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The Gorgias & Shopify Integration: 8 Features Your Support Team Will Love

See how Gorgias’s Shopify integration makes customer support easier—fewer tabs, faster replies, happier customers, and more revenue.
By Holly Stanley
0 min read . By Holly Stanley

Managing customer support as a Shopify store owner can feel like juggling too many tools at once.

Constantly switching tabs to look up orders, update customer information, or track returns wastes valuable time. Plus, it prevents your team from focusing on what really matters––delivering quick, personalized customer service

Gorgias’s Shopify integration solves this. It keeps all your Shopify data in one place, so your team spends less time toggling tabs and more time helping customers. The result? Faster responses, better service, and more revenue.

Below, we break down the eight key capabilities of this integration, each paired with practical use cases to showcase its real-world value.

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1. View Shopify data in tickets

What it does: Shopify order data is displayed directly within support tickets, allowing agents to view essential details like order status, customer information, and transaction history without leaving the helpdesk.

Use case: An agent handling a “Where’s my order?” request can instantly check tracking information and update the customer.

The fashion retailer Princess Polly improved their customer experience team’s efficiency by using Gorgias's deep integration with Shopify. Agents can view and update customer and order data directly within Gorgias, eliminating the need to switch between multiple tabs.

Taking a streamlined approach led to a 40% increase in efficiency, an 80% decrease in resolution time, and a 95% decrease in first response time

Screenshot of Shopify order data within Gorgias ticket
Customer order data, including their shipping address and product details, can be found directly in the ticket.

2. Perform Shopify Actions

What it does: Agents can update Shopify order and customer data with Shopify Actions right in Gorgias.

Key features:

  • Create a new order: Add existing products or custom items, apply discounts, modify quantities, add notes and tags, and choose to charge taxes. Then set the order as Paid or Pending and email the invoice to the customer.
  • Duplicate an order: Replicate an existing order and make adjustments as needed.
  • Cancel/refund an order: Cancel or refund orders by setting quantities to refund, specifying shipping amounts to refund, providing reasons for cancellation, restocking items, and notifying the customer.
  • Edit shipping address: Update the shipping address for an order.
  • Insert product links: Add product links or product cards from tickets so customers can add the product to their cart quickly.
  • Display the customer’s cart: View the exact items the customer has in their cart at the moment they reach out via Chat.

Use case: Agents can perform Shopify actions directly from Gorgias, such as adding products, applying discounts, updating quantities, or issuing refunds.

Screenshot of duplicate order Shopify action in Gorgias ticket.
Agents can perform Shopify Actions like duplicate an order directly from Gorgias.

3. Embed customer-specific Shopify data in Macros

What it does: Create templated responses called Macros with dynamic Shopify variables to automatically incorporate customer-specific information. 

Key features:

  • Dynamic variables: Macros can include variables that pull real-time data from Shopify, such as order status, tracking numbers, and customer details.
  • Automated actions: Beyond inserting dynamic content, Macros can perform actions like tagging tickets, setting statuses, or assigning conversations to specific agents. The automation streamlines workflows and ensures consistent handling of similar inquiries.

Use case: A customer inquires about their order. With one click, the agent uses a Macro that pulls in the order status and expected delivery date, creating a faster and more personalized response.

Take Try The World, a gourmet subscription service, needed a robust Shopify integration to handle an increasing volume of customer inquiries. By switching to Gorgias, they gained the ability to unify conversations and embed Shopify data directly into Macros. Now, agents could quickly generate personalized responses that included order details, tracking links, and customer-specific information. 

Try the World’s support team’s efficiency skyrocketed, enabling them to handle 120 tickets per day, up from 80, and reduce response times to just one business day. 

Screenshot of templated response with Shopify data in Gorgias ticket.
Shopify data lets agents create Macros, templated responses with personalized data.

4. Provide product information with Macros

What it does: Macros with embedded Shopify data let agents quickly and accurately share pre-sale information like product links, stock availability, and discount codes, helping to convert prospective customers into buyers.

Key features:

  • Dynamic Shopify variables in Macros: Agents can use dynamic variables to pull real-time product information.
  • Pre-built responses for common questions: Macros can include templated responses tailored for pre-sale inquiries, such as providing direct links to products or applying discount codes.

Use case: A customer asks if a specific product is available in their size and color. The agent can apply a Macro that automatically pulls the product's inventory details and includes a discount code, sending a response like this:

“Hi {{ticket.customer.firstname}},
Great news! The product {{ticket.customer.integrations.shopify.products[0].title}} is currently in stock in the size and color you’re looking for. You can check it out here: [Product Link]. Use the code WELCOME10 at checkout for 10% off your first order! Let me know if you have any other questions!”

How it helps:

  • Eliminates manual search and typing for agents.
  • Ensures accurate, real-time product information for customers.
  • Improves the likelihood of converting inquiries into sales.

5. Enable self-serve order management in Chat 

What it does: Using Gorgias’s chat widget, customers can track orders or manage their purchases on their own with no agent assistance needed.

Key feature:

  • Order management automation: Customers can access real-time order information, including status updates and tracking details, through the chat interface. This automation reduces the volume of live chat inquiries by up to 30%.

Use case: A customer wants to check the status of their recent purchase. By accessing the Chat widget on your website, they can enter their email and order number and receive instant updates on their order's progress, including shipping and delivery information, without waiting for an agent's response.

How it helps:

  • Automates routine inquiries and frees up your support team to handle more complex issues.
  • Enhances customer satisfaction thanks to immediate responses.
  • Reduces the need for multiple communication channels, consolidating support interactions in one place.

6. Use Shopify variables in Rules


What it does: Rules paired with Shopify variables can automate various support tasks, such as identifying specific customer segments or tagging tickets, to boost efficiency and consistency.

Key features:

  • Automated tagging: Rules can automatically tag tickets based on specific Shopify data. For instance, you can set up a Rule to tag tickets from customers with high order counts or significant total spending as "VIP."
  • Prioritization of tickets: Rules can prioritize tickets that meet certain criteria, such as high-value orders or repeat customers.

Use case: A customer with a history of substantial purchases contacts support. A rule detects that the customer's total spending exceeds a predefined threshold and automatically tags the ticket as "VIP." 

This tag can then trigger other workflows, such as assigning the ticket to a senior support agent or escalating its priority.

How it helps:

  • Improves customer experience by prioritizing high-value customers.
  • Maintains consistent service quality.
Rule setup for auto tagging VIP customers
Rules let you identify VIP customers using Shopify variables.

7. Track revenue with reporting

What it does: Gorgias offers comprehensive reporting that allows you to measure how your support interactions influence sales.

Key features:

  • Tickets converted: Tracks the number of support tickets that led to a sale within five days of the ticket's creation.
  • Conversion rate: Calculates the percentage of created tickets that resulted in sales, helping you assess the effectiveness of your support team's interactions.
  • Total sales from support: Sums the revenue generated from orders associated with converted tickets, accounting for refunds and order adjustments to provide accurate figures.

These metrics are accessible under Statistics → Support Performance → Revenue in your Gorgias dashboard. You can filter the data by integration, ticket channel, tags, or specific time periods to gain detailed insights.

Use case: By analyzing Revenue Statistics, you can identify which support channels or agents are most effective in driving sales. For example, if live chat interactions have a higher conversion rate, you might allocate more resources to that channel. 

Additionally, recognizing top-performing agents can inform training programs to elevate overall team performance.

For example, One Block Down, a Milan-based streetwear brand, struggled to manage a growing volume of customer inquiries across multiple platforms. By integrating Gorgias with Shopify, they centralized all customer interactions into a single platform, giving agents instant access to crucial information like order history and returns directly within tickets.

The setup allowed the team to measure the direct impact of their support efforts on revenue. 

The result? An impressive 1,000% increase in support-generated revenue and a 1-hour average first response time. By connecting the dots between customer service and sales performance, One Block Down demonstrated how proactive, data-driven support can directly influence the bottom line.

How it helps:

  • Quantifies the revenue generated from support interactions.
  • Faster team optimization with data-driven insights.
  • Understanding the correlation between support interactions and sales can help refine customer service strategies.

Screenshot of Revenue Statistics dashboard in Gorgias.
Revenue Statistics highlight which support channels and agents are best at generating sales.

8. AI Agent integration

What it does: AI Agent automates Shopify actions like canceling orders, editing order details, and reshipping items.

Key features:

  • Cancel Shopify order: AI Agent can automatically cancel unfulfilled orders upon customer request, restocking the items and issuing a full refund. A confirmation email is sent to the customer once the cancellation is complete.
  • Edit order shipping address: When a customer needs to update their shipping address, AI Agent verifies if the order is unfulfilled, confirms the new address with the customer, and updates it in Shopify accordingly.
  • Replace order item: AI Agent facilitates item replacements in orders by confirming the item to be removed and the new item to be added, checking stock availability, adjusting payments if necessary, and sending an updated order confirmation to the customer.
  • Reship order for free: In cases where an order is lost in transit or arrives damaged, AI Agent can duplicate and resend the order at no additional charge.
  • Remove order item: If a customer decides to remove an item from their order, AI Agent can handle the removal, restock the item in Shopify, process the refund for the removed item, and notify the customer of the updated order details.

Use case: A customer realizes they've entered an incorrect shipping address shortly after placing an order. They contact support, and AI Agent promptly verifies that the order is unfulfilled, confirms the correct address with the customer, updates the shipping information in Shopify, and sends a confirmation email—all without human intervention.

How it helps:

  • Automating routine order management tasks reduces the workload on human agents.
  • Quick and accurate responses to order modification requests lead to a better customer experience.
  • Automated processes ensure consistency and accuracy in handling order changes, reducing the likelihood of human error.
Screenshot of AI Agent Actions.
Using Gorgias’s AI Agent you can customize multiple Shopify actions with Gorgias.

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min read.

Introducing Conversational AI: The Smartest Way to Handle Chat, Actions, QA, and Insights

Gorgias is entering a new era of conversational AI. Watch out for these new and exciting features in 2025.
By Gorgias Team
0 min read . By Gorgias Team

Today, we’re announcing our deeper investment in conversational AI for ecommerce. 

"Since day one, Gorgias has been dedicated to helping ecommerce brands deliver exceptional customer experiences. We started with a helpdesk to centralize support, then introduced AI Agent to instantly resolve support questions,” says Romain Lapeyre, CEO of Gorgias.

“Now, we're taking the next leap forward with an AI Agent that powers the entire customer journey—anticipating buyer needs, boosting sales, and automating high-quality support. Today, I'm happy to announce Gorgias as the Conversational AI platform for ecommerce.”

Gorgias’s Conversational AI platform will let teams provide fast, scalable, and cost-effective support while helping them drive revenue growth. From automatic order changes and refunds to product recommendations and cross-sells, brands will be able to flawlessly combine their support and sales efforts.

The end result is an AI-powered customer journey where every customer interaction feels complete, personal, and connected, both before and after purchase.

Questions in Chat, resolved in seconds

Last year, we introduced AI Agent for email. 

Some brands call their AI Agent Lisa, some call it Wally, and most treat it like a real member of the team. But this reliable support sidekick was only available to answer customers on email—until now.

Get ready for instant responses that tackle support inquiries of all sizes. Now, your customers can enjoy fast responses that keep their shopping experience as smooth as possible.

On top of improving first response times, AI Agent can play an even more critical role in unblocking sales, suggesting products, and driving upsells and cross-sells.

With responses sent in 15 seconds or less, brands can delight customers with near-instant resolutions.

AI Agent responding in chat and email
AI Agent can autonomously respond to customers on email and chat.

Let your AI Agent take action

Actions let AI Agent perform customer requests on behalf of your support team. This includes changing shipping addresses, fetching fulfillment status, canceling orders, adding discounts, and more. 

You can use a library of pre-configured Actions for popular apps like Shopify, Rebuy, Loop, and more. And you don’t need any technical skills to set them up.

With almost half of queries requiring some kind of update, Actions is your go-to for complete resolutions so you can get more accomplished.

AI Agent actions are connected to ecommerce apps
AI Agent can perform actions on ecommerce apps, right from the Gorgias platform.

Quality built into every support ticket

Quality checks have traditionally been manual, time-consuming, and inconsistent. Our brand new Auto QA feature changes that by automatically scoring 100% of conversations on resolution completeness and communication quality—whether from a human or AI agent.

With Auto QA, team leads can:

  • Scale quality consistently and easily. Both human and AI agents follow the same quality standards, allowing for consistent, high-quality customer experiences.
  • Coach smarter. Use real-time QA ratings in tickets to give agents targeted feedback.
  • Track team performance. The dashboard highlights metrics by agent, showing what’s working and where to improve.
The Auto QA Score includes resolution, accuracy, efficiency, communication and text field for feedback
Receive automatic QA checks on all customer conversations with Auto QA.

Gain clarity on your AI Agent’s impact

Support teams should be in complete control of their AI. That’s why the AI Agent Report and AI Agent Insights were created—to help you know exactly how your AI Agent is performing and contributing to your customer service operations.

The AI Agent Report provides full visibility into AI Agent’s performance, covering metrics like First Response Time, CSAT, and one-touch ticket resolutions. Fully integrated into your Support Performance Statistics dashboard, the report includes:

  • The percentage of tickets automated by AI Agent
  • The number of tickets closed by AI Agent
  • Success rates for one-touch resolutions
  • How satisfied customers are with AI Agent’s responses
AI Agent performance displays metrics like automation rate and customer satisfaction
Monitor AI Agent’s performance with a glimpse into metrics like automation rate, closed tickets, and customer satisfaction.

AI Agent Insights takes it a step further. It analyzes AI Agent’s performance data and provides you with a dashboard of recommendations, including potential automation opportunities, popular ticket intents to optimize, and knowledge base improvements.

AI Insights show automation metrics and top intents
Find out which areas of your support workflow could benefit from automation with AI Insights.

Meet your new AI sales assistant

Soon, we’ll be expanding our AI capabilities with the launch of AI Agent for Sales, a tool designed to assist customers on their shopping journey.

AI Agent for Sales helps brands boost their sales capabilities through smart product recommendations, on-page checkout assistance, and personalized conversations. Now it's easier to reduce cart abandonment, suggest complementary products to boost average order value, and overcome pre-sale objections.

This new tool will bridge the gap between marketing and CX, ensuring brands can scale personalized interactions 24/7 without increasing headcount.

Coming soon: AI Agent for Sales
AI Agent for Sales is coming to chat soon.

Looking ahead with conversational AI

As we continue to innovate with conversational AI, our focus remains on helping you succeed.

By combining smarter tools with valuable insights, we’re creating opportunities for you to put your customers first and build deeper connections at every touchpoint.

Join us as we pave a new way for the future of ecommerce.

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min read.

AI Quality Assurance: The New Standard for Customer Support QA

Help your CX team deliver better service with AI quality assurance for fair feedback and consistent customer support.
By Christelle Agustin
0 min read . By Christelle Agustin

TL;DR:

  • The landscape of QA is moving from manual to AI-powered, where AI can analyze every customer interaction, uncover patterns, and suggest data-driven changes at scale.
  • Automating QA allows ticket reviews to be routine. This means customers will always receive high-quality support.
  • Every customer interaction is reviewed with AI QA — not just a sample. This gives support leaders full visibility into performance and service quality.
  • AI QA saves time and improves agent and AI Agent feedback. By automating ticket reviews, agents receive instant, unbiased feedback, and leaders can focus on big-picture CX improvements.

This year, 71% of customer experience (CX) leaders are using AI and automation to handle the holiday shopping season. These tools, including AI agents and email autoresponders, speed up tasks like responding to customers and updating orders.

But answering tickets isn't enough. Responses must also be high-quality, whether from humans or AI. And while customer satisfaction (CSAT) is the standard measure of how successful these interactions are, they have major limits.

CSAT scores don’t tell the full story about whether agents were helpful or if they used on-brand language. These gray areas in quality lead to missed sales, higher return rates, and frustrated customers during peak periods.

AI quality assurance (QA) is changing that. In this article, we’ll see what QA looks like today, how AI can simplify the process, and how CX teams can use tools like Auto QA to improve quality across all conversations.

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Traditional customer support QA is falling by the wayside

Today, QA in customer support is a largely manual responsibility. Customer conversations are reviewed by CX team leads to ensure customer satisfaction and identify areas for agent coaching. Team leads evaluate agent responses against a checklist of best practices, including the proper use of language, product knowledge, consistency, and helpfulness.

However, reviewing tickets takes a long time.

QA is important, but it's hard to prioritize when customers are actively waiting for help with refunds, urgent order edits, or negative reviews. And when CX teams are under-resourced and short-staffed, it’s easy to put QA on the back burner. 

What’s more, as AI plays a bigger role in responding to customers, quality assurance must evolve to ensure the quality of AI-generated responses, not just human responses. 

Over time, the lack of QA in CX can hold back support teams for three reasons:

  1. Delayed feedback makes it harder for agents and AI tools to improve.
  2. Leaders have less time to train agents and refine workflows.
  3. Inconsistent service risks losing customer trust and loyalty.

What is AI-powered QA in CX?

AI-powered quality assurance (QA) uses AI to automate the process of reviewing customer interactions for resolution completeness, communication, language proficiency, and more. 

Instead of team leads spending hours manually sifting through tickets, AI takes over and evaluates how well tickets were resolved by agents.

Shifting this traditionally manual work to an automated process pulls teams out of the weeds and into more beneficial work like speaking to customers and upselling.

Manual vs. AI-powered QA
Manual QA is prone to inconsistent checks and fewer tickets reviewed compared to AI-powered QA.

With AI QA, routine ticket reviews are not just an optional part of your customer service strategy, they become a permanent part of it. The road to greater customer trust, resolution times, and stronger product knowledge becomes easier.

Read more: Why your strategy needs customer service quality assurance

Why choose AI-powered QA over manual QA? 

Manual QA is like trying to review a handful of tickets during a flood of new customer requests. Team leads can only focus on a small sample, leaving most interactions unchecked. Without complete visibility, creating a standard across all interactions is challenging.

Now, switch over to AI QA. You don’t have to choose between QA duty or answering tickets — QA checks are automatically done. You’ll still need to monitor AI’s performance, but now there’s more time to focus on creating strategies that improve the customer experience.

Here’s how AI QA and manual QA measure up to each other:

Feature

AI QA

Manual QA

Number of Tickets Reviewed

All tickets are reviewed automatically.

Only a small sample of tickets can be reviewed.

Speed of Reviews

Reviews are completed instantly after responses.

Reviews are time-consuming and delayed.

Consistency

Feedback is consistent and unbiased across all tickets.

Feedback varies depending on the reviewer.

Scalability

Scales, regardless of ticket volume.

Struggles to keep up with high ticket volumes.

Agent Feedback

Provides instant, actionable feedback for every resolved ticket.

Feedback is delayed and limited to a few cases.

Leader Advantage

Frees up leaders to train the team and improve workflows.

Disadvantageous, as leaders spend most time manually reviewing tickets.

7 benefits of using AI quality assurance in CX

AI quality assurance helps CX leaders move beyond manual reviews by offering fast, thorough insights into performance and customer needs. Here are seven key benefits it brings to your team.

1. Improved visibility into customer interactions

AI QA reviews every ticket, giving CX leaders a complete view of agent performance and customer trends. Nothing slips through the cracks, so you can act on real data each and every single time.

What the team wins: Key areas to focus on to improve the customer experience.

What the customer wins: A consistent support experience where their concerns are fully addressed.

2. Instantly identify major customer pain points

Only a third of customers highly trust businesses, and without QA checks in place, that trust only deteriorates.

AI QA feedback can highlight confusing policies or common product issues that lead to unhappy customers. With instant feedback, teams can quickly make changes and create better, consistent customer experiences.

What the team wins: Faster fixes for recurring issues.

What the customer wins: A smoother, frustration-free experience.

3. Faster identification of process gaps

Agents can receive feedback that instantly highlights gaps in workflows or unclear escalation steps. This is an efficient way to resolve issues within the wider team before they become more significant problems.

What the team wins: Process issues are solved quickly.

What the customer wins: Faster resolutions with little to no delays.

4. Standardized scoring for AI and human agents

AI QA evaluates both AI Agent and human agent interactions using the same criteria. This creates a level playing field and ensures all customer interactions meet the same quality standards.

What the team wins: Fair evaluations for both AI and human responses.

What the customer wins: High-quality support, no matter who handles the ticket.

5. More time for coaching and training

With less time spent on manual reviews, leaders can dedicate more energy to team development. Training sessions guided by AI insights help agents improve quickly and ensure the team delivers support that aligns with protocols.

What the team wins: More focused skill-building based on data.

What the customer wins: Clearer and more accurate support.

6. Drives continuous knowledge for the entire team

AI QA is helpful for showing agents which areas they need more training on, whether it's being better about using brand voice or polishing up on product knowledge. This leads to better support processes and stronger product understanding across the team.

What the team wins: Better support tactics and product expertise.

What the customer wins: Faster resolutions due to knowledgeable agents.

7. Enhanced customer experience through consistently high-quality support

Since all tickets are reviewed, teams can feel confident they’re delivering high-quality support on a regular basis. Customers get clear, helpful answers, while agents gain insights from every ticket with AI feedback.

What the team wins: Consistent support performance.

What the customer wins: Reliable support they can trust.

How accurate is AI QA?

AI QA analyzes tickets using predefined categories to evaluate how complete and helpful agent responses are. Let’s take a closer look at how it maintains accurate ticket reviews with an AI QA tool like Gorgias’s Auto QA.

It measures multiple metrics

Auto QA evaluates tickets based on three key areas: Resolution Completeness, Communication, and Language Proficiency.

For Resolution Completeness, it checks if all customer concerns were fully addressed. For example, if an agent resolves only one of two issues raised, the ticket is marked incomplete. Tickets where customers resolve issues on their own or don’t respond to follow-ups can still be graded as complete if handled appropriately.

Communication quality is scored on a scale of 1 to 5, assessing clarity, professionalism, and tone. Agents earn higher scores when they provide clear solutions and remain positive throughout the interaction.

Finally, Language Proficiency evaluates whether an agent displayed high proficiency in the language of the conversation. The score considers how well spelling, grammar, and syntax were employed.

Auto QA in action
Gorgias’s Auto QA scores agent responses based on communication and completeness.

Teams can improve AI with their own feedback

Auto QA isn’t set in stone. Team leads can expand on AI-generated feedback by adding their comments. For example, if a resolution is graded as ‘Incomplete,’ a team lead can explain why and provide additional context. This helps clarify the evaluation for the agent and also helps the AI model improve over time.

How to get started with AI quality assurance using Auto QA

Ready to bring the benefits of AI QA to your team? Here’s how to get started with Auto QA:

  1. Audit your current QA process to identify gaps. How do you currently review tickets? Pinpoint areas where manual QA falls short, such as inconsistent feedback or missed interactions.
  2. Pilot Auto QA with a small team. Introduce Auto QA to a small group of agents to test its impact. This allows you to find out how the new QA process fits into your workflow and how it affects agent performance.
  3. Use AI insights to refine processes. Analyze the feedback Auto QA provides to identify process gaps or recurring issues. Use these insights to update your workflow, improve training, and address root causes of customer pain points.
  4. Gradually scale adoption across the team. Once the pilot is successful, roll out Auto QA to more agents. Make sure everyone is trained on how to use its insights and integrate the tool into daily operations.
  5. Monitor and provide feedback to improve AI accuracy. Review Auto QA’s evaluations to ensure accuracy. Add manual feedback as needed to fine-tune its scoring on future tickets.
  6. Measure the impact on performance and satisfaction. Track key metrics like ticket close rates, resolution times, and customer satisfaction scores. Use this data to understand how Auto QA transforms your QA process and drives better results.

Make high-quality responses a standard with Auto QA

AI QA isn’t just about automating ticket reviews — it empowers CX leaders to focus on what truly matters: training and improving processes.

Leave spot-checking and inconsistent application of policies and brand voice in the past. As a built-in feature of Gorgias Automate, Auto QA makes high-quality customer interactions your brand’s standard. 

Book a demo now.

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min read.
Create powerful self-service resources
Capture support-generated revenue
Automate repetitive tasks
Create powerful self-service resources
Capture support-generated revenue
Automate repetitive tasks

Further reading

Thank You Interns

Thank you, interns!

By
1 min read.
0 min read . By

At Gorgias we've been very fortunate to work with some amazing people who did their internship with us:

Amit Poonia
Astrid Parmentier
Emilie Drouin
Hadrien de Lamotte
Ram Goli

Thank you all for your work!

Their contributions big and small make an indispensable part of what Gorgias is today and what it will be in the future. We are very grateful for their hard work, and we want to continue working with them after they finish their studies. To make returning more attractive for them, we've decided to take into account their stock option vesting period if they ever decide to return as full-time employees.

What exactly does this mean?

Interns that decide to return to Gorgias within a limited amount of time and choose to take our stock options offer upon the start of their full-time employment will have an accelerated schedule of their stock option vesting period. The offer will be judged case by case with our board's approval.

Let's take the example from our friends at Cockroach Labs (which this decision was inspired from):

For example, our standard option vesting schedule is that 25% of the stock options vests after 12 months of service from an employee’s start date (the “cliff”), and the remaining option vests in equal installments over the following 36 months of continuous service. However, if an intern spent four months with us, on their hire date, they would only have eight months until they hit their one-year cliff date and vest 25%.

We hope that by doing so, we're showing that we're taking their time seriously and we show our intention to work with them beyond their internship.

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Announcing The Recharge Integration

Announcing the ReCharge integration

By Astrid Parmentier
1 min read.
0 min read . By Astrid Parmentier

Recharge is the most popular subscription app in the Shopify app store and is the preferred solution for Shopify Plus stores. Over 10,000 Shopify merchants chose ReCharge to help sell products on a recurring basis, including stores like Dr. Axe, Hubble Contacts, and 5 Hour Energy.

The challenge is, when a customer has an issue with their subscription, the support team needs to jump between their helpdesk, Shopify and the ReCharge platform to fix the problem. This negatively impacts response time. Agents end up wasting hours per week going to ReCharge to skip a box for a customer, edit a subscription, etc. One of the key advantages of using Gorgias is to manage all your customer support in one place. A few months ago, our customer Darn Good Yarn asked us to build an integration with ReCharge. They no longer wanted to switch between ReCharge, Shopify and their helpdesk. This was completely aligned with our vision, so we decided to build it.

Today, we're excited to announce we've partnered with ReCharge to launch this integration.

Here are the key benefits:

  1. Display ReCharge subscriptions next to support tickets.
  2. Edit ReCharge subscriptions in one click from your helpdesk: refund charges, skip monthly payments or cancel subscriptions from Gorgias
  3. When a customer ask to edit their subscription, you can send them an auto-response with the link to manage the subscription.

“Gorgias gives us a holistic view of our customers. This way we can provide them with fast and personalized help”
Nicole Snow, DarnGoodYarn

Let’s take the example of Averill John. She wants to cancel her subscription to the Yummy Box and has just sent an email to your support.

Here is how your helpdesk looks like:

You can see that Astrid has been assigned to this ticket and that this ticket is tagged “Ambassador”. It means that Averill is one of your super loyal customers.

On the right, you can see the ReCharge account data of Averill. Here, Averill has a monthly subscription to the Yummy Box and will be charged on the 15th of October.

Astrid can skip the October charge in one-click on the “Skip charge on subscription” button. It will immediately set the action within ReCharge. Response time? Less than 1 minute!

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

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New Integration

Announcing the Aircall integration

By
1 min read.
0 min read . By

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

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

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

Here are the benefits of this new integration:

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

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

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Shopify Plus Partner

We're joining the Shopify Plus Technology Partner Program

By
1 min read.
0 min read . By

Today, we’re thrilled to announce we’re joining the Shopify Plus Technology partner program.

Over the past few months, we’ve worked with some incredible Shopify Plus merchants like Darn Good Yarn, Fjallraven and Frichti, who serve tens of thousands of customers every month. What they all had in common was a shared commitment to maximizing the efficiency of the customer service team to keep delivering high-quality support as they grow.

We’ve worked with other technology partners, like LoyaltyLion, in order to provide merchants with a holistic view of their customers when they respond to them in an effort to continue delivering best-in-class support interactions. We’ve also worked with the Plus team to leverage the latest features of the Shopify Plus API, to allow agents to create customized solutions for their customers, For example, creating personalized gift cards based on support conversations. Also, check out the guide we wrote comparing Shopify and Shopify Plus for an idea of the additional functionality and benefits ecommerce business owners get when they upgrade to Shopify Plus.

Using our technology, we’re proud to announce that our Shopify Plus customers have managed to improve their support request treatment time by 30%.

By joining the Technology Partner Program, we’re excited to take our collaboration with Shopify Plus and Shopify Plus merchants to the next level, by further enabling more customers to improve their customer service.

"We are glad to welcome Gorgias to the Shopify Plus Technology Partner Program. We’re particularly excited about how they’re helping our merchants provide efficient & personalized customer support, and hope they can help more of them."
Jamie Sutton, Head of Technology Partnerships, Shopify Plus
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We're Integrating With LoyaltyLion

We're integrating with LoyaltyLion!

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1 min read.
0 min read . By

Great news! Today, we're announcing a new integration with LoyaltyLion. LoyaltyLion is a digital loyalty framework that gives ecommerce stores innovative ways to engage and retain customers.

Our mutual customer Darn Good Yarn uses it to successfully increase customer retention. When they switched from Freshdesk to Gorgias to manage customer support, they wanted to leverage their loyalty program for customer support.

We used their feedback to build the integration with LoyaltyLion, which they have been using for a couple months in beta. Today, we're excited to make it available to all our users.

What is the LoyaltyLion integration?

Here are some of the benefits of this integration:

  • Display how many points a customer has when they contact your support team
  • When you respond to customer support requests, award loyalty points to customers directly in Gorgias
  • Include the customer's personal referral url in your responses. This way, if they are happy about your support, they'll refer their friends to your store.

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Overall, this allows your team to use your loyalty program for customer service.

"We love being able to issue our customers loyalty points directly from Gorgias! It's a great way to boost efficiency and also customer retention."

Chloe Kesler, Customer Support manager at Darn Good Yarn

How can I use the LoyaltyLion Integration?

The integration is immediately available on your Gorgias account. If you don't have an account, you can create one here. Then, follow the instructions in our documentation and you can get started!

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Customer Support To Increase Sales

How to leverage customer support to increase sales?

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14 min read.
0 min read . By

Most customers are loyal to brands because they know what level of service they can expect. As a result, providing an above-average customer experience is key to increase repeat in sales.

It’s relatively easy to provide great support when you get started with your store: your team gets a few dozens of support requests a day, and they respond to them almost instantly. The thing is, this level of service is very hard to maintain as you scale. Response time usually drops, and most brands start using standardized macros to keep up with the pace, which is a poor customer experience.

Your sales have increased, good. Now, you need to get your customer support up to speed

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Source: Gorgias customers during the Thanksgiving peak

At Gorgias, we’ve been chatting with 400 stores over the past year, and we’ve seen a lot of them working on crossing this “chasm”.

This post shares learning on how you can build a customer support organization that will scale with your business, and provide best-in-class customer service, which will drive customer retention.

Step 1: Run an audit of your support organization

A good place to start is to list the most common reasons customers are contacting you about. Go ahead and manually classify 200 tickets from your support inbox. This should take you about an hour. You can build categories from scratch, or use this spreadsheet of the most common requests for e-commerce companies we built.


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Most frequent support requests in e-commerce. Source: Gorgias customers


Now, you should be able to understand what problems are causing the most pain to customers.

If a specific type of request is above 10% of requests, then it’s a good candidate for optimization. For instance, if you’re getting a lot of “where is my order” questions, here are a few things you can do to deflect those:

  • Add a tracking section for customers to track their package on your site. Aftership can help here.
  • Send updates to customers about issues with delivery, through SMS or email.

Now that you have a good understanding of the reasons customers are contacting you for, you can map the customer journey, and identify what actions your agents need to take to respond to tickets.

Later, you can use this for training purposes, and to identify optimization opportunities.

At Piper, we basically studied the whole customer journey and tried to identify all reasons why someone could contact us (based on previous history). This helped us quickly identify where customers were "blocked"

Finally, let’s analyze the efficiency of your team. Of course, every business is different, but you can use this table to figure out how efficient your agents are compared to other stores. A good metric to track it is ticket closed per month. Just make sure that satisfaction remains consistent.

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Related: Learn more about the impact of live chat on sales. And see how Gorgias live chat can help you turn more browsers into buyers with chat campaigns.

Step 2: Figure out how you can improve the customer experience

Now, let’s work on creating “wow moments” for your customers. If you manage to exceed customers expectations when they contact you, you’re most likely to increase their loyalty and have them refer your store to their friends.

Here are a few ways you can create “wow moments”.

Make it easy for customers to contact you

You should be where your customers are. For example, if you have a Facebook page with a large audience, consider it as a real customer support channel. The point is, you should provide the same level of assistance across all support channels that your customer will use.

Also, don't be afraid to contact customers first, especially when they have items in their shopping cart. Offering help or a discount code at the right time could make the difference between a sale and an abandoned cart.

Example: providing high quality support on Facebook
70% of customers consider Facebook as a live chat support. To maximize customer satisfaction, your response time should be no more than 1 min. You’ll then be listed as a very responsive page, which will encourage your customers to respond.

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You can also leverage public posts to build relationship with your customers. Another easy way to facilitate customer communication is to remove the need for customers to repeat themselves. On your support platform, make sure your merge Facebook conversations with email tickets. This way, if the customer switches channel, your team will have access to the context of what the customer said before.

Related: Check out our trends and best practices for customer support.

Personalize every interaction with customer support

You should leverage every data point you have about the customer to personalize the way you communicate with them:
For how long they have been a customer
Their order preference
Their location
The days of the “we value your business” are over.

Always go an extra mile for your customers. If the customer asks for the status of their order, don’t respond only with the tracking number. Go get the order status on UPS so the customer doesn’t have to do it themselves when they’ll receive your email in the subway with poor network connection.

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Another good thing to do is to use a specific tone with your customer, that matches the brand image you want to convey.

If you’re into gifs, you can use them to build a brand tone your own set of gifs, designed for your own brand, and use them in your support emails. You can hire an illustrator on Upwork for that, or build them yourself.

Related: Tips to respond to angry customer emails.

Step 3: Give your team the “ironman suit” for support

Now that you know the level of support you aim at giving your customers, and you know what actions your agents need to take to get the delivery info, create an RMAs, etc., you can start optimizing the process for them.

Display rich customer profiles for your agents

To personalize messages, your agents need to have access to customer data. You can leverage the standard Shopify integration from your help desk as a starting point.

Though, it can be relevant to connect other data points to your help desk:

  • Display fulfillment data. Shippo is great for that
  • Inventory data: Stitch, display inventory to the reps
  • NPS responses
  • Responses to last promotions

If you’re on Zendesk, enabling the Shopify integration is a good start: it shows how much the customer has spent, and the past orders.

Some Gorgias customers have pretty advanced widgets that display data from Shopify, Stitch & Shipstation. This way, all the customer information is available.

Empower your reps to perform actions from support conversations

You can create custom widgets for your help desk, so that your agents can trigger actions from your help desk. Here are the most helpful actions:

  • Create a coupon
  • Place a replacement order
  • Cancelling an order
  • Create an RMA

This is a bit more tricky to implement. You need to build a custom app with buttons that will trigger actions - there are some good tutorials for Zendesk, Freshdesk & Help Scout. At Gorgias, we’ve built integrations with Stitch, Shipstation to embed these actions in the product, and enable you to add your own.

Other 3rd party apps like Chargedesk enable you to refund customers in one click.

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Step 4: Track your progress

Our goal here is to improve the customer experience to drive sales. A good way to track the efficiency of your support work is to compare the behavior of customers that have been in contact with customer support from those who have not.

Shopify helps you easily to this. You can create an integration between your help desk and Shopify to tag customers who reach out to support, using the Shopify API. Say you add a “customer_support” tag to them.

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Then, you can use Shopify statistics to monitor how the cohort of customers who have been in touch with your support team behaves, and assess the impact of your efforts with customer support.

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Another way to proceed is to tag orders that generated a support tickets. This way, if you work on improving delivery notifications, you can monitor the impact.

Final thoughts

Building a scalable support team that provides an amazing customer experience takes time.

Try to test different “wow moments”, iterate on the way you personalize messages, on the tone you’re using, and always track your progress. Among the teams we surveyed, several mentioned they managed to increase sales repeat by 30% after implementing these tactics.

Want to learn more about how customer support can improve your conversion rate and lead to more purchases? Check out our guides to ecommerce upselling and Shopify abandoned cart recovery.

Celery Gorgias

Celery + Gorgias

By
1 min read.
0 min read . By

Celery just released their API on Github, currently in beta. Here are some of the cool stuff you can do with it in Gorgias.

Display customer information

When you receive an email from a customer, you can connect your Celery account and see customer information (orders, shipping address, etc.). Here’s what it looks like:


Customer info from Celery

To configure it, grab your Celery access_token, head to integrations, and add an HTTP integration using this URL:
https://api.trycelery.com/v2/orders?buyer.email={ticket.requester.email}

Then you can customize the sidebar to only show the Celery data you need to respond to customers. Click the cog and simply drag and drop elements you want to show.

Select the data you want to show about your customers

Refunds, order change... without leaving tickets

Celery’s API enables you to perform a few actions from your favorite helpdesk:

  • Edit an order
  • Cancel an order
  • Issue a refund
  • Create a coupon

Here’s an example of how you can cancel an order from Gorgias itself. Say you already have a macro to cancel an order. Add an HTTP action to it, in this case:
https://api.trycelery.com/v2/orders/{ticket.requester.customer.data[0].number}/order_cancel

Then, when you use this macro and send it to the customer, it will automatically cancel the last order at the same time:

Action in celery from Gorgias

We hope this integration with Celery can save you time. If you'd like to try Celery with Gorgias, shoot us a note! At support@gorgias.com.

PostgreSQL Backup

PostgreSQL backup with pghoard & kubernetes

By Alex Plugaru
2 min read.
0 min read . By Alex Plugaru

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

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