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.

{{lead-magnet-1}}

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.

{{lead-magnet-2}}

Every year, businesses lose a total of $75 billion due to poor customer service. To prevent bad experiences with support from limiting your company’s growth, you need to prioritize improving customer satisfaction with a fast, low-effort, and helpful customer experience. 

Most brands would agree that customer satisfaction is important, but few realize just how much interactions with customer support matter for your revenue. In our analysis of over 10,000 online businesses, we found that raising CSAT score by just one point — from 4 to 4.9 — lifts overall revenue by 4%. 

In this article, we’ll dive deep into a metric that tells you a lot about your company’s customer experience and revenue potential: customer satisfaction score (CSAT). We’ll offer nine strategies to help you measure and boost your CSAT score, and share some tips to get more customers to rate their satisfaction so you have the best data to work with.

{{lead-magnet-1}}

The most important ways to improve CSAT scores and response rates

If you're looking for a quick summary, you've found it! Here are the top ways to raise CSAT and response rates:

• Review CSAT scores under four and look for common themes
• Reach out to low-scoring customers and ask them follow up questions
• Automate repetitive tasks to free up time for agents to help with more complex or unique questions
• Look for opportunities to improve the product experience and customer journey beyond the agent level
• Automate CSAT surveys after positive customer service interactions
• Personalize your CSAT email or incentivize longer CSAT responses

What is customer satisfaction (CSAT) score?

Customer satisfaction (CSAT) score is a customer support metric that measures how a customer feels after an interaction with your brand’s customer support. Brands measure CSAT by sending out customer satisfaction surveys as a follow-up to customer service interactions. The survey simply asks customers to rate the interaction on a scale from 1 to 5, 1 being the worst and 5 being the best.

While customers rate the interactions between 1 and 5, many company’s run scores through a formula that will spit out an overall CSAT score somewhere between 0 and 100. However, we at Gorgias keep CSAT simple and just average all CSAT responses for an overall score from 1-5. Our recommended goal for CSAT is 4.8.

On top of the numeric score, CSAT surveys also usually include a field for customers to explain why they chose that rating. This qualitative feedback is a hugely important benefit of measuring CSAT because they help you understand your customer support’s strengths and weaknesses.

CSAT Formula

One way to calculate your overall CSAT score is to divide the number of respondents who rated their interaction as 4/5 or 5/5 by your total number of CSAT survey responses. Then, multiply by 100. The number you are left with is your company's overall CSAT score.

For example, if you have 500 CSAT responses and 400 of those responses are positive (4/5 or 5/5), then your CSAT score is 400/500 x 100 = 80.

However, you can also keep things simple by taking the average of all your CSAT responses and using that as your CSAT score. That’s what we do at Gorgias: If a company’s CSAT responses are 50% 4 and 50% 5, their overall CSAT score is 4.5.

What’s a good benchmark for CSAT score?

The average CSAT score varies from industry to industry, but here’s a general breakdown of CSAT score by industry:

• Consulting: 85
• Healthcare: 79
• Ecommerce: 74
• Digital marketing agencies: 67
• B2B software and SaaS: 65
• Education: 47
• Consumer services: 20
• Communication and media: 16

As mentioned, we at Gorgias simply average all CSAT responses to result in a score from 1-5. We recommend our customers, all of whom are ecommerce merchants, aim for a CSAT score of 4.8.

That said, if your CSAT score doesn’t line up with your industry, don’t be discouraged. Every brand starts somewhere. Rather than focusing on your industry’s benchmarks, focus on the changes you can make to improve your CSAT score one point at a time, month after month. You might even see your CSAT score shoot up when you start collecting more responses or start tweaking your customer service offerings. 

{{lead-magnet-2}}

9 strategies to improve CSAT score fast

The main point in tracking your CSAT score is to look for ways to improve it. If you would like to start creating more satisfied customers, here are nine effective tips to try:

1. Audit CSAT scores under 4/5 and look for common themes
2. Use natural language processing (NLP) to find common themes in CSAT feedback
3. Reach out to low-scoring customers for deeper feedback
4. Create a system to measure ticket quality objectively
5. Bolster your customer service training and resources around problem areas
6. Automate repetitive tickets to free up more time for agents
7. Look for opportunities to improve the product experience and customer journey beyond the agent level
8. Implement customer service best practices like omnichannel, proactive, and self-service support
9. Activate instant messaging channels like live chat, social media DMs, and SMS

1) Audit CSAT scores under 4/5 and look for common themes

Positive CSAT survey responses are great, but negative responses tend to offer the most value. Auditing CSAT responses lower than 4/5 can help you identify common themes and issues harming customer satisfaction.

If you use Gorgias, you can go to Statistics > Satisfaction to see every single ticket in chronological order and investigate tickets four stars and under:

Jot down common themes that pop up and tally up the number of tickets that mention those issues: Wait times, unclear answers, and unresolved product issues are all common offenders. Issues with lots of tallies are likely to be high-impact opportunities for improvement. For instance, if long wait times are a common theme in your negative CSAT responses, then you know what your support team will need to do in order to improve customer satisfaction — find ways to reduce wait times.

2) Use natural language processing (NLP) to find common themes in CSAT feedback

As your brand grows and receives more tickets, analyzing every single low-scoring CSAT response may not be possible. If you don’t have an internal team to help you analyze large amount of data, a thematic analysis tool that uses natural language processing (NLP) can quickly scan all your tickets and look for common themes.

Here’s how the process works:

• Download all your CSAT scores — if you use Gorgias, you’ll find a CSV download button in your Satisfaction dashboard
• Run your downloaded file through a thematic analysis tool like Thematic
• Watch the tool turn a mountain of scattered responses into a list of common keywords, pain points, and themes 
• Study those themes to gain important insight into your customers’ needs

Just like we described above, these themes help you isolate one or two areas to work on at a time, which is the most strategic way to improve your CSAT score.

3) Reach out to low-scoring customers for deeper feedback

CSAT surveys are great for forming a general idea of a customer's satisfaction level, but they don't always tell you everything you need to know. Even with the open-ended field, you may not get much detail about why customers pick a certain rating. In cases where customers give your company a low CSAT score, reaching out to them to get detailed feedback could reveal more about how you can prevent low scores in the future.

4) Create a system to measure ticket quality objectively

One issue that may cause lower CSAT scores is poor or inconsistent responses coming from your team. Creating a detailed rubric that breaks down what a quality ticket response looks like can provide both a valuable template for your agents and a more comprehensive system for objectively measuring ticket quality. By aligning your team’s efforts around this kind of rubric, you’ll be much closer to providing satisfying responses to all customer inquiries. 

In the rubric, you can include aspects like response time, accuracy (with company policy), alignment with brand voice and tone, and anything else you believe contributes to a great customer service interaction for your brand. 

While the purpose of the rubric is to help agents create responses that get high satisfaction scores, that may not always be the case. For example, if your brand voice is very punny and whimsical, a response with lots of puns will score high on the rubric. However, that ticket might not be clear enough to be satisfying for the customers. If you notice that interactions score high on your rubric but low on CSAT, then you may need to update the rubric.

5) Bolster your customer service training and resources around problem areas

Once you use CSAT surveys to identify areas with room for improvement, it's time to put that data into action. Bolstering your customer service training and resources can help you eliminate specific issues harming the customer experience and improve your CSAT score.

Creating an internal knowledge base so that agents have easy access to the information they need to assist customers can be one effective way to bolster the quality of your customer support. Providing your agents with templated responses is another way to ensure that every customer interaction is satisfactory and on brand.

6) Automate repetitive tickets to free up more time for agents

When agents have more time to give each support ticket their undivided attention and A+ effort, customer satisfaction is bound to improve. But chances are that most tickets that your company receives don't actually need an in-depth response from a live agent. And if those repetitive tickets take up too much time, agents won’t be able to take the time to give a high-quality response when it’s needed.

Support tickets such as "where is my order?" inquiries, common product questions, and other repetitive tickets take time and resources away from more complex tickets requiring a more detailed and personalized response. 

By using Gorgias to create automated responses to these repetitive tickets, you can free up time in your support team's daily schedule so that they can put more focus and effort into high-value or complex tickets. Specifically, you can use:

• Variable Macros to create high-quality, personalized templates
• Automated Rules to fire responses and trigger actions like “Refund order”
• Self-Service Flows to let customers find answers and modify orders themselves 

7) Look for opportunities to improve the product experience and customer journey beyond the agent level

Customer satisfaction doesn't begin with customer support, and it doesn't end there, either. Along with boosting customer satisfaction by improving your customer support quality, you can also improve your CSAT score by searching for opportunities to improve the customer experience beyond the agent level.

This can include: 

• Improving the quality of your product
• Creating clearer product descriptions to set expectations
• Improving your product photography
• Improving your shipping speed and reliability
• Offering free shipping to qualifying customers
• Creating a more helpful post-purchase experience
• A wide range of other opportunities to create a more satisfying customer journey

Of course, your support team will need to pass along customer feedback with ideas to improve the product and customer experience. Check out our post on collecting and sharing customer feedback for tips.

8) Implement customer service best practices like omnichannel, proactive, and self-service support

Meeting customer expectations regarding customer support is one crucial key to high CSAT scores. Consider incorporating customer support best practices like the following three suggestions to meet those customer expectations.

Omnichannel support is the strategy of creating and uniting customer touchpoints on many channels: email, social media, SMS texting, and more. An omnichannel approach gives you more chances to meet customers where they’re at. Plus, with a helpdesk that combines all of these channels, you can easily manage incoming messages without having to spend half your day switching between windows.

Customer self-service is any tool or resource that helps customers answer questions without having to reach out to an agent — resources like FAQ pages and knowledge bases, self-service flows, or chatbots. 88% of customers expect self-service resources because they are fast and low-effort. Fortunately, self-service resources also reduce the number of repetitive tickets your agents receive on a day-to-day basis. 

Proactive customer service is a strategy to reach out to customers before they think to reach out to support. Common self-service tactics include live chat campaigns that ask customers if they need help while browsing your site or welcoming customers with a DM when they follow your social media profiles. Proactive customer support gives you more opportunities to answer customer questions, offer discounts that boost your conversion rate, or find new ways to make happy customers.

9) Activate instant messaging channels like live chat, social media DMs, and SMS

Slow response times are another common customer support issue that can harm customer satisfaction. If you notice that long wait times are a recurring complaint in your low-scoring CSAT responses, introducing touchpoints that allow fast, one-to-one interactions can lower your response times (and hopefully, by extension, your CSAT score). 

The most effective of these conversational channels include live chat, social media DMs, and SMS texting. These real-time support channels enable your agents to quickly handle multiple tickets at a time, without hours of delay, which is common in emails. 

If you have the bandwidth to keep up with these channels, they can dramatically improve response times and resolution times. That said, be sure you’ve hired enough agents to respond to requests on these live channels within the first few minutes to keep your customer experience great.

Tips to improve CSAT survey response rate

CSAT survey responses are valuable, and collecting as many of them as possible is important. However, customers aren't always going to jump at the opportunity to fill out a survey. To improve your CSAT survey response rate and start collecting more valuable customer feedback, here are a few effective tips:

1. Automate CSAT surveys after customer service interactions
2. Send CSAT surveys while the interaction is still fresh
3. Keep CSAT surveys simple — at least 90% of the time
4. Make the survey visual
5. Personalize your CSAT survey email
6. Give incentives for CSAT responses

1) Automate CSAT surveys after customer service interactions

You should send out a CSAT survey following every customer interaction. One great way to ensure that every customer is sent a survey without further burdening your support team is to send these surveys out automatically.

With Gorgias, you can create CSAT surveys that send automatically following every customer service interaction, ensuring that every customer gets the opportunity to leave feedback.

2) Send CSAT surveys while the interaction is still fresh

Customers are more likely to respond to a CSAT survey when the interaction is still fresh on their minds. It is typically best to send out CSAT surveys immediately following a customer interaction.

The only exception is if you have a particularly complicated product, like a piece of software that the customer needs to set up. That’s because the customer might still need to configure something before they know whether or not your support team effectively addressed the pain point. But for most products, the sooner the better.

3) Keep CSAT surveys simple — at least 90% of the time

While detailed feedback is great, most of your customers won't be willing to answer dozens of survey questions. It's usually best to keep your CSAT surveys short and simple. A single question that asks customers to rank their satisfaction on a scale of 1 to 5, along with an optional form for providing more detailed feedback, is the tried-and-true best format for CSAT surveys.

With that said, there are certainly times when you will want to reach out to customers for more detailed feedback. We've already mentioned how reaching out to low-scoring customers can be a great way to identify issues and take another stab at satisfying them. However, it's best to use these long-form surveys and feedback requests as a follow-up to low-scoring CSAT survey responses instead of the initial survey.

4) Make the survey visual

Making it fun and interesting for customers to fill out your CSAT surveys can go a long way toward boosting your response rate. One simple way to make your surveys more appealing is to include visually engaging elements such as buttons, images, and stars:

5) Personalize your CSAT survey email

Something as simple as including the customer's name in your CSAT survey email can add a professional touch to these emails and help ensure that customers don't mistake them for spam. Referencing the ticket number in question is another effective practice for personalizing CSAT survey emails.

6) Give incentives for CSAT responses (or long-form feedback)

It might not be sustainable long term, but offering incentives such as discount codes or gift cards for CSAT responses can certainly improve your CSAT response rate. If you can't afford to offer incentives for every CSAT response, offering incentives for customers to complete your more long-form feedback surveys can effectively gather more detailed customer feedback.

Why is keeping track of your CSAT score important?

We recommend all brands measure customer satisfaction and use CSAT scores as a key performance indicator (KPI) for the customer support team. That’s true whether you have a large in-house support crew, outsource to a call center, or are a one-person business. Regardless, keeping tabs on your customer satisfaction will pay off. Here’s why:

It’s a leading indicator of customer loyalty and revenue growth

According to Shopify data, even small ecommerce companies with less than four employees spend between $21 to $533 on average to acquire a new customer, depending on the industry. So if your strategy is too focused on customer acquisition — and not customer retention — you’re building a ship with a hole. In other words, you’ll leak revenue from existing customer churn and sink under ocean-sized acquisition costs.

A high CSAT score indicates you don’t have a hole in your ship: Your customer loyalty is high and you’ll stay afloat at a much lower cost. And the best way to keep customer loyalty high is to deliver a customer experience that satisfies your customers. 

In our CX Growth Playbook, which analyzed data from over 10,000 ecommerce merchants, we also found that raising your CSAT from 4 to 4.9 could raise overall revenue by 4%, thanks to the number of repeat purchases that follow high CSAT responses.

It measures the quality of your customer experience

Customer experience is complex and multi-dimensional. Everything, from the quality of your website’s FAQ page to the email customers receive after a purchase, stacks up into a customer experience that’s either satisfying or frustrating. 

Tracking CSAT scores is one of your best bets to measure the overall quality of your customer support experience. And measuring the quality of your customer support experience is the first step to identifying where you excel and where you have an opportunity to better satisfy customer needs.

It correlates to other customer service KPIs like FRT and AHT

CSAT scores tend to directly correlate with other important customer service KPIs such as first-response time (FRT), average handle time (AHT), average reply times, and resolution times. Tracking all of these KPIs gives you a fuller picture of your customer support experience. 

For example, if your CSAT score and resolution times start to fall but your response times are high, the takeaway is that your support team needs to focus on quality responses, not just fast ones. Low CSAT scores and resolution times indicate that your responses — even if they’re near-instant — aren’t solving customer needs. For example, a cause of this might agents blindly applying canned responses, or Macros, without updating information or making it relevant for the customer.

It helps you identify areas to train your customer service team

Tracking customer satisfaction can help you pinpoint the root cause of issues harming the customer experience, whether that’s slow responses, low-quality responses, or some other aspect of the customer experience that customers find dissatisfying.  For example, while auditing, you might find that many customers are upset about a discount code not applying at checkout. Only once you realize it’s a pattern might you realize that you’ve been communicating the wrong discount code to customers.

By measuring your CSAT and digging into themes across qualitative responses, you may be able to triangulate issues that need customer service training or new resources like a knowledge base. Plus, with the right helpdesk, you may be able to see CSAT broken down by a customer service agent so you can see which agents need additional training or quality assurance.

It surfaces customer feedback you can share with other teams

Above, we explained how you can use the customer feedback from CSAT surveys to improve your customer support service quality. However, you can also use it to improve other areas of your business, too. For example, your team can pass feedback regarding the product itself to your product development team. Similarly, feedback regarding your website can be routed to your marketing or software development team.

Don't use CSAT as your end-all-be-all customer satisfaction metric

CSAT is an insightful metric for customer support teams to track, but it doesn't tell the whole story about customer satisfaction. For example, you could have a high CSAT but never get to 10% of your tickets — those customers would not be satisfied but never get the chance to fill out a survey. Similarly, CSAT may give you a skewed sample population if only your most engaged and happy customers respond to your survey requests.

For that reason, keep an eye on other signals of customer satisfaction, like social media mentions and customer referrals. Other important metrics to track include net promoter score (NPS), first-response time (FRT), average handle time (AHT), and customer effort score (CES).

Gorgias developed a new metric called support performance score, which is our best shot at creating a single north-star metric that measures the overall quality of your support. Support performance score combines CSAT, first-response time, and resolution time to estimate how fast, helpful, and satisfying your support is. If you use Gorgias, you’ll find your support performance score in your Statistics dashboard:

By tracking multiple customer support and customer satisfaction metrics, you can form a comprehensive view of how satisfied customers are with your company and better identify areas where there is room for improvement.

Boost your CSAT score — and revenue — with Gorgias

Improving your ecommerce store's CSAT score can improve customer retention, boost referrals, limit negative reviews, and provide a wide range of other business-boosting benefits. 

From freeing up your team via automated responses to repetitive tickets to speeding up first-response times via SMS and live chat support, Gorgias enables you to move faster, make more happy customers, and grow your store. 

Our platform also offers tools for collecting and analyzing customer feedback automatically so that the valuable information you need to improve your customer experience further is always at your fingertips. See how our customer, Ohh Deer, uses Gorgias' live chat to maintain a 4.95 CSAT score (and generate $50,000 in revenue annually.)

Get started with Gorgias now to see how our industry-leading customer support platform can help you track and improve your CSAT score.

It's tough to point to a single most important metric in customer service. But if we had to, first response time would be a top contender.

First response time (FRT) is the time between a customer asking a question and your team’s initial response. When your FRT is too long, customers are left wondering whether you even received their question, let alone will get them an answer.

"Of course, the best-case scenario is quickly answering the customer's question (or automating the answer). But even if you can't solve the question right away, letting the customer know you received their inquiry — and that it didn't get sent into the void — is great for customer confidence and satisfaction.” —Bri Christiano, Director of Customer Support at Gorgias

Let’s dive into first response time to understand why it’s so make-or-break for your team. Then, we’ll unpack best practices you can use to lower FRT for your team, plus how to use this KPI alongside other metrics to support your overall customer service strategy. 

Why is first response time important in ecommerce?

A quick first response time is a key way to build customer trust, letting customers know right away that you are taking their inquiry seriously and that you will resolve the issue as fast as possible.

Here are a few reasons a strong FRT improves your customer experience and your support team’s impact on the business:

Meet customer expectations 

According to our research, 90% of U.S. customers say an immediate customer service response is “important” or “very important.” Plus, 60% of people who need support want it in 10 minutes or less. 

In other words, near-instant FRTs are important to 90% of shoppers — and after 10 minutes, you’re disappointing over half of your shoppers. 

Drive conversion rate

First-response time is especially important for pre-sales support questions, like "Will this arrive before Christmas?" or "Which size is right for me?". Any customer reaching out about pre-sales support likely needs their questions answered before they commit to click checkout, or before they hop over to Amazon to buy it.  

A speedy response is just the thing to give the shopper the information they need to make a confident purchase decision and boost their trust in your brand — two factors that can contribute to high conversion rates. 

Increase revenue-related KPIs

First response time also impacts other important support metrics, including ones that impact your revenue:

• Resolution time: A fast response time often leads to a quicker resolution — and a customer who’s more likely to cite a positive shopping experience with your brand. 
• Lower return rate: Give a customer a fast response to their questions, especially in pre-sales moments, and they’ll have the information they need to make a confident purchase decision. This lowers the likelihood that they’ll need to return the item later. 
• Higher conversion rate: If a customer has a question about a product, they need a quick response to convince them to click checkout. Otherwise, they’re just going to go to a competitor. 
• Customer satisfaction: Fast response times go a long way to show a customer they are valued. Offer a quick response to increase brand trust, which leads to improved customer satisfaction. 

{{lead-magnet-1}}

How to calculate and track first response time 

Luckily, you don’t have to be a math wiz to find your brand’s first response time.  

Start by simply looking at your tickets. Compare the time the ticket came in with the time a support agent responded. That time difference is your FRT. 

For example, if a ticket comes in at 8 am Monday, and an agent responds at 8 am Tuesday, your response time is 1 day. 

You can also keep track of first response times across a certain period, or from a certain agent, to understand the average response time. Simply collect response times over a certain period, then, divide that number by the total number of resolved tickets during that same time frame. 

The equation looks like this: 

Total first response times during chosen time period / total # of resolved tickets during chosen time period = Average first response time

Here’s what calculating FRT averages looks like, using real numbers: 85,000 seconds / 900 resolved tickets = 94.4 seconds (average first response time) 

That means that, on average, your agents are able to respond to customer tickets within 94.4 seconds of receiving a request (for that period). 

If math isn’t your thing, don’t sweat it. Most helpdesks these days automatically calculate and report on average first response time for you. 

Gorgias calculates important metrics, like first response time, automatically. Plus, you can slice and dice the information to understand FRT by factors like: 

• Channel (email, SMS, social media, etc.)
• Contact reason (to understand what kind of questions to automate)
• Agent (to inform coaching)
• Time period (to understand if it changed after implementing something)

This way, you’re never left in the dark about how your support strategy is performing.  

First response time benchmarks by support channel 

Customers want the option to get in touch with your customer service team on the channel of their choice. Even more, Salesforce reports that 74% of shoppers want a variety of channels to choose from.   

If you’ve adopted an omnichannel support strategy, keep in mind different channels have varying response times. 

We’ve broken down a few of the most popular channels to give you an idea of what to expect — and what response times Gorgias customers achieve, on average. 

Email 

• Stellar: 1 hour
• Above average: 2 hours
• Average: 1 day
• Unacceptable: More than 24 hours

Gorgias customers see an average email FRT of 7 minutes and 57 seconds.  

Chat

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

Gorgias customers see an average chat FRT of 7 minutes and 54 seconds. 

SMS

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

Gorgias customers see an average SMS first response time of 59 seconds.

Social media 

• Stellar: A few minutes
• Above average: Under 2 hours
• Average: 1 day
• Unacceptable: More than 1 day

Gorgias customers see a slightly different average FRT depending on the social media platform. 

• Facebook Messenger: 4 hours and 30 seconds 
• Instagram DM: 7 hours and seven minutes 
• Twitter DM: 7 hours and 58 minutes 

Automation is preferable to offer a quick response to your customers. Either an instant automated answer to their question, or an automation to let them know you’re on the way.  

5 tactics to reduce first response time 

Reducing your FRT is a great way to optimize for customer satisfaction. Luckily, there are a few tactics you can take now to reduce FRT that also reduce the load on your support team. 

1. Automate repetitive questions to reduce ticket volume

Automating responses to repetitive customer questions has a two-fold benefit:

• Automating answers with a helpdesk effectively means achieving one-touch resolutions for your most common customer inquiries.
• It reduces the overall number of tickets reaching your agents, letting them focus on high-impact inquiries that automation can’t handle. 

How this works in Gorgias

Gorgias Automate deflects up to 30% of tickets (meaning 30% of customer issues were resolved without human interaction.) If 30% of your helpdesk is cleared, that means you can get to the leftover tickets faster. 

Two great features in Automate are Flows and Article Recommendations, which provide personalized, automated answers to customer FAQs.

Both features give customers a 0-second first response time, but these interactions don’t impact your measured FRT since no ticket is created.

You can then track how much time and money automation saves your customers in first response time:

Take a look at how skincare brand Topicals implemented Flows to help shoppers navigate their product offerings. So, when a customer asks, “How do I find the right face wash?” Flows will ask a series of questions and offer a personalized recommendation based on the customer’s answers. 

2. Automatically send a message that you’re on your way

Even if you can’t use automation to answer a customer question, it can let customers know their message has been received and that an agent is on their way to help. 

Leaving customers in the dark about when they’ll receive a response is likely to make any customer anxious. An automated response not only lowers your FRT by responding immediately, but it also quells your customers’ fears that their questions will not be answered.

"Offer an automated message to fire almost instantly so customers know their question was received and someone will be looking into it shortly. Fire it off regardless of channel — the only exception being if your human agent happens to be available to respond."

—Bri Christiano, Director of Customer Support at Gorgias

Berkey Filters built a Rule using Gorgias to automatically reply to SMS messages as they came in.  

In their message, Berkey Filters starts by thanking the customer for reaching out. It also sets expectations by sharing customer support’s hours of operation. That way, if a customer messages outside of operating hours, they aren’t left waiting for a response. 

By adding in an "If the message from agent is false" condition, it also protects you from accidentally firing off this response if a live agent has already responded.

This is only one example of how to use Rules, or Gorgias automations, to automatically reply to tickets. With Gorgias, you could set this up for any channel, or set up a Rule so that it only fires outside of your set business hours, on live chat, when your agents are away, and so much more.

3. Assign and prioritize tickets automatically 

Some tickets need a more immediate response than others. Angry or upset customers require ticket escalation to try and salvage the relationship and prevent negative reviews, returns, or customer churn. 

Prioritizing your incoming tickets will help your agents lower FRT on tickets that need the fastest responses. They can respond to high-priority tickets first. Any other tickets that automation can’t cover can wait. 

Instead of manually sorting your tickets day in and day out, Gorgias can automatically prioritize tickets as they come in. 

Gorgias makes use of AI to analyze incoming tickets based on natural language processing (NLP). The platform also lets you create Rules to determine a ticket’s priority level. Then, it processes language on incoming tickets using the Rule you set in order to take an automatic action. 

This is also where Gorgias’s deep integration with Shopify really shines. The integration lets you pull in customer information, like order number and order status, to help prioritize tickets. 

For instance, you can prioritize cancellation requests from customers that placed an order in the last 24 hours, to avoid shipping products with the wrong shipping address. You could also prioritize messages from customers who have spent more than $100 (or any amount) from your store, to make sure your VIP customers are taken care of.

4. Drive support traffic to messaging channels (and away from email)

Email is notoriously one of the slowest customer support channels out there. The good news? This aligns with customer expectations: A customer who sends an email isn’t waiting at the computer for a response, whereas one who sends a live chat message probably is.

With all the faster options out there, don’t rely on email as your most prominent support channel. Deprioritize email by adding a live chat option, or by making your email address a little harder to find on your website. Consider also adding a robust Help Center and guiding shoppers toward self-service channels. 

You can easily use email as a springboard to push customers to other, faster channels. 

Berkey Filters does this by using an automated response to inform customers about faster options to connect with an agent. Plus, they share a link to the Help Center, so customers can see if they can find a solution to their problems themselves, without needing human interaction. 

Customers were informed right away that they were placed in the email queue, but were offered the option of texting or joining a chat with a live agent to resolve their problem even faster. 

5. Give your agents templates and Macros

One of the most time-saving tools you can give yourself and your team is templated responses, which help your agents avoid typing messages from scratch, or copy/pasting customer information. 

At Gorgias, these templates are called Macros. These are canned responses you can use to populate answers to customer questions. You can also personalize these responses by pulling data from your Shopify account. 

If you can't automate an answer, the Macro gives your agents a headstart so they aren't wasting time remembering what the right policy is, typing out a message from scratch, or manually copying/pasting the customer's information (like name or order number). 

First response time works best when it’s combined with other metrics

First response time isn’t a be-all, end-all KPI — it’s just one metric, best used in concert with others to get a broader understanding of how your team is performing. 

Average Resolution time

Average resolution time (ART) is the amount of time it takes your customer support team to fully solve a customer’s problem and close the ticket.

Gorgias customers have an average resolution time of 1.67 hours.

Read our guide on resolution time to learn best practices to improve this metric for your brand.

How Average Resolution Time works alongside FRT

The initial response time is vitally helpful to understand how quickly your agents can spring into action, but it’s your resolution time that speaks to how helpful your responses are. 

If you have a great first response time but have unhelpful answers, or just go back and forth with a customer, your resolution time is going to suffer. Calculating both helps you make sure you're balancing speed (FRT) with quality answers that lead to a full Resolution (RT)

OLIPOP grew quickly and needed help from Gorgias to keep up with their exceptional customer support. 

Gorgias helped them reduce Response Time by 88% and Resolution Time by 91%, which led to a 1,200% increase in revenue from customer support. 

"We wanted to make sure customers can reach out to us via any platform and we'd have the ability to quickly answer it all in one place." —Eli Weiss, Director of CX, OLIPOP

📚 Related reading: How OLIPOP decreased their response time by 88% and resolution time by 91% with 25x ROI

CSAT

Customer satisfaction score, or CSAT is an important metric to measure your customer base’s level of satisfaction with their shopping experience. 

The more satisfied a customer is, the more likely they are to become a repeat shopper, refer friends, or leave a great review. 

Using Gorgias, you can automatically send customer satisfaction surveys and track your scores over time. Learn more about our satisfaction survey and dashboard: 

How CSAT works alongside FRT

First response time is a metric that goes hand-in-hand with your CSAT. 

If you slow response time, you can expect your CSAT to be similarly low. A customer who has to wait days for an email response, or several minutes on hold during a phone call is likely to have an unsatisfactory experience. 

Decreasing your first reply times will inevitably increase customer satisfaction.

Read our Director of Support's guide to improving CSAT scores for more guidance.

Contact rate

Customer contact rate is a metric to measure the percentage of active customers in contact with your support team over a specified period. 

Generally speaking, you want your customer contact rate to be low. A low rate means most customers are satisfied with their shopping experience and don’t require further support. 

One tactic to lower your contact rate is to offer more self-service options, like a knowledge base or FAQ. That way, your customers can help themselves with frequently asked questions like “Where’s my order?” or “Do you accept returns?” Then, higher-priority tickets can be tackled by your reps. 

How Contact Rate works alongside FRT

While you want your first response time to be low, even better is reducing your contact rate. 

That means your customers are running into fewer issues that would lead them to reach out to customer support in the first place. Or, that they turn to self-service resources when they do have an issue. 

Gorgias: your ecommerce helpdesk for cutting first response times

If your support agents have to answer every question by hand, or toggle between a dozen different tabs to respond to different challenges, your first-response time will always suffer.

A helpdesk like Gorgias has an immediate positive impact on your FRT because it collects messages from every channel, automatically responds to basic questions, and gives agents powerful tools to respond to messages as fast as possible.

Before implementing Gorgias, Timbuk2’s customer service team took, on average, 2 days to respond to customer inquiries. They knew they needed to centralize and automate their customer support — that’s where Gorgias came in. 

Making the leap to Gorgias helped Timbuk2 streamline its support strategy, gaining a 96% faster response time and a nice 35% boost in revenue. 

"Increased customer support should go hand in hand with revenue growth. We want to turn customer experience into a profit center and we have more opportunities to grow with Gorgias." —Joseph Piazza, Senior Customer Experience Manager, Timbuk2

Gorgias helps ecommerce companies improve their first response time, along with other key metrics, to build exceptional customer experiences that drive revenue. 

‍Sign up for Gorgias or book a demo to start tracking and improving your first response time today!

{{lead-magnet-2}}

I firmly believe everyone should experience working in customer support because, let’s face it, working in support isn't always recognized for the challenging job it is. 

The importance of customer service for brand success has been proven time and again. Yet, customer support continues to get regarded as a necessary cost the business has to bite. It's often under-resourced and under-performs as a result, reinforcing the perception that support brings little value.

I’m on a mission to change that. 

I'm Amanda Kwasniewicz, VP of Customer Experience at Love Wellness, and my journey has taught me that we customer support professionals have to be loud and proud about the importance of our work, since we're repairing a pretty damaged reputation.

In this article, I will share practical tips and firsthand experiences to help you showcase the significant impact of customer support on your bottom line, and make the case for more budget and respect in the organization.

Why is customer service important

A great customer experience is crucial to any business. And at the heart of that experience is good customer service.

Right now, every small business owner is experiencing the frustrations of rising customer acquisition costs. The solution? Leverage the relationships with customers you already have by focusing on repeat purchases and customer lifetime value (LTV). This strategy is much more profitable: Keeping customers costs much less than attracting new ones, and returning customers generate 300% more revenue than first-time shoppers (according to Gorgias data).

Your customer service agents are your brand’s frontline representation. Whether you’re a small business or a large enterprise, great reps have the capacity to enable sales and keep customers coming back. And undertrained or ill-equipped reps have the capacity to drive new customers away and dissolve relationships with current customers. 

Simply put, customer service is important because it has a huge impact on your revenue. Let’s break that truth down into some specifics.

{{lead-magnet-1}} 

7 ways customer service impacts your bottom line

From generating more referrals to increasing your average order value, there are several benefits to offering a great customer service experience. 

1. Excellent service increases conversion rates

The truth is, new customers are often hesitant to trust a company that they’ve never done business with before. 

Studies have found that 18% will abandon their cart if they don’t trust the website with their credit card information. And, even if a customer trusts your business enough to make a purchase, still roughly 70% of all online shopping carts are left abandoned. 

Why? Some of the top reasons are

• A complicated checkout process
• Questions about product pricing
• Problems with payment 

These are all customer problems that live chat support agents can address proactively, which will increase trust and decrease abandoned carts. Adding live chat to your website can boost conversions by 12%.

Tip: Provide pre-sales support

Picture a shopping experience where uncertainty is met with immediate guidance, and questions are answered before they even arise—this is the essence of Love Wellness' commitment to elevating pre-sales support.

On our product description pages, we prominently feature 

• Links to our general FAQ page
• A striking red button on the bottom right corner for customers to reach out and connect with our support team via email. 
• A FAQ block on the product page with answers related to the product being viewed.

In addition to what we do at Love Wellness, you can enable chat campaigns to proactively guide customers through the checkout process or answer common questions that are blockers to purchasing.  

Chat campaigns can trigger when certain conditions are met (like visiting/dwelling on a certain page or being a repeat shopper). You can hit these targeted shoppers with a message, like offering personalized product recommendations or providing a unique discount code. Now that’s an experience worth telling your friends about.

Remember: Customer service involves more than just resolving customer issues post-purchase. Support reps also act as sales agents, answering pre-sales inquiries and offering discounts to encourage orders.

Already using Gorgias? Learn how our platform integrated with referral platforms like Smile.io and LoyaltyLion to combine the forces of your word-of-mouth marketing and customer experience.

2. Personalized customer service drives repeat business

According to a report from Salesforce, 97% of marketers report an improvement in business results due to personalization. Customer service is no exception: including customers' names, avoiding asking for the same information multiple times, and providing customer-specific recommendations all help build customer loyalty.

Your customer support platform should make personalization easy by showing a customer’s order and conversation history with your brand, so reps have the full context when speaking to customers:

And, with a helpdesk like Gorgias, you can build templated Macros, which automatically pull customer data into your messages (names, order numbers, shipping addresses, etc). 

Tip: Offer premium support at key stages of the buyer’s journey 

One way we offer personalized customer support at Love Wellness is our “Shop with a wellness specialist” program. Shoppers can take a short quiz, get matched with an expert, and text that specialist directly to build a personalized wellness routine.

3. Customer service data holds key information

Customer service can be a goldmine of key data that benefits the entire team, serving as a wellspring of insights that drive informed decisions and overall business success. 

How? Customer service acts as a direct line to your customers' thoughts and experiences. By consistently collecting and analyzing feedback, you gain an understanding of pain points, preferences, and trends that can influence product development, marketing strategies, and overall business direction.

Tip: Collect customer feedback often

One word: convenience.

Your customers should be able to share feedback without leaping through hoops. 

And, when you've got a vault of feedback, don't let it gather digital dust. Your team has so much data they can review between channels like email, SMS, chat, and social media—both compliments and complaints. You need to be willing to listen to every customer’s needs. 

We have a channel in Slack dedicated to customer feedback. Dropping in feedback is part of the team’s daily and weekly responsibilities, which helps them get really familiar with all of the content. It also allows our team to dissect them and collaborate on how we can improve. You could also schedule recurring feedback share sessions with the Product or Website teams, or even invite them directly into Gorgias (at no extra cost) and create a dedicated view for product feedback, website feedback, and so on.

4. A great customer service experience drives referrals

Happy customers are much more likely to recommend your brand to others than customers who have a poor customer service experience. 

94% of U.S. shoppers will recommend companies with service they rate as “very good.”

Along with increasing the likelihood of organic referrals, a great customer service experience can earn your more positive reviews.

Considering 95% of customers report reading online reviews before making a purchasing decision, showcasing just how important these reviews can be when it comes to attracting new business. We have a whole page dedicated to this on the Love Wellness website.

There’s also a filter option on every product page review widget so that shoppers can see the most common things people are saying about a product and filter down accordingly. 

Tip: Train everyone on how to have a customer-first mindset

Customer service is one of the main ways we build trust with customers, which is especially important in the personal care and women's health niche. Our aim is to provide a safe space for questions that customers might not even be comfortable asking a doctor.

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

This program is about truly understanding Love Wellness' purpose, from top to bottom. Whether I'm involved in customer service management, product sourcing, managing our online presence, or crafting compelling copy, I've come to realize that a customer-first mindset is the key. 

Bonus reading: See Gorgias’ tips on customer service training to help improve the quality of support.

Tip: Create self-service resources

Your customer support team can create self-service resources like an FAQ page or Help Center to educate customers about your return policies, shipping practices, and the quality of your materials or ingredients. And by proactively during the pre-purchase process, you can provide first-time customers with the answers they need to make a purchase.

Here’s what ours looks like at Love Wellness, which answers key pre-sales questions about each product, plus frequently-asked questions about payment, shipping, and more.

5. Satisfied customers have higher average order values

By addressing any questions or concerns that may be preventing a customer from making a purchase, proactive customer support can boost your AOV by encouraging customers to purchase additional products they might not have bought otherwise.

The proof is in the pudding: businesses that offer proactive live chat customer support generate a 10%-15% higher AOV than those that do not. 

At Love Wellness we have a proactive outreach program for delivery issues, with the goal of reaching out to the customer to triage before they reach out to us. Since starting this, of our ~250 tickets, 105 have received a CSAT and the score is a solid 5 across the board!

According to Gorgias data, repeat customers make up only 21% of the average brand’s customer base but generate 44% of that brand’s revenue thanks to these higher cart values:

Tip: Find opportunities to sell more

Another effective way that customer support boosts AOV is by providing your sales team with upsell and cross-sell opportunities.

For example, at Love Wellness we make sure to explain to customers how they should use the product on the description page. In this section, we also call out additional products that pair well with what they’re looking at.

6. Good customer service increases customer loyalty

One well-known rule of business is that attracting new customers is always more expensive than marketing to your existing customer base. 

And fun fact: A staggering 95% of U.S. consumers use customer service quality as a factor when determining whether or not to do business with a company. 

My point? By prioritizing customer relationships and positive customer experiences, you can ensure that the customers you attract remain loyal to your brand and offer as much value as possible over the full course of their relationship with your business.

Tip: Fulfill your promises to customers

Promises made, promises kept. Make sure you have the means to follow through on your claims—and the backup available when mistakes happen

My two-fold advice:

• Build trust: If you're advertising 2-day shipping, get the necessary resources and operational capacity to consistently meet this commitment. 
• Tip: during a high volume period, especially over holidays, if there's even a chance that your shipping commitment isn't going to be met 100%, temporarily remove that option to keep expectations realistic.
• Manage customer expectations: Claims like "better taste" are subjective. Highlight provable benefits, such as health advantages, to set realistic expectations.

When customers consistently receive what they expect, they are more likely to become repeat buyers and advocates for your brand.

7. Great customer service reduces marketing spend

Between social media, content, advertising, and SEO, marketing can get very expensive very quickly. For small businesses, these expenses cost thousands of dollars every month. 

I’ve already mentioned how exceptional customer service improves customer retention rate. By investing in your support team, your brand can generate positive word-of-mouth, reviews, and repeat customer service. 

This means you’ll draw more value from your existing customers rather than spending money trying to attract new ones, which is a much more cost-effective and sustainable path to growth.

Tip: Use tools that are well-integrated

In the past, we had a custom tech stack that operated in isolation, causing manual errors and a great deal of confusion. We were practically solving puzzles blindfolded when something went wrong.

After finally having enough, we dismantled our old tech stack and reconstructed it with components that had native integrations already in place. We've learned the hard way that a well-integrated tech stack is the backbone of efficient customer service.

There's no more frustrating tab-switching or tedious copy/pasting to handle tasks like creating discount codes, editing orders, and processing refunds — trust me, it’s saving us from a lot of hair-pulling moments.

One tool that has been a game-changer for us is Gorgias, thanks to its integrations with Shopify (ecommerce), Okendo (reviews), Yotpo (loyalty rewards and referrals), and Recharge (subscriptions). These integrations have streamlined our customer support process by helping agents make changes to those other tools (like refunding an order or updating subscription status) without changing tabs. It also helps our agents offer more personalized support (with less back-and-forth) by giving them the full customer context, right in the ticket view.

Tip: Take an omnichannel approach to customer support

Every customer has a different communication preference. Omnichannel support makes it easy for them to reach you on various channels like text (SMS support), live chat support on your website, and social media support).

Offering omnichannel communication is important and can be effective, but only if it's tailored to the consideration of your customers and business needs.

For example, the bulk of our inbox is subscription management, so tackling those tickets via SMS is not effective for us. The messages are too long, and often include details customers need to hang onto to reference back to, so email is by far the better channel. 

Want more tips? Read our list of customer service best practices.

What happens when customer service isn’t prioritized

We've all been there — waiting endlessly on hold, being bounced around different departments, and feeling the frustration mount. It's not a feeling we relish. 

Take contacting your bank, for instance. The last thing that crosses your mind after that ordeal is calling them again anytime soon. Instead, it's more like, "Phew, glad that's over. Hope I won't have to do that again."

Now, transpose that to an ecommerce scenario. A lousy customer service experience can easily push a shopper to the point of churn, or even talk bad about your brand online or to their friends.

Above, we discussed the impact of great customer service on your bottom line. But the real thing to be aware of is just how damaging bad customer service is — enough to tank a great product, brand, and company. 

The costs of subpar service are staggering, ranging from $75 billion to a jaw-dropping $1.6 trillion annually. Plus, according to Retail Dive, a whopping 73% of customers won’t return to your brand after just a couple of poor customer service expenses. 

There’s a compounding snowball effect beyond losing customers as well: your customer service team gets burnt out and quits, you hire quickly (and not carefully) to replace those reps, and you’re left with an untrained and understaffed team. 

As a result, your company has poor customer service, so execs never get to see the impact that good experiences could have on your bottom line, leading to even fewer resources for customer success. The cycle continues from there.

Thankfully, good customer service can have the opposite effect.

Example: Excellent customer service helped Best Buy overcome bankruptcy

CB Insights shared a story about how, in 2012, Best Buy grappled with a $1.7 billion loss due to rising ecommerce and Amazon's Price Check app. The company turned this around by putting customer service at the forefront by 

• Empowering sales staff with thorough training that focused on being friendly and knowledgeable
• Introducing a bold price-matching guarantee to keep shoppers engaged
• Reviving the employee discount program
• Offering personalized in-home consultation with a technology advisor

This customer-centric approach revitalized the brand. If they hadn’t made these improvements, Best Buy might not be here today.

Transform customer support into your new growth engine with Gorgias

Looking back, I've realized that nailing customer support is all about staying ahead of the game and making smart moves — fast.

Remember, your customer support situation can impact your revenue in ways you might not imagine, and profitability is essential these days. The goal is to ensure your customer support strategy cultivates loyalty rather than driving customers away. That's where Gorgias comes in.

Designed exclusively for ecommerce, Gorgias equips online stores with powerful tools to enhance customer interactions, ultimately driving revenue growth, including:

• A centralized view of support interactions from all your channels
• Live chat support widgets (including proactive chat campaigns)
• Customer self-service tools like Help Centers and self-service order tracking and management
• Deep integrations with Shopify and other ecommerce platforms to quickly cancel, refund, and modify orders
• Rules and Macros for automating tedious customer support tasks
• Detailed and flexible reporting and analytics features

I encourage you to book a short time with the team to learn all about it. Gorgias has been a game-changer for Love Wellness and I’m confident it can be for your brand too.

{{lead-magnet-2}}

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

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

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

Why you should have non-support employees answer support tickets

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

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

Establish respect for support

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

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

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

Find areas to improve support

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

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

Find areas of opportunity outside of support

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

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

Improve cross-functional collaboration

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

Here are a couple of examples from my experience:

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

{{lead-magnet-1}}

How I structure this kind of program

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

Here’s how my team manages it:

Train a cohort every 4-6 weeks

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

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

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

Set up a dedicated View in Gorgias

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

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

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

Require 20 hours of support work over 4 weeks

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

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

Appoint a CX’er to be available for support

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

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

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

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

How to get buy-in

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

Here are some tips as you prepare your case:

Find an executive champion

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

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

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

Emphasize the cross-functional benefits

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

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

Share this article

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

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

Choose a helpdesk with unlimited seats

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

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

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

{{lead-magnet-2}}

TL;DR:

• Customer expectations for quick and efficient customer service are higher than ever.
• It's important to strategically choose a few customer service channels to focus on, rather than spreading attention across many.
• Self-service options, live chat and chatbots, email, messaging and SMS, voice and phone support, and third-party channels are essential customer service channels to consider.
• Each channel has its own benefits and should be chosen based on your brand and audience demographics.
• The future of customer service is omnichannel, where multiple channels work together to provide a cohesive customer experience.

Customer expectations are higher than ever. According to Intercom’s recent Customer Service Trends report, 83% of customer service teams are noticing an increase.

Most customers want an answer about their issues immediately, and without a hitch. That’s a big reason why you need to think strategically about how you communicate with customers and the customer service channels you invest in.   

While it’s tempting to sprinkle your attention across a dozen different channels, consider choosing just a handful. That way, you can focus your efforts on resolving customer problems and can become an all-around more efficient team.

Let's dive into the most commonly used channels, like self-service, chatbots, and SMS messaging. Then, we’ll break down exactly how these channels work so you can make a sound investment for your support team.

‎The 6 essential customer service channels for your brand

A majority of shoppers these days expect to have their issues solved quickly, successfully, and in their channel of choice. 

Salesforce reports that 78% of customers prefer to have access to a variety of engagement channels for support.

Ultimately, it’s up to you to find the proper channels that best suit your brand and audience demographics. That’s because customer service service channels aren’t one-size-fits-all — different audiences have different preferences. But, it’s helpful to understand basic channels and how they function so you can make an informed decision about where to invest your energy. 

We’ll walk you through the 7 essential channels that most organizations use to support their shoppers, like self-service options, email, and SMS messaging. 

1) Help customers help themselves with self-service

A growing number of shoppers prefer self-service options, where they can quickly help themselves to solve their problems — no human interaction needed.

Research from Nice supports the trend to self-service options: 81% of surveyed consumers say they want brands to offer self service. 

An added bonus for implementing self-service options? It frees up your team to focus on higher-priority, or more complex, tickets. 

How to implement self-service in your customer support strategy 

A help center, sometimes called a knowledge base, is an example of self-service in customer support. It’s designed to provide detailed information that helps customers answer simple questions, like “Do you ship to my area?” 

This kind of self-service option can reduce ticket volume for your support agents.

For example, office furniture store Branch’s help center created using Gorgias, is like a one-stop shop to help customers solve common problems. 

Branch’s help center has an extensive offering of resources, including detailed shipping and delivery information. It also includes informative articles dedicated solely to answering customer’s most frequently asked questions. 

Help centers are a great starting point to power self-service support. Used in tandem with Gorgias’ Automate features, like Flows, your brand can become a support powerhouse. 

If you’re not ready to create a comprehensive help center, you can start out with a simple FAQ page. Check out our free FAQ template generator to get started. 

Read our guide on customer self-service to learn about indirect ways to boost customer satisfaction.

2) Live chat & chatbots: Create better customer experiences

Shoppers expect a quick answer to their issues — and 90% of customers in the US agree that an immediate response from a brand is important. 

One way to meet these rising customer expectations is to consider implementing both live chat and chatbots that work in tandem to provide a seamless experience.  

This way, you can leverage live agents during working hours, then let the bots take over customer queries when it’s time for your reps to clock out. 

Similarly, you can use a Flow via Gorgias to build in personalized, automated responses based on customer input. If the issue isn’t resolved by the bot, it can be automatically elevated to a live agent. 

How to implement live chat and chatbots in your customer service strategy 

Live chat is one of the most preferred methods of communication for shoppers. So much so, that 86% would rather interact with a human over a bot. 

The team at CROSSNET made use of live chat to quickly handle support tickets. Their efforts resulted in massive growth, including $450,00 in a single sale. 

Weaving an automation option into your customer service strategy helps your team provide a seamless customer service experience, working 24/7 to answer customer tickets even after your reps have gone home. 

Gorgias offers a few automation options that act as quick-response tools, like Quick Response Flows, Macros, and Rules, to help resolve tickets faster. 

With Macros, you can build premade responses and set up Rules to that trigger them when a customer asks a common question, like “where’s my order?” 

3) Gain customer trust by responding quickly through email

Email is one of the most tried-and-true methods to communicate with customers. 

Unlike some of the other channels mentioned in this list, email support is an asynchronous method of communication. This is largely because a customer isn’t immediately connected to an agent or support resource. 

But, that doesn’t mean you can relax on your response time. Treat an email like the first step before a shopper leaves a bad review. Take steps to thoroughly read their message and offer a thoughtful response to resolve the issue.  

How to use email to support your customer service strategy

If an agent receives a customer service email from an angry customer, a great first step is to apologize right away. 

From there, the agent can take steps to de-escalate the situation and offer a solution.  

{{Customer First Name}},

Thanks so much for your feedback on {{Concern or issue they had with the brand or their experience}}.

We strive to provide an amazing experience for all of our customers, and sometimes we fall short of doing that. We sincerely apologize for the experience you’ve had with our brand.

As a token of our appreciation, we’d like to offer you {{Discount code, free gift, free shipping on next order; whatever aligns with your policy}}. Have a great day,

{{Current agent first name}}

Read more about how to use emails in your customer service strategy + templates to respond to angry customers.

4) Messaging & SMS: Make your support convenient

Customer service SMS is quickly rising in the ranks as a preferred way for shoppers to get in touch with a brand. 

One reason for messaging’s popularity may lie in the fast response times. Most customers expect to have a response to their message within 10 minutes. 

Plus, a text message is convenient. Most people have mobile devices and they’re more willing to respond to a quick text in their day-to-day life. For some shoppers, it’s just easier to send a text than it is to find a contact-us page, or type up an email. 

How to implement SMS messaging in your customer service strategy

OLIPOP has seen an 88% decrease in response time since implementing SMS messaging — powered by Gorgias — in their customer support strategy.  

"Don't treat SMS like email - talk to these folks like they're your friends. That's something that OLIPOP does via SMS really well." - Claire Goodill, Head of Partnerships, Postscript

{{lead-magnet-1}}

5) Voice & phone support: Creating person-to-person relationships

Reliable phone support is one of the most traditional forms of customer service channels out there. Voice support is one of the most powerful ways for support agents to foster empathy with customers. 

This empathy can lead to positive support outcomes as well — letting agents earn customer trust and boosting customer satisfaction metrics, or CSAT.

“I've seen that a phone call can actually turn things around,” says Bri Christiano, Director of Customer Service at Gorgias. “Some people just need to be heard on the phone, especially people who are more used to having conversations over the phone. I've called angry customers, and if you let them speak and hear them out, and repeat back to them their frustrations, that alone will save that customer in the end.” 

Gorgias’s customers prove time and time again that voice is a powerful tool: Our customers that use phones in their support strategy have an average Satisfaction score of 4.56 out of 5. 

How to use voice and phone support in your customer service channels 

Phone support works really well when it’s integrated into your organization’s overall support strategy. 

Try The World invested in Gorgias to help merge its customer contact channels into one cohesive platform, including phone. 

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

In Gorgias, when a customer calls for support, agents can pull up all other points of contact with the customer. This makes it easy for agents to give detailed and personalized support to handle customer issues. 

6) Third-party channels: Leverage social proof to boost brand awareness  

By 2025, Gartner estimates 60% of your customer base will turn to third-party channels, like social media or forums, for information about your brand. This makes a compelling case to invest in these channels and thoughtfully integrate them into your larger support strategy. 

It may be scary to think about shoppers talking about your brand in a place where you have little-to-no control of the narrative. But, third-party channels have a few benefits.

It’s a massively useful form of brand awareness that taps into social proof — aka, that your brand and its products are as great as they seem on your website. Plus, you can turn great posts from customers into marketing collateral, like user-generated content (UGC). 

When you take the time to respond to customers in third-party channels, it also shows prospective shoppers that your brand is dedicated to providing a really great experience. 

“It's really important to be monitoring social posts, even if you don’t have a massive following. These are public platforms where potential new customers are going to look at your brand and see immediately how you engage with customers,” says Bri Christiano, Director of Customer Service at Gorgias. 

Meet customers where they are on social media

A growing number of younger shoppers — particularly Gen Z-ers — treat social media like a search engine. These shoppers use social platforms to answer their questions about brands and products by scrolling through content created by real customers. 

As social media customer service becomes more common, more and more shoppers will turn to social media platforms, whether through comments or DMs, to engage with brands.

Ecommerce, or direct-to-consumer brands, might see more success on platforms like Instagram or TikTok, while B2B organizations might want to lean heavily into a more professional platform like LinkedIn. It all boils down to where your target audience is already spending time online. 

A helpdesk can help your team keep track of customer communication on social channels.

These platforms are designed to integrate into your existing social media presence.

Gorgias, for example, pulls social media channels into one central space for your agents to easily monitor, respond to, and track comments or tags from customers. 

For example, Everyday Dose turned to Gorgias to help manage the massive influx of comments and DMs they received from shoppers on their social profiles. 

The main goals were to lower first-response and resolution times while maintaining high CSAT scores.

After implementing Gorgias, Everyday Dose met their goals, reducing response time by 60% and saw resolution time reduced by 45%. On top of this, the brand was able to convert 30% more tickets into sales, giving their revenue a nice boost.  

Build community with your audience on forums

Online forums are excellent spaces for community building. For shoppers, forums are useful to swap experiences or get information about a brand and its products. 

Some brands opt to build their own forums from the ground up, but there are many free options available you may already be familiar with, like Discord, Reddit or Facebook groups.

Do your research before building from scratch to see if your brand already has a word-of-mouth presence on a third-party forum.

Read more about the best practices to leverage online forums as spaces for community building. 

How to choose the right support channels to manage customer interactions 

We’ll let you in on a secret: When it comes to choosing the best customer support channels to invest in, there’s no perfect answer. 

You don’t need to use every channel out there in order to successfully and efficiently support your shoppers. The communication channels used by your team to manage customer expectations will differ across organizations. 

That’s largely because of who your target audience is and how your customer service team best communicates with them. 

For example, at Topicals, the customer support team leans into SMS messaging to follow up with customers. 

This works because an important part of their communication strategy is to sound relatable to skincare-conscious millennials and Gen Z-ers. 

SMS messaging is less useful for a company like Comme Avant, who sees a bulk of their customer support tickets come through social media DMs. 

To choose the best right channels for your brand, start by thinking about your audience. Some questions you may want to ask include: 

• Where is my audience already hanging out online?
• How does my audience prefer to communicate? 
• How do our support agents typically interact with shoppers? 
• Does my audience want a self-service option over a service agent? 
• Is there a process to route complex customer issues to a different channel? 
• How long is my audience willing to wait in a queue to troubleshoot their issues? 

The future of customer service is omnichannel

The old-school way of customer service was single-channel, mainly by way of call centers. 

Then, as technology evolved, customer service became increasingly multi-channel. This meant customers could reach a brand through channels like email, chat support, or phone calls, etc. 

Now, customer service has become about omnichannel support — allowing multiple channels to work together to form a cohesive system. 

Gorgias leverages omnichannel support by connecting a customer service team’s tools into one simple system. That way, agents can handle tickets across social media, SMS messaging, live chat, and more. 

It also gives your customers multiple touchpoints to reach your brand and allows them to communicate through a preferred channel for troubleshooting issues. 

Achieving true omnichannel support with a consistent customer experience across all channels is tough, but it is possible with support from a modern help management platform, like Gorgias. 

{{lead-magnet-2}}

Chatbots have become a go-to customer service tool for many brands. Their promise? Efficiency and scalability, powered by artificial intelligence (AI). But when it comes to ecommerce, these bots often miss the mark in providing a solid service experience.

The customer service chatbot has its place in answering straightforward questions. But it often falters when faced with intricate questions, or inquiries that require managing orders. When customers need to see their order status or request a return, a ChatGPT-style answer is annoying, not helpful.

Instead, a better customer experience comes from customer self-service automation that’s built with these ecommerce use cases in mind. Below, we’ll explore the downsides of chatbots and share some powerful alternatives to help your support team automate repetitive tickets to save time for interactions that really need a human touch. 

What is a customer service chatbot?

A customer service chatbot is a digital tool on your website or app designed to mimic human interactions and answer user questions. At a basic level, chatbots aim to interpret customer inquiries, generate responses with AI, and resolve the issue without any agent effort. 

For an ecommerce business, implementing a chatbot promises to deliver 24/7 automated customer support at scale without requiring as many human customer service agents. 

Should you use customer service chatbots?

Chatbots aren’t terrible, but they struggle to respond accurately to more complex or nuanced customer questions. And most chatbots can’t actually change a customer’s order, or show up-to-date information specific to that shopper. Even if the chatbot doesn’t have an answer, it will still try, resulting in confusing or inaccurate information for the customer. 

While chatbots can help handle basic FAQs, they’re less effective for ecommerce-related customer interactions. Chatbots regularly fail to deliver satisfactory results when customers want to change an order, inquire about order status, or ask more complex questions. 

Before implementing chatbots, consider their limitations in meeting your customer’s needs and the customer relationship you want to build with buyers.

{{lead-magnet-1}}

How AI-powered chatbots are used in customer service

While chatbots promise many customer service solutions, their capabilities are narrow. Though they’re helpful for high volumes of repetitive questions, chatbots have limited aptitude as a comprehensive customer service solution. Their strength remains relatively basic automated assistance.

Here’s how chatbots are used in customer service:

• Providing 24/7 assistance. A 2021 study from Drift found that 44.2% of respondents cited engaging buyers 24/7 across the globe as a top benefit of implementing an AI chatbot. Chatbots eliminate the need for brands to have customer service agents available to respond at all hours of the day. 
• Answering simple questions. Chatbots provide immediate responses to basic customer inquiries on live chat channels. Their scripted dialogues resolve common FAQs, reducing response times. 
• Responding immediately to customer queries. Chatbots provide instant automated responses to questions submitted on live chat, day or night, providing timezone coverage across countries.
• Accommodating international support. Chatbots are often multilingual, answering questions in various languages. This facilitates a better user experience for international shoppers.  

Downsides of customer service chatbots

At first glance, chatbots seem appealing. Who wouldn’t want round-the-clock availability and limitless scalability? However, their limitations emerge when testing the limits of conversational AI for satisfactory ecommerce customer service.

Often unsatisfying for customers

A 2022 Userlike survey of 415 respondents found that 60% of respondents who chatted with a chatbot could not solve their issues because they needed to speak with someone. Approximately 50% indicated the chatbot did not know how to solve their issue, and nearly 40% indicated that the chatbot didn’t understand them. 

While chatbots aim to use machine learning to respond accurately to customer issues, their capabilities crumble in complex scenarios. Yet, they still try to spit out a response, annoying customers.

Adds another layer between the problem and solution

Given their limited problem-solving capabilities, chatbots often fail to resolve more complicated customer issues fully. This forces customers to painfully repeat explanations of their issues across different channels, seeking out an actual solution. 

Adding these unnecessary repetitions and delays only further frustrates customers who want their ecommerce order issues quickly fixed on the first try.

Bots struggle with more complicated queries

For straightforward FAQ-style queries, chatbots manage fine. However, they struggle whenever contextual complexities enter the equation. Their canned scripts struggle to dig deeper into dynamic customer issues. 

Chatbots disappoint customers who expect tailored, back-and-forth dialogue when describing complex order scenarios or product problems.

Only works in a chat window 

For the most part, chatbots operate solely on your website’s chat window, so they can’t support customers across channels like email, social media, voice, etc. This limits their ability to handle multifaceted issues. Customers understandably seek and expect omnichannel customer service, especially options that provide a swift resolution.

A better automation solution to manage customer requests

The right automation focuses more on resolving customer issues than imitating humans. That’s why self-service options — like self-service order trackers, FAQs, and product quizzes — are a great alternative to chatbots. A 2022 Salesforce Research report found that 66% of respondents have used self-service account portals, with 66% of millennials and 61% of Gen-Z consumers preferring self-service for simple use cases.

Gorgias Automate serves as an advanced chatbot replacement. This suite of automation tools is built for ecommerce, and customizable for your brand’s unique needs. Below, we’ll show you how each feature takes a more straightforward approach to solving customer issues than chatbots. 

But activating automation doesn’t mean forgoing live chat altogether — or needing it 24/7. With the right solution, you can offer automated options only during select hours or have customers use them before contacting an agent. 

Answer common questions in seconds 

The ideal customer service solution instantly resolves frequent, repetitive questions through robust automation. When customers have questions like, “What’s your return policy?” or “What product is right for me?,” they deserve an answer at the click of a button. And that’s exactly how Flows work.  

Gorgias Flows

Gorgias Flows are buttons in your chat widget and Help Center (and soon, email) that provide instant answers — personalized to customers, where needed. 

Whether buyers seek product recommendations, pricing, or your sizing chart, they only have to click a button to get a pre-written response (that you know is more accurate or on-brand than an AI-generated answer). If you want to personalize the answer, you can program the Flow to ask follow-up questions to understand the customer’s location, preferences, etc., for the most accurate answer.

TUSHY, an ecommerce company that sells modern bidets that attach to toilets, uses Flows to respond to common questions swiftly. 

Queries like “Which TUSHY is right for me?” and “Will TUSHY fit my toilet?” are automatically answered through these self-service flows without customers needing agent assistance.

And if customers have follow-up questions or still want to speak to an agent, they can get connected to the TUSHY team with the click of a button:

‍

Automate access to order tracking, refund requests, and cancellations

The right customer service solution doesn’t just answer FAQs, it helps customers track and manage their orders. 

Rather than relying on agents (or chatbots with limited capabilities), automation enables customers to get answers and close the loop on routine issues independently, boosting customer satisfaction. 

Gorgias Order Management Flows

Gorgias Order Management Flows provide customers with self-service options to track orders, report issues, and request refunds or cancellations without needing agent assistance. Customers simply access Order Management Flows through the chat widget or Help Center.

Customers log in with their email or phone number (no need to remember an order number!) to independently check the order status, initiate returns or exchanges, and make other changes. This feature closes the loop on common post-purchase requests and empowers customers with instant DIY resolutions, letting your support reps focus on more complex interactions that actually need human support.

Loop Earplugs, which sells high-quality audio earplugs for concerts and loud environments, uses Gorgias Order Management Flows to let customers handle post-purchase requests independently. This automated self-service enables tracking shipments, reporting order issues, and initiating returns or cancellations without chatting with a support rep. 

‍

Here’s what it looks like to log in, see recent purchases, and request a return:

Provide article suggestions

One advantage of chatbots is they can answer a variety of questions. While you can only have up to 6 Flows, another great solution is leveraging content from your knowledge base or Help Center to answer a wider range of customer questions. 

Gorgias AI-powered Article Recommendation in Chat

Gorgias’ Article Recommendation in Chat harnesses advanced AI to analyze incoming chat tickets, pinpointing and sharing the most pertinent help center articles as immediate responses. This ensures customers receive precise, relevant information in real-time, streamlining their query resolution process. 

And again — your customer experience is free of potentially incorrect or off-brand AI-generated responses. AI only steps in to provide the correct human-created content at the right time. 

Here’s an example from Sol de Janeiro, a skin and body cream brand using Article Recommendations to answer customer questions about their products:

‍

Automatically respond to customers' email common questions

Chatbots only work on your live chat window. But ideally, when customers submit inquiries via email or contact forms, they also get an immediate answer. 

Gorgias AI-powered Autoresponders

Gorgias Autoresponders use AI to scan every single incoming email and contact form submission for frequently asked questions, like “Can I get a return?” or “Where is my order?”

When one of those questions is found, the Autoresponder instantly replies with a pre-written and designed email that gives personalizes support answer to the customer, pulling data from Shopify, BigCommerce, or Magento. 

Other alternatives to customer support chatbots (and how to use them)

While chatbots have become a popular AI customer service tool, they’re not the only solution worth exploring. Brands have many options at their fingertips, each catering to buyer needs along the customer journey. 

Live chat, for instance, offers real-time interactions, bridging the gap between immediacy and personalization. On the other hand, for customers who still want to leverage chatbots, Gorgias integrates with leading providers like Siena AI, combining the benefits of automation with specialized support. Diversify your customer service strategies and embrace alternatives to ensure that every customer touchpoint is addressed.

Live chat

Your team doesn’t need to choose between a chatbot vs live chat. When shoppers face pressing issues or need assistance on the fly, live chat steps in as the hero, providing real-time, personalized support from human agents. Plus, amplify live chat support efficiency using templates and automation, reserving agent’s energy for complex concerns.

Gorgias Live Chat

Gorgias Live Chat provides an instantaneous bridge between customers and brands. Real-time interactions allow customers to get swift, personalized responses to their queries or concerns. Enhanced with automation and templates, this feature guarantees swift support and consistent quality in communication, making every customer feel valued.

Parade sells comfortable, size-inclusive, sustainable underwear made from recycled materials. They use Gorgias Automate alongside Gorgias Live Chat, available to their website visitors during business hours. This allows for the best of both worlds — easy and automated responses for simple questions and a human touch for more complex queries. 

Contact forms

Every customer’s concern deserves the attention it needs. With contact forms, shoppers can detail their queries, complaints, or feedback when it works for them, even if you’re not online staffing the chat. This format, which prompts customers to categorize their message and provides details, also gives your team everything they need to (hopefully) resolve the issue in one response.

Gorgias Contact Form

The Contact Form, which is available standalone or in the Help Center, streamlines the customer messaging process. It offers customers a direct and structured way to submit their concerns and questions. Incoming communication arrives organized, making it easier for your customer service team to prioritize, tag, and resolve tickets.

Comfort One Shoes, which sells high-quality, stylish footwear that fits just right, uses the Gorgias suite of products, including the Help Center Contact Form. This form on their website lets customers get specific about their asks, including attachments to add every detail.  

Help Centers

Help Centers are like the libraries of customer service — organized, exhaustive, and empowering. Customers can independently navigate these centers to find order-related answers, leading to instant resolutions. And if they can’t find what they’re looking for? That’s when support agents step in to handle more intricate or unique questions. 

Gorgias Help Center

The Gorgias Help Center is a comprehensive hub for customer support, allowing brands to create, import, house, and categorize resources to assist users. Whether it’s FAQs, guides, or tutorials, customers can find the answers they need without the wait times.

Parade hosts their resources on a Gorgias Help Center, which has an abundance of articles for customers to find the answers they need on a host of topics:

• Returns and exchanges
• Product and sizing
• Sustainability
• US orders
• International orders
• Refer-a friend

Email support

In the age of instant messaging, email remains a steadfast channel for customer service. Customers can lay out their concerns in detail, asynchronously. On the other hand, brands can prioritize email requests based on current customer demands, getting away from the immediacy and urgency of live chat.

Gorgias Email

Gorgias Email is tailored to redefine email-based customer support through its shared workspace format. Its advanced tools facilitate a more organized, efficient, and rapid response to incoming queries by keeping track of email threads and allowing agents to respond quickly with Macros. 

By integrating with other platforms and using its automation capabilities, Gorgias Email ensures that each customer email is handled with precision and timeliness, elevating the standard of customer service.

Read more: Customer service email strategy: A guide for ecommerce brands

Community forums

Community forums are essentially marketplaces of ideas and solutions. Here, ecommerce customers can tap into the collective wisdom of their peers, crowdsource advice, and find solutions to questions that others have faced before. They reduce the number of repetitive inquiries to customer service agents and foster a community spirit among first-time shoppers and brand loyalists alike.

Streamline support with Gorgias Automate

Enhance your customer support capabilities with Automate. Tailored to address high-volume routine inquiries, the top 10% of Automate users deflect at least 30% of overall questions, while the top 5% automate up to 45%.

But it’s not about replacing the human element; quite the opposite. When Automate complements your current strategy and pairs with a genuine human connection, it crafts a harmonious and effective customer support environment. 

‍Book your demo today to learn more about Gorgias and Automate.

{{lead-magnet-2}}

With a decade of experience in customer service roles, I’ve recognized that ecommerce customer service goes beyond answering questions. 

The best experience you can give customers is proactively providing them with what they need so they don't have to contact support at all. In instances where customers do need to talk to someone on the team, interactions that surprise and delight help keep them coming back. 

Ecommerce customer service may feel less personal than it would in person, but there are a multitude of ways you can make it special.

Whether you’re building an online store from scratch or need extra hands to handle your growing customer base, I’ve rounded up the top 15 best practices for ecommerce customer service that you can start using to improve your support team.

The top 15 ecommerce customer service best practices to implement

1. Use a customer service helpdesk specifically built for ecommerce stores

‎If I could only recommend one tool, it would be a helpdesk. A helpdesk is a customer service software that allows support agents and teams to manage customer data, inquiries, and orders in one platform.

If you run an online store, Gorgias is the perfect helpdesk specifically designed for ecommerce tasks. It smoothly combines order management, order fulfillment, and customer service in one tool, so that you can speak to customers and resolve their issues while being able to pull up their order data in one window. 

{{lead-magnet-1}}

2. Combine all your support channels on one platform

‎When customers can receive help the way they want — whether that’s a phone call or Facebook messages — they feel more comfortable initiating a relationship with your brand. Establishing a positive first impression can be the fuel you need to turn them into returning customers.

💡 Tip: Phone support can be the key to keeping customers. Throughout the years, I’ve seen first-hand how a simple 10-minute phone call can turn a sour interaction around. Most customers may prefer written communication, but being able to hash out an issue over a voice call can be the difference between losing a customer and keeping them.

The top support channels you should offer: 

• Email: Provides customers a channel to voice in-depth and detailed inquiries.
• Chat: Useful for quick questions that can be answered within one interaction.
• Social media: The best channel for new customers who want quick answers.
• Voice/phone: A valuable channel to explain and resolve complicated issues. 

3. Automate responses with reusable Macros 

‎To cut down first response times, use Macros or customer service scripts. On Gorgias, Macros are pre-written responses that can be applied to the most common customer interactions.

The best way to use Macros is by applying them to what I refer to as empty-calorie tickets. Empty-calorie tickets are repetitive inquiries that people ask over and over again, such as “Where is my order?” Automating the responses to these low-effort tickets is the easiest way to incorporate Macros into your workflow. 

When to use Macros:

• Welcome emails
• Order status emails (transaction completed, order shipped, order delivered)
• Refund processed emails
• Customer loyalty emails

4. Trigger shopping cart abandonment notifications

Customers who abandon their carts are inevitable, but you don’t have to leave it there. Sending an email to a customer who still has items in their shopping cart can be the final push to trigger a purchase. You can even pair the notification with a discount to make the purchase more appealing.

Acquiring new customers is expensive, so it’s extremely important to recapture customer attention when you have the chance. 

5. Respond to social media comments quickly

Pay attention to your social media presence because 26% of people learn about a product through social media, according to a 2023 study by Statista. Public social media comments have the power to either bring in new customers or completely turn them off from your brand. For this reason, it’s important to actively engage with social media users who mention your brand. 

Having an active social media presence is an easy way to show you care about what your customers have to say. When you address comments publicly, prospective customers will trust you more for your ability to be transparent and authentic.

📚 Related reading: 5 tips to leverage social media for your store

6. Send order status and shipment update emails

Customers like to know when an action they’ve taken was successful. When it comes to ecommerce, you can easily check this best practice off your list by making it a routine to send order status emails, like when an order has been shipped.

On Gorgias, we take the manual work out of sending routine emails with Macros. If you’re a Shopify store, Gorgias automatically populates your emails with important customer information pulled from Shopify such as customer name, order number, tracking number, and more.

7. Offer self-service options

88% of customers like to find answers on their own and expect a brand to have a self-service portal, according to Statista. You can help make the search easier by filling your website with self-service options. 

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

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

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

📚 Related reading: A guide to building an FAQ page

8. Collect email addresses

Data collection makes up a large chunk of customer service, and it doesn’t have to be complicated. The easiest way to gather customer data is by collecting email addresses via newsletter signups and contact forms on your online store.

Customer service is important and shouldn't stop when your agents are off the clock. On Gorgias, you can add a contact form to your chat widget when your store is offline, so you have the opportunity to turn first-time customers into loyal followers.

‎Benefits of collecting customer emails: 

• Allows you to entice new customers with promotional offers and discount codes
• Boosts customer data with requests for feedback
• Personalizes customer interactions

9. Optimize your website for mobile

Three-quarters of Americans are shopping with their smartphone. It’s time to shift your focus. To take advantage of this customer behavior, match a convenient tool like the smartphone with an equally convenient and optimized website.

A website optimized for mobile includes:

• A responsive layout that adapts to all device sizes
• An easy-to-use menu
• Limited popups and distractions
• Legible fonts and text sizes

10. Create a customer returns and exchanges portal

If your store accepts returns and exchanges, it’s a good idea to automate the process with a portal. Returning an item is essentially just one step: getting an item out of a customer’s hands. It shouldn’t require a live agent. So, when your customers can return an item on their own, it becomes a huge time-saver for both them and your agents.

For example, when I worked at Stitch Fix, every time a customer needed an exchange, they'd have to reach out to support. It was a huge friction point. Eventually, we decided to build an exchange tool that became part of our checkout flow. From then on, our customers didn’t even need to think about contacting support because it was just an automatic part of the process.

💡 Tip: The easiest way to make a returns portal is by connecting Loop Returns with Gorgias. Loop Returns simplifies the return and exchange process by routing customers to a link, not an agent. By automating this part of the customer journey, your support team can deal with more urgent tickets.

11. Feature customer reviews to amplify your brand

Showcasing personal experiences can be the magic ingredient that adds credibility to your product. When potential customers read about real-life encounters with your product, they gain trust in your brand. Customer reviews can even nudge hesitant buyers toward making a purchase.

For example, PuffCuff does an amazing job at making their product shine. Not only do they feature reviews, but they also include a customer review video. Being able to add a visual element that shows how conveniently your product solves a problem can convince customers who are on the fence.

Where to feature customer reviews:

• Homepage
• Product pages
• Social media posts
• Welcome emails

12. Create a loyalty or rewards program

Attracting new customers requires extra marketing that you may not have the budget for. Here’s a different approach: increase the value you get from your current customers with a loyalty program.

With a loyalty program, customers who already love your brand are incentivized to buy more while earning exclusive perks. An easy way to set up a program is by integrating LoyaltyLion with Gorgias. You instantly get customer retention features like shopping cart rewards, in-site notifications, and loyalty emails. 

13. Use high-quality product photos

Without a physical storefront, your product photos will be doing all the talking. Customers want to get as close to the product as they possibly can to make an informed purchase. In short, gaining customer trust depends on the appearance of your products.

Here’s how to build trust through product photos:

• Standardize product photos across your website. Using the same high-quality camera, lighting, and background will show customers your brand pays attention to details, allowing them to trust your products more.
• Display multiple angles of your product. Allow customers to envision how your product will fit into their lives with accurate photos.
• Implement zoomable photos. Letting customers zoom in on your products can show them the exact qualities of your product, such as color, texture, and build quality.

📚 Learn more: Improve your product photography with these 3 tips

14. Improve your checkout experience 

When customers get to checkout, they’re inches away from the finish line. Don't risk hampering their journey by subjecting them to a bad checkout experience. In fact, a staggering 17% of US online shoppers abandoned their orders in 2022 because of a "too long/complicated checkout process," according to Baymard. 

Here's how to improve the checkout experience:

• Offer guest checkout. Customers want fast service and that means letting them skip the tedious account creation process.
• Present all extra fees and costs. Surprise fees can turn customers off from buying a product. Be transparent by including any extra fees at the checkout page to avoid losing their trust.
• Accept a variety of payment options, including Buy Now, Pay Later. A brand that caters to all wallet sizes is likely to bring in more customers.
• Include a checkout progress bar. Visually guiding your customer through the buying journey allows them to feel at ease with manageable steps and provides them with a sense of achievement once they reach the end.

15. Track trends by using customer service metrics

‎You’ve got pages of customer emails, buying behavior data, and feedback — now what? The next step is to use this data to track customer buying trends and your support team’s performance. With Gorgias, you can track how well your customer service operates with Support Performance Statistics. 

Track these support performance metrics to improve your processes:

• First response times: The faster you answer tickets, the more satisfied customers will be.
• Average resolution times: How effectively is your team resolving tickets? You can track this number to pinpoint gaps and inefficient steps in your process.
• Average number of tickets: A high number of tickets may indicate that you need more self-service options.

💡 Tip: Great customer service should have clear KPIs that are aligned with company goals such as customer retention and revenue generation that clearly demonstrate how your customer service creates value for the company and enable you to evaluate the effectiveness of your support program.

The bottom line: Delight your customers at every stage  

Making every customer interaction delightful goes a long way. Customers are more motivated to keep interacting with your brand and can even inspire new customers to join in. When you show customers that you care, you give way to loyalty. 

At Gorgias, we quickly get support teams the customer trust they need with an all-in-one helpdesk. Our helpdesk streamlines the customer experience with omnichannel communication, ecommerce platform integration to Shopify and BigCommerce, Revenue Statistics, and automation in one convenient platform. 

Ready to put these best practices into practice? Book a demo now.

{{lead-magnet-2}}