About Arcade Belts

Arcade Belts is the industry leader in performance stretch belts, dedicated to giving customers the flexibility they need to live freely. Their range of functional belts provides the perfect balance of comfort and support for customers anywhere they go. 

The Challenge: Choosing the best platform for a small CX team 

As a growing brand, Arcade Belts has to manage a growing volume of customer service tickets. 

“Having a growth mindset and focus on high level customer service, the most important goal for us is automation. So it fell perfectly into the Gorgias wheelhouse.” 

—Grant, Ecommerce Coordinator at Arcade Belts 

The team was looking for a more efficient way to manage repetitive requests like order changes or warranty claims.

“We're a fast-paced and growing company with high order volume, especially in Q4, as our belts make perfect gifts,” Grant explains. “So we handle a high volume of orders and customer questions/requests in a short period of time between Thanksgiving and Christmas.” 

With a high order volume comes a high ticket volume. 

For Arcade Belts, this meant spending valuable time answering customer FAQs like “What belt is right for me?” or “What is your warranty policy?” Now, the team can focus more time on growing the business, with automation in place for repeat questions.

The Solution: Finding scalable support with Gorgias

Arcade Belts needed a new customer service platform that would keep up with its growing order and ticket volume while supporting them along the way. Grant felt that its current solution, Zendesk, was geared more toward larger companies that spanned multiple markets, platforms, or industries. The team wasn’t receiving the guidance or support they needed and was eager to migrate. 

Arcade Belts wasn’t new to customer support platforms — or even Gorgias, for that matter. “We actually were on the Gorgias platform before,” Grant tells us. “We went from Gorgias to Zendesk for one year, and back to Gorgias.”

“Switching back [from Zendesk] was a little bit of a leap of faith, but it just took a demo or two to realize that Gorgias was far and away the better platform for us.”

—Grant Alston, Ecommerce Coordinator at Arcade Belts  

As with any change, the Arcade Belts team initially hesitated to switch. Worried about the risks and effort of migrating documentation and customer data to a new platform, Grant was pleasantly surprised with how easy the transition to Gorgias was. “If you need to onboard a whole new customer service platform, Gorgias is definitely the best that I've seen,” Grant says.  

“Zendesk focuses on the bigger fish and is meant for much larger companies. That’s where Gorgias is great because they provide white-glove service for all of their customers – regardless of size. Our Gorgias onboarding manager, Obaid, really helped us with this seamless transition onto the platform.”

—Grant, Ecommerce Coordinator at Arcade Belts  

Automation made easy with Gorgias

After onboarding with Gorgias, Arcade Belts set up automation and workflows to support their customers effortlessly. Gorgias provided a seamless transition with guided onboarding that made the set-up easy. “If I’m thinking, ‘Do I want to turn that off?’ There's going to be a toggle for it. ‘Do I want to write in text here?’ Well, there's going to be a text box there for it,” Grant notes.  

With a niche product, Arcade Belts was able to configure self-service flows that answered common customer questions and provided basic product information to new shoppers. 

From helping customers choose the right product to handling shipping and policy-related queries, Arcade Belts leveraged automation to reduce the time its bootstrapped team had to dedicate to answering routine questions. 

“We got to a point where we were sitting around 30% automation even before AI Agent came out.” 

—Grant, Ecommerce Coordinator at Arcade Belts

Handling routine tickets with AI Agent

As one of the first adopters of AI Agent, Arcade Belts saw a significant boost in automation rates from day one.

Scaling our business required efficiency and automation to grow. That’s why bringing AI Agent to the team made sense. “The motivation was the quicker we can get this set up and the higher automation rate, the more time we’re going to have for other projects,” he shares. 

Building comprehensive Guidance documents in Gorgias lets Grant train AI Agent to handle a broad range of customer questions, even rare ones.

“I didn't want to make a new Guidance for every single little nuance, so I started creating many Guidance prompts,” Grant notes. “It’s like a giant study guide that spans multiple categories and questions. It can pick up different bits of information, and it helps with those nuanced small issues because I don't have a macro for what customers say once or even five times. But if you see it, you can throw it in the Guidance and let AI Agent pick it up.” 

With more time freed up, the team has focused on improving other areas of the customer experience. Customers have also appreciated the quick responses, often not realizing they were powered by AI.

“A lot of times, I'll receive the response, ‘Wow, I didn't know that was AI.’”  

—Grant, Ecommerce Coordinator at Arcade Belts

The Results: Cutting ticket volume in half  

AI Agent has significantly reduced the number of tickets Arcade Belts receives each day. However, since automating with Gorgias and introducing AI Agent, Arcade Belts now sees half of their previous volume. 

“Getting tickets down to just a handful a day has been awesome.”

—Grant, Ecommerce Coordinator at Arcade Belts

Gearing up for the busiest time of the year — BFCM

Black Friday & Cyber Monday is the biggest revenue-generating opportunity of the year for most ecommerce brands, including Arcade Belts. With an influx of new customers visiting your store, every part of your online customer experience needs to be optimized. 

Preparing customer support in advance of BFCM

In anticipation of their busiest season, Arcade Belts decided to make the switch to Gorgias well in advance of BFCM. This allowed plenty of time to familiarize themselves with the technology and onboard, train, and continuously improve its AI Agent to handle tickets during the rush. 

“By November, we're pretty much just focused on customer service and making sure that everything runs smoothly,” Grant says. “Migrating to Gorgias early gave us time to set everything up, get it working correctly, and test it before the busiest time of the year.” 

Streamlining order management and fulfillment 

Returns are an inevitable part of BFCM, but that doesn’t mean they have to be difficult. Arcade Belts is leveraging AI Agent and self-service flows to make order amendments as seamless as possible. 

By enabling actions within AI Agent, the team has automated address edits and order cancellations. This has relieved some of the pressure associated with delivering the instant support that customers expect. 

“We fulfill orders within hours which doesn't give us a lot of leeway,” Grant explains. “There's not a lot of time where orders can be canceled or addresses changed. Because of that, we have to be pretty on the spot with customer service when those inquiries do come through.” 

Using custom ticket views, Arcade Belts has stayed on top of these time-sensitive requests. 

“We've got everything set up where if a ticket even comes through with the word ‘address change’ mentioned, it'll go into its own view, its own folder. We can look at everything urgent, with most of it being addressed by AI immediately anyway,” Grant tells us. 

“It gives us a lot of peace of mind for weekend fulfillments, knowing that we don't need someone to log on during Thanksgiving or around the holidays.

—Grant, Ecommerce Coordinator at Arcade Belts

Looking forward: Continuous improvements with Gorgias

As Arcade Belts continues to scale, Gorgias and AI Agent are equipped to scale with them. By joining Gorgias community roundups and town halls, Arcade Belts is constantly implementing new actions and flows, and iterating to maximize AI Agent’s impact. Grant has continued to introduce new actions to AI Agents as they become more comfortable with the capabilities. Based on its success, Arcade Belts has introduced new actions, including handling warranty claims and order cancellations. 

AI Agent has been instrumental in increasing automation for Arcade Belts. But they’ve also been able to go at their own pace. Grant advises other brands to do the same, “You don’t need to unlock the floodgates immediately. You can make small changes and see how they do.” 

“We have growth aspirations, and we wanted to make sure that we could switch to a platform that could handle that volume moving forward. That's why we switched.”

—Grant, Ecommerce Coordinator at Arcade Belts 

Find out how Gorgias’s AI Agent can make your customer support more efficient, handle routine tasks, and enhance the customer experience.