TL;DR:

• Helpdesk automation uses both AI and automation to handle recurring tasks and reduce manual work done by agents
• Using an automated helpdesk results in better customer satisfaction, decreased ticket volume, and higher revenue
• Ensure your automated helpdesk has features like chat, one-click answers, an order management portal, and article recommendations
• The top helpdesk automation solution is Gorgias, an automated helpdesk made for ecommerce merchants at all levels

Customer service helpdesks are essential for managing customer conversations, but support teams are looking to increase efficiency beyond being organized. Answering customer questions is the easy part for agents — the main challenge lies in making manual tasks like typing up responses faster. This is where helpdesk automation comes in.

The top helpdesks have automation features that solve issues without agents needing to sift through complex documents or advanced settings. Helpdesks shouldn’t only streamline the customer experience, they should also simplify the process of delivering that service.

This guide will explore the benefits of helpdesk automation, pinpoint the must-have features of a helpdesk, and highlight the leading automated helpdesks. By the end, you’ll be ready to put helpdesk automation into action and trim out the extra tasks from your workflow.

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What is an automated helpdesk?

An automated helpdesk is a customer service tool that uses automation and AI to synthesize customer messages from various channels. The goal of automated helpdesks is to handle repetitive tasks, like categorizing and routing support tickets, so agents have fewer manual tasks to do.

The Gorgias Helpdesk is an example of an automated helpdesk made especially for ecommerce merchants. Notable features include:

• Rules. Processes, such as ticket tagging or rerouting, are automatically activated when certain conditions are met.
• Macros. Pre-written response templates that can be reused for recurring customer interactions like WISMO requests.
• Inbox. Omnichannel communication is prioritized with email, SMS, voice, and social media messages in one inbox.
• Quick Responses. Automated one-click Q&A interactions on Chat. 
• Flows. Interactive Chat conversations powered by automation. 

Why more companies are adopting helpdesk automation

Helpdesks are brilliant tools by themselves but truly shine once combined with customer service automation. The time saved from automation leads to a significant drop in resolution times, and a boost in CSAT scores and revenue. Let’s take a closer look.

Resolve customer issues instantly

If you run an online store, you’re familiar with replying to the same messages about your shipping policy, returns, and products day in and day out. The beauty of helpdesk automation is how it handles frequently asked questions with self-service resources, like a knowledge base, that are available 24/7 and allow customers to get instant answers outside of business hours.

Give your agents bandwidth to focus on trickier tickets

When you remove copy-pasting answers from your customer service responsibility list, support agents get time back to engage with high-value shoppers who are either loyal customers or at risk of churning. With more time to focus on complex tickets, response times will be faster, and customers happier.

Drive more revenue by turning questions into sales

Automation is a proven way to drive more revenue, not just a quick fix to smooth out the wrinkles in your support workflow. Working with 30 brands, Gorgias found that brands that automated 30% of their customer support tended to generate around 8.7% of their companies' revenue.

6 key automation features your helpdesk needs

Automation is common in many helpdesk software, but the key is to focus on how the automation features can speed up support tasks. 

Below are six essential automation features a helpdesk should have. 

1) Chat

What is it? A website chat window for customers to get automated or real-time answers. The chat window’s visibility can differ on each webpage.

The manual task it replaces: Exiting the brand website and using a different channel (like email or social media) just to contact a brand’s support.

Why is it important? If the process of getting help is too complicated, customers are forced to switch to competitors with simpler solutions. But when you provide a clear way to receive support, customers get faster responses, are better informed, and more inclined to make a purchase.

The best part about Chat is it gives shoppers the option to either receive a quick, automated answer or chat with an agent if they prefer real-time assistance. 

Success story with Gorgias: RevAir implemented Chat and increased response times by 93% and revenue to $76k per quarter.

2) Quick Responses

What is it? One-click question-and-answer scenarios that occur in Chat. Quick Responses are not powered by a chatbot and use pre-set answers to reply to users.

The manual task it replaces: Responding to frequently asked questions (FAQs)

Why is it important? Quick Responses is your solution to 24/7 support when agents aren’t available. Giving customers a low-stakes method of asking questions lets them experience a more pleasant and low-pressure shopping journey. 

Success story with Gorgias: ALOHAS nearly tripled growth by automating 83% of support with Chat and Quick Responses.

3) Order Management

What is it? An in-chat order portal that lets customers track, cancel, and return their orders without contacting a support rep.

The manual tasks it replaces: Resolving where is my order? tickets, order return and cancellation requests

Why is it important? Customers who ask order-related questions typically have one of two goals: to track the status or change the status of their order. Basically, order management tickets aren’t unique and can be easily handled by automation. When you provide answers to your customers’ top priority (their purchase), you deflect a ticket from entering your inbox while improving customer satisfaction.

Success story with Gorgias: Topicals implemented Chat to reduce returns and ended up deflecting 69% of tickets from manual agent intervention.

📚 Read more: 12 best shipping software tools for ecommerce stores

4) Chat Campaigns

What is it? Promotional messages in Chat that activate when visitors interact with your website.

The manual tasks it replaces: Spending money and time finding new customers, promoting storewide discounts and sales, upselling and cross-selling

Why is it important? Finding new customers is more expensive than retaining the ones you already have. Chat Campaigns acts as a virtual salesperson, making sure sales, promotions, and products are getting the attention they need. Even when agents are offline, Chat Campaigns work overtime to capture every visitor, effectively reducing cart abandonment, website bounce rate, and lost sales.

Success story with Gorgias: Glamnetic’s exit intent Chat Campaigns increased sales by 49%.

5) Autoresponders

What is it? AI processes that declutter your email inbox of spam and easily answered inquiries 

The manual tasks it replaces: Deleting spam emails, answering WISMO tickets, sending tracking links, and processing refund requests

Why is it important? Autoresponders handle routine inquiries such as order status or refund requests. This improves customer service response times and frees you up to focus on more complex issues that require a human touch. You can also gain insights into the effectiveness of your automation strategies with Autoresponders, allowing you to monitor what customers need more or less of.

Success story with Gorgias: Stoov leveraged insights from ticket information and increased CSAT to 4.9 with 10% cost savings.

6) Article Recommendations

What is it? An AI-powered recommendation tool that resolves questions with relevant Help Center articles

The manual task it replaces: Responding to product-specific inquiries

Why is it important? Answering product questions can get long, especially if agents are manually typing the same explanations and instructions over and over again. By offloading this repetitive and laborious task to AI, customers receive consistent and detailed answers, while agents focus on resolving one-of-a-kind tickets.

Article Recommendations combines the knowledge power of AI and your own Help Center to give customers accurate and personalized solutions. This allows curious shoppers to receive complete information about your brand and products since articles can include images, videos, and links.

Success story with Gorgias: TUSHY gained 25% in revenue from leveraging pre-sales education including the use of Article Recommendations.

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The top 6 automated helpdesk options

Within the diverse range of available options, there are five standout helpdesk platforms renowned for their remarkable features: Gorgias, Zendesk, Kustomer, Freshdesk, Help Scout, and Shopify Inbox. Let’s take a closer look at what each helpdesk offers.

1) Gorgias

Price: Starts at $50/month; billed per ticket

Best features: The only ecommerce-focused helpdesk, powerful and easy-to-use automation features

As more businesses rely on ecommerce platforms to offer their products, Gorgias stands out as the best helpdesk for merchants at all levels.  Gorgias offers seamless integration with major ecommerce platforms like Shopify, BigCommerce, WooCommerce, and Magento and centralizes customer data and conversations within the platform. 

Combining it with the AI-powered Gorgias Automate makes it a top contender for customer support teams seeking to streamline the customer experience and maximize the power of automated workflows. Gorgias Automate checks off all the boxes with foundational features like Quick Responses, Order Management, Chat Campaigns, Autoresponders, and Article Recommendations.

2) Zendesk

Price: Starts at $49/month; billed per user

Best features: Designed for enterprise companies, advanced reporting capabilities

Zendesk is favored by enterprise-level businesses for its excellent multi-channel support and strong reporting features like real-time data views and customizable dashboards.

However, while its specialty is raising customer satisfaction, users report dissatisfaction with Zendesk’s very own customer service due to unresponsiveness and difficulties with subscription changes. Despite these drawbacks, Zendesk's configurability makes it a valuable tool for larger businesses aiming to optimize their customer service operations.

3) Kustomer

Price: Starts at $89/month; billed per agent

Best features: Interface is easy to navigate, ability to add internal notes to tickets

Kustomer shines in organizing data and managing customer interactions. Though it may not fully meet the needs of ecommerce-based businesses, its strengths in streamlining support processes stand out. Users have noted some drawbacks such as a complicated search engine and limited mobile functionality. However, if a straightforward ticketing system is what you need, Kustomer may be the right fit. 

4) Freshdesk

Price: Starts free for up to 10 agents; billed per agent

Best features: Includes a free plan, innovative collaboration features for convenient ticket assignment

If you're a SaaS business, Freshdesk is a great pick, excelling in basic ticket management. Its ability to integrate seamlessly with non-ecommerce applications like Salesforce and Jira makes it valuable for tech companies. Large ecommerce stores, on the other hand, might find Freshdesk's features somewhat limited. 

Freshdesk's solid ticket management system, coupled with its user-friendly interface, makes it a top choice for SaaS businesses.

5) Help Scout

Price: Starts at $20/month; billed per user

Best features: Intuitive user interface, extensive knowledge base and documentation features

Help Scout excels in managing inbound customer emails with its feature-rich toolset. Recent enhancements like help docs and video embedding have improved its functionality. However, workflow automation still needs improvement and can lead to unintended mass email responses. 

The limitation of features like real-time chat on higher-tier plans and subpar support experiences are its weaknesses, but its streamlined email support and knowledge management make Help Scout a strong option for teams that rely on email support.

6) Shopify Inbox

Price: Free for Shopify users

Best features: Native Shopify helpdesk solution for Shopify merchants, user-friendly interface

Shopify Inbox is favored by Shopify store owners for its excellent customer communication and user-friendly interface. Users appreciate its ability to centralize conversations and enhance customer engagement, which is great for brand-new merchants. 

However, some find the initial learning curve challenging, with concerns over limited reporting features and inconsistent message notifications. Nevertheless, its cost-effectiveness and efficient customer engagement tools make Shopify Inbox a great pick for customers who don’t want to leave the Shopify environment.

Gorgias is the ultimate automated helpdesk for ecommerce

Gorgias stands out as the only helpdesk designed explicitly for ecommerce businesses. Boasting an incredible 4.3/5 stars on Shopify, it offers unparalleled integration with major ecommerce platforms like Shopify, BigCommerce, and WooCommerce. Its suite of features is powered by advanced AI, streamlining ticket and order management, support workflows, and customer communication. 

For ecommerce businesses looking to elevate their customer support experience, look no further than Gorgias. To see how Gorgias can transform your customer service, book a demo today.

TL;DR:

• Key customer service techniques for agents include understanding customer issues, using positive language, thoroughly understanding products, adapting to different communication styles, and setting clear expectations.
• Key techniques for support leaders include providing agents with enriched customer data, building a library of templates, specializing agents in specific channels or issues, and training the entire organization to be customer-first.
• Gorgias offers features such as automated responses, self-service options, live chat for pre-sales support, and integrations with other tools to enhance customer service.

Amid the barrage of social media ads, email campaigns, and influencer endorsements that consumers navigate weekly, PWC highlights that 73% of people see customer experience as a pivotal factor in their buying decisions. 

The techniques today’s customer service teams use are the foundation for those excellent experiences.

Below, learn five key customer service techniques for agents and four for CS leaders.

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9 customer service techniques for agents, leads, and managers

Here are five essential techniques for agents to provide great customer service.

Effective techniques for agents to enhance customer service

To deliver good customer service, agents should first aim to understand customers’ issues at the beginning of each interaction. Then, they can leverage other tactics like reframing statements and setting clear expectations.

1) Get an understanding of the issue before you start the interaction

Every customer service encounter is unique and should be approached with a fresh perspective. Here’s how to make sure you understand the customer’s issue before diving into problem-solving mode:

• Active listening: Context is key. Start every conversation by allowing the customer to feel heard by giving them the space to fully express their concerns before making any recommendations.
• Review previous interactions: Skim past customer interactions to gain context. Tools like Gorgias streamline this process by integrating data across multiple channels, offering a comprehensive customer history at a glance.
• Ask clarifying questions: Politely ask for more details if the customer’s problem isn’t immediately clear.
• Avoid assumptions: Never assume you know the issue before the customer fully explains it, even if it seems familiar. 
• Empathy: Demonstrate understanding and concern for the customer’s issue to empathize with them.

2) Maintain a positive and uplifting tone in your communication

The words we choose in customer service can significantly impact the tone of an interaction. 

Psychology professor Albert Mehrabian conducted insightful research on communication and found a fascinating breakdown: only 7% of a message's meaning is derived from the actual words spoken, while a much larger portion, 38%, is understood through tone. Meanwhile, body language proves to be the most influential factor, accounting for 55% of how the message is interpreted.

Since all customer conversations for ecommerce brands happen via chat, email, or on the phone (not face-to-face), agents can’t rely on body language. This means tone of voice becomes even more important for agents to get right.

How can you maintain positive language? 

1️⃣ ‎First, avoid negative words: “can't,” “won't,” or “don't” can often be reframed in a positive manner. Swap them for phrases like "I understand," "I'm here to help," and "Let's see what we can do," which are much more reassuring to customers.

2️⃣ ‎ Second, aim to be solution-oriented. Focus on potential solutions or next steps rather than dwelling on the problem.

3) Develop a comprehensive knowledge of the products or services

What happens when a recent customer sends an email asking about how to fix a broken part from the product they purchased from you, and your agents don’t know enough about it to help?

Or, if your skincare line recently underwent a formula change that your agents get asked about, but they aren’t sure what was changed and how it alters the performance of your products?

Knowledge of the products you’re selling is critical for accurately informing customers and managing their expectations.

💡 ‎Our recommendation: Encourage a culture of sharing by creating feedback loops across the entire organization. The product team should communicate product details and capabilities, marketing teams should share information about customer behavior, and support teams should share the pain points they hear from customers.

Plus, when one agent learns something new about a product, such as an undocumented use case or a common customer complaint, sharing this insight with fellow agents can enrich everyone with deeper product knowledge.

4) Adapt your communication style to suit different customers

Every customer comes with a unique set of expectations and comfort levels, making flexibility in your communication skills a key skill for customer service agents.

Whether you’re talking on the phone or messaging the customer on Instagram, you can match a customer’s preferred style by recognizing customer profiles.

Pay attention to cues that suggest how each customer prefers to interact. Some customers are straight to the point, desiring quick, factual information with minimal fuss. 

Others might appreciate a more personable and reassuring approach, especially if they're dealing with a stressful issue. 

Take it from Deja Jefferson, CX and Consumer Insights Manager at Topicals: “I ensure that customer service provided by Topicals not only exhibits empathy when issues arise but should be seamlessly integrated throughout the entire transaction process. Our priority is to ensure that our customers feel fully supported at every step.”

If you use ‎Gorgias Helpdesk to manage your customer support channels, you’ll easily be able to see historical conversations with customers to give you an idea of their preferred communication style. You can also leverage sentiment detection, a Gorgias feature that automatically detects the tone of voice the customer is using. Using sentiment detection, you can also prioritize support tickets based on customers' urgent needs.

5) Establish clear expectations with customers

Managing customer expectations is a delicate balance. You don’t want to overpromise services, but you also don’t want customers to feel like you aren’t able to help them.

The balance? Be optimistic about solving their issues, but equally crucial not to promise more than can be delivered. Here's how to set realistic expectations:

• Be transparent: When a resolution might take some time, communicate this to the customer, providing a realistic timeline. It's better for a customer to be pleasantly surprised by an early resolution than frustrated by a late one.
• Keep commitments achievable: Assure the customer that what you know can be delivered within the set constraints. 
• Follow up: If you've provided a timeframe, check back in with the customer within this period. If there’s a delay, communicate it promptly—customers will appreciate the update even if it's not the news they were hoping for.
• Acknowledge limitations: If a request falls outside the scope of what the company can provide or if there are factors beyond your control, it’s better to be upfront about it. Honesty goes a long way in maintaining a respectful and professional relationship with customers.

The truth is, you won't always have the answers customers want to hear. But being clear and honest with them can help them grasp why things are the way they are.

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Techniques for leads and managers

Effective leadership in customer service hinges on empowering agents with the right tools and strategies to excel in their roles. 

Considering that 78% of customers will switch to a competitor after multiple bad customer service experiences, it’s important for your team to be well-equipped for success.

Let’s talk about how to do that.

1) Provide agents with enriched customer data

For customer service teams to excel, they require more than just basic customer information. Leads and managers can empower their teams by providing enriched customer data, leading to more personalized and efficient service.

A helpdesk software will make this easy — if it offers a range of integrations. This is an essential feature to look for because you want your helpdesk to mesh with your existing tech stack. Here’s why: agents need access to data beyond a customer’s name. Integrations are the only way a helpdesk can pull in this additional context.

We’re talking about past orders, historical conversations, engagement info, and conversion metrics into comprehensive customer profiles. This will help agents get a holistic view of the customer, paving the way for tailored interactions. 

Bonus tip: Beyond your helpdesk, share any feedback you hear from customers with the rest of the team. Integrating your helpdesk with a tool like Slack can make this easy, and it’s one way the Love Wellness team actions quickly on the advice from customers:

“We have a channel in Slack dedicated to customer feedback. Dropping in feedback is part of the team’s daily and weekly responsibilities, which helps them get really familiar with all of the content.

“It also allows our team to dissect them and collaborate on how we can improve. You could also schedule recurring feedback share sessions with the Product or Website teams, or even invite them directly into Gorgias (at no extra cost) and create a dedicated view for product feedback, website feedback, and so on.”

—Amanda Kwasniewicz, VP of CX at Love Wellness

2) Create a library of templates to streamline agent responses

Templates are a big help for customer support teams, especially those who are strapped for time (which, let’s be honest, that’s 99% of them). 

Two types to build include:

• Standard responses for common queries: Develop and include a set of pre-written answers tailored to frequently asked questions and routine issues. This ensures quick, consistent, and accurate responses to customer queries.
• Scenario-specific templates: Different situations call for different responses. Having templates specifically designed for complaints, product inquiries, returns, and other common scenarios can guide agents to handle each situation with the appropriate tone and information.

Gorgias offers dynamic, reusable answers, so your agents can build a template of canned responses for all your FAQs. These are easily accessible for agents to swiftly locate and use when replying to customers.

         

If you want some tips on how to craft these templated responses, check out this article with tips for responding to frustrated customers for a good start. 

3) Specialize agents in specific channels or issues

Just as every customer is unique, so too is every communication channel. Providing specialized training for agents in their chosen channels — be it phone, email, social media, or live chat — ensures they are not just familiar but highly skilled in navigating the nuances of these platforms.

But you can take this one step further by encouraging agents to become connoisseurs of specific product lines or types of issues. This deep dive into a particular area enables them to provide not just answers but insights, elevating the customer experience from good to great.

However, remember that specialization doesn’t mean working in silos. It's still crucial for specialized agents to also have a broad understanding across all areas. 

💡 Tip: With Gorgias, you can auto-assign tickets to an agent based on issue or channel. This way, you’re routing tickets to agents who can best help every customer. 

4) Promote a customer-first mindset across the entire organization

A tip that we love from Amanda Kwasniewicz at Love Wellness is the idea that to truly excel in customer service, a customer-first mentality needs to be woven into the very fabric of your organization. 

This goes beyond the customer service department and includes everyone, from the C-suite to the front lines.

She suggests organizing workshops that paint the picture of the crucial role a customer-centric approach plays in every department. These sessions should highlight how each team member's contributions echo in the symphony of customer satisfaction.

“At Love Wellness, we believe that every single team member plays a vital role in creating a haven of care and understanding. That’s why we created an immersive customer experience training program that involves each and every one of us, including the president of the company and even our office manager!” she said.

Read more: Why customer service is important (according to a VP of CX)

Additional resources to support customer service teams

For those who are eager to dive deeper into the world of customer service and sharpen their skills even further, Gorgias offers a treasure trove of resources. 

Whether you’re starting from scratch or looking to refine your expertise, these materials are designed to enhance your understanding and execution of top-tier customer service:

• Customer Service Terms: A comprehensive glossary to get you fluent in the language of customer service. 
• Customer Service Phrases: This collection of key phrases can help guide your communication towards more positive and impactful interactions. 
• Customer Service Skills:An outline of the essential skills every customer service professional should master, for any situation. 
• Customer Service Tips: A series of actionable tips that can be implemented to improve your customer service delivery immediately.
• Customer Service Email Templates: Save time and maintain consistency with a variety of templates that cover common customer service scenarios. 

Each of these resources is designed to instruct and inspire your customer service team to exceed expectations and create memorable customer experiences.

Enhance agent support with Gorgias

Exceptional customer service isn't just about the right words; the helpdesk tool you use is equally important to enhance efficiency and deliver exceptional service. 

Gorgias is tailored to provide such support with innovative features that streamline your customer service processes. Let’s review a few in detail:

Automate responses with reusable Macros 

Macros are pre-scripted customer service templates that accelerate response times by using automation to tackle those repetitive but essential customer inquiries that come in droves. Think of them as pre-made customer service scripts. 

Often called ‘empty-calorie tickets,’ queries like “Where is my order?” don't require personalized responses and can be time-consuming if handled manually. Automating responses to these repetitive questions frees your agents to focus on more complex issues.

Here are some other times when Macros help:

• Welcome emails: A friendly and informative welcome message can set a positive tone for the customer relationship.
• Order status updates: For updates on transactions, shipping, and delivery, a Macro can provide customers with the information they need promptly.
• Refund confirmations: When processing refunds, a clear and courteous Macro can assure customers that their request has been handled.
• Customer loyalty messages: Keep your loyal customers engaged with updates and rewards information through efficient Macro communication.

Enable customers to find answers themselves

A staggering 88% of customers prefer to find answers independently, according to Statista. This tells us that the modern customer values autonomy, which is why self-service options are key.

Self-service options are resources for customers to get the answers they need without contacting an agent. These include FAQ pages, help centers, chat widgets, and interactive quizzes.

Here’s how each self-service option can benefit you:

• FAQ page: Centralizes customers’ most commonly asked questions on one page to prevent your inbox from being filled with the same questions.
• Help center: Larger in scope than an FAQ page or contact center, a Help Center is a database of detailed resources like articles and how-to videos to help customers learn more about your brand and product.
• Chat: Chat can turn into a self-service option with the implementation of Quick Responses, or preset conversations that can answer customers without a live agent.
• Interactive quiz: A fun self-service addition to online stores that carry highly specialized products, like skincare, health supplements, and apparel. 

Here’s a great example from BrüMate, which uses a product finder quiz in its customer knowledge base:

         

Use live chat for pre-sales support

Live chat has become an indispensable tool for connecting with customers in real-time. Some inquiries present a great opportunity to sell a specific product, which Olipop shows here: 

         

Gorgias live chat is designed to integrate seamlessly with the leading platforms for ecommerce customer support. It allows you to manage live chat tickets alongside those from email, phone, and social media, providing a unified interface to serve your online customers more effectively.

Chat campaigns can trigger when certain conditions are met (like visiting/dwelling on a certain page or being a repeat shopper). You can hit these targeted shoppers with personalized product recommendations or provide a unique discount code. 

To sum it up: You're not only addressing customer needs in real-time with live chat but also creating opportunities to influence purchasing decisions positively.

Integrates your helpdesk with the rest of your tech stack

Gorgias boasts a suite of over 100 app integrations, covering every facet of your store's tech stack like CRMs, loyalty tools, ERPs, and more. Some popular choices are Shopify (ecommerce), Okendo (reviews), Yotpo (loyalty rewards and referrals), and Recharge (subscriptions). 

This extensive range means that Gorgias can likely connect with whatever tools you use to manage your ecommerce business, creating a streamlined workflow for your customer service agents.

The real win with these integrations? They let your agents get super personal with support. 

When an agent pulls up a ticket, they’re able to see everything they need to know— past buys, loyalty points, you name it. This means they can give spot-on help that feels really tailored to each customer, cutting down on all that back-and-forth and making the whole experience smoother.

“Having quick access to previous order info in the helpdesk is super convenient and helps us turn our support agents into sales people.”

—Ian Anderson, Operations Manager @ mnml

Boost revenue through improved customer satisfaction

When it comes to turning satisfied customers into sales, Gorgias users are living proof of the potential.

Take Kirby Allison, for instance, who saw a 23% uptick in conversions after automating 30% of their customer support tickets. Or consider TUSHY, influencing a whopping 25% of their sales through Gorgias Convert.

These success stories highlight a clear message: customer service strategy isn’t just about problem-solving but about creating opportunities.

Ready to see the difference a proactive customer-first approach can make for your bottom line? Give Gorgias a try.

Consumers are increasingly multi-screen and multi-channel. From desktop to mobile to tablet, they interact with businesses through Instagram DMs, Facebook Messenger, emails, support chat, and even phone calls. 

Though omnichannel customer service lays a valuable foundation, communicating effectively as a brand involves weaving marketing, sales, and customer service into a cohesive omnichannel communication strategy. 

An omnichannel communication approach makes it easier to talk to customers in a personal way, helping drive sales and keep customers loyal. 

This article explores how centralizing communications offers your team — from marketing and sales reps to support staff — the tools and insights they need for a consistent customer experience. 

By doing so, you don’t just react to customer needs; you anticipate them, opening avenues for proactive engagements that positively impact both relationships and revenue.

Omnichannel communication: an overview

Omnichannel communication is a customer-centric approach that integrates different methods of communication and business channels into a unified, seamless experience for prospective and existing customers.

Omnichannel communication goes beyond just offering multiple avenues for customer interaction; it creates a seamless and integrated experience across all touchpoints. 

How omnichannel works

Omnichannel communication focuses on three key facets—data unification, fluidity of customer interactions, and data-driven insights. By focusing on these key tenets, omnichannel communication moves beyond being a buzzword to a strategic approach that places the customer at the center of your business operations. This strategy allows retailers to deliver an experience that is consistent, contextually relevant, and highly personalized.

Data unification

Centralizing customer data from various digital channels like email, social media, and in-store interactions enables a more consistent and personalized experience. Also, it serves as the foundation for customer profiles. These profiles are critical for delivering targeted offers, rewards, and personalized service to shoppers.

Fluidity of customer interactions

Customers don’t experience channels; they experience your brand. They want to transition effortlessly between online chats, phone calls, and physical visits and have a conversation pick up right where it left off. This seamlessness is particularly beneficial for ecommerce retailers, who can use these channels to provide real-time updates such as stock availability or order status, enhancing customer satisfaction and reducing friction.

Data-driven insights 

Turn data into actionable insights. By analyzing integrated data across platforms, you can discern valuable patterns in customer behavior and preferences, allowing you to continuously refine your marketing strategies and improve the overall shopping experience.

Omnichannel communication moves beyond being a buzzword to a strategic approach that places the customer at the center of your business operations.

Omnichannel communication in action

While the concept sounds promising, how does it manifest for a single brand?

Graza excels at omnichannel communication, offering its customers a seamless and enriched experience across various touchpoints. 

Using Gorgias Live Chat, they provide real-time customer support, resolving queries when customer service reps are online. As an alternative, their customer service email channel serves as both a satisfaction tool and a means for personalized marketing, sending targeted offers. 

On social media platforms — like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram — they respond to customer inquiries and engage the community with educational content about their single-origin olive oils. 

This multi-layered approach ensures that every interaction is not just a transaction but an opportunity to deepen the relationship. The outcome is higher customer satisfaction and increased brand loyalty, leading to repeat purchases and a more robust bottom line.

Omnichannel communication vs. multichannel communication

We’re in a platform renaissance: retailers now have many ways to connect with customers. 

However, not all channel strategies are created equal. Understanding the differences between omnichannel and multichannel approaches is critical to developing a communication plan that meets customer expectations. 

Data integration sets omnichannel apart

Both omnichannel and multichannel strategies use multiple channels for customer engagement. Omnichannel takes it a step further by integrating data across these platforms. This provides cohesive and personalized customer experiences, rather than fragmented interactions that are often the result of multichannel approaches.

Customer continuity is a hallmark of omnichannel

An omnichannel strategy focuses on offering a seamless customer experience across all touchpoints, whereas multichannel often treats each channel as an isolated silo. This can result in a disjointed and less satisfying journey for customers who hop from one channel to another, asking the same question to different customer service reps.

Instant communication and real-time interaction

Omnichannel doesn’t just collect data; it leverages real-time analytics. This level of insight can drive data-driven decision-making, which is generally absent in multichannel strategies. This makes multichannel less effective for optimizing customer engagement and marketing efforts.

More tech setup for better communication

To make an omnichannel strategy work, you need strong tech systems that bring together data and tasks from different channels. While this may cost more at first compared to simpler multichannel setups, the benefit is happier customers and smoother day-to-day running of your business.

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Different channels to focus on

In the retail landscape, multiple channels connect your brand and your customers. To harness the full power of an omnichannel strategy, you need to focus on integrating different types of customer service and specific channels that offer different advantages for customer engagement. 

Selecting the right mix of channels allows you to meet your customers where they are and offer them a consistent and seamless brand experience. Keep in mind that different communication channels have different customer expectations. According to data collected by Gorgias from over 12,000 ecommerce brands, here are the average response times for different communication channels:

Email

• Below average: 1 day
• Average:12 - 24 hours
• Above average: Under 4 hours
• Stellar: Under 1 hour

Social media

• Below average: 1 day
• Average:12 - 24 hours
• Above average: Under 4 hours
• Stellar: Under 15 minutes

SMS

• Below average: 1 hour
• Average: 10 minutes
• Above average: Under 5 minutes
• Stellar: Under 1 minute

Live chat

• Below average: 1 hour
• Average: 10 minutes
• Above average: Under 5 minutes
• Stellar: Under 1 minute

With that in mind, here are some channels to consider including in your own omnichannel communications strategy:

Email

Email remains a powerful tool for businesses to speak to customers, allowing for targeted marketing campaigns tailored to specific customer segments. Personalized follow-up emails are also critical for nurturing long-term customer relationships and encouraging repeat purchases.

SMS

SMS is an increasingly effective channel for businesses, offering real-time customer engagement. Targeted SMS campaigns can reach specific customer groups with timely offers and updates, while personalized follow-up messages help sustain long-term relationships and promote repeat business.

Social media

Platforms like Facebook and Instagram facilitate immediate customer engagement and provide a wealth of data on customer preferences and behavior. This data can be integrated into your larger omnichannel strategy to refine marketing campaigns and product offerings.

Live chat

Live chat offers real-time, on-site customer support, which can drastically improve conversion rates. Resolving customer queries and concerns in real time removes barriers to purchase and enhances customer satisfaction.

Mobile app

A dedicated mobile app can be a hub for personalized promotions and a streamlined shopping experience. A well-designed app can significantly boost customer engagement, build loyalty, and even integrate with your in-store experiences.

In-store experience

Physical stores are not just about sales; they offer tactile and immediate experiences that are challenging to replicate online. They also provide opportunities for cross-promotion with online channels, making a thoughtful in-store experience a vital part of a cohesive omnichannel strategy.

Phone support

Even in the digital age, phone support retains its value. According to a report, 43% of consumers favor non-digital customer service methods, such as in-person consultations or phone calls. Many customers prefer the immediacy and personal touch of voice support, especially for resolving complex queries or deciding about high-ticket items.

The impact that an omnichannel strategy can have on your company

Implementing an omnichannel strategy has far-reaching implications for your business, affecting everything from customer engagement to your bottom line. Here, we delve into how this integrated approach can drive revenue, increase customer loyalty, and offer other pivotal advantages for your ecommerce business.

Boost brand awareness and reach

A solid omnichannel strategy amplifies brand awareness by offering unified messaging across all customer touchpoints, whether social media, email, or in-store interactions. 

This consistency strengthens brand recognition and facilitates customer engagement as they know what to expect from your brand. This multi-pronged strategy, leveraging both digital and traditional channels, ensures you’re where your customers are.

Parade, an undergarment brand committed to comfort and inclusivity, maintains a solid social media presence that includes customer support on platforms like Instagram and Facebook. Using Gorgias tools, Parade offers customers a seamless omnichannel communication experience.

Drive more revenue

Omnichannel communication isn’t just about convenience — it’s a revenue multiplier. Customers who feel understood and valued across all touchpoints are more likely to become repeat buyers. This is achieved by harnessing data for personalization and ensuring consistent, real-time communication. Here’s how:

• Personalized offers. Tailoring offers to individual customer behavior increases both engagement and spending. 
• Seamless interaction. Providing consistent and timely responses across channels boosts customer trust and satisfaction, further fueling revenue growth. 
• Real-time updates. Immediate inventory updates across platforms prevent stock-out situations, safeguarding potential sales. 

Increase customer loyalty and satisfaction

Earning customer loyalty is about creating brand advocates through consistently exceeding expectations. Exceeding expectations across all channels fosters a sense of reliability and trust in your brand. Here’s how:

• Brand credibility. By delivering a consistent and high-quality experience across all touchpoints, your brand becomes a trusted name that customers gravitate back to.
• Immediate support. Real-time support minimizes customer wait times and leads to higher satisfaction and positive reviews. 
• Enhanced loyalty programs. Managing loyalty programs with unified data allows tailored rewards based on individual customer behavior, increasing lifetime value. 

Bychari boosts brand trust through omnichannel communication

BYCHARI is a luxury jewelry brand established in 2012, known for its unique and modern handmade pieces designed for women who desire luxury while appreciating simplicity. The brand excels in omnichannel communication, offering a variety of customer touchpoints, including a contact form, live chat powered by Gorgias, calls, and emails. 

To empower customers 24/7, especially when live support is unavailable, BYCHARI also provides self-service options like comprehensive FAQs, and uses Gorgias Flows to automate tasks such as order tracking and management.

Optimize marketing efficiency

Centralized data and analytics make your marketing campaigns smarter and more efficient. When you understand your customers’ behaviors and preference across channels, your targeting becomes dynamic and your messaging more personalized. Here’s how:

• Clearer ROI tracking. Aggregating data from multiple channels into one dashboard sharpens your view of ROI, enabling quicker strategy adjustments. 
• Channel-specific insights. Detailed analytics help pinpoint which channels are driving customer conversion and engagement more effectively.  
• Efficient personalization. Using cross-channel data, both customer service and marketing teams can tailor their interactions, saving time while boosting customer engagement. 

Enhance customer data analysis

A holistic view of customer data from multiple touchpoints uncovers insights that can drive quick, informed decisions. This rich data not only refines marketing efforts but also helps product teams tailor their offerings. Here’s how: 

• Actionable insights. Integrated analytics convert behavioral patterns into actionable tactics for sales and marketing adjustments. 
• Improved customer segmentation. Comprehensive data allows for more precise customer categorization, enabling highly targeted campaigns. 
• Maximized impact. This granular level of data enhances the effectiveness of each customer interaction, contributing to long-term business success. 

How to create an omnichannel communication strategy

An omnichannel communication strategy can transform customer engagement and drive meaningful business results. This section will guide you through the essential steps for crafting a practical omnichannel approach that aligns with your retail goals.

1) Measure engagement across channels

Understanding your customer’s journey begins with measuring engagement across multiple channels. Use analytics tools to capture key metrics such as click-through rates and time spent on various pages, providing a quantitative foundation for your omnichannel communication strategy. By comparing these performance metrics, you gain insights into which channels are most effective in capturing and holding customer attention.

While these analytics can offer a comprehensive view of customer activity on marketing platforms, don’t overlook support channels. Platforms like Gorgias can measure engagement metrics within customer support, supplementing your overall data collection. Gorgias Support Performance serves as a control center for tracking key metrics such as ticket volume and agent activity, offering actionable insights to improve customer experience and measure engagement across various platforms.

Combining this support data with your broader analytics will provide a fuller understanding of customer engagement, equipping you to refine your omnichannel strategy.

2) Focus on brand voice and values in employee training

Employee training ensures that your omnichannel communication strategy reflects your brand’s voice and values. Developing a robust employee training program can instill these crucial elements in all customer-facing personnel, setting the stage for consistent brand representation. Real-life scenarios can serve as effective teaching tools, guiding employees on maintaining branding consistency during interactions, whether via email, social media, or SMS.

Given that companies evolve, your training materials must keep pace with any shifts in brand messaging or objectives. Regular updates to these resources can help your support team adapt to changes and continue to offer an aligned and cohesive customer experience across all touch points. 

Don’t miss our article on customer service training, which provides 15 valuable activities your team can try to improve customer interactions.

3) Centralize customer data

When creating an effective omnichannel communication strategy, the importance of centralizing customer data can’t be overstated. A CRM system aggregating customer information from various touch points into one database is invaluable. It brings together disparate data and provides an integrated view of customer interactions, helping your team make data-driven decisions.

To realize the full potential of this centralized approach, ensure your CRM seamlessly integrates with all communication channels your company uses, enabling real-time data updates. Data from customer support platforms like Gorgias can then be merged with the information in your CRM, enhancing the quality and depth of the customer profiles that drive your omnichannel strategy.

4) Foster interdepartmental collaboration

Effective omnichannel communication necessitates collaboration that extends beyond the confines of individual departments. One approach is to conduct regular cross-departmental meetings where teams can share and discuss customer data insights. This guarantees everyone is on the same page about customer behaviors and needs, contributing to a holistic customer engagement strategy.

All departments should be aligned to respond more cohesively to customer needs. Amanda Kwasniewicz, the VP of Customer Experience at Love Wellness, ensures that her team collaborates broadly by having an internal communication channel for discussing customer concerns. 

“We have a channel in Slack dedicated to customer feedback,” she says. “Dropping in feedback is part of the team’s daily and weekly responsibilities, which helps them get familiar with the content. It also allows our team to dissect them and collaborate on how we can improve.”

Establish a feedback loop, particularly with customer service, to continually share frequently encountered customer issues and trends. This feedback can catalyze improving products, services, and customer communication strategies.

5) Deliver personalized messages on customers’ channels of choice

Elevate your omnichannel strategy by tailoring your communications to the specific channels your customers prefer. Leveraging your centralized customer data, identify which channels—email, social media, or in-app notifications—are most effective for reaching your audience. Then, craft personalized messages that are not generic but informed by customer behavior and past interactions.

Continuously monitor how well personalized customer service resonates with your customers by tracking engagement metrics such as click-through and open rates. Equally important is collecting and analyzing customer feedback to understand the qualitative impact of your efforts. Based on these insights, make necessary adjustments to your messaging strategy, ensuring it remains aligned with customer preferences and behavior.

6) Harness automation to interact with customers 24/7

According to a report from Statista, 88% of consumers anticipate that brands will offer self-service support options. Automation is vital for maintaining a 24/7 connection with your customers. Implement chatbots on your website and social media channels to answer frequently asked questions immediately, enhancing user experience and satisfaction through proactive customer service. 

Employ customer experience automation tools like Gorgias Automate to configure automated Flows for common customer queries. Fable, a brand dedicated to elevating dining experiences with premium dinnerware, utilizes Automate to provide round-the-clock customer service. Their automated flows are designed to swiftly answer common customer queries, such as active discounts and return procedures, ensuring customers can always find the information they need.

Create an omnichannel customer experience with Gorgias

Despite the benefits of a unified approach to customer communication, a 2022 report found that only 12% of digital platforms are “highly integrated.” Gorgias can be your key partner in achieving an omnichannel communication strategy, offering core helpdesk capabilities designed to seamlessly integrate customer interactions across multiple channels. Gorgias ensures that you meet and exceed customer expectations while driving revenue.

Data enrichment for agents communicating with customers

Gorgias equips agents with enriched customer profiles, pooling data from different channels — including social media, voice, and SMS — to provide context during interactions. This feature allows for quicker, more accurate support, as agents don’t have to switch between each communication platform to gather customer history.

A centralized hub to manage customer interactions

Gorgias is a one-stop hub, consolidating communications from email, chat, social media, and more, enabling easier management and response. The centralized system facilitates proactive support, which can directly impact sales by addressing customer concerns before they abandon their shopping carts.

Tools to customize branding in different channels

Gorgias allows you to maintain consistent branding by customizing the look and feel of your customer support channels. This ensures that no matter the channel, customers always have a uniform omnichannel experience that reinforces brand identity and trust.

Cupcakes and Cashmere, founded by Emily Schuman in 2017, has gained a devoted following for its curated jewelry, loungewear, and home goods. To extend this trust and cohesiveness into customer support, the brand uses Gorgias, its chat widget color-matched to the brand’s palette, ensuring a visually seamless and engaging user experience across its website.

Explore Gorgias for omnichannel communication solutions

If you’re focused on streamlining customer interactions across various channels, consider exploring what Gorgias offers. With features that centralize communication, enrich agent information, and ensure brand consistency, Gorgias aims to make the omnichannel communication strategy more manageable and effective for ecommerce retailers. 

Take a closer look to see how these capabilities could fit into your existing operations and customer engagement efforts. To learn more about Gorgias, book your demo today.

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TL;DR:

• Email is a common customer service channel but can be slow and challenging to manage.
• To maximize email as a support channel, use it as a stepping stone to faster channels.
• Email allows for longer, more detailed responses and is accessible on all devices.
• To effectively use email, use contact forms instead of listing an email address, funnel customers to faster channels when possible, prioritize tickets by topic and urgency, use templates for consistency, enrich emails with customer and order information, and supplement emails with self-service resources.

As of June 2022, 64% of US customers prefer email when contacting brands, so it’s clear why email is a mainstay in customer support programs. Even still, the Internet’s snail mail can sometimes translate to a slow and negative experience. 

So, how do you maximize email as a customer service channel? You use it as a stepping stone to point customers to faster support channels.

Email is simply the medium; the resources are your answer. From including Help Center articles in your emails to replacing a raw mailto link with a user-friendly contact form, we’ll present plenty of ways to transform email into an efficient support channel.

The good and bad of email as a customer service channel

Like all channels, email has its benefits and weaknesses, but you can’t rely on it alone. Here’s what you can expect from email as a customer service channel.

The good 👍

Email is a commonly preferred channel for customers

It would be unwise to skip offering email support when more than half of customers prefer it over social media. Email support provides a vital bridge to connect with customers, especially if you’re a DTC business that can't engage with your shoppers in person.

Email allows for longer, more detailed responses to inquiries 

Email can illustrate solutions for customers with embedded links, images, and attachments — something instant channels like social media DMs and SMS would handle with more difficulty.

For example, look below at Dr. Squatch’s eyecatching promotional email. Their use of multiple high-quality images, call-to-action buttons, social links, and logos proves how email can accommodate the most elaborate messages.

Email is accessible

If you have a digital footprint, email is almost always a requirement. You need it when creating a new account or when contacting people. It’s even accessible on all devices. Email’s prevalence means customers will expect online stores to offer email support at the very least.

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The bad 👎

Email tends to be a slower channel

The average first response time for email is 7 hours and 34 minutes. While most people tolerate how slow email is, it still doesn’t make for the best customer service experience. Urgent customer questions about product defects or bank account issues require rapid responses that other channels are better suited for.

Email inquiries can be challenging to categorize and prioritize

Email allows for more creative liberty than other messaging channels but also has downsides. Since customers are free to format their own subject lines and messages, the responsibility of sorting through your inbox is on your agents. 

The problem here isn’t just about maintaining a clean workspace but ensuring urgent messages like angry customer emails aren’t overlooked due to a messy inbox.

How to use email as part of your customer support program

Support teams often feel their inbox is an obstacle course rife with concerned customers and a flood of recurring questions. Luckily, there’s a solution: use a customer service helpdesk that can consolidate email and other support tickets to keep your inbox and support team at bay.

Here’s how to effectively use email as a support channel with a helpdesk like Gorgias.

Don’t list an email address — use contact forms instead

Why? To maintain organization 🗂️ and increase service quality ✨

Plainly leaving your email address on your contact page can be intimidating for customers. What should they put in the subject line? Will they actually get a reply back? Since this contact method has practically no guidelines, you’ll want to set parameters to make reaching out more approachable.

How? Do away with a raw email link and use a contact form. Contact forms provide structure to emails. Thanks to step-by-step guidance through drop-down menus and required fields, you can sort emails even before they reach you.

💡 Tip: We recommend that merchants don't direct customers to an email address for support. Instead, use a contact form to intake email support. Contact forms are superior because messages get structural data that helps customer service agents categorize and prioritize incoming tickets.

Funnel customers to faster channels when you can

Why? To increase customer satisfaction (CSAT) score 👍

Don’t forget that you can start an interaction via email and move to a different channel. This tactic isn't new — it's known as omnichannel communication. After all, 46% of customers expect a response time of 4 hours or less, and if switching support channels is the key to providing faster service, then go for it.

How? Let’s say a panicked customer wants to reverse duplicate charges on their credit card ASAP. This interaction could take multiple back and forths spanning several business days. Instead, you can reap the benefits of voice support, SMS or WhatsApp by directing them to your phone number.

“Being able to organize and divert tickets internally, having a good FAQ, making sure that you're actually solving the problems instead of putting band-aids on them, all goes into [reducing] resolution time.” —Zoe Kahn, Manager of CX & Retention at Chomps

Prioritize tickets by topic and urgency

Why? To maintain organization 🗂️ and increase customer retention 🤝

A common customer service mistake is treating tickets on a first-come-first-serve basis. This can lead to more unhappy customers because some tickets are less urgent than others. This is where prioritization can be effective.

How? First, categorize incoming tickets with Gorgias Rules and Tags. Do this by determining the conditions for which tickets should be tagged with an “Urgent” tag. For example, emails containing the word “cancel” will be tagged “Urgent.” Now your most high-value tickets will be solved and your loyal customers won’t need to worry.

How to prioritize unsatisfied customers: Set up a Rule to identify and auto-tag customer complaints as Urgent so you can turn their day around with exceptional customer service.

Use templates to create a consistent standard of service

Why? To increase service quality ✨ and enforce brand voice 🗣️

Being an advocate for personalized customer service doesn’t mean automation needs to be off-limits. Automation can and should be your best friend. 

Automating customer service reduces response times and standardizes service quality. Automation can also capture data from customer interactions, letting support teams make data-driven improvements to their operations.

How? Use Macros (pre-written sample emails) to immediately answer questions about common topics, such as shipping information, return policies, and product-specific questions. Macros are a convenient way to compose professional messages, like customer apology emails, while allowing agents to add a personal touch.

📚 Related: The risks & rewards of customer service automation

Enrich emails with customer and order information

Why? To increase customer satisfaction 👍 and service quality ✨

The biggest challenge about sending emails as a business is striking a balance between valuable and bothersome. It’s not only about crafting attractive promotional emails but making even the most mundane “Your order has shipped!” emails pop with purpose.

How? Integrate your ecommerce platform of choice, whether it’s Shopify, BigCommerce, or Magento (Adobe Commerce), with Gorgias. You can view customer information from your chosen platform in the Customer Sidebar and extract the data to automatically populate emails.

Supplement emails with self-service resources

Why? To increase customer satisfaction score 👍 and reduce ticket volume 🔻

In ecommerce, a self-service resource is any resource that answers customer issues without talking to an agent. They include a Help Center (or knowledge base), FAQs, or automated chat widgets. 

How? Create a Help Center with linkable articles that can be inserted into customer support emails. This is especially useful for new customers who may want to ask several frequently asked questions. A Help Center effectively acts as technical support, while freeing up agents to deal with more unique tickets.

A successful customer support program should maximize self-service options to minimize manual effort.

Metrics to track your email performance

How well are you serving your customers through email? The answer lies in measuring how quickly you accomplish support tasks like opening and closing a ticket. But it's not only about speed. Tracking metrics is invaluable for troubleshooting gaps in your customer service operations.

Here are three metrics that can shed a light on how well your customer support team is using email.

Average first response time

Average first response time is the average time it takes for your customer service team to send the first response to a customer after receiving a request. 

🕒 Industry average: 18 hours (Timetoreply)

🟢 Time to aim for: Under 4 hours

🔻 What slows it down: Inadequate staffing, lack of automation, and poor prioritization

➕ How to improve it: Use automation like Rules, Tags, Macros, and more self-service options

Average resolution time

Average resolution time refers to the average amount of time it takes to resolve or address a specific issue or request, typically measured in hours or days.

🕒 Industry average: 18.1 hours (Gorgias) 

🟢 Time to aim for: Same day

🔻 What slows it down: Inefficient process, disorganized inbox, and complex issues

➕ How to improve it: Reroute tickets to faster channels like voice, and build self-service options like a Help Center

First contact resolution rate

First contact resolution rate or FCR rate measures the rate of resolving a customer inquiry within the first interaction. An excellent FCR rate indicates that your support team is well-trained to be able to solve issues efficiently.

🕒 Industry standard: 70% (Fullview)

🟢 Rate to aim for: 78% (Qualtrics)

🔻 What slows it down: Complex issues and lack of customer service skills training

➕ How to improve it: Add more self-service options, ensure agents are given complete information on product/service knowledge and resolution techniques

[Callout] How to calculate FCR: Total number of requests resolved with one interaction in a single time period / the total number of requests in the same time period

Once you’ve got the hang of the basics, you can refine your operation by tracking 25 more customer support metrics.

Manage email — and all your other channels — with Gorgias

Email is stronger when combined with other channels — no one knows this better than multitasking expert Gorgias. 

As a powerful helpdesk tool, Gorgias offers omnichannel support and powerful automation features like Macros and Rules that make managing email effortless. You can even supercharge Gorgias with integrations to ecommerce apps like Shopify, Yotpo, and Shipbob to keep you focused on delivering support without distractions. 

Ready to bring in a crowd of happy customers? Book a demo now.

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‎Today, 80% of customers say the experience a company provides is just as necessary as its products or services. Conversational customer support can provide more memorable experiences that keep shoppers engaged long-term.

And, conversational customer support doesn’t demand an endless investment of personal time. With the right tools and strategies, you can exceed customer expectations.

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What is conversational customer service?

Conversational customer support is an interactive approach to assisting customers with their queries and concerns. This communication style uses a range of channels, including live chat, messaging apps, chatbots, and even voice support, to engage customers in interactive and often real-time conversations across the customer journey.

The goal is to create a friendly and genuine interaction, which in turn enhances customer satisfaction, builds brand loyalty, and fosters long-term relationships with their customers. Consumers who rate a company's service as "good" are 38% more likely to recommend that company (according to the Qualtrics XM Institute). 

Advantages of conversational customer service vs. traditional

When you walk into a physical store, you expect the staff to be knowledgeable, friendly, and ready to assist you. 

The same principle applies to online shopping. However, traditional customer support often involves shoppers searching across a website for a contact center to make a phone call, where they’re then placed on long holds while waiting to contact a real human. 

Conversational customer support, on the other hand, offers immediate responses, operates 24/7, and uses natural language processing for a more efficient and convenient customer experience. In return, businesses see the following benefits: 

Faster responses, anytime, anywhere

Today's customers expect rapid responses. According to Hubspot research, 2/3 of customers expect a reply in under 10 minutes. Embracing a conversational approach and automating your customer support channels can help you meet these expectations. 

One way to achieve this is with Gorgias Automate, which allows you to offer 24/7 support and can answer up to 60% of your most repetitive tickets with a 0-second response time. 

More personalized experiences, more profits

Personalization is one of the most important pillars of conversational service. But “personalization” has become a bit of a blanket statement over the years, so what does it actually mean? 

Personalized customer support is about assisting customers based on their specific needs, preferences, and history with a business. It goes beyond generic responses and addresses customers on a personal level by using relevant data like purchase history and intent-based engagement.

That’s why it’s crucial to use a support platform that can pull relevant information about customers from the rest of your ecommerce tech stack (CRM, marketing automation, logistics), making it easier to automate tailored responses and give your agents all of the context they need to help customers efficiently.

Excellent customer service = more revenue

Conversational customer service isn’t just good for improving customer satisfaction scores; it’s also excellent for your bottom line. McKinsey research has shown that improving the customer experience has increased sales revenues by 2-7% and profitability by 1-2%.

Customers at Gorgias often see this kind of success. For example, skincare brand Topicals increased sales by 78% using conversational customer support. Specifically, the brand uses Quick Response Flows to automate answers to common questions, such as: 

• How should I use the Faded Serum?
• Where do you ship?
• How do I apply to the Ambassador Program?
• How do I find the right products for my skin type?

All of this takes place within a self-service chat. These chat flows also guide shoppers to additional helpful resources in Topicals' Help Center or product pages. If a customer still has unanswered questions, a customer support agent can take over the conversation and chat with them directly.

Cost efficiency through automation

Businesses often avoid personalized support due to perceived cost and time constraints. However, providing personalized service can actually increase customer loyalty and boost revenue.

Automation, intelligent responses, and customer knowledge bases abstract away the tedious, repetitive questions support teams get daily. This frees up their time, allowing them to focus on driving conversions through pre-sales support and building strong customer relationships. 

Take Stoov, the Dutch company known for its innovative heating cushions. A conversational approach to customer support helped Stoov achieve 10% in cost savings.

Thankfully, automation has come a long way since its earlier days. (We all remember those generic, one-size-fits-all answers that clearly came from a robot.) 

Some helpdesks like Gorgias offer more interactive automation, which provides personalized answers based on customer inputs and key phrases.

Multichannel accessibility

Conversational customer service can be seamlessly deployed across various communication channels, including websites, mobile apps, messaging apps, and social media platforms. 

Taking a cross-channel approach means businesses (and their customers) aren’t limited to a single mode of communication. Instead, they can engage with customers across various channels, catering to diverse preferences and enhancing overall convenience.

Again—offering customer support across various channels doesn’t have to be challenging to manage. 

Gorgias pulls in customer conversations from channels like email, SMS, Messenger, WhatsApp, and more to view and respond to customers in a single dashboard. Omnichannel communication demonstrates a company’s commitment to being present and responsive wherever their customers may be.

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6 conversational customer service channels

As you know, ​​one size doesn't fit all when it comes to customer service. Every shopper has their preference, so a blend of automated assistance and human touchpoints is necessary for exceptional customer support. 

Let’s talk about six key channels to leverage.

1) Live chat

Live chat is like having a helpful assistant available at the click of a button. It involves instant, text-based communication between a customer and a live support agent, accessible through a website or messaging platform. 

This approach provides immediate assistance, helps resolve issues promptly, and adds a personalized touch to customer interactions. 

One of our favorite examples is from Princess Polly. In its live chat widget, Princess Polly highlights several FAQs upfront. These are based on the most common questions the support team gets and help customers be more self-serve. Plus, it’s easy for the customer to get in touch with a live agent if they still need support.

2) Phone support

Phone support is the classic, tried-and-true method of customer service. Customers can call the business directly to seek assistance, ask questions, or resolve issues. Interaction happens in real-time with live human agents, creating a direct and personal connection.

Did you know an annual study on buyer behavior shows that 59% of consumers prefer the traditional medium of phone calls to reach customer support representatives?

In other words—yes, shoppers still use phone support, and it can be beneficial for you to offer it.

You can also manage phone support with the rest of your channels under one roof using Gorgias. For example, Try The World, a gourmet subscription service, uses live chat, email, and phone support as its three primary support channels. 

"Another big time-saver is the fact that chats, emails, and phone calls are united under one customer view. This way, when a customer calls, we immediately see previous conversations with them."
- Amanda, Customer Support Manager, Try The World

After switching to Gorgias as its helpdesk to centralize all support queries, the team also integrated the helpdesk with Chargify and Shopify to pull in subscription and order data. All this information is readily available for each support agent — whether they’re providing support via phone or live chat. 

This approach transformed Try The World’s efficiency — as a result, the team increased ticket handling from 80 to 120 per day while reducing response time to just one business day.

3) SMS and WhatsApp

Messaging apps like SMS and WhatsApp have become integral parts of our daily communication. Both of these channels are helpful for brands that want to offer “on-the-go support.” 

While these two channels are great for marketing purposes, they’re also perfect support channels. Think about it: SMS always has the highest open rates and is one of the most convenient ways for shoppers to connect with the brands they love.

As a support channel, you can complement your SMS marketing efforts. A good example of this is from Printfresh. The Printfresh team uses SMS often to share updates with customers. Customers can also use the same number to text the brand back and ask any support-related questions. 

4) Email support and ticketing systems

While not instant like live chat, email and ticketing systems allow customers to submit inquiries or issues, which support agents address in an organized manner. Automated responses and ticket tracking enhance the efficiency of this method. 

You may be wondering, how is email support conversational? First off, conversational support doesn’t always have to be in real-time. 

Sometimes, providing well-thought-out, detailed responses via email or tickets can be equally effective, allowing customers to digest information at their own pace. 

When you’re pairing these responses with personalized information (perhaps you already know the customer’s size, preferred tastes, or skin type), you’ll be able to respond effectively and guide customers through their decision-making.

Love Your Melon uses this approach with customer service email and social media support. Pulling Shopify variables into Gorgias, the team enables Macros to streamline personalized responses. 

Aside from using usual variables in canned responses, such as the requester's name, email, or the support agent’s name, Macros allow users to add information pulled from Shopify. These order-specific variables include the order ID, the tracking URL of the last order, the delivery status, the shipping address, and many others.

With this single strategy, Love Your Melon can answer 25% of tickets automatically, reducing response time from 10 minutes to a few seconds.

5) Social media support

For the most part, social media support is straightforward: it involves engaging with customers through social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram. 

You can take this strategy one step further by responding to comments on these channels—all under the same roof that you handle other conversations.

Shinesty uses Gorgias to address their Facebook ad comments. And since they’re using automated responses to answer common questions, the customer support team has more time to get creative with responses to social comments (which has driven more conversions for the brand). 

The best part? Your CS team doesn’t all have to share a single login anymore 😉

“The Facebook ad commenting has been very interesting. People have been converting right there, thanks to a simple social interaction.”
- Cody Szymanski, Customer Experience Manager, Shinesty

6) Self-serve portals

Customer knowledge bases might not involve direct human interaction, but they provide customers with a conversational interface to find information, troubleshoot problems, or access FAQs independently. 

These portals are designed to be user-friendly and intuitive, empowering customers to find solutions on their own. 

Tools like Gorgias’ Quick Responses via Gorgias Automate or article recommendations in live chat enhance the conversational aspect, allowing self-service portals to feed into chat interactions and make the experience even more engaging.

BrüMate's Help Center is a good one to get inspiration from. BrüMate addresses two common customer queries at the top of the page: returns policy and product compatibility, ensuring quick answers without scrolling.

In case customers aren’t on the knowledge base, the same FAQs are featured in the brand’s live chat. These direct customers to answers immediately, but they can still reach out to talk to someone directly if they need to.

“We have a great help center that attracts tens of thousands of monthly visitors who are then redirected back to the main site and in this circular motion where we don't want those customers to drop off." —Colin Waters, Director of Customer Experience at The Feed & former Associate Director of Customer Experience at BrüMate

Implement conversational customer service in 7 steps

Now that you know it’s easier to manage conversational customer support with the right tools, here are seven steps to implement this strategy without extra effort from your team.

1) Centralize customer interactions with a helpdesk 

Surprisingly, more brands than you realize are handling support by logging in and out of multiple channels. Imagine how much time you would save if you could see every email, phone call, comment, and ticket under one roof.

The first step to conversational customer support is setting up a helpdesk. Centralizing customer interactions allows your team to view message histories across all channels in one unified interface. 

With over 65+ integrations across the ecommerce tech stack, Gorgias gives teams a comprehensive view of customer interactions and data, eliminating guesswork and enhancing efficiency.

2) Automate repetitive queries

Save your agents from repetitive typing. Apply automation tools like rules to share templated responses (called Macros in Gorgias) across support channels, speeding up responses and ensuring consistency. 

And even after responding, you can automate more actions in your workflow. This could be to assign a ticket to an agent, add tags, or even cancel/refund an order right away.

Here’s an example of a Macro being used by the Darn Good Yarn team.

3) Prioritize urgent tickets automatically

Not all customer issues are equal. To solve this, implement rules that automatically prioritize urgent or important tickets. By prioritizing different issues, you enhance customer satisfaction and demonstrate your commitment to resolving the most important concerns promptly.

For example, if you’re in the midst of a busy holiday season, you’ll want to prioritize tickets like address change requests over others. 

4) Route tickets based on agent specialization

Do you have a list of VIP customers? Or agents who specialize in certain products or support channels over others? 

Prioritizing tickets based on agent specialization is one way to increase efficiency so your agents can use their expertise to help shoppers quickly. This also enhances problem-resolution efficiency. 

Consider creating dedicated views that consolidate inquiries so specific agents see only what’s relevant to them. 

5) Empower agents with rich customer data

According to Salesforce research, 63% of consumers expect businesses to know their unique needs and expectations. 

By equipping your agents with valuable insights into customer history and preferences, your agents can personalize interactions and foster meaningful conversations. 

Gorgias pulls in customer information like past order history, support tickets, social media comments, or subscription status. Agents can see all of a customer's past history with a brand in one place when they’re talking with them. This allows support teams to get the full picture of every customer they’re chatting with. 

6) Provide proactive pre-sales support and engagement

One way to be conversational in your customer support is to anticipate customer needs and reach out proactively. That means sharing self-service resources like a help center or FAQ page. It also means addressing pre-sales questions that might be blocking them from making a purchase or making the right purchase. 

BrüMate accomplishes this by featuring an interactive product finder quiz in its customer knowledge base: 

7) Make it easy for customers to engage with agents

Remember, offering conversational support is only effective if it's easy for customers to reach out. 

You can do this by prominently featuring support CTAs across your site, from product pages to emails and footer links. Every transactional email can subtly highlight how to reach support, ensuring customers know how and when to engage. 

Make customer support conversational with Gorgias

Conversational customer service bridges the gap between face-to-face interactions and online transactions. But it’s not just about addressing customer concerns; it's about creating meaningful connections and positive experiences, which are essential for customer retention and brand advocacy.

A key part of a conversational support strategy is simplifying the complexity of handling multiple channels. Every customer interaction and data point needs to live under one roof. Otherwise, it’s too difficult for teams to manage.

This is exactly what Gorgias does. We don’t want brands to have to settle for ordinary customer experiences. Your support is your foundation, and it should be easy to manage.

Sign up for free here to see how you can get more conversational with customers.

TL;DR:

• Customer experience automation (CXA) can enhance revenue and increase customer satisfaction.
• CXA platforms convert manual tasks into automatic processes, improving customer service operations.
• Implementing CXA improves ROI, resolves issues faster, and delivers personalized experiences at scale.
• Real-world examples show how automation can improve customer experience and boost conversions.

The thought of automating repetitive customer service tasks has likely crossed your mind. But often, that consideration is followed by a train of concerns: Will automation eliminate personal touch? Will it reduce the quality of customer service? Will it replace human agents?

In reality, customer service automation (CXA) can enhance your revenue and increase customer satisfaction.

Read on to learn more about CXA and get four easy ways to automate. We'll also share a story of how one company successfully implemented CXA and gained 23% more conversions.

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What is customer experience automation (CXA)? 

Customer experience automation (CXA) refers to the process of automating and enhancing the interactions that customers have with a business. It involves using automation tools like a helpdesk, Macros, Rules, and artificial intelligence to automate various aspects of customer engagement, from pre-sales and support to the post-purchase stage.

What is a customer experience automation platform? 

A customer experience automation platform is a tool that can convert manual customer experience tasks into automatic processes. CXA platforms aim to alleviate the workload of human customer service agents while optimizing customer service operations.

Gorgias, for instance, is a leading example of a CXA platform, offering a wide range of powerful features, such as:

• Efficient ticket triage
• Automated responses across various channels
• Automated order management
• Automated emails
• Smart Article Recommendations via Chat and email
• Powerful integrations with ecommerce platforms‎
  

The impact that CXA can have on your customer experience (and bottom line)

Implementing CXA is not just about lightening your team's workload, it's a transformative strategy that greatly influences how customers interact with and perceive your brand. CXA ensures that your team can focus on more intricate interactions, resulting in an improved ROI, increased customer loyalty, and offering personalized experiences at scale.

Improve ROI for your support & experience teams

Customer service agents who have poor impressions of their companies say they don’t have all the tools they need to do their job. Factors like clunky software and insufficient training and processes all contribute to their experience, which, in turn, affects the overall customer experience. 

The solution is to equip agents with powerful tools, like CXA, that will make their jobs easier and your customers’ experiences more enjoyable. Automation and an improved customer service ROI go hand in hand, leading to faster and more profitable customer experiences.

Help customers resolve issues faster

One of the immediate benefits of CXA is faster resolution times. With automation handling routine tasks like resolving where is my order (WISMO) requests and answering pre-sales questions, agents have more time to attend to complex support tickets and meet customer expectations with precise answers.

Deliver more personalized experiences at scale

Most automation skeptics fear losing the human touch once you bring automation into the picture. However, the reality is quite the opposite. A comprehensive CXA strategy allows support teams to express their brand voice and personality through adjustable features like pre-written templates or Macros. If your CXA platform restricts you from customizing default responses, you should find a tool that can adapt to you and your customers.

CXA in action: 4 easy ways to use automation to improve the customer experience

Now that we've covered the theory, it's time for your support team to implement CXA. Below are the top four ways to quickly incorporate customer experience automation using Gorgias Automate. We'll provide details on each feature, offer tips to get the most out of them, and showcase examples of how these strategies have worked for actual merchants.

1) Use Quick Responses to give customers instant answers to simple questions

Quick Responses are predefined replies automatically triggered when customers ask specific questions in Chat.

When to use: For teams who receive a daily flow of frequently asked questions that require them to copy and paste the same responses.

Tips: 

• Quick Responses are best for answering FAQs that have straightforward answers and don’t need elaborate explanations
• Infuse your brand messaging and vocabulary into your Quick Responses to maintain natural interactions with shoppers
• Always provide a route back to live support channels through email, live chat, phone, SMS, or social media in case customers need more assistance

Real-world results: The stationery company Ohh Deer achieved an impressive average 4.95 CSAT score and generated about $12,500 per quarter after implementing Gorgias Chat alone.

📚 Related: Why customer service chatbots aren’t a great fit for ecommerce

2) Use Tags and Rules to organize and prioritize customer tickets

Take advantage of efficient ticket triage by using Tags and Rules to ensure the most important tickets are addressed and complex tickets are routed to your most knowledgeable agents.

When to use: If urgent tickets (billing issues, product defects, and inquiries from returning customers) are getting buried in your inbox, you have a low retention rate, a high churn rate, or your inbox is disorganized.

Tips:

• Create “Urgent” and “Not Urgent” Tags to establish a streamlined prioritization process for agents to follow
• Use Rules to direct complex tickets to more experienced agents so you avoid compromising resolution times and customer satisfaction
• Create a Rule to remind agents to follow up on customers who have recently contacted your contact center

Real-world results: Drinkware brand BrüMate cut down their first response time from 5 hours to 1 minute and 30 seconds and drove $9M in revenue after they made use of Chat Campaigns and a Help Center (Gorgias’s customer knowledge base).

Colin Waters, BrüMate’s former Associate Director of Customer Experience, highlights that organizing Tags and Macros by their proper names keeps team onboarding running smoothly. He adds, “I'm very steady with naming conventions. I mean, my team must hate it. But anybody could come in and figure out what it all means without having a doctorate in CX."

3) Automate the order management, tracking, and returns process

Order management, including order creation, tracking, returns, and exchanges, is one of the aspects of customer service that is best suited to automation because of its repetitive nature.

When to use: If you get an influx of WISMO tickets and/or return-related inquiries in your inbox or need to streamline your order workflow.

Tips: 

• Enable tracking, returning, and canceling in Chat to allow customers to quickly check their orders 
• Automate order status notification emails to trigger after hitting milestones in the entire customer journey, such as order confirmations, order delivery, and post-purchase customer feedback requests
• Integrate Loop Returns with Gorgias to automate your returns process and create a returns portal

Real-world results: Jaxxon includes their Return Policy in Chat via Quick Responses and maintains an easily accessible Return Portal. By maximizing their self-service resources, they brought in a staggering 46% more in revenue.

4) Use AI to recommend Help Center articles 

Your articles shouldn’t only be found in your Help Center; make the most out of your resources by sharing them on multiple channels like Chat and email. Making your articles widespread gains you two benefits: an educated customer base and faster resolution times.

When to use: If you have a high return rate and negative customer reviews or sense a lack of understanding from your customers about your product.

Tips: 

• Insert Help Center articles into customer communications to build anticipation and proactively address issues
• Create Chat Campaigns to automate the customer education process, offering targeted information and support
• Scenarios where you can use chat campaigns: holidays and limited-time offers, for customers browsing high-value products, at checkout to reduce cart abandonment

Real-world results: After creating Chat Campaigns that displayed welcome discounts and toilet compatibility checkers to shoppers, TUSHY achieved an impressive 25% increase in revenue and improved customer satisfaction. They also brought their bounce rate down by 37%.

Success story: How Kirby Allison boosted conversions by 23% with CXA

If the previous real-world examples weren’t enough to convince you about automation’s integral role in CX, here’s another success story. 

Kirby Allison, a luxury garment care business, struggled to handle a growing volume of repetitive and time-consuming tasks. Surviving on a minuscule two-person customer support team, they were drowning in tickets outside business hours.

Once they enlisted the help of Automate, it was a weight off their shoulders. Gorgias’s multifunctional Chat provided 24/7 support with Quick Responses, self-service Order Management, and Article Recommendations.

Immediately, Kirby Allison saw a 46% increase in sales, a 23% increase in conversions, and drastically reduced response times.

If you want to make huge successes easy wins — take the first step towards transforming your customer service and book a Gorgias Automate demo today.

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It’s true that a great customer experience is key to winning happy customers — but to keep a pulse on customer satisfaction, you need to dig a little deeper. 

To understand the quality of a customer’s experience with your brand, you need to track Customer Effort Score (CES). This metric lets you evaluate your customer service efforts by tracking the level of effort a shopper must exert to fix an issue with your customer support team.  

In this article, you’ll learn exactly how to track and monitor CES, as well as how to optimize your support strategy to minimize customer effort as much as possible.  

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What is Customer Effort Score (CES)?

Customer Effort Score (CES) is a way ecommerce brands can accurately measure how much effort a customer has to exert in order to interact with your support resources. 

This metric is relevant to any interaction a shopper might have that touches your customer support strategy, like: 

• Talking with a rep through Live Chat 
• Navigating a return
• Answering tricky product questions 
• Canceling an order in progress 

The easiest way to measure customer effort score is by sending customers a survey after their interaction with customer success ends. In this survey, ask them to rate their service experience on a 1-10 point scale. 

We’ll dive into the details behind how to create a survey to measure the amount of effort your customers take shortly.  

📚 Related: 13 live chat support metrics

Why customer effort is the key to customer loyalty

No shopper wants a high-effort experience. According to The Effortless Experience, 96% of high-effort customer experiences drive a customer to be disloyal to your brand — making retention nearly impossible. 

Clearly, it's worth the effort to make life a little easier for your customers — doing so will convince many of them to shop with your brand again. 

When you calculate your customer effort score, you’re able to keep a pulse on exactly what it takes to create seamless experiences that lead to increased loyalty. The metric is a strong predictor of customer retention and can help identify pain points in your customer support strategy. 

A quick-start guide to measuring CES with surveys

As we mentioned earlier, you can measure customer effort by sending customers a customer effort survey.

In this survey, customers are asked to rate their experience with customer support on a Likert scale from “less effort” to “a lot of effort”. 

Let’s walk step-by-step through how to build a CES survey and how to send them to your customers. Then, we’ll look at how to interpret results once you’ve compiled enough data. 

When to send a CES survey

You can send a CES survey immediately after any customer interaction, like post-purchase.

To zoom in even more on customer effort, consider only sending a CES survey once a shopper has a service interaction with your support strategy, like chatting with a live agent, visiting a self-service portal, or clicking through an interactive FAQ page. 

This way, you’re able to get an accurate idea of how easy, or how frustrating, your support touchpoints are. 

How to create a CES survey

A CES survey typically has one simple question that asks, “How easy was it to solve your problem today?”

Every brand tracks responses a little differently, using a scaled system. Here’s a few examples of different kinds of scales you can choose from: 

Word-based scale

A word-based scale lets respondents share their experience by choosing a word or phrase ranging from “very easy” to “very difficult.” 

Sentiment scale

A sentiment scale gives customers the option to share their experience using angry, happy, or sad faces to depict the emotion they felt while seeking support from your brand.

Numerical scale

A numerical scale lets customers share their experience using a scale of 1 to any number of your choosing. Some brands like a scale of 1 to 10, while others prefer scales of 1 to 5. 

No matter what thresholds you set, 1 should always be the lowest, meaning the worst, and your end number should be the highest, meaning the best. 

It's important to note that no option is better than another. The survey type you choose all depends on your shop’s needs. 

Some brands might also ask an open-ended question as a follow-up so customers can share specific details about their experience. 

You can send a CES survey question through email, SMS, or a similar channel to customers who recently reached out to your support team. 

Of course, you can send a customer effort score question manually, but it takes precious time away from your reps who are busy handling active tickets. Automating the process means your agents can focus on more meaningful work, like following up with disgruntled shoppers. 

Gorgias integrates with Delighted to provide easy-to-use survey templates to automatically distribute customer surveys, including for CES. Once a customer makes a purchase, it triggers Gorgias to automatically send a customer effort score survey to that customer. 

How to calculate your CES score

Like many other customer service metrics, you want to calculate your average CES in order to get a snapshot view of how most customers perceive their experience with your support resources. 

If you want to calculate customer effort manually, start by tracking response data from your CES surveys over a given period of time. 

The timeframe all depends on your goals. You can look at a month, quarter, half-year, etc. Ultimately, it's more important to be consistent with the timeframes you measure. That way, you can accurately track how your CES changes over time.

Once you’ve collected enough data, plug it into this simple formula: 

Divide the number of customers who agree the interaction was easy by the total number of responses. 

To put it in actual numbers, if 100 people responded to your CES survey, and the total sum of their scores amounts to 800, that means your CES score is 8 (out of 10).

What drives a high CES?

Like most other customer service metrics, there is no such thing as a standardized “perfect” benchmark for customer effort. 

That’s because it all goes back to your brand and its goals. What makes sense for your customer effort might not translate to another ecommerce shop. 

As a general rule of thumb, when it comes to CES you want your score to be as high as possible. 

A high CES shows that your support strategy is clear cut and that customers have to exert minimal effort to have their problems resolved. Conversely, a low CES means customers find their experiences with your support resources arduous — putting your brand at risk of a high churn rate. 

The best way to drive a high CES is to provide a painless and straightforward experience. If your CES isn’t quite as high as you’d like it to be, start by asking yourself these questions: 

• How many touchpoints did the customer have before their issue was resolved? 
• How long did it take for an agent to respond to a customer ticket? 
• Are all your links up-to-date for important self-service options like a knowledge base, forum, or FAQ? 
• Do you agents have access to the resources they need to make well-informed decisions? 

From there, you can look into ways to optimize your support strategy to boost your customer effort score.

How to improve your Customer Effort Score

To improve your customer effort score, you need to build pathways to make it as easy as possible for customers to find the answers they’re looking for. That means decreasing the number of steps it takes for a customer to complete a task and optimizing your first response time.

Research from Genesys shows that 94% of customers intend to make a purchase after a low-effort experience — versus 4% of customers after a high-effort experience. 

Clearly, it’s worth the effort to optimize your customer experience. 

Let’s look at some of the easiest ways ecommerce brands can lower their CES using functions commonly found in helpdesks. 

1) Build out a thorough knowledge base

​

A knowledge base is a portal, of sorts. It connects your shoppers to both sales and customer service so they can make an empowered purchasing decision. 

The beauty of a knowledge base is that is goes way beyond just a static library of articles. 

BrüMate's Help Center is a learning environment where customers can go to in-depth knowledge about their products. 

2) Lean on self-service

Customers might not reach out to your agents immediately. 

According to Gartner, 70% of customers seek out self-service options before contacting support. 

Offering more self-service options also means you can deflect low-priority tickets so your agents can focus on solving more challenging customer issues. 

We’ve already discussed a popular self-service option: knowledge bases. Here are some other examples of what customer self-service might look like: 

• FAQ page: Answer your customers’ most frequently asked questions with key information like operating hours, product availability, pricing, return policy, basic troubleshooting, and more.
• Forums: Build community among your shoppers and encourage them to talk to each other about their experiences so that they can empower themselves to resolve low-effort problems.  
• On-demand webinars: Educate your customers with step-by-step tutorials about your brand’s products. Record webinars so that you can publish them as evergreen content on your website for customers to access anytime.  
• In-product tutorials: Give customers step-by-step instructions in the moment its needed. In-product tutorials are effective at helping customers get value out of your product quickly.

3) Harness automation

Many of the tickets your agents handle are repetitive. 

Sure, tracking a customer’s order is important, but automation can handle these kinds of straightforward questions for your team. 

In customer service, automation likely won’t replace your hardworking support reps. Rather, automation can work with your teams to improve workflows and optimize communication with your customers by tackling redundant manual work. 

A helpdesk like Gorgias can help you completely automate 60% of repetitive tickets with a 0-second response time.

4) Auto-prioritize tickets to reduce response times

Assigning ticket priorities is a best practice to empower your team to become more efficient. But you could spend all day on this task alone.  

Ticket prioritization is another useful form of automation, assigning low-, medium-, and high-value to every incoming request. This way, your team can handle the higher-priority issues first. 

Gorgias comes with advanced intent and sentiment detection features to automatically assign value to incoming tickets based on Rules that you can set. 

5) Use Macros to streamline responses

Macros are another form of automation that optimize a customer support team’s workflow. 

Macros are pre-written, automatic responses to incoming customer requests. 

Gorgias Macros automatically pull customer data into your messages, like name, order number, and shipping addresses. This makes for a more efficient conversation and helps customers get to a resolution with minimal effort for both the customer and the agent. 

Other important customer experience metrics to consider

Customer effort is a big slice of the pie when it comes to monitoring your customer experience, but it can’t show the whole picture on its own. 

We recommend bolstering your CES efforts with additional metrics in order to add helpful context to your customer support strategy. 

Customer satisfaction metrics such as CSAT score, Net Promoter Score (NPS), and customer churn rate (CCR) can all provide helpful insights into how your support team is performing. 

Plus, it gives you a better look into the customer’s journey, so you can see how shoppers experience your brand — and give you ideas for how to boost satisfaction and drive loyalty. 

Customer Satisfaction (CSAT)

Customer satisfaction score (CSAT) is a metric to measure your customer base’s level of satisfaction with their experience. 

The metric is one of the most important measurements your support team can track. Satisfied customers are the key to unlock loyalty, reviews, and referrals, along with returning customers that boost revenue for your brand. 

With Gorgias, you can automatically send a customer satisfaction survey after each interaction with customer support:

Net Promoter Score (NPS)

Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a commonly tracked metric that lets you learn how likely your customers are to recommend your brand to their friends and family. 

This metric likely correlates closely with your CES. A customer who has had a great experience is likely to want to hype you up to their networks, versus a customer who had to put in a ton of effort to resolve an issue. 

If you optimize your NPS, there’s a good chance your CES will also improve — which can lead to more repeat customers and a boost in customer loyalty. 

Ecommerce Churn Rate 

Ecommerce churn rate is the percentage of lost customers your business sees over a given period of time. 

This metric is similar to Customer Churn Rate (CCR), which is typically measured by SaaS or subscription-based B2B companies. These companies can easily see when a customer cancels their subscription, making this data easy to monitor. 

Ecommerce, or online stores, can measure churn rate by looking at negative customer feedback, like a high CES, in order to identify customers at risk for churn. 

Gorgias: Your ecommerce helpdesk to lower Customer Effort Score

A helpdesk like Gorgias has the power to immediately optimize your customer service team — which, as we’ve learned, directly impacts the effort a customer has to exert with your brand. 

Because Gorgias has purpose-built automation features like Chat, Macros, and ticket prioritization, it can empower your customers to find a resolution to their problems as fast as possible. 

Sign up for Gorgias or book a demo to start tracking and improving your customer effort score today!

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Your first priority as a customer service manager should ensure fast, consistent, high-quality support. 

However, good customer service management can be very complex, requiring technical skills and an understanding of many interconnected operational tasks. Strong people and team management skills are the foundation for success. 

In this guide, you’ll learn customer service management and how to improve as a leader. Here’s everything we cover below:

• What is customer service management?
• What a smoothly functioning customer service team looks like.
• How to measure your customer service team’s performance.
• Four essential tools and resources for customer service managers.

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What is customer service management?

Customer service management is the role of running a customer service team in a way that ensures customer satisfaction, loyalty, and long-term retention. 

This involves various tasks, from hiring agents to ensuring everyone on the team has the necessary tools and resources to do their job. 

We can organize these tasks into two broad categories:

• People and team management, which we’ll discuss in the next section.
• Operational management and optimization, which we’ll discuss later in this guide.

What is customer service team management? 

Customer service team management is the collection of actions the customer service manager takes to consistently enable agents to perform their job well. This can include a whole range of activities, including:

• Hiring agents with the right customer service skills and attitude
• Training them on how to deal with different customer inquiries
• Setting standards for individual agents and the team as a whole
• Providing regular feedback and constructive criticism when necessary
• Establishing targets, metrics, and KPIs for the customer service team and analyzing agents’ performance based on them

What a smoothly functioning customer service team looks like

As a customer service manager, most of the success of the customer service team rests on you. It’s your job to build the team and the rules, systems, and guidelines agents will use daily. 

A helpful starting point is to learn what a smoothly functioning customer support team should look like. This will help you lay the foundation for effective customer service management.

Easy interdepartmental communication

As with all other team activities, internal communication is the key to success. In a good customer service operation, agents are ready to communicate and have the tools to do so.

For example, Slack, Microsoft Teams, and other chat and video conferencing software should always be available for real-time communication in urgent situations. Asynchronous communication methods like email should be encouraged in other cases. 

As a manager, it’s your job to set clear rules around communication methods in different situations (e.g., no real-time calls where an asynchronous email or Slack message will do). Good communication rules can guarantee that everyone values their colleagues' time and attention.

Clearly defined workflows

A good customer service manager ensures each agent knows:

• How to handle common inquiries, e.g., where to look for information, when to escalate the issue, etc.
• What to do in abnormal situations.
• What’s expected of them in terms of response and resolution times.

The key here is that agents should have this information before they need it. 

💡 Tip: Build a detailed hub of all the essential documents and information your agents need. This can include your customer service policy, refund and return policies, escalation rules, video walkthroughs of challenging situations, and much more.

“Remember, you can't pour from an empty cup –– taking care of yourself is beneficial for you and crucial for your ability to support your customers effectively.” - Eli Weiss, CX Unlocked

Low stress and less risk of burnout

High-stress environments and burnout are all too familiar in customer service. This often stems from understaffing, poor training, or confusing workflows. 

Eli Weiss provides a few great tips for avoiding burnout in his CX Unlocked Guidebook:

1. Practice mindfulness. Train your team to recognize when they’re starting to feel frustrated. That might look like realizing when a customer’s harsh tone is beginning to bother them, taking a moment, and responding calmly (rather than acting on impulse). 
2. Create and respect boundaries. Designate “work-free” zones in your life. These could be certain hours of the day, specific locations, or even mental spaces.
3. Celebrate every win, no matter how small. Boost morale and motivation by reminding your team how amazing they're doing.

Performance tied to specific KPIs

A big part of customer service management is evaluating your team’s performance. The only way to do that fairly is to use specific, measurable key performance metrics (KPIs). This ensures you’re evaluating agents objectively, giving them clarity and goals to aim for. 

For example, response and resolution times are two of the most critical metrics for any support team. Keeping them consistently low shows a well-managed, prepared, appropriately trained team. It also shows that there are enough agents to handle the incoming inquiries.

The better your agents’ time management skills, the faster their response and resolution times will be. As a manager, you can help your team prioritize tickets and reduce the time spent on repetitive tasks with automation (like Rules) and pre-made template resources (like Macros).

Also, remember that while industry-standard KPIs are helpful, you shouldn’t use them just because other organizations do so. All KPIs should be tailored to your customer service and business goals — whether that’s higher customer satisfaction, better customer engagement, more revenue, higher on-site conversion rates, or anything else.

Five most important tips for first-time customer service managers

First-time managers can easily find themselves overloaded with information about customer service management. So, we’ve gathered five essential tips to help you get started.

1) Put your team first

This doesn’t just mean monitoring agents’ performance. It means being there for them when they need you, whether it’s about work or their personal lives. Team members must know they can count on you when it matters.

That’s also why regular 1:1s are essential. They allow you to check in on everyone and detect potential problems early on. 

2) Don’t neglect customer self-service 

Customer self-service combines technology and resources, allowing current and new customers to resolve issues independently. For example, FAQ pages, articles, videos, self-service chatbot flows, and other resources can help massively reduce repetitive support tickets.

Besides being beneficial for your agents, offering self-service is a must for customers. According to Statista, 88% of customers in the US expect companies to provide a self-service support portal. 

3) Fill the valleys before creating the peaks 

Eli quotes this tip from The Power of Moments by Dan and Chip Heath in his guidebook. 

The premise? Focus on finding and fixing the problems your customers face before trying to wow them with exceptional customer service experiences. That way, you’re laying a good foundation for your customer service strategy.

Any customer journey has its low points (i.e., valleys). You can identify these with data analytics or customer feedback. Once you’ve addressed the problems, you can move on to creating the “peaks” that form a truly memorable experience and build customer loyalty.

4) Give agents the techniques, tools, and guidance they need for success

Agents can’t be expected to do their job well without the necessary resources. As their manager, it’s your job to give them:

• Impactful customer support tools, like a powerful and versatile helpdesk (like Gorgias).  
• Clear and specific standards and goals, like each customer service channel's expected response and resolution times (if you take an omnichannel approach).
• Extensive training materials during their onboarding, like articles, videos, workshops, webinars, and more. These should be tailored to each team since call center agents will need different institutions for handling customer requests than ones providing support via written communication channels like email or SMS.
• Regular feedback, like how well they’re performing, their strengths, and where they can improve.

5) Analyze results and base decisions on reliable data

Customer service is ultimately about people, which makes it easy to let subjective opinions affect your judgment. However, accurate data is a much more reliable gauge of how your team is performing.

It allows you to avoid biases and enables key outcomes like customer satisfaction, loyalty, and retention to guide your decisions. We’ll explore some key metrics that can help you in this regard below.

How to measure your customer service team’s performance

Evaluating the impact of a customer service team can be a complex and nuanced task. There are many factors and metrics to consider, which can easily overwhelm first-time managers.

Below, we’re keeping things simple by focusing on three key ways to gauge your team’s performance.

Tie support tickets to revenue

The best way to get buy-in from stakeholders for your customer service program is to prove its impact on business outcomes. That’s why it’s a good idea to track metrics related to revenue, including: 

• Customer retention rate
• Conversion rate from customer service conversations
• Customer satisfaction metrics, which we’ll discuss later in this guide

This will help you prove customer service ROI and get buy-in for future new hires, software, or training.

Get direct customer feedback

Support interactions can massively impact customers’ overall experience with your brand. It’s crucial to keep a pulse on your customers’ opinions of them, especially since people who rate their experience with a company as very good are 94% more likely to buy again, according to Qualtrics.

You can do this by running regular customer satisfaction surveys. For example, you can run a quick, low-friction survey by asking customers, “On a scale from 1 to 5, how satisfied are you with your experience today?”.

Taking the total number of 4- or 5-star responses, dividing it by the total number of responses, and multiplying the result by 100 will give you a customer satisfaction (CSAT) score — a key metric for measuring support performance.

Track key customer service performance metrics

You can use many quantifiable metrics to gauge your team’s performance. Here are some of the most widely used ones:

• First response time (FRT) is the time that elapses between a customer's question and your team’s initial response. Aim to keep FRT as short as possible, especially on real-time channels like live chat and SMS. 
• Resolution time is the amount of time a customer spends interacting with a business’s customer support, helpdesk, or customer service team before their issue is solved. Like with FRT, the lower your resolution times, the better.
• Support performance score, which represents the overall performance of your team (or an individual agent). This unique metric we developed for our in-house team at Gorgias combines average first response time, average resolution time, and CSAT. The result is a score between 1 and 5, representing the team’s (or an individual agent’s) performance.

Like with CSAT scores, Gorgias can track these metrics for you and give you a more nuanced view of them. For example, you can use our software to analyze average resolution time by channels, agents, time frames, and more.

Four essential tools and resources for customer service managers

1) Helpdesk

Helpdesks are platforms that help manage all of your customer service interactions. Collaborate on managing, organizing, responding to, and reporting on customer tickets. Or, set up automation for key processes like ticket prioritization. 

For example, Gorgias can enable your team to:

• Manage tickets. This can include simple actions like closing, assigning, and resolving tickets. It can also involve more complex automation around ticket tagging, categorizing, and more.
• Centralize customer communications from multiple channels — like email, SMS, social media, WhatsApp, and live chat. This can drastically simplify agents’ workflows by giving them a unified view of all customer interactions and relevant customer data in one place, so they don’t have to constantly switch between tabs.
• Implement proactive customer service. For example, your agents can proactively contact customers via a live chat widget to walk them through the purchase process. They can even automate this process and trigger a live chat only in certain situations, e.g., when customers reach specific cart values or linger on a purchase page.

• Track key metrics and measure support performance. Gorgias can help you monitor response and resolution times, open and closed tickets, CSAT scores, and more.

2) Self-service tools 

Customer self-service combines technology and resources that let customers resolve issues independently. 

Self-service is great for your support team and your customers because:

• Agents don’t have to deal with as many repetitive tickets, which reduces their stress and ensures their focus is on high-value activities. 
• Customers don’t have to wait for a response from a live agent.

Common self-service resources include:

• Frequently asked questions (FAQ) pages. One of the simplest resources to create, FAQ pages provide straightforward answers to customer questions. These pages are often grouped together so customers can find what they need by browsing categories or using a search function, as shown in the example below. 

• Knowledge bases. These interactive portals make it easy for customers to find answers before making a purchase and help them troubleshoot any possible issues afterward. Process Polly’s knowledge base is a good example here — it’s well-organized, helpful, and consistent with the overall brand.

• Self-service flows. Good self-service flows can help you deflect up to a third of all tickets. They’re projected to save companies $11 billion this year. For example, Gorgias’ self-service flows let you create multistep automated responses to customer questions without engaging an agent.

3) Customer service policies and SLAs

Customer service policies and service level agreements (SLAs) are among the first documents new agents should learn.

• A customer service policy is an internal document containing your customer service team's fundamental guidelines, rules, and standards. It includes steps for handling common workflows (e.g., refund or return requests), ticket prioritization rules, and standards for response and resolution times.
• An SLA is an external document that defines the expected service level between your business and your customers. SLAs contain information about your support team’s working hours and their expected response and resolution times on different channels.

Without these documents, customer service agents can’t be expected to do their job well. That’s why ensuring they’re detailed, well-written, and included in each agent’s mandatory training is essential.

4) Practical courses and other training materials

All agents need a solid foundation of knowledge before they can start resolving problems quickly and consistently. 

The specific training topics will differ depending on your business. However, most support courses and training should cover:

• In-depth product knowledge. All agents should be experts in what your business is selling.
• Policy and process knowledge, like how to handle return requests, when to grant refunds, and what to do when customers ask for an exchange.
• Customer service tools used in your company, like your helpdesk software, live chat, customer relationship management (CRM) system, and so on.
• Tone of voice, phrases to avoid, and other brand-related considerations.
• Technical skills, like following internal escalation rules.

Become a better customer service manager with specialized training (and Gorgias) 

As you can see, a lot goes into being a good customer service manager. This guide will give you a good foundation for success in your journey, and you can get even more valuable tips in:

• The CX Unlocked Guidebook by Eli Weiss. Eli is known for his work around customer experience and retention at DTC brands like OLIPOP and Jones Road Beauty. This book will give you his first-hand experience and help you become a better customer service manager.
• These 19 best customer service certifications. In this article, you’ll find 19 customer service certifications for different use cases, including certifications for helpdesks, leadership, call center service, and more.
• The support leader’s guide to customer service training. This guide will walk you through the basics of customer service training and show you 15 practical training activities to try with your team.

Finally, Gorgias can be your centralized customer service software that lays the foundation for a successful customer service management strategy. Our software can help your agents prioritize tickets, save time with automation, drive revenue with proactive customer service, and much more. 

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