How CX Leaders are Navigating Tariffs with Transparency
If you're an ecommerce leader right now, you’re likely facing a new wave of uncertainty. Rising tariffs, disrupted imports, and sudden cost increases are putting pressure on your margins, and your customer relationships.
At Gorgias, we are working with thousands of brands that are grappling with tough calls: adjust prices, shift sourcing, or absorb costs to protect loyalty. And while the supply chain is where these issues start, the customer experience is where they play out.
Whether you’re a growing DTC or an enterprise brand, your customers deserve transparency. We know the pressure you're under, and we're here to help you navigate it. To help you not only manage the conversation, but lead it with clarity, empathy, and speed.
Ecommerce brands are in an impossible position right now, following the 24 hours news cycle, and waiting to see how tariffs will cut into profits and impact their business.
For customers? It can create confusion, frustration, and a flurry of angry tickets if brands aren’t proactive and transparent. But here's the truth: how your team talks about tariffs is just as important as what they say.
These moments of friction, and how you communicate these changes to your customers can be opportunities to build trust, reduce churn, and even demonstrate the real revenue power of your team. In a moment when clarity and trust are everything, the role of CX leaders is more important than ever.
When tariffs hit, CX takes the call
Tariffs may seem like a back-end issue, but in reality, they shape front-end experiences—from product pricing and availability to fulfillment speed and satisfaction.
For ecommerce brands, especially those sourcing from China or shipping globally, these trade shifts hit close to home. Products get more expensive, shipping slows down, and some SKUs disappear altogether.
And CX teams are often the first to hear about it. The question isn’t if you should communicate tariff implications, but how.
What customers actually want to know
Here’s the good news: customers don’t expect you to control global trade policy. But they do expect honesty.
What matters most right now is:
- Transparency: Be clear about what’s changing and why.
- Timing: Tell them before they find out at checkout.
- Empathy: Acknowledge that increased prices or delays are frustrating and explain what you're doing to help.
And even more specifically, your customers are likely looking for answers to three simple questions:
- Did the price increase? Why?
- Why can’t I find this product anymore?
- Is my order going to be delayed?
In times of change, trust becomes foundational. If you're not upfront about what’s happening and how it affects them, customers will fill in the blank, or worse, turn to competitors.
How to talk tariffs without losing trust
Be clear, not complicated
Tariffs are complex, but your messaging shouldn’t be. Strip out the policy jargon and explain the changes in human terms. Let customers know what’s changing, why it’s happening, and what steps you’re taking to protect their experience.
Instead of: “Due to regulatory changes impacting import duties…”
Say: “Because of new tariffs, some of our prices have gone up. Here’s why, and what we’re doing to keep costs down.”
Say the same thing everywhere
From your Help Center to your agents to your email updates, your message should be consistent. Mismatched explanations create confusion and erode trust. Align your team on the key talking points and update scripts and automations across all customer touchpoints.
Speaking of your Help Center, now might be a great time to create an article specifically about tariffs and how you’re approaching them. The article can serve as a source of truth for your customers and your AI agents on the front lines answering questions.
Lead with empathy
Customers don’t just want the facts, they want to know you care. Acknowledge the frustration, and offer reassurance. Small gestures like a personalized note or a shipping perk can show you’re on their side.
Be specific and honest
Generic messages fall flat. Give customers details that they can rely on: Are the changes permanent? Are you absorbing part of the cost? Is a specific product impacted? When you’re upfront about the situation, and how you’re responding to it, you build credibility.
Decide how AI Agents should help
Times of uncertainty are times to cut costs, but it may also mean increased ticket volume. AI agents can help on the frontlines. But be sure to build your handovers to escalate to your team in the right moments to build trust.
Start with transparency: Beis sets the bar
Luggage brand, Beis, recently sent an email to customers that is a great example in customer-first communication. Rather than quietly raising prices or burying fees in checkout, they called it what it was: tariffs.
They explained the change clearly, why it was happening, and what customers could expect. And most importantly, they acknowledged the frustration. No spin, or vague language, just a clear message from a brand that respects its customers enough to be honest with them.
This kind of proactive messaging does more than prevent a flood of support tickets. It creates alignment between the brand and the customer. Beis didn’t make the rules but they’re navigating them with their customers, not in spite of them.
Make it a CX conversation, not just a policy page
Too often, tariff policies get relegated to the FAQ page or terms and conditions. Customers typically only land there after they’re already confused or upset.
Instead, CX should treat tariffs as a key part of the customer journey and be equipped to speak about them empathetically and clearly.
1. Proactive chat leads to fewer surprises
Add a proactive message to your chat widget that addresses tariff-related questions before they even come up. A short note like, “You may notice some pricing changes – here’s why,” with a link to your FAQ or a specific article, helps to deflect confusion and prevents cart abandonment.
2. Update your FAQ with key information
Surface timely information right where customers are most likely to look. Use your chat or search function to include a clear callout.
“Looking for information on recent pricing or shipping updates? Here’s what changed.”
This type of visibility empowers self-service, and reduces ticket volume.
3. Equip your agents with scripts that are genuine
Don’t leave your support team guessing. Create internal scripts with clear language on what to say (and what to avoid) when talking tariffs. Script empathy, not just compliance: Empower agents with language that acknowledges the inconvenience while reinforcing the brand's values.
Say:
- We’ve made some pricing updates due to new tariffs, and we’re doing everything we can to minimize the impact.
- We know this change may be frustrating. Here’s how we’re helping our customers through it.
Avoid:
- Overly technical or vague terms like “regulatory adjustments” or “economic climate shifts.”
- Any messaging that deflects responsibility or blames external factors without explanation.
4. Build smart macros for Tariff FAQs
If you’re using automation, make sure your AI Agent and autoresponders can explain tariff policies accurately and compassionately. Use macros to ensure fast, consistent replies, without sacrificing tone. Some key macro themes to create:
- Why did prices increase?
- Are tariffs permanent?
- Is my order delayed because of tariffs?
- Why is this product no longer available?
Each macro should strike a balance of clarity, empathy, and brand voice, offering both the what and the why.
You can’t control tariffs. But you can control trust.
Tariffs might be out of your control. But how you talk about them? That’s entirely in your hands.
This is your moment as a CX leader, not just to react but to lead. To turn friction into transparency, tension into trust, and confusion into connection. Because when policies change overnight and customer confidence is on the line, the brands that communicate with honesty, consistency, and care don’t just survive. They strengthen loyalty.
Your customers don’t expect perfection. They expect clarity. They expect empathy. And they expect you to show up.
At Gorgias, we’re here to make sure you can. With tools to automate answers, personalize conversations, and empower your team to deliver the kind of CX that builds long-term brand equity, even when times get tough.
TL;DR
- Ecommerce teams are overwhelmed by app overload, with 42% using six tools daily—leading to inefficiencies, rising costs, and poor customer experiences.
- Top brands are consolidating their tech stacks, choosing deeply integrated, ecommerce-specific platforms to simplify operations and lower costs.
- AI adoption and excitement are accelerating, with 77.2% of ecommerce professionals using AI daily and 55.3% rating their excitement as an 8-10 out of 10.
- Gorgias powers AI-driven support and sales in one platform, through a single workspace that helps ecommerce teams resolve faster, sell smarter, and operate more efficiently.
At Gorgias, we work with over 16,000 ecommerce brands and one common challenge emerges over and over:
Ecommerce tools are essential, but too many tools becomes a burden.
With different teams responsible for different functions, brands risk creating a disconnected tech stack that causes inefficiencies, reduces productivity, and ultimately impacts profitability.
Ecommerce teams are shuffling between tabs, copying and pasting order numbers, searching for customer data, and trying to piece it all together. It’s not only inefficient—it’s expensive, frustrating, and unsustainable as you scale.
So we dug into that data.
Our 2025 Ecommerce Trends Report surveyed ecommerce professionals across industries and job roles to understand what they really think about tech stacks and AI’s role in it.
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Ecommerce professionals are approaching app overload
There is now an ecommerce app for every possible use case a brand could need. But as businesses adopt new technologies for each part of their customer journey, their teams end up working out of dozens of platforms.
The study found that 42.28% of ecommerce pros use at least six apps daily to perform their role. Regardless of the number of apps used, integration and compatibility are a must. When technologies don’t talk to each other, you spend time context-switching instead of focusing on customer experience.
For Audien Hearing, Gorgias’s open API allowed them to create an integration with its warehouse software to manage returns directly in Gorgias rather than a shared Google spreadsheet. This integration helped them reduce returns by 5%, protecting their margins and leading to higher customer satisfaction.
Read more: How Audien Hearing Increased Efficiency for 75 Agents and Reduced Product Returns by 5%
Consolidation is the smartest move a brand can make
The most successful ecommerce brands aren’t necessarily using more tools—they’re using smarter tools. Leading businesses are opting for platforms that are deeply integrated, AI-compatible, and built specifically for ecommerce needs.
A growing tech stack also comes with a growing tech budget. Each new app has new costs, including subscriptions, set-up, management, and development fees. They quickly add up.
Nearly 40% of ecommerce professionals spend $5,000 to $50,000 annually on their tech stack.
Different roles have different priorities
We asked ecommerce professionals what they actually value in their tools. Unsurprisingly, the answer changed based on who we were talking to.
Top tool benefits included:
- Revenue growth for support leaders, revenue-focused roles, and founders
- Simplified workflows and time savings for support agents
There’s a clear difference between what ecommerce leaders and agents value in a tool and considering both is key to success.
Why brands hesitate to consolidate
Despite the benefits of using fewer, well-integrated tools, there are a few things that hold brands back from consolidating their tech stacks.
We asked respondents:
What, if any, are the biggest deterrents to consolidating your tech stack?
Top concerns are:
- Compatibility issues with existing software (52.4%)
- Direct costs (fees for software licenses, subscriptions, or customizations) (47.6%)
- Time required (40.3%)
AI adoption is accelerating—and it’s driving results
AI is dominating the world of ecommerce. It impacts every aspect of the customer journey, from brand discovery to the post-purchase experience. AI is actively reshaping the way ecommerce professionals work, so we wanted to know how they feel about it.
- 77.2% of ecommerce professionals use AI and automation to perform their role in 2025, compared to 69.3% in 2024.
- 55.3% of respondents rate their excitement for AI as an 8-10, compared to 45.6% in 2024.
Despite growing usage and excitement, teams still have their concerns with AI:
Read more: 8 AI Trends in Ecommerce: What’s Changing and How to Prepare
The AI shift—From just a support tool to a sales engine
The most impactful use cases we’ve seen aren’t just about reducing support ticket volume. AI is now driving revenue, increasing conversion rates, and enabling 24/7 coverage without expanding headcount.
Gorgias’s AI Agent is now capable of virtual sales assistance through personalized product recommendations, dynamic discounts to reduce cart abandonment, and cross-sells and upsells.
Top brands are already leveraging these new capabilities and seeing results. For example:
- TUSHY uses a Gorgias AI Agent to accurately answer pre-sale questions, leading to a 15% conversion rate, with AI Agent driving 2x more sales than human agents.
- Trove Brands enabled an AI Agent named Wally that cut misshipments by 70%, meaning reducing unwanted charges, avoidable fulfillment costs, high return rates, and customer frustration.
- Caitlyn Minimalist uses AI to reduce response times by 99% and saw a 150% increase in ticket conversions.
Gorgias: A one-tab tool for Conversational AI
We asked one final question to make ecommerce folks really reflect on how they work:
How many tabs do you currently have open?
The average ecommerce professional works with 22 open tabs. We’re not here to judge, but if you’re looking to close a few of those tabs, Gorgias might be what you’re missing.
Gorgias replaces all that complexity with a single workspace. From support to sales, order management to automation, it all happens inside one platform.
Ecommerce businesses can now leverage Gorgias’s Advanced AI for both support and sales. Within the same AI Agent, ecommerce brands can
- Fully resolve customer inquiries, not just respond
- Provide order tracking details
- Cancel, edit, and manage orders in Shopify and integrated apps
- Process returns and exchanges
- Provide tailored product recommendations
- Drive conversions
- And much more!
Get your copy of the 2025 Ecommerce Trends Report
This blog just skims the surface of what we uncover in our 2025 Ecommerce Trends report.
Want the full story?
Download the complete 2025 Ecommerce Trends: AI Adoption & Smarter Tech Stacks report to access:
- Data-backed insights and trends from ecommerce professionals
- The biggest barriers to consolidation—and how to overcome them
- Real-world case studies from leading brands like TUSHY, Caitlyn Minimalist, and July that are winning with AI
- Tactical recommendations to future-proof your ecommerce stack through AI-powered consolidation
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TL;DR:
- Gorgias eliminated helpdesk outages by implementing multiple database connection pools with PgBouncer, achieving over 99.99% uptime.
- We accelerated data retrieval by organizing 40TB of data into 128 partitions, reducing query times to less than 4ms.
- Our streamlined incident response process with dedicated Slack channels and clear roles now resolves almost all incidents in under an hour.
- Looking ahead, we're strengthening security, doubling our SRE team, implementing production readiness reviews, and enhancing monitoring tools.
When customer service teams are at their busiest, they need a helpdesk that keeps up. That’s exactly why our Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) team has been working behind the scenes to make the Gorgias platform faster than ever.
Over the past year, we've made remarkable improvements to our platform to eliminate bottlenecks, speed up data retrieval, and reduce incidents. For you, this means fewer disruptions, faster load times, and a more reliable helpdesk experience.
Here's how we did it.
Eliminating helpdesk outages by increasing our connection pools
The challenge
Our platform relied on a single, shared database connection pool to manage all queries. Think of it as having just one pipe handling all the water flowing through your house — when too much water rushes in at once, the whole system backs up.
In practice, this meant a single surge in database requests could clog the entire system. When lower-priority background tasks got stuck, they could prevent high-priority operations (like loading tickets or running automations) from working properly. This would cause the entire helpdesk to slow down or, worse, become completely unresponsive.
The solution
Using PgBouncer, a tool that manages database connections and reduces the load on a server, we implemented multiple connection pools. Instead of relying on a single pipeline to stream all requests, we created separate "pipes" for different requests.
Like how road traffic picks up again after an exit, routing our database traffic into separate connection pools makes sure high-priority customer interactions don’t lag behind automated background tasks.
This solution is future-proof. In the event that a lower-priority task is delayed in one connection pool, other functionalities of the helpdesk will continue working because of the remaining connection pools.
The benefits
The results speak for themselves:
- Complete elimination of helpdesk-wide outages caused by connection pooling issues
- Faster response times — 99% of automated rules tasks take less than 800 milliseconds to complete from inception
- Partial degradation instead of full outages if issues do occur — at worst, only a single feature might be affected instead of your entire helpdesk
We've eliminated incidents caused by connection pool issues in the helpdesk completely. This reduced major helpdesk outage incidents by around four per year and maintained an average uptime of over 99.99%.
Speeding up the helpdesk by organizing 40TB of data into 128 partitions
The challenge
As Gorgias grew to over 15,000 customers, so did the volume of data. We’re talking data from tickets, integrations, automations, and many more. The combination of more users and data meant slower searches within the helpdesk.
However, the amount of data was not the problem — it was how our data was organized.
Imagine this: An enormous storage room full of file cabinets containing every piece of data. Sure, those file cabinets kept data organized, but you would still need to spend time searching through the entire room, running up and down aisles of cabinets, to find your desired file. This method was cumbersome.
We needed a more efficient way to keep our data easy to find, especially as more customers used our platform.
The solution
The answer was database partitioning — breaking our large datasets into smaller, more manageable segments. Using Debezium, Kafka, and Kafka-connect JDBC, all managed by Terraform, we migrated over 40TB of data, including 3.5 billion tickets, without a moment of downtime for our merchants.
Instead of a giant room with thousands of file cabinets, we divided that giant room into 128 smaller rooms. So now, instead of looking for a file in one room, you know you just need to go into room number 102, which has a much smaller area to search.
This approach allows our system to quickly pinpoint the location of data, significantly reducing the time it takes to find and deliver information to users.
Additionally, database maintenance has become more efficient. Some of the partitions can probably sit without needing to be changed at all. We just have to maintain the partitions that are getting new files, which cuts down on maintenance time.
The benefits
Better database partitioning provides several benefits:
- Faster queries — We have an average of 600 lookups or updates per second across these databases, each taking less than 4ms
- More efficient database maintenance — We halved the number of automated maintenance runs and cut each run’s duration in half
- Better scalability as our infrastructure is now equipped to handle continued customer growth
Faster resolutions with a streamlined incident response process
The challenge
When incidents occurred in the past, our response process was inconsistent, leading to delays in resolution. It was sometimes unclear who should take the lead, what immediate actions were required, and how to effectively communicate with affected customers.
Additionally, post-incident reviews varied in quality, making it difficult to prevent similar issues from happening again. We needed a standardized framework to address incidents in a timely fashion.
The solution
To streamline incident management, we introduced a replicable, automated process:
- Dedicated Slack channels — Every incident gets its own Slack channel, ensuring our team is immediately notified.
- Clear roles & responsibilities — We defined specific roles so every engineer knows what next steps to take.
- Retrospectives — After each incident, we conduct thorough post-mortems to analyze root causes, identify improvements, and share learnings across teams.
- Proactive prevention — By improving our monitoring tools, we catch potential issues earlier, reducing the likelihood of major disruptions.
The benefits
With our improved incident management process:
- Response times have decreased significantly — almost all incidents are mitigated in under an hour
- Customers receive clearer communication during incidents, including our regularly updated Gorgias Status page
- 100+ smarter preventative measures to reduce the overall incident frequency or permanently fix recurring problems
What's next: Four ways we're improving the platform experience
With more brands catching on to how essential a solid CX platform is, our team's got our work cut out for us. Here's what's on the way:
- Enhanced security measures — We've hired a dedicated security engineer to strengthen our security infrastructure.
- A bigger SRE team — Our Site Reliability Engineering team has doubled, allowing us to address performance issues rapidly.
- Production readiness reviews — We're formalizing a process to audit new and existing services, ensuring they meet our reliability standards before deployment.
- Improved monitoring — We're investing in better monitoring tools to detect and resolve potential issues before they impact customers.
Count on a reliable future with Gorgias
Gorgias will inevitably face new challenges in performance — no system is completely immune to downtime.
But we've built our architecture with the future in mind, and it’s more resilient than ever as more and more brands realize the power of conversational AI CX platforms.
The result? A platform you can count on to help you deliver exceptional customer service, without technical issues getting in the way.
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Featured articles
9 Ways to Use AI to Personalize the Customer Journey
TL;DR:
- Use AI across both support and sales. Ecommerce brands are using AI to drive revenue and efficiency by combining automation in chat, email, and customer data with personalized product guidance and upsells.
- Analyze post-purchase surveys with AI to uncover customer insights. AI quickly identifies themes, sentiment, and trends from open-ended feedback to inform product, shipping, and support decisions.
- Predict customer intent with AI before they take action. By analyzing behavior like cart activity or page views, AI can engage high-intent shoppers with personalized nudges in real time.
- Automate QA and proactive support with AI. AI reviews 100% of conversations, flags quality issues, and triggers outreach for known problems — all before customers even ask.
Shoppers aren’t just open to AI — they’re starting to expect it.
According to IBM, 3 in 5 consumers want to use AI as they shop. And a McKinsey study found that 71% expect personalized experiences from the brands they buy from. When they don’t get that? Two-thirds say they’re frustrated.
But while most brands associate AI with support automation, its real power lies in something bigger: scaling personalization across the entire customer journey.
We’ll show you how to do that in this article.
AI for customer data
Before AI can personalize emails, recommend products, or answer support tickets, it needs one thing: good data.
That’s why one of the best places to start using AI isn’t in sales or support — but in enriching your customer data. With a deeper understanding of who your customers are, what they want, and how they behave, AI becomes a personalization engine across your entire business.
Enriching surveys with AI
Post-purchase surveys are gold mines for understanding customers — but digging through the data manually? Not so fun.
AI can help by analyzing survey responses at scale, identifying trends, and categorizing open-ended customer feedback into clear, actionable insights. Instead of skimming thousands of answers to spot what customers are saying about your shipping times, AI can surface those insights instantly — along with sentiment and behavior signals you might’ve missed.
Try this prompt when doing this: "Analyze 500 open-ended post-purchase survey responses. Identify the top 5 recurring themes, categorize customer sentiment (positive, neutral, negative), and surface any trends related to product quality, delivery experience, or customer support."
Predicting customer intent before they even say a word
One of AI’s biggest strengths? Spotting intent.
By analyzing things like page views, cart activity, scroll behavior, and previous purchases, AI can identify which shoppers are ready to buy, which ones are likely to churn, and which just need a little nudge to move forward.
This doesn’t just apply to email and retargeting. It also works on live chat, in real time.
Take TUSHY, for example.
To eliminate friction in the buying journey, TUSHY introduced AI Agent for Sales — a virtual assistant designed to guide shoppers toward the right product before they drop off.
Instead of letting potential customers bounce with unanswered questions, the AI Agent steps in to offer:
- Personalized product recommendations based on shopper questions
- Compatibility guidance (especially for customers unsure which bidet works with their toilet)
- Real-time installation tips and links to helpful how-to articles
With a growing product catalog, TUSHY realized first-time buyers were overwhelmed with options — and needed help choosing what would work best for their home and hygiene preferences.
“What amazed us most is that the AI Agent doesn’t just help customers choose the perfect bidet for their booty — it also provides measurement and fit guidance, high-level installation support, and even recommends all the necessary spare parts for skirted toilet installations. It’s ushering in a new era of customer service — one that’s immediate, informative, and confidence-boosting as people rethink their bathroom habits.”
—Ren Fuller-Wasserman, Sr. Director of Customer Experience at TUSHY
Forecasting revenue by segment
AI also helps you see the road ahead.
Instead of looking at retention and loyalty metrics in isolation, AI can help you forecast what’s likely to happen next and where to focus your attention.
By segmenting customers based on behaviors like average order value, order frequency, and churn risk, AI can identify revenue opportunities and weak spots before they impact your bottom line.
All you need is the right prompt. Here’s an example you can run using your own data in any AI tool:
Prompt: “Analyze my customer data to forecast revenue by segment. Break customers into at least three groups based on behavior patterns like average order value, purchase frequency, and churn risk.
For each segment, provide:
- A projected revenue trend for the next quarter
- A key insight about their behavior
- One actionable recommendation to either grow or retain revenue from that segment.”
Here’s what a result might look like:
- VIPs (Top 5% by LTV): Predicted 15% growth next quarter based on repeat behavior
- One-time Buyers: 70% churn risk flagged—time to trigger a win-back campaign
- Discount-Only Shoppers: Revenue likely to dip unless incentive strategy changes
Instead of flying blind, you’re making decisions with clarity — and backing them with data that scales.
AI for sales
When used strategically, AI becomes a proactive sales agent that can identify opportunities in real-time: recommending the right product to the right shopper at the right moment.
Here’s how ecommerce brands are using AI to drive revenue across every part of the funnel.
Dynamic pricing that responds to the market (and the shopper)
Your prices shouldn’t be static — especially when your competitors, inventory, and customer behavior are anything but.
AI-powered pricing tools like AI Agent for Sales help brands automatically adjust pricing based on shopper behavior. The goal is to make the right offer to the right customer.
For example:
- Show a discount to a price-sensitive shopper who’s hesitating at checkout
- Recommend premium add-ons to high-LTV customers who are more likely to spend
With dynamic pricing, you can protect your margins and boost conversions — without relying on blanket sales.
Turning chat into a personal shopper (that never sleeps)
AI-powered chat is no longer just a glorified FAQ. Today, it can act as a real-time shopping assistant — guiding customers, boosting conversions, and helping your team reclaim time.
That’s exactly what Pepper did with “Penelope,” their AI Agent built on Gorgias.
With a rapidly growing product catalog (22 new SKUs in 2024 alone), Pepper knew shoppers needed help discovering the right products. Customers often had questions about styles, materials, or sizing, and if they didn’t get answers right away, they’d abandon carts and move on.
Instead of hiring more agents to keep up, Pepper deployed Penelope to live chat and email.
Her job?
- Instantly answer questions about fit, fabric, or product differences
- Guide shoppers toward the best option for their needs
- Recommend complementary products (like matching panties or bottoms)
- Free up agents to focus on higher-value 1:1 moments, like virtual fit sessions
“With AI Agent, we’re not just putting information in our customer’s hands; we’re putting bras in their hands... We’re turning customer support from a cost center to a revenue generator.”
—Gabrielle McWhirter, CX Operations Lead at Pepper
Let’s look at how Penelope performs on the floor:
Real-time recommendations
A shopper asked about the difference between two wire-free bras. Penelope broke down the styles, support level, and fabric in plain language — then followed up with personalized suggestions based on the shopper’s preferences.
Proactive engagement
Using Gorgias Convert chat campaigns, Pepper triggers targeted messages to shoppers based on behavior. If someone is browsing white bras? Penelope jumps in and offers assistance, often leading to faster decisions and fewer abandoned carts.
Intelligent upsells
If a customer adds a swimsuit top to their cart, Penelope suggests matching bottoms. No full-screen popups, no awkward sales scripts — just thoughtful, helpful guidance.
Support and sales in one
Penelope also handles WISMO tickets and return inquiries. If a shopper is dealing with a sizing issue, Penelope walks them through the return process and links to Pepper’s Fit Guide to make sure the next purchase is spot on.
By implementing AI into chat, Pepper saw a 19% conversion rate from AI-assisted chats, an 18% uplift in AOV, and a 92.1% decrease in resolution time.
With Penelope handling repetitive and revenue-driving tasks, Pepper’s team now has more time to offer truly personalized touches — like virtual fit sessions that have turned refunds into exchanges and even upsells.
Curating bundles with AI-powered sales data
Bundling is a proven tactic for increasing AOV — but most brands still rely on subjective judgment calls or static reports to decide which products to group.
AI can take this a step further.
Instead of just looking at what’s bought together in the same cart, AI can analyze purchase sequences. For example, what people tend to buy as a follow-up 30 days after their first order. This gives you powerful clues into natural buying behavior and bundling opportunities you might’ve missed.
If you’re looking to explore this at scale, you can use anonymized sales data and feed it into AI tools to surface patterns in:
- Frequently bundled items
- Follow-up purchases within a set time frame
- High-value product pairings with repeat potential
Try this prompt:
"Analyze this spreadsheet of order data and identify product bundle opportunities. Look for: (1) products frequently purchased together in the same order, (2) items commonly bought as a second purchase within 30 days of the first, and (3) patterns in high-value or high-frequency product pairings. Provide insights on the most promising bundles and why they might work well together."
Just make sure you’re keeping customer data anonymous — and always double-check the insights with your team.
Related: Ecommerce product categorization: How to organize your products
AI for support
AI isn’t just here to deflect tickets. From quality assurance to proactive outreach, AI can elevate the entire support experience — on both sides of the conversation.
Quality checks powered by AI
Manual QA is slow, selective, and often feels like it’s chasing the wrong tickets.
That’s where Auto QA comes in. Instead of reviewing just a handful of conversations each week, Auto QA evaluates 100% of private messages, whether they’re handled by a human or an AI agent.
Every message is scored on key metrics like:
- Resolution completeness
- Brand voice
- Empathy and tone
- Accuracy
It gives support leaders a full picture of how their team is performing, so they can coach with clarity, not just gut feeling.
Here’s what brands can do with automated QA:
- Save time by focusing only on the conversations that need attention
- Ensure consistency across agents and AI with a single scoring standard
- Improve agent performance with targeted coaching and feedback
- Deliver higher-quality support that customers actually notice
Let’s walk through a real example.
Customer: “Hi, my device broke, and I bought it less than a month ago.”
Agent: “Hi Kelly, please send us a photo or a video so we can determine the issue with your device.”
Auto QA flags this interaction with:
- Communication Score: 3/5 — The agent was clear, but could have shown more empathy in tone.
- Resolution Score: Complete — The issue was addressed effectively.
Proactive support that reaches out first
Reactive support is table stakes. AI takes it a step further by anticipating issues before they happen — and proactively helping customers.
Let’s say login errors spike after a product update. AI detects the surge and automatically triggers an email to affected customers with a simple fix. No need for them to dig through help docs or wait on chat — support meets them right where they are.
Proactive AI can also be used for:
- Order delay notifications with live tracking updates
- Subscription renewal reminders
- Back-in-stock alerts with support follow-up for next steps
This saves the time of your agents because the AI will spot problems before they turn into tickets.
Understanding sentiment at scale
Your customers are telling you what they think. AI just helps you hear it more clearly.
By analyzing reviews, support tickets, post-purchase surveys, and social comments, AI can spot sentiment trends that might otherwise fly under the radar.
For example:
- Multiple reviews mention “runs small”? AI flags it, so your team can update the product description or add a sizing chart.
- A sudden rise in “frustrated” language in support tickets? Time to check if something’s off with your shipping or product quality.
Related: 12 ways to upgrade your data and trend analysis with Ticket Fields
Personalization at scale starts with the right AI stack
Whether you’re enriching customer data, making smarter product recommendations, triggering dynamic pricing, or proactively resolving support issues, AI gives your team the power to scale personalization without sacrificing quality.
With Gorgias, you can bring many of these use cases to life — from AI-powered chat that drives conversions to automated support that still feels human.
And with our app store, you can tap into additional AI tools for data enrichment, direct mail, bundling insights, and more.
Personalized ecommerce doesn’t have to mean more work. With the right AI tools in your corner, it means smarter work — and better results.
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8 AI Trends in Ecommerce: What’s Changing and How to Prepare
TL;DR:
- AI is reshaping ecommerce, giving early adopters a competitive edge. From visual search to dynamic pricing, these tools meet rising customer expectations and drive growth.
- Conversational AI boosts support efficiency and customer satisfaction. Solutions like Gorgias's AI Agent automatically resolve up to 60% of tickets while personalizing responses across channels.
- Personalization now extends beyond product recommendations. AI is customizing everything from discounts to website layouts in real-time, creating unique experiences that convert.
- AI automation streamlines back-end operations for inventory and pricing. By predicting demand and adjusting prices dynamically, brands improve margins while reducing stock issues.
AI is no longer a futuristic concept associated with sci-fi movies and robots. It’s driving real change in ecommerce right now. Currently, 84% of ecommerce businesses list AI as their top priority. And it’s only getting bigger. By 2034, the ecommerce AI market is expected to hit $62.64 billion.
Brands that use AI to improve personalization, automate customer support, and refine pricing strategies will have a major competitive edge.
The good news? Most brands are still figuring it out, which means there’s huge potential for early adopters to stand out.
Let’s dive into the key AI trends shaping ecommerce in 2025, and how you can use them to future-proof your business.
1. Visual search
Instead of searching for keywords, shoppers can upload a photo and instantly find similar or matching products. Visual search eliminates the guesswork of finding the right words to describe an item and reduces friction in the search process.
In 2025, improvements in computer vision and machine learning will make visual search faster. AI will better recognize patterns, colors, and textures, delivering more precise results in real-time.
For customers, visual search simplifies product discovery while brands benefit from increased average order values. Visual search creates more opportunities to surface related products that customers might miss during manual searches, ultimately boosting conversion and revenue.
Pinterest is already doing it. With Pinterest Lens, users can take a picture on the spot to find similar products or ideas to help them with easier purchases or creative projects.
Pro Tip: Optimize product images and metadata (like color, size, and material) so your products appear accurately in visual search results. Clean, high-quality images and detailed tagging will make your catalog easier for AI to process and match.
2. Conversational AI
Conversational AI, like Gorgias’s AI Agent, already handles 60% of customer conversations. Brands that adopt it often see more than a 25% improvement in customer satisfaction, revenue, or cost reduction.
Soon, advanced natural language processing (NLP) will make it easier for customers to use text, voice, and images to find exactly what they’re looking for. These multimodal capabilities will elevate support conversations, resulting in fewer abandoned carts and support teams that can focus on more complex issues.
For example, Glamnetic uses AI Agent to manage customer inquiries across multiple channels, resolving 40% of requests automatically while maintaining a personalized touch. Their AI can automate responses to common questions, recommend products based on browsing history, and even track orders in real-time.
Pro Tip: Invest in AI chat tools that integrate with your customer support system and sync with real-time product and order data. Your responses will be accurate and timely, without losing the personal touch.
Read more: The Gorgias & Shopify integration: 8 features your support team will love
3. Product recommendations
According to McKinsey, omnichannel personalization strategies, including tailored product recommendations, have a 10-15% uplift potential in revenue and retention. But with only 1 in 10 retailers fully implementing personalization across channels, there’s a massive opportunity for brands to innovate.
In 2025, AI-driven product recommendations will become even more precise by analyzing customer behavior, preferences, and purchase history in real-time. Predictive AI will adjust recommendations on the fly, showing customers the right products at the right moment.
Take Kreyol Essence as an example. They use Gorgias Convert to track customer behavior and recommend products based on past purchases and browsing patterns. When a customer buys a hair mask, AI suggests complementary products like scalp oil or leave-in conditioner — increasing average order value without feeling pushy.
Personalization boosts sales by helping customers discover products they actually want. Plus, it creates a more tailored shopping experience, which encourages customers to return.
Pro Tip: Test different recommendation strategies, like “frequently bought together” or “you may also like,” to see which ones drive the most conversions.
Learn more: Reduce Customer Effort with AI: A Smarter Approach Than Surprise and Delight
4. Voice commerce
In 2025, more customers may use smart speakers and voice assistants like Alexa and Google Assistant to shop hands-free. AI will improve voice recognition and contextual understanding, so it’s easier for customers to find products they want.
Instead of fumbling with a keyboard, customers will be able to say, “Order more coffee pods,” and AI will not only recognize the request but also pull up the preferred brand and size based on past orders. Less friction will make the buying process more intuitive, especially for repeat purchases.
Voice commerce expands shopping accessibility and creates a more convenient experience for busy customers. It also opens the door for brands to surface product recommendations and upsell during the conversation.
Pro Tip: Optimize product descriptions and catalog structure for voice search. Clear, simple language and detailed product tags will help AI understand and surface the right products.
5. Dynamic pricing
A recent McKinsey report suggests that investing in real-time customer analytics will continue to be key to adjusting pricing and more effectively targeting customers.
In 2025, machine learning will allow ecommerce brands to adjust product prices instantly based on demand, competitor pricing, and customer behavior. If a competitor drops their price on a popular item, AI can respond immediately, so you stay competitive without sacrificing margins.
Machine learning will also refine pricing models over time, finding the sweet spot between profitability and customer conversion.
For example, AI might detect that customers are more likely to buy a product when it’s priced at $29.99 rather than $30, and adjust accordingly. More competitive pricing means higher revenue and better margins, but it also increases customer trust when prices are consistent with market trends.
Pro Tip: Test different pricing strategies and monitor how they affect sales and customer behavior.
6. Better customer insights
According to McKinsey, AI-driven personalization and customer insights can improve marketing efficiency by 10-30% and cut costs significantly.
In 2025, AI will analyze customer data like purchase history, browsing patterns, and feedback to generate smarter, more actionable next steps. Instead of guessing what customers want, brands will have the data to predict it.
For example, Gorgias’s AI Agent for Sales can identify a shopper’s interest level and purchase intent and then use it to adjust its conversational strategy. It analyzes shopper data like browsing behavior, cart activity, and purchase history.
Here’s how it would behave for different customers:
- A browsing customer: AI Agent will ask clarifying questions
- An interested customer: AI Agent provides tailored recommendations and handles objections
- A customer with an intent to buy: AI Agent assists with checkout, payment, and nudges purchase
7. Personalized shopping
AI-driven personalization leads to a 5-10% higher customer satisfaction and engagement. Yet, only 15% have fully implemented it across all channels — leaving a huge gap to fill.
In 2025, AI-driven personalization will go beyond product recommendations. Brands will be able to adjust website layouts based on customer preferences, highlight products that align with their style, and even customize customer service interactions.
A higher level of personalization will boost conversion rates and customer satisfaction. When customers feel like a brand “gets” them, they’re more likely to make a purchase and come back for more.
For example, AI Agent for Sales can adjust discounts and provide smart incentives to drive sales. When adjusting for discounts, AI Agent analyzes shopper behavior, including browsing activity, cart status, and conversation context, to offer a discount based on how engaged and ready the shopper is to buy.
Pro Tip: Use AI to test different personalization strategies and refine them based on performance data. Small adjustments, like changing product order or highlighting specific categories, can have a big impact on sales.
8. Automated inventory management
Keeping the right products in stock at the right time is about to get a whole lot easier. In 2025, AI will predict demand patterns and automate restocking decisions based on sales trends, seasonality, and customer behavior. Instead of manually tracking inventory, AI will handle it in real time to avoid stock issues.
For example, AI could notice a spike in orders for a specific product right before the holidays. It could then automatically increase stock levels to meet demand or scale back on items that aren’t moving as fast. Real-time tracking means fewer missed sales and less wasted inventory.
Efficient inventory management not only cuts costs but also improves the customer experience. When products are consistently available, customers are more likely to trust and stick with your brand.
Pro Tip: Implement AI-powered inventory management to sync data across all sales channels. This ensures accurate stock levels and seamless fulfillment, whether customers are shopping online or in-store.
Embrace AI trends in your ecommerce store in 2025
AI makes it easier for brands to deliver a personalized and efficient shopping experience. From helping customers find products faster with visual search to automating support with conversational AI, there are plenty of opportunities for personalization.
The brands that adopt and refine these strategies now will be better positioned to meet customer expectations and stay ahead of the competition. Start by implementing conversational AI and later test some other AI trends like personalized suggestions.
Ready to see how AI can upgrade your brand? Book a demo to see AI Agent in action.
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Should Brands Disclose AI in Customer Interactions? A Guide for CX Leaders
TL;DR:
AI is everywhere in customer service—powering live chats, drafting responses, and handling inquiries faster than ever.
But as AI takes on more of the customer experience, one question keeps coming up: Should brands tell customers when they’re talking to AI?
Legally, the answer depends on where you operate. Ethically? That’s where things get interesting. Some argue that transparency builds trust. Others worry it might undermine confidence in support interactions.
So, what’s the right move?
This guide breaks down the debate and gives CX leaders a framework to decide when (and how) to disclose AI—so you can strike the right balance between innovation and trust.
The legal landscape: What are the disclosure requirements?
Depending on where your business operates, disclosure laws may be strict, vague, or nonexistent. Some laws, such as the California Bolstering Online Transparency Act, prohibit misleading consumers about the use of automated artificial identities.
For maximum legal protection, it’s best to proactively disclose AI use—even when not explicitly required.
A simple disclaimer can go a long way in avoiding legal headaches down the line. Here’s how to disclose AI use in customer interactions:
- In email: Use your email signature to indicate that AI has assisted in generating the response.
- In chat: Update your Privacy Policy to clarify when AI is involved in customer interactions.
Truthfully, AI laws are evolving fast. That’s why we recommend consulting legal counsel to ensure your disclosure practices align with the latest requirements in your region.
But beyond avoiding legal trouble, transparency around AI usage can reinforce customer trust. If customers feel deceived, they may question the reliability of your brand, even if the AI delivers great service.
Related reading: How AI Agent works & gathers data
How does disclosure impact trust and satisfaction?
Research shows that 85% of consumers want companies to share AI assurance practices before bringing AI-driven products and experiences to market.
But what does “transparency” actually mean in this context? An article in Forbes broke it down, explaining that customers expect three key things:
- Clear disclosure: They want to know when AI is (and isn’t) used in customer interactions.
- Simple, non-technical language: AI disclosures shouldn’t feel like reading a terms-of-service agreement. Keep it digestible.
- Easy-to-find information: AI disclosures should be visible—not buried in fine print. A chatbot notification, a banner on your site, or a brief message before an AI-powered chat begins can make a big difference.
How you disclose AI matters just as much as whether you disclose it. At the end of the day, AI isn’t inherently good or bad—it’s all about how it’s implemented and trained.
The business perspective: Risks and benefits of AI transparency
The way a brand approaches AI disclosure can impact trust, satisfaction, and even conversion rates—making it a decision that goes beyond simple legal requirements.
While some customers appreciate honesty, others may hesitate if they prefer human support. Brands must weigh the pros and cons to determine the best approach for their audience.
Risks of disclosure
Let’s be honest: AI in customer service still carries baggage. While some consumers embrace AI-driven support, others hear "AI" and immediately picture frustrating, robotic chatbots that can’t understand their questions.
This is one of the biggest risks of transparency: customers who’ve had bad AI experiences in the past may assume the worst and disengage the moment they realize they’re not speaking to a human.
For brands that thrive on personal connection and high-touch service, openly stating that AI is involved could create skepticism or drop-off rates before customers even give it a chance.
Another challenge? The perception gap.
Even if AI is handling inquiries smoothly, some customers may assume it lacks the empathy, nuance, or problem-solving skills of a live agent. Certain industries may find that transparency about AI use leads to more escalations, not fewer, simply because customers expect a human touch.
Benefits of disclosure
Despite the risks, transparency about AI can actually be a trust-building strategy when handled correctly.
Customers who value openness and ethical business practices tend to appreciate brands that don’t try to disguise AI as a human.
Being upfront also manages expectations. If a customer knows they’re speaking to AI, they’re less likely to feel misled or frustrated if they encounter a limitation. Instead of feeling like they were "tricked" into thinking they were talking to a human, they enter the conversation with the right mindset—often leading to higher satisfaction rates.
And then there’s the long-term brand impact.
If customers eventually realize (through phrasing, tone, or inconsistencies) that they weren’t speaking with a human when they thought they were, it can erode trust.
Deception—whether intentional or not—can backfire. Proactively disclosing AI use prevents backlash and reinforces credibility, especially as AI becomes a bigger part of the customer experience.
Example: How Arcade Belts used AI transparency without losing the human touch
Arcade Belts, known for its high-quality belts, wanted to improve efficiency without compromising customer experience. By implementing Gorgias Automate, they reduced their reliance on manual support, creating self-service flows to handle common inquiries.
Initially, automation helped manage routine questions, such as product recommendations and shipping policies. But when they integrated AI Agent, they cut their ticket volume in half.
The transition was so seamless that customers often couldn’t tell they were interacting with AI. “Getting tickets down to just a handful a day has been awesome,” shares Grant, Ecommerce Coordinator at Arcade Belts. ”A lot of times, I'll receive the response, ‘Wow, I didn't know that was AI.”
You can read more about how they’re using AI Agent here.
Decision-making framework: Should you disclose AI?
We mentioned it earlier, but deciding whether or not to disclose your use of AI in customer support depends on compliance, customer expectations, and business goals. That said, this four-part framework helps CX leaders evaluate the right approach for their brand:
Step 1: Assess legal requirements
Before making any decisions, ensure your brand is compliant with AI transparency regulations.
- Research regional laws governing AI disclosure, as requirements vary by jurisdiction.
- Consult legal counsel to confirm whether your AI usage falls under any mandated disclosure policies.
- Stay informed on evolving AI governance frameworks that could introduce new compliance obligations.
Step 2: Review customer expectations and brand positioning
AI transparency should align with your brand’s values and customer experience strategy.
- Consider whether transparency supports your brand’s messaging—does your audience expect openness, or do they prioritize seamless interactions?
- Analyze customer sentiment through surveys and engagement data to determine if they prefer knowing when they’re speaking with AI.
- Review past AI interactions to identify patterns in customer reactions and adjust your approach accordingly.
Step 3: Test both approaches and measure the impact on CSAT
Rather than making assumptions, run controlled tests to see how AI disclosure affects customer satisfaction.
- Conduct A/B tests comparing interactions with and without AI disclosure.
- Track key support metrics like response time, CSAT scores, and AI resolution rates to measure effectiveness.
- Experiment with different positioning strategies—does framing AI as a helpful assistant improve customer perception?
Step 4: Adjust based on customer feedback and industry trends
AI strategies shouldn’t be static. As customer preferences and AI capabilities evolve, brands should refine their approach accordingly.
- Regularly collect customer feedback to understand how AI disclosure impacts their experience.
- Monitor industry trends to see how competitors and market leaders are handling AI transparency.
- Stay flexible—if sentiment shifts, be ready to adjust your disclosure strategy to maintain trust and efficiency.
Best practices for AI disclosure (if you choose to disclose)
If you decide to be transparent about AI in customer interactions, how you communicate it is just as important as the disclosure itself. Let’s talk about how to get it right and make AI work with your customer experience, not against it.
First, make AI part of your brand voice
AI doesn’t have to sound like a corporate FAQ page. Giving it a personality that aligns with your brand makes interactions feel natural and engaging. Whether it’s playful, professional, or ultra-efficient, the way AI speaks should feel like a natural extension of your team, not an out-of-place add-on.
Instead of:
"I am an automated assistant. How may I assist you?"
Try something on-brand:
"Hey there! I’m your AI assistant, here to help—ask me anything!"
A small tweak in tone can make AI feel more human while still keeping transparency front and center.
Read more: AI tone of voice: Tips for on-brand customer communication
Clarify the AI’s role
One of the biggest mistakes brands make? Leaving customers guessing whether they’re speaking to AI or a human. That uncertainty leads to frustration and distrust.
Instead, be clear about what AI can and can’t do. If it’s handling routine questions, product recommendations, or order tracking, say so. If complex issues will be escalated to a human agent, let customers know upfront.
Framing matters. Instead of making AI sound like a replacement, position it as a helpful extension of your support team—one that speeds up resolutions, but hands off conversations when needed.
Blend human and AI seamlessly
Even the best AI has limits—and customers know it. Nothing is more frustrating than a bot endlessly looping through scripted responses when a customer just needs a real person to step in.
AI should be the first line of defense, but human agents should always be an option, especially for high-stakes or emotionally charged interactions.
A smooth handoff can sound like:
"Looks like this one needs a human touch! Connecting you with a support expert now."
Frame AI messaging positively
AI disclosure doesn’t have to feel like an apology. Instead of focusing on limitations, highlight the benefits AI brings to the experience:
- Faster responses
- 24/7 availability
- Instant answers to common questions
It’s the difference between:
"This is an AI agent. A human will follow up later."
vs.
"I’m your AI assistant! I can answer most questions instantly—but if you need extra help, I’ll connect you with a team member ASAP."
The right framing makes AI feel like an advantage, not a compromise.
Monitor customer feedback and adjust messaging
AI perception isn’t static. Regularly analyzing sentiment data and customer feedback can help refine AI messaging over time—whether that means adjusting tone, improving explanations, or updating how AI is introduced.
When you follow these best practices, AI can be a real gamechanger for your customer support. Just take it from Jonas Paul…
When AI is done right: Jonas Paul’s success story
Jonas Paul Eyewear, a direct-to-consumer brand specializing in kids' eyewear, needed a way to manage high volumes of tickets during the back-to-school season without overwhelming their customer care team.
To streamline these conversations, Jonas Paul implemented AI Agent to provide instant responses to FAQs. This allowed human agents to focus on more complex cases that required personalized attention.
“Being able to automate responses for things like prescription details and return policies has allowed us to focus more on the nuanced questions that require more time and care. It’s been a game changer for our team,” said Lynsay Schrader, Lab and Customer Service Senior Manager and Jonas Paul.
Jonas Paul saw a 96% decrease in First Response Time and a 2x ROI on Gorgias’s AI Agent with influenced revenue. You can dive in more here.
Make AI transparency work for you with AI Agent
Whether or not your brand chooses to disclose AI in customer interactions, the key is to ensure AI enhances the customer experience without compromising transparency, accuracy, or brand identity.
So how can you get started? Gorgias AI Agent was built with both effectiveness and transparency in mind.
For every interaction, AI Agent provides an internal note detailing:
- The Guidance, Articles, or Macros it referenced
- The source of any account information it used
- A prompt for your feedback to continually refine and improve responses
Excited to see how AI Agent can transform your brand? Book a demo.
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Further reading
Say Hello to AI Agent on Chat: 24/7 Support for Online Stores
TL;DR:
- AI Agent on Chat automates up to 50% of chat conversations. It ensures customers get fast, context-aware answers, product recommendations, and seamless handovers to human agents when needed.
- AI Agent goes beyond automated tools like Flows and article recommendations. Unlike pre-set FAQ flows or suggested Help Center articles, AI Agent can handle complex inquiries like modifying orders and providing personalized product recommendations.
- Setting up AI Agent on Chat is quick. Brands can activate AI Agent with a few clicks, improving efficiency during peak seasons and reducing the need for follow-ups.
- Updating AI Agent’s knowledge and behavior ensures the best customer experience. Businesses should refine their Help Center, set Guidance instructions, personalize AI Agent’s tone, and test responses before going live.
It’s clear that shoppers want answers fast—chat accounts for 20% of all customer support tickets.
The appeal is obvious: Chat is an easy-to-access customer service channel for quick questions and a convenient and subtle way to cross-sell complementary products.
But without the right chat tool, brands risk losing these valuable opportunities.
Introducing AI Agent on Chat, a conversational AI assistant that can automate up to 50% of chat conversations. This new feature upgrades chat by combining agent knowledge with superhuman efficiency and response times.
Now, customers can guarantee personalized interactions at any point of the shopping journey—whether they’re looking for a quick answer or a tailored recommendation.
With AI powering every interaction, one-to-one conversations become a seamless part of every customer experience.
Why Chat is better with AI Agent
Before AI Agent, customers reaching out through chat outside business hours had two options: following pre-set Flows (automated FAQ conversations) or browsing through suggested Help Center articles.
These features are great for quick answers to basic questions, but AI Agent takes support to the next level by handling more complex needs like modifying orders or offering personalized product recommendations.
With AI Agent in Chat, customers enjoy dynamic, real-time conversations available on multiple channels. AI Agent generates personalized responses that match exactly what customers ask for, automating 50% of chat interactions so agents get time back to upsell, create stronger relationships, and craft better experiences.
Related: How to optimize your Help Center for AI Agent
The key features of AI Agent on Chat
Upgrade your chat support from a basic Q&A tool into an intelligent assistant that handles customer inquiries 24/7. Here's how AI Agent makes that possible:
Real-time conversations
AI Agent responds within 15 seconds or less, offering fast responses that result in frictionless conversations. Unlike traditional chatbots, AI Agent also adapts to your brand’s unique tone of voice to enhance the customer experience and assure shoppers their questions will be taken care of.
24/7 availability
Today’s shoppers expect instant responses regardless of time zone or business hours. AI Agent on Chat means customers get the help they need, when they need it. This availability leads to higher customer satisfaction and fewer abandoned carts.
Instant product recommendations
AI Agent understands context and customer intent. Whether a shopper needs help finding the right product size or changes their mind and wants to compare features, AI Agent customizes its recommendations for each person.
Intelligent handovers
Some conversations, like technical issues or complaints, need a human touch. AI Agent recognizes these situations and smoothly transfers them to the right agent.
Using Handover topics, you can choose which types of inquiries should go straight to human agents. Then, if AI Agent lacks the confidence to provide an answer or can’t locate relevant knowledge in its database, it automatically escalates the conversation.
Read more: Handover rules
Why enable AI Agent in Chat now?
Based on Hiver’s 2024 study, 62% of customers prefer live chat to other support channels. With AI Agent in Chat, agents can cut down average response times while customers get the answers they need in one conversation with zero wait times or follow-ups.
Easy setup
AI Agent on Chat is ready to use in a few clicks. Simply connect your Shopify store and Chat widget to AI Agent, and you’re ready to resolve questions asked by visitors and loyal customers faster than you ever have.
Capture the growing demand for live support
Chat is often a customer’s first touchpoint with your brand, whether they’ve just discovered your brand or are on their third order. Meet customer expectations by being available with AI Agent on Chat. The faster you can ease their concerns, the faster they can head to checkout.
Maximize team efficiency
AI Agent makes scaling support effortless, especially during peak seasons like Black Friday. While it handles repetitive support tickets like order status and shipping questions, your team can focus on high-priority tasks like requests from VIP customers.
Eliminate the need for follow-ups
Drawing from knowledge sources like your Help Center and policy pages means AI Agent can often resolve inquiries within one conversation. No more unnecessary back-and-forths. Quick resolutions = happier and more loyal customers.
How to activate AI Agent on Chat
Ready to get started? Here’s how to activate AI Agent on Chat:
- Click Automate in the top left menu.
- Select your store from the sidebar, then click on AI Agent.
- In the Settings tab, under Chat Settings, select one or more Chat from the dropdown menu.
- Toggle Enable AI Agent on Chat on.
- Select Save Changes at the bottom of the page.
Already use AI Agent for email? No need to set up Guidance and Handover topics all over again—AI Agent will behave the same way in Chat.
Best practices for setting up AI Agent on Chat
Get the most out of AI Agent on Chat by following these best practices.
1. Prepare and optimize your knowledge base
The Help Center is AI Agent’s brain. This customer knowledge database is the key to AI Agent’s accurate and on-brand responses. To ensure your AI Agent is as trained as your human agents, include important topics in your Help Center like shipping, returns, cancellations, and account management.
No articles yet? No problem! Gorgias has 20+ article templates for you to use and modify. Or, even better, check out the AI Library for AI-generated articles based on your customer tickets.
2. Set restrictions with Guidance
AI tools perform best when you set limitations. A Guidance is the main way to control AI Agent’s behavior. It is a set of written instructions that outline how AI Agent should interact with customers, handle certain requests, and more.
We recommend publishing a Guidance on the top five questions you receive from customers.
Tip: AI Agent prioritizes Guidance above Help Center articles. Unlike Help Center articles, the content in your Guidance will not be customer-facing.
3. Personalize AI Agent's voice
The beauty of AI Agent is its ability to speak like one of your agents. Select from Friendly, Professional, or Sophisticated presets—or create a custom tone that aligns with your brand.
Need help finding your brand voice? Here are seven brand voice examples.
4. Test AI Agent’s responses before going live
Use test scenarios to see how AI Agent responds to common customer questions, such as order status, shipping questions, and return policies. To cover all your bases, test AI Agent as both a new and returning customer to make sure it delivers accurate responses no matter the customer's need.
5. Improve AI Agent’s behavior
AI Agent becomes smarter as it learns from you. Like a human agent, give your AI Agent feedback on its responses, from how it speaks, which topics it escalates, and what actions it takes in certain scenarios.
There are multiple ways to give AI Agent feedback on a ticket:
- Mark AI Agent’s message or any of the resources it used as correct or incorrect.
- Suggest that AI Agent use a different resource if a better or more correct piece of knowledge exists.
- Report an issue to the Gorgias Product team.
Coming soon: Actions on Chat
Soon, AI Agent will be able to perform actions like accessing Shopify order details and executing third-party app actions, such as updating shipping addresses and order cancellations, directly in Chat.
Excited to deliver an elevated chat experience? Book a demo now to experience the power of AI Agent on Chat.
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The Gorgias & Shopify Integration: 8 Features Your Support Team Will Love
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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The Problem with Full-Screen Pop-Ups for Driving Conversions
TL;DR:
- Full-screen pop-ups disrupt the shopping experience. They frustrate visitors by interrupting their browsing and increase bounce rates, driving 72% of customers away.
- Gorgias Convert offers a non-intrusive alternative. With a chat-based widget, it engages customers naturally without interrupting their journey.
- Convert tailors messages to shopper behavior. Personalized campaigns detect browsing habits, cart details, and exit intent to deliver relevant offers at the right moment.
- Shopify brands see measurable results with Convert. Users report conversion boosts of 6-10%, improved customer satisfaction, and revenue growth, proving its effectiveness over traditional pop-ups.
Looking to grow an email list to capture leads or offer welcome incentives? These days, the default solution is to plaster a full-screen pop-up on your homepage.
It seems effective on the surface, collecting emails right off the bat, but dig deeper, and these pop-ups disrupt the shopping experience and skyrocket bounce rates—with 72% of customers exiting a website.
But how else do you get your message across?
That’s where Gorgias Convert comes in—a smarter, more customer-centric tool to drive conversions without pushing your visitors away.
Below, we’ll explore why it’s time to move on from full-screen pop-ups and how Gorgias Convert offers a better alternative for Shopify brands looking to boost engagement and revenue.
What’s wrong with full-screen pop-ups?
Pop-ups can be an effective marketing tool, but their full-screen counterpart often creates more problems than they solve. These intrusive overlays pose several challenges that can harm both user experience and your bottom line.
Disruptive experience
Full-screen pop-ups demand attention, often at the worst possible moment—like when a customer is browsing products or is just about to check out. This experience can frustrate visitors and lead them to abandon your site entirely.
High bounce rates
The BBC says every extra second a page takes to load can cost you 10% of your users—and pushy pop-ups don’t help. If your pop-ups are poorly timed or overly intrusive, visitors feel unwelcome, causing them to leave before exploring your offerings.
Lack of personalization
Traditional pop-ups are static and one-size-fits-all. They can’t adjust messaging based on where the customer is in their shopping journey or their behavior on your site.
Can be blocked
Many users employ ad blockers that filter out pop-ups altogether, meaning your message never even reaches a portion of your audience.
Why Gorgias Convert is the better alternative: 7 benefits
Gorgias Convert flips the script by offering a subtle, customer-friendly way to capture leads and drive sales without the drawbacks of full-screen pop-ups. Here’s why your Shopify brand should make the switch:
1. Non-intrusive
Gorgias Convert integrates seamlessly into your store, using a chat-based widget that feels like a natural part of the browsing experience. Using chat to double as a supporting and converting tool is less disruptive, allowing customers to explore your store at their own pace.
2. Caters to user behavior
Convert makes it easy to bring any type of campaign to life. Catch the attention of the exact shoppers you want by detecting their browsing behavior, customer profile, cart attributes, and more.
For example, the exit intent campaign is the top-performing Convert campaign—it detects when a user is about to leave and displays a discount code. It’s fully customizable, allowing you to tailor offers based on how much time they’ve spent on a page, the number of items in their cart, or if they’ve visited more than three times without making a purchase.
3. Customizable messaging
Unlike one-size-fits-all pop-ups, Convert lets you tailor your messaging based on customer behavior, order history, and engagement. For example, if a customer is browsing a specific product, Convert can offer a relevant discount or incentive tied directly to that item.
4. Encourages conversations
With Convert, you’re not just collecting an email address—you’re starting a conversation. The tool allows you to engage with customers in real-time through pre-set flows that guide them toward taking action, whether it’s signing up for your newsletter, redeeming an offer, or completing a purchase.
Related: 6 types of conversational customer service + how to implement them
5. Mobile-friendly
In 2024, smartphones were responsible for generating 68 percent of online shopping orders. To meet shoppers where they are, Convert’s chat-style interactions are optimized for mobile users. Unlike traditional pop-ups that don’t display correctly on smaller screens, Convert maintains a seamless experience for shoppers who prefer to shop on the go.
6. Integrated with Shopify and Gorgias
Using Convert means you can combine immediate assistance with smart marketing through its native integration with Gorgias and Shopify. For example, if a customer hesitates to make a purchase, you can intervene with a live chat offer or product recommendation in real-time.
The Shopify integration also allows you to generate unique discount codes that expire within 48 hours—preventing them from being shared on unauthorized coupon sites. These codes are automatically created with customizable thresholds, such as discounts for specific collections or individual users, without manual setup.
7. A/B testing made easy
Convert allows you to test different messages and incentives, giving valuable insights into what resonates most with your audience. This data-driven approach ensures your lead capture strategy evolves with shoppers over time.
Read more: How campaign messaging can increase conversions
Rave reviews from real Shopify brands
Shopify brands using Gorgias Convert have led to a conversion rate boost of 6-10% more across their website, up to a 24% click-through rate and 43% click-to-order rate, and improved customer satisfaction. By prioritizing a frictionless shopping experience, these brands are turning casual visitors into loyal customers.
Here’s what some happy brands have to say about Convert:
Haircare brand, Kreyol Essence, influenced 13% of revenue with Convert campaigns: “With Convert, we’ve not only improved our conversion rates but also created a seamless, personalized shopping experience that our customers love. It’s like having a personal assistant for each shopper. Thanks to Convert, we can interact with our customers and surface key information at the right time, turning clicks into connections."
Brands using customer service management agency, TalentPop, love how easy it is to generate revenue with Convert: “Clients are constantly surprised and delighted by how effective Gorgias Convert is for revenue generation. They especially appreciate that Convert can be used to target a diverse range of customers across the entire purchasing journey.”
In five months, yoga brand Manduka, increased revenue by 284.15% after using Convert: “Gorgias Convert has helped us make the shopping experience more intuitive. We can give a nice prompt to remind people of promotions we’re running, highlight specific product features, or just remind them we're here to help and answer questions. The chat campaigns make it easy for customers because they lead them to us, as opposed to them having to search for how to contact us for assistance.”
Goodbye full-screen pop-ups, hello Gorgias Convert
Shoppers want personalized experiences that respect their time and preferences. Full-screen pop-ups belong to an era of intrusive marketing that shoppers would rather leave in the past.
Gorgias Convert for your Shopify brand means delivering impactful interactions, more conversions, and an easy path to long-term customer loyalty.
Ready to make the switch? Start your effortless shopping journey today with Gorgias Convert. Chat with our team!
Introducing Conversational AI: The Smartest Way to Handle Chat, Actions, QA, and Insights
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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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12 Ways to Upgrade Your Data and Trend Analysis With Ticket Fields
TL;DR:
- Ticket Fields make it easy to organize ticket data. They let agents collect the right information by filling out specific fields before closing a ticket.
- Conditional Ticket Fields are smart fields that adapt based on the ticket type. These fields show up only when they’re needed, helping agents capture just the right details.
- Use Ticket Fields to spot trends and improve your CX. Track things like return reasons, product feedback, or refund patterns to make smarter decisions and keep customers happy.
- Get your team up to speed with quick, practical tools. Share a best practices deck, give them a handy cheat sheet, and run a quick demo to make Ticket Fields easy to understand and use.
Your customer service conversations contain a goldmine of insight about your shoppers—like why they reached out, trends in shopper behavior, and how your products or services perform.
But how do you turn thousands of unstructured support tickets into accurate, digestible, and actionable takeaways?
Ticket Fields are the answer. They give support teams extra layers of data by labeling tickets in a much smarter way than traditional tags. With the right setup, Ticket Fields can help you uncover patterns, make smarter decisions, and highlight the value customer experience (CX) brings to your entire organization.
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What are Ticket Fields?
Ticket Fields are customizable properties that allow CX teams to collect and organize information about tickets. Agents fill in ticket fields before closing the ticket, making it much easier to scale data collection.
Ticket Fields can be mandatory, requiring an agent to populate a field before closing the ticket. They can also be conditional, only appearing when relevant to the ticket.
There are four types of Ticket Fields: Dropdown, Number, Text, and Yes/No. Here are some ways to use each:
- Return Reason (Dropdown): Track why customers are returning items, such as incorrect sizing, damaged goods, or dissatisfaction. This can help you spot product deficiencies or fulfillment errors.
- Product Feedback (Text): Collect feedback about products directly from customers. Share this data with your product team and make it easier for them to make improvements that customers ask for.
- Refund Amount (Number): Use this to identify trends, like high refund rates for a specific product, and modify your refund policies to minimize losses.
- First-Time Buyer (Yes/No): Flag whether a customer is making their first purchase. Use this to address pain points among new customers.
Why Ticket Fields are more powerful than Tags
Unlike Tags, which are single-reason and non-conditional, Ticket Fields ensure key information, such as fulfillment details or cancellation reasons, is built into a ticket.
Think of Tags as stickers added to a ticket, while Ticket Fields are part of the ticket’s DNA itself, giving you much more control and insight.
Let’s take a closer look at why Ticket Fields are far superior at collecting data than Tags:
Mandatory fields for comprehensiveness
Agents manually apply Tags, which means it’s easy to forget to tag a ticket.
Ticket Fields, however, enforce structure by allowing CX managers to decide which fields are mandatory and which are optional. This flexibility ensures that all tickets contain the same basic details.
Conditional fields for a streamlined experience and in-depth data
Ticket Fields can be conditional, meaning certain types of tickets automatically include fields that must be filled in.
How does it work? Take a look at this example:
If the Contact Reason field is Cancellation, conditional ticket fields like Cancel Reason, Did We Cancel Subscription, and Order Number must also be filled out.
Here’s how it looks in the Field Conditions settings:
No more missing context, gaps in the data, or typing N/A in a field. Support teams can capture the data they need from each ticket every time.
Ease of migration
For CX teams transitioning from other helpdesks, being able to import historical ticket data with the field information intact is significant. This preserves workflows and existing data, helping teams get set up in no time without losing crucial information.
Tags, on the other hand, should be used to:
- Sort tickets in different Views. Tags are helpful for organizing your tickets into different views to aid your workflow. For example, you can focus on all urgent tickets by creating a view that only displays tickets tagged as “Urgent.”
- Used as temporary categories for exceptions. Tags can be used to add extra detail to an existing category. For instance, if you have a field named “Subscription Type” with “Premium Plan” selected as value in the ticket, you can add a “Gift Subscription” Tag temporarily.
12 Ticket Fields every CX team should consider for better reporting
Ticket Fields are incredibly adaptable, allowing you to capture the exact data your team needs to meet your goals—whether it’s tracking product trends, choosing a shipping carrier, or increasing customer satisfaction.
Here are 12 examples of custom Ticket Fields to level up your data analysis.
1. Contact reason
Type of ticket field: Dropdown
What to do with the data: Identify common reasons customers contact you and take proactive steps to address them.
The Contact Reason ticket field is an easy way to figure out why customers reach out to your support team in the first place.
You can quickly identify trends, such as a sudden spike in return requests, and investigate whether it's a website, fulfillment, product, or service issue.
Some common contact reasons:
- Status inquiry
- Discount
- Refund
- Product question
- Feedback
Note: Gorgias AI automatically suggests contact reasons, pre-filling the field with a prediction based on message content. Agents can accept or adjust the suggestion, helping the system become smarter over time as it learns from these interactions.
2. Resolution
Type of ticket field: Dropdown
What to do with the data: Assess the effectiveness of resolutions and refine your service level agreement.
The Resolution ticket field tracks the action taken to resolve a ticket. Analyzing how your team handles tickets and identifying opportunities to improve resolutions is essential.
For example, you could analyze how often issues are resolved with replacements versus discounts. If you find replacements are overused for minor issues, you might implement a policy to provide discounts instead, helping to reduce costs without harming customer satisfaction.
Here are some values to add to the Resolution ticket field:
- Sent more information
- Replacement sent
- Discount given
- Refund
- Sent tracking order information
- No action taken
3. Feedback
Type of ticket field: Dropdown
What to do with the data: Use both positive and negative feedback to update your policies, escalation process, customer-facing resources, product, and more.
The Feedback ticket field can capture general feedback about your brand or feedback specific to your products.
This field is an excellent way to carry out product research. For example, if you’re a food brand, you can create a dropdown that categorizes feedback by sentiment, such as “Too Sweet,” “Too Salty,” “General Dislike,” and “Artificial Taste.” Once you’ve received a decent amount of feedback, you can return to the test kitchen and perfect your recipe.
4. Product
Type of ticket field: Dropdown
What to do with the data: Track product trends and prioritize improvements.
The Product field is valuable for tracking which items generate the most inquiries. If you have a large inventory, incorporating a Product ticket field can help flag which products are causing the most issues or trouble for shoppers.
If a product is the most used value, this could indicate frequent issues with the product, such as quality issues, defects, or missing information on its product page.
If a product is the least used value, it may not be generating much attention. If this is due to low sales, consider enhancing its visibility through marketing to attract more shoppers. However, being the least used value can also be good news, meaning your product performs well, and shoppers have no complaints.
Pro Tip: To understand which specific products are getting returned, add a conditional “Product” ticket field.
5. Defect
Type of ticket field: Dropdown + conditional field
What to do with the data: Identify recurring quality issues and fix root causes.
Track the most prominent defects reported by customers with a Defect ticket field. This can help you monitor product quality and adjust production, manufacturer, or supplier processes.
For deeper insights, add a conditional “Product” field to pinpoint which products experience specific defects. For example, if you’re a bag brand, you might find that a certain backpack is usually tied to a “Zipper” defect. This can be a valuable insight to pass on to your product team to alter the design or adjust your manufacturing process.
Here’s a look at the dropdown values for the Defect ticket field:
6. Cancellation reason
Type of ticket field: Dropdown
What to do with the data: Lower churn by addressing cancellation triggers.
If you’re a subscription-based business with a climbing cancellation rate, adding a Cancellation Reason ticket field can help you stop the churn. This field tracks why customers cancel orders or subscriptions. It’s a powerful way to identify patterns, such as price sensitivity or delivery delays, and to take steps to retain customers.
Cancellation reason examples:
- Too expensive
- Bad product-customer fit
- Don’t need it
- Moving to a competitor
- Poor customer service
7. Shipping carrier
Type of ticket field: Dropdown + conditional field
What to do with the data: Evaluate shipping carrier performance and improve logistics.
For any ecommerce brand, your shipping carrier is a big contributor to customer satisfaction. The faster a customer’s order gets to them, the better.
Use a Shipping Carrier ticket field to track the shipping carrier for tickets related to delivery issues. This will provide insights into which carriers perform poorly, enabling you to modify your logistics and order fulfillment processes.
Pair the Shipping Carrier field with a conditional “Shipping Issue” field to identify potential correlations. For example, if “Delayed” is a top shipping issue for a certain carrier, it may be time to change your logistics process.
8. Purchase origin
Type of ticket field: Dropdown
What to do with the data: Learn how customers find your brand and see what types of customers and issues are tied to the purchase source.
The Purchase Origin field helps you see where customers are coming from. Are they buying directly from your website? Or from social media platforms like Instagram or TikTok?
Dig deeper, and you may also spot connections between purchase origin and common issues.
For your marketing team, this data will help improve strategies at all levels, from advertising and messaging to targeting the right platforms.
9. Customer escalation
Type of ticket field: Yes/No
What to do with the data: Reduce escalations by revising escalation processes and retraining agents.
The Customer Escalation field tracks whether a ticket was escalated to a manager. It helps teams identify training needs and improve processes to reduce escalations.
As the use of AI agents increases in ecommerce customer service, having a clear view of which tickets are escalated can help pinpoint gaps in AI performance and identify scenarios that require human intervention.
Analyzing this data over time can guide updates to AI workflows and agent training, reducing the need for escalations altogether.
10. Discount percentage
Type of ticket field: Number
What to do with the data: Understand how discounts impact customer satisfaction.
The Discount Percentage ticket field tracks the percentage of a discount applied to a customer's order, offering insights into how promotions affect customer behavior.
For example, if customers using a 20% discount frequently contact support about order confusion or dissatisfaction, it might indicate unclear promotion terms or product descriptions. This data helps brands refine promotional messaging and determine whether higher discounts lead to increased ticket volumes, customer satisfaction, or sales.
11. First-time buyer
Type of ticket field: Yes/No + conditional field
What to do with the data: Improve the customer experience for brand new customers.
The First-Time Buyer field flags whether a customer is making their first purchase, making it easier to spot and support new shoppers. When a customer is marked as a first-time buyer, a conditional “Customer Sentiment” field can appear to capture how they feel about their experience.
First-time buyers often have questions about products or need recommendations to feel confident about their purchase. Pairing this ticket field with sentiment data helps to identify common pain points, preferences, and patterns among new customers so your team can finetune the customer experience and leave a lasting first impression.
12. Months in use
Type of ticket field: Number
What to do with the data: Analyze product performance over time.
The Months in Use field tracks how long customers have been using a product. It’s perfect for spotting when items start breaking down, spoiling, or losing effectiveness.
This data helps brands figure out where durability, shelf life, or packaging could be improved to keep customers happy and products performing as expected.
Who benefits from Ticket Fields?
Ticket Fields provide value across the entire CX ecosystem, from agents to decision-makers.
- Support teams: Gain a deeper understanding of shopper behavior and where issues arise from.
- Operations teams: Identify and resolve operational inefficiencies in your support, fulfillment, and feedback workflows.
- Data and tech teams: Analyze Ticket Fields reports from the support team that provide detailed customer service and product data that can inform other departments like product.
- Executives: Get visibility into CX operations, including shipping, damaged items, cancellations, and team performance, to make data-backed decisions.
How to make Ticket Fields a core part of your support process
Ticket Fields are only as powerful as the processes that support them. Follow these five steps to help your team turn support tickets into valuable data for better reporting.
1. Define your data and reporting goals
Decide what insights your team needs to improve workflows, product quality, or customer satisfaction. For example, if you want to track cancellations, set up fields like "Cancellation Reason" and "Refund Amount." Keep your Ticket Fields focused on data your team can use.
2. Set up Ticket Fields
Use Gorgias to configure Ticket Fields in a structured and easy-to-use format. Keep dropdown options concise and specific to avoid confusion. Then, run a test ticket or two to confirm the setup works smoothly for agents.
Read more: Create and edit Ticket Fields
3. Train and onboard your team
Create a presentation deck that clearly explains the purpose of every Ticket Field, the options agents can select for each field, and how the fields tie into the team’s data goals. For added visuals, include flowcharts to show when and how to use each field.
Pro Tip: Give agents a quick reference tool they can easily consult by providing a cheat sheet summarizing Ticket Field best practices.
4. Implement changes based on insights
Whether the data points to gaps in your workflows, product details, or customer education, acting on these patterns is how you drive meaningful change.
Here are some fixes, from low to high effort, that your team can implement:
- Update FAQs in your Chat Flows
- Edit automated responses
- Retrain your AI agent with new information
- Add relevant answers to your Help Center
- Optimize product pages with more details like usage instructions, ingredients, or sizing charts
- Modify product categorization on your website
- Adjust internal workflows
- Renegotiate contracts with underperforming shipping carriers
- Redesign or reformulate products
5. Review Ticket Field data in monthly meetings
Schedule a monthly meeting to review your Ticket Fields Statistics and evaluate their impact on your support workflows and customer satisfaction.
During the meeting, discuss:
- What trends do the reports reveal?
- Are agents consistently filling out each field?
- Which fields are consistently filled out and provide actionable insights?
- Have our priorities changed, making some fields less useful?
Lastly, remember to document the insights and update your team regularly to keep everyone aligned.
Drive smarter decisions with Ticket Fields
Gorgias’s Ticket Fields turn ticket data into insights you can actually use. Spot trends, improve workflows, and make faster, smarter decisions.
Are you ready to see it in action? Book a demo, and let us show you how Ticket Fields can elevate your support.
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Which Gorgias Plan Should You Choose?
TL;DR:
- Gorgias subscriptions are billed monthly or yearly. Yearly plans get two months free.
- Gorgias uses ticket-based pricing by charging per billable ticket, automated interactions, and overages. Gorgias does not charge per user.
- Billable tickets are tickets answered by an agent or Rule. The messages within a ticket are not charged individually.
- Overages happen when you exceed your plan’s ticket volume. When your business grows and your usage increases, we will notify you when it’s time to upgrade to the next plan.
- To find the best Gorgias plan for you, evaluate how many customer interactions you get across different channel every month. Learn how to find your monthly ticket volume here.
Not sure which Gorgias plan is right for you? It all starts with understanding how many customer interactions you handle each month.
Whether you’re just starting out with 50 tickets or managing thousands across different channels, we’ve got you covered.
Our ticket-based pricing grows with your business, making it flexible and easy to scale.
This guide will help you figure out your ticket volume, explore the plan options, and find the perfect fit for your needs.
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How does Gorgias’s pricing structure work?
Billing is based on a monthly or annual subscription, with plans determined by the number of billable helpdesk tickets, automated interactions, and overages.
A billable ticket is any ticket where an agent or Rule (an action that triggers based on certain conditions) responds to a customer's message. Each ticket you receive on your helpdesk is counted as one billable ticket, no matter how many messages are exchanged in the thread.
An automated interaction is a customer request resolved with Automate features, including Flows, Order Management, Article Recommendations, and AI Agent.
Important: A billable ticket can also be classified as an automated interaction depending on the timing of the responses. If an agent or Rule responds more than 72 hours after the automated interaction, it will be billed as both. If the response is within 72 hours, it will be billed as a single billable ticket.
Overages occur when your billable ticket/automated interaction volume exceeds the number included in your plan. Consider changing to a yearly plan if your volume fluctuates from month to month. We will also notify you when to upgrade to the next plan to save money.
This structure applies to all our products and add-ons, making it flexible and scalable to fit businesses of any size:
- Helpdesk 🖥️: All-in-one inbox with 100+ ecommerce app integrations; charged by billable tickets
- Automate 🤖: AI-powered features that can automate 60% of support interactions, including conversational AI Agent; charged by automated interactions
- Voice ☎️: Support channel add-on; charged by Voice tickets
- SMS 💬: Support channel add-on; charged by SMS tickets
Why ticket-based pricing, not seat-based?
Gorgias uses a ticket-based pricing model, allowing you to grow headcount without worrying about increased costs. We believe in AI-powered CX, and as AI tools become universal, brands can rely on agents to handle tasks more effectively at accelerated speeds.
Take a look at the advantages of paying by ticket volume:
- Cost-effective: You can have unlimited support agents without incurring additional costs.
- Efficiency through automation: Pairing our automation-focused platform with ticket-based pricing means deflecting and automating tickets is the goal, which helps businesses improve efficiency and reduce manual workload.
- Flexibility: Managing costs is more straightforward with ticket-based pricing, as companies can pay overage fees rather than temporarily upgrading to a higher-tier plan.
How to find your current monthly ticket volume
You may be coming from another helpdesk or currently trying out Gorgias. If you’re considering switching to Gorgias, it’s important to know your current monthly ticket volume.
Below, we show you how to find your monthly ticket volume whether you’re using Zendesk, Tidio, Shopify Inbox, Re:amaze, or the Gorgias trial.
Find your monthly ticket volume on different helpdesks
Here’s how to find ticket volume on the helpdesk platforms Zendesk, Tidio, Shopify Inbox, and Re:amaze.
Zendesk
- In Explore, click the Dashboard icon in the left sidebar.
- Select the Zendesk Support dashboard.
- Click the Tickets tab.
- Set the Time to a one-month range.
- Note your monthly ticket volume in the Created tickets section.
Tidio
- Click the Usage & Plan button in the top right of the Tidio panel.
- Note your monthly ticket volume in the Customer service row under Current usage.
Shopify Inbox
- Go to Shopify Inbox > Overview.
- Note your monthly ticket volume under Conversation metrics.
Re:amaze
- Click on the Reports icon in the menu.
- Under Team Reports, click Overview.
- Note your monthly ticket volume under Last 30 Days Volume.
Find your monthly ticket volume on the 7-day Gorgias trial
Here’s a four-step guide to accurately gauge your monthly ticket volume on the Gorgias trial.
Step 1: Connect all your support channels
Immediately after sign-up, connect all the channels you offer support on, such as email, social media, voice, SMS, etc. All messages from these channels will now be consolidated in the Helpdesk.
Use Gorgias to reply to all incoming messages for the entire 7 days. This is crucial because only replies sent from the helpdesk will count as billable tickets. This process ensures you select the right pricing plan after the trial ends.
Find your ticket volume in Statistics > Support Performance > Overview. There, you can view your ticket volume (created, closed, and open tickets) and support metrics like first response time and resolution time.
Step 2: Note the total tickets used at the end of the 7-day trial
Go to Statistics > Account > Billing & usage > Usage & Plans. To get your estimated monthly ticket volume, multiply the number of tickets used by 4 (for four weeks). For average yearly ticket volume, multiply the resulting number by 12.
Step 3: Estimate the number of automated interactions
As a starting point, we recommend automating 10-20% of your annual ticket volume to increase repeat purchases, reduce response times, and increase overall customer satisfaction.
Multiply your yearly ticket volume by 0.2 to find the optimum number of automated interactions you need.
Step 4: Use the pricing calculator
Once you’re ready to find the plan that works for you, input your anticipated number of tickets, automated interactions, and Voice and SMS tickets per month into the pricing calculator.
How the Gorgias pricing calculator works
Our pricing calculator is designed to help you find the most cost-effective plan for your business needs in four simple steps.
Step 1: Estimate your customer support ticket volume per month
Use the slider to set the number of tickets your store receives per month, ranging from 0 to 10,000.
Not sure how many tickets you receive per month? On average, brands receive one support ticket for every 15 orders.
Step 2: Select your helpdesk plan
You can choose from four plan options. The first is a base plan with the number of tickets you can use per month and the overage fee. The following plans are the base plan with the addition of automated tickets, ranging from 10%-30% automation.
Pro Tip: Based on 2023 data, brands that automated 20% of their tickets substantially reduced response times and resolution times and increased CSAT.
Step 3: Choose your add-ons
Expand your customer service channels by adding Voice and SMS tickets to your plan.
- Voice add-on: Select your monthly voice ticket volume if you receive and make calls. There is also a pay-as-you-go option.
- SMS add-on: Select your monthly SMS ticket volume if you send and receive SMS texts. There is also a pay-as-you-go option.
Step 4: Select a monthly or yearly plan
Lastly, finalize your selection by toggling the option to pay on a monthly or yearly basis. You’ll see your final plan summary along with the time and money you save. When you’re ready, click ‘Book a Demo’ to get started with Gorgias.
Which plan should I choose?
Choosing the right Gorgias plan depends on your estimated ticket volume. Here are our recommendations based on your monthly ticket volume.
Pro Tip: We include Automate in every recommendation because it can automatically resolve up to 60% of your customer inquiries, freeing you from repetitive work and allowing you to focus on more complex tasks.
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How to Reduce CX Stress in 2025 with AI and Automation
TL;DR:
- Automate repetitive questions to give agents time back. Use tools like Help Centers, Flows, and AI agents to handle common queries so agents can take care of more complex issues.
- Lower response times with automation. Set up automated email responses, use Flows, and leverage AI Agents to reply to customers faster.
- Maintain a consistent tone of voice with AI. Automate QA processes and provide custom tone instructions to ensure every response aligns with your brand's voice.
- Self-serve returns and use chat campaigns to upsell. Use tools like Loop Returns for self-serve returns and Gorgias Convert to boost revenue with personalized upselling campaigns.
According to Salesforce research, 77% of support staff have dealt with increased and complex workflows compared to the year prior. In addition, 56% of agents have experienced burnout due to support work.
As teams transition into the next era of CX –– one where almost every customer expects efficiency, convenience, and friendly and knowledgeable service –– they’ll need the support of more than just a stellar lead to avoid the stress that comes with the job.
AI and automation are valuable and impactful tools that can aid teams in providing these top-notch experiences while helping agents lower their own stress.
Here are seven ways to leverage AI and automation to increase agent productivity, meet customer expectations, and decrease burnout on CX teams.
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How to reduce stress with AI and automation
While there will always be reasons for human intervention, here are seven support challenges that AI and automation can solve for CX teams long term.
- Tackle repetitive questions
- Lower response times
- Keep a consistent tone of voice
- QA responses at scale
- Upsell customer conversations
- Let customers self-serve returns
- Address common points of confusion
1) Tackle repetitive questions
Every CX team receives repetitive questions like “where is my order” (WISMO), “can I change my shipping address,” or “what is your return policy” every single day. These questions add up over time, creating frustration and burnout for agents and longer response times for customers.
Instead, teams can leverage AI and automation to answer these questions and take time back for other essential tasks.
How to use AI and automation to reduce repetitive questions
If you use Gorgias, there are a couple of ways to put automation to work.
- Lowest effort: Create a help center. Help centers are beneficial for a couple of reasons. First, they give customers an avenue for self-service. Second, they're the primary knowledge source that Gorgias’s AI Agent draws from. To make set- up a breeze, browse 50 help center templates with included answers, all customizable to your brand’s policies.
- Medium effort: Set up Flows. Flows guide simple automated interactions that get customers the answers they need. Flows might help customers understand sizing, learn how long delivery will take, or find warranty information.
- Highest effort: Activate AI Agent. AI Agent is an autonomous support agent who can handle repetitive tickets for teams by learning your brand’s policies, tone of voice, and specific instructions.
"Gorgias's AI Agent has been a game-changer for us, allowing us to automate nearly half of our customer service inquiries. This efficiency means we don’t need to hire additional staff to manage routine tasks, which has saved us the equivalent of two full-time positions.
—Noémie Rousseau, Customer Service Manager at Pajar
Resource: How to Automate Half of Your CX Tasks
2) Lower response times
Many customers get frustrated due to delayed support responses, especially if (they believe) they’re asking a simple question. Not only can AI and automation support by offering responses to these questions, they allow human agents to respond faster to customers who have more complex questions.
How to use AI and automation to lower response times
- Lowest effort: Use automated acknowledgment responses to reassure customers that you’ve heard them, and provide a time frame for when they can expect to hear back. This can be as simple as setting up an email to trigger each time a customer sends in a support request.
- Medium effort: Set up Flows.
- Highest effort: Use AI Agent to answer customers 10x faster than your human agents.
AI Agent has been an effective tool for the team at luxe golf accessory shop VESSEL. “Now we’re able to get back to people so much faster than before,” says Lauren Reams, their Customer Experience Manager.
“We can quickly collect information – avoiding the back and forth questions like what is your name, email or shipping address. Using AI to eliminate the back and forth has been great, and getting back to customers much faster than before has been the biggest win for our team.”
3) Keep a consistent tone of voice
If customers see an inconsistent tone of voice across responses, it’ll affect your brand credibility. It also causes confusion and may create issues maintaining repeat and loyal customers.
How to use AI and automation to keep tone of voice consistent
- Lowest effort: Conduct frequent agent training via automated QA. Automated QA systems can provide instant feedback on agent responses to ensure they’re on brand and use the right tone of voice.
- Medium effort: Use Macros. Macros, or templated responses, always keep agents on brand.
- Highest effort: Set up AI Agent’s tone of voice with custom instructions. While AI Agent comes with three pre-set options (Friendly, Professional, and Sophisticated), you can also provide custom Guidance for how you’d like it to sound.
4) QA responses at scale
Manual quality assurance checks are time-consuming and often inconsistent. But they’re key to providing great support at scale while maintaining a high standard across thousands of interactions. Aside from catching any errors, a regular QA process also builds trust with customers, increases personalization, and helps agents improve over time.
How to use AI and automation for QA
Automated quality assurance can provide up to 90% accuracy, according to research by McKinsey. All you’ll need to do to get started is to choose and implement an automated QA tool.
5) Upsell customer conversations
When CX teams are bogged down with an overwhelming amount of tickets, there’s going to be a lack of time and opportunity to upsell in customer conversations. This is especially true when dealing with angry or upset customers, and during high-impact periods like BFCM.
How to use AI and automation for upselling
Activate onsite marketing campaigns with Gorgias Convert to provide product recommendations and promote current discounts, sales, or campaigns.
For example, you can use AI to promote relevant items to shoppers to increase their cart value. You might highlight items that are frequently bought together, or show a bundle that would make a great gift for someone. Research shows that these types of personalized recommendations can increase average order value (AOV) by 15%.
Resource: 5 Holiday Onsite Campaigns to Maximize Year-End Sales
6) Let customers self-serve returns
The National Retail Federation (NRF) projects that retail returns will total $890 billion in 2024. With so many brands losing money from returns, it’s essential that you find ways to mitigate them.
How to use AI and automation for returns
By switching to Gorgias, Audien Hearing saw nearly a 5% drop in return rates. And Rumpl saw $8,000 in recouped return fees by integrating Loop Returns with Gorgias.
Loop lets customers self-serve returns through a returns portal that encourages exchanges instead. It makes the entire process a breeze, and eliminates back and forth between customers and busy support teams.
7) Address common points of confusion
Many times, issues that were completely avoidable are escalated, leaving support teams with more tickets and already frustrated customers. These issues are likely common points of confusion that you can easily solve before they ever reach your customers.
How to use AI and automation to ease confusion
If you use Gorgias, here’s how you can leverage automation:
- Lowest effort: Update your Help Center to address FAQs or policies customers have found confusing in the past.
- Medium effort: Create Flows to address frequently asked questions.
- Highest effort: Set up AI Agent’s handover rules to only escalate certain topics to your human team.
“I’ve been in this role for four years and this was probably our best back to school season yet. In past years, you knew you were going to come in and be bogged down – but this year was way more seamless and much less stressful and that’s thanks to AI Agent.”
—Danae Kaminski, Customer Care Team Lead at Jonas Paul Eyewear
Get time back to do what really matters
At Gorgias, our goal is to create solutions to the real problems CX professionals face every day. Tools like Automate and AI Agent make it possible for teams to provide better customer experiences, reduce agent stress, and create more cohesive and positive working environments overall.
”Thanks to the time we've saved by automating many of our routine tasks, our team has had the chance to bond more,” says Noémie.
“We even had time for a team picnic and painted a picnic table outside! It’s been great to step away and spend time as a team occasionally, knowing that our customers are still being taken care of by the AI Agent. It’s really improved team morale.”
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How to Refresh Your Help Center for 2025: A Step-by-Step Guide
TL;DR:
- Audit your help center. Review analytics, gather feedback, and test usability to identify gaps and outdated content.
- Update and optimize content. Add trending FAQs, visuals, and clear formatting to improve readability and usability.
- Boost accessibility and SEO. Place links across your site, optimize with keywords, and integrate with proactive support tools.
- Leverage AI for better support. Use your help center to train AI tools and regularly update content for accuracy.
The start of a new year is the perfect time to give your help center the refresh it deserves. For many ecommerce brands, the help center is one of the most underused support tools—yet it's also one of the most powerful. 88% of customers already search your website for some kind of knowledge base or FAQ.
Customers expect fast answers, and a well-designed, updated help center can meet their needs while taking some weight off your support team. We’ll walk you through why refreshing matters and how to do it.
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Why refresh your help center?
90% of consumers worldwide consider issue resolution their top priority for customer service. A robust help center gives you the tools to meet this expectation, delivering fast and reliable solutions that simplify your customers’ lives.
A well-designed help center benefits both your customers and your team. For customers, it lets them solve problems quickly and independently. Instead of waiting for an email response or queuing for live chat, a help center empowers them to find answers on their own terms 24/7.
For your team, a refreshed help center is transformative, too. Here’s what a help center update can achieve:
- Deflect repetitive pre-sale questions: Save your agents from answering the same FAQs over and over by addressing common queries proactively in your help center.
- Support your team: Equip agents with easy access to up-to-date product, service, and policy information. You’ll reduce response times, and your team will deliver consistent answers.
- Train AI tools: Turn your help center into a powerful data source for AI tools. Comprehensive, structured content helps AI provide accurate and consistent responses, giving customers fast solutions and further reducing ticket volume.
In short, refreshing your help center will improve customer experience and boost efficiency across your entire customer service strategy. It’s a win-win for everyone.
How to refresh your help center: 4 steps to follow
Refreshing your help center doesn’t have to be overwhelming. By breaking the process into clear, actionable steps, you can transform your help center into a powerful self-service tool that delights customers and supports your team.
Here are four key steps to guide your refresh.
Step 1: Audit your existing help center
Before making any major changes, you need to understand where your help center currently stands. A thorough audit will help you identify areas for improvement and ensure you make targeted updates.
Here's how to start:
Review analytics
Dive into your help center metrics to spot underperforming content. Look at article views, time-on-page, and bounce rates. Low engagement might mean the content is unclear, irrelevant, or hard to find.
With a customer experience platform like Gorgias, you can view the performance of each article:
Survey your customers
Customer feedback is invaluable. Use surveys or follow-up emails to ask customers what information they had trouble finding. Their responses can highlight blind spots in your help center.
Add CSAT questions
At the end of each help center article, include a simple question like, "Was this content helpful?" Use the feedback to pinpoint which articles are effective and which may need improvement.
Test usability
Put yourself in your customers’ shoes. Try searching for answers to common questions. Is the layout intuitive? Are the search results helpful? A smooth user experience is key to a successful help center.
Evaluate content freshness
Check if your articles are outdated or missing important updates, like new product features or policy changes.
Read more: How to create and optimize a customer knowledge base
Step 2: Update and optimize your help center content
Fresh, well-organized content is the backbone of a great help center. Customers rely on clear and accurate information, so investing in your content can transform your help center into a powerful self-service tool.
Here’s how to refresh your content and make it shine:
Add trending FAQs
Regularly analyze support tickets to identify common and emerging questions. Integrate these into your knowledge base to address customer needs proactively and reduce incoming tickets.
Create multimedia content
Text alone isn’t always enough. Use images, GIFs, and videos to break down complex topics and make instructions easier to follow. For example, a quick explainer video can save customers time and eliminate confusion.
Princess Polly’s customer help center exemplifies what a great help center should look like. Its visually appealing design ensures that customers can quickly navigate to the information they need. Whether they’re looking for help with shipping, payments, returns, or any other issue, the intuitive layout makes the process simple and stress-free.
Gorgias lets you customize fonts, logos, and headers for your Help Center without any coding. If you want more customization, you can dip into HTML and CSS to tailor specific elements.
Standardize your tone
Ensure your content reflects your brand voice while staying approachable and customer-friendly. Consistency builds trust and reinforces your brand identity.
Need help finding your brand voice? Read AI Tone of Voice: Tips for On-Brand Customer Communication for guidance.
Update outdated articles
Review older content for inaccuracies or missing information, such as policy changes or new product details.
Structure for readability
Use bullet points, short paragraphs, and clear headings to make articles easy to scan. Most customers skim for quick answers—design your content to match their behavior.
Step 3: Make your help center easy to find
Even the most well-crafted help center is ineffective if customers can’t locate it. Ensuring visibility across all customer touchpoints is key to driving engagement and making self-service the first stop for support. Here’s how to do it:
Link it everywhere
Make your help center easily accessible by placing links in strategic locations, such as your website’s header, footer, and main navigation menu. Include links in transactional emails, like order confirmations, tracking updates, or shipping updates, where customers often have questions.
Improve SEO
Optimize your help center articles with keywords your customers are likely to search for. Use clear, concise titles, meta descriptions, and headings to boost search engine visibility and help customers find answers directly from Google.
Integrate with support tools
Use tools like automated chat and automated email responses to proactively surface relevant help center articles. For instance, when customers type a question in a chatbox, suggest related articles before escalating to a support agent.
Read more: Offer more self-serve options with Flows: 10 use cases & best practices
Promote it proactively
Don’t wait for customers to stumble upon your help center—promote it! Highlight it in onboarding emails, social media posts, and banners on your site.
Jonas Paul Eyewear ensures their help center is easy to access by prominently linking it in the website’s footer under the “Quick Links” section. The thoughtful placement ensures customers can quickly navigate to the help center from any page, making it a convenient resource for addressing their questions or concerns.
Read more: Boost your Help Center's visibility: Proven strategies to increase article views
Step 4: Use your help center to power AI tools
Your help center isn’t just for customers—it will also level up your AI-driven support strategy. By structuring your knowledge base effectively, you enable AI tools to deliver accurate, reliable, and consistent answers to customer queries.
Here’s how to make it work:
Create comprehensive content
Ensure your help center articles cover a wide range of customer questions in detail. This makes it easier for AI tools to pull relevant information and respond accurately.
Structure for machine readability
Organize your content with clear headings, bullet points, and simple language. Well-structured articles are easier for AI to parse and interpret.
Focus on consistency
Use uniform terminology across articles to prevent confusion and ensure AI tools can quickly identify relevant data.
Update regularly
Keep your knowledge base fresh by adding new FAQs, updating outdated content, and incorporating customer feedback. Up-to-date information ensures AI tools provide answers that align with your latest products, policies, and services.
Test AI performance
Periodically review how well your AI tools are using your help center content to address customer needs. Identify gaps in information and fine-tune articles as needed.
Dr. Bronner’s built their help center to power AI Agent, a conversational support assistant that answers both transactional and personalized customer inquiries in the same style as a human agent. Making this change helps the brand save $100,000 a year and decrease their resolution time by 74%.
💡Pro Tip: Transform your help center into an AI training powerhouse with Gorgias’s help center AI optimization guide. This guide offers actionable tips for making your knowledge base AI-ready.
By using your help center to power AI tools, you’ll improve customer self-service options and lighten the load on your support team. AI-enhanced support delivers faster resolutions, higher customer satisfaction, and a scalable approach to customer service.
Elevate your support strategy with a help center refresh
Refreshing your help center isn’t just about improving customer experience—it’s a game-changer for your entire support strategy. With tools like Gorgias’s Help Center, you can empower customers to self-serve while equipping your team with the resources they need to excel.
In 2025, make your help center the cornerstone of your support operations—and watch the results speak for themselves.
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