.

These issues are common, but they add up over time, diminishing your customer experience (CX) and growth potential. Building loyal customers is key to repeat business and a poor fulfillment strategy put that at risk. Every time a customer has to reach out about an issue in the process, you’re a step closer to losing them. 

Even if you have the fastest, friendliest customer service team around, a fulfillment operation that doesn’t require customers to reach out is always preferred.

📚Related reading: Our list of revenue-driving ecommerce shipping best practices.

Why is order fulfillment important for ecommerce businesses?

Why pay close attention to your order fulfillment strategy? Because it’s what ensures your customers get what they ordered, when they expect it. 

As many as 90% of online shoppers see 2-day and 3-day delivery as the standard, with 30% of shoppers saying that they expect same-day delivery. In fact, the same-day delivery market in the US is expected to grow by more than $9 billion from 2020 to 2025.

What’s more, Arvato finds that 54% percent of U.S. shoppers have walked away from a purchase because of the cost of delivery, and 27% percent have done the same because the ecommerce business didn’t have fulfillment options that arrive in time.

Providing a delivery estimate is also key. A 2020 report from Navnar found 68% of customers said estimated delivery time during the checkout process influenced their decision to complete a purchase.

The bottom line is that customers expect fast, cost-effective, and transparent shipping if you want to win their business and loyalty.

How does the order fulfillment process generally work?

Let’s take a step back to the basics and look at how the order fulfillment process works for the typical ecommerce business selling on an ecommerce platform.

Each of these steps has its own set of intricacies and details, and it’s easy to overlook something in one or more of these areas. Looking at each step before getting any deeper in will help you better assess what your business needs to handle — and how to go about doing so.

1) Receiving inventory

Receiving inventory is the process of taking stock into a warehouse or fulfillment center. Before you (or your order fulfillment company) can ship products to customers, you (or they) must first have products to ship. 

Depending on how your business is structured, inventory can come from your own production facilities, from other companies directly, or from third-party or intermediary services.

Part of the receiving process is counting and inspecting incoming stock for damage. Categorizing or labeling starts here and continues in the next step.

2) Storing inventory

Any products you don’t immediately process and ship need to be categorized, logged, and stored, usually using a stock-keeping unit (SKU). Some larger businesses may also use some other kind of barcode or radio-frequency identification (RFID) tracking system to help with inventory management.

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Items are placed into inventory storage, either in your warehouse (whether that’s a large facility or just your garage) or in your fulfillment service center or third-party logistics partner’s warehouse.

This step encompasses a lot, as your strategy here dictates how much time and labor goes into finding and packing items later on. For example, digital inventory management systems are crucial for tracking and locating items stored in inventory.

3) Processing the order

Processing an order involves developing a system to find items, pull them from the inventory, and then pack them once a customer places an order. 

This could look like you going to your at-home inventory and packaging the items, or your fulfillment partners taking your items from a warehouse. It all depends on the size of your business.

You can streamline and track order processing Gorgias and with apps that integrate into Gorgias such as ShipMonk and Bigblue. ShipMonk, for example, pulls order fulfillment data and tracking information right into Gorgias helpdesk.

There’s also ShipBob, a 3PL that takes care of order fulfillment for ecommerce businesses. ShipBob integrates with Gorgias to pull all your customer orders fulfilled by ShipBob into a single account.

4) Shipping the order

This step is when your team (or your 3PL) hands off the order to a transportation channel (for example, shipping carriers like FedEx, UPS, and USPS).

This is the step where your strategy most directly influences the costs your business incurs. The packing materials, weight, and sizes you choose get calculated into a measurement called dimensional weight (DIM weight), which generally determines how much you pay in shipping costs.

This is an opportunity to communicate shipping notices to the customer. AfterShip provides tracking for you and transparency for customers and integrates with Gorgias so you can quickly access shipping information when communicating with customers.

Providing detailed shipping information is a crucial step of your fulfillment process. According to Optimroute, 24.6% of customers said they were “extremely likely” to buy again from a brand that provides real-time order tracking.

Shipping is deep into the process, but your shipping options greatly impact your incoming sales. Shipping costs are the most common reason behind abandoned carts: According to the Baynard Institute, 48% of customers will abandon a cart if shipping costs are too high, and 22% will do the same if the delivery time was too slow.

📚Recommended reading:

• 12 Best Shipping Software Tools for Ecommerce Stores
• 9 Revenue-Driving Ecommerce Shipping Best Practices
• How To Provide Order Tracking for Your Ecommerce Customers

5) Handling returns

Any ecommerce business must have a process for handling returns in place, and this crucial function usually falls under order fulfillment. Your returns procedures must establish when returns are and are not accepted, along with how to determine which returns can be restocked and which cannot (e.g., soiled or defective items).

You need to be prepared for returns as they’re guaranteed to happen. In 2021, shoppers returned over 20.8% of products ordered, according to the National Retail Foundation. Items returned in 2021 alone were worth a total of $761 billion.

Again, apps can make this all easier. Loop Returns, for example, automates returns for Shopify merchants. Loop and Gorgias work together to place all your returns data inside the Gorgias helpdesk. 

📚Recommended reading: 

• 9 Best Returns Management Tools for Easier Returns
• Ecommerce Returns: 10 Best Practices for Taking Your Online Store to the Next Level

The 4 types of order fulfillment

While the broad strokes we just outlined are fairly consistent, the details of order fulfillment are different from company to company, as are fulfillment costs.

Most businesses fall into one of four categories or types of order fulfillment. Below, we’ll detail each of these four categories: in-house order fulfillment, third-party order fulfillment, dropshipping order fulfillment, and hybrid order fulfillment.

In-house order fulfillment

In-house order fulfillment is what it sounds like — the business handles all the steps listed above internally (aside from the actual shipping). Employees or contractors for the ecommerce business receive and store inventory, pick and pack orders with a shipping label and packing slip, and handle the customer relationships that accompany each order.

In-house is common on two extreme ends of the spectrum: smaller, low-volume businesses and startups (where packing boxes doesn’t consume too much of any one person’s time), and major enterprises (think Amazon).

📚Recommended reading: How to Offer Free Shipping and Lift Revenue

Third-party order fulfillment

In a third-party model, everything about the order fulfillment process is outsourced to a third-party logistics company. Outsourcing to a third-party fulfillment provider like the Shopify Fulfillment Network, Amazon FBA, Amazon MCF, or Deliverr is a highly strategic choice for ecommerce businesses that have grown to a certain order volume but lack order fulfillment infrastructure.

Using an order fulfillment service also makes sense for firms with volatile or seasonal sales patterns, where maintaining as much storage space as possible is unsustainable during slower seasons.

📚Recommended reading: Shopify Fulfillment Network Review From an Ecommerce Merchant

Dropshipping order fulfillment

Dropshipping is when an ecommerce store doesn’t keep items in stock and, instead, sources products from a third-party manufacturer or wholesaler who holds the items and ships them as needed. The store owner pays the wholesale price as items are shipped, removing the burden of keeping their own inventory.

This is different from the 3PL model, where the store provides its own inventory to the third-party provider, and different from when a store stores its own inventory.

It makes sense for D2C businesses that own their own manufacturing and want to keep order fulfillment in house. It also makes sense for ecommerce businesses that want minimal involvement in the fulfillment process. Essentially, the business forwards shipping details to the manufacturer, who takes over the transaction.

The downside to dropshipping is that it means giving up control of the order process. Additionally, costs (and shipping times) can shoot up quickly when customers are far away from your manufacturing partner’s shipping locations.

Hybrid order fulfillment

Hybrid order fulfillment is any scenario that combines multiple strategies. For example, a company with heavy seasonal sales might keep most order fulfillment in house, but outsource some to a third-party firm during Q4. Alternatively, the company may select high-value or specialty items for dropshipping, while everything else is handled another way.

10 Best practices and tips for an optimized order fulfillment process

Once you’ve determined a broad direction for your order fulfillment strategy (or identified some top-tier issues with your current process), it’s time to reevaluate and optimize. Use these best practices and tips to tighten up your order fulfillment strategy and further wow your customer base.

1) Streamline receiving processes so damaged goods are handled promptly

Returns handling is something no business wants to focus on, but it’s an important area nonetheless. 

Assess all incoming products before they’re sent to your inventory and set a process to separate and catalog those damaged goods. All damaged items should be documented so you can provide proof to the wholesaler or manufacturer of defective items.

Return damaged goods as soon as possible so you can get replacements and not slow down your order fulfillment. The last thing you want is to find a product that is damaged just as you’re packing it for shipment and be left scrambling.

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2) Organize your inventory and warehouse with efficiency in mind

If you’re handling your own inventory management and doing in-house fulfillment, keeping your inventory and warehouse organized can have a meaningful impact on your bottom line. When used in combination with an order fulfillment system, better organization can generate real results.

Searching for lost pallets is a resource drain that generates zero revenue. The right organizational strategy makes it easier for human or automated pickers to find the items, and can even reduce travel time between items. This is especially true as you scale organizational strategies across entire or multiple distribution centers — clear organization helps improve pick and pack times.

Even for small businesses, which may involve keeping inventory in a garage or office, it’s still important to have an organizational system in place. Simple tools like labels and a spreadsheet can go a long way.

Using a 3PL like ShipBob makes this all easier by taking inventory out of your hands, leaving you to focus on branding and customer service.

📚Recommended reading: An Essential Guide to Ecommerce Inventory Management

3) Automate processes wherever possible

Automation in warehousing settings requires substantial upfront investment and may even require rethinking your entire warehouse footprint. But wherever you’re able to implement it, automation can help save you money and time in the long run by optimizing labor, improving working conditions, and making operations safer.

Automation can happen in small ways, too. Using Gorgias and the apps that integrate into the helpdesk puts all your data into one place and makes it easier and faster to make decisions.

Adding an app like Alloy Automation makes your Gorgias admin even more efficient by pulling in tickets, daily shipments, survey data, and review information.

📚Recommended reading: Automate and Streamline Ecommerce Tasks While Keeping a Human Touch

4) Use order fulfillment software that integrates with customer service software

As your company grows, you’ll eventually turn to some kind of order fulfillment software. When you do, choose one that integrates well with your chosen customer service software — you don’t want siloed information systems that can’t talk to each other.

When your fulfillment software integrates with your helpdesk, you can see fulfillment data while answering customer questions. So, if a customer asks about the status of their order, you don’t have to pull open a new tab and copy/paste things like tracking numbers and estimated delivery dates. All of that is already in your helpdesk, making it much faster to provide helpful, personalized answers. 

Source: NetSuite and Gorgias integration

NetSuite and ShipBob are two leaders in this category. The latter also offers some third-party logistics support.

Learn more about Gorgias’ multiple integration options.

5) Prioritize your inventory’s accuracy

From a customer’s perspective, which is worse? Seeing that an item is sold out before you order it, or ordering (and paying for) an item that’s listed as in stock, only to find out later that the item was not actually in stock?

Most customers would prefer the bad news upfront. Inventory inaccuracies create a host of customer frustrations that your business would surely prefer to avoid.

The math here is simple, even if the execution is complex: The more accurate your inventory, the more success you’ll have in delivering the right products on time.

Whether you’re using an in-house order fulfillment model or you’re relying on a 3PL partner’s distribution centers, using a warehouse management system is generally better than relying on manual data entry. This is certainly true as you grow or scale your ecommerce venture.

You also want to be sure to watch the right set of inventory management metrics, which can show you how well you’re doing at keeping an accurate inventory. These metrics will vary depending on your goals, but could include:

• Backorder rate (rate of unfulfilled orders due to items on backorder)
• Accuracy of forecast demand (compares on-hand quantity to the forecasted demand)
• Lost sales ratio (number of days a product is out of stock compared to projected sales over that time)
• Inventory shrinkage (inventory that you cannot find or cannot sell due to damage)
• Fill rate (measures how many items were shipped compared to ordered)
• Customer satisfaction score (number of positive responses against all responses)

If you’d like to learn more about these and other metrics, NetSuite has put together a solid explainer on 33 of the most important inventory management KPIs and metrics. Their guide explains all six of the metrics we’ve listed, plus several others.

6) Minimize package touching and handling

In general, it’s a good idea to limit the number of touches that each package gets (There are packing strategies that disregard this, such as wave picking, but we still consider it to be a best practice unless you have an overriding reason to choose a different strategy).

Why is it a good strategy to minimize touching and handling? Because of all the things that could potentially go wrong at every touch:

• Product damage
• Shrinkage
• Employee injury
• Packing mistakes (too many, not enough, or missing items)

Additionally, every touch is added time and energy expended on an item. You want to get items out the door with as little friction as possible, so engineer your processes in a way that minimizes touches and handoffs.

7) Keep enough inventory to keep up with demand

This best practice circles back to demand forecasting, which is always a complex element for ecommerce retailers. You want to keep enough inventory on hand to keep up with customer demand, because delivering on time and reducing stockouts are two primary ways to increase customer satisfaction.

Of course, you don’t want to overdo it and end up with excess or even dead inventory. Keep your inventory levels modest, yet sufficient — always have enough to deliver on time, but remain agile enough that you don’t end up with pallets upon pallets of product sitting around that cannot be sold.

Regularly assess your orders for what items are most popular and keep an eye on key calendar dates — like Black Friday and the holiday season — to predict how much inventory you’ll need.

8) Use an RFID system to enhance analytics

If you’re not relying on a third-party order fulfillment system and you’ve reached a certain size and complexity, consider implementing a radio-frequency identification (RFID) system for tracking inventory. 

RFID is a technology that uses tags and a reader device to track inventory in an automated way. It’s a way of providing real-time tracking for your inventory. Learn more about RFID with this Luluemon case study:

https://youtu.be/cZfx2naKYXo

Such a system far outpaces traditional systems for tracking and managing inventory, and it unlocks additional levels of analytics that can give you a better understanding of your inventory.

When doing inventory at scale, better data means better decision-making, which can filter through all levels of your supply chain.

9) Be clear with your shipping options

Unless you offer pick-up or can deliver orders yourself, such as in a local delivery area, you’ll be relying on a shipping carrier such as USPS, FedEx, or Purolator.

Customers want clear shipping times and flexibility. Do your research to understand which shipping partner will best suit your needs and communicate their various options to your customers, who may be willing to pay more for shipping if it means a faster delivery time.

The same is true if you’re using a third-party fulfillment partner. Ensure they can meet your shipping expectations, keeping in mind the average customer expectation for online delivery is three days. 

Another way to achieve this is with good coverage. Ideally, a fulfillment provider has enough warehouse locations to cover at least 95% of the US, for example.

Native Union, a tech accessory brand, lets customers input their shipping zip code to estimate the cost of each delivery option before they place an order:

10) Make returns and edits a simple process

Your customers want a simple returns process, as do your in-house order fulfillment teams.

There’s strategic value in instituting a transparent returns process that’s easy for your customers to understand and use when they need it. Don’t forget about the back end, either. Your internal teams are just as important to your continued order fulfillment success, so make sure the process for handling returns is simple to execute.

Start by setting expectations for returns and exchanges ahead of time with a FAQ or Help Center page that clearly outlines your return and refund policies.

Then, streamline the returns process with the following recommendations:

Use self-service order management to let customers cancel orders and request returns

Make it as easy as possible for customers to initiate cancellations or request returns, saving time for both them and your customer service team.

Use Gorgias’ Automate to create a self-service portal that customers can use for these processes. Instead of waiting for an agent to help, customers can use the chat widget on your ecommerce website to:

• Track the status of their order
• Return an order
• Report issues
• Cancel an order

For any ecommerce business, these are the top reasons customers reach out or file tickets, cluttering your dashboard. Letting customers take care of these processes themselves streamlines your workflow and builds customer satisfaction.

Use a tool like Loop to fully automate the returns and exchanges

Loop is a returns app that allows a customer to initiate a return or exchange all on their own without having to wait for your customer support team. With Loop, customers can see which of their items are available for return or exchange or select a new item or size for replacement.

Loop helps with customer retention by offering an exchange or bonus credit rather than an outright return, giving customers a chance to stay a customer. Loop then provides you with data so you can get insights into where customers may be running into issues with your products.

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And best of all, Loop fully integrates with Gorgias so you can see all those return and exchange details in one place. Read how Kulani Kinis saved $400,000 in refunds using Gorgias and Loop together.

📚Recommended reading: 10 Ways To Reduce Ecommerce Product Returns With Great CX

Enhance your ecommerce order fulfillment process and customer service with Gorgias

Ecommerce businesses benefit when they get intentional about their order fulfillment strategy. By leapfrogging past common hurdles like poor inventory management or poor shipping experiences, businesses can strengthen customer relationships and continue to grow.

The best practices and tips we’ve provided here can get you well on your way to improving your order fulfillment strategy. But in the end, you also need the right tools and apps to round out your inventory and customer service abilities.

Gorgias can transform how you empower your customer service team with better helpdesk and customer service tools tailored to the needs of ecommerce businesses. 

Plus, Gorgias integrates with all the top ecommerce platforms, shipping and fulfillment software, and other ecommerce apps used by businesses like yours to simplify essential services like order management.

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Ready to find out how Gorgias can help improve your order fulfillment strategy? Sign up for free today!

We've been busy, but not deaf!

Last few months we got lots of feedback about our extension and found to our delight that most people are satisfied, but still a few recurrent issues came up:

• The HTML/WYSIWYG editor sucks.
• No support for Outlook.com.

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We listened and now we're presenting:

• A brand new editor
• Support for outlook.com
• More on the Rich-Text editor

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WYSIWYG editors for the web are notoriously buggy and are just difficult to develop.

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I have yet to see one that is bug free. There are few venerable editors that do a good job like TinyMCE, FKEditor or CKEditor.. but they are big and all have edge cases that break the intended formatting and add a lot of garbage html.

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There are newer good quality editors in town such as Redactor. The one that got my attention and finally landed in Gorgias is this wonderful editor called which is super lightweight, uses modern content-editable (no i-frames) and 'just works' most of the time. That's not to say it's perfect, but it's good enough and I'm satisfied with it's direction in terms of development.

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Enjoy it and as always send us bug-reports or feedback on: support@gorgias.com

Did you know that 80% of companies base annual pay increases on performance? Doing so may seem like a no-brainer, especially since other studies like Lattice’s State of People Strategy show effective pay-for-performance strategies are indicators of individual and company performance.

But despite this evidence, we at Gorgias believe compensation shouldn't only be based on performance. The right combination of performance, behavior, and business needs will lead people to a promotion, but we don't provide individual salary raises (that aren’t tied to promotions) based only on performance.

You might be raising an eyebrow, but don’t click away. Removing performance-based compensation helps us reduce bias and focus on long-term growth.

Here’s our compensation plan in a nutshell:

• We base compensation on benchmark data and rely on multiple databases to define our compensation grid. (Notice I don't say "compensation bands" because we don't believe in bands. It's one number, period).
• We pay well. This part is extremely important because a company with low base salary and no variable pay will struggle to attract talent. You must pay well, especially if you want to eliminate merit increases.
• Our compensation grid, aka "Salary calculator," is transparent and accessible to everyone at Gorgias, as well as externally. Check out our salary calculator to get a better sense of our compensation system.
• We don't negotiate offers. I know, it's hard to believe. But it's true! We have our grid, we're confident in what we offer, and we stick to it.

Why compensation shouldn’t only be based on performance

First, let’s define what we mean by compensation here. In this post, I discuss the total package offered upon hiring and the so-called “merit cycle” which gives financial rewards to “top performers.”

I won’t open the topic of commissions, which is a slightly different pay structure. It’s also an interesting topic — maybe a future post?

Regardless, here are the main reasons we don’t believe in compensation models that reward individual performance.

Biases are lurking everywhere (yes, even if you're a great manager)

Startups move fast, and managers do too. Even managers who are aware of bias are still susceptible to them. And evaluations of employee performance are very hard to rid of bias.

Let me ask you this: Would all employees have the same salary today if they had different managers? At most organizations, the answer is no. When one manager decides yearly compensation of their direct reports, those direct reports end up with subjective, bias-ridden compensation. That’s no good.

You're probably well aware of biases, so let's skip the usual suspects like affinity bias (which makes you like more people who are similar to you) and focus on others.

Pressure bias

Pressure bias occurs when an employee constantly talks about money and puts pressure on you to give them more. A common response is to compromise, just to end the uncomfortable pressure: "Alright, I'll give them at least a 3% raise so they won't complain forever."

You might be thinking, "I'm experienced and wouldn't do that." That might be true. But a more junior manager might reward employees who apply this kind of pressure, and that's a problem.

Visibility bias

Visibility bias is the phenomenon of noticing (and rewarding) an employee just because of visibility. Perhaps they had a very visible project, or are vocal in meetings and on Slack. Or, perhaps they work in the same office as their manager and get more one-on-one time than remote teammates.

Just because you — or even the CEO — see more of one person or their projects doesn’t mean that person had the strongest impact. And it definitely doesn’t mean they deserve more compensation than teammates with less visibility.

Person's presence

Ah, my favorite topic. Let me illustrate with an example.

Imagine you have three employees. The first one has been here the whole year. The latter two have been absent for a few months due to illness and maternity leave. They've only been present for two or three quarters out of the four.

If you pay based on performance, you should reward the employee who had a greater impact by simply being present and shipping projects — right? But if this is the case, the employees would be punished simply for taking time off (which is a legal right).

Women are still paid 16% less than men in the US and 18% less in Europe. The same issue applies to people with disabilities. Compensation-based performance perpetuates these unfortunate statistics.

"But wait," you might argue, "performance should be assessed when the employee is here. If someone is absent for several months, you evaluate their performance and increase based on the period of presence."

This compensation strategy makes sense in theory but introduces room for interpretation and “gaming the system.” Now, employees have to strategically plan their absences around the annual performance appraisal to ensure they don't miss out.

What about a mother who is having her third pregnancy and is entitled to a one-year leave in many countries and companies? Would you truly base her performance increase on her performance from a year ago?

By penalizing employees for being away for a few months, you're creating unnecessary complexity and potential discrimination.

Performance is unlikely to remain stable over time

You may excel in one project, perform slightly below par in the next, and then shine again in another.

Let’s say your scope switches a bit and suddenly you’re not as great at keeping up with everything, you’re just good. However, your compensation is still higher — even if a colleague is now performing at a higher level.

It's the famous Peter Principle in action: People end up in positions where they perform at their worst because when they're great, they keep getting promoted.

By paying based on performance you apply the Peter Principle on compensation: You will ultimately pay employees more than the level of their performance.

For the same reason, we don’t believe compensation should be based on tenure. If you are rewarded for your tenure, over the years, you’ll become isolated at a very high level of compensation and misaligned with the market.

As the years pass, it will become extremely hard for you to find a job that pays what you expect and ultimately you can become unemployable. As a consequence, you’ll be very likely to stay but not for good reasons.

You might create tension within the team

"But if you don't pay based on performance,” you say. “How is it fair that a high performer makes the same as an average performer?"

My answer is simple: As a human resources leader or a Manager, you must work tirelessly to avoid having average team players. You don't want average; you want excellence. A+ players only, period.

"This is unrealistic," you say. "You'll definitely have average employees, even poor ones."

I agree. But not for long. If you set high expectations and transparently communicate this at a company level, there are no surprises. If someone misses their performance goals too many quarters in a row and becomes a low performer, we trigger a performance improvement plan (PIP).

At Gorgias, our ultimate goal is to have the absolute best versions of ourselves in every corner of the company. Pay-for-performance programs force people to constantly strive to be "better" than others, which directly contradicts our company's vision of fostering high talent density. We believe this model leads to better employee engagement and company culture.

And ultimately, pay-for-performance doesn't work for top performers. When someone sees themselves as a rockstar and expects a 20% increase, but only receives 5%, it creates a misalignment between their beliefs and reality. With performance-based compensation as an option, it’s hard to make top performers (or anyone, really) satisfied.

But what if a candidate wants more? Should we make performance-based pay exceptions to keep them?

Well, dear hiring manager, I'm sorry to burst your bubble, but no.

We share our compensation package with candidates right at the beginning of the hiring process (they can even check our salary calculator). If they say they're good with it, they're good with it. No surprises at the end, we offer exactly what we've shared from the start.

Being absolutely inflexible on this matter has made my life (and the lives of everyone involved in the hiring process) so much easier. No need to negotiate with HR when sending an offer. No need to get finance involved to revalidate the budget. It's smooth sailing.

Will this scale (and is it right for everyone)?

I'm not saying that paying for performance is inherently bad. Obviously, if 80% of companies do it, there must be advantages like boosting retention of top talent.

I'm also aware that my vision may seem utopian. Maybe it's not entirely scalable, and perhaps we'll have to revisit our principles at some point.

But I've been told so many times that many things were not scalable and proved the opposite.

Not yielding is hard. Sticking to your principles is challenging. But adhering to your core principles is what creates wonderfully exciting machines like Stripe, Netflix, Apple, and Amazon.

You might think, "When people join a 20-person company, they know they're expected to work hard and strive for excellence. But when they join a 250-person company like Gorgias, they're not looking to work hard without direct compensation increases."

Maybe that’s true for some employees. As for me, I've worked just as hard in my previous 400,000-person company as I do in my current 250-person company.

And for those who desire something different, that’s okay. We just have to make our stance and policies clear and transparent in the interview process.

Yes, Gorgias is not for everyone. It's for people who thrive in a fast-paced environment, possess a growth mindset, and want to advance their careers. It's completely fine if it's not for you.

As long as we're aligned and embrace this statement, I sincerely believe we can continue scaling by paying people with the same job title and seniority level the same salary.

In the quest for ever-increasing efficiency, it’s easy to lose sight of a core business reality: Your customers are humans, and they still like to be treated as such.

Customer service departments certainly should leverage automation technology and work toward greater efficiency — but not in a way that frustrates customers. Instead, businesses should use automation to enhance a personalized customer service approach.

In this guide, learn personalized customer service is a top trend in customer service. Then we’ll give you nine ways to start providing more personalized customer service that you can implement right away.

What is personalized customer service?

Personalized customer service is the strategy of using individual customer information to tailor customer interactions. This information can include the customer’s name, purchase history, past support tickets, and anything else that your business might already know.

5 concrete examples of personalized customer service

Personalized customer service can be delivered throughout the whole customer journey, from the pre-sales stage to post-purchase. Here are five fantastic examples of personalized customer service:

1. Using a customer's purchase history to send them relevant product recommendations
2. Customizing communications to include customer information such as name and most recent orders
3. Sending birthday discounts on a customer's birthday
4. Notifying customers about back-in-stock items based on their browsing history
5. Sending a personalized check-in or follow-up message after a purchase, return, or exchange

9 steps to provide personalized customer service at scale

Providing excellent personalized customer service can seem overwhelming for many businesses, especially during periods of rapid growth. It’s true that developing a comprehensive personalization strategy takes resources and effort, but there are all sorts of simple ways to start transitioning to a more personalized approach:

1. Proactively reach out before a customer even needs support
2. Mention specifics in customer messages
3. Use customer data to inform the support you provide
4. Unify conversations in one platform
5. Employ an omnichannel approach
6. Use social media to your advantage
7. Create low-effort experiences
8. Ask for feedback
9. Prioritize requests in order of importance or urgency

1) Offer proactive support

Proactive customer service anticipates when customers might need assistance, and offers help before they reach out. For example, some brands use proactive support as part of their marketing strategy. They might use an automated live chat pop-up to share product recommendations, offer to answer questions or help new customers make a purchase, or share that a live chat support option is available, should they need it. 

Proactive support has many forms, like providing self-service resources like an FAQ page to answer repetitive questions or help with common pain points. It also might be an email that says “Can I help you with anything?” Offering help before people need it feels infinitely more personal than forcing the user to comb the website and find the right contact information.

‎Proactive support helped Gorgias customer Loop Earplugs increase their revenue by 43% with pre-sales flows. “When customers get a quick and honest answer, they often end up buying more than one product in a short span of time,” says Customer Service Manager Milan Vanmarcke.  

The first step towards implementing a proactive strategy of your own is to take a look at past customer conversations and look for common threads. Once you identify your most frequently asked questions, create an FAQ page with them. Be sure to link to any policies you have as well, like shipping, returns, exchanges, and where folks can reach out to get more help if needed. 

📚Recommended reading: Our complete guide on proactive customer service.

2) Mention specifics in customer messages

There’s a reason that car salespeople learn prospective customers’ first names within the first few seconds of an encounter. It’s a science-backed approach that builds trust and familiarity. 

Using specifics like a customer’s name or last order number goes a long way toward making the customer feel trust for your brand. It also shows that you’re listening, that you care, and that you have accurate information in front of you. Though this type of approach can be more time consuming, using templates with dynamic variables can help. Plus, it’ll lessen the need to go back and forth with customers to get that information in the first place. 

Next steps 

Consider signing up for a centralized helpdesk. Some helpdesks allow you to use templates with dynamic fields that pull in customer data like tracking information or the date their recent order shipped. On Gorgias, these templates are called Macros, and you can use them throughout your communication channels, on chat, or via email.  

3) Use customer data to inform support

As you work to further customize your approach, refine the way you use the customer data you already have from your other ecommerce tools to inform the kind of care you provide. 

Analyzing data from your CRM (customer relationship management system) can help you identify trends and common issues. This data can help you find common questions that are better handled via a FAQ or knowledge base, or that can be generated through automated chatbots or emails, saving your CS teams and your customers time.

Take a look at the demographic information you have about your audience to learn more about what might be most important to them. Use metrics like CSAT to understand how your support is performing, or retention numbers to see how many customers make second and third purchases, especially after requesting support.  

How Gorgias can help 

With a helpdesk like Gorgias, you can use the Customer Sidebar to pull customer data from different app integrations. Pull loyalty information from LoyaltyLion, get insight into reviews from Yotpo, or get marketing data from Klaviyo. 

‎This type of information can aid in your personalization efforts by providing further insights into how customers are feeling and what kind of support they’re looking for. For example, you might find some negative reviews and be able to send those customers a follow-up email to see how you can help. 

4) Unify your conversations in one platform

Personalization at scale requires the use of tools that keep your customer data safe, centralized, and accessible so that agents can answer questions with a consistently high level of care. 

Unifying all your customer touchpoints in one helpdesk platform lets reps see all past interactions and information, so they avoid asking customers to repeat themselves. They’ll be able to see information like past order history, returns, past support conversations and resolutions, and how long someone has been a customer. 

‎That’s been a key differentiator for Gorgias customer Absolute Collagen. "We hear all the time in a Facebook group or on the phone how much customers trust us because they know we'll get back to them and resolve the issue quickly,” says founder Maxine Laceby. “It's a real point of difference for us that our customer service team can do that. And the reason they can do that is that all of our channels are in one place."

How Gorgias can help

Gorgias is an all-in-one platform for ecommerce merchants looking to improve their customer service and helpdesk functions, from chatbot-like menus to customer self-service. It’s the perfect place for DTC ecommerce brands to start scaling their personalization efforts and drive more revenue.

5) Employ an omnichannel approach

Customers want to interact with your brand in different ways, and an omnichannel approach to customer support takes customers’ preferences into account. By offering support across all channels, like social media, email, phone, live chat, and SMS, you can better meet customers where they are and give support on their terms. 

To do this effectively, you’ll need to ensure that all of your channels connect (a helpdesk like Gorgias will do this for you). And, that you have a support strategy for each channel. 

‎Unifying platforms into one place helped the team at Lillie's Q, a shop that sells authentic Southern barbecue sauces and rubs, offer a true omnichannel experience to its customers. Before using Gorgias as its centralized helpdesk, messages on different platforms were getting passed manually to customer support, a tedious task with a big room for error. 

"We received comments and questions from Instagram and Facebook, organic and paid. Our digital content manager was passing a lot of these questions and comments on to our customer service team before we were with Gorgias," says Nicole Mann, the Marketing Director at Lillie’s Q. 

📚Recommended reading: Check out our guide to omnichannel customer service. 

6) Use social media to your advantage

Support requests come into social media channels for many reasons. For example, angry customers might send a direct message or comment on a post because it feels more immediate, especially if a brand is active. Or, they could respond to a post asking for more information about a featured product they’d like to purchase. 

Whatever the reason, people spend 147 minutes on social media per day, which means that by offering support there, you’re able to engage with people directly within the apps where they already spend time. This also allows you to engage with people in positive ways by sharing relevant content with them, posting packing videos of their orders to make them feel special, or reposting a picture of them using your products in real life. 

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7) Create low-effort experiences 

According to The Effortless Experience, only 4% of customers who had a high-effort customer support experience will return to make another purchase from that brand. 

When a customer decides to contact support, they’re already likely a little bit frustrated to have to put in any effort at all. But actions like having to go back and forth with a support agent to give simple information like order numbers, shipping address, or email can increase the time it takes to get a resolution.

This effort increases with the amount of time it takes for the agents to respond each time, and whether support even responds at all the first time a shopper reaches out. These high-effort experiences ignore the customers’ needs, which drives disloyalty and can make a big impact on revenue long term. 

Self-serve resources or automated responses can get people an immediate response, which means a lot less effort for them, and takes the burden off of your team.

‎"We realize the impact of building relationships and trust with our customers,” says Caela Castillo, the Director of Customer Experience at jewelry shop Jaxxon. “Quick Response Flows help us do that by allowing us to provide a customer experience that meets expectations and drives lifetime value (LTV) up per customer." 

Other options include using a centralized system that shows a customer’s information all in one place, eliminating the need for timely back and forth. 

8) Ask for feedback

Customer feedback is valuable data collection for your customer service team. It can help you provide more personalized support based on the information you get. 

All you have to do is make it easy for your customers to provide feedback, and take action on the notes you do receive, especially if they cite negative experiences.

A quick way to ask for feedback is to send an email survey that takes less than 2 minutes to fill out. A simple star rating on the experience and comment box should be enough to give you some valuable insight into where you can improve. 

📚Recommended reading: Our Director of Support’s guide to collecting customer feedback from your helpdesk. 

9) Prioritize customer service requests

Prioritize customer service requests to provide faster, more bespoke service to VIP customers. With customer acquisition becoming more costly and time consuming, keeping existing, loyal customers around can produce more revenue for your business overall. 

These customers, especially those with a high lifetime value, should get your most real-time support. Other high-priority conversations include very angry customers and time-sensitive requests. 

A helpdesk can help you assign value to tickets, and bring the most urgent ones in front of agents so that they can treat them with high priority. 

‎The four benefits of personalized customer service

98% of companies say that personalization increases customer loyalty and 83% of customers agree, according to a 2022 study by Twilio. Continue reading to understand why personalization is such a key aspect of delighting your customers, making it an undeniable best practice for customer support. A more personalized approach to customer support can help you:

• Meet customer expectations
• Drive more sales
• Raise customer satisfaction
• Get more consistent business and loyal customers

Meet customer expectations

Regardless of whether a customer’s chatting with human customer service agents or some automation tool like an artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot, nearly 70% of them want to receive personalized communications. Personalization starts with simple steps like including the customer’s first name in email correspondence. Because that’s how people communicate with each other — by name.

Fun fact: While people want personalized communication, they would rather have prompt, helpful customer service. 90% of customers expect a near-instant response to questions, according to a HubSpot survey. 

The takeaway? Only use personalization if you can do some promptly.

📚 Recommended reading: Our tips to improve customer service response times and resolution times. 

Drive more sales

Personalization matters for another crucial reason: It makes potential customers more likely to place an order. As many as 80% of respondents to an Epsilon/GBH survey indicated they were more likely to make a purchase after a personalized message than a non-personalized one.

For example, imagine a customer asks a video game distributor’s customer support team which game they should get for their child for Christmas. Without personalization, you’d either have to ask follow-up questions or provide a generic recommendation. With customer data, however, you might be able to:

• Greet the customer by name
• See the customer’s previous orders to know whether their child has a Playstation, Nintendo, or X-Box
• See the customer’s location and tell them the last day they can place an order to receive it by Christmas
• See the customer’s 5-star review of the last game they purchased to offer a more tailored recommendation

This is just a short list of potential ways to personalize a message, but it’s clear that personalization offers the best customer experience and gives the customer a much shorter path to a confident purchase.

Joseph Piazza, Senior Customer Experience Manager at messenger bike bag brand Timbuk2 says it best: “Increased customer support should go hand in hand with revenue growth. We want to turn customer experience into a profit center.”

Learn how Timbuk2 raised overall revenue by 35% with Gorgias.

Raise customer satisfaction

Personalized customer service greets your customers quickly and personally. It also reduces the time to problem resolution because your customer service agents have better information at the point of first contact. 

Absolute Collagen saw firsthand how fast, personalized service can raise customer satisfaction (CSAT) to near-perfect levels (4.9/5), thanks to mitigating non-personalized “pre-determined, pre-scripted” responses:

Lead to consistent business and loyal customers

When businesses improve their customer service efforts through personalization, they typically see an increase in brand loyalty. HubSpot found that 93% of customers were more likely to return as repeat customers at businesses they categorized as having an excellent customer service experience.

Customer retention doesn’t just lead to more repeat business. A loyal customer base also leaves reviews, refers new customers through word of mouth, and places larger orders than new customers. That’s why repeat customers generate 300% more revenue than first-time shoppers.

📈 Want to gauge the impact of your customer support? Read our take on the importance of customer service and check out our guide to customer service ROI.

The challenges of offering personalized service

Most businesses would agree that personalizing interactions is wise. But we all know from numerous personal encounters with airlines, warranty call centers, and maybe even healthcare providers that personalized customer service is far from universal. Many businesses have yet to find a way to successfully bring that personal touch, tailoring their efforts to the individual customer — especially at scale.

Local and small businesses tend to have an easier time offering personalized customer service because they have fewer customers. Think of a local coffee shop or boutique retail outlet that sees regular, repeat traffic: Staff at stores like these tend to learn their customers’ names and preferences and can offer a level of service that big-box stores can’t match.

Digital-first businesses and large ecommerce brands can’t develop these in-person relationships so they need an alternative approach to offer personalized experiences. Specifically, they need tech solutions that collect and use customer data. This means storing customer data in customer relationship management (CRM) software, surfacing that data throughout the customer journey, and implementing it in smart ways.

Deliver world-class personalized customer service faster than ever with Gorgias

If you’re ready to offer personalized customer service, the right tools will help you get there. Gorgias empowers ecommerce businesses to deliver world-class personalized customer service and helpdesk services faster than ever, thanks to deep integrations with Shopify, Magento, and BigCommerce — plus dozens of other ecommerce tools — to put customer data front-and-center.

Book your demo to learn more about how Gorgias can transform your customer support into a revenue-generating machine.

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