How buah Cut Response Times from 3 Days to 40 Seconds with Gorgias’s AI Agent

Challenge: As buah’s ticket volume grew, Gmail’s lack of Macros, automation, and analytics challenged the support team. Shuffling between windows for emails, Shopify, and key ecommerce tools hindered efficiency and delayed customer response and resolution times, often taking between 3-5 days. 

‍Solution: With the help of Gorgias Services Partner, Support Coach, buah implemented Gorgias for better inbox management, AI capabilities, and customer service metrics tracking.

About buah

In 2015, brother and sister duo Daniel and Jessica founded buah after tasting delicious, vibrant fruits during their travels in Costa Rica and Thailand. They vowed to bring the sun-ripened fruit they experienced abroad back home to Germany. 

buah sells premium freeze-dried fruits without additives to preserve the purity of their products. With a guarantee they’ve coined “the buah purity seal,” customers can expect 100% pure, ripe fruits that are harvested and frozen immediately. 

Since the benefits of freeze-and-air-dried fruit are not widely known, buah’s support team handles many product-related questions. Customers often ask what the difference is from conventionally dried or frozen fruits, how nutritious they are, and how to use them in recipes. 

As buah scaled over the past 10 years, they needed a way to make these answers more readily accessible. 

The Challenge: Outgrowing Gmail as a customer support tool

buah used Gmail for customer support before adopting a Helpdesk, requiring constant tab shuffling between email threads, Shopify, and their ERP system. Resolving simple requests like order modifications or delivery updates often took up to five working days. 

Gmail lacked key features like:

• Macros, requiring the team to manually search for, copy, and paste template messages
• Automation, which made it hard to handle tickets efficiently 
• Customer service metric tracking, giving no visibility into customer satisfaction

“Customers had to wait a long time to receive answers when we used Gmail. We also couldn’t track customer satisfaction, so we really didn’t know how happy our customers were.” 

—Daniel Krauter, Co-Founder of buah

As the brand and ticket volume grew, the three-person support team had less bandwidth to personalize each customer interaction. With hundreds of monthly tickets asking the same questions like “Where is my order?” or “Are your products organic?”, agents relied on pre-built responses to answer the customer as quickly as possible. This meant conversations were more transactional and less focused on relationship building. 

The Solution: Implementing Gorgias for centralized, automated customer support 

Transitioning to Gorgias brought structure and automation to buah’s customer support operations. This enables the team to handle customer inquiries with greater speed, personalization, and ease. 

buah improved its support efficiency with Gorgias features such as:

• Macros and tags to easily send pre-made responses and view key ticket details like the topic, channel, and urgency
• Ticket Views for high-priority requests like order changes or cancellations to ensure they’re resolved quickly 
• Integrations with Shopify, Klaviyo, LoyaltyLion, Reviews.io, and social media channels to centralize customer data and interactions
• AI Agent for instant resolutions, like order tracking or gathering basic customer information before handing over to an agent

Macros and tags boost productivity 

Compared to Gmail, where the team had to copy and paste templated email responses from another window, Macros have been a huge time-saver. In Gorgias, agents can quickly type in keywords to pull up a ready-to-go response to common customer inquiries. 

For example, if a customer reports that an item is missing from their order, an agent can quickly search for the “lost” Macro. This will populate a prewritten message with dynamic variables like the customer’s name and order number. 

Tagging each ticket lets buah track the topics customers reach out about. In the example above, the Macro is automatically tagged with “missing” and “forget”, and the agent can manually add other relevant tags based on the conversation.  

Tags give buah insight into aspects of their customer journey that can be improved, allowing them to make their customer experience even better. 

Ticket views for better inbox management 

With Gorgias, buah created custom ticket views to organize conversations based on topic, agent, and priority. 

For urgent inquiries like order modifications or cancellations, buah created a Priority 1 ticket view that all agents can see. Resolving time-sensitive issues quickly avoids misshipments, saving buah operational costs and ensuring customers won’t have to return an unwanted product because it wasn’t cancelled in time.  

Ecommerce tool integrations eliminate tab shuffling 

buah centralizes customer data within Gorgias from its ecommerce tools like Shopify, Klaviyo, LoyaltyLion, and Reviews.io. This makes information like loyalty program information or customer reviews readily available in the same view. 

For example, when a customer asks about their points balance, buah’s agents, including AI Agent, can instantly pull details like points balance or past rewards from the customer’s LoyaltyLion account. 

AI Agent handles repetitive inquiries instantly

buah onboarded AI Agent on email and chat to speed up response and resolution times for repetitive customer inquiries.

The team trained AI Agent by creating a custom tone of voice, providing access to the Help Center, and writing custom Guidance documents to instruct it on handling common customer scenarios. 

For example, buah outlines how AI Agent should respond:

• When shoppers request order status, tracking, or missing delivery information
• When a customer asks about the availability of an out-of-stock item
• When a customer receives a wrong, damaged, or missing item
• When a customer has issues with discounts, promo codes, and Bestsnacker Points 
• And many other FAQs

Using the knowledge documents buah has set up, AI Agent is fully equipped to answer detailed product questions. 

For example, AI Agent is able to have a two-way conversation with a customer who asks:

• Are the fruits organic? 
• Which country are they grown in?
• Are synthetic and pesticides sprayed?
• May I see the certificate?

This back-and-forth would take time for a human agent, delaying the customer’s responses and potentially increasing their hesitation. AI Agent handles it effortlessly and passes the customer over only at the final stage. 

“AI Agent means less ping pong with the customer and way more flexible and personal replies. What an improvement compared to using static forms or autoresponders!”

—Micha Weber, Founder of Support Coach

AI Agent also handles simple order tracking requests without further human assistance. For instance, AI Agent can provide an order number and tracking link to a customer whose order hasn’t arrived yet. 

“It’s incredible how well AI Agent understands and resolves our customers' needs instantly.” 

—Daniel Krauter, Co-Founder of buah

How Support Coach enhanced the implementation process 

buah worked with Support Coach, a CX agency, to make the process as smooth as possible. With Support Coach’s help, they optimized buah’s configuration in Gorgias by creating new Macros, proactively improving the order experience from a customer’s point of view to reduce incoming tickets, and setting up AI Agent. 

“Configuring and training the AI Agent is amazing because the answers are so personal and empathetic. It is almost impossible to expect this level of personalization from a human agent during busy times. The way AI Agent adds personal messages reflecting the specific customer situation is a game changer.” 

—Micha Weber, Founder of Support Coach

With 5+ years of experience helping multiple ecommerce companies optimize Gorgias, Support Coach has witnessed how flexible AI Agent is. “It’s interesting to see how AI Agent adapts to each store or support team’s needs and challenges,” she explains. “For some, the AI Agent is like a team member, simply handling all easy routine tickets. For others, it is more pivotal in making sure the necessary information is collected. For example, when agents need to check videos or photos to move forward.”

The Results: A 24% automation rate that drove FRT down from days to seconds

Making the switch from Gmail to Gorgias gave buah better inbox organization, AI and automation capabilities, and insight into key customer service metrics. 

Onboarding AI Agent with Support Coach helped buah achieve: 

• 24% automation rate, which doubles after introducing AI Agent 
• 100%+ decrease in average first response time, from 1-3 days to 40 seconds
• 84%+ decrease in average resolution time, from more than 5 days to 20 hours
• Operational cost-savings since they didn’t need to hire new agents 

With visibility into customer satisfaction, buah also noticed an increase in CSAT scores reflecting the faster, more personalized responses and resolutions. 

Looking forward: Leveraging Gorgias for customer engagement and conversions 

After initial success using Gorgias, buah is excited to adopt even more features to help its customers. The team is eager to use Gorgias to drive higher customer engagement and conversion rates through proactive chat campaigns and personalized product recommendations. 

Learn how AI Agent can save your team time, handle repetitive tasks, and enhance your customer experience.