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Seeing a gap in the market where college students were taking a lot of supplements but no brands targeted them, and no products served their needs, Russell Saks started Campus Protein to solve that problem.

As Russell started getting into fitness, he noticed that his friends would head to the local supplements store to purchase $200 to $300 worth of protein and workout drinks every month. These were the same people who always complained that they didn't have beer money on the weekends. Yet here they were, spending hundreds of dollars on supplements without batting an eyelid.

Created in a dorm room in 2010, Campus Protein provides college students with protein, pre-workouts, amino acids, fat burners, mass gainers, vitamins, and athlete-approved supplements at the best prices. Their products are tailored to college students' lifestyles and speak to this community.

To differentiate Campus Protein from alternatives and expensive retail stores out there, Russell and his team focused on building an excellent customer experience through customer support — which didn't exist in the industry.

However, as the team started implementing customer experience as a growth channel, they found that traditional email showed many limitations and was too basic for their needs.

Complicated and Generic Customer Experience

After realizing traditional email was too overwhelming and cumbersome, the team decided to use Zendesk. Unfortunately, Zendesk didn't have its own chat component track back then, so they had to use an additional plugin called Zopim. This caused them to change between chat and ticketing screens, making the workflow very complicated.

Later on, Zendesk acquired Zopim, and the "changing back and forth" situation was solved. However, the team soon discovered another issue: while they were trying to create a personalized experience for their customers, Zendesk didn't support personalization. When a customer submitted a ticket, they would receive an immediate auto-reply which is standard, robotic, and impersonal.

"When you see that type of same auto-reply from multiple companies, you really lose that personal touch somebody is actually fixing and working on it. Trust is not being inherently built-in immediately." -Russell Saks, Founder

Inefficient Customer Support Workflow

Personalization wasn't the only problem Campus Protein had with Zendesk.

Russell shared that another big reason they wanted to switch from Zendesk was inefficiency. The team had to go through many different apps and screens to answer one particular customer request or change or modification. He found that inefficiency to be a huge blocker for his team.

Migrating to Gorgias, Seamlessly

There are a lot of customer support and ticket management solutions available, but what Campus Protein needed was a platform dedicated to ecommerce.

Russel shared that many helpdesk alternatives out there don't necessarily speak to ecommerce business. Everything an ecommerce brand is looking for is totally different from what a software-as-a-service (SaaS) client or any other company wants.

Hence, when Russell found Gorgias and knew it offered all they were trying to get, he was sold quickly.

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"From an efficiency perspective, operations perspective, to never having to change between screens, all of that spoke to us."

- Russell Saks, Founder

The transition from Zendesk to Gorgias took place quickly and easily.

"Gorgias' team was extremely hands-on. They gave us that white-glove treatment and we didn't even notice a blip. It was seamless."

- Russell Saks, Founder

A Significant Increase in Efficiency and Customer Satisfaction

Since using Gorgias, Campus Protein has seen a significant decrease in their time to communicate with customers. Thanks to Gorgias Macros, the team can quickly support customers whenever they have questions.

For example, if a customer wants to know where their order is, Gorgias presents the support agent with a templated response that pulls in the customer's order details from Shopify. The support agent can answer the question in real-time with just a click.

Appart from that, because every ticket shows up on the same screen, Campus Protein's support agent team can get ahead of every request and never miss out on one. The team has observed increased efficiencies and overall customer satisfaction. None of this could happen before Gorgias.

"Gorgias allows us to cut back on the amount of time of other stuff we're doing to get to the stuff that we need to be working on, whether it's a new product launch or some FAQs. The quicker we can enter the tickets, the quicker we can build that out. Gorgias really boosts efficiencies, saves time, and allows to work on what we're great at." - Russel Saks, Founder

The Helpdesk That Scales with Campus Protein

It has been a game changer for Campus Protein to switch from Zendesk to Gorgias.

"If we were still using the prior systems, it would be detrimental to our business." - Russell Saks, Founder

Russell emphasized that as a business grows, a percentage of time is always taken up by certain support activities, whether order management or convincing people to purchase. That percentage may not change, and the sheer volume will always increase.

"One of the great things about Gorgias is Gorgias makes merchants kind of superheroes as their new features are an extension of our own brand. Whenever Gorgias comes out with a new feature, it's effectively the same as us coming out with a new feature." - Russell Saks, Founder

Russell also didn't hesitate to give Gorgias a rating of 10 out of 10. From a satisfaction level, they are thrilled. They are really excited to continue on their journey with the Gorgias team and see what the platform will put out.