When your company decides to launch a new support channel — usually for efficiency and customer convenience — setting it up is only half the battle. The other half is driving customers toward the new channel (and away from your old ones). Without a concerted effort for customer adoption, you risk paying for a support channel that nobody uses.

Berkey Filters, a world leader in water purification and seller of water filter systems, wanted to add SMS as a support channel for their shoppers. SMS is more convenient for on-the-go shoppers and allows agents to provide service to multiple shoppers more efficiently than other channels.

Berkey Filters launched SMS with Klaviyo, and wanted wanted to add the Klaviyo SMS integration to Gorgias to unify customer conversations in one platform.

The launch was one of the most successful we’ve seen to date, both in terms of ticket efficiency and customer adoption. Within a month of launching SMS, Berkey Filters: 

• Achieved a 2-minute average first-response time for SMS
• Achieved a 20-minute average handle time for SMS
• Converted 2% of tickets to SMS from more time-consuming channels
• Decreased time-consuming phone tickets by 23%
• Decreased time-consuming email tickets by 21%

We sat down with Jessica, the Gorgias account owner and Customer Experience Analyst for Berkey Filters, to ask how Berkey Filters achieved such suburb support stats so quickly. Jessica was generously willing to share her strategies to drive customer adoption of the new support channel. 

In this Playbook, learn about the six tactics Berkey Filters used to launch SMS, increase the number of customers using this channel, and decrease ticket volume on older channels. 

Why add SMS to your helpdesk in the first place?  

SMS is one of the fastest-growing support channels today. It’s one of five channels consumers expect from brands, alongside email, website, voice, and chat. 

Consumers love SMS because it’s fast, convenient, and always with them (even on the go). They don’t need to block off time in their day to sit by their laptop or on the phone to deal with a support situation. They can carry about their day and effortlessly reply to texts whenever they have a moment – something most people already do. 

Support managers love direct messaging channels because conversations are typically shorter and resolved faster. And as long as SMS tickets are managed in the same places as other channels, it’s easy for agents to manage. 

Jessica was specifically interested in using the SMS channel in Gorgias for Berkey Filters to achieve the following goals:

1. Decrease the number of phone calls they received (because agents can only talk to one person at a time) 
2. Decrease the number of times a customer reaches out across multiple channels for the same issue (because faster response times on SMS would make it less likely for duplicate tickets to come in) 
3. Let customers using mobile — which accounts for half of their website visits — contact customer service on the device they’re already using
4. Easily send photos back and forth with customers (especially because they frequently get questions about how to fix or store their products) 
5. Offer a channel that doesn’t require a stable WiFi connection (because they have customers all over the country, including in rural areas that don’t always have reliable service) 

Jessica’s team also views SMS as a modern support channel. More and more brands want to offer a customer service experience that’s seamlessly integrated into the shopper’s day, and Berkey wanted to be an early adopter. 

While some of these benefits are pretty applicable to any store, make sure you’re clear on your “why” before adding a new support channels. This will help you know how to prioritize it compared to other channels and justify the work that goes into adding a new method of communication with your customers. 

How to add Gorgias SMS to your helpdesk

For the purposes of this playbook, we’ll assume you’ve already created your Gorgias helpdesk. If you haven’t, get started with a free trial or schedule a call with our team for a personalized demo. 

Gorgias SMS allows you to send and receive 1:1 SMS and MMS messages with your customers. To add it, go to Settings > Integrations > SMS. 

You’ll need a Gorgias phone number to get started. If you have one already (likely because you use Gorgias voice support), you can add the SMS integration without changing numbers. If you do not have a number yet, it’ll prompt you to create one first. 

If you already have a phone number but it isn’t owned by Gorgias, you’ll need to port it. Learn how in this help doc. 

If you’ve just added SMS (or any new channel), there are a few administrative tasks we recommend before following the steps outlined this playbook: 

• Create a dedicated view for SMS tickets
• Set up routing Rules for SMS tickets
• Create SMS-specific Macros (SMS messages should probably be shorter than some of your other channels, for example) 
• Review existing Rules to add or exclude SMS as a channel trigger

Now, we’ll share exactly how Jessica promoted SMS for Berkey Filters customers. 

{{lead-magnet-1}}

6 steps to drive customer adoption of your new SMS channel (inspired by Berkey Filters)

Jessica knew they would eventually add their SMS number directly on the Berkey Filters website, but she also knew she’d have to wait for her developer to do so. In the meantime, she started with the tools available to her in Gorgias. 

Here are six tactics Jessica used to drive adoption of the newly launched support channel: 

1. Launch a Gorgias Chat Campaign on the Berkey Filters “Contact us” page
2. Customize the auto-reply that was sent to new email tickets
3. Add the SMS number directly on the “Contact us” page
4. Promote SMS in the top banner of the website
5. Leverage their 2 min. first response time (FRT) for SMS in messaging
6. Maintain that FRT with an SLA view in Gorgias

Let’s break each of these down. 

1) Launch a Gorgias Chat Campaign on the Berkey Filters “Contact us” page

Even though Jessica would need to wait for her developer to update the actual page content, she knew she could launch a Gorgias Chat Campaign on the “Contact us” page to announce they now offer support via SMS. (If you don’t know, a Chat Campaign is a live chat session that automatically and proactively triggers for targeted website visitors, often to announce special promotions.) 

Here’s what their campaign looked like: 

Jessica’s campaign automatically opens a live chat box announcing the launch of SMS for anyone who stays on the Berkey Filters contact page for longer than 30 seconds. That time frame is a good way to target anyone who’s clearly trying to identify the best contact method, and not someone who accidentally clicked onto the page (and would likely bounce before 30 seconds). 

To create a Chat Campaign in Gorgias, go to Settings > Integrations > Chat and select the chat widget you want to use. Click the “Create Campaign” button in the top right. 

From here, you can enter the URL(s) the campaign should appear on, set a required time spent on the page, and customize the message that displays. 

Read this help doc to learn more about chat campaigns. 

2) Customize the auto-reply on new email tickets

One of the best ways to tell customers about a new support channel is to promote it on one of your existing channels — especially to customers who are already accustomed to those existing channels and may never visit the contact page again. 

For the segment of customers who already use email to contact support, Jessica leveraged the initial auto-reply that Berkey Filters sends when a customer emails them to announce the new, faster channel. 

In addition to the standard, “Thanks for contacting us! An agent will reply back shortly,” Jessica added, “We are currently experiencing high contact volumes and will be responding as quickly as possible. Our chat and text response times are typically faster. We are now accepting text messages at 1-800-350-4170.” 

By customizing the auto-reply to promote the new channel, Jessica met Berkey Filters’ customers where they were to make sure they knew about the latest and greatest way to get support. 

3) Add the SMS number directly on the “Contact us” page

At this point, Jessica got developer support to add the support phone number to the website. The contact page is a natural location to add any new support channels, because you know new customers will go there looking for contact information. 

Here’s what the Berkey Filters “Contact us” page looks like: 

When building this page, Jessica made many intentional decisions to funnel visitors toward the new channel. Specifically, she:

• Featured SMS next to another efficient (and therefore preferred) channel
• Put the phone number in the headline so it’s easy to see
• Added “Text Us” and a chat bubble visuals to clarify the number is for texting, not calls
• Pointed out that texting is great for “Conversation On The Go,” reminding people to use the channel if they plan to step away from the computer
• Set expectations by listing each channel’s average response time (ART) 

The lesson? When releasing a new support channel, don’t be afraid to give extra context around it to help your shoppers understand when they should use one over the other. 

4. Promote SMS in the top banner across the website

The banner at the top of the website is a high-visibility location that’s especially great for getting in front of returning customers (since they may not need to visit your contact page anymore). 

Brands usually use the top banner for promotions or sales, but Berkey Filters uses it for a mix of sales and support to cater to the entire customer experience. If you refresh their website a few times, you’ll see it rotate through three messages: 

1. Free shipping on orders over a certain amount
2. Chat now for an immediate response
3. Text us for support on the go

5. Promote first response time (FRT) for SMS in messaging

You might’ve picked up on this already, but Jessica was doing something really strategic with her messaging about SMS: She was promoting their first response time of 2 minutes.  

That’s fast! And therefore, a pretty compelling reason for shoppers to use it over other, slower channels like email or voice. 

Now, obviously this only works if your team is achieving a fast response time like that and willing to maintain it. (More on that in the next point.) 

What’s important is that Gorgias gives you insights into your support team’s performance. While that’s useful for internal planning (staffing, budgeting, etc.), we also highly recommend leveraging these data points with your own customers to show the value of the support you provide. 

Support stats that are great to leverage when promoting support via SMS: 

• Global first response time
• SMS first response time
• Global resolution time
• SMS resolution time
• Global CSAT score
• Total or percentage of tickets your brand has answered via SMS (if you’re still trying to increase adoption post-launch)

We don’t currently include SMS CSAT score in Gorgias reporting. If you’d like to measure and promote your SMS CSAT score, share that product feedback here!

6. Maintain that FRT with an SLA view in Gorgias

To help her team keep those impressive first response and resolution times, Jessica knew she needed to improve (and not just measure) those times. She set up a service-level agreement (SLA) view in Gorgias that shows SMS tickets that are open and were created more than one minute ago. 

Here’s what that looks like: 

This view sits at the top of their sidebar along with a few other SLA-based channel views, so agents can quickly prioritize what tickets they should solve next. 

In addition to the view, Jessica created an Auto-Reply Rule that sends the first message to an SMS ticket. 

This message thanks the customer for texting support, and states the business hours for Berkey Filters. We love how this helps set expectations right from the start, especially for customers who might text in outside of these hours. (So they don’t text again waiting for a reply!) 

Here’s what that Rule looks like: 

Last but not least, it’s worth mentioning that Jessica was also incredibly intentional about rolling all of this out to the Berkey Filters agents. Specifically, she involved them in the decision to launch the new channel, trained them on the new system, and made sure they were prepared before launch. 

None of this would be possible if agents were unsure how to handle incoming SMS tickets or use the SLA view.

{{lead-magnet-2}}

Berkey Filters’ results from adding support via SMS

We’ve already teased some of the impact that Berkey Filters has seen since adding SMS support, but how does it all add up? 

In their first 30 days using Gorgias SMS, Berkey Filters: 

• Closed over 250 SMS tickets
• Sent almost 1400 messages via SMS
• Achieved a 2-minute first response time
• Achieved 20-minute resolution time
• Converted 2% of all tickets to SMS
• Decreased phone calls by 23%
• Decreased emails by 21%

That’s remarkable! And while those stats certainly speak to the high quality of their support team, they first needed to make customers aware and excited about the new channel.  If you decide to launch a new support channel, we recommend following Berkey’s lead and creating an intentional adoption campaign to accompany the launch. 

Get your customers excited about texting your brand

Prioritizing SMS shifts customer service conversations to a “live” channel where agents can help multiple customers at once, giving everyone a better experience. 

And even if you’re strained for resources (like waiting for your developer to be able to update your store’s site) you can follow Berkey Filters’ lead and use other features and channels in Gorgias to start promoting your new channel.

Gorgias also integrates with SMS marketing platforms like Klaviyo to make texting a seamless part of your customer journey (and easy for agents to manage).

Specifically, if customers reply to an SMS sent with Klaviyo, Gorgias will create a ticket so your agents can respond right away. Plus, Klaviyo and Gorgias share customer data in real time, so you have as much information about your customers as possible in both tools:

“Having the Gorgias + Klaviyo integration has helped provide a service to our customers that we did not have before. Our customer service department is now able to provide a near-instant response via text message without having to exit Gorgias. This feature has made the entire process of getting to these tickets so effortless and much more efficient.”

— Jessica Robles, Customer Experience Analyst at Berkey Filters

To get started with Gorgias SMS, log into your helpdesk or click here to sign up for free.

At my company, every single employee — from office manager  to the CEO — must create a Gorgias account and spend 20+ hours answering customer support tickets. It’s an unusual program, but it’s incredibly impactful.

My name’s Amanda Kwasniewicz, VP of Customer Experience at Love Wellness, a brand dedicated to helping women improve their gut, brain, and vaginal health. 

When everyone interacts with customers and learns how customer support operates, we become a more customer-centric, collaborative company. Below, I’ll share more details about this program so you can build something similar at your company.

Why you should have non-support employees answer support tickets

In my eyes, this program truly adds so much value back to the company. It always generates insights and improvements for the CX team (as well as other departments). Plus, it facilitates ongoing collaboration between support and other departments, long after the program ends. 

Here are some specific benefits, each illustrated by real-life wins, to help you understand why this program is so impactful:

Establish respect for support

Customer support was never disrespected. But this program helped the entire company understand how much we’re responsible for. Plus, it gives everyone a better idea of how our work impacts the rest of the business (and vice versa). 

At many companies, all kinds of decisions are made in silos that impact customer experience, and a handful of people on the CX team are left to clean up the mess. This program helps the rest of the company consider the downstream impact on the customer’s experience for whatever they’re working on — whether that’s updating the website, developing a product, or planning logistics. 

In other words, it helps give CX a seat at the table and encourages everyone to think proactively about how their work will impact customers. 

Find areas to improve support

Getting all kinds of skill sets and perspectives into the helpdesk has sparked many smart improvements to the CX team’s processes. A couple of examples: 

• Someone from our Ops team recognized a high number of DNRs (orders the customer never received). They suggested we turn on an “Order delivered” notification so customers can grab the order the minute it hits their doorstep, or can reach out to our team right away if they can’t find it. 
• Another Ops team member suggested an app that tracks delivery issues (like failed delivery attempts and returns to sender). Now that we track these issues, we can proactively reach out to impacted customers to better manage the issue. (By the way, the app we use is Trackhive, but it’s no longer available — a simple app like TrackingMore should work!)

Find areas of opportunity outside of support

When other departments get into the helpdesk, they discover tons of ways their work impacts the customer. This program always sparks ideas for changes in other parts of the business to improve CX:

• The Product Development Team noticed customer complaints about our packaging and pushed our manufacturers to update the packaging so it’s easier to open. 
• A marketing email was sent out with a broken link and an incorrect promotion, which led to an influx of support tickets. The marketing built a new process to test marketing emails before they go live, preventing countless mistakes going forward.
• Our Retail Team discovered a product issue caused by the way retailers stored one of our products. They jumped on the issue, and are now attuned to these kinds of issues, and quickly help solve issues stemming from retail orders. 
• Our VP of Finance learned we had an effective system to track replacement orders and was able to use that data to improve the company’s operational budgeting. 

Improve cross-functional collaboration

Once non-CX employees understand the value and processes of Support, they’re more likely to rope you into conversations and support your team down the road. 

Here are a couple of examples from my experience:

• When the company evaluated a new 3rd-party logistics (3PL) partner, we were roped into the conversation to ensure we chose an option that let us automate more support tasks, like canceling orders and editing addresses.
• During a particularly busy period, our small team of 5 needed help managing the support inbox. 3 non-CX employees (who had previously gone through this program) stepped in to catch up with our inbox. It’s a great strategy to manage the Black Friday — Cyber Monday surge!

{{lead-magnet-1}}

How I structure this kind of program

Getting non-CXers into the helpdesk and answering tickets requires customer service training and guidance. Especially since we’re pulling employees away from their roles, we need to make sure it’s an efficient and effective program. 

Here’s how my team manages it:

Train a cohort every 4-6 weeks

Training new hires one at a time would be a big timesuck for my team. So instead, we train a group of new hires (or anyone else we missed in the past) once every few months or so. For us, groups of 6-8 work well — but adjust for the size of your team. 

Onboarding is a 2-hour session run by me, where we cover the fundamentals of CX, the tools we use, and the processes they need to know to answer tickets. Here’s a checklist of what I cover:

• Customer Experience fundamentals (including Love Wellness’s CX philosophies)
• Where our information lives (the Help Center for customer-facing content, and Guru for employee-facing content)
• Shopify 101: A tour of the checkout flow and order details
• Gorgias 101: A tour of the helpdesk, including how to respond to tickets
• A tour of Macros (listed in the image below), so they rarely have to draft emails from scratch

Set up a dedicated View in Gorgias

During the last 30 minutes of onboarding, we give each employee their own Gorgias login and set them free to start answering emails. To make the inbox more digestible (and steer trainees away from complex emails), we set up a View with simple inquiries as a sort of training ground, in addition to adding them to a Training Team.

We prefer to manually add tickets to this view when the CX team stumbles across simple questions. But you could easily set up an auto-tag to send simple questions — like subscription renewals or requests to edit orders — to this View.

We also have a simple process for trainees to hand off tickets that become complicated to the CX team. They simply send the handoff Macro, which lets the customer know an answer is coming and automatically assigns the ticket to the CX team. 

Require 20 hours of support work over 4 weeks

Once training is complete, the cohort is set free! The expectation is that everyone who participates in this program spends 20 hours on CX over a month. 

How they choose to spend that 20 hours is choose-your-own-adventure style. They can answer 1-2 emails daily, for 3-4 days a week, to meet the 20-hour requirement. During lighter periods, they can also study past tickets or read FAQ content — anything that helps them better understand CX and how we communicate with customers.

Appoint a CX’er to be available for support

While trainees self-guide their 20 hours, one member of the CX team is available to answer questions or jump in to provide support. We also schedule a 30-minute, 1-on-1 shadowing session so the trainee and the CXer can deep-dive on any topics that come up. 

These 1-on-1 sessions are where we spark a lot of great ideas. Naturally, the trainee and the CXer learn more about one another’s departments and processes and find opportunities to collaborate or support one another. 

The CXer that manages the program has a few additional responsibilities over the 4 weeks:

• Monitoring a Slack channel where trainees can ask for help
• Sending weekly updates on each trainee’s stats
• Running a survey to gather feedback from the trainees

How to get buy-in

This program requires 20 hours from every employee, which is no small ask. If you’re excited about implementing something like this at your company, I recommend preparing a business case to convince your boss that it’s worth the investment.

Here are some tips as you prepare your case:

Find an executive champion

I was lucky that a previous boss had an operational background and understood how CX is deeply interconnected with other parts of the business. She was actually the one who suggested this program, and her executive support was essential to put the plan into action. 

If possible, find someone with leadership status to champion this program. They can help convince whoever has the power to approve the program and get the rest of the company excited to participate. 

Regardless of whether you’re trying to implement this program, I want to encourage you to frequently showcase the work of your CX team to executives and the rest of the company. It’s not often that CX gets a spotlight for their work — unless something is on fire. By showing how complex and impactful the team’s work is, you’ll boost team morale and get buy-in for out-of-the-box initiatives like this. 

Emphasize the cross-functional benefits

This program is great for your CX because you’ll get new ideas to improve processes and a trained staff of agents who can step in during busy periods. But the larger benefits — the ones to emphasize when building your case — are the cross-functional collaboration and improvements.

Be sure to underscore how this program orients the entire company to think about CX and adopt a more customer-centric mindset. Plus, share a few examples about how Marketing, Product, and other teams (like Logistics and Wholesale) could refine processes by understanding how their work overlaps with the CX team’s work. 

Share this article

A testimonial from someone with first-hand experience goes a long way — let this article be that testimonial! My anecdotes about the benefits of this program are 100% real, and I’m confident any company could see similar improvements. 

Plus, you’re welcome to use my structure as a template to get started.

Choose a helpdesk with unlimited seats

Most helpdesks charge per user seat, which makes this kind of program impossibly expensive. You’d have to pay for each account, limiting your ability to get additional help in a pinch or share CX insights from customer conversations with the rest of your team. 

One of the (many!) reasons we chose Gorgias is because it allows you to have unlimited users, so every single person in the company can create an account, interact directly with customers, develop a great understanding of CX, and find ways to refine processes and implement customer feedback throughout the business. 

If you haven’t yet, I strongly recommend chatting with the Gorgias team — it’s a no-brainer for any ecommerce brand looking to make their CX more effective and efficient.

{{lead-magnet-2}}

In customer service, few things are as valuable as great self-service.

• For customers, great self-service means easily accessible information without relying on an agent. 88% of customers want some sort of self-service, so they can do things like check the status of their order or answer a pre-sales question without typing out a message and waiting for a response. 
• For your team, great self-service means only a fraction of your tickets actually require human effort. Your team has more time to handle complex and urgent issues, and is on standby to answer follow-up questions.

The most central hub for self-service is the Help Center. It’s a powerful knowledge base for customer support articles, supercharged with a customizable Contact Form and (if you use Gorgias Automate) advanced order management and Article Recommendations. 

We sat down with Toby Moors, Customer Happiness Specialist at Loop Earplugs, a Belgian DTC company that’s redefined what earplugs sound, look and feel like. We discussed their Help Center — one of the top 10 most visited Help Centers of any Gorgias merchant. 

We’ll share what makes Loop’s Help Center so successful, and give you actionable tips you can implement to drive more of your traffic toward this self-serve channel to improve CX and make your customer service program more efficient. 

Why you should study the Loop Earplugs Help Center

Before we dive into how Loop set up and optimized its Help Center, you might wonder why this particular Help Center is worth emulating. 

‍

• It funnels traffic away from time-consuming support channels. As Loop optimized the Help Center, their overall contact rate fell from over 10% of overall website traffic to just 3%. So, overall ticket volume (especially email tickets) went way down, saving time for the team thanks to the power of self-service. 
• It resolves a huge portion of overall tickets. Loop’s automation rate is over 40% of all interactions. This includes automated interactions on other channels, like in the chat widget, but the Help Center plays a major role in the overall automation rate.
• It structures support requests to give agents all the information they need. Loop used to receive nearly 35k monthly email tickets — messages like “Can I get a refund?” with no additional info. Since embedding the Contact Form in the Help Center, these unstructured email tickets have dropped to 10k per month. They're replaced by Contact Form tickets, which prompt the customer to give all the necessary context up front, help agents resolve the issue in one touch. 
• It’s localized across 4 websites. Loop is an international company with websites spanning different languages and continents. The Help Center is effectively deployed and localized for each website. 
• It maintains Loop’s high CSAT score (4.8/5). Help Center sessions don’t trigger CSAT surveys, so this isn’t a direct measure of the Help Center’s CSAT. But as Loop increases the amount of automation and self-service, customers are just as satisfied — at a fraction of the effort per interaction. 

Now, let’s take a step back. Here’s the story of how Loop chose to migrate to the Gorgias Help Center and set it up for success. 

Loop migrated from the old system because of a few key advantages of Help Center

Before using the Gorgias Help Center, Loop used a Shopify app for FAQs. They decided to switch after realizing a few advantages of the Gorgias Help Center:

A more accessible self-service solution

The old FAQ page had plenty of useful content, but customers had a much harder time finding it. Like the Gorgias Help Center, it was broken down into categories. But beyond that, there was no structure — just a long list of questions and answers.

This was a great start, but Toby from Loop said customers had to “doomscroll” to find the right question, a big barrier to accessible self-service. He said customers often ended up contacting the support team anyway because they couldn’t find the answer to their questions.

This is especially problematic for brands like Loop Earplugs, with innovative products that customers often have questions about both before and after a purchase. 

Better insights with much less effort

With the old helpdesk, Loop had to build custom Google Analytics queries and export them to Excel spreadsheets to understand the Help Center’s performance. 

With Gorgias, Loop has more insights about the impact of their Help Center. For instance, customers can leave feedback on each article (with a thumbs up or down) so the team understands which articles need more work. Plus, they can see which articles get sent to customers with AI Article Recommendation in the chat (more on that later). 

Note: We’re hard at work to make Help Center Statistics even more powerful and easy. Keep an eye on our product roadmap for updates. 

A headache-free way to manage content (across 4 online storefronts) 

For Loop, the ability to consolidate tools and manage knowledge base content within Gorgias was a great incentive to switch. And because content management in the Help Center happens within Gorgias, they can update it themselves instead of relying on the website team to update a separate FAQ page.

Loop also has websites for the US, Europe, Japan, and Australia. Each of these domains needs a Help Center with a lot of overlapping content, but some localized elements — like local language and policies specific to each region. 

With the old system, Loop had to manage each website’s FAQ page independently. This led to a lot of copy-pasting for every single website, plus plenty of room for human error and accidentally missing an update on one of the Help Centers.  

With Gorgias, Loop has control over whether they want to mirror changes across all 4 Help Centers (for global updates, like a new product) or just edit one domain’s Help Center (for local initiatives, like supporting Klarna in Europe but not elsewhere). 

How Loop set up its Help Center for success

Once they decided to switch to the Gorgias Help Center, Loop took the following steps to make sure it's effective.

Loop built its Help Center around the theme of accessibility

Once Loop chose to migrate, the Customer Happiness team went through the customer journey themselves to design a standout Help Center. Quite quickly, they identified a major theme: accessibility.

Accessibility is important to Loop for two reasons:

• 1) If a self-service solution like the Help Center isn’t easy to use, it misses the point. Customers must be able to find an answer easily, or they’ll end up contacting support after getting frustrated by a wild goose chase. ‍
• 2) Loop pays extra attention to accessibility to accommodate neurodivergent customers. Many neurodivergent people use Loop in daily life, so Loop strives to make every element of the website and CX is as accessible as possible.

This theme of accessibility comes through in a few ways:

• Specific, unambiguous categories: When people land on the Help Center, they shouldn’t wonder which category to click
• Searchable and non-collapsible: This is true for all Gorgias Contact Forms, but Loop knew it was important to have a Help Center with a functional search bar and without collapsable tabs so people could Ctrl+F to find something specific
• Concise, focused answers: The copywriting team at Loop handles all Help Center content to ensure it’s to-the-point and not one word longer than needed
• Visual navigation. A clear icon serves as a helpful visual aid to illustrate each article category
• Contact Form and chat widget: Customers should always be able to get in touch with an agent, even in the Help Center — as you see below, the Contact Form and chat widget are available on every page of the Help Center

Loop added order management and tracking with Automate

For Automate subscribers, the Help Center has extra functionality: Your customers can easily track the status of their order, request returns and cancellations, and report issues. 

Order tracking deflects one of the most common questions in ecommerce customer service — where is my order? — by giving customers real-time information about the status of their orders. 

And when customers request returns and cancellations or report issues, they are prompted to fill out forms that give your team all the context they need up front to resolve the issue without additional back-and-forth. 

These order tracking and management features are available to customers in the Help Center as well as the chat widget, for customer ease and accessibility:

✨ Learn more about Automate.

Loop upgraded the Help Center with some HTML customizations

The Help Center is a turnkey solution for most brands, but it is customizable for brands that desire.

“Gorgias gave us a great wireframe, and we adapted the look and feel from there. The code was easy to adapt and implement — shoutout to our Shopify developer Nathan, who turned our Help Center from good to great in one day.”


— Toby Moors, Customer Happiness Specialist at Loop Earplugs

Nathan was able to develop HTML code to easily modify the Help Center within Gorgias:

Using this built-in editor, Loop made two major customizations:

First, Loop added icons to each of the categories to make the Help Center more visual and accessible. We think this is a brilliant decision — so much so, that we’re excited to share that you can now add images to articles and categories in your Help Center.

Second, they embedded the Contact Form directly in the Help Center. Normally, the Contact Form is just one click away from any page in the Help Center. But with Loop’s customization, it’s available on every page of the Help Center.

How Loop gets the most mileage out of the Help Center

With a highly accessible Help Center customized to fit Loop’s standards, they were off to a great start. But a great Help Center might not have great results if it’s not in the right spots.

Here’s how Loop turned a Help Center with a lot of potential into a Help Center with high-impact performance.

Embed the Help Center on the website’s homepage

While many brands simply link the Help Center in the website footer, Loop prominently links it in the top navigation, greatly improving the Help Center’s discoverability. Keep an eye out — embedding your Help Center directly on your website will soon be much easier.

Before embedding it on the homepage, Loop’s Help Center received about 16k monthly visits. Now, it’s up to 70k — that’s 70k customers learning more about the product, resolving pre-sales objections, resolving issues with their earplugs, or get the basic information they need to submit a support ticket with a more advanced question. 

Plus, it’s 70k customers not turning to the support team as the first line of defense.

If you’re currently trying to make your Help Center more discoverable, also consider linking it in your customer support email signatures and any order confirmation emails. 

Activate Article Recommendation Flows to deflect chat questions

The content in Loop’s Help Center is valuable outside the Help Center, thanks to Automate’s Article Recommendation feature. When customers send a question in the chat widget, AI scans the message’s contents and suggests a relevant article from the Help Center when appropriate. 

If customers still have questions, the support agent is only a click away. 

Over the last two months, nearly 16,000 articles were recommended to customers in chat, most of which were successfully deflected (meaning the customer did not have any follow-up questions). 

The success rate of Article Recommendations are 15% higher for Loop than the average merchant. That means 70% of customers who receive an article recommendation click through and don't answer follow-up questions, compared to an average of 55%. This is thanks to Loop's robust, clearly labeled Help Center.

Plus, remember how Loop has 4 domains, spanning different languages? Each of those domains has its own chat portal (hosted under one Gorgias account), linked to the appropriate Help Center. So customers get served article recommendations in their language, and associated with their region’s Help Center. 

What’s next for Loop’s Help Center

Loop is on the cutting edge of customer experience, so the team is always looking for new ways to improve. Toby had a couple of ideas of what’s next to explore:

First, they’re excited to take advantage of Quick Response Flows in The Help Center, a recently released Automate feature. With this new feature, your Help Center can provide instant answers to FAQs, just like the chat widget. Plus, Quick Response Flows can be interactive, providing personalized answers based on customer inputs. 

For example, you could create a product quiz that suggests the right product based on each customer’s unique goals, challenges, and preferences. Here’s a mock-up:

‍

Last, Loop is excited that Gorgias is exploring features that let users generate responses with AI trained on Help Center content. Loop’s got a great head-start here, thanks to their robust library of Help Center content.

‍Feeling inspired? Your Help Center is just a few clicks away. Go to Settings > Help Center (under Channels) to get started. Reach out to our customer support team if you need help along the way!

‍

There are plenty of reasons your company might use Gorgias. For starters, it keeps your support team organized and efficient (and prevents your laptop from overheating from a million open tabs). But here at Chomps, one of our favorite things about Gorgias is how it helps us analyze tickets to improve our product, customer experience, and brand. Every. Single. Day. 

I’m Zoe Kahn, the Sr. Associate of CX here at Chomps. We’re a better-for-you snack brand dedicated to serving the highest quality products and the best experiences to our consumers. 

We’ve been using Gorgias for almost a year at Chomps. And at my last company, I switched our helpdesk to Gorgias (where I fell in love with the tool). Big-time Gorgias girlie here. 

Below, I’ll show you how we use Gorgias to analyze tickets and surface insights that help us improve the Chomps brand. I hope you can steal some of these ideas to improve your product and brand, too.

What do we learn from ticket analysis?

Ticket analysis means studying customer support conversations to find the root of your customers’ most common frustrations. It’s how you evolve your product to delight customers and build a brand that people genuinely love. 

Let’s back up to understand the kinds of insights we can learn. We all know that issues are inevitable, especially in the ecommerce world. Tons of things can go wrong, like:

• Shipping delays
• Lost packages
• Fulfillment errors
• Website crashes
• Inaccurate customer expectations
• The list goes on (and on and on)

{{lead-magnet-1}}

But even when things do go wrong, we want to make experiences seamless for our consumers. At its most basic, this means getting customers answers as fast as possible when they experience issues. But even better, it means being proactive about preventing future issues rather than constantly applying bandaids. 

Ticket analysis is how you make all of this happen. 

Every company approaches ticket analysis a little differently. At Chomps, ticket analysis helps us find patterns in support tickets and improve our products and processes. The end goal is more happy customers and a leaner support team — both of which hugely impact the business’s bottom line. 

How we set up Gorgias for ongoing ticket analysis

At Chomps, we use multiple tactics for ticket analysis, all based on the tools and dashboards Gorgias supplies. If you’re serious about ticket analysis, you’ll have the most success by first setting up a solid foundation within Gorgias.

Specifically, you’ll want to integrate all of your channels (email, SMS, live chat, and so on) and set up clear Views to keep your work organized. 

Once you set your foundation, you’re ready to tag your support tickets. Tagging tickets — consistently and robustly — is the key to analyzing your frequent support issues and making high-impact decisions backed up by data.

At Chomps, we use three methods of tagging to keep track of our ticket trends:

1. Auto-tagging based on keywords and support channels
2. Manually adding tags to tickets where needed
3. Creating macros for top inquiries and monitoring usage

1) Auto-tag based on topics

To get Gorgias to start auto-tagging tickets for you, you’ll set up auto-tags based on your unique business and the kinds of inquiries you usually see. Here are some common tags we use at Chomps that you’ll probably need, too:

• Manufacturer
• Subscription
• Return/Exchange
• Fulfillment
• Order-Status
• Mis-ship
• Wholesale
• Urgent

Let’s use my favorite priority folder as an example: the Urgent tag.

Auto-tagging is super relevant to most DTC businesses: It surfaces tickets that need immediate attention, such as order changes and address updates that need to be implemented before an order’s out the door.

This automation is incredibly useful, especially when you’re dealing with a high volume of tickets.

Here’s what our URGENT tagging rule looks like at Chomps:

Let’s look at the logic:

• The trigger is simple: It runs when tickets get created.
• Next, under “message body CONTAINS ONE OF,” we’re telling the Rule to look for keywords that are good guesses about what urgent tickets might include: things like “cancel” and “update my address.” If a customer uses those keywords, we want that ticket on our radar quickly. 
• See the keyword that says  “cs_urgent_order_update”? This phrase is always on a ticket if the customer has filled out our contact form (you can build one of these with Gorgias) and selected “Urgent Order Update” as the subject. 

We use this tactic across a variety of areas — every single subject in our dropdown list auto-tags the ticket so we can route it correctly. 

These tags — whether generated from the form or automatically applied based on keywords — allow us to assign priority and monitor the types of tickets we receive. These tags help us find common issues and inefficiencies and solve issues at the root.

Thanks to this urgent auto-tag Rule, we are more likely to update incorrect customer orders before they’re fulfilled by our warehouse. Since our warehouse team is speedy, if orders aren’t adjusted (almost) immediately, these requests get lost among all the non-urgent requests.

Not being able to prioritize correctly means we either lose money by honoring a replacement order or upset the customer.

The fixes don’t just apply to support operations, either: We’ve made changes to our website, fulfillment processes, marketing emails, and much more based on this kind of bulk ticket analysis.

📚 Related reading: See nine more Rule suggestions for auto-tagging your customer service requests. 

2) Manually add tags where needed

We use tags to track ticket types and to understand the percentage of our total tickets that each topic makes up. Automation gets us most of the way there, but even Gorgias’s best-in-class language detection isn’t 100% perfect. Anyone who works in customer service knows that customers can use all kinds of different vocabulary to describe what they’re after. 

At Chomps, every team member gets trained to check the tags on a ticket as soon as they start working on it. On top of that, no tickets should ever be closed without applying at least one tag.

Thanks to this vigilance, we have a lot of confidence in the data we’re using for ticket analysis. There’s no point in spending time analyzing support tickets if you think the data is bad, so it’s worth building these habits and processes. Future you will be thankful (and so will all your customers).

💡 Pro tip: If getting your team to check and apply tags is a challenge, you can set up a Rule that reopens untagged tickets or assigns them to a manager. 

3) Create Macros for top inquiries and monitor usage

Macros are imperative for keeping an efficient and lean support team. But did you know you can also use macros to monitor inquiries, problems, and customer feedback? 

I have a great example of this. At one point last year, we weren’t able to keep up with demand and many of our jerky stick flavors were going out of stock (a good problem to have, but still a problem). 

We made efforts to proactively communicate supply issues, like back-in-stock notifications and keeping social media up to date with the available flavors. However, we’d still get an influx of consumers who wanted to know when exactly specific flavors would be back in stock. 

Using Gorgias, I was able to set up Macros based on each unique flavor we offer and send these out to every customer who asked. It’s not all that creative, and most support teams and companies would stop there. We didn’t.

From there, I looked at our team’s Macro usage and reported back to the rest of the company weekly to share which flavors were requested the most. This analysis was crucial because at that time we had to pick and choose which flavors to produce. 

We needed clarity on what our consumers really wanted — rolling the dice and gambling on random flavors would have made a bad situation worse. Specifically, we may have ended up with overstock on some flavors, and failed to stock up on flavors customers would actually try to order.

This is just one example. But these kinds of issues are things that pop up all the time when you work in customer service. Getting smart about your Macro creation and monitoring usage unlocks a whole new set of data your CX team can use to understand your customers.

How to implement feedback

You can analyze until you’re blue in the face, but if the outcome isn’t taking tangible action to improve your product, customer support, and brand, does it really matter?

Implementing changes based on your support ticket analysis is where the true brand improvement happens. You can’t do that without creating an impeccable feedback loop with key players across your company.

At Chomps, our CX team has recurring meetings with different parts of the team to share the results of our ongoing ticket analysis. Here are two regular meetings we use to share insights:

Monthly CX & Operations meetings

Each month, we have a meeting between our CX and Ops teams. This is where we go over product complaints, innovation requests, and order fulfillment hiccups. 

We like to keep this meeting recurring instead of just doing it when there’s a fire to put out. It allows us to touch base on what’s coming in future months, putting us in a more proactive place. However, we’ll schedule additional meetings if we see an influx in complaints on a certain topic.

We structure the meetings around notable tickets with the following tags, all of which fall into our operations category:

1. Manufacturer: These are any complaints about the product that we get about the product, whether it’s about the package being damaged or a customer commenting on the texture. These tickets also get a tag based on which retailer or online shop the customer ordered from. That way, if we see an influx of outreach from a certain retailer, we can dig into it and communicate with the appropriate teams.
2. Mis-ship: This is when a customer orders one thing and receives another. while we’d love this never to happen but that’s not possible. We’re happy as long as we can catch it.
3. Innovation: This tag is used when customers request a new flavor or snack suggestion. Since the possibilities are endless, we love hearing and sharing these inquiries!

Each month, we analyze the number of tags along with the number of times relevant Macros get used. We compare these to the previous month(s), keeping in mind the percentage of issues compared to sales. 

{{lead-magnet-2}}

For example, if the Macro named “Fulfillment - Mis-ship - MISSING” is up 25%, we can reach out to the warehouse team and ask them to look into what might have happened. Maybe there’s a new team member who needs more training or maybe some bins have gotten mixed up. Stuff happens! Issues are inevitable, the trick is to find (and correct) them.

We get a ton of value out of analyzing complaints around things like taste and texture, as well as innovation requests. Our goal is to amplify the voices of our customers to help other teams throughout Chomps understand what matters to our customers, so we can give them what they want.

Weekly CX & Ecommerce team meetings

Each week, we discuss support tickets about sales, user experience, site bugs, and related topics with our Ecommerce team. They take the insights and apply improvements to our site. 

For instance, this past summer, we had a “$10 off $49” promotion. Customers experienced confusion about the fact that they had to manually enter coupon codes, and didn’t always understand they needed to reach a $49 threshold for the code to work.

Below is a clipping from an old promo email we sent out for a sale. Customers had to use the code at checkout and ensure the order was over $49. This initially seemed like no big deal to us. But every extra step or stipulation you give the customer is a barrier to conversion. 

These are “issues'' we didn’t think of before launching the promotion, but customers wrote in when they experienced these issues. We received emails saying, “I forgot my coupon code,” and noticed conversions decreased. We wondered if it was perhaps because we didn’t provide examples of how to get to the $49 threshold and didn’t offer any “help” at checkout, or examples in the emails.

We were able to improve our promotions in the future thanks to ticket and Macro analysis.

In promotions we’ve held since then, we’ve:

• Implemented an auto-apply discount so customers don’t have to remember codes
• Included clear cart upsell callouts to help customers reach thresholds
• Created clearer graphics for our email, SMS, and social campaigns

We also do a better job of showing the types of discounts customers can receive right on the website, in the flow of shopping:

We also installed a Shopify app that helps guide customers to discounts in their cart — for example, a clear indication of how to unlock free shipping. This helps us increase conversions and average order value (AOV) and decrease customer frustrations and confusion. A win-win for Chomps and our lovely consumers!

Without analyzing these support tickets, we would probably be making the same mistakes over and over again, losing out on sales while frustrating our consumers at the same time.

Take advantage of unlimited seats in Gorgias

This last suggestion isn’t exactly a step in the process. But it’s something to keep in mind as you share customer feedback with your team: Take advantage of the fact that Gorgias allows unlimited seats. 

During our new employee onboarding (for all positions at Chomps), we teach new hires how to use the Gorgias platform. They also get to spend a couple days “on the desk,” handling tickets in Gorgias. This is helpful for team onboarding, plus it means we don’t have to hire additional outside help or sacrifice our average response times during peak seasons. We simply grab internal volunteers to help! 

This also helps with analyzing issues: Oftentimes, Chomps volunteers from other teams have different insights and can spot issues that we CX folks might not have noticed. For instance, Alexa from our ecommerce team has helped out a few times, and here’s what she told me about using Gorgias:

“As a non-CX'r, Gorgias has made helping out the CX team so much easier.  The platform is intuitive. And because our team has built out many Macros, I can easily answer common questions and concerns. Although I'm not on the platform every day, I can toggle between open and closed tickets if I need to reference an old situation and get up to speed quickly and efficiently.”

Ticket analysis (done right) drives great experiences and business growth 

Gorgias includes all kinds of tools to help us analyze our support tickets at Chomps. This analysis has tons of impacts:

• We can fix issues, rather than put bandaids on them (or even worse, ignore them!)
• We can scale our brand more efficiently because we’re not constantly barraged by the same tickets over and over
• Our CX team can spend more time on meaningful conversations with our customers

At Chomps, we love to connect with and build relationships with our consumers. We think it’s part of what makes for an exceptional brand. It’s how you get loyal customers. But you can’t do this when your CX team is bogged down with tickets or your product is rife with issues. 

Ticket analysis is the secret sauce that uncovers issues so you can focus on delivering exceptional experiences, over and over and over.

Want to keep learning from other Gorgias power users? Check out our recent webinar with jewelry brand Jaxxon. They share how they prepare for peak season and set up customer experiences that drives sales instead of repetitive tickets.

The post-purchase experience is a crucial window of time that starts the moment after a customer checks out and completes a transaction on your ecommerce store. Clicking “buy” is not a finish line in the customer relationship: It’s the beginning of the next leg in the customer journey, from first-time shopper to (hopefully) loyal customer.

With the right tactics and strategies, ecommerce businesses create post-purchase experiences that proactively support these new buyers, strengthen the relationship, and nudge them to return to the store.

Follow these nine strategies to make your brand’s post-purchase experience more customer-centric and profitable.

{{lead-magnet-1}}

9 post-purchase experience strategies for ecommerce stores

We define the post-purchase experience as any and all touchpoints a customer has with a brand from the moment the shopper completes checkout until they start using your product. Building a powerful post-purchase experience that creates long-lasting customer loyalty takes finesse because a lot of small pieces make up the customer experience.

Here are nine strategies for how to encourage better post-purchase behavior among your customers. 

📚Recommended reading: 20 Ecommerce Customer Service Best Practices to Help You Level Up

1) Figure out notable touchpoints on your customers’ journey

There are a lot of best practices when it comes to encouraging repeat business, but often brands jump right into tactics and overlook the overall journey. 

“My biggest piece of advice,” says Bri Christiano, Director of Customer Support at Gorgias, “is to really understand the customer journey for your business. Which touchpoints are going to drive the most revenue?” 

The first step is to consider the outcomes you want from the post-purchase experience. Most likely, those outcomes include: 

• Reducing churn
• Convincing shoppers to upgrade to a subscription 
• Getting people to refer their friends 
• Cross-selling or upselling 

Then, as you set up touchpoints like email campaigns or SMS messages, think about the different moments where your shoppers will be most engaged post-purchase. 

Ideally, you’ll catch them while they're already interacting or thinking about you. You don't want to try to talk to them randomly when they're probably not thinking about you or their experience. The more personalized you can make the experience, the better. That means segmenting emails based on a customer’s profile wherever possible. 

“My biggest piece of advice is to really understand the customer journey for your business. Which touchpoints are going to drive the most revenue?”

— Bri Christiano, Head of Customer Support at Gorgias 

Keep in mind that the flows will look different over time to a first-time purchaser than to someone who's been a customer for a year. 

When you should do this 

As you’re starting to optimize the post-purchase experience for your brand, this is the first step to take. 

How to get started  

First, map out your customers’ journey. You can use anything, from a tool like Miro to a whiteboard. We recommend this article on customer journey mapping in retail from Delighted.

Then, take a look at the emails you're sending today and start with the small elements. How often are shoppers opening those emails? Why do you think they're not opening them? Maybe you have the wrong subject line, or perhaps you’re sending emails on the wrong day.

Then, consider how your customers behave and think about some small tweaks you can make. Be sure you’re looking at your current metrics like email open and click rates or CSAT scores as you’re doing this audit. 

{{lead-magnet-2}}

2) Offer a great unboxing experience

Shoppers already look forward to receiving packages in the mail. But sending eye-catching, fun packaging that people actually want to keep makes your brand stand out. It also sparks joy by turning the simple task of unboxing into an enjoyable, surprising experience. 

For example, stationery shop Ohh Deer and its subscription brand Papergang send creative and recyclable packaging to their customers. The boxes and packaging are so loved that fans post unboxing videos on YouTube. 

📚Recommended reading: Ohh Deer uses Gorgias Chat to provide excellent CX & generate revenue by $12,500/quarter

When you should do this 

Now is a great time to start! The sooner you create fun and interesting packaging, the sooner your customers can start enjoying it. 

How to set this up 

Use a tool like Arka or Fantastapack to create custom boxes for your brand. If you don’t have design skills yourself, hire a freelance designer to work on the design for you. 

3) Set up and launch post-purchase email campaigns

Sending detailed and personalized post-purchase email campaigns is a major part of your overall email marketing and post-purchase strategies. This is how you’ll stay engaged with customers throughout their post-purchase journey. These campaigns also make up a key part of your marketing strategy as a business. 

📚Recommended reading: 16 Useful Email Templates for Your Customer Service Teams

Order confirmation emails

Let shoppers know that you’ve got their order and you’re working on it to give them peace of mind that their payment went through and that it’s coming soon. You can set up various order status updates in your ecommerce platform (like Shopify). 

Post purchase, before an order ships

Before a customer’s order ships, you have the opportunity to upsell customers and add that item to the same shipping box. Not only are you driving additional sales here, but from a cost perspective (especially if you offer free shipping) it helps you out as a business. 

For example, maybe a customer signed up to get notified when an out-of-stock item comes back in. Now that it's in stock again, you can send that item out with whatever that customer already purchased. 

You can use a Shopify app like AfterSell to upsell customers after checkout.

When an order ships 

Send a shipping confirmation email and offer order tracking so that shoppers can stay up to date with the whereabouts of their package. 

You can also use a tool like AfterShip to automate real-time tracking updates.

After an order gets delivered

A good rule of thumb is to trigger different emails based on the delivery status. But within a few days, under the assumption that someone needs a few days to check out the new product. 

Check in to ask questions like:

• How is your order
• Did you have any feedback for us?
• Was it the right size? 

To nudge them to purchase a refill or subscribe 

If you sell a physical product like soap, vitamins, or soda, customers will likely run out of them within a set amount of time. If you can figure out what that average amount of time is, you can trigger an email reminding them to refill or sign up for a subscription. 

For example, Method soaps are all built around the eco-friendly principle of refilling, keeping waste to a minimum (and as it happens, strongly pushing repeat purchase decisions and driving up customer lifetime value). 

The company sends replenishment emails that nudge customers to purchase those refills, often with a special, time-limited discount attached.

When a free trial is about to run out 

Some brands, like curiosities retailer Uncommon Goods, offer a paid subscription program with benefits like free shipping, donations to non-profit partners on your behalf, and members-only emails. 

Its program comes with a two-week free trial. Near the end of that free trial, the brand sends out an email with the subject line, “Reasons to stick with Uncommon Perks.” The email lists the different benefits of the program. If you have a program like this, consider a similar email campaign. 

Add-on sales and product recommendations

Do you sell other items that would enhance the customer’s experience with what they already bought? They might not have seen the need before (in an upsell or cross-sell attempt), but now with the product in hand, they may be ready to buy.

Loyalty program invites

If you have a loyalty program and the first-time customer hasn’t joined it yet, now could be a great time to pull them in.

A tool like LoyaltyLion will come in handy here.

How to set this up 

If your ecommerce site is built on Shopify, BigCommerce, or Adobe Commerce, check out the links below for how to set up different email notifications powered by automation. 

• Shopify post-purchase email setup 
• BigCommerce post-purchase email setup
• Adobe Commerce (formerly Magento) post-purchase email setup

4) Deliver important how-to and use case content

If the product you’re selling requires some setup or assembly or has features that go beyond the basics, one form of post-purchase communication you’ll want to focus on is tutorial-style content. You want to show customers how to use or set up their new product so they get the maximum benefit from it.

Explain the importance of content that can show customers how to properly use or set up your product or even creative alternative ways to do things with your product — both because this is helpful for customers and because this effortless experience tends to reduce returns and lead to loyal customers who make repeat purchases.

For example, D2C ecommerce retailer Bug Bite Thing offers one primary product: a plastic suction contraption that reduces the severity of stings and bites, including from mosquitoes. Unless you’ve used their exact product, you’ve probably never seen anything similar. The company sends an excellent tutorial email to all customers and features clear instructions with custom GIFs that show exactly what to do with the thing.

https://youtu.be/jWPgoeDSDYM

Tutorial videos, use cases, explainers, or links to FAQs can be helpful while the customer is waiting for the item to arrive or as the customer is learning about the item. 

When you should do this 

Send out tutorial information after the item ships and before the item gets delivered. 

If you're not getting a lot of traction on email, or you want to make sure that customers see your setup guide, include an insert with a QR code that links to a setup video or blog post on your website. 

This is another good lever for physical, good ecommerce brands to have a touch point in the actual physical product that they’re sending since not everyone opens their emails. 

How to set this up 

Share product-specific how-to content via links to your Help Center to find set-up and troubleshooting information for their new product. 

For example, Brümate created a handy Help Center with help from Gorgias that customers can visit to get all of the information they need.  

5) Provide a simple returns and exchanges portal

Having to return an item is already frustrating on its own. So if your brand complicates the returns process further, it will discourage people from shopping with you again. 

Instead, start by listing your refund policy clearly on your website. Then, create an easy, self-service return portal where folks can easily initiate a return or exchange. 

How to set this up 

Loop Returns is one of the best tools for ecommerce returns management, and it integrates with Help Desks like Gorgias. 

For example, jewelry shop Jaxxon uses Loop to facilitate an easy returns process and push exchanges over returns. 

6) Follow up a purchase with rewards, referral, and loyalty programs

If you have a loyalty program, the post-purchase timeframe is the perfect time to plug it. You’ll get your brand back in front of eyeballs while impressions are still fresh, and if you can get them to sign up now, you’ll turn more existing customers into long-term fans.

If you don’t have a loyalty program, consider starting one. eMarketer found that 58.7% of internet users indicated loyalty points or rewards as one of the aspects of retail shopping they valued most.

Loyalty program or not, you can also send discounts, incentives, or rewards during this period, sweetening the pot for a second purchase and producing an even better post-purchase customer experience.

Loyalty programs are ubiquitous these days, from the loyalty punch card (or app-based version) at your local coffee shop to paid VIP programs like what Uncommon Goods offers with Uncommon Perks.

When you should do this 

If someone has ordered from you multiple times or filled out a CSAT or NPS survey that scored high, it’s a great time to invite them to join your loyalty program. 

“You're catching that person at a point where they're feeling really energized about the brand,” says Bri. 

How to set this up 

LoyaltyLion is a great tool that makes setting up a loyalty program a breeze. It also integrates with Help Desks like Gorgias, so your support team can keep an eye on how your loyalty members are doing.  

Growave is another great tool that can help you manage referral programs to bring new shoppers to your store and improve conversion rates thanks to social proof — or in other words, turning more browsers into buyers because their friends vouch for your brand.

7) Provide plenty of opportunities for feedback (and ask directly)

According to Bright Local’s Consumer Review Survey, 94% of consumers are more likely to use a business because of positive reviews. 

“You're catching that person at a point where they're feeling really energized about the brand”

— Bri Christiano, Director of Support at Gorgias 

The more feedback you get, the more you can act on it, which can improve the customer experience and lead to more positive reviews. 

When you should do this 

Request customer feedback a few days after a product gets delivered to see if they liked it. This can be in the form of a quick NPS survey or a request for a public product review on your website. And once you get those reviews, spread them far and wide! We love how prominently Loop Earplugs features customer reviews:

‍

After a support interaction, you can send out a CSAT (customer satisfaction) survey to collect feedback about the support experience. 

📚Recommended reading: How to collect and implement customer feedback from your helpdesk.

How to set this up 

A customer service platform like Gorgias can help you automate sending these surveys after every single interaction:

You can solicit feedback and reviews with automated email campaigns, chatbots, human chat agents, or an SMS campaign.

Review tools like Yotpo can also help. If you use a Help Desk like Gorgias, Yotpo integrates with it to make it easy to collect feedback and respond to negative or positive reviews easily. 

8) Invite customers to join your brand communities

If your brand has any official online communities, the post-purchase period is the perfect time to invite customers to join. Doing so can build up greater customer loyalty by building a sense of connection. 

If customers are engaged in a community, they're more likely to stay longer, both in the community and as customers. Communities also can help people answer questions or solve problems. 

Nearly half of businesses that had online communities saw between 10 and 25% savings in customer support costs. Customers got their answers from communities instead.

For example, Instant Pot is a well-known consumer brand that has leveraged the power of online communities to grow its brand. It has a large, active official Facebook group, and it’s active on other social spaces too. Additionally, the brand has managed to get its product mentioned on all sorts of mommy blogs, cooking and recipe sites, and more.

When you should do this 

After a purchase, send an email or drip series that invites customers to follow you on social media or join your community. Consider offering an incentive within that, like 15% off their next order. 

How to set this up 

Online communities can take shape on social media or on community or collaboration platforms like Slack and Discord. Choose whichever platform makes the most sense for your business. You can leverage your brand’s community to foster greater customer relationships and raise customer lifetime values.

9) Build an omnichannel support strategy to engage customers post-purchase

Many successful brands have moved to an omnichannel support strategy, one that’s customer-centric and delivers consistent help across all avenues where a customer might reach you. Helpdesks make omnichannel more feasible, as do back-end ecommerce platforms and systems that can sync experiences across all channels.

Social listening (tracking brand mentions and customer feedback) and customer support play an elevated role here. The goal is to ensure that no matter where your already-paying customers are, you can hear them and respond to their conversations.

When you should do this 

In terms of availability, you don’t need to be available 24/7, but you should always post your hours or automate a response to let customers know when they’ll hear back. 

In terms of proactive outreach, as with any post-purchase communication, think about the user experience and what timing makes the most sense for that user and your product. 

You might send an email thanking a customer for a positive review or send a text message once a product gets delivered. For example, pajama shop Printfresh sends a personalized text message to see if customers liked their purchase or need support a few days after it’s been delivered. 

How to set this up 

A centralized help desk like Gorgias makes setting up and maintaining an omnichannel support experience easy for you and your customer support team. 

These tools pull in customer information from different locations like social media, SMS, email, your ecommerce platform (like Shopify or BigCommerce), and other ecommerce tools (like Yotpo and Klaviyo) into one central place, so you can see any and all interactions with a customer from within their profile. 

Why the post-purchase experience is important

The post-purchase experience is a crucial time for customer relationship building: it affects customer retention and can set you apart from your competition. Creating a positive post-purchase experience has many benefits, including reducing customer confusion, nurturing customers to make repeat purchases, and reducing support tickets. 

1) Reduce customer confusion

As a brand, you can make the customer experience smoother and eliminate guesswork for shoppers. Offer information proactively so customers don’t have to panic and wonder whether: 

• They ordered the right item to the right address
• The product will arrive on time
• They can return the product if they don’t love it

This is the primary benefit of a solid post-purchase experience because customers won’t return to a store that left them confused, frustrated, and sending a hundred questions to customer support. 

Like it or not, giant ecommerce brands like Amazon have trained customers to expect lots of information automatically, and keeping pace is in your brand’s best interest. 

2)  Nurture the customer to win repeat purchases

According to our research, repeat customers generate 300% more revenue than first-time customers do. And with the rising costs of acquisition, especially via paid advertising, this is crucial for your business. 

A smooth customer service experience, plus follow-up marketing, promotions, self-service resources, and other value-adds (like a customer community) help turn first-time shoppers into loyal customers. 

3) Reduce the number of questions your customers ask support 

While fielding questions from customers isn’t a bad thing, forcing new customers to write to your support team for basic information creates a more high-effort experience. 

Those high-effort experiences can ruin relationships. The Effortless Experience found that 96% of these customers lose their loyalty to customers after putting in high levels of effort to get help. 

Plus, your team probably has more important conversations to get to. If you spend all day answering WISMO tickets, you won’t have time to offer product recommendations, update your Help Center, or experiment with new chat campaigns. 

Your post-purchase flow provides a great opportunity to proactively answer customer questions without having to wait for a live person on the other end. You can also create self-service resources like FAQ pages and knowledge bases that share pertinent policies (like return policies or shipping times). 

Building the best post-purchase experience starts with Gorgias

While a post-purchase experience entails more than just customer support and helpdesk services, you can’t build a top-quality post-purchase experience without these crucial functions.

Gorgias is the world’s best helpdesk and customer service platform for ecommerce businesses. It was built specifically for ecommerce and has the features, integrations, and flexibility you need to create the best possible post-purchase experience.

Learn more about how Gorgias helps ecommerce brands streamline support, improve CX, and drive revenue in the video below:

See more about what Gorgias can do and sign up for free today!

TLDR: https://github.com/xarg/pghoard-k8s

‍

This is a small tutorial on how to do incremental backups using pghoard for your PostgreSQL (I assume you’re running everything in Kubernetes). This is intended to help people to get started faster and not waste time finding the right dependencies, etc..

‍

pghoard is a PostgreSQL backup daemon that incrementally backups your files on a object storage (S3, Google Cloud Storage, etc..).
For this tutorial what we’re trying to achieve is to upload our PostgreSQL to S3.

‍

First, let’s create our docker image (we’re using the alpine:3.4 image cause it’s small):

FROM alpine:3.4

ENV REPLICA_USER "replica"
ENV REPLICA_PASSWORD "replica"

RUN apk add --no-cache \
   bash \
   build-base \        
   python3 \
   python3-dev \
   ca-certificates \
   postgresql \
   postgresql-dev \
   libffi-dev \
   snappy-dev
RUN python3 -m ensurepip && \
   rm -r /usr/lib/python*/ensurepip && \
   pip3 install --upgrade pip setuptools && \
   rm -r /root/.cache && \
   pip3 install boto pghoard


COPY pghoard.json /pghoard.json.template
COPY pghoard.sh /

CMD /pghoard.sh

‍

‍

REPLICA_USER and REPLICA_PASSWORD env vars will be replaced later in your Kubernetes conf by whatever your config is in production, I use those values to test locally using docker-compose.

‍

The config pghoard.json which tells where to get your data from and where to upload it and how:

‍

{
   "backup_location": "/data",
   "backup_sites": {
       "default": {
           "active_backup_mode": "pg_receivexlog",
           "basebackup_count": 2,
           "basebackup_interval_hours": 24,
           "nodes": [
               {
                   "host": "YOUR-PG-HOST",
                   "port": 5432,
                   "user": "replica",
                   "password": "replica",
                   "application_name": "pghoard"
               }
           ],
           "object_storage": {
               "aws_access_key_id": "REPLACE",
               "aws_secret_access_key": "REPLACE",
               "bucket_name": "REPLACE",
               "region": "us-east-1",
               "storage_type": "s3"
           },
           "pg_bin_directory": "/usr/bin"
       }
   },
   "http_address": "127.0.0.1",
   "http_port": 16000,
   "log_level": "INFO",
   "syslog": false,
   "syslog_address": "/dev/log",
   "syslog_facility": "local2"
}

‍

Obviously replace the values above with your own. And read pghoard docs for more config explanation.

‍

Note: Make sure you have enough space in your /data; use a Google Persistent Volume if you DB is very big.

‍

Launch script which does 2 things:

1. Replaces our ENV variables with the right username and password for our replication (make sure you have enough connections for your replica user)
2. Launches the pghoard daemon.

‍

‍

#!/usr/bin/env bash

set -e

if [ -n "$TESTING" ]; then
   echo "Not running backup when testing"
   exit 0
fi

cat /pghoard.json.template | sed "s/\"password\": \"replica\"/\"password\": \"${REPLICA_PASSWORD}\"/" | sed "s/\"user\": \"replica\"/\"password\": \"${REPLICA_USER}\"/" > /pghoard.json
pghoard --config /pghoard.json

‍

Once you build and upload your image to gcr.io you’ll need a replication controller to start your pghoard daemon pod:

‍

apiVersion: v1
kind: ReplicationController
metadata:
 name: pghoard
spec:
 replicas: 1
 selector:
   app: pghoard
 template:
   metadata:
     labels:
       app: pghoard
   spec:
       containers:
       - name: pghoard
         env:
           - name: REPLICA_USER
             value: "replicant"
           - name: REPLICA_PASSWORD
             value: "The tortoise lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs trying to turn itself over. But it can't. Not with out your help. But you're not helping."
         image: gcr.io/your-project/pghoard:latest

‍

The reason I use a replication controller is because I want the pod to restart if it fails, if a simple pod is used it will stay dead and you’ll not have backups.

‍

Future to do:

• Monitoring (are you backups actually done? if not, do you receive a notification?)
• Stats collection.
• Encryption of backups locally and then uploaded to the cloud (this is supported by pghoard).

Hope it helps, stay safe and sleep well at night.

‍

Again, repo with the above: https://github.com/xarg/pghoard-k8s

Today, we’re announcing pricing updates for our Pro, Advanced, and Enterprise customers, along with customers using our Automate product. We’re also introducing a voice & SMS add-on that will allow you to communicate with customers on even more channels, enabling brands to continue providing the best customer support for their loyal customers.

This follows our recent announcement of a $10 monthly starter plan (50 tickets), which makes our platform more accessible to all merchants.

Over the past few years, we’ve proudly shipped many new features to serve our mission: empowering all merchants to deliver an exceptional customer experience that drives revenue.

Now, with Gorgias, you can:

• Interact with customers on more channels, including DMs and comments on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook — plus voice, SMS, and native help centers
• Sell more products with chat improvements (including native Shopify product links) and revenue statistics
• Work more efficiently with ticket auto-assign, improved Shopify actions, and live statistics that keep your team on track
• Integrate with your favorite tools, including the most advanced Klaviyo integration on the market and 80+ other integrations since mid-2019

Here’s a snapshot of the new pricing, which will go into effect in the next few months and empower further innovation on our product:

What is changing with our prices and plans

Here's an outline of everything that's changing:

Pricing increases for Pro, Advanced, and Enterprise plans:

Pricing is changing for Merchants on the Pro, Advanced, and Enterprise plans.

Updated pricing

• Pro: $360/month or $3,600/year
• ‍Advanced: $900/month or $9,000/year
• ‍Enterprise: Contact us

Billable ticket limit decreases

We’re also updating the billable ticket limit for Basic and Advanced plans to better reflect the number of tickets merchants of this size typically see each month:

Updated billable ticket limit:

• ‍Basic: 300 tickets/month
• ‍Advanced: 5,000 tickets/month

Doubling down on Automate

Automate includes several valuable features that allow you to automate up to 25% of total customer interactions. This means you’ll spend more time driving revenue through high-quality support and less time handling repetitive tickets, such as where is my order (WISMO) interactions.

Some of the features only available in Automate include:

• Quick Answer Flows
• Help Center / Self-Service features
• Email Auto-Responders and Auto-Close Rules

We initially launched Automate with introductory pricing in late 2021. We had great feedback from early adopters, especially after improving features like updated Quick Response Flows and Self-Service Flows. Now that Automate is delivering on its promise, we're ending our introductory pricing for the add-on and the full price will be reflected for all add-on subscribers.

Here is the updated Automate pricing:

Updated pricing

• ‍Basic: $30/month or $300/year
• ‍Pro: $180/month or $1,800/year
• ‍Advanced: $450/month or $4,500/year
• ‍Enterprise: Contact us

Legacy Self-Service features added to Automate

Furthermore, some of our legacy customers currently have access to a smaller set of automation features, separate from Automate. We will discontinue support for those legacy automation features for monthly users by December 31st, 2022. For users on annual plans, we will honor their legacy features until their renewal date. We encourage all customers to explore Automate, which provides a superior automation experience.

Automate overages increasing

As part of this pricing update, overages for accounts with Automate will be increased to account for the cost increase for the account. This will help us avoid pricing anomalies and keep things fair for customers across the board.

New features for some of our earliest customers

Currently, some of our oldest customers are on plans that we no longer support. We will migrate customers to the plan that most closely matches their current billable ticket count. This migration will also grant access to a suite of new features that were unavailable on those legacy plans:

• Managing Instagram DMs in Gorgias
• Agent Statistics
• Customizable Help Center
• Any additional upcoming product releases

We’re introducing a $10 plan for merchants that are getting started

We’ve heard from merchants who just launched their stores that they need a way to chat with customers on their website and host help center articles that proactively answer common customer questions. So we introduced a $10 plan with up to 50 tickets, that includes most of the features available to other Gorgias users.We’re excited to serve more small businesses with this new plan.

When are these changes happening?

For our customers paying monthly, these changes will come into effect two billing cycles from today (September 21, 2022). Your plan and price will change by November or December 2022, depending on when you first signed up for Gorgias.

For our annual customers, we will update your plan and prices in 2023 on your billing renewal date. Any annual customers renewing before the end of 2022 will keep their existing prices and features for another year, until 2023.

Why are we updating pricing?

Our product has grown and evolved significantly in the past three years since we last updated pricing in mid-2019. In order to continue on this trajectory, we plan to heavily invest in our product to bring even more value to our ecommerce merchants, growing their businesses.

Here are the biggest recent areas of growth for Gorgias:

Interact with customers on more channels

As a merchant, you understand the importance of showing up where your customers are. We have made great strides in this arena to bring you to all of the places your customers are expecting you to be, all in your single Gorgias feed.

Our social media channels have evolved to best-in-class status, allowing you to interact with customers in all of the different ways they might reach out. Whether you’re responding to comments on your ads to increase return on ad spend or handling angry customers that slide into your DMs, we have you covered on major social networks.

And when you want to help customers help themselves, we now have a robust help center to answer all of their top questions without human attention. You can even upgrade your help center with self-service features like order tracking.

Sell more products

Your customer experience should drive revenue — happy customers are the best fuel for growth.

This belief is at the center of Gorgias’ philosophy and guides our product development. As a result, the Gorgias platform has gotten much better at driving revenue for our customers, resulting in $1.1 billion in support-driven revenue in 2021 alone.

Want to learn more? Read our CX growth playbook to drive 44% more revenue through customer experience.

Our chat improvements and native Shopify product links turn your agents into sales reps, and our revenue statistics show just how much impact your team has had.

And this is going to be one of our biggest areas of focus going forward, so expect lots of new features like refined chat campaigns, one-time discount codes, and advanced sales analytics.

We’re even building a full-featured Revenue Add-on to help you increase your revenue impact. More on that in our Series C announcement.

Work more efficiently

Gorgias is built around the unique needs of ecommerce merchants, and we’ve designed the tool to be the fastest platform for ecommerce customer service teams right out of the box.

Agent and team efficiency have been areas where our platform has seen some of the most improvement over the past few years.

We have Macro suggestions and a Rule library, now, to get you started fast and make sure you’re never at a loss for words. And you can make all the necessary edits to a given Shopify order without leaving the Gorgias platform.

Plus, our advanced dashboards keep your whole team on track and show the impact of your process improvements in real time.

When you spend less time on repetitive tasks and tickets, you can spend more time with the tickets that matter to your business — the ones that actually require human attention.

Integrate your favorite tools

In 2019, we had just started to connect with your favorite ecommerce apps.

Now, Gorgias is your command hub for the entire customer experience, integrating data from all of your favorite apps to make it all more actionable. That’s a major way we help you make better decisions and provide a world-class experience for your customers.

Our Klaviyo integration has been upgraded to enable even more advanced functionality, and we have also added 80 other integrations that upgrade your support process.

And we’re not done yet — with a host of new integrations coming soon, we’re going to keep bringing more insight to your first-party customer data — across all of the different platforms you use.

Questions? Reach out to our team

We understand you may have further questions about which changes will impact you. For further clarity, please check the emails associated with your account for a more detailed breakdown of the specific changes that apply to your account. You may also reach out to our support team or connect with your Customer Success Manager for additional details.

Our mission continues to be helping merchants deliver an exceptional customer experience. We believe this is how you’ll build long-lasting relationships with your customers to maximize retention and grow your business.

When a shopper places an order, the second phase of customer acquisition begins: Turning new customers into repeat customers. Return customers generate 300% more revenue over first time buyers on average, according to data from 10,000 ecommerce brands. 

So, what kind of post-purchase behavior leads to long-term loyalty? Ideally, your customers follow up purchases with: 

• Leaving positive reviews and CSAT scores
• Signing up for a customer community or participating on social channels 
• Introducing friends and social followers to your brand and products
• Engaging with follow-up marketing email campaigns
• Making repeat purchases with the help of product recommendations or a generous loyalty program

Below, learn more about the psychology of your shoppers once they place an order, and get tactics to improve your brand's post-purchase experience.

{{lead-magnet-1}}

What is post-purchase behavior?

Post-purchase behavior is the set of actions customers take after purchasing an item. Post-purchase behavior can be positive (repeat purchases, raving fans), negative (poor reviews, excessive returns), or neutral (transactional purchases, simply using the product).

Why is it important to understand post-purchase behavior?

Post-purchase behavior matters because making the first sale isn’t the finish line. It’s the beginning of a race to win long-term, loyal customers: people who repeatedly return to your store, have a high customer lifetime value, buy more from you (increasing cart size and transaction value), and send new customers your way.

Gorgias’s data shows that while repeat customers make up 21% of all customers, they bring in 44% of revenue. 

What is post purchase dissonance?

Post-purchase dissonance, or what’s also known as “buyer’s remorse,” is when an otherwise positive purchase experience creates cognitive dissonance in the form of discomfort or other negative feelings. 

Usually, customers experience post-purchase dissonance when you don’t give enough information about:

• Order confirmation: “Did it go through?”
• Shipping: “When it arrive on time?”
• The product: “How do I set this up?”
• Returns: “Am I stuck with it?”

This often, understandably, dampens positive post-purchase behavior. On the other hand, a great post-purchase experience and strong customer service and support can drive positive post-purchase behavior, including brand loyalty.

{{lead-magnet-2}}

13 ways to provide a pleasant post-purchase experience that leads to more sales

Happy customers tend to become repeat customers. Focusing on creating a positive post-checkout process can increase customer satisfaction, bolster your repeat customer rate, and build customer loyalty.

Here are 13 ways to anticipate what your customers may think after clicking “Confirm order” and how  steer your customer’s post-purchase behavior. 

1) Do some audience research before getting started 

Consider: What metrics are we optimizing for?

The first step in encouraging positive consumer behavior through a thoughtful post-purchase experience is understanding what you want your customers to do. Then, take a look at who they are, what they care about, and how they behave. The key is to fully understand your brand’s customer journey. This will help you craft a better experience for them that’s based on real learnings about your business. 

“The first question brands should ask is, what kind of post purchase activities do you want to drive differently,” Bri Christiano, Director of Support at Gorgias, says. “And, who are you really targeting? That's going to dictate what your main metric is, and it’ll determine where you focus.” 

After you have a top-level understanding of the kinds of results you want to see overall, you can drill down into the specific activities that will be effective, like timely email sends. 

2) Immediately send an order confirmation email

Customer sentiment: “Did my purchase go through?”

In order to ensure a stress-free purchase process for your online store, send shoppers a confirmation email so they can confirm that their transaction went through. 

Include details like their order number, the shipping destination address, payment method, product details (in case of an order mistake), and the total cost including any promotional discounts. 

Caption: Gorgias customer Printfresh sends a thorough post-purchase email that includes all important order details.

💡Tip: Bri recommends sending timely emails that “catch customers when they're interacting with your brand. Don't send random emails at times when you’re likely not top of mind. Then, add personalization when you can for goals that they have, if your brand aligns with that.”

Even better if your order confirmation email links to a clear and helpful order management portal where customers can track their order, report issues, and modify the order.

3) Set up self-service order management

Customer sentiment: “Shoot, I messed up my order. I need to change it, fast!”

Sometimes a customer realizes that they didn’t make the right decision about an order, or legitimately made a mistake. 

Giving customers the opportunity to cancel an order themselves before it ships gives them peace of mind and allows them to correct their mistake in time without having to wait to send in a return. Using a helpdesk like Gorgias, customers can use self-service order management in chat or in the Help Center to cancel a recent order. 

If you do require customers to write into support (or if customers bypass your self-service options), set up a ticket prioritization system to surface those urgent tickets before it’s too late. Ensure that your support reps can do a quick information search to find the order and change or cancel it quickly. 

Here’s an example of a Gorgias Rule that automatically tags tickets about order cancellation requests from orders within the last two days, so your agents can confirm the cancellation before the order is shipped:

4) Be transparent about shipping times, carrier information, and customer service information

Customer sentiment: “When will it get here?”

Retail disruptions have reached 59% or higher over the past couple of years. With supply chain issues and shipping delays, giving people as much information as possible about how and when their purchase will reach them helps better meet customer expectations. 

Plus, questions about order status make up a large chunk of customer service requests. So, preemptively providing this information can help reduce the number of those repetitive tickets that don’t actually require a human touch. 

Offering real time order tracking information (ideally, without making customers jump through hopes) provides transparency, sets expectations, and allows customers to stay up to date with any order delays or changes without having to reach out to customer support.  

📚Recommended reading: Check out our post on how to offer real-time order tracking for more strategies.

5) Enhance the “unboxing” experience

Customer sentiment: “A package! I hope I love it.” 

Every moment, from the moment a shopper makes a purchase to when they unwrap your product for the first time, should build anticipation. Creating a fun and creative unboxing experience will help. 

Stationary brand Ohh Deer and its subscription program Papergang sends visually stunning packaging, especially for its monthly boxes. These fun, “keepable” boxes spark joy, can be reused or gifted, and create an overall positive experience that customers can look forward to. 

To get started, take a look at brands like Arka or Fantastapack, which provide custom options for enhancing your packaging.  

6) Have an honest and forgiving return/refund policy

Customer sentiment: “What if I don’t like it?”

When customers inevitably experience hiccups in the order process, the goal is that their behavior is constructive and positive, rather than angry and combative. To get that kind of post-purchase behavior, you need to offer easy paths to contact customer support and a smooth return or exchange process. 

Customers love the peace of mind of knowing that they can return something without hassle, even if they never have the need. Communicating that returns are easy (and free, if you can manage it) upfront can even encourage shoppers to convert. 

Still, solely-online retailers can be tricky for consumers. Many are hesitant to make a purchase decision on items that they can’t see in person first. To address that concern, share your returns process and policy in every order confirmation email and in FAQs and the Help Center on your website. 

Mattress company Casper created an easy and generous return policy that’s a gold standard for ecommerce: If you don’t like your mattress, tell them within 30 days, and they’ll cover shipping for a free return. With something as bulky as a mattress, free return shipping can eliminate any concerns about not liking such a big investment. 

A returns tool like Loop can really help you optimize the product so customers don’t have to jump through hoops to return a product:

7) Encourage exchanges over refunds

Customer sentiment: “I don’t love it. Should I get my money back?”

Encouraging shoppers to make an exchange keeps them around as a customer and also allows you to keep the revenue from the sale, which will help with your bottom line. According to returns tool Loop, “Turning refunds into exchanges is 10x more impactful than reducing return costs.”

Loop incentivizes returns by offering customers slightly more in-store credit than they would get for a refund: 

Shopify stores that use Loop for their returns see a 15% reduction in returns on average.  If you use Shopify or Gorgias, it’s easy to integrate Loop as an impactful return/exchange tool. 

💡Learn how Loop integrates with Gorgias to improve the customer experience of your returns even further.

8) Provide detailed instructions on how to use the product or service

Customer sentiment: “It’s here! How do I set it up?”

Devices or tools that arrive with no or unclear instructions, DIY furniture assembly that seems nearly impossible, or even complex software tools with poor onboarding can cause a less than positive experience, even if the end product is great. 

Create a simple YouTube video, send clear step-by-step instructions with images, or share a live chat hotline customers can reach out to if they get stuck. These options make it easy for people to get all of the information they need to set up or use the product or service they just purchased successfully. 

For example, GEN3 e-bikes come with a paper manual for assembly, but they also send a QR code (using a QR code generator like Beaconstac) that takes shoppers to a short, high-quality how-to video that’s less than 5 minutes long.

9) Send a CSAT survey and request product reviews from high scorers

Customer sentiment: “This is seriously (un)cool.”

Brands usually send a customer satisfaction (CSAT) score after a customer has interacted with customer support. Consider only asking for product reviews from people who score 4 or 5 on CSAT and leave positive feedback about their interaction with support. 

If you use a helpdesk like Gorgias, you can likely send these kinds of CSAT surveys automatically after conversations, purchases, and other kinds of transactions:

📚Recommended reading: Our Director of Support’s guide to improving CSAT score and survey response rate

10) Include relevant product recommendations

Customer sentiment: “Loved it! What else do they have?”

The time when shoppers are still deciding on a purchase is a prime opportunity for your support team to cross-sell or upsell them on additional items. 

For example, a customer might have trouble finding an item on your website that they saw on social media. Or, they might ask for recommendations for what to purchase or for items that will go best with the item that they already bought from you.

After a purchase is complete, consider surfacing additional product recommendations for customers via email. Even if these don’t result in an immediate second sale, you keep customers engaged and thinking about how that recommended item would improve their lives or enhance the use of the current item they have. 

11) Incentivize customers to show off their purchases on social media

Customer sentiment: “This product’s the best — everyone needs it.”

Providing discounts or other perks in exchange for social media shares and reviews brings more exposure to your brand and enhances the post-purchase experience for your fans. 

Underwear brand Parade runs a program like this called Parade Friends. Existing customers apply for the program, and once accepted, post pictures of themselves wearing Parade items on social media. Their followers can then use their Instagram handle as a discount code, incentivixzing future purchases (with a discount for customer delight). 

That means that both parties benefit, which makes them happy, and you benefit by bringing in new customers and more revenue.

12) Build a community for your customers

Customer sentiment: “I love this brand! Where can I find more?”

For many brands, community drives customer perception of the brand — and drives future sales. Brands have leveraged Facebook groups, Reddit forums, Instagram Live, and more to encourage community among their customers and fans. 

For example, soap shop Dr. Squatch hosts its community on Discord, a community-based social and chat platform, so its customers can hang out with each other and chat about the brand.

Creating a community can increase customer engagement and satisfaction, generate trustworthy, quality customer feedback about your products, and make more opportunities for cross selling and upselling. 

📚Recommended reading: What is Ecommerce Community Management and Why Does it Matter?

13) Follow up with special offers and marketing sequences

Customer sentiment: “Which brand was that again?”

Inevitably, your brand won’t always be top of mind for customers, even if they absolutely love it and your products. This is where a thoughtful marketing strategy comes in, and where email automation can be really effective. 

Set up automated flows that offer personalized product offerings, discount emails based on customer behavior, target returning customers, and ask for feedback. 

📚Recommended reading: 8 Ecommerce Email Automation Series for Online Stores

Encourage great post-purchase behavior with Gorgias

Turning first-time customers into repeat, loyal, raving-fan customers takes meticulous attention to the customer experience, especially in the post-purchase window. This is where Gorgias shines.

Ultimately, getting the ideal post-purchase behavior starts — and ends — with delivering a great customer experience, especially in the post-purchase evaluation phase. Gorgias delivers a powerful platform for your customer service helpdesk, tailored to the needs of ecommerce businesses who want to deliver an exceptional customer experience.

Gorgias offers powerful features that drive ecommerce success, including:

• Ticketing system
• Live chat
• Self-service order management
• Intent and sentiment detection
• Data analytics
• Powerful macros and automations

See how Gorgias can transform your customer service efforts. Sign up now!