For over a century, Angelus Direct has made leather and shoe paints, dyes, cleaners, and more. Beloved by people who customize, restore and make shoes and other leather products, Angelus Direct thrives on recurring business — with happy customers returning to buy up to 60 times.

"Our core model is making sure our customers are taken care of and educated. We want customers to have a really good experience with a personal touch. We make lots of videos showing how to use our products, and our customer support agents spend time using the product so they know them well."
- Tyler Angelos, CEO at Angelus Brand

The challenge: Managing customer conversations across multiple platforms led to slow responses and missed sales

With many loyal customers returning to buy again and explore new products, Angelus Direct receives around 8,000 customer support tickets each month. Under the company's old set-up, the customer support team struggled to manage and respond promptly to customer messages across multiple platforms. This led to missed sales opportunities and customer experience that sometimes fell short of Angelus Direct's high standards.

"Before Gorgias, we had huge issues with keeping on top of all the platforms not associated with email or chat — constantly switching between different tabs and apps. Keeping all the socials aligned and taken care of was a mammoth task. Sometimes messages were missed, and sales didn't convert or customers weren't helped in a timely fashion."
- Tyler Angelos, CEO at Angelus Brand

Each day, Angelus receives a steady stream of straightforward inquiries:

• Where's my order?
• Can I return this item?
• Can I cancel my order?

Although simple to respond to, the sheer volume of these messages meant the Angelus Direct team had less time to reply to more complex queries requiring a personalized conversation.

Angelus Direct was using Zendesk as a helpdesk and to manage emails and chat. Tyler and his team found it robust but complicated to understand how the automation worked. They were also frustrated that Zendesk's customer support wasn't always as helpful as the would have liked, due to gaps in product knowledge.

The solution: Faster responses and more efficient workflows with Gorgias's all-in-one platform and smart automation

Angelus Direct chose Gorgias after seeing it recommended on Shopify Plus. Fully integrated with Shopify, Gorgias provides the all-in-one platform Tyler wanted to centralize all customer support channels, with customer data automatically pulled through from Shopify. No more tab shuffling, no more copy/pasting order numbers and names, no more messages getting lost in the mix.

"Gorgias has everything I was looking for from a customer support app. It pulls all the craziness of social media and brings it together into a much more manageable space. Having all customer support and media channels funneled to one spot makes it infinitely easier for your customer support team to focus, and do their jobs professionally and with less frustration."

- Tyler Angelos, CEO at Angelus Brand

Macros: Templated responses with personalized data enable faster yet accurate answers

Angelus Direct creates pre-made responses for commonly asked questions. When Gorgias detects these questions, Macros automatically suggest the relevant templated response, including personalized data such as the precise, custom-mixed paint colors previously ordered. It's then quick and easy for the customer support agent to edit the response as needed before sending to the customer.

Meanwhile, more straightforward questions that are asked frequently — such as order status, shipping, and returns — are deflected to automated answers by tailored Rules and Quick Response Flows in Gorgias live chat.

Together, the rapid, accurate replies from all these features make customers happy while allowing the Angelus Direct team to resolve ticket faster and work more efficiently — freeing up time to focus on higher-impact customer conversations.

"Gorgias Macros are essential to our business. They make it so easy for customer support or media to quickly answer the same questions again and again — it's a huge time saver. And customer satisfaction goes up a ton when you can answer them immediately."

- Tyler Angelos, CEO at Angelus Brand

Tags: Label, sort, and track tickets to boost effective prioritization and customer satisfaction

Gorgias tags help Angelus Direct manage customer conversations more efficiently, by making it easy to see at a glance what the ticket is about and how urgent it is. Gorgias automatically assigns tags to messages based on their contents. Angelus Direct uses a mix of default and custom tags to label and sort messages exactly how they want.

Given Angelus Direct's commitment to exceptional customer service, resolving problems as quickly as possible is a priority:

"Thanks to Gorgias tags, we can really focus on first response for the most important messages. Anything that could cause or has caused a bad experience is flagged right away and we take care of it immediately. Tags are crucial for helping customers with bad experiences and being able to manage and turn them into good experiences. Something as simple as this has been immense at supporting us in providing the best customer experience possible."

- Tyler Angelos, CEO at Angelus Brand

From the start, Tyler and his team were impressed by Gorgias's high level of customer service, which compares favorably to patchy or inadequate support received from other customer support companies. "Any issues we've ever had were easily fixed by Gorgias, and they helped us understand and use the app better," says Tyler.

The results: Customer satisfaction soars to 4.7/5 as 18% of tickets are resolved in one touch, with faster response and resolution times

With Gorgias, 18% of tickets are now dealt with in just one touch — a whopping 100% increase compared to the previous quarter. Combined with faster responses and a 41% reduction in resolution time, it's no surprise that Angelus Direct's customers are happier than ever with the brand. Customer satisfaction has risen to an impressive 4.7/5 — a metric Tyler rates as the most important for the company.

"Ever since we moved to Gorgias, our response time has been immensely faster. Our resolution times have been cut down and customer satisfaction is extremely high due to Gorgias."

- Tyler Angelos, CEO at Angelus Brand

Gorgias's intelligent automation helps the customer support team to do what they do best — deliver personalized, knowledgeable, and helpful customer service.

From easily filtering tickets using tags to prioritize urgent messages, to providing ultra-fast yet personalized responses using Macros, to enabling customers to track and manage their own orders for instant answers. All give customers swifter responses and free up time for customer service agents to focus on more detailed customer conversations requiring a human touch. Together, this keeps customers coming back to buy more Angelus Direct products, time and time again.

"I want to be known as a company where people say, wow, you really can contact them and they'll get back to you and talk to you like a human. And we make these relationships using Gorgias. It gets us more sales, it gets us more reputation, it gets us more loyalty."
- Tyler Angelos, CEO at Angelus Brand

Next steps: Continuing to grow the Angelus Direct brand as a "life-long customer" of Gorgias

Tyler is so delighted with Gorgias's support that he can't imagine using any other platform. As Angelus Direct continues to expand worldwide, year after year, Tyler has the the confidence of knowing its customer support is in the best possible hands.

"Gorgias has a life-long customer here due to the relationship they have fostered with me showing they actually want to help their customers. With Gorgias, I can spend less time worrying about customer support and instead put my efforts into continuing to grow the brand."

- Tyler Angelos, CEO at Angelus Brand