Candy-colored health and wellness brand Obvi sells a range of supplements to help women feel and look younger and more energized, with a focus on collagen. CEO Ron Shah and his co-founders set up Obvi as a fresh alternative to the “dusty-looking” supplements available at the time. 

Obvi also runs a thriving Facebook community sharing support, advice, and encouragement to help its 75,000 members live healthier, happier lives.

The challenge: How to automate CX when so many questions are the same

As a small, fast-growing startup, Obvi found it was spending a lot of time and effort on answering customer questions manually using just Gmail — and that many covered the same few topics over and over. 

Keen to process these tickets more efficiently without downgrading customer experience, in 2020 Obvi implemented Gorgias Helpdesk to manage all tickets received via email, chat, and social media. 

“The Helpdesk made us more efficient, but the CX team was still spending most of their time answering repetitive questions."

— Ron Shah, CEO and Co-founder at Obvi

Yet even with the leap in efficiency from the Helpdesk, the Obvi customer support team — one full-time agent plus half of another person’s time — still found Black Friday Cyber Monday a hugely busy and stressful period. The surge in customer inquiries made it difficult to give more complex tickets the necessary attention — to save a sale from an unhappy customer or convert an inquiry into a sale — because they were plowing through thousands of repetitive tickets, like “where is my order” requests. 

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“Every founder thinks BFCM is that highest peak feeling of nervousness. It’s a tough week. So anything that makes our team’s life easier instantly means we can focus more on things that need the time.”

— Ron Shah, CEO and Co-founder at Obvi

For BFCM 2023, Obvi’s CEO Ron Shah decided to take advantage of Gorgias Automate so they could boost CX efficiency even further while still providing excellent customer support.

The solution: Automation frees up time to answer complex tickets and drive sales 

Gorgias Automate resolves simple customer queries using AI automation, freeing up CX teams like Obvi’s to focus on more personalized and complex customer support. Because Automate is so quick and easy to set up, Obvi was able to get it up and running just a couple of weeks before BFCM.

“I told our team we were going to onboard Automate for BFCM, so a good portion of tickets would be handled automatically. There was a huge sigh of relief knowing that customers were going to be taken care of.”

— Ron Shah, CEO and Co-founder at Obvi

Here are some examples of how Obvi’s customers and CX team had the best BFCM yet:

Customers get instant answers to the most important FAQs

Many of Obvi’s customers want pre-sales guidance to help them choose the right supplements. Obvi uses Quick Responses and Article Recommendations to give instant, automated answers to popular customer questions within Chat. 

Quick Responses offer shoppers a menu of questions to choose from, focusing on common queries about products and shipping. 

But surely there are more than just 6 FAQs. What about all the other highly specific questions customers ask? 

Enter Article Recommendations. When a customer asks a question in Chat — How do I mix Obvi collagen? Is Obvi vegan? Can I take collagen while pregnant? — Automate will scan Obvi’s bank of Help Center articles to find and share one that answers the customer’s question.

To pinpoint the questions customers are most interested in, the Obvi team checks data from Gorgias Helpdesk tickets, to understand which questions people ask. They adjusted their FAQs after discovering a mismatch between what they originally thought shoppers would want to know and what people actually ask.  

"We thought we knew what our FAQs were, but data from Gorgias was incredibly insightful to understand which FAQs to automate. That's one reason it's really valuable to have our Helpdesk tickets and automation features in one tool."

— Ron Shah, CEO and Co-founder at Obvi

Driving more sales during BFCM due to more personalized customer support 

Automating answers to repetitive questions via Automate immediately freed up Obvi’s customer support team to focus on more personalized and proactive customer interactions that help drive sales and boost customer experience — even during BFCM.

“Instantly, our CX team had time to prioritize important matters, like being active in our community of 75,000 women instead of sitting answering emails.”

— Ron Shah, CEO and Co-founder at Obvi

This additional bandwidth throughout BFCM also helped the team prioritize revenue-generating conversations, driving over 3x the purchases from support conversations compared to previous years. 

"Our CX team uses unique sales codes for each BFCM. Last year, they generated around 3,000. With more time for important conversations, they drove $10,000 this past year."

— Ron Shah, CEO and Co-founder at Obvi

Used to working until 10pm during BFCM week — then starting again early the next day — the Obvi team were astounded when Madyson, who leads support, reached inbox zero by 6 pm. 

“At 6 pm on the second day of Black Friday week, our CX agent said, ‘Alright guys, I’ll see you tomorrow. I'm all caught up. We’re at inbox zero.’ And the biggest change enabling that was having Automate.”

— Ron Shah, CEO and Co-founder at Obvi

The results: 27% automation rate helps CX drive 10x more sales during BFCM and handle 150+ tickets daily

Obvi now handles 150+ tickets per day with 1.5 support agents, thanks to a 27% automation rate — which they achieved within two weeks of onboarding Automate. With Automate deflecting all the simple questions, Obvi’s CX team drove 10x more revenue during BFCM.

Using Automate creates both time and cost efficiencies for Obvi, all while still delivering a high-quality customer experience.

“We spend only $5-6k a month on managing all of our CX, which in turn creates efficiency for our profit and loss (P&L) as a business.”

— Ron Shah, CEO and Co-founder at Obvi

Next steps: More AI to power Obvi’s CX efforts

An enthusiastic AI advocate, Ron is excited to see how AI will further open up possibilities for ecommerce brands to focus more on deep work by automating simpler, standardized functions.

“AI is going to help us transform ourselves into deeper thinkers, by taking over simple, standardized functions. In the ecommerce world, Gorgias is getting ahead with doing that for customer support. Brands should use Gorgias because they’re becoming the center of the AI revolution and that is the standard customers are expecting.”

— Ron Shah, CEO and Co-founder at Obvi

With AI-generated Articles and Conversational AI on the horizon, Obvi is set up to take advantage of these emerging technologies and drive even more efficiency with Automate going forward.