Ohh Deer is home to illustrated greeting cards, stationery, and gifts for every occasion. The brand sells to consumers, big corporates, and independent businesses.

Recently our team sat down with Ohh Deer's Customer Experience Manager, Alex Turner to learn more about how this brand has built a great customer experience and turned a traditional customer service team into a revenue-generating machine! Below are some key insights we've learned that can be a great source of inspiration for your team.

Previous customer service platforms didn't work for Ohh Deer's subscription business model

The COVID-19 pandemic caused Ohh Deer to pivot. "A large proportion of our revenue came from the B2B market and we knew that wouldn't stabilize for some time. We'd also all need something fun to do, something to get excited about every month", Alex added.

Ohh Deer, therefore, increased its subscription offering releasing 4 new brands including an art school in a box, socks and cacti, and acquiring new subscribers along the way. However, this brought them challenges in terms of customer experience.

According to Alex, the lifecycle of a subscription means that customers are typically debited at the beginning of every month. "This naturally creates an increase in subscription-related renewal inquiries during the same time each month." Alex soon realized that Ohh Deer's customer support platform "wasn't set up in a way that benefits our customer success team who speak to and serve our customers on a daily basis."

Moving to Gorgias enabled better tagging and more tailored "Views". "The primary objective was removing the roadblocks for our customer success team so they could efficiently manage the workload." Within hours Ohh Deer set up rules within Gorgias that made ticket prioritization easy and the result was that subscription-related inquiries at the beginning of each month were grouped into 2 views and answered before all others. "We were able to resolve this inquiries 3x faster purely because we could separate them from all other inquiry types," Alex added.

Unrelated but a problem nonetheless was that Ohh Deer needed to use a variety of third party platforms to find the information required to provide answers to customer inquiries. Alex emphasized that it isn't effective from a training perspective because it adds unnecessary complexities. "The efficiency problem we're trying to solve is key to the department being capable of supporting the increase in customers," he said.

A big part of the challenge wasn't that Ohh Deer needed to use multiple platforms, more that they didn't all integrate into one place, making the customer success agent's journey a slow one. Ohh Deer needed a platform with a deep Shopify integration that could provide omni channel support to Ohh Deer's growing customer base. "We're a very social brand so we needed to integrate with apps such as IG, Facebook, and Twitter as well as offering support via the usual email, phone, and live chat options."

The team had to regularly check all platforms to keep on top of their ticket volumes. "Let's say you get a ticket on Facebook. You need to open Shopify Admin and find the customer's information before you can even look at the ticket properly. The interaction is only held in Facebook so if that customer comes through via email or live chat, or Twitter, you can't quickly see the original exchange. Then for the next ticket, you have to do the same process again. It became very time-consuming and I knew that with the great team we had in place, we could help our customers much more efficiently if we provided them with better tools. I wanted something that would provide a holistic view of customer interaction," Alex explained.

Alex revealed that the team tried Groove and Zendesk, but these tools don't offer the features they want, like tagging, advanced reporting and social listening.

"Zendesk doesn't provide the feature to enable our team to identify new customers. Everything was pushed to a dashboard, but you couldn't track how much revenue is generated by positive service interaction. Our websites are built on Shopify, so we need something compatible with Shopify."

Alex Turner, Customer Experience Manager

Switching to Gorgias: problems solved!

Alex had specific criteria for their new customer platform. He wanted a tool that provides the following features:

• Deep integration with Shopify. It should be scalable as the business grows.
• Social listening and lead generation.
• Reporting capabilities. All data points should be exportable.
• Customer satisfaction (CSAT) and Net Promoter Score (NPS).

After a lot of research, and evaluation of 12 different platforms over a two months period, Alex selected Gorgias as the best fit for Ohh Deer.

"Gorgias was great for us because we could pull in Shopify, Recharge, Loyalty Lion; we could build our own app, and we could plug it in with a web hook. And that made a massive difference for us."

Alex Turner, Customer Experience Manager

Turning CX into a revenue-generating machine

The Ohh Deer team doesn't use Gorgias only for optimizing customer support efficiency and effectiveness. They also take advantage of Gorgias' best features to turn customer experience into a revenue-generating machine. Here's how they do that:

1. Using tagging to increase efficiency

Gorgias' tagging is crucial for the Ohh Deer team to gain a top-line overview of what is happening at any one time. Thanks to this feature, they can focus on tickets that require a human response, therefore prioritizing those tickets where people need assistance compared with, liking a comment or responding with an emoji, which is taken care of by Gorgias via automations within their workflow.

This approach led to providing quick response to the right customers, an increase in customer service satisfaction, and a drive-in repeat customers.‍

2. Leveraging Gorgias Chat to address objections and convert customers

The Ohh Deer team believes that giving great service should always be the no. 1 priority and the byproduct of providing good customer service is that their customers are more likely to come back. The team started using data from Shopify, ReCharge, Loyalty Lion, and Gorgias (all within the same place!) to track repeat customers, spending, and referrals, and the most valuable customers were put on a VIP list.  

The team also uses chat to convert customers who may not place an order. “We look at combinations such as pages with high traffic/low conversion and high abandoned rates, and push chat campaigns to try and engage with the customers. The goal is to learn and get some feedback about why they might have chosen not to make a purchase. And we’ve learned lessons that have helped us change the product description or price, which subsequently aided conversion. With chat campaigns, the goal is to remove any customer equivocation and get the customer to the product they really want. Or hope they help us to make the page better and convert future visitors to that page.” 

Apart from that, they use chat to offer self-service tracking, cancellation, and issue reporting. Gorgias enables them to design their self-service and decide how much they want to automate and deflect depending on the ethos of the brand.

Alex said, “We have key brand values and although we use automation and self-service tools we keep one thing in mind at all times - ‘Automation should never be used as a way to avoid talking to your customers.’ We work very hard to ensure that the automation we use doesn’t focus on ticket deflection, rather we use it to help customers self-serve.”

Alex added that they look at conversions from a customer experience perspective. They were trying to engage with the customer to find out what it was they were actually looking for, and how they found what they wanted but decided not to purchase it. What was the reason? Based on that info, ‘With the information available to them, the customer success team can make a quick cost-benefit analysis to come to a decision that will keep the customer happy and clinch the sale.

"When you make sales thanks to your good service, customers will come back and recommend you. That's revenue-generating."

Alex Turner, Customer Experience Manager

Because Gorgias allows revenue tracking tracked down to a specific ticket, Ohh Deer can determine the value of the level of service they provide. “Our primary aim is to give great service but as a department head, being able to track how that service impacts our bottom line is invaluable.” Alex shared. 

The Ohh Deer team has achieved an average 4.95 CSAT score for the last 90 days and generates about $12,500 per quarter from Chat alone. 

3. Turning Gorgias into a CRM tool and a means of tracking revenue and sales

Thanks to Gorgias and Shopify's tight integration, the Ohh Deer team can work directly from Gorgias for all customer interactions, which helps them create a massive efficiency. "For certain response types, we are now three times as fast as we were," Alex said. He also emphasized that they now can free up time for value-added work like retention and customer surveys.

"If you're more efficient, you don't need to increase headcount. Your team is happier because they're not hitting the same roadblocks in their day-to-day work."
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Alex Turner, Customer Experience Manager

Alex also attributes Ohh Deer's increased efficiency to a holistic view of data they get after using Gorgias. Whenever the team receives a new ticket from a customer, they can quickly get a snapshot of that customer's lifetime value, like orders, customer satisfaction, referrals, and even the number of Instagram followers. Having access to these insights, the team can develop a strategic plan to treat the customer better and turn them into brand advocates. "That's how you go from being a cost center to becoming a revenue-generating customer-focused team," he said.

Moving forward: pushing retention and lead generation through Gorgias

With all the benefits Gorgias has brought, the Ohh Deer team plans to develop Gorgias to be used as an outbound tool.

Currently, customers create inquiries, and their team follows up. They now want to use Gorgias to create tickets internally to engage with customers first rather than just waiting for tickets to come in. The goal is to become more proactive by creating customer touch points to find out how a customer feels about the service or product they've receiving from Ohh Deer and be in a position to do something about it earlier in the customer journey. If something is identified, they can quickly offer a solution to keep the customer happy and remain loyal to their brand. "Loyalty goes both ways," Alex added.

Alex believes that Gorgias is the best tool to improve customer experience and boost customer service efficiency. From the ease of use, various customization, and advanced reporting to world-class customer support.

"I couldn't think more highly of Gorgias. I evaluated 12 different apps before landing on Gorgias, and it hasn't let me or the business down, and we've been using it since July 2021. Gorgias has been fantastic for us."

Alex Turner, Customer Experience Manager

Ohh Deer offers a great corporate program. If you’re interested in reading more click here and to speak to the team reach out to wholesale@ohhdeer.com
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