In 2005, Jessie Dee started her business, Dance4Me (X-POLE Australia), in a tiny one-person operation with an HTML website that a friend built for her.

Since then, Jessie has grown the company into a team of highly skilled, passionate women and men who love this industry and are fiercely proud of the X-POLE brand and its products. She's also grown it into an opportunity for people starting out—from events and competitions to team memberships and ambassadorships.

"We have grown a brand that is all about people. As a small local company, we have invested over a quarter of a million dollars in the Australian industry, Aussie events, and local athlete support. We are proud to say that we have been a driving force in growing the Australian Pole industry into one of the most respected, professional Pole communities in the world," Jessie shared on the company website.

In an interview with the Gorgias team, Jessie shared what made them choose Gorgias over other helpdesk platforms and how it helped her team improve customer experience.

The challenge: Looking for a customer service platform dedicated to BigCommerce

The Dance4Me website is running on BigCommerce. Jessie prefers this ecommerce platform because it doesn't require buying separate apps for basic functionality like stock management, invoicing, and promotions. "All should be standardize in the platform — separate apps should be only for additional ‘pretty’ or ‘nice to have’ features.”

Despite putting live chat and ticketing on a "nice-to-have list", when knowing another store using this technology, Jessie quickly became interested in integrating it within her store. But she had some criteria for an ideal solution. She wanted a chat platform that is affordable and tightly integrated with BigCommerce so that she could maintain business efficiency and effectiveness. She also expected a centralized view of all customer inquiries instead of switching back and forth between Outlook for email, Instagram and Facebook messages, and landline phones.

After much research, Jessie decided to go with Gorgias as it met most of her expectations.

The solution: A more convenient and efficient support process with Gorgias & BigCommerce

According to Jessie, Gorgias helps her team improve customer service in many ways. For example, Gorgias allows the team to recognize inbound calls as existing BigCommerce customers rather than assigning them a new customer number. That way, if someone calls in and asks a question about their purchase from BigCommerce, it's easy for the team to pull up relevant information and help the customer immediately.

Additionally, the Dance4Me team loves Gorgias' ability to add self-serve and promote products in chat. "When our team isn't available when people want to chat (in the evenings), we'd like the self-serve feature to pick up the slack. Gorgias macros have been our favorite feature in servicing technical questions. If we had a technical representative available immediately, it "may" increase conversion slightly." Jessie explained.

Other Gorgias features that make the Dance4Me team easier to support customers:

• A master dashboard that shows all of BigCommerce information on the sidebar: The team doesn't have to go over to the BigCommerce backend to check on things—they can just look at their Gorgias dashboard.
• Social integration: When someone contacts them through Facebook Messenger or email, the ticket automatically gets created in Gorgias. The team won't miss out on emails or any other messages from customers—they'll always be able to see inquiries all in one place.
• Omnisend integration: The team can view the ongoing tickets and assign tickets to a new team member if someone has to leave. They can continue their work without missing out on any emails.

As the result of this centralization and integration, the team successfully decreased their first response time to 72% and their resolution time to 88% week over week.

The result: Improved support means improved customer experience

During the last holiday season, the Dance4Me team saw a 104% increase in ticket volumes. Thanks to Gorgias, they managed to reply to more than 7,000 tickets and closed more than 10,000 tickets in total—an impressive 88% and 118% higher than the normal season, respectively.

Fast forward to today, after integrating Gorgias with BigCommerce, Dance4Me spent much less time on low-impact tickets and much more time on positive customer interactions. More specifically, Dance4Me uses Gorgias automation's auto-close feature to deflect 66% of tickets that don't need to be replied like delivery order and approved payment notifications. With that extra time, Dance4Me can now focus on the actual customer conversations and provide high-quality, human support on tickets that need it.

As the result of delivering a better customer experience, the Dance4Me's team saw twice as many positive interactions than before Gorgias. They saw a 100% increase in tickets with positive sentiment, signaling that happy customer interactions doubled. Sentiment and intent are determined by Gorgias' proprietary algorithms, which are trained to understand the tone and purpose of each message to categorize them appropriately.