Customer service dictates your customers’ entire experience with your brand. When you pair a memorable experience with a product that resonates with people, you've got the recipe for attracting repeat customers.

I’m Eli Weiss, the Senior Director of Customer Experience & Retention at Jones Road Beauty and a proud Gorgias Ambassador. After working in customer experience roles for almost a decade, I’ve learned the best ways to build strong customer relationships and teach teams to do the same.

This is the first article in Gorgias’s Intro to Ecommerce Customer Service series. We’ll go over the basics of ecommerce customer service, setting up a successful customer service program, the challenges, and the best tools for customer service teams.

What is ecommerce customer service? 

Ecommerce customer service combines the power of support agents with self-service resources to assist online shoppers throughout their experience with a brand. It includes everything from pre-sales and purchase questions to returns and exchanges.

The traditional view

The old-fashioned approach to ecommerce customer service is like a game of whack-a-mole ––– it’s reactive. The goal of customer service representatives under this traditional view is simply to resolve issues.

This may have worked back when call centers were the primary customer service channel, but today, brands and marketing are so entrenched in our lives that customers want authentic experiences with whoever they do business with. 

The cutting-edge view

Today, ecommerce customer service is about giving customers the full VIP treatment. Customers don’t only matter once they send in a complaint. The goal is to provide them everything they need from the get-go so they don’t ever have to complain.

What a successful ecommerce customer service program looks like

Picture a well-oiled assembly line of seamless interactions, happy customers, and glowing reviews. It's like having your own customer service dream team who know the best techniques to keep your customers satisfied. But to get to that point, you'll need some key ingredients. 

Below are the top six elements an ecommerce customer service program should have to succeed.

1. Builds customer loyalty

Customers rave about brands that not only align with their values, but give them zero friction throughout the buying journey. When you create thoughtful customer experiences at every point, it will be a no-brainer for customers to stick with your brand, instead of moving over to a competitor.

Here are the building blocks to gaining customer loyalty:

• Maximize pre-sales moments. What does customer experience look like when customers aren’t contacting you? Take this opportunity to reach out to customers with an email, text, or chat message to grab their interest.
• Elevate the voice of the customer. When you make changes, how will your customers feel? Are you updating your pricing or return policies? Represent your customers in all internal meetings and discussions because the decisions you make will affect them.
• Create honest, customer-centric policies. Update your customer service policies to answer all of a customer’s potential questions. Leaving anything out is likely to decrease brand loyalty and bring you a barrage of complaints.

2. Offers proactive support 

Make the first move and don’t wait for your customers to contact you. Taking a proactive approach involves not only initiative and common sense but research.

Here are a few ways you can deliver proactive customer service:

• Ask for customer feedback at every opportunity. Feedback is the basis of delivering effective support. Ask for feedback at every point of the customer journey, from on-site pop-up surveys to customer reviews.
• Track live statistics. Taking note of metrics like the total number of tickets being opened and resolved within a time period can help you identify trends or issues so that your services can be more efficient.
• Celebrate customer moments. It’s easier to keep customers than find new ones. Make sure to recognize your customers on their birthdays or anniversaries by giving them discounts or gifts.

3. Offers omnichannel support

Online businesses can make the most out of their digital presence by offering omnichannel customer service. This is a multi-channel approach to support and includes assistance given on email, live chat, chatbots, voice, and social media.

When you use a helpdesk that leverages omnichannel communication like Gorgias, you benefit from:

• More customer engagement. Offering multiple support channels allows you to reach customers of all demographics.
• A streamlined workflow for your agents. With all conversations in one place, agents don’t need to split their attention between multiple tabs.
• An easier time scaling. A helpdesk makes it easier for growing ecommerce platforms to take care of their customers in an organized fashion.

📚 Related reading: A guide to all the different types of customer service companies need to know

4. Delivers rapid response times

Customers just want answers. Meet their expectations by providing solutions as quickly as possible. Ultimately, this means getting your internal customer service operations right before the questions even roll in.

Here are some ways to hike up your first response times:

• Train your support team thoroughly. Training your agents on customer service skills, brand voice, and exposing them to potential customer questions will ensure they have the foundation to handle both familiar and new inquiries.
• Auto-assign your tickets with Rules. Automating ticket management makes sure your inbox is organized and easy for your agents to navigate. Rules allows you to sort your tickets when certain conditions are met.
• Use Macros and scripts. Simplify responses by using customer service scripts (called Macros on Gorgias), so your agents can stop doing repetitive, manual work and get straight to delivering good customer service.

5. Includes useful & easily accessible self-service

Customers shouldn’t always need to go to your support team for answers. Empower them to find their own answers with self-service options like a Help Center, knowledge base, or FAQ section. It’s a win-win: your customer support team dodges a pile of tickets and your customers have an answer in seconds.

Don’t forget that self-service options should be easy to access, too. Put them front and center, like on your website’s menu or as a fixed element at the bottom right corner of all webpages. Customers should be able to find what they need with just a few clicks.

6. Always measuring & improving

You'll want to dig into your customer service metrics, like response times, customer effort score, customer satisfaction scores, and feedback from your customers. Measure it, analyze it, and figure out where you can refine customer service even more.

Maybe your response times are extremely slow, and you need to start using automation. Maybe customers are complaining about a confusing checkout process. Whatever it is, your customers are your cheat sheet. Use the feedback to make improvements, and implement those changes. 

💡 Note: Contrary to what online customers think, customer service agents, and even leads, don’t know everything. Their goal is to continuously learn about how to improve the customer service experience with the help of customer feedback.

5 common challenges of ecommerce customer service 

Challenging customers and questions are part of the job. But if you’re struggling to handle what you feel should be an easy fix, you may not have the resources you need.

To mitigate those problems, I’ll show you the solutions to the five most common challenges in ecommerce customer service.

1. Too many customer inquiries

❌ Problem: Your inbox is full of customer questions and you don’t know where to start.

✅ Solution: Prioritize tickets by urgency based on each customer’s message and whether the customer is a new or returning customer.

On Gorgias, you can create a Rule to automatically tag tickets into their appropriate categories. For instance, tickets that contain complaints can be automatically identified and tagged as “high priority,” while “where is my order?” tickets are tagged as “low priority.”

The benefits of automating ticket management leads to better managing customer expectations, response times, and makes it easier for you to keep loyal customers.

2. Not enough agents to handle customers

❌ Problem: You have a small team of agents and too many customer inquiries to resolve in a timely manner.

✅ Solution: Automate your recurring tasks so your agents can handle more important interactions.

With Macros, app integrations, and Automate, routine tasks like organizing your tickets, sending scripted responses, and checking up on customers can take seconds. When agents don’t need to handle repetitive work, they can focus on delivering more thoughtful support.

📚 Related reading: 14 best customer service software for every kind of business

3. Too many support channels

❌ Problem: You have too many tabs open and customer conversations to track.

✅ Solution: Integrate all your communication channels under one platform.

An omnichannel strategy is the easiest fix, which Gorgias specializes in. By combining your email, social media, SMS, and phone support in one platform, your attention won’t be split across multiple tabs, allowing you to provide personalized customer service no matter which channel a customer chooses. 

4. No customer feedback loop

❌ Problem: You routinely send customer surveys but don’t know how to effectively apply the feedback.

✅ Solution: Determine the most important issues to resolve, create an actionable plan, and share your findings with the appropriate teams.

Collecting customer feedback is pointless if you don’t know what to do with it. The main purpose of feedback is to gain insights that can resolve issues or bring forth new questions.

Most CX teams have one of two problems:

1. Not collecting enough data and therefore not having the answers to customer questions
2. Collecting a lot of data but not synthesizing it effectively and sharing it with the right people

Bridge the gap between data collection and insights by sharing your learnings with the appropriate team members to inspire them to take action. In essence, it’s about translating critique into innovative support methods.

5. Tough customers

❌ Problem: A customer is wrong but insists they’re right, and you don’t know how to reply properly. 

✅ Solution: Acknowledge their frustration and provide them with the correct information by using positive language.

Surprise, surprise — customers are not always right but it’s important stay respectful even during tense conversations. You shouldn’t outright tell them they’re wrong, instead do the following:

1. Thank them for writing. Let them know your brand values all customer feedback to ensure your interaction starts off on a positive note.
2. Acknowledge their frustration and issue. Give them the peace of mind that the agent they’re talking to understands them and can lead them to a resolution.
3. Provide multiple solutions. Chances are, your customer has already browsed your website for answers, so be sure to offer alternate solutions and resources in addition to the most obvious ones.
4. Escalate the ticket to a customer service lead. If the customer is still not satisfied, direct them to a specific agent that could provide them with more information.
5. If necessary, make an exception. Some issues simply can’t follow your policy and may be better solved with a refund, discount, or novel solution. Allowing exceptions for returning customers can be the means of retaining them.

📚 Related reading: How to respond to angry customer emails

How to improve ecommerce customer service with a helpdesk

If you could invest in just one tool, make it an ecommerce helpdesk. Having a single hub to manage customer conversations and order management streamlines the customer experience.

I've tried almost every helpdesk out there, and Gorgias is by far the most intuitive helpdesk I've used. Gorgias goes beyond the basics of a customer service tool by giving you the ability to talk to customers across multiple support channels, manage tickets efficiently, and handle customer queries all within Gorgias's easy-to-use interface.

Try it out for yourself with their interactive tour:

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3 ways top-notch customer service can boost your bottom-line

Delivering exceptional customer service isn't just about addressing inquiries. It's a reimagining of your brand’s overall experience that directly impacts your financial success. When customer service is your priority, it leads to repeat purchases, a boost in your repeat customer rate, and the creation of customer ambassadors.

1. Drive repeat purchases

Your CX team has the 411 on what your loyal customers love about your product and what they'd like to change. 

This data is invaluable for your retention team when crafting engaging campaigns and creating educational content post-purchase to ensure they know how to use the products they ordered.

2. Create customer ambassadors

Customers are more likely to remember your brand if you initiate moments that cause happiness after they use your products. 

How exactly do you do it? You introduce a bit of surprise and delight to the online shopping journey instead of sticking to the script. You want to delight customers with memorable moments — without overdoing it to the point of being predictable.

When I worked at OLIPOP, one of my favorite moments was when a customer ordered 20 cases of OLIPOP for her wedding. However, our shipment was cutting it close to their wedding date. To compensate for the panic our newlyweds might’ve been feeling, we asked them for their wedding registry and got them a shiny new waffle iron.

3. Boost onsite conversions

When potential customers are given speedy support, it’s easier to turn window shoppers into brand new customers. A well-integrated customer service strategy can remove obstacles and can push browsing customers into making their purchase.

How Gorgias has helped top ecommerce brands grow revenue

Delivering great customer service might involve some experimenting. With the right tools, you can help your customers feel more connected to your brand overall. 

If you're in search of ecommerce customer service software, give Gorgias a try. Gorgias is designed specifically for ecommerce businesses and their customer support needs.

At OLIPOP, we were able to decrease our first response time by 88% in the first two months of using Gorgias — even when our ticket volume doubled. And our revenue? It grew over 1200%. 

If you want to learn about how we accomplished this, read the OLIPOP case study.

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You’re no stranger to the complicated challenges of customer service management. From dealing with frustrated customers, solving problems in real-time, and striving to provide a consistent level of service across multiple channels, the hurdles are numerous and often interlinked. 

How can you make your customer service operations more efficient? What’s the right strategy for offering personalized experiences to a broad customer base? How do you handle high-volume customer queries while maintaining quick response times?

Generic tips and one-size-fits-all best practices rarely offer the answers you need to address these complex challenges. You’re searching for actionable, strategic approaches that can genuinely transform your customer service from being just another function to becoming your company’s ultimate competitive advantage. With this backdrop, this guide delves into key strategies tailored to alleviate your most pressing customer service pain points.

What is a customer service strategy? 

A customer service strategy is a company’s comprehensive plan for delivering exceptional customer service. It’s the blueprint that outlines how your customer support team interacts with customers, from the channels used for communication to the quality and speed of service. The strategy often integrates various tools, techniques, and metrics to ensure a seamless and compelling customer experience across multiple touchpoints.

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The underlying goals of a customer service strategy

An effective customer service strategy is not just a nice-to-have — it’s a significant lever of business success. Beyond problem-solving, a well-rounded strategy yields tangible benefits like increased revenue, stronger brand reputation, and long-term loyal customers. This isn’t just about satisfying customer queries; it’s about elevating every interaction into an opportunity for growth and brand advocacy.

Drive additional revenue

In the competitive world of ecommerce, every bit of revenue counts. According to a McKinsey report, enhancing the customer experience can boost sales revenue by 2% to 7% and raise profitability by 1% to 2%. Customer service has evolved into a critical part of that equation. 

With customer acquisition costs rising, the economics of retaining existing customers through top-notch service becomes increasingly important to consider. Exceptional customer service is a potent differentiator, elevating average order values and nurturing customer loyalty. The net effect is not just happy customers but an ongoing relationship that keeps the virtual shopping cart full.

Maximize the ROI of your team’s time

Balancing service quality and efficiency is crucial for ecommerce businesses, especially during high-demand events like Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Optimal resource allocation isn’t just about cost-saving; it’s about leveraging your team's time to create the most impact. 

When customer service is finely tuned and effective, team members function at their maximum capacity. This efficiency allows for quicker response times and more personalized service. As a result, their time becomes a high-return investment that enhances both the customer experience and the company’s bottom line.

Create a personalized customer experience across all channels

In an era where consumers are inundated with options, personalized service is key to keep customers coming back. For ecommerce companies, the stakes are even higher: the entire customer journey is digital, making every touchpoint an opportunity for personalized engagement. 

Whether tailoring product recommendations in an email or responding promptly via social media channels like Instagram, a personalized approach to customer service can elevate your brand, turning transactions into relationships.

Reduce customer churn

Customers can effortlessly switch to a competitor with just a few clicks. As a result, minimizing churn is crucial for sustainable ecommerce growth. Identifying the factors that lead to customer dissatisfaction early on presents a difficult challenge but is vital for retention. 

In Gorgias's data from 12,000+ merchants, repeat customers make up 21% of buyers but contribute 44% of revenue and 46% of orders.

Customer service departments serve as the frontline in recognizing early warning signs that customers may churn. By swiftly addressing these customer issues and executing well-planned retention strategies, customer service teams can reduce the churn that eats away at revenue and profits.

Improve your brand reputation

In 2022, 85% of companies thought that customers were increasingly likely to share both good and bad experiences compared to previous years. In the absence of a physical storefront to build rapport with shoppers, building online trust is particularly crucial for ecommerce businesses. 

Your brand’s reputation is directly tied to the quality of interactions, and the customer feedback shoppers share across multiple platforms — from social media to review sites. Excellent customer service boosts brand credibility and positive word-of-mouth by efficiently resolving issues and exceeding expectations.

TUSHY has earned a reputation for great customer service, contributing to its strong following. The company leverages Gorgias Convert to run highly targeted chat campaigns, which influence 25% of total revenue and effectively educate prospective buyers, reducing bounce rates by 37%.

Streamline operational efficiency 

What if you could seamlessly manage customer expectations while optimizing operational costs? A well-designed customer service strategy in ecommerce involves a blend of automated solutions for frequently asked questions, real-time data analytics for efficient resource allocation, and highly-trained staff for personalized customer interactions. This multi-faceted approach exceeds customer expectations and reduces operational expenses while boosting operational efficiency.

The 6 most important customer service strategies every team should use

When we talk about “customer service strategies,” we’re referring to overarching approaches that capture various aspects of customer service — from essential technology to critical processes. Unlike generic best practices like “know your customer,” these are multi-faceted, actionable game plans designed to elevate customer service from a reactive function to a proactive advantage. Let’s dive in. 

1) Implement proactive customer support to anticipate needs

Adopting proactive customer support practices isn’t just about resolving issues; it’s about foreseeing them before they even happen. By identifying potential problems and offering solutions in advance, you’re not just fixing issues but enhancing the entire customer experience. This level of foresight streamlines your support processes, making them more efficient.

When you proactively address concerns, you’re signaling to your customers that you care about their experience, which leads to higher satisfaction levels. Fewer complaints mean fewer support tickets, lightening the load on your customer service team. More importantly, a proactive approach encourages customer loyalty. Customers will likely stick around when you make the first move to ensure their comfort.

BrüMate, a premium drinkware and cooler brand, improved its customer experience by taking a proactive approach to customer support and solving issues at the root. For example, BrüMate’s former Associate Director of Customer Experience, Colin Waters told us, “based on customer feedback, we might add more details to our product pages, update language at checkout, or highlight specific reviews.”

Their transition to Gorgias allowed the company to reduce its first response time to 1.5 minutes and generate more than $9 million in revenue from its support team.

How to implement proactive customer support

• Gorgias Live Chat allows real-time communication between your support reps and website visitors. Using it to contact customers with items in their cart pre-purchase, you can address questions or concerns on the spot, reducing cart abandonment.
• Gorgias Chat Campaigns let you send targeted messages to customers browsing your website based on their behavior or specific conditions. By strategically implementing chat campaigns, you can proactively reach out to users at points in their browsing where they are most likely to have questions, guiding them toward a purchase.
• Gorgias Help Center is a centralized hub where customers can find answers to their questions — from shipping information to product details. By proactively answering FAQs and providing detailed walkthroughs, you reduce ticket volume for your support agents, making the support process easier for staff and customers.
• Help Center Article Recommendations in Chat automatically suggest relevant help center articles to customers based on their chat input. This provides immediate, detailed solutions and educates customers, reducing the need for live agent assistance.

2) Craft personalized customer support for enhanced engagement

Personalized customer service goes beyond using a customer’s name in emails; it means meaningfully understanding and catering to their unique needs. By providing tailored support, you set your brand apart from competitors and build deeper, more meaningful customer relationships. This bespoke level of interaction strengthens your brand’s identity and keeps customers returning.

Shoppers who feel seen and understood are likelier to stay loyal to your brand, ultimately boosting customer retention rates. Moreover, knowing your customer’s preferences and history allows you to recommend relevant products or services, creating new revenue streams. On the operational side, readily available customer history allows your support team to resolve issues more efficiently, reducing the time and resources spent per ticket.

Absolute Collagen, a specialist in marine collagen drinks, uses Gorgias to centralize customer inquiries and provide a holistic view of each customer. By doing so, they’ve achieved a customer satisfaction score of 4.9 and reduced their average response time across all channels to less than five minutes.

How to craft personalized customer support

• Gorgias Macros are templates with dynamic fields that let your agents auto-fill customer-specific data like tracking info or shipment dates. This speeds up response times and ensures personalized, relevant communication for each customer.‍
• Gorgias Integrations pull in additional data into Gorgias from third-party tools like Attentive, Yotpo, or Klaviyo. These integrations give you a comprehensive view of customer interactions for more personalized and insightful support experiences.

3) Develop customer self-service options for user empowerment

Offering customer self-service puts control in the hands of your customers. When customers can resolve simple issues themselves, they experience greater convenience and satisfaction. Quicker problem resolution meets modern consumers’ immediate expectations, further enhancing their overall experience.

The financial benefits are noteworthy, too. You can achieve a more cost-effective operation by reducing the number of simple queries directed at your support staff. Meanwhile, it lightens the workload for your customer service agents, letting them put their human expertise to better use. 

Loop Earplugs leverages Gorgias’s Automate to improve their customer self-service experience. This automation has decreased WISMO (“where is my order”) inquiries from 17% to 5%, allowing customers to independently check shipping statuses, freeing up customer service agents for more complex issues and revenue-generating activities.

How to develop customer self-service options

• Gorgias Automate is a collection of features designed to handle up to 60% of repetitive customer service tickets autonomously, allowing teams to focus on complex issues. It offers Autoresponders, Quick Response Flows, Order Management Flows, and Article Recommendation Flows. ‍
• Gorgias Flows let you create customer self-service workflows to guide users through solutions without agent intervention. Flows can improve the user experience by giving shoppers immediate answers to common queries, reducing ticket volume.‍
• Gorgias Rules automate ticket management by performing specific actions like tagging or auto-responding based on custom triggers you set. Rules efficiently sorts incoming queries to the appropriate resources or information, streamlining the customer service process for agents and customers.‍
• Gorgias Help Center is a centralized hub for customer service, education, and engagement, offering a knowledge base or FAQ for customers seeking answers. such information on your website. See these resource hubs in action — Branch Furniture uses Gorgias for its Help Center, while BruMate hosts their FAQs on the Gorgias platform.  

4) Build an omnichannel support system for seamless interactions

According to a recent report, 53% of consumers say customer support interactions feel fragmented. An omnichannel customer service system is the backbone for a seamless customer experience — that means consistent interactions across email, social media, or live chat. This interconnected approach eliminates the common frustration of customers repeating information when switching channels. The result is a unified, streamlined customer experience.

This ease of interaction translates to less work for the customer, smoothing their path to resolution or purchase. The rich data from multiple channels also becomes valuable for refining your customer service approach and shaping marketing initiatives. Building this integrated system promotes better inter-team communication, ensuring that customer service agents are well-equipped to provide top-tier support.

Ohh Deer specializes in creating quirky, eye-catching stationery, gifts, and homeware. To provide a seamless customer experience, they integrated Gorgias Chat to centralize support channels like Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, email, phone, and live chat, increasing efficiency and revenue. This omnichannel approach contributed to a high average CSAT score of 4.95 and an additional $12,500 quarterly revenue.

How to build an omnichannel support system

Gorgias allows businesses to manage all their support channels, such as email, Instagram, Facebook, phone, and live chat, in a single interface. By consolidating these channels, businesses can provide a more seamless customer experience, streamline support operations, and improve response time, increasing customer satisfaction and revenue.

5) Leverage pre-sales support to boost conversions

Strategic pre-sales support engages prospective customers right when they are wavering on the edge of a purchase decision. You can guide them through uncertainties by offering prompt and insightful assistance, creating a more frictionless path to conversion and sales. Immediate and expert guidance can accelerate a potential customer’s transition from consideration to purchase, shortening the overall sales cycle. 

You can promote higher-value packages or complementary items with skilled pre-sales interactions, raising the average order value. Pre-sales service not only aids in conversion but also sets the tone for future interactions, elevating your brand’s reputation in a competitive landscape.

Topicals excels in customer support by adopting a proactive pre-sales approach to educate their customers, addressing a previously high return rate due to incorrect product selection or usage. They employ Quick Response Flows and Macros, which deflect 69% of customer queries to provide immediate, automated answers to frequent questions. This approach has enhanced customer satisfaction scores to 4.8/5 and led to a 78% increase in sales driven by customer support.

How to leverage pre-sales support

• Gorgias Quick Response Flows offer self-service options via a chat widget that can answer common customer queries instantly. Automating immediate, accurate answers improves customer satisfaction and frees up human agents to handle more complex pre-sales inquiries.
• Gorgias Chat Campaigns allow you to initiate proactive live chat conversations with online shoppers, offering tailored promotions or vital product information. This feature engages potential customers at crucial touchpoints in the sales funnel, providing the necessary nudge to convert browsers into buyers.

6) Incorporate automation in customer service for operational efficiency

Embracing customer service automation simplifies daily operations by taking over mundane, repetitive activities. This operational ease allows customer service agents to dedicate their customer service skills to more nuanced and complex customer needs, often requiring a human touch. Automation becomes the backbone that supports a highly efficient customer service operation.

Automation technology quickly scales to manage increased customer inquiries, making it easier to handle peak periods without inflating your workforce. Immediate automated responses to straightforward queries mean customers don’t have to wait in long queues, elevating the customer experience. Moreover, since automated systems operate based on programmed logic, the chances of errors occurring in routine tasks are significantly reduced, bolstering the credibility and dependability of your customer service function.

ALOHAS, a Barcelona-based sustainable fashion brand, has effectively incorporated automation into its customer service through Gorgias Automate. By setting up self-service resources and Quick Response Flows, ALOHAS has achieved an 83% automation rate, resulting in faster response times and doubling revenue.

How to incorporate automation in customer service

• Gorgias Automate enables businesses to set up automated self-service resources and flows, streamlining customer interactions and reducing manual ticket handling.‍
• Gorgias Flows create workflow automations that guide the customer support process, making it more efficient and consistent.‍
• Gorgias Macros program predefined responses that can be used to quickly answer common customer inquiries, speeding up the customer service process.

How to prioritize customer service strategies

Prioritizing customer service strategies can be complex, especially when resources and team sizes vary. A well-thought-out approach can make all the difference in effective strategy implementation.

For smaller teams (1-10 people)

When operating with a compact team, every action has to count. Automation can be a lifesaver for small customer service teams. A feature like automated responses in chat can field common customer inquiries, freeing up team members for more complex tasks. Additionally, investing in proactive support — like anticipating customer needs before they reach out — can significantly improve customer satisfaction without requiring a lot of hands on deck.

For mid-sized teams (11-50 people)

Having a larger team presents both opportunities and challenges. The key is to capitalize on the resources at your disposal while avoiding inefficiencies to provide the best customer service possible. One way to achieve this is through omnichannel support, allowing customer inquiries from different platforms — email, social media, chat — to be funneled into a single dashboard for easier management. 

This streamlines the customer service process, aiding in quick response times. Simultaneously, a customer self-service portal can offer solutions for everyday problems, enabling customers to help themselves.

For larger teams (51-200+ people)

With an extensive team, the focus shifts toward fine-tuning and optimizing customer service operations. Here, coordination among team members and units becomes essential. Real-time monitoring systems can track customer satisfaction and response time, enabling immediate adjustments. 

Additionally, specialized teams can be set up for specific functions like pre-sales support, each contributing a unique value to a comprehensive customer support strategy. This segmented yet integrated approach allows for breadth and depth in customer service capabilities.

Make Gorgias the foundation of your customer service strategy

Don’t just adapt to the future of customer service — lead it. Gorgias centralizes all your customer interactions into a single platform for streamlined efficiency. From proactive support through our Gorgias Chat Campaigns to omnichannel capabilities that unify email, chat, and social media conversations, Gorgias offers a one-stop solution.

Whether you’re a team of 10 or 200, make the shift to intelligent, scalable, and personalized customer service with Gorgias. To learn more about Gorgias, book your demo today.

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Written in partnership with Okendo. 

Repeat customers are a revenue-boosting engine in the world of ecommerce. 

According to data from Gorgias’s merchants, repeat customers generate 300% more revenue than first-time customers. The small act of winning back a customer has a huge impact on your brand.

That’s why it's important for brands to understand repeat customer rate (RCR), or the percentage of customers who shop with your brand beyond a one-time transaction. 

In this article, you’ll learn how to track and measure repeat customer rate for your brand, along with tips to boost purchase frequency and improve RCR among your shoppers. 

What is repeat customer rate?

Repeat customer rate (RCR) is a key metric used by retailers to measure the percentage of shoppers who make multiple transactions over their customer lifetime. 

In ecommerce marketing, you may see this metric go by a few other names, including returning customer rate, customer retention rate, or repeat purchase rate. 

Why winning repeat customers is so critical in ecommerce

If you want a major revenue win for your brand, look no further than your own customer base. 

The benchmarks for a typical RCR vary by market, but data collected from Gorgias's 12,000+ merchants shows that repeat customers account for only 21% of customers but generate 44% of revenue and 46% of orders. 

If that wasn’t compelling enough, retaining an existing customer is five times less expensive for a brand than finding a new customer. 

📚 Recommended reading: 25 customer support metrics to measure your team’s impact & how to calculate

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What drives repeat customer rate?

To entice customers to come back, brands work to provide incredible experiences throughout a customer’s entire journey.

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

For online stores, customer support acts as a vital touchpoint. Build an iron-clad retention strategy, and you’ll see customer satisfaction soar, including boosted conversion rates and repeat business. 

How to calculate repeat customer rate

Repeat customer rate is very simple to calculate, but getting started takes a little pre-work. 

To calculate RCR, you first need to track the number of repeat customers you have over a specific time period. 

Of course, this can be done manually by combing through transactional data, but it would mean days of looking through customer information with a fine-tooth comb. Plus, since customer data is always coming in, you might never see the full picture.

A helpdesk like Gorgias can automatically find repeat customer data for you so you can focus your energy on ways to improve your RCR. 

Once you’ve collected your returning customers, divide the number of repeat customers by your total number of customers. Then, multiply that number by 100. 

The formula for RCR looks like:

(Total repeat customers / total paying customers) x 100 = RCR

Here’s what calculating RCR looks like using real numbers:

(80 repeat customers / 230 paying customers) x 100 = 34.78%

What is a “good” repeat customer rate in ecommerce? 

Like many customer support metrics, there’s no specific benchmark for a “good” repeat customer rate. Ultimately, it all comes down to your brand’s goals, along with factors like industry, audience needs, and the size of your ecommerce business.

The key to returning customer rate is to strike a balance between customer acquisition of new shoppers and re-engaging with existing customers. 

Based on Gorgias’s own first-party data with our merchants, we estimate that a 20% increase in customer base can boost your brand’s revenue by 6%. 

RCR works well in tandem with a few other metrics to determine the actual value of your marketing efforts: 

• Customer Lifetime Value (CLV): How much money a customer will likely spend on your products over a specific timeframe. 
• Customer Acquisition Costs (CAC): How much it costs your brand to obtain a new customer versus retaining existing ones. 
• Average Order Value (AOV): The amount of money your customers spend per transaction. 
• Churn Rate: The percentage of customers your brand loses over time.  

6 steps to improve your repeat customer rate

In a recent study, HubSpot found that 93% of customers were more likely to become repeat customers with brands they believe have excellent customer service.

What characterizes excellent customer service? These days, it’s personalization that incentivizes customers to keep coming back. 

Let’s look at six tried-and-true steps to create a positive, personalized shopping experience that will encourage your customers to return for more. 

1) Build a strong post-sales experience

A customer’s journey doesn’t end when they click checkout. 

The post-sales, or post-purchase, experience is a prime moment to keep a customer thinking about your brand or products long-term. 

Post-sales can also lead to better brand trust, a critical factor in gaining loyal customers. Bri says, “You're catching that person at a point where they're feeling really energized about the brand.”

The customer service team at TUSHY realized a post-sales strategy was exactly what they needed to close a knowledge gap around their bidets. They found customers who bought a bidet needed help understanding how to install them.

Reps were able to communicate with customers that installing a TUSHY bidet wasn’t a major plumbing project by creating an omnichannel support strategy with email, social media, SMS, live chat, FAQs, and a robust Help Center.  

2) Reduce response times

We noticed an interesting customer service trend: 90% of US customers say an immediate customer service response is “important” or “very important.” 

To give your customers a near-instant response, consider these ideas that not only boost customer satisfaction but can reduce the load on your support team. 

Automate repetitive questions

According to McKinsey, 71% of shoppers want personalized interactions with support teams, and 76% are frustrated when they don’t receive one.  

But a team stuck repeating return policies or tracking down orders doesn’t have much time to personalize a well-thought-out response.  

Gorgias Automate can help deflect up to 60% of your chat ticket volume by automating responses to repetitive questions. It works by sending personalized answers to customers based on their unique Shopify data.

Use a helpdesk to prioritize tickets 

You never want to leave a frustrated customer waiting. A helpdesk like Gorgias can automatically assign priority levels to your incoming tickets so agents know exactly which tickets to respond to first. 

Quickly resolving a frustrated customer’s problem could be just the thing to turn the negative interaction into a positive one that makes the customer want to come back again. 

Drive support traffic to your preferred channels

Customers prefer to have multiple ways to get in touch with your support team. However, some channels have longer response times than others. 

Customers who send a support request via email might fear their problem is lost in the void. Use slower channels as a springboard to push customers to faster channels, like SMS or Live Chat.

📚 Recommended reading: First response time: your guide to understand + lower the metric

3) Collect customer feedback 

Customer feedback is your golden ticket to creating great experiences that encourage repeat shopping. 

Customers have high expectations for brands these days — and without customer feedback, you’re stuck in the dark about how to meet those expectations. 

Here are a few ideas for your team to collect customer feedback and improve your brand experience: 

• Monitor customer reviews to find out what actual customers are saying about you. Gorgias customers can manage reviews by integrating with Yotopo, which allows users to track and respond to reviews in a central space. If the feedback you see is positive, that’s a sign your team is in the right direction. If it’s negative, use the feedback to look for areas of improvement.
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• Send out surveys to shoppers using a customer marketing platform like Okendo. CSAT helps gather general customer satisfaction. Likewise, you can offer an NPS survey to determine how likely customers would recommend your brand to their friends.
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• Build questions into your customer support scripts so agents can talk directly to customers about their experience. Your agents can find out if there are any gaps in the customer journey or reasons why the customer had a negative experience.
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• Implement a customer feedback loop to tie your tactics into a cohesive strategy. 

4) Create loyalty programs

Customer loyalty programs encourage customers to stay engaged with your brand after their initial purchase — which can dramatically boost your repeat customer rate. 

A loyalty program works by rewarding customers for shopping with your brand and incentivizing them to want to come back. It also shows your customers that you value the relationship. 

Consider also offering incentive-based referral programs to reward customers for sharing your brand and products with their friends. 

Software solutions such as Smile.io and LoyaltyLion make it incredibly easy to build a customer loyalty program from the ground up. Best of all, these options both integrate with Gorgias to pull loyalty customer data into your helpdesk. 

5) Offer discounts

So many people hear the word “discount” and get scared for their bottom line. In reality, a sale or deal is just the thing to sweeten the pot and entice a customer to return for more. 

That’s because a discount creates the perception of value in the hearts and minds of your customers. Remember how often you offer a deal since many customers will only buy with a discount.

A helpdesk, like Gorgias, can help you automate the process of giving a discount once you pinpoint great moments to offer them to customers. 

• Add a discount to your confirmation email to send to customers who recently completed a transaction. 
• Leverage SMS messaging to send a small discount to customers who purchased in the last month. 
• Use live chat to message a customer who added an item to their carts but moved it to “saved for later” or outright deleted it. 

Find out what went wrong, offer a new product recommendation, and a small discount to entice the customer to return to their cart and complete a new transaction. 

6) Upsell and cross-sell relevant products

For ecommerce brands, upselling is a tactic to encourage customers to purchase a higher-priced item instead of the one they initially selected. 

At its simplest, it’s a way to convince a customer to spend more money on an item.

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Cross-selling is a similar sales tactic where you can strategically recommend add-ons related to whatever the customer has put in their cart. 

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With upselling and cross-selling, the goal is the same: create higher ticket value, encourage greater sales, and improve customer satisfaction.  

Okendo recently launched a feature called Quizzes to provide personalized shopping experiences. 

With Quizzes, brands can ask their shoppers questions to make product recommendations and help customers make fast purchasing decisions.

Invest in a helpdesk to win more repeat customers

You could spend hours scrolling through transaction lines, physically track repeat customers, and manually build marketing campaigns to follow up with customers. 

Or, invest in a helpdesk to automate these processes for you. That way, you can focus on building a customer experience that incentivizes customers to shop beyond their first purchase. 

Ready to learn how to optimize your returning customer rate and maximize your company’s bottom line? Check out our CX growth playbook, a free resource that dives into:

• 18 tactics to boost profitability by 44%
• 25+ interviews with top ecommerce stores
• Analysis of +12,000 Gorgias customers.

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Yotpo, Loop Returns, ShipBob, TalentPop, Onepilot, Dedication Agents, and C(x)atalyze by Brolly Labs share the strategies and tools that can revolutionize your brand’s Black Friday and Cyber Monday approach.

We’ll share some of their success stories, helpful tips, and checklists for BFCM that will help you plan and optimize tasks that traditionally demand extensive time and resources. 

Explore how to harness automation to enhance marketing efforts, simplify returns management, and elevate customer support interactions.

BFCM Loyalty & retention automation tips from Yotpo

In 2024, the tools that brands use for loyalty and retention marketing automation have gotten more sophisticated and effective, allowing for deeper integrations between them. 

This gives brands the ability to create personalized, timely engagement at every touchpoint, creating a fully connected journey across channels — while building retention strategies that keep customers coming back long after BFCM and the holiday shopping season.

Key elements to automate for BFCM

Automating loyalty program updates, like points earned and progress to the next loyalty tier, keeps customers engaged between purchases and gives them a reason to come back. 

One thing brands shouldn’t automate is blasting out tons of generic offers to their entire customer base. Leverage advanced segmentation and predictive analytics to send targeted campaigns around what — and when — your customers are likely to purchase next.

BFCM retention marketing automation checklist

Nailing your post-purchase flows is essential for BFCM and beyond. Automated transactional messages with order and delivery updates are crucial for giving customers peace of mind and building trust — and if you can integrate your shopping info to time review requests at the right time, even better. 

Here are all the flows that you should automate:

• Welcome flows. Set up these flows before BFCM to send when a customer subscribes to email and SMS or joins your loyalty program. 
• Browse and cart abandonment flows. Activate before BFCM to bring customers who abandon the shopper journey back with a reminder or discount.
• Upsell and cross-sell flows. Boost the average order value of your store and promote repeat purchases. Map out complementary products for promotion well in advance of BFCM so your flows are ready to go on Black Friday. 
• Winback flows. Deploy these flows for pre-BFCM offers based on their past purchases to bring lapsed back to your brand and prime them for your BFCM promotions. 
• Transactional flows. Have these set up and tested in advance of BFCM so customers can receive accurate updates on order and delivery status.
• Review requests. Integrate your reviews with your shipping software to ensure that you’re sending requests at the right time, i.e. after the customer has received the item and had a chance to use it. 
• Loyalty flows. Ensure that loyalty flows are set up before BFCM so you can extend exclusive offers to rewards program members. Keep members updated on points and spending status and any exclusive perks.
• VIP flows. A week or two before BFCM, segment your most loyal customers and offer them early access to your BFCM sales. 

DIME Beauty’s approach to automation & retention marketing

DIME Beauty is a brand that thinks about retention marketing year-round by finding unique ways to use automation to engage and retain their customers. 

Since launching with the Yotpo Platform, DIME has seen an impressive 15% increase in their repeat purchase rate — now it’s consistently above 55%. When you look closer, it’s because DIME engages customers in every channel. Here’s everything else they accomplished:

• Personalized communications on post-purchase upsell flows consistently produce 130x ROI
• +300x ROI on abandoned cart flows tailored to loyalty members eligible for redemption
• 70% of DIME’s loyalty members are subscribed to SMS, and when they engage a loyalty member via that channel, these customers are twice as likely to redeem loyalty points
• Members subscribed to SMS purchase 3x more a year than loyalty members not subscribed to SMS

DIME will be going into BFCM 2024 with their marketing automation strategies already in place and tested, giving them the ability to turn their influx of new shoppers into repeat buyers and loyal customers. 

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Loop’s tips for automating returns and exchanges in 2024

This year, there are plenty of new automation tools that you can use to help improve your returns and exchanges. 

Loop has built out real-time exchange and return tracking so that there’s no more wondering where the products are. They’ve also built Loop Point of Sale, which allows brands to unite their online ecommerce operations with their in-store operations. With Loop POS, brands can save up to an estimated 780 hours of labor every year. 

Key processes to automate for BFCM

While AI-driven return management systems can offer speedy inventory management and predictive analytics, if they aren’t seamlessly integrated into your returns process, they run the risk of depersonalizing the customer experience.

BFCM returns automation checklist 

⏱️ Three months before BFCM

Customize your return policies. With Loop’s Workflows, you can leverage automation to help determine which customers and which return reasons should get which return policies. This can take some time to figure out, so we recommend starting about 3 months out. 

Implement easy-to-use, automated processes. If you haven’t yet automated your returns management process, you’ll want to do so. Because onboarding times can vary, we recommend starting this process 3 months out. 

⏱️ One to two months before BFCM

Integrate your tech stack. Once your returns are automated, you’ll want to integrate the rest of your tech stack with your returns management solution so that all of your BFCM processes (marketing, customer support, and more) run as smoothly as your returns will. Depending on who your providers are, this might take about a month or two.

Seek negotiated rates and processing efficiencies.
Look into streamlining your reverse logistics processes. Many 3PLs offer automated warehouse processes, and Loop offers negotiated rates and rate shopping to help make your returns more cost-effective. 

Elevate your exchanges. Build sophisticated exchange automation options, like Loop’s Shop Now feature, which allows your customers to easily shop your entire catalog during an exchange.

Shipping and fulfillment: automation tips from ShipBob

As the first fulfillment solution to integrate with Gorgias, ShipBob has seen how more brands are enabling seamless customer support and shipping data in one place to streamline post-purchase order inquiries and actions. 

This relatively new integration allows brands to connect their customer support team directly to detailed fulfillment information, so they can answer tickets and kick off follow-up communications without having to leave Gorgias, giving a more detailed answer to "Where is my order?" 

They can even create automation when orders are in exception or on hold to proactively alert customers about delays as soon as they occur.

Processes to automate for BFCM

• Establish fulfillment guidelines for recurring, automated processes. For instance, consider a scenario where each time an order is imported from your store, you want to insert marketing collateral into the order.   
• Order processing and importing from your store to your 3PL or WMS, and pushing back shipment tracking. Implementing these fulfillment rules streamlines the order processing and shipment tracking stages.
• Instructions for packers in the WMS. Consider using images of products on picklists and gifs/videos for pack-out processes, especially as you hire temp labor/outside help.
• Auto-generated picking lists. Make sure to include SKUs, quantities, and information on where items are located in the warehouse.
• Batch or zone picking via a WMS. This will increase efficiency as your order volume ramps up.
• Order routing that automatically utilizes the most optimal fulfillment center location. Selecting the location closest to the order’s destination for the fastest allows for the most cost-effective delivery.

Keep these elements manual

• Forecast volumes. Weekly isn't enough — know what you need to manage on a daily and sometimes hourly level to make sure you have the right capacity for not only the average but also the heaviest days.
• Build a contingency for every scenario. What action will be taken when weather disrupts the supply chain? How will demand heaviness or lightness change the plan?  Having a playbook created in advance will save you time and customers.
• Communications about order delays. You can even go above and beyond by offering a discount on a future order. Customers will appreciate the transparency.

Tasks to tackle in October 

• Set automatic inventory reorder points at the SKU level. This is useful when inventory falls below a certain threshold, providing you with greater lead times.
• Establish packaging preferences for each SKU. Whether that’s deciding between box and mailer, and attributes (fragile, HAZMAT, etc.) Automating which packaging materials to be used will increase your efficiency. 
• Automate inventory placement, distribution, and replenishment. This is crucial if you store your products in more than one warehouse. You can reduce shipping costs, transit times, and risk if a fulfillment center or carrier gets overloaded during peak, or if carriers are unable to pick up due to severe weather.
• Build carrier cutoff deadlines into workflows. In addition to proactively sharing deadlines with customers, tie them into your shipping methods schedule, automated cart abandonment emails, website banners, and other marketing promotions.
• Weigh and get exact product dimensions for all SKUs. Doing this will help optimize for dimensional weight. If you work with a fulfillment provider like ShipBob, they should already do this for you via Cubiscan machines and box selection algorithms. ‍
• Display estimated delivery dates and 2-day shipping badges on your product pages. These visual cues help customers make informed purchase decisions and set clear expectations for when their items will arrive.‍
• Spice up your unboxing experience by creating rules. Some examples are automatically adding a marketing insert to every order or gift notes. 

How ShipBob helped Sharkbanz save BFCM sales

Sharkbanz was able to save their Black Friday Cyber Monday sales by using ShipBob’s end-to-end freight solution, FreightBob, which automates the shipping of inventory from the manufacturer, to ShipBob’s fulfillment centers, to the end customer.

“The time-savings achieved on the shipment using the dedicated freight service were incredible. We not only cut down our shipping time from Hong Kong to LA significantly but even saved money doing it. Thanks to ShipBob’s freight program, we had no stress and were super well-stocked for the rest of the year, without any kind of inventory issues that have plagued us in the past. 

Once picked up from the port, ShipBob cross-docked it from California to Pennsylvania, while keeping some inventory in California too. As it turned out, our sales for BFCM exceeded expectations — so we were lucky that we had FreightBob to deliver extra inventory so quickly. We were in a tough spot, and I don’t think we would have been able to fulfill all of our retail orders across every single SKU throughout the entire BFCM holiday period without it. It came at a really clutch moment!” ––Nathan Garrison, Co-Founder and CEO of Sharkbanz

Customer service BFCM automation 

Automating customer service processes during the BFCM period is central to providing a solid customer experience while significantly lightening the load on your reps. We had several partners give us amazing advice on how to set up your BFCM customer support for success.

• TalentPop
• OnePilot
• Dedication Agents 
• C(x)atalyze by Brolly Labs 

TalentPop’s CS tips for BFCM automation

2024 made it clear that for brands to succeed, they have to start leveraging CX as a revenue-generating channel and not just using it as a channel for solving requests. 

At TalentPop, we see a lot of brands address simple requests like WISMO, return/exchange, and order status requests with automation through a chat widget. Many also use self-service options like an FAQ or Help Center to confidently direct customers to the correct answer on-site. 

However, brands need to ensure that there’s an easy way for customers to engage with a live support agent if their request can’t be handled through automation. For example, tickets related to pre-purchase questions, product suggestions, and escalated customer situations such as lost packages, damaged orders, and defects should be taken care of by a human as there is a need to establish brand loyalty while exercising sensitivity.

When live agents handle complex issues, simple requests can be resolved with automation and can turn into revenue-generating opportunities. 

⏱️ 3 months before BFCM, do the following:

• Historical analysis. Review past BFCM data to anticipate ticket volume, ticket types, and Customer Service Metrics (FRT, Resolution Time, CSAT, Tickets Handled Per Hour) customer behavior.
• Peak timing identification. Determine the busiest customer service hours from previous BFCM. ‍
• Ensure mobile optimization. Ensure the website/app is fully functional and user-friendly on mobile devices.‍
• Set up performance analytics. Monitor customer service metrics and adjust KPIs and SLAs accordingly.‍
• Capacity planning. Ensure infrastructure and personnel can handle BFCM volume. Look to onboard more CS agents if needed.‍
• AI-powered solution implementation. Establish AI in your helpdesk for smarter, faster customer service and problem prediction on simplified Customer Service Requests.

⏱️ 2 months before BFCM, do the following:

• Omnichannel support setup. Ensure all customer service channels are enabled and that your brand can establish a consistent support experience across all platforms.
• Automate error notifications. Create instant alerts in Slack to report any outages to any major software or apps you are using and have established links you can visit to ensure you can track statuses.‍
• Update Macros. Review existing macros and add a new Macros section to have responses for commonly asked questions and ensure you have new macros created for any questions related to BFCM.‍
• Implement basic Gorgias automation. Set up Gorgias Quick Response Flows and Order Management Flows. Establish Chat Campaigns on Gorgias to proactively communicate with customers based on BFCM offers or anticipate questions they may have based on where on the site they are navigating. Set automated replies with expected wait times or common solutions.‍
• Create BFCM-specific tags. Ensure you have tags related to all ticket types and add any tags specific to BFCM to categorize customer interactions. Implement Auto-Tagging to address all ticket types, and automate the process of tagging BFCM-related customer inquiries.‍
• Customer segmentation. Define VIP criteria based on # of purchases, frequency of purchases, loyalty, etc.‍
• Dedicated BFCM page creation. Design a specific page detailing all BFCM offers, terms, etc. Ensure it communicates all BFCM-related policies like returns, shipping, etc.‍
• Agent training sessions. Update agents on BFCM deals, new product offerings, policies, and common BFCM queries. Develop internal knowledge base guides for your top customer service requests to ensure clarity across all team members.

⏱️ 1 month before BFCM, do the following:

• Communicate loyalty benefits. Ensure VIPs are aware of and receive all their loyalty benefits.
• Escalation procedures setup. Have a clear plan for escalating unresolved or complex customer issues.‍
• Streamline returns & exchanges. Simplify the process for post-BFCM returns or exchanges to avoid unnecessary bottlenecks and delays.‍
• Plan post-BFCM deals and communications. Strategize for post-sale communications and deals to retain customers.‍
• Set up email and push notifications. Implement notifications to update users about deals, restocks, etc. Set emails to automatically update customers about orders, shipping, etc.
• ‍Fast-track ticket views for VIPs. Dedicate faster or exclusive support channels for VIP customers by ensuring proper ticket routing to VIP customers.‍
• Set up automated post-purchase surveys and thank yous. Gather customer feedback on their BFCM shopping experience and send personalized appreciation messages to customers post-purchase.

⏱️ Implement the following ASAP:

• Send exclusive VIP offers. Provide VIPs with special BFCM deals or early access.‍
• Live chat activation. Enable a live chat on Gorgias to allow for real-time assistance on the website/app.

⏱️ Tasks to do on an ongoing basis:

• Send exclusive VIP offers. Provide VIPs with special BFCM deals or early access.
• Live chat activation. Enable a live chat on Gorgias to allow for real-time assistance on the website/app.‍
• Send proactive notifications. Notify customers about order statuses or stock changes proactively.‍
• Feedback loop implementation. Regularly update resources based on customer feedback.‍
• Keep inventory updated. Ensure stock levels on the site/app are updated in real-time to prevent over-selling.‍
• Provide seamless order tracking. Allow customers to easily track their BFCM orders in real time.‍
• Integrate feedback for improvement. Use received feedback to better future BFCM strategies.

Setting Brown Girl Jane up for BFCM Success

Women’s fragrance brand Brown Girl Jane came to TalentPop in October of 2022 searching for the perfect team to help them tackle their influx of tickets during the holiday season. 

After helping them crush their goals in 2022, TalentPop is setting them up for success this BFCM with automation. Using Gorgias’s Automation Add-On, TalentPop’s Implementation team was able to set up Rules and Flows to automatically respond to common inquiries that did not require agent oversight. 

The result? Brown Girl Jane is now seeing 70% of their tickets resolved through automation, freeing up agent time to focus on customer concerns that require more oversight and drive revenue through upselling and cross-selling opportunities. 

The Brown Girl Jane team is now prepared to head into 2024’s BFCM with the confidence that their Customer Service agent will be able to handle the influx of tickets, and more efficiently address customer concerns! 

OnePilot’s BFCM automation hacks for CS in 2024

At OnePilot, a customer service outsourcing company, we keep up to date with all things CS and automation.  

In 2021 or 2022, mail and phone were still the main channels of communication for brands. The shift to chat and social media allowed brands to pivot to using more automation, especially with the rise in the popularity of AI. 

Automation and AI can pre-qualify customers' demands and help human agents to focus on answer quality. 

OnePilot’s BFCM customer service checklist

• Train your agents with new tools and processes specific to BFCM
• Prepare alternative channels of communication. Some customers will still prefer the human touch, so make sure that they can easily connect with an agent if they need further support. 
• Plan to add additional agents to manage additional BFCM volume. 
• Ensure you have key metrics like First Resolution Time, First Response Time, CSAT, and NPS set up to monitor BFCM results. 

Dr. BRANDT x Onepilot

A few years ago, Dr. BRANDT was using Zendesk as their ticketing tool, but it required too much time and training for a small brand. With a backlog of tickets and slower shipping times than normal during the BFCM period, there was a real risk of losing revenue, losing customers, and getting negative reviews.

Dr. BRANDT was facing these challenges: 

• A doubled ticket volume pre-, during, and post-BFCM across all channels
• Increased customer expectations in terms of responsiveness, expertise, and coverage since many people are in a rush to get gifts on time. 
• 5 to 10x more orders to handle

Their small team felt that the helpdesk was “not plug and play” and they needed something simpler to implement. That’s when they decided to use Gorgias which fully integrated with Shopify and other tools in their stack such as Klaviyo and Recharge.

Today, all their channels are connected in a single app, allowing them to streamline their customer support, keep track of their client history, and enhance their partnership with Onepilot.

Dr. BRANDT also automates simple tickets, like WISMO inquiries, to speed up their resolution times. “For these simple questions, customers don’t need a “human touch” — they need fast, helpful responses,” they said. 

By taking advantage of automation, their agents can focus on more complex customer demands that require human interaction during the stressful BFCM period.

Dedication Agents’ tips for BFCM automation, CS edition

The advent of generative AI becoming mainstream through ChatGPT has made consumers extremely familiar with automation and self-service options on ecommerce websites.

Dedication Agents sees this with all clients who are looking to empower customers to find information on their own. 

And it’s a good idea — arming consumers with self-service tools allows the merchant to scale sales volumes without having to dramatically adjust their store operations.

Automate these processes ahead of BFCM

A smooth-sailing BFCM means automating all answers to customer questions that can be answered from content on your site. The less time the customer spends finding an answer, the more likely they are to make a purchase.  

Things like order updates, product information, and shipping policies –– essentially all standard things a customer looks for — should all be automated.  More complex items like refunds, chargebacks, and fraud claims are best left for human agents as the user temperament with a dollar has a much higher sensitivity.

⏱️ One month before BFCM, plan to: 

Review customer interactions and feedback. Take into consideration what customers say about your products and services to help you streamline support through automation. 

Ensure that automated Flows do not sound robotic by using language that caters to what a customer is looking for. This should be done a month before to give you ample time to fine-tune and test messaging to ensure it reflects your brand voice.

Set up automated post-purchase surveys and thank yous. Gather customer feedback on their BFCM shopping experience and send personalized appreciation messages to customers post-purchase.

⏱️ Two weeks before BFCM, you should: 

Update all site content. Make sure content is as fresh as possible to ensure customers know how to find what they need.  This should be done a couple of weeks before BFCM given customers will start to look at their favorite brands in advance.

Personalized chat flows specific to BFCM. Repurpose chat automations and Macros where necessary to ensure that communications have to do with BFCM.  Getting this done two weeks before the rush of BFCM will give you room to carry out tests and modifications.

⏱️ One week before BFCM, you should: 

Update and/or double-check store policies, specifically for refunds and exchanges. Maintaining messaging accuracy in emails and chat automations is key to a headache-free customer experience. Do this about a week before BFCM customers have clear expectations about returns and exchanges.

Test all automations. Given the various changes that will likely be made during the BFCM period, it’s best to test out all automations at least one week in advance to allow time to address glitches, unexpected problems, and more.

A Dedication Agents success story

Dedication Agents supports a global artist’s online store that sees heavy volumes of orders and inquiries. Originally,  the Dedicated Agents team answered all live chat and emails around order support, which became a very monotonous task since they were answering the same question over and over again.

They then realized they could use automation to free up the team to work on other higher-value tasks.

This became a huge time saver and value add to customer support. Responses became instantaneous which kept customers happy as they waited for their order. Once first response times were reduced, saw future sales increased by 45% with the customers who had originally interacted with the automations — a surprising win.

BFCM customer service tips from C(x)atalyze by Brolly Labs

If you think ticket count will double during BFCM, it will likely quadruple. If you think it will triple, it could end up being 5x. 

C(x)atalyze highly recommends using the Gorgias Automation Add-On to manage chat.

The Automation Add-On enables customers to answer their questions in the most efficient way possible. Adding several Help Center articles for BFCM will also enable customers to access specific questions via the Automation Add-On.

In addition, use Gorgias Flows to supplement the chat widget to serve customers even during offline hours.

Putting in the effort to set up automation thoroughly will make things easier for you in the future. A few hours of work on your Help Center and Flows will decrease your work by hundreds of hours during the holidays.

The CS elements C(x)atalyze recommends automating for BFCM

There are two certainties with BFCM: 

• There will be operations issues, and tickets will pile up.
• There will be questions. So many questions. Many from new customers.

BFCM is an opportunity that brands must optimize for future growth. This means being proactive with customers when they have sales questions. 

Never automate sales questions. C(x)atalyze, recommends adding the live chat function and ensuring that FRT is less than 2 minutes. Then make sure to set up urgent views in Gorgias to categorize “sales leads” based on email and chat so you never miss these opportunities — don’t let them get lost in the inbox shuffle!

Try to automate operational questions as much as possible. Have an auto-reply set up letting customers know you are busy, but will get back to them. Automate all tracking requests, change of address requests, and other questions that can be solved with dynamic variables. 

Set up automated responses to these questions

Where is my order?

C(x)atalyze recommends adding the dynamic Gorgias tag for tracking information. You can also dynamically input the customer’s address into the response to provide further peace of mind. 

Shipping and delivery questions

These can all more or less be maintained by automation. Nuances include questions about expedited shipping (especially during the holiday season) and shipping speed.

Note: Change of address can be tricky. Make sure you change the address within both Shopify and your subscription management tool if you use one. 

• Use a Gorgias rule and Macro to enable the Gorgias change address in Shopify action which will automatically perform this task for you.
• Tag all of these using rules and tags so an agent can review and verify that the process was performed correctly. In this manner, your customers receive an update right away and increase your CSAT score, while your agent can double-check to verify it was done correctly.

Order cancellations 

C(x)atalyze recommends automating order cancellations for new orders and non-subscriptions. If a customer places an order by mistake, this automation makes it easy for them to cancel. 

Pro Tip: Save subscriptions from cancellations — retaining customers is more cost-effective than acquiring new customers. 

Questions about BFCM / holiday season discounts 

• Many customers will email inquiring about discounts knowing that most brands provide discounts. C(x)atalyze recommends automating this response by using Gorgias’ “contains” rule feature. Include words such as “discount” AND “BFCM”, “holiday”, “Thanksgiving”, “Black Friday”, “Christmas”, etc.
• In the response, make sure you provide the method by which to receive a discount (e.g. signing up for SMS). 

For example, one of C(x)atalyze’s customers in the food space gets tons of questions about when the food will be delivered. This company ran a “lifetime discount” campaign last BFCM, so they set up two key automations that reduced ticket responses by 50%:

• An auto-response rule that automatically responds to customers asking about the discount. Any tickets containing the word “discount” and a “discount/request” intent condition were targeted to generate the lifetime discount for customers.

• An auto-response to WISMO tickets. Using Gorgias Intent and Rules, tickets that included certain keywords (e.g. “where is my order”, “order status”, etc.).   received auto-responses that included a tracking URL.

Give your ecommerce strategy a boost this holiday shopping season

The name of the game this Black Friday - Cyber Monday isn’t just to get a ton of online sales, it’s to set up your ecommerce site for a successful holiday shopping season. 

If you want to move the meter, focus on setting up strong BFCM automation now. 

Gorgias is designed with ecommerce merchants in mind. Find out how Gorgias’s time-saving automations and convenient platform can help you create successful customer experiences.

Claim your demo today, or sign up to try Gorgias.

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Every business has to have customer service. But what makes an experience memorable versus just functional means imbuing every customer interaction with magic. 

I’m Ren Fuller-Wasserman, the Director of Experience at TUSHY. At TUSHY, our end goal is to have everyone using bidets — and that means it’s crucial for our team of Poo-Rus (our customer service reps who are poop gurus!) to make people feel comfortable enough to talk about what they would never dare — bathroom hygiene.

On paper, customer service and customer experience may have different definitions, but ecommerce founders need to know that they’re inseparable when crafting long-lasting relationships with customers.   

How customer service and customer experience intersect

When you build customers a world that intertwines both customer service and customer experience, you have a higher chance of aligning them with your brand mission and converting them into loyal amb-ass-adors.

What is customer service?

Customer service is the functional side of interacting with customers and addressing customer needs. It is assistance that can be managed by service agents or automation, like a one-on-one conversation on email or an automated conversation through an AI chatbot or self-service options on your website.

There are several ways to evaluate your customer support program, like response time or keeping track of how many customer service interactions it takes to resolve an issue, or what’s called a Customer Effort Score (CES).

Where does customer experience come in? 

If you think of customer service as the reception of an establishment, it’s necessary, essential, and expected. Customer experience is all the welcoming perks, extra treats, your favorite corner table with your name on it, and fancy decorations that take the rating of an establishment from three stars to five.

In short, customer experience comes down to how a customer feels after interacting with your brand — and what will bring them back again and again. It includes every interaction a customer has with you, from seeing an ad and liking a post on your social media, to browsing your website and receiving the product on their doorstep. 

You want each experience to mimic your brand’s core values. At TUSHY, we want our customers to experience magic and delight at all touchpoints. 

Customer experience is usually quantified by customer perception of your brand, using metrics such as a Net Promoter Score (NPS) or Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT).

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5 ways to blend customer service with customer experience

Below are five ways our CX team wraps customer service in a nicely packaged experience with the help of Gorgias. We’ll look at how we build an exceptional experience with a chat widget, the right tone, omnichannel support, a proactive attitude, and a consistent experience across all platforms.

➡️ See our posts on why customer service is important and how to improve customer service. 

1. Anticipate customer needs with automated chat conversations

Customer and agent conversations are where we see the most friction, which is why it's crucial to pad it with a customer experience that can make customers feel taken care of right off the bat.

Often, the first tickets we get from new TUSHY customers are about bidet installation and usage. To prepare for these inquiries, we use Flows, or pre-configured conversations, to customize our chat widget to include an “I need help with installation!” button. In a couple of clicks, customers can watch our video tutorials to install their TUSHY product on their own.

Customer service isn’t only about getting an agent in front of a customer. It’s also about finding the most convenient ways to get an answer to your customer with the least amount of obstacles. Changing culture is hard, so we want to make it as easy as possible for customers to learn more about bidets.

🚽 Where customer service comes in: Agents identify and anticipate the customer issue.

🚽 Where customer experience comes in: An easily accessible chat widget on the homepage offers one-click answers to the appropriate issue. 

2. Find the right tone for customers

While TUSHY is known for its cheeky brand voice, we turn it down a notch when it comes to answering customer tickets. Customer interactions about a bidet can get pretty intimate and we want people to know we’re trustworthy and have their backs (and bottoms).

The Customer Sidebar on Gorgias is helpful in adjusting our tone for each customer since customers don’t always speak to the same Poo-Ru. When a different Poo-Ru gets assigned to an existing customer, they can find the customer’s order history, location, and personal notes from the sidebar and use the right tone to naturally continue the conversation.

We once even had a mother tell us how using TUSHY helped her daughter deal with threadworms! When we put effort into building relationships, customers feel comfortable enough to tell us even the most personal details, and we often learn new things about how our customers interact with our product that we might not have even considered.

🚽 Where customer service comes in: Agents adjust their voice and tone depending on the customer.

🚽 Where customer experience comes in: Conversations are continuous and don’t have to restart with every interaction, allowing customers to feel valued and heard.

3. Provide multiple avenues of support at post-purchase

We pay close attention to the post-purchase stage for two reasons: to make sure customers are educated and satisfied.

To ensure our customers are confident with their new bidets, we educate them through Gorgias omnichannel support or support through channels like email, SMS, live chat, FAQs, and our Help Center.

Through these channels, we manage customer expectations by letting them know that installing a bidet isn’t actually a major plumbing project. Our comprehensive TUSHY Support Center covers everything from order management and installation videos, to our rewards program and fun fact articles about our eco-conscious efforts.

🚽 Where customer service comes in: Provides your customer base with multiple support channels to reach them where they are.

🚽 Where customer experience comes in: Customer conversations are continuous and streamlined with Gorgias’s omnichannel support feature.

📚 Related reading: How omnichannel communication can drive revenue & boost customer loyalty

4. Foster a proactive team unafraid to talk to customers during slip-ups

Our TUSHY CX crew is a deeply empathetic bunch who truly care about being of service to people even when slip-ups happen. That means we don’t just fix pain points in the customer journey, we encourage our Poo-Rus to be proactive and reach out to the affected customers.

We’re fervent believers that even the worst customer experiences are actually opportunities ripe for the Poo-Rus to convert into meaningful customer interactions, experiences where we can show a customer that we’re truly listening and have heard their concerns. We can’t always solve every problem, but our customers knowing that they have a real live pooping human supporting them through their woes has been invaluable in building lifelong product and brand relationships.

If you can believe it, multiple customers have sent us photos after devastating house fires, showing the TUSHY still intact but needing a replacement part or two. We respond by sending them the full suite of TUSHY products, including our now famous “Ask me about my butthole.” shirts. This small gesture can mean so much in this time of need, and it’s the least we can do!

These are the great customer experiences, coupled with support, that define our brand.

By creating an environment that motivates agents to be creative and empathetic problem-solvers, maintaining customer retention becomes a breeze.

🚽 Where customer service comes in: Agents engage in proactive customer service to listen to customers.

🚽 Where customer experience comes in: Customers feel heard knowing their opinion will be directly applied to how customer service will run in the future.

💡 Pro Tip: Team-building is integral to keeping your customer service team aligned and thriving. At TUSHY, we have a monthly space called TUSHY Gang where we engage in group activities to build stronger bonds with each other, and for our remote team this has made our CX game even stronger. Investing in our team has been a valuable way to invest in our customers — we’ve seen how when they feel cared for they always want to pass this along! 

5. Continue the customer experience across all platforms and mediums

Some customers purchase TUSHY outside of our website, like Amazon or Walmart, which can make it challenging for us to provide a uniform customer experience.

We realized that the common touchpoint for all customers regardless of their entry point is the unboxing experience. Thus, the easiest way we would bring them into the TUSHY-verse would be right at their fingertips.

Here’s what we print on our packaging to bring customers closer to TUSHY:

• A scannable QR code: Customers can access product registration, warranty activation, and a list of other resources with a quick scan of their phone. 
• Our website: hellotushy.com is printed on the front flap of the box in big, clear text.
• Our social media handles: Our username and the icons for each of our social media platforms on the front flap of the box.

The goal is to give customers just enough information but also make them curious enough to check us out and engage with us. If they dig in, there’s a wealth of bidet knowledge!

🚽 Where customer service comes in: The essential contact points like website and social media handles are included on the packaging.

🚽 Where customer experience comes in: We provide an uncomplicated unboxing experience with only the essential information customers need, and they can find more as needed without feeling overwhelmed. 

How TUSHY provides poo-rific post-purchase support

As we mentioned before, new customers often have problems with installation. Right after purchase, we see a drop-off when customers aren’t comfortable installing TUSHY. We uncovered this gap via user focus groups, return reports via Loop, Stella Connect reviews, NPS score ratings, and Okendo product reviews.

Our customers tend to get very excited when they learn about a bidet, and might pull the trigger on a purchase only to later discover they aren't ready to take on a small DIY project. It's pretty common for TUSHYs to sit in their box for weeks, months, or years before getting installed. So we're aiming to close that gap with more in your face installation guidance and instructions, so that TUSHYs aren't sitting in closets, but rather under butts delighting the customer!

To recapture customers who may need help, we make use of post-purchase SMS and emails (we use Klaviyo). In our messages, we make sure to give customers exactly what they need with a link to our YouTube video tutorials and our website for additional educational resources.

Go beyond the numbers and learn from customer feedback

Metrics are important, but they need the context that comes from customer feedback. That’s where insights from your agents who talk to customers day in and day out will be extremely beneficial.

For example, we noticed that a percentage of customers were returning their bidets, but we didn’t know why. So, we had a chat with 10 customers and took note of the challenges they were facing with our product and the improvements they wished to see in our service. Turns out, they simply didn’t want to go through the hassle of installation. 

Without taking the time to reach out to our customers, we wouldn’t have had the knowledge to fix a critical metric like churn rate.

Build unforgettable customer experiences with Gorgias

When you weave CX and CS together, the most memorable customer moments can happen. At TUSHY, we can attest to that. With the help of a customer-centric helpdesk like Gorgias backing our Poo-Rus, we’ve managed to make over tens of thousands of bums happy with our best-selling, five-star-rated Classic bidet.

Gorgias puts brands in the driver’s seat by championing personalized customer service. They let you customize everything from scheduled messages with Macros, interactive messages with Flows, and an educational hub with a Help Center.

From the overall customer experience, to customer support, and everything in between, Gorgias makes it easy for TUSHY users to feel supported through the entire customer journey. As a result, every touchpoint builds the potential to gather a mass of loyal customers.

📚 Related reading: How TUSHY influences 25% of sales with Gorgias Convert

All we had to do was refine our customer service experience and we got brand ambassadors. How amazing is that? If you’re looking to do the same, book a demo today.

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I’m Colin Waters and I’m the Director of Customer Experience at The Feed. You might know me from my experience at BrüMate, where I was the Associate Director of Customer Experience. In three years, I worked my way up from answering tickets and being on the front line with customers to overseeing the entire customer experience team. 

My different roles have shown me the various ways to adapt your customer service to fit your team’s and customer’s needs.

In this article, I’ll walk you through the different types of customer service, support channels, strategies, and philosophies you can offer based on what your company requires.

3 types of customer service + when and how to use each

Customer service is kind of like a sandwich. You’ve got your bread or the necessary foundational elements like a great customer service strategy and philosophy, and then you’ve got your support channels which can be more varied and customizable, like the sandwich fillings.

We’ll start with support channels, which you can take care of first, and move onto the strategies and philosophies of customer service. Let’s get into it!

Channels

There are many different support channels out there. But instead of offering them all — which can actually harm your support team in the long run — take a look at your customer service responsibilities, resources, and business needs to figure out which channels make the most sense for you.

Here’s a rundown of the different support channels you can offer and what they’re best used for.

Email

Email is flexible in terms of the type of customer inquiries they’re best for (most of them!) and turnaround time, unlike more instantaneous and short-form support channels like live chat and social media.

Provide email support if…

• Customer inquiries are lengthy and detailed. Email is best suited for comprehensive responses that can handle file attachments and additional resources like images, videos, and links.
• Your operating hours are flexible. Customers can reach out to your support team outside of regular business hours, no matter their time zone.
• You deal with sensitive issues. Email provides a private platform for discussing sensitive matters that customers might not want to share publicly.
• You provide technical support. You can easily share resources like documents, videos, and screenshots in a continuous conversation that would be harder to do through other support channels like voice or social media.

Social media

Social media customer service is fairly new. However, as 26% of people learn about a product through social media, it’s a good idea to follow the trend and use your social media platforms to not only assist new customers, but take note of feedback. 

Provide social media support if…

• You want to reach a younger audience. With Gen Z on apps like TikTok and Instagram, offering your presence and assistance where they are in their free time can boost exposure and conversions.
• Your marketing strategy is social media-focused. Take advantage of the brand recognition you’re getting by personally connecting with followers and getting them closer to your brand.
• Many of your brand mentions are on social media. Mentions are a fantastic way to build a connection with your followers and turn them into customers, exhibit how your brand prioritizes customer service, and collect criticisms to pass along to your team.
• You have a product or service that’s going viral. Get excited with your customers, or provide important information like restock timing or shipping delays. 

Live chat, chatbots & automation

If your main source of traffic comes from your company’s website, using live chat or chatbots can easily capture your customer inquiries and lessen the load for your team. Sometimes, however, chatbots may provide inconsistent answers — that’s when using automation to create templated conversations will be your best option.

Provide live chat, chatbots, and automation if…

• You receive a lot of customer inquiries. A chat widget with automatic responses or a chatbot is one of the easiest ways to decrease tickets that contain the same inquiries. 
• You’re a small team. With fewer hands on board, routing tickets to AI and automatic responses can keep your customer service reps focused on more complex issues. 
• It’s the holiday season or peak hours. Getting a barrage of tickets, especially on Black Friday-Cyber Monday when most people are hunting for sales, can be a nightmare for customer service teams. Let a chat widget be your first line of defense.
• You sell personal or specialized products. Think of products like skincare and health supplements when most of your consumers will need to divulge personal information to get the answers they need. With live chat, customers can resolve their worries with an empathetic agent on their side.

Help center

A help center (also referred to as a knowledge base) is a collection of self-service resources that customers and employees can use to resolve questions and issues. They can contain FAQs, troubleshooting guides, instruction manuals, video tutorials, and more. 

Provide a help center or knowledge base if…

• You update or change your products regularly. If you release new versions of your products or services every year, a one-stop hub to update documents will be extremely helpful. 
• You sell specialized products. If your products need additional explanation before using them, a knowledge base can answer all customer questions and curiosities.
• You want to optimize your website for SEO. On top of being a helpful resource hub, a knowledge base can point eyes to your website. In turn, it earns your brand more exposure and new customers.

On BrüMate, our Help Center is made with Gorgias. It’s organized in sections like FAQs, shipping, and returns and exchanges which can be modified when our product lineup expands.

Voice, messaging & SMS

Voice support can still be an extremely valuable channel when you want to resolve tricky situations. In fact, 42% of Americans still prefer to resolve customer service issues via phone conversations.  

Provide voice support if…

• You deal with technical and complex issues. Having a support agent empathize and understand a customer’s problems is crucial not only to boost customer satisfaction but also to lay out solutions in a clear way.
• You serve customers internationally. Language barriers can make written communication difficult. With voice support, it can be easier to resolve issues when you can talk through instructions in real-time.
• Your customer issues are time-sensitive. Offering phone support can give customers an option to resolve urgent issues within minutes, instead of waiting for an email or social media reply back.

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Strategies

Depending on your goals as a customer service team, there are a few strategies you can choose from. In my experience, employing a mix of strategies allows you to adapt to more types of customers, resulting in higher customer satisfaction. 

Let’s look at the four customer service strategies, omnichannel, proactive, self-service, and personalized. I’ll go through what they are, their purpose, how to employ them, and my experience with each strategy at BrüMate.

Omnichannel support

What is it? Omnichannel customer service is offering support on multiple channels to create a seamless customer service experience. 

Purpose: To make your support as accessible as possible, so all customers can reach you from whichever channel they prefer.

How to implement it: Use a helpdesk that can combine support channels. 

At BrüMate, we use Gorgias to combine all customer conversations in one tool. Our main channels are email, social media, and live chat. 

Using Gorgias as a single source of truth for all of our channels helps to ensure that our customers get consistent responses. And, it means that all messages from a customer, regardless of channel, are visible in one place and can be handled by the same agent.

Proactive support

What is it? Proactive customer service is an approach to customer service that anticipates customer needs and meets customer expectations.

Purpose: To lessen the effort customers need to make to find answers to their questions.

How to implement it: Monitor your most common customer tickets and implement resources in advance to avert future inquiries.

We work closely with our marketing and digital teams to deflect issues as they come in and solve them at the root. For example, based on customer feedback, we might add more details to our product pages, update language at checkout, or highlight specific reviews. 

Self-service support

What is it? Self-service support is a customer service approach that empowers customers to independently find solutions to their problems using available resources and tools.

Purpose: To speed up resolution time by allowing customers to find answers on their own without waiting for an agent.

How to implement it: Provide self-service options (like a Help Center, automated responses in chat, or ways to easily track orders) at all customer touchpoints, from pre-sales and product inquiries to order status emails and returns. 

On the BrüMate website, we display helpful self-service resources in the Gorgias chat widget so that it’s easy for folks to get the help they’re looking for quickly. 

We strategically show links for customers to check order status, get warranty or return information, or learn more about the products that would best fit their lifestyles. 

We also leverage this area to highlight new products or call out any major issues at the moment (i.e. preorders, shipping delays, etc.) and drive those back to more detailed help center articles and resources.

Personalized support

What is it? Personalized customer service focuses on personalizing customer interactions. 

Purpose: To enhance customer satisfaction by customizing interactions to each customer’s preferences and needs.

How to implement it: When interacting with customers, adjust to their voice, acknowledge their history, and suggest solutions relevant to their preferences.

A majority of the BrüMate customer base is female and, fittingly, the majority of our Customer Experience agents are female as well.. This takes empathy to a new level since our team knows exactly what our customers are going through, whether they’re a mom of three or a college student. We’re also big brand ambassadors which helps make the connection more individualized.

Philosophies

What are your priorities when it comes to customer service? Do you prioritize speed? Or would you rather go slow and build out from there? 

The way you approach customer service will dictate the overall customer experience. Like customer service strategies, your team can follow more than one philosophy. But make sure to pick one philosophy as your north star to create a clear path towards your goals.

Below are four customer service philosophies that can help establish brand loyalty.

Long-term foundation

Since BrüMate’s CX team is still pretty small, our core philosophy is to build a strong foundation. Delivering good customer service starts with making sure you’ve got all your bases covered, so you can prevent headaches along the way. Make it easy for the customer to find you early in their experience and that CX is a valuable resource along any point in their journey.

When I’m onboarding new agents, I want them to take their time learning our process. For instance, our team is very particular with naming conventions for ticket tags and Macros. While some will find it tedious, the upside is anybody could come in — agent or not — and start answering tickets without too much guidance.

The customer is (not) always right

As a customer service representative, it’s easy to realize that the customer is not always right. Products wear down over time, delays happen, and unpredictable changes come up. The goal is to prepare your team to handle difficult situations that still align with your brand’s values.

For example, I’ve had to deal with a customer being irritated because we couldn’t cancel an order a few hours after it was placed. From their point of view, cancellations should be a given. They were unaware of the complex behind-the-scenes process and that our team will start fulfilling an order immediately after it is placed. 

We started educating customers on our order fulfillment process and giving them insight on the reason the cancellation was no longer available. Fortunately, the context allowed them to cool down and forgive the inconvenience. We also provided them with options once the item was delivered.

Balancing human support & automation

Automation is handy for handling smaller customer hiccups. It’s important to note, though, that the best customer service balances automation with human touch. 

When customers reach out to the BrüMate support team, we try our best to keep them with the same agent until their ticket is resolved. This way, their experience with BrüMate is tied to a personal connection. On occasion, I have a few customers who I prefer to work directly with to resolve their issue to ensure they are satisfied with their experience. They are even willing to wait until I’ve returned from vacation due to this level of personalized touch.

Surprise and delight

The concept of "surprise and delight" is a philosophy that makes the customer experience unexpected but delightful. This can come in the form of exceptional, personal customer service (like at BrüMate!) or through gifts and discounts.

Our customer support team at BrüMate plays a pivotal role in building strong relationships. We like to turn the perception of customer service upside down and give customers a pleasant experience. It's an amazing thing to hear when customers mention our agents by name because we've gone above and beyond to build a connection with them.

Customer support as a revenue center 

Many people think of customer service teams as a way to resolve problems. I see our team as a marketing and revenue driving machine that can take it a step further by taking a sales approach. This means support’s main goals are to divert unsatisfied customers by using methods of upselling and cross-selling.

Your team should be experts and help close orders. Incentive your team to be one part customer service and sales. I guarantee you’ll see results! 

With a help desk you can deliver support whenever, however, and wherever you need

Gorgias makes multitasking look like a breeze. Its simple user interface makes it easy for new and experienced agents to use. You can speak to multiple customers at one time across different channels and integrate with ecommerce tools like Shopify, Affirm, and Yotpo without leaving the window.

Take a look at what Gorgias has helped some of my other favorite CX brands do:

• Pit Viper’s first response time and CSAT skyrocketed to 4.9
• Oger boosted its first response time by 69% 
• Kulani Kinis saved $400K in refunds by using Gorgias and Loop Returns 

If you’re ready to join me and these other amazing companies using Gorgias, book a demo today.

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As the Customer Experience Manager at Dr. Squatch, a men's naturally-derived personal care company, I’m constantly looking for ways to craft exceptional experiences for our customers. But the question to ask is: does it actually make a difference to our revenue?

Unearthing the impact of your customer service team starts with evaluation. To do this, it’s essential to track metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) around customer service.

Evaluating the impact of a customer service team can sometimes be an ambiguous task. That’s why I’m here to outline the most important customer service metrics to watch, so you can effortlessly recognize the ways your customer service team directly moves the needle.

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What is customer support evaluation?

Customer support evaluation is the process of measuring your customer service program's impact on the business.

It requires using metrics and KPIs to understand whether your support team is providing a great customer experience that can generate repeat customers, positive reviews, referrals, and more.

Evaluating your customer support also requires understanding the return on investment (ROI). In other words, do the benefits produced by your support efforts outweigh the cost of your support program?

The benefits of evaluating customer service

In almost every business, a developed support program is worth its weight in gold. Evaluating your program is how you prove it to company leadership, earning you additional budget for tools and team members. 

You can think of a strong customer experience as a rising tide that lifts all ships — the impact is vast but also hard to quantify.

At Dr. Squatch, we’re close with our customers and even closer to the numbers. Once we started employing a data-driven approach to customer support management, it made a huge difference in both customer satisfaction and hitting company targets.

Let’s look at the five incredible benefits you get after you make evaluation a regular part of your customer service program.

1) Detailed insight into your customers’ needs

Customer inquiries are a treasure trove of rich data for you to dig into to create a better experience for future interactions. By evaluating metrics like customer satisfaction (CSAT) or average resolution time, you can identify key trends and issues online shoppers are dealing with and update your customer service strategy.

On Gorgias, your incoming tickets are automatically sorted by AI-powered intent and sentiment detection, giving you a quick overview of which customer issues should be at the top of the list.

2) Identifies which customer service tasks can be automated

It’s not enough to have a talented team replying on behalf of your brand. You need to make sure your team is focusing on the right activities and not wasting their time on the wrong ones.

By measuring metrics related to your team’s performance — like first response time and resolution time — you can identify which tasks can be done with automation. You’ll also be able to figure out which agents on your team may need more training and support.

3) Balances your revenue and expenses

Customer acquisition is becoming more expensive, so keeping track of customer service can give you an idea of how much customer service truly provides within your organization. 

4) Lets you calculate the true customer lifetime value 

True lifetime value is the measure of a customer’s worth over the duration of the customer-business relationship. 

Keep in mind, it’s less expensive to keep current customers than to find new ones. This is increasingly true as customer acquisition costs and social media ad prices soar.

5) Helps to create predictable support quality

Solid customer support quality is predictable. And that’s not a bad thing. That means when anything new, surprising, or daunting happens, you don’t need to call in a special task force. 

Thanks to your stable operations, your whole team will simply need short-term and long-term action plans, like establishing a list of steps to take and point of contacts and to inform.

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Four key indicators that your customer service program needs a makeover

Beyond bad reviews and customer complaints, there are a few quick ways you can tell if your customer service program is not doing well. 

These four key indicators are major signs that your customer service program needs some refining.

1) High contact rate (over 33%)

A contact rate of over 33% means something about your customer journey, communication, or product is not quite right. Your customers aren’t getting the answers they need.

The goal of your customer service team should always be to resolve tickets efficiently. If a customer has to reach out to your brand multiple times, you most likely need to update your support resources.

Leading indicator: Multiple touchpoints per customer

How to fix it: Include more self-service options to give customers quick answers without having to wait to talk to an agent. Add a Help Center, chat widget, or send informative confirmation and post-purchase emails. For example, our chat widget at Dr. Squatch suggests common questions and answers them via an automated quick response flow based on the customers’ reply. 

2) A customer satisfaction score (CSAT) under 4/5

Your customers should be coming away from interactions feeling good about your brand and the support it provides. There’s no acceptable reason for a low CSAT score, so you should always take a closer look when it starts to fall. 

Leading indicator: Friction in customer conversations 

How to fix it: Provide additional training to your support agents to ensure they’re equipped to handle the most pressing customer requests effectively and empathetically. Then, actively seek feedback from customers and use their input to make continuous improvements to your program.

3) Inconsistent first response time and resolution time

Your first response time (FRT) will fluctuate, and most people understand that, but waiting 4 days for an email from support is unacceptable for today’s shoppers. In general, customers want answers within 10 minutes.

Leading indicator: More customer complaints and a low CSAT

How to fix it: Align with your team and identify your customer base’s main complaints. To deflect repeat inquiries, immediately add self-service options like a Help Center or a chat widget to your online store. You can also use automated responses to acknowledge inquiries right away. 

4) Significant percentage of revenue spent on support

Ecommerce companies should aim to spend anywhere from 10% to 15% of revenue on customer service. If you’re spending significantly more than that, it may be a sign that it’s time to reprioritize and take a closer look at how your agents are performing.

Leading indicator: Low agent efficiency

How to fix it: Analyze ticket volume and estimate how many tickets each agent should be able handle and in what set amount of time. When expectations are set within a service level agreement (SLA), align your team and train them on your new methods.

Challenges that impact your customer service program

Managing a customer service program comes with challenges that typically start from the top of the organization and quickly become a domino effect.

Here are the most common challenges a customer service program faces:

• A lack of buy-in from your company. Executive teams may not understand the value in investing in a support team. They often think customer service is there to keep problems away, instead of bringing new value in.
• Under-supported agents. A lack of trust in the customer service team trickles down to agents. It results in insufficient resources and, in turn, overworked and unmotivated support reps.

• Inadequate policies and guidelines. Since agents don’t have the proper resources, the quality of policies take a hit. Whether customer-facing or internal, these policies can suffer from being too broad or unenforced.
• High ticket volumes. An non-cohesive team ultimately affects how customer service runs and the biggest indicator is a workflow that can’t handle a large number of customer inquiries.

These challenges usually exist for one reason: your company hasn’t seen the tangible value your customer service program brings. 

So, how do you prove it? By prioritizing data collection and evaluating your customer service program, of course.

📚 Read more: 12 customer service challenges harming your team and revenue (+ how to solve them)

How to evaluate your customer service program’s success 

Let’s dive into 12 of the most important customer service KPIs to track to help evaluate your customer service program. By doing so, you’ll be able to recognize how the assistance you provide directly impacts your goals, revenue, and customers.

Note: It’s hard to create a one-size-fits-all reporting template — due to the differences between industries and companies — but a solid understanding of these metrics will help you create a plan for tracking the ones that matter most to your business.

1) Customer satisfaction score (CSAT)

The customer satisfaction score tracks how satisfied customers are with your company’s products and services. A high CSAT is a reliable measure of good customer service.

How is it measured?

First, you’ll need to collect customer data through a customer satisfaction survey, typically sent through email. It includes a single question like, “On a scale from 1 to 5, how satisfied are you with your experience today?” 

Once you’ve collected enough responses, use this formula:

CSAT = (Satisfied customers / Total customers surveyed) x 100

Tools for measuring CSAT

There are a ton of tools out there to help you track your organization’s CSAT, but a few to check out include:

• Gorgias
• Nicereply
• Lumoa

Why is it important?

Tracking your company’s CSAT gives you important insight into exactly how satisfied customers are right after an interaction with a member of your team. It can even help identify potential issues before they grow too large. 

2) Net promoter score (NPS)

Net promoter score (NPS) measures how likely a customer is to recommend your brand to another person. It indicates how effective your customer service is as well as how satisfied customers are by gathering data about how likely they are to promote your brand.

How is it measured?

Like measuring CSAT, you can use a survey approach. Through email, you can ask your customers, “How likely are you to recommend our brand to a family member or friend?” 

To determine your NPS, subtract the percentage of detractors (people who say they wouldn’t promote your brand) from the percentage of promoters (those who said they would promote your brand). The resulting score is a whole number between -100 and 100. 

Here’s the formula:

NPS = Percentage of promoters - Percentage of detractors

Similar to tracking CSAT, NPS data can be continuously gathered, but we recommend checking in on a monthly basis. 

Read more about NPS scores and how they’re calculated.

Tools for measuring NPS

• Survicate
• HubSpot Customer Feedback Software
• SurveySparrow
• Survey Kiwi

Check out our guide to how to create an NPS survey that gets responses.

Why is it important?

Your brand’s NPS directly ties to the customer relationship as well as how well your customer success team is doing. Tracking NPS along with CSAT can give you a clearer picture of how customers feel about your brand.

3) Customer retention rate (CRR)

As mentioned previously, retaining customers is always less expensive than finding new customers, that’s why your customer retention rate is a vital metric to keep track of. In particular, ecommerce companies have an average CRR of about 30%, according to Omniconvert, so if your company’s CRR is lower than that, it could be a sign that your customer support isn’t as effective as it could be. 

How is it measured?

To calculate CRR, you’ll need the following information: number of customers at the end of a given time period (E), number of customers gained within that time period (N), number of customers at the beginning of the time period (S). 

Then, plug those numbers into this formula:

CRR = [(E-N)/S] x 100

Tools for measuring CRR

• Mixpanel
• Qualtrics 
• Optimove

Why is it important?

Your company’s ability to retain customers directly relates to its success because when customers disappear, so does revenue.

4) Net retention rate (NRR)

Sometimes known as net dollar retention (NDR) or net revenue rate, NRR is the percentage of recurring revenue retained from your existing customer base over a period of time. This period can be monthly, quarterly, or annually. According to Klipfolio, a good NRR can range between 90% and 125% depending on your brand’s target customer size.

How is it measured?

NRR = [(Monthly recurring revenue (MRR) at the start of a month + expansions + upsells - churn - contractions) / MRR at the start of the month] x 100

Tools for measuring NRR

• ChurnZero
• Mosaic

Why is it important?

Net revenue retention is another extremely valuable metric that helps you understand how your customers are feeling about your brand and products, as well as how your business is doing from a financial standpoint. 

5) First reply time (FRT)

First reply time, or first response time is how long it takes one of your customer service reps to respond to a customer inquiry on average. This could be over email, phone, or chat. Typically, a “good” first reply time is less than 24 hours in a ticketing system, less than 90 seconds for live chat, and three minutes for phone, according to Klipfolio. 

If your brand dedicates a lot of time to live chat, check out these metrics specific to live chat.

How is it measured?

You can calculate your first reply time by measuring the duration of time between when a customer submits a request and the time when a member of your customer support team responds.

FRT = Total first response times during period of time / Total number of tickets resolved in that period

Tools for measuring FRT

• Gorgias
• GeckoBoard
• Observe AI

Why is it important?

First reply times are directly related to your brand’s CSAT. No customer wants to wait days for an email response, or sit on hold for several minutes. Decreasing your first reply times will inevitably increase customer satisfaction.

6) First contact resolution (FCR)

First contact resolution, or first call resolution (FCR), measures an agent’s ability to resolve a customer’s problem or question within the first interaction without requiring a follow up. The average standard benchmark for FCR is 70% to 75%, according to global research.

How is it measured?

You can use this simple formula to calculate FCR:

FCR = Total number of inquiries resolved on the first call / Total number of unique inquiries

Tools for measuring FCR

• TalkDesk
• mySQM
• Akixi

Why is it important?

Your company’s FCR also directly ties to boosting customer satisfaction. According to McKinsey & Company, 83% of customers expect to be able to resolve their complex issues within one interaction. When you meet customer expectations, you encourage brand loyalty and repeat customers, and reduce encountering difficult customers.

7) Average resolution time (ART)

Customers are happier when they don’t have to wait a long time, and average resolution time (ART) is another metric that keeps track of this data. ART shows how customer service team members are performing, and lets you see who may need additional training or support.

How is it measured?

To measure average resolution time, take the total duration of all resolved conversations and divide that by the number of customer conversations that took place over a specific period of time. This metric is also sometimes referred to as the mean time to resolve, or MTTR. 

ART = Total resolution time for all resolved tickets / Total number of tickets solved

Tools for measuring ART

• Gorgias
• AgileCRM
• Kissmetrics

Why is it important?

Your ART is a vital metric that helps keep tabs on how efficient your customer service team is. If your ART is long, or you notice that it’s getting longer, this is a sign that you need to give your processes a closer look and adjust your strategies if needed.

8) Total resolution time

Resolution time is the total time it takes to complete a customer interaction. This is similar to average resolution time, but focuses on the total time spent resolving tickets rather than the average time spent resolving tickets.

How is it measured?

To measure your total resolution time, note the start and end time of each customer conversation over a specific time frame, such as a one-month period. 

Measuring your total resolution time doesn’t require a formula, but is much easier to track with a helpdesk that includes support performance statistics like Gorgias.

Tools for measuring total resolution time

• Olark
• Aircall (specifically for contact center support)

Why is it important?

Total resolution time gives you a deeper look into how long your customer service team spends helping customers solve their issues, which can help inform further strategy and business direction. 

For example, if the total response time steadily increases over several months, you may need to look at hiring additional customer support reps.

9) Customer effort score (CES)

Your customer effort score (CES) tracks how much effort customers feel like they need to put into resolving an issue. The effort customers should have to put into resolving the issue should be minimal, so you want this score to be as low as possible. 

How is it measured?

To measure your brand’s CES, you can use a questionnaire with a scale and ask the question, “On a scale of 1 to 5, how easy was your experience today?” with 1 being “very easy” and 5 being “very hard.” 

Once you have your responses, tally up how many of each score you received — meaning, how many times were you rated a 1, a 2, etc. Then, you can use this formula to determine your CES:

CES = Percentage of “very easy” responses - Percentage of “very hard” responses 

Much like NPS, CES is a whole number between -100 and 100.

Tools for measuring CES

• Typeform
• AskNicely
• Formstack

Why is it important?

CES gives you the opportunity to see how your support team is performing through the eyes of your customers. It can also help identify areas for improvement within your operations if you give customers a place to voice feedback within your questionnaire.

10) Conversation abandonment rate

Your brand’s abandonment rate is a simple, yet highly informational metric. Whether the conversation is happening via email, chat, or phone, if a customer abandons the session, it should be a red flag that there is friction in the process.

How is it measured?

All you need to track is the number of abandoned incidents and the total number of incidents. In this context, “incidents” refers to either calls, emails, or live chat sessions. Once you have those two numbers, you can plug them into the following formula:

Conversation abandonment rate = (Number of abandoned incidents / Total number of incidents) x 100

Tools for measuring conversation abandonment rate

• Hotjar
• Omnisend

Why is it important?

A customer abandoning a conversation they initiated is a bad sign and can lead to poor net promoter scores and high churn rates.

11) Contact rate

Contact rate, also known as customer contact rate, measures the percentage of active customers who ask for help in a given time period — usually a month. 

How is it measured?

To calculate your company’s contact rate, you can divide the number of customers who contact your customer service team for help over the course of a month by the number of total customers. Then, multiply that number by 100. 

Contact rate = (Number of customers who contact you in a month / Total number of customers) x 100

Tools for measuring contact rate

• Mixpanel
• Woopra

Why is it important?

Contact rate is helpful in diagnosing your company’s overall health. For example, a high contact rate may indicate that customers are contacting your support team about everything because you don’t have alternative resources like a Help Center or FAQ page.

12) Backlog

Otherwise known as revenue backlog, backlog is a metric that determines how much revenue will be coming into your business. This metric can be especially helpful if you’re an ecommerce brand that operates on a subscription-based model. 

How is it measured?

The only thing you need to determine your revenue backlog is the sum of the values of your customers’ subscriptions. However, this can be much more complicated in practice if your business model has multiple types of subscriptions, so it’s beneficial to use tools to track this metric.

Tools for measuring backlog

• Y42
• Dataweave

Why is it important?

Keeping tabs on your revenue is vital to ensuring the growth and continued success of your brand. By tracking your revenue backlog, you’ll be able to see if revenue is going to drop before it actually does. 

How to evaluate individual agent performance in 5 steps

Understanding your customer service program at an organizational level is an excellent step. But what about individual employee performance? 

A customer service performance review is key. It gives the agent constructive feedback and provides clear guidance for improvement. The goal of a performance evaluation is to assess their abilities, yes, but also motivate them towards even better performance.

Let’s look at the common performance review phases step by step. 

1) Decide the objective of your review

Lay out the objectives of the review. Is it to assess past performance, set future goals, identify areas of improvement, or all of the above?

2) Analyze relevant data

Take a look at the relevant metrics to gauge agent performance. Make sure you have a record of any previous performance reviews, goals set, training undergone, and feedback received.

Key metrics to pinpoint individual performance:

• First contact response time
• Total resolution time
• Average ticket volume
• Error rate

With Gorgias, it’s easy to keep track of every agent’s performance with Support Performance Statistics. Their intuitive dashboard provides a quick look at the health of your support team and even gives you detailed information on each of your team member’s stats, like their first response time, total closed tickets, and more.

3) Run a soft skills and behavioral assessment 

How effectively does the agent communicate with customers? Are they clear, empathetic, and responsive? Assess the agent’s ability to diagnose customer problems and find solutions. Look at important customer service skills like problem solving, communication skills, as well as teamwork skills.

4) Present your findings to the agent

Share the metrics you’ve collected and any feedback received from customers. Present this so customer service agents understand how customers perceive them. Discuss the agent’s strengths and achievements, where they need improvement. 

5) Set goals and expectations

Discuss immediate and future objectives with the agent. Encourage open dialogue and assure them to come to you with any feedback or concerns.  

At the end of the day, you have to care. Make feedback a regular occurrence. It doesn’t have to be scary. Give feedback whether it's positive, negative, or you just want to tell someone to continue going in the same direction. 

Be prepared to create action plans and reset expectations for bottom performers or people you just want to improve. Having a low performer doesn't necessarily mean that they're tanking, but maybe there's just one area of improvement they can really work on. It's just a matter of having an action plan. 

Do customer service metrics really affect business growth?

Absolutely.

Customer service is the backbone of a business’s success. When you focus on giving outstanding customer service (in addition to product quality, of course), you get customer satisfaction, which turns into new and repeat customers and more revenue.

The customer service metrics outlined in this article are helpful tools to set you on the right path toward building a more successful customer service program. Paying closer attention to the data that matters most can help you identify areas for improvement, which is necessary in order for any business to grow.

Make your customers happy and your business happier with Gorgias

Now that you know which customer service metrics are the best to track to ensure your ecommerce business’s success, you can start evaluating your customer service program. 

Every metric I included above can offer your business better insights into what your current customer service program is doing right, and where there’s room for improvement. You don’t have to track all of these KPIs, but I highly recommend using a platform like Gorgias to keep your customer conversations and metrics in one spot.

If you’re ready to revamp your customer service program and improve your level of service, learn more about what Gorgias can do for ecommerce businesses or sign up today.

Customer service agents are front and center when they provide customers with outstanding support. But once you pull back the curtains, you’ll find the support operations team behind the scenes supporting conversations, tools, and more.

Like backstage managers, a customer support operations team identifies opportunities for your support team to be more efficient while keeping both your company and customers happy.

I’m Bri Christiano, the Director of Customer Support at Gorgias, and I know first-hand how hectic it can be to perfect your customer service processes. We'll go through how a support operation team functions, the benefits, how to build the team including key roles. 

What does customer support operations do? 

Customer support operations oversees the technical, operational, and organizational parts of customer support. As a distinct team, they support the customer service team, including the representatives and managers.

You may think, but isn’t that what customer service managers are for?

Not quite. 

Customer support managers are on the frontline with agents and ensure the operations run smoothly. A support ops team member enables the frontline team to do their best work.

What is a support operations team?

A support operations team constructs the blueprint that makes your company’s customer service processes run more efficiently while hitting your business targets. Some common roles on a support ops team include managers, analysts, developers or product managers, trainers, and specialists.

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A guide to support operations teams

Investing in a support operations team is a step toward improving the customer experience, which can lead to a 2-7% increase in sales revenue. 

Below we'll explore the advantages of establishing a support ops team, show you the tell-tale signs of when it's time to invest, and provide an overview of each role and function.

Benefits of having a support ops team

When you enlist the help of a strategic support ops team, you gain:

1. Predictable, stable operations. A support ops team standardizes your customer service processes, which can help managers and agents stay on the same page and deliver consistent, high-quality service.
2. A better future for the customer service team. CS leads may only forecast a few months or a year ahead. A support ops team can strategize years in advance and plan for more scenarios with their reporting expertise.
3. A louder voice of support across the org. A support ops team aligns customer service with the company’s targets and has the power to bring relevant issues to other teams. This allows the often-isolated customer service team to be better represented across the company.
4. A stronger, alternate perspective to customer service. The support ops team provides a big-picture view that a customer service team doesn’t have the time to look into. You can arrive at a more complete view with the help of support ops.

Every support ops role & responsibility, ranked by budget

A full-fledged support ops team includes a manager, developer, analyst, trainer, and specialist. However, not all organizations have the budget for every support ops role. In that case, you’ll want to find candidates who can take on the responsibilities of multiple roles.

Below, we’ve ranked each support ops role based on your company’s hiring budget. 

1. Support ops specialist

Hiring budget: Low

Customer operations specialists provide support to customer service teams by managing technical aspects, including assisting with setup, analyzing metrics, and reporting, while also lending a hand to enhance customer experience.

Responsibilities:

• Identify when to help customers and note signs of potential issues or opportunities for more sales
• Understand how the product works and know who to ask for help with specific product issues
• Collect important data and make reports about how satisfied customers are, what products they like, and takes note of what competitors are doing

2. Support trainer

Hiring budget: Low 

A customer support operations trainer is responsible for educating and preparing customer service representatives to effectively handle inquiries, issues, and interactions with customers.

Responsibilities:

• Create and update training materials that the customer support team uses
• Deliver onboarding and ongoing training sessions and workshops to keep team members up-to-date with industry best practices
• Assess the effectiveness of training programs through feedback collection, performance metrics analysis, and evaluations

3. Support operations analyst

Hiring budget: Medium 

A customer support operations analyst analyzes data and metrics related to customer interactions and customer service processes to identify trends and improve the overall quality of customer support.

Responsibilities:

• Create a complex staffing model with multiple inputs and considerations
• Create reports based on KPIs and present findings to the customer support team
• Assess support workflows and processes to identify inefficiencies and bottlenecks, and makes recommendations for optimization
• Evaluate and implement tools and automation solutions to streamline tasks

4. Developer or Product Manager

Hiring budget: High 

A customer support operations developer (also known as a product manager) creates and maintains the systems, tools, and processes used to enhance and streamline customer support operations.

Responsibilities:

• Create and maintains tools and applications that enhance the efficiency and functionality of support operations, including self-service tools and chatbots
• Automate repetitive tasks and processes within support operations to reduce the manual work done by agents
• Assist and troubleshoot technical issues for support agents to ensure they can effectively use the necessary tools

5. Support operations manager

Hiring budget: High 

A support ops manager oversees and coordinates the operational aspects of customer support teams.

Responsibilities:

• Oversee the support ops team and recruit, train, and mentors team members
• Analyze data and key performance metrics to identify areas for improvement and make data-driven decisions for customer service
• Develop strategies to align support operations with overall business objectives, including budget management and resource allocation
• Planning for each upcoming quarter and setting key performance metrics
• Working with customer service managers and aligning on goals with them 

When to build a support ops team

There are a few signs that indicate you’re ready to expand and join forces with a support ops team.

1. New roles and duties are popping up

As your business grows, new roles start to emerge to accommodate your team’s size and customer base. This may look like managers and agents finding themselves taking on more operational tasks like leading training sessions, tool workshops, or focusing on data to increase profits.

If these duties are taking away time for you to do your regular customer service responsibilities (like resolving customer issues or supervising your agents), it’s time to invest in support ops.

2. Your support leads are spread across multiple time zones

If support leads are located in various time zones, it’s harder for your team to get on the same page. For instance, one team lead may prioritize using brand voice more than another lead does. This results in inconsistent and confusing brand messaging.

To align your team leads, you’ll need one source of information to standardize your processes — and that can be fulfilled by a support ops manager.

3. Your current workflow can’t keep up with complex tickets

If your workflow fails to cover all your customer inquiries, it may be time to redesign your processes. Unfortunately, building an efficient workflow from scratch takes time that managers typically don’t have. Support ops is exactly the team you need to ideate, test, and deploy these workflows.

Processes, policies, and automation: a framework for optimizing customer support operations

Focus on building a sound hiring process

Rushing to fill positions will only harm your brand and customers in the long run. When hiring for customer service, use a proactive hiring process. This means taking the time to take stock of your needs and resources, and being selective about your candidates.

Here are three ways to be intentional with the hiring process:

1. Determine which specialized support roles are needed. Are new operational duties being delegated to managers or agents? Maybe you need an analyst to make better use of your data or a training specialist for your growing team.
2. Assess the inefficiencies in your current support operations. Certain support ops roles can fill in the gaps that your support team doesn’t have the time for. For example, a support ops developer can improve your tools, while a support ops manager can take care of hitting your business targets.
3. Consider your budget. Your budget will determine the size of your support ops team. Be realistic and adjust your expectations according to your needs. This can mean hiring for one support ops team member or outsourcing.

🧠 Learn more: Why proactive customer service is essential for growing your business

Implement a customer service policy as soon as possible

A customer service policy is a document containing a set of guidelines, rules, and standards for customer service teams. Its goal is to help agents handle day-to-day tasks and set benchmarks for great customer service.

These documents are essentially guides for how the customer service team should work. Agents can use them when they onboard or need a refresher. They can even be adapted into customer-facing policies.

📚 Related reading: How to build an FAQ page + 7 examples

Set realistic SLAs

A service level agreement (SLA) is a contract that outlines the minimum acceptable service between one party and another. In your case, the ops team and the support team. An SLA typically covers topics like SLA best practices, including service availability and average response times.

Here’s how to create one:

1. Define objectives and metrics: Clearly define the objectives and expectations of the support ops team and the customer support team. Identify specific key performance indicators that both teams can stick to.
2. Agree on responsibilities: Specify who’s responsible for what tasks on both teams, including training, reporting, and development to avoid miscommunication.
3. Set performance targets: Establish targets and deadlines for meeting performance metrics. These targets should be realistic and aligned with the organization's goals and customer expectations. 
4. Compose, review, and publish the document: Share your document with all members of the support ops and customer service team. You may even conduct a meeting to align on your new agreement. 
5. Continuously improve: Schedule regular SLA review meetings between the support ops and customer support teams to assess performance, identify areas for improvement, and create new initiatives.

Create a solid training plan for the customer service team

Elevating the quality of training for the support team significantly increases customer satisfaction. Improvement is key: 40% of customers claim that they stop doing business with companies who have poor customer service.

Some ideas for useful training activities:

• Improve customer interactions by reviewing tickets as a team
• Deepen product knowledge with Loom videos
• Drill down empathy by mapping the customer journey together
• Refine soft skills with workshops dedicated to active listening, empathy, and effective communication
• Practice responding to public social media reviews and comments

When you put these strategies together, you empower your ops team with the expertise and resources needed to excel in their roles, allowing them to pass the knowledge on to your customer service reps.

Write templates that your agents can use in various circumstances

Agents shouldn’t have to spend their time crafting templates — that’s a job for the support ops team. With templates, agents can speed up resolution times and increase customer satisfaction scores (CSAT). 

Here are the key templates to prep for customer service agents:

• Where is my order? (WISMO) response 
• Order shipment update
• Returned/refunded order
• Abandoned cart recovery
• Complaint acknowledgment
• Follow-up emails for prior tickets
• Feedback/survey requests

On Gorgias, you can quickly create a library of templates with Macros. Whenever you need to send a canned response, just click the template or Macro you need and you’re done — no need to type anything out.

🧠 Learn more: 25+ customer service scripts inspired by top ecommerce brands

Use tagging to organize and prioritize tickets

An unorganized inbox can ruin customer experience and risk your highest-value customers. By implementing a system that strategically tags and prioritizes tickets, the customer support team can focus on delivering exceptional customer experiences.

To create a library of useful tags, ask yourself these questions:

• What are the most common inquiries? 
• Which channels receive the most urgent inquiries?
• Which types of tickets require escalation?
• Can you identify high-value customers from the inquiry?

Based on these questions, you can start creating Tags based on the most relevant customer query topics, ticket urgency, high-value vs. low-value tickets, and response urgency. 

Harness automation to streamline workflows

Automating parts of the customer service workflow can be a game-changer. Work with the customer service team to identify the repetitive tasks in their day that they can go without and offload to automation. 

On Gorgias, you can create Rules to…

• Auto-tag tickets. Automatically apply tags to tickets to categorize them based on keywords, issue types, or other criteria for easier tracking.
• Send automated responses. Send pre-written responses (called Macros) to customers based on specific triggers or ticket attributes.
• Assign tickets to specific agents. You can assign incoming tickets to specific support agents or teams based on criteria like keywords or urgency.
• Auto-close resolved tickets. Automatically close tickets when certain criteria are met, such as a customer confirming issue resolution.

Check out our customer service automation guide for more tips on which automations can speed up your support.

How Princess Polly built a seamless customer service operations system

Princess Polly, the leading Australian fashion DTC brand, is an expert when it comes to establishing streamlined customer service operations.

With their priorities set on comprehensive metrics and a constant feedback loop, they entrusted Gorgias to do the heavy lifting. Immediately after using Gorgias, Princess Polly managed to increase their efficiency by 40%, decrease resolution time by 80%, and decrease first response time by 95%.

📚 Read more: Princess Polly improves their CX team efficiency by benefiting from Gorgias-Shopify integration

Optimize your support ops team’s efficiency with Gorgias

Whether you're starting your support ops team from scratch or expanding it, Gorgias can be there to build it with you. With powerful features like Macros for automating routine tasks and detailed support performance and revenue statistics at your fingertips, Gorgias empowers your support ops team to work smarter, not harder. Unlock a new level of productivity by booking a Gorgias demo today.

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