‍Company Overview

‍Created in 2012, Love Your Melon is an apparel brand dedicated to fighting pediatric cancer. Love Your Melon started out as an entrepreneurship class project in 2012 with a mission to put a hat on every child battling cancer in America. Since then, Zachary Quinn and Brian Keller set a larger goal for their company: give 50% of profit from the sale of Love Your Melon products to nonprofit partners engaged in the fight against pediatric cancer. To date, they have managed to give 4.7 million dollars to these partners and over 156,000 hats to children battling cancer.

"Our goal is to give best-in-class customer service to our 1.6+ million customers in order to provide the largest impact possible in the lives of children battling cancer all over the world. We achieve a high level of customer service through taking the time to politely and effectively respond to a customer’s inquiry from the first point of contact to increase trust, brand loyalty, and boost brand awareness. By providing a platform that is easy to set up, use, and that connects to our Shopify, we believe Gorgias helps make this possible."

Bernie Kolar - Customer Service Director

Building a community of engaged customers

As of today, Love Your Melon has expanded their product lines to a wide variety of beanies, caps, shirts, scarves and other accessories. They have also developed a community of engaged volunteers to spread the word about pediatric cancer and Love Your Melon’s mission through a Campus Crew Program as well as a Freelance Program.

The brand has leveraged its social media presence - mostly Facebook and Instagram - to become a multi-million dollar company, so providing excellent customer support to inform clients on their products but also on the cause they are serving has always been a top priority. Also, although the organization offers popular spring & summer lines, the company is still subject to seasonal activity with sales soaring from October to March. This has a direct impact on the workforce needed to handle the spike in customer requests which are 30 times more numerous than during the rest of the year.

The need for an efficient customer support process

As a large Shopify store, Love Your Melon uses several associated apps that integrate with the platform, whether it be back office ones to manage inventory and shipping, or communication media like email and social media. In the first few years as a company, Love Your Melon used many different tools to make sure that every customer request was dealt with on all available communication channels.

However, it quickly became very complicated to handle support on so many different applications, along with the fact that they regularly had to hire multiple additional temporary support agents during their busy season. Not only was customer support becoming a major cost center, it was also a variable team that needed a lot of on-boarding, in a period when time does not permit such training.

So when the Operations team started looking for more efficient ways to manage their support, Gorgias’s strong integration with Shopify and all related apps was the ultimate deal-maker. Love Your Melon is using Gorgias’s platform for the 2018-2019 busy season and is excited about all of the cost and time savings it will allow.

Using automation to lighten the support team workload

Not only does Gorgias centralize all customer channels into one place - which was not the case previously for Love Your Melon, as they managed social media messages and emails on two separate tools - it also enables them to use automation with the finest conditions thanks to Shopify variables.

Creating order-specific macros for recurring requests

Having the ability to include Shopify variables in the macros - which are canned responses - will make a huge difference for Love Your Melon’s support team in terms of efficiency and ease of use. Aside from using usual variables in canned response such as the requester name, email or the support agent’s name, users can add in very precise information that is pulled from Shopify. These order-specific variables include the order ID, the tracking url of the last order, the delivery status, the shipping address, and many others.

Performing actions in Shopify, directly in Gorgias

Even more than simply using Shopify variables in their macros, Love Your Melon will go even further in the automation process by attaching Shopify actions to their macros. This feature changes the way they handle their most recurring request: editing a customer’s shipping address.

As compared to their previous helpdesk, this is how it improves their customer support: previously, whenever they would receive a message asking to change the shipping address for a specific order, they would have to go on Shopify to find that particular order, edit the address, and then come back to either their email inbox or their social media dashboards to inform their client that they had replaced the shipping address with the new one. Now that they use Gorgias, they have created a macro that identifies the customer and the order, and automatically updates the shipping address in Shopify. All they have to do is press “send”. “It’s all-in-one, super quick.”

Results

As of today, about 25% of Love Your Melon’s tickets are handled with automation. 

Until now, the average first response time during the busy season has been close to 10 minutes. By using Gorgias, Love Your Melon hopes to reduce this waiting time to a few seconds thanks to automated actions, and just minutes for complex requests. The level of automation provided by Gorgias (not only with the macros, but also the rules that can auto-close tickets that do not need attending from a support agent), alongside the thorough on-boarding process that paved the way for a great relationship and common trust, have proven successful so far, and Love Your Melon is looking forward to increased productivity and efficiency with Gorgias this busy season.