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The State of Conversational Commerce: 5 Trends Reshaping Ecommerce in 2026
Explore 5 key trends from The State of Conversational Commerce Trends Report in 2026.
TL;DR:
- AI is resolving tickets, not just replying. AI now handles 31% of customer interactions for ecommerce brands, and that number is expected to nearly double within two years.
- Every channel is becoming a storefront. Conversations are replacing the traditional browse-and-buy journey, with 79% of brands reporting sales from AI-driven interactions.
- AI is shortening the buying cycle. 93% of AI-influenced purchases happen within the first 48 hours of the conversation.
- CX teams are changing, not shrinking. Ecommerce brands are actively hiring for more technical roles to implement, coach, and maintain AI.
- The winning model is hybrid. AI handles volume and speed, while humans handle complexity and judgment.
The way shoppers buy online has shifted and customers are at the center.
They no longer want to scroll through product pages, dig through FAQs, or wait 24 hours for an email reply. They open a conversation, ask a specific question, and expect a useful answer in seconds. Brands that can’t deliver these experiences at scale are seeing customer hesitation turn into abandoned carts and lost revenue.
This shift has a name: conversational commerce. It's the practice of using real-time, two-way conversations as your primary sales channel, through chat, AI agents, messaging apps, and voice.
What started as an experiment for early adopters has become a key growth lever, with 84% of ecommerce brands treating conversational commerce as a strategic pillar this year vs. last year.
We surveyed 400 ecommerce decision-makers across North America, the U.K., and Europe to understand how conversational commerce and AI are reshaping the ecommerce landscape. These findings are complemented by aggregated and anonymized internal Gorgias platform data from 16,000+ ecommerce brands.
The State of Conversational Commerce in 2026 trends report breaks down all of the findings, including five key trends shaping the ecommerce landscape.
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Trend 1: AI is table stakes for ecommerce and it’s no longer just about efficiency
A few years ago, adding an AI chatbot to your site that could provide tracking links and Help Center article recommendations was a differentiator. Today, it's table stakes. McKinsey found that 71% of shoppers expect personalized experiences, and 76% get frustrated when they don't get them.
Right now, most ecommerce professionals use AI, with 93% having used it for at least 1 year. Enthusiasm is accelerating quickly, with only 30% of ecommerce professionals rating their excitement for AI at 10/10 in April 2025. Similarly, while AI adoption rose steadily year over year, it reached a clear peak in 2026.
The use cases driving this adoption are practical and high-volume:
- Order tracking and status updates
- Returns, exchanges, and refund requests
- Shipping FAQs and delivery estimates
These are the tickets that flood brands’ inboxes every day. AI agents resolve them instantly, without pulling teams away from conversations that actually require human judgment.
Explore AI adoption and use case data in more depth in the full report.
Trend 2: Conversations are the new path to checkout
The traditional ecommerce funnel, visit site, browse products, add to cart, check out, is losing ground. Shoppers now discover products on Instagram, ask questions via direct message, and complete purchases without ever visiting a website.
Conversational AI is actively increasing revenue, with 79% of brands reporting that AI-driven interactions have increased sales and conversion in their business.
The practical implication is that every channel is becoming a storefront. Creating personalized touchpoints with customers earlier in the journey, through proactive engagement, is impacting the bottom line.
Read the full report to explore how AI conversions have increased QoQ by industry.
Trend 3: AI is accelerating the purchase cycle
Pre-purchase hesitation is one of the biggest conversion killers in ecommerce. A shopper lands on your product page, has a question about sizing or compatibility, can't find the answer quickly, and leaves. That's a lost sale that had nothing to do with your product.
Conversational AI changes that dynamic. When a shopper can ask a question and get an accurate, personalized answer in real time, the friction disappears.
Brands using Gorgias saw this play out at scale in 2025. When AI Agent recommended a product, 80% of the resulting purchases happened the same day, and 13% happened the next day.
Brands are further accelerating the buying cycle through proactive engagement. On-site features such as suggested product questions, recommendations triggered by search results, and “Ask Anything” input bars drove 50% of conversation-driven purchases during BFCM 2025.
Explore how AI is collapsing the purchase cycle in Trend 3 of the report.
Trend 4: AI is making CX teams more technical
There's a persistent narrative that AI is making CX teams redundant. The data tells a different story. 62% of ecommerce brands are planning to grow their teams, not cut them. But the scope of those teams is changing.
New roles are emerging around AI configuration and quality assurance. Teams are investing in technical members to write AI Guidance instructions, develop tone-of-voice instructions, and continuously QA results.
CX teams are also bridging the gap between support goals and revenue goals, as the two functions increasingly overlap.
The result is CX teams that are more technical than they were before. Agents who once spent their days answering repetitive tickets are now spending that time on higher-value work: complex escalations, VIP customer relationships, and improving the AI systems and knowledge bases that handle the volume.
Learn more about the evolution of CX roles in Trend #4.
Trend 5: The future is hybrid: AI-first, humans when it counts
Despite increasing AI adoption, data shows that ecommerce brands shouldn’t strive for 100% automation. Winning brands are building systems in which AI handles repetitive tier-1 tickets, and humans handle complex, sensitive cases.
AI handles speed and scale. It resolves order-tracking requests at 2 a.m., processes return-eligibility checks in seconds, and answers the same shipping question for the thousandth time without compromising quality.
Human agents handle conversations that require context, empathy, or decisions that fall outside the standard playbook. There are several topics where shoppers still prefer human support.
Successful hybrid systems require continuous iteration, meaning reviewing handover topics, Guidance, and reviewing AI tickets on a weekly basis.
Discover how leading brands are balancing human and AI systems in Trend #5.
Where conversational commerce is heading by 2030
The 2026 trends are about expansion and standardization. The 2030 predictions are about what comes next.
Voice-based purchasing is the biggest bet on the horizon. Only 7% of brands currently use voice assistants for commerce, but 89% expect it to be standard by 2030. The vision is a customer who can reorder a product, check their subscription status, or manage a return entirely over the phone.
Proactive AI is the other major shift. Rather than waiting for a customer to reach out, AI will anticipate needs based on browsing behavior, purchase history, and where someone is in their relationship with your brand. Think of it as the digital equivalent of a sales associate who remembers what you bought last time and knows what you're likely to need next.
Explore where ecommerce brands are allocating their AI budgets in the full report.
Start building your conversational commerce strategy today
The brands winning in 2026 are creating smart, scalable systems where AIhandles volume and humans handle nuance. They’re treating every conversational channel as an opportunity to serve and sell.
The data is clear: AI adoption is accelerating, customer expectations are rising, and the revenue impact of getting this right is measurable.
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We Rebuilt Chat to Feel Less Like a Bot. Here Are the Results
TL;DR:
- Chat is growing 2.5x faster than email. The shift toward real-time, conversational commerce pushed a full redesign to match how people actually want to shop.
- The new Chat is designed to drive action, not just answer questions. Clickable replies, contextual prompts, and built-in shopping features guide shoppers from discovery to checkout faster.
- 36% more customers click on products shown in Chat. Shoppable product cards make browsing feel natural and keep shoppers engaged in the conversation.
- 2.25x more shoppers add products to cart from Chat. Removing external links and keeping the journey in one place significantly increases buying intent.
- 7.3% more shoppers engage with Chat overall. Cleaner design and contextual entry points encourage more visitors to start conversations earlier.
In 2025, chat’s growth outpaced email by 2.5x quarter over quarter. Chat has become our most powerful customer experience tool for how shoppers discover products, ask questions, and decide to buy.
We knew it needed an upgrade, so we reimagined the entire experience from the ground up.
The result is 36% more engagement with product recommendations, nearly 2.25x more shoppers add-to-cart, and 7.3% more customer engagement.
In this post, we'll walk you through our thinking, what’s new in Chat, and how brands are already seeing big gains.
Why the legacy experience needed a makeover
Chat has outpaced email support. Today’s shoppers prefer the speed of quick chat conversations over email. And when shoppers make a new move, we watch, listen, and move with them.
This behavioral shift isn’t happening in isolation. It aligns with the rise of conversational commerce and proves a universal move toward real-time conversations in ecommerce.
In fact, the signals were already there. Two years of building AI Agent showed us just how much design shapes behavior. The interface is the experience, and we knew that pushing chat experiences to closely resemble human interactions would transform how shoppers engage.
Our new and updated chat brings that vision to life. We believe that shopping is moving from static pages to conversations. This new update is built for how people actually want to shop.
What the new Chat can do
The new design turns live chat into an interactive shopping surface made for modern shoppers. We've brought together multiple ways for shoppers to jump into chat, added clickable replies instead of typing, browsable product cards right in the conversation, and quick cart access.
Let's walk through what's new.
A cleaner visual experience
Chat now comes in a softer color palette that adapts to your store’s branding. We removed message bubbles in favor of an airy design that brings in the familiarity of speaking to your favorite conversational AI assistant. Every interaction now has the breathing room for deeper conversation and personalization.
One-click replies that move shoppers forward
It’s now easier for shoppers to get an answer with quick reply buttons and suggested questions in Chat. This replaces the tree-based flows of the previous Chat, removing the need to follow a fixed path. Shoppers can find answers faster without typing text-heavy explanations.
Shoppable product cards in messages
Browsing and buying within Chat is now possible. Previously, it only supported product links that would open in a new page. With the upgrade, you can view item details without leaving the conversation. Shoppers can browse, compare products, and add to cart in one place.
Product detail pages that open in chat
We’re keeping the context by removing the external redirects. The new interface lets shoppers browse product recommendations right in chat. View key product details, images, descriptions, variants, and pricing without opening a new tab.
Product page questions that remove hesitation
Chat adds clickable questions on product pages — like “Is this true to size?” or “What’s the difference between shades?” — designed to match what a shopper is likely wondering in the moment. These context-aware prompts help remove buying hesitation before shoppers even think to ask.
Instant access to cart and order status
Chat adds instant access to shopper actions, like a cart button and an orders button for returning customers. Shoppers can jump straight to their cart or check on an existing order without waiting for an agent to give them a status update.
How our redesigned chat improves your bottom line
Every update in Chat drives performance. We didn’t simply give it a makeover, we also fine-tuned its underlying mechanics.
36% more customers click on products shown in Chat
When product suggestions are easy to browse, shoppers interact with them more. The new product cards make shopping feel natural, allowing customers to explore items at their own pace. That convenience led to a 36% increase in engagement with recommended products.
2.25x more shoppers add products to cart from Chat
Chat keeps the entire shopping journey inside the conversation, from browsing and asking questions, to adding to cart and checking out. This new layout removes the usual tab-switching between chat and the website. Less friction has led to more than double add-to-cart actions than before the redesign.
7.3% more shoppers engage with Chat
Chat's cleaner design and contextual entry points make it easier for shoppers to start a conversation. With suggested questions on product pages and quick reply buttons, more visitors are choosing to engage earlier in their journey. This has resulted in a 7.3% lift in chat engagement.
Your store, now in every conversation
Conversational commerce has moved from concept to reality. Chat makes it part of the everyday shopping experience, letting shoppers browse, ask questions, compare products, and check out in one interaction. It brings the ease of the in-person shopping experience into the digital world.
We built Chat to redefine the shopping experience. We hope you see it reflected in your customers’ journeys.
Book a demo to see what's possible with the new experience.
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AI Is Table Stakes for Ecommerce: What the Data Tells Us About 2026
AI adoption in ecommerce has reached 96% in 2026, with use cases spanning support automation, personalization at scale, product discovery, and end-to-end operations.
TL;DR:
- AI adoption is rapidly accelerating. 96% of ecommerce professionals now use AI in their roles, up from 69% in 2024.
- AI has moved beyond support automation. Use cases have evolved into revenue generation, personalization, and logistics.
- Brands are tying AI success to profit-and-loss outcomes. 60% of brands consider AOV a top indicator of AI effectiveness.
A year ago, ecommerce brands were still debating whether AI was worth the investment. That debate is over. Today, nearly every ecommerce professional uses AI to do their job.
The shift isn't just about adoption. It's about what AI is used for and how brands measure its impact. Support automation was the entry point. Now, AI is embedded across the full operation, from product recommendations to inventory control to real-time shopping conversations.
In our 2026 State of Conversational Commerce Report, we break down trends on AI usage among 400 ecommerce decision-makers and 16,000+ ecommerce brands using Gorgias.
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AI adoption has reached a tipping point
If we rewind 12 months ago, the industry was still split on AI. Some ecommerce professionals were excited, but most were still hesitant. In 2024, 69% of ecommerce professionals used AI in their roles. By 2025, that number reached 77%. In 2026, it hit 96%.
The confidence numbers back it up. 71% of brands say they are confident using AI for ecommerce, and 73% are satisfied with its business impact.
In early 2025, only 30% of ecommerce professionals rated their excitement for AI at 10/10. Today, zero percent of respondents describe themselves as hesitant about AI.
AI use cases now span the full ecommerce stack
Using AI in ecommerce is not new. In fact, it dates back to the 1980s with the invention of algorithms and expert systems. And if you’ve ever leveraged similar product recommendations or chatbots, you’ve already integrated AI into your ecommerce stack.
Modern AI is far more sophisticated.
With the rise of agentic commerce and conversational AI, brands began leveraging AI agents to automate the processing of repetitive support tickets. That’s still happening today, but the scope has expanded beyond the support queue.
Ecommerce brands are deploying AI across every layer of their operation:
- Customer support automation: 96%
- Product recommendations: 88%
- Automated tracking and status updates: 69%
- Personalization: 64%
- Inventory control: 51%
- Dynamic pricing and discounting: 36%
- Order fulfillment: 18%
When brands were asked which channels contribute most to their AI success, conversational channels dominated. Social media messaging led at 78%, followed by SMS at 70%, and website live chat at 51%. Shoppers want fast, personal conversations, and AI is the best way to deliver that at scale.
Learn more about AI adoption, perception, and use case trends in the full 2026 Conversational Commerce Report.
How AI is changing CX success metrics
For decades, customer support success meant fast response times and high satisfaction scores. Those are still important indicators of success, but leading brands are adding revenue-focused metrics to their dashboards.
91% of brands still track CSAT as a measure of AI's impact. But 60% now include AOV as a top indicator, and higher-revenue brands earning $20M+ are focusing on metrics like total operating expenses, cost per resolution, incremental revenue, and one-touch ticket rate.
AI can now start a conversation, ease customer doubts, sell, upsell, and recover abandoned carts in a single conversation. When you’re only measuring CSAT, you’re ignoring the real ROI of conversational AI investment.
AI makes every conversational channel a storefront
Virtual shopping assistants now proactively engage shoppers, adapt to their needs in real time, and offer contextual product recommendations and upsells. When the moment calls for it, they can close the deal with a targeted discount.
Gorgias brands using AI Agent's shopping assistant capabilities nearly doubled their purchase rates and converted 20–50% better than those using AI Agent for support only.
Orthofeet, the largest provider of orthopedic footwear in the US, is a concrete example of this in practice. Using Gorgias, they achieved:
- 56% of support tickets automated in 2 months
- Email response times down from 24 hours to 35 seconds
- Double-digit revenue growth without adding headcount.
What this means for your AI strategy
The data tells a clear story: AI has evolved beyond a tool for handling tier 1 support tickets. It’s a core part of your revenue generation strategy.
57% of brands are already using AI for 26–50% of all customer interactions, and 37% expect that share to rise to 51–75% within the next two years. The brands building toward that range now are the ones who will have the operational advantage when it matters most.
The practical question isn't whether to invest in AI. It's where to focus first. Based on where brands are seeing the most impact, three priorities stand out:
- Start with high-volume, low-complexity tickets. WISMO (where is my order) inquiries, return policy questions, and order status updates are where AI delivers the fastest return. Automate these first.
- Expand into conversational channels. Social messaging and SMS are where AI is driving the most success right now.
- Connect AI performance to revenue metrics. If you're only measuring CSAT and response time, you're missing half the story. Add AOV, conversion rate, and incremental revenue to your reporting.
Want to go deeper on the full 2026 conversational commerce trends? Read the complete report for data across every major AI use case in ecommerce.
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Make AI Sound More Human: How to Avoid Robotic Replies in Customer Support
Learn how small tweaks can make AI sound human and build trust in customer support.
Further reading
15 Best Practices for Ecommerce Customer Service
With a decade of experience in customer service roles, I’ve recognized that ecommerce customer service goes beyond answering questions.
The best experience you can give customers is proactively providing them with what they need so they don't have to contact support at all. In instances where customers do need to talk to someone on the team, interactions that surprise and delight help keep them coming back.
Ecommerce customer service may feel less personal than it would in person, but there are a multitude of ways you can make it special.
Whether you’re building an online store from scratch or need extra hands to handle your growing customer base, I’ve rounded up the top 15 best practices for ecommerce customer service that you can start using to improve your support team.
The top 15 ecommerce customer service best practices to implement
1. Use a customer service helpdesk specifically built for ecommerce stores
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If I could only recommend one tool, it would be a helpdesk. A helpdesk is a customer service software that allows support agents and teams to manage customer data, inquiries, and orders in one platform.
If you run an online store, Gorgias is the perfect helpdesk specifically designed for ecommerce tasks. It smoothly combines order management, order fulfillment, and customer service in one tool, so that you can speak to customers and resolve their issues while being able to pull up their order data in one window.
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2. Combine all your support channels on one platform
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When customers can receive help the way they want — whether that’s a phone call or Facebook messages — they feel more comfortable initiating a relationship with your brand. Establishing a positive first impression can be the fuel you need to turn them into returning customers.
💡 Tip: Phone support can be the key to keeping customers. Throughout the years, I’ve seen first-hand how a simple 10-minute phone call can turn a sour interaction around. Most customers may prefer written communication, but being able to hash out an issue over a voice call can be the difference between losing a customer and keeping them.
The top support channels you should offer:
- Email: Provides customers a channel to voice in-depth and detailed inquiries.
- Chat: Useful for quick questions that can be answered within one interaction.
- Social media: The best channel for new customers who want quick answers.
- Voice/phone: A valuable channel to explain and resolve complicated issues.
3. Automate responses with reusable Macros
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To cut down first response times, use Macros or customer service scripts. On Gorgias, Macros are pre-written responses that can be applied to the most common customer interactions.
The best way to use Macros is by applying them to what I refer to as empty-calorie tickets. Empty-calorie tickets are repetitive inquiries that people ask over and over again, such as “Where is my order?” Automating the responses to these low-effort tickets is the easiest way to incorporate Macros into your workflow.
When to use Macros:
- Welcome emails
- Order status emails (transaction completed, order shipped, order delivered)
- Refund processed emails
- Customer loyalty emails
4. Trigger shopping cart abandonment notifications
Customers who abandon their carts are inevitable, but you don’t have to leave it there. Sending an email to a customer who still has items in their shopping cart can be the final push to trigger a purchase. You can even pair the notification with a discount to make the purchase more appealing.
Acquiring new customers is expensive, so it’s extremely important to recapture customer attention when you have the chance.
5. Respond to social media comments quickly
Pay attention to your social media presence because 26% of people learn about a product through social media, according to a 2023 study by Statista. Public social media comments have the power to either bring in new customers or completely turn them off from your brand. For this reason, it’s important to actively engage with social media users who mention your brand.
Having an active social media presence is an easy way to show you care about what your customers have to say. When you address comments publicly, prospective customers will trust you more for your ability to be transparent and authentic.
📚 Related reading: 5 tips to leverage social media for your store
6. Send order status and shipment update emails
Customers like to know when an action they’ve taken was successful. When it comes to ecommerce, you can easily check this best practice off your list by making it a routine to send order status emails, like when an order has been shipped.
On Gorgias, we take the manual work out of sending routine emails with Macros. If you’re a Shopify store, Gorgias automatically populates your emails with important customer information pulled from Shopify such as customer name, order number, tracking number, and more.
7. Offer self-service options
88% of customers like to find answers on their own and expect a brand to have a self-service portal, according to Statista. You can help make the search easier by filling your website with self-service options.
Self-service options are resources for customers to get the answers they need without contacting an agent. These include FAQ pages, help centers, chat widgets, and interactive quizzes.
Here’s how each self-service option can benefit you:
- FAQ page: Centralizes customers’ most commonly asked questions on one page to prevent your inbox from being filled with the same questions.
- Help Center: Larger in scope than an FAQ page, a Help Center is a database of detailed resources like articles and how-to videos to help customers learn more about your brand and product.
- Chat widget: Chat widgets can turn into a self-service option with the implementation of Quick Response Flows, or preset conversations that can answer customers without a live agent.
- Interactive quiz: A fun self-service addition to online stores that carry highly specialized products, like skincare, health supplements, and apparel.
📚 Related reading: A guide to building an FAQ page
8. Collect email addresses
Data collection makes up a large chunk of customer service, and it doesn’t have to be complicated. The easiest way to gather customer data is by collecting email addresses via newsletter signups and contact forms on your online store.
Customer service is important and shouldn't stop when your agents are off the clock. On Gorgias, you can add a contact form to your chat widget when your store is offline, so you have the opportunity to turn first-time customers into loyal followers.
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Benefits of collecting customer emails:
- Allows you to entice new customers with promotional offers and discount codes
- Boosts customer data with requests for feedback
- Personalizes customer interactions
9. Optimize your website for mobile
Three-quarters of Americans are shopping with their smartphone. It’s time to shift your focus. To take advantage of this customer behavior, match a convenient tool like the smartphone with an equally convenient and optimized website.
A website optimized for mobile includes:
- A responsive layout that adapts to all device sizes
- An easy-to-use menu
- Limited popups and distractions
- Legible fonts and text sizes
10. Create a customer returns and exchanges portal
If your store accepts returns and exchanges, it’s a good idea to automate the process with a portal. Returning an item is essentially just one step: getting an item out of a customer’s hands. It shouldn’t require a live agent. So, when your customers can return an item on their own, it becomes a huge time-saver for both them and your agents.
For example, when I worked at Stitch Fix, every time a customer needed an exchange, they'd have to reach out to support. It was a huge friction point. Eventually, we decided to build an exchange tool that became part of our checkout flow. From then on, our customers didn’t even need to think about contacting support because it was just an automatic part of the process.
💡 Tip: The easiest way to make a returns portal is by connecting Loop Returns with Gorgias. Loop Returns simplifies the return and exchange process by routing customers to a link, not an agent. By automating this part of the customer journey, your support team can deal with more urgent tickets.
11. Feature customer reviews to amplify your brand
Showcasing personal experiences can be the magic ingredient that adds credibility to your product. When potential customers read about real-life encounters with your product, they gain trust in your brand. Customer reviews can even nudge hesitant buyers toward making a purchase.
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For example, PuffCuff does an amazing job at making their product shine. Not only do they feature reviews, but they also include a customer review video. Being able to add a visual element that shows how conveniently your product solves a problem can convince customers who are on the fence.
Where to feature customer reviews:
- Homepage
- Product pages
- Social media posts
- Welcome emails
12. Create a loyalty or rewards program
Attracting new customers requires extra marketing that you may not have the budget for. Here’s a different approach: increase the value you get from your current customers with a loyalty program.
With a loyalty program, customers who already love your brand are incentivized to buy more while earning exclusive perks. An easy way to set up a program is by integrating LoyaltyLion with Gorgias. You instantly get customer retention features like shopping cart rewards, in-site notifications, and loyalty emails.
13. Use high-quality product photos
Without a physical storefront, your product photos will be doing all the talking. Customers want to get as close to the product as they possibly can to make an informed purchase. In short, gaining customer trust depends on the appearance of your products.
Here’s how to build trust through product photos:
- Standardize product photos across your website. Using the same high-quality camera, lighting, and background will show customers your brand pays attention to details, allowing them to trust your products more.
- Display multiple angles of your product. Allow customers to envision how your product will fit into their lives with accurate photos.
- Implement zoomable photos. Letting customers zoom in on your products can show them the exact qualities of your product, such as color, texture, and build quality.
📚 Learn more: Improve your product photography with these 3 tips
14. Improve your checkout experience
When customers get to checkout, they’re inches away from the finish line. Don't risk hampering their journey by subjecting them to a bad checkout experience. In fact, a staggering 17% of US online shoppers abandoned their orders in 2022 because of a "too long/complicated checkout process," according to Baymard.
Here's how to improve the checkout experience:
- Offer guest checkout. Customers want fast service and that means letting them skip the tedious account creation process.
- Present all extra fees and costs. Surprise fees can turn customers off from buying a product. Be transparent by including any extra fees at the checkout page to avoid losing their trust.
- Accept a variety of payment options, including Buy Now, Pay Later. A brand that caters to all wallet sizes is likely to bring in more customers.
- Include a checkout progress bar. Visually guiding your customer through the buying journey allows them to feel at ease with manageable steps and provides them with a sense of achievement once they reach the end.
15. Track trends by using customer service metrics
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You’ve got pages of customer emails, buying behavior data, and feedback — now what? The next step is to use this data to track customer buying trends and your support team’s performance. With Gorgias, you can track how well your customer service operates with Support Performance Statistics.
Track these support performance metrics to improve your processes:
- First response times: The faster you answer tickets, the more satisfied customers will be.
- Average resolution times: How effectively is your team resolving tickets? You can track this number to pinpoint gaps and inefficient steps in your process.
- Average number of tickets: A high number of tickets may indicate that you need more self-service options.
💡 Tip: Great customer service should have clear KPIs that are aligned with company goals such as customer retention and revenue generation that clearly demonstrate how your customer service creates value for the company and enable you to evaluate the effectiveness of your support program.
The bottom line: Delight your customers at every stage
Making every customer interaction delightful goes a long way. Customers are more motivated to keep interacting with your brand and can even inspire new customers to join in. When you show customers that you care, you give way to loyalty.
At Gorgias, we quickly get support teams the customer trust they need with an all-in-one helpdesk. Our helpdesk streamlines the customer experience with omnichannel communication, ecommerce platform integration to Shopify and BigCommerce, Revenue Statistics, and automation in one convenient platform.
Ready to put these best practices into practice? Book a demo now.
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Customer Service Messaging: Tips and Templates for SMS + Conversational Channels
Customer service messaging (also known as conversational customer service) is a powerful way to elevate the customer experience and delight customers beyond their expectations. For customers, texting with a support agent feels much more convenient and casual than slower channels like email. And, SMS is a much better channel for “on-the-go” communication, since most people always have their mobile phones and can usually reply to text messages quickly.
That’s why customer service messaging is one of many recent customer service trends shaking up how ecommerce and D2C businesses offer support.
In this guide, we’ll discuss how your business can implement or improve this type of customer support and other conversational channels in your customer service strategy.
Let’s get started with why it’s important for businesses to offer SMS customer service.
What is SMS customer service?
SMS customer service is when support teams resolve customer questions and issues via text message.
Why SMS text messaging improves the customer service experience
Customers love these one-to-one messaging channels for customer service because they’re so quick and convenient. When implemented well, conversational messaging allows customers to reach your CS team and get answers quickly — within 42 seconds, most of the time. Especially considering that 42% of customers prefer communicating with customer service on messaging apps over any other channel, introducing a conversational channel may do wonders for your brand’s customer satisfaction.
Your customer support team can also use these channels to proactively reach out to customers with important updates and timely discounts.
SMS customer service is especially attractive to your customers because they don’t have to stay glued to your website or check a social media app for new DMs. They can get answers to their questions on a device they already check 96 times per day. Let’s take a closer look at SMS, a channel that’s quickly gaining ground as a standard support option.
10 tips to successfully incorporate messaging into your customer service strategy
Adding each messaging channel at one time might overwhelm your customer support team. Likewise, a new channel may have low adoption if you don’t announce it to your customers. As you begin offering messaging experiences as a part of your customer care portfolio, use our top 10 techniques to maximize the effectiveness of your workflows on those channels.
1) Funnel all interactions to SMS or messaging channels and then move to email or phone if needed
For issues with easy solutions, there’s no reason for customers to engage with email or phone. Emails are slow and clunky and phone calls can lead to customer frustrations, especially if your wait times are excessive. Texts are far faster than either option and can provide simple, accurate information that leads to speedier solutions — and happier customers.
For that reason, we recommend setting up your contact page and information so that text and other live channels are your first line of communication — well, after self-service support. You can always move to email or phone if the customer requests it or if the problem you’re trying to solve is better suited to one of those channels.
Tip: Speed is an important factor in all customer service interactions, but it’s critical when sending any sort of instant message. First response time (FRT) is a key customer service metric you can measure with Gorgias through the analytics dashboard. Make sure to track the speed of your responses when you start your support messaging program.
2) Consistently let your customers know that you’re available on quick messaging channels
To inform your customers they can now text your brand, we recommend adding “Text us,” plus your phone number, in some or all of these places:
- The footer of your website
- The “Contact Us” page of your website
- Your Gorgias Help Center
- Transactional emails (order confirmation, return initiated, etc.)
- The signature of your support agents
You can put your messaging app information in the same spots, and make sure to say you accept support requests via DM in your social media bios so customers know they can shoot you a message.
Tip: Because conversational customer service usually takes place on a user’s phone, you need to keep responses short and friendly. The long, detailed macros and templates you might use for emails won’t work when communicating through short messages — depending on your platform and your customer’s phone, long messages might not send or might get broken into multiple text messages. Plus, depending on your brand’s tone of voice, conversational channels are a great place to use emojis, images, and GIFs to make the conversation even more friendly and casual.
3) Use autoresponders for a lightning-fast first response
Start every messaging interaction with an autoresponder. This tactic lets your customer know that you received their request, and it gives your human agents a small buffer of time to finish up their current encounter before starting the new one. You can also include a link to your help center in case they want to look for their answer on their own.
You can use this tactic whether you’re incorporating chatbots for basic query automation, or using your customer service agents for all customer interactions.
See page XX for an example of an autoresponder Rule for messaging.
4) Create a system to categorize and segment priority tickets
Some customer support tickets should take higher priority than others. A customer that’s reporting a fraudulent purchase with their debit card needs a quicker response than someone who’s asking if there are any discounts they can use.
You can start by prioritizing:
- Tickets that have been open the longest. These are the customers who may be growing impatient, or even angry enough not to shop or work with your business again. This can be set up with a View of tickets that have been open for more than X minutes, where X is an amount of time corresponding to your service-level agreement (SLA).
- Tickets from VIPs and loyal customers. You can tag these customers and make a View based on that tag to surface their questions and concerns.
- Tickets that fall into certain intents, like “order/damaged,” which Gorgias auto-assigns through our proprietary algorithms. You can auto-assign these tickets with a “priority” tag using a simple automation Rule and set up a View that has all open priority tickets.
You can even set up dual priority queues for all priority-tagged tickets: One for priority tickets that are about to go past the first response time in your SLA and another for all other priority tickets. Then prioritize the former, followed by the latter, followed by other tickets, to keep your first response time and resolution time down while giving attention to important tickets.
Beyond prioritizing tickets, it’s also helpful to categorize them if they share similarities. Grouping similar tickets together boosts efficiency. For example, your team can come up with one main solution (create a new discount code because the previous one is buggy) and easily resolve the entire group of tickets in a single pass.
5) Use Macro templates to respond faster to repetitive requests…
If you are responding to customer service messages on a platform like Gorgias that supports Macro templates, you need to take advantage of this time-saving feature. But you can’t just take your existing email templates and drop them into these conversations.
You need to create a specific set of Macros for messaging purposes, using the principles we mentioned earlier: short, friendly, personalized, etc. That means you need to use variables like [Customer first name] or [Last order number] to personalize messages. If you set up your Macros strategically for DM and SMS messaging, many can be reused for live chat, as well.
To prioritize building Macros that will have the highest impact, create Macro templates to respond to the most common questions that have come through your helpdesk. You can also ask your team which responses they end up writing out the most and add those templates too.
Once you create and launch these Macros, you can automatically add Tags to Macros for reporting to see which Macros are being used the most. This will help you understand where you have gaps (or unhelpful Macros) and can make tweaks to improve your agent workflow and customer experience.
6) …Or deflect those repetitive requests altogether with automation Rules
If your customer service platform supports automation, as Gorgias does through our Automation Add-on, you can deflect up to a third of repetitive, tedious tickets instantly, with no human interaction. Much of this automation can be applied to customer service messaging, as well.
When we mention automated answers, some support professionals say something like, “We don’t want to send low-quality automated responses to our customers.” We completely agree: For many tickets, automation doesn’t provide the best customer experience.
However, as you know, most tickets your support team receives are repetitive and low-impact, like questions about order status (WISMO) or your refund policy. We recommend setting up automatic responses for these tickets, so customers get instant answers and agents have more time to respond to tickets that actually need a human touch.
Look through your reporting dashboards to see the tickets that are taking up the most time on your support team, and prioritize those requests for automation with Rules, where appropriate.
7) Go beyond text-only interactions with multimedia messaging
WhatsApp Business, Facebook Messenger, and SMS support images, and luckily so does Gorgias. This is a more engaging way to interact with customers, and it also allows you to exchange relevant images like broken parts, malfunctioning equipment, and screenshots for more helpful instructions.
If you want to go this route, maintain a catalog of fun, topical images that your support team can use in their customer conversations, and give them the freedom to collect their own images to insert. It’s a great way to make your support feel more personal and human, but use common sense: Frustrated customers don’t want to receive a picture or meme, they want their problem solved as quickly as possible.
8) Provide proactive support at scale on platforms that allow it
SMS and other personalized one-to-one support channels can get a little complicated because not everyone wants to interact on the same messaging application. True SMS support goes out over cellular networks and lands in users’ actual text messages, the same way messages from their friends and family do.
But you may need to be ready to handle other support channels that use similar short, text-based communication. These include Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, and your website’s web chat. Certain channels may be a better fit for your unique customer base — for example, Instagram attracts a younger audience than Facebook Messenger, and WhatsApp is more common outside the US. Likewise, you may have other specialized messaging channels or messaging platforms that you need to support.
As a rule of thumb, you need to be where most of your customers are, which varies across businesses and industries. But to reach the desired level of customer engagement, most businesses need to be reachable via most, if not all, the major applications and support channels.
That’s where a unified customer service platform can be really useful. By keeping all of your customer conversations in one feed, you can handle more channels more strategically, through triage and routing to dedicated agents for specific tasks. For example, you could have one agent who just handles messaging and route all messages to that person for a quicker response.
On platforms like WhatsApp Business, you don’t have to wait around to hear from customers. This allows for a wide range of strategic and proactive support interactions.
For example, you can send out text blasts:
- When you have an issue affecting all customers (i.e. website downtime) to let them know what’s going on (and avoid getting excessive tickets about the issue)
- When you have new product launches or add-ons, driving revenue and customer education
- When you have relevant announcements for customers: limit these to news that actually affects customers (i.e. shutting down your community or a time-sensitive sale), not company news (i.e. your latest fundraising)
A proactive approach builds trust with your audience — they will see you going above and beyond with these efforts, and know that you’ll be upfront with potential issues.
9) Integrate your SMS support with your marketing efforts
SMS marketing is a useful tool for your ecommerce store, but it becomes even more powerful when you integrate your SMS marketing tool into Gorgias. Send out SMS blasts and have support agents on hand to handle any questions you get in response, to help nudge those customers closer to a sale.
With certain integrations — Klaviyo, for example — you can even use Gorgias attributes to segment and build campaigns. Use this function for win-back campaigns, or to send a special offer to customers who posted low CSAT scores.
10) Conduct surveys using text messages to collect feedback from customers
Text messages are an effective method for collecting feedback from existing customers, too. Once customers opt in to SMS communication, you can use this point of contact to launch quick surveys that provide valuable feedback.
Response rate is always an issue with email surveys, and other channels see higher response rates. Using a multichannel approach will supply you with more responses and help you make more data-driven decisions with the results.
Note: In a customer service tool like Gorgias, you would use one of our integrations with Klaviyo or Attentive to send the survey to entire segmented lists of customers or prospects, all at once.
SMS customer service templates for common response types
Ready to start implementing an SMS customer service strategy but not sure what to say? We get it: Staying concise yet friendly is tough, and so is conveying all the needed information in such a short space.
We’ve put together a collection of proven templates you can start using today. Adapt as many of these as you need to fit the contours of your business, and bring them into your customer service platform of choice. In Gorgias, you could auto-populate these responses through our Macros.
Note: We’re sharing these templates as text messages, but they can easily be adapted to other conversational channels like social media DMs and live chat.
Ticket received template
As we mentioned earlier, it’s a good idea to set up an autoresponder. This tactic can buy your team time to finish up a previous interaction or send an email, yet it shows you’re on top of the interaction and will be back soon.
Here’s our template for a ticket received autoresponder:
Thanks for texting {Brand Name}. An agent is reviewing your question now. We’ll get back to you shortly :)
Introduction message template
The introduction message is the point where your autoresponder or chatbot passes off the reins to a human agent. It’s the first point of personalization, and you want to make a solid impression. Still, your agents don’t need to be typing these out every single time. Use a template like this one to break the ice (just with a little less repetitive stress injury):
Hello, {Customer First Name} {Customer Last Name}! I’m {Your Name} from {Brand Name}. Thanks for messaging us. What can I help you with today?
Hours of operation template
There are two frequent scenarios where an hours-of-operations text makes sense. One is as an answer for when customers message you on social media or elsewhere just to ask when you’re open. In those cases, use this template:
Hello, {Customer First Name}! I’m {Your Name} from {Brand Name}. Our hours of operation are Monday through Friday, 9 a.m. to 8 p.m. Best, {Your Name}
The other scenario is when a customer reaches out via a messaging channel and there’s no one on the other end. If your helpdesk isn’t open 24 hours a day, use a template like this when the team isn’t live:
Hello, {Customer First Name}! Our live chat helpdesk is open {list hours}. You’ve reached us outside those hours. Leave a short message here and we’ll get back to you tomorrow.
By the way, if around-the-clock coverage is a goal of yours, you might be interested in introducing contact forms into your live chat widget. These forms let you keep your live chat on 24/7 and, when nobody’s available to answer, they ask customers for contact information so you can be sure to follow up. Learn more about Gorgias’ automation add-on and contact forms.
Order status template
This one’s pretty obvious: You want to let the customer know the status of an order, and there’s no reason to manually type a whole message to do it.
Use this template when a customer asks for their order status. You can create variations of this one for delays or other order status updates, and even customize it further to include tracking information.
Hey {Customer First Name}, great news: Your order has shipped! It will arrive on {delivery date}. Let me know if I can help you with anything else!
Payment reminder template
Customers with recurring subscriptions sometimes forget the frequency they sign up for or when their next payment will be. Use this template if customers frequently ask your brand when their next payment is:
Hello, {Customer First Name} {Customer Last Name}! I’m {Your Name} from {Brand Name}. Your next payment of {amount} is coming up. Your card on file will be charged {due date}. Questions? Reply here or call {phone number}.
Pro tip: While there’s nothing inherently wrong with soliciting payment via SMS, many consumers will view this with suspicion. Text channels may not be the best avenue for inviting bill payments or collecting credit card information. It could also lead to more cancellations, which makes it a balancing act, though customer clarity is important to have. Always track the impact of changes to your process and be mindful of how new touchpoints could affect it.
Deals or rewards template
If you’re trying to build brand loyalty or win back an upset customer, sometimes a simple discount code can go a long way. At the end of an SMS conversation, there may be times when you can surprise and delight customers by sending over an exclusive deal. Here’s a template (though you’ll certainly need to customize this one further to fit the details of your offer):
{Customer First Name}, thanks for being such a loyal customer. We’d like to give you {details of the offer}! Click to redeem: {short URL}
Refund issued template
Refunds happen, and they don’t always require a massively complicated interaction with your contact center. If you’re able to resolve a ticket and issue a refund with a simpler interaction, this template can finish the one-to-one portion of the encounter.
Notice the template specifies that the interaction will finish up asynchronously (via email). It’s a great way to tie off the synchronous, real-time interaction and lead the customer right to the next step (check your email.)
Here’s the template:
Hey {Customer First Name}! We’ve issued a refund for your last order. We’ll send all the details to your email, but feel free to let me know here if you need anything else.
Pro tip: You can tie discounts and future order credits into this template, but make sure your entire team is aligned on your official policy as you update the Macros to match it. You may also want to have different tiers of intervention (and offerings) depending on the severity of the issue.
Customer check-in template
The customer check-in is another asynchronous message that occurs outside of an active conversation. Perhaps the customer walked away from a previous encounter or seems to be stuck on the customer journey based on other CRM data.
Whatever the reason, a gentle, well-timed message can sometimes get the customer back on track.
Here’s a model:
Hello, {Customer First Name} {Customer Last Name}! I’m {Your Name} from {Brand Name}. Just checking in to make sure everything is working well for you. If you have any issues with our {products/service} or need anything else, let me know!
Templates for SMS marketing and relevant integrations
Though a customer service platform can handle the above templates, you’ll likely want to expand even further through additional integrations with the platform. If you take that approach, here are some opportunities that open up:
Discount template
If you’re running a sale or trying to drive traffic to your site, a great way to do so is by texting a discount code to customers on your SMS list. Because their phone is probably close by, it’s great way to promote your sale and make sure it gets noticed. Here’s a template you can use (but remember to update with your own promotion!):
Flash sale, this weekend only! Up to 40% off, including our latest collection. Shop now: {insert URL}
Appointment reminder template
Medical offices and other organizations that schedule appointments or meetings can bolster attendance and reduce no-shows by providing yet another reminder — one that reaches patients and customers directly via phone.
If your SMS system supports it, you can invite an auto-reply to confirm or cancel an appointment, too. Use this template:
Hello, {Customer First Name} {Customer Last Name}! I’m {Your Name} from {Brand Name}. Your appointment is scheduled for tomorrow at {appointment time}. See you then! Reply Y to confirm, N to cancel.
Order confirmation template
Order confirmation messages simply confirm that your business has received and is processing a customer order. These don’t typically take place during an active one-to-one customer service interaction. Instead, they’re sent automatically and asynchronously, whenever the order confirms.
Still, you can set them up as personalized messages and enable replying so that, if something happens to be wrong, the customer knows how to reach out.
Hello, {Customer First Name} {Customer Last Name}! I’m {Your Name} from {Brand Name}. Your order #{order number} has been received, and we’re working on it now! We’ll message you again when it ships. Questions? Reply here.
Pickup notification template
If you’re in an industry that offers pickup services (whether curbside pickup, custom goods like eyeglasses, or anything else), a text message is a great way to let someone know their order is ready for pickup. SMS reaches customers when they’re on the go in a way that email frequently doesn’t.
Here’s an example:
Hello, {Customer First Name} {Customer Last Name}! I’m {Your Name} from {Brand Name}. Your recent order #{order number} is now available for pickup at {location}. Stop by to grab it anytime today before {closing time}!
Survey or poll template
This message asks your customers to respond to a survey or poll. It’s a data-gathering tool that can pull in responses from people who ignore your emails or the messages at the bottom of store receipts. Try a script like this:
Hello, {Customer First Name} {Customer Last Name}! I’m {Your Name} from {Brand Name}. We value your opinion as a customer and we’d love specific feedback on {topic}. Here’s a 5-minute survey: {short URL}
Membership renewals template
Membership renewals, like payments, ought to be set up as automatic occurrences. Still, it’s helpful to remind a customer that a charge will hit their bank account soon — you don’t want to track down non-payments, and you don’t want angry customers who weren’t prepared for a bill.
Here’s an example:
Hi, {Customer First Name} {Customer Last Name}! I’m {Your Name} from {Brand Name}. Your annual membership renewal is coming up on {date}. Your card on file will be charged on that day.
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Is conversational and SMS customer service right for your business?
At Gorgias, we believe any industry can find value in conversational support, though some industries and brands will get more bang for their buck with these channels.
For ecommerce brands that deliver physical products, conversational support is a no-brainer. Imagine your customers get shipping updates via SMS and can just respond to the message if the package isn’t delivered correctly to get immediate help. No need to open up a laptop and log into a support portal or compose an email.
If you’re on the fence about offering conversational customer support, consider whether any of these points are relevant for your business:
First, consider your primary audience. If you sell to millennials and Gen Z, conversational customer service deserves serious consideration. These groups value speed and convenience more than anything: Millennials prefer live chat over every other channel, and 71% of people between 16 and 24 agree that faster customer service would drastically improve the shopping experience.
These two generations grew up texting. It’s a very natural communication style for them, so they’ll feel right at home texting and DMing your brand. They’re also absolutely massive groups — combined, they make up a staggering 42.3% of the U.S. population.
If you’re targeting an older generation, texting may not feel as natural. They have a higher tendency to prefer email or phone, although that’s changing by the day.
Is your marketing team already sending SMS campaigns?
One of the biggest hurdles to implementing conversational support is getting the systems, hardware, and staff in place to respond to SMS texts and messaging app requests at scale. If you’re already sending SMS marketing campaigns, then you already have some of that infrastructure in place.
So, if you’ve already made the investment in SMS for marketing purposes, then integrating messaging with your customer service platform and team requires minimal additional investment.
Fortunately, your helpdesk and SMS marketing software may integrate to give you a centralized way to spark conversations if customers reach out via text or respond to SMS campaigns. With Gorgias and Klaviyo, for example, customer responses to SMS marketing campaigns get assigned directly to an agent for fast response times.
Are customers abandoning conversations on other channels?
One of the benefits of messaging is that customers don’t have to stay on the phone or by their computer — they can easily continue talking even if they have to take the dog out, go to work, or even fall asleep and respond in the morning. Plus, while email conversations often span multiple days which is frustrating for customers with simple requests, requests on messaging channels usually get resolved before customers lose interest or patience.
If you notice that your brand currently sees lots of unresolved email threads or phone calls, you might need to offer customers a more convenient and flexible channel to talk to your team. This is a perfect use case for SMS and other messaging channels.
Are you already active on related channels?
It’s important to show up where your customers are. That’s why most brands post and engage with customers on social media pages. But if you’re posting on social media and not providing support to customers who reach out via DM, you’re missing a big opportunity.
By adding conversational support via Facebook Messenger and Instagram and Twitter DMs, you can maximize your presence on those platforms and provide an omnichannel customer experience for both existing and prospective customers.
Are you struggling to gather customer feedback?
We often discuss the importance of customer feedback to monitor brand perception and constantly improve the product and customer experience. But as most brands know, getting feedback via email can be a challenge because of low survey open rates and lack of follow-up from customers.
Business texting lets you ask your customer base for feedback on a channel they are less likely to ignore. Text messages have a whopping 98% open rate. Consider sending CSAT, NPS surveys, and other requests for customer feedback on this channel to raise your response rate for more accurate customer support metrics. Of course, with great power comes great responsibility: Spamming customers will quickly damage customer relationships, so don’t send too many messages to their personal devices.
What to look for in text messaging tools
SMS customer service is an avenue that customers are growing to expect. But managing yet another communication channel — much less one that demands real-time responses — takes careful planning.
Implementing a messaging strategy requires using tools built for that purpose. Some customer service messaging platforms offer SMS support natively, while others integrate a third-party SMS integration tool to add this functionality.
As you consider the available options, make sure the one you choose offers the features you need. Some tools are full-fledged SMS marketing solutions. Others focus specifically on SMS as a support channel.
It’s easier for most businesses to use an all-in-one customer service platform like Gorgias to support an omnichannel approach. With this kind of helpdesk platform, SMS tickets can be handled in the same feed as your other tickets and benefit from the same workflows and automation.
Here are some other features your customer service tool needs to have to handle SMS ticket effectively:
- Conversation history (for SMS and other text-based channels like Facebook Messenger or webchat) so your agents know what this client has asked about or needed support for in the past
- Ability to create and customize macros as replies to SMS questions
- Ability to send and receive images or videos (this is great if your support teams need to see the damaged item to issue a refund, for example)
- Routing or triaging capabilities to make sure SMS conversations don’t get lost in a queue of tickets
- Integration with other ecommerce tools so your agents have all the context they need to reply in a single space (e.g., surfacing Shopify customer data or CRM data during a support interaction)
Ecommerce SMS marketing tools to complement your customer experience
As we mentioned earlier, SMS marketing lets brands connect with consumers in a personalized and measurable way, just like with customer service. According to Attentive, average read rates of 97% within 15 minutes make SMS a prime channel for connecting with prospects and customers.
If you’re looking for the right SMS marketing tool to work in tandem with your new SMS customer service channel, consider these four leading tools. Each one integrates with Gorgias, along with most of the rest of your tech stack.
Each tool offers a slightly different feature set. Revisit the list of features we compiled earlier in this article to help determine which are the most important to you, then vet these four tools against your customized list.
- Klaviyo, a Gorgias preferred partner, is a leading customer data and marketing automation platform that leans heavily on SMS communications. Automatically create tickets in Gorgias if customers reply to Klaviyo SMS messages, and send Gorgias events into Klaviyo to create targeted audience lists based on support experiences.
- Attentive, also a Gorgias preferred partner, sends automatic text messages to your subscribers at each step of the customer lifecycle. It collects real-time behavioral data on customers as well, and the Gorgias integration allows you to see that customer data within the Gorgias sidebar. If a customer replies to an Attentive SMS, it’ll automatically create a ticket in Gorgias for agents to reply to.
- Postscript is an SMS messaging tool that drives revenue growth and improves the customer experience over SMS. If a customer replies to a Postscript SMS, it’ll automatically create a ticket in Gorgias for agents to reply to.
- SMSBump is a D2C focused SMS customer journey automation tool by Yotpo that boasts powerful results: 45% conversion rate and 25x ROI for D2C brands. By connecting SMSBump with Gorgias, tickets will automatically be created if customers reply to SMSBump campaigns.
Integrate your SMS tool with your helpdesk for a seamless customer experience
Integrating any of these SMS marketing tools with Gorgias is a great way to unify your marketing and support efforts to improve the overall customer experience.
For example, if customers respond to an SMS marketing blast from a tool integrated with Gorgias, the response gets brought into the helpdesk. The agent can see the initial marketing message and the customers response, so they can answer any follow-up questions. It's like an alley-oop from your marketing to your support team.
Also, these integrations help your marketing team be more aware of active support conversations to avoid tone deaf marketing. For example, by integrating Gorgias and your SMS marketing tool, you can pause marketing campaigns on customers awaiting a response from support. (Nobody wants to get marketing messages if they're waiting on a delayed order, or troubleshooting their last purchase).
Message your customers in real time with Gorgias
Customer service messaging across a wide range of message-based platforms can be a powerful addition to your customer service channels. Of these, the SMS channel is one of the most powerful options for businesses that want to reach customers directly where they are.
The scripts and tools provided in this guide should put you well on your way toward a successful SMS support rollout. But make sure that at the core of your customer service operation, you have a platform robust enough to handle everything you need to do — and whatever functionality you might add in the future. For more examples and tactics to launch a successful rollout of SMS support, check out our playbook of Berkey Filters, an online store that released SMS support to great adoption.
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Gorgias is the customer support and helpdesk platform built for ecommerce businesses like yours. Our live chat tools and 150+ integrations equip you to reach your customers — whenever and however you choose.
See how Gorgias supercharges customer support and helpdesk via SMS. Alternatively, check out more information about our integrations with:
12 Customer Service Challenges Harming Your Team and Revenue (+ How To Solve Them)
As a manager of customer experience and retention, I've seen my fair share of customer service challenges. I even co-host the Oopsie Podcast, where we chat with leaders in DTC about their biggest on-job mistakes.
While the occasional error is inevitable, these random blunders don’t determine the quality of your company’s customer support. It’s really about how you address not only these one-off situations but also the bigger challenges that customer service teams face, day in and day out.
In this article, I'll talk through 12 of the most common pitfalls plaguing growing support teams, and give actionable advice to resolve each one.
With some awareness of these challenges, and the right systems to solve them, you’ll set your team up for success and give your customers the A+ experience that keeps them coming back.
Team management and resourcing challenges
Striking the right balance of staffing and skills for a customer service team is tricky. Under-resourcing leads to agent burnout, but overstaffing drives up costs and causes even bigger problems.
Use the strategies ahead to better allocate your company resources, increase the productivity of your team, and maintain consistent service quality (without going over budget).
1) Proving the team’s ROI and getting buy-in for additional agents and tools
Let’s bring it back to basics for a moment: a customer support agent’s job is to answer questions and address customers’ problems, along with maintaining incredible feedback loops. However, too many teams strictly focus on clearing the ticket queue, measuring the impact of their support teams with non-business metrics like response and resolution times.
Of course, these customer support metrics are important. But they’re only pieces of the larger picture of your team’s impact on the business.
Another common pitfall? Aiming for overly broad goals of “surprising and delighting” customers without a real understanding of how support impacts the whole customer journey or business ROI.
The reality is that customer experience (largely driven by the support team) has many touch points across the entire customer journey (from pre-sales to post-sales) that lead to more sales and customer loyalty.
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It’s important for your customer service team to proactively measure and prove ROI. Without knowing how much money your customer experience (CX) drives, you’ll never:
- Actually understand the impact you're having on the business
- Learn about the biggest opportunities to improve your CX
- Have up-to-date data about your impact on revenue to ask for more resources from company leaders
Solution: Shift your support team’s metrics and KPIs
If you only measure first response time and average handle time, you're only seeing whether your agents are good at answering tickets. Not whether they’re boosting revenue.
Expand your KPIs and reporting dashboard to track customer retention rate (CRR), customer satisfaction (CSAT) score, and conversion rate from customer service conversations.
If those are your base measurements, you'll incentivize support team members to act more as sales agents by reaching out to customers proactively to suggest products. This encourages happy customers to leave product reviews and other tactics that boost revenue.
And if you use Gorgias, like my team at Chomps, you can focus on CX-driven revenue even more with this Revenue Statistics dashboard:
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2) Hiring quality customer service agents at scale
As your business gets bigger, it’s tougher to build a team that provides high quality customer support.
Growing a team? Easy, lots of people are looking for jobs. But scaling with the right people? That’s another challenge entirely. If you hire low-quality agents and provide poor training, your team’s morale, performance, and ROI will begin to snowball:
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Solution: Hire agents like they’re sales associates
Hiring skilled customer service reps — that you compensate competitively — is the first key to solving this challenge. People often view customer service as a junior, anyone-can-do-it kind of role. That’s just not the case.
Especially in ecommerce, customer support has a huge impact on revenue. Between pre-sales support and post-sales conversations that drive loyalty, it makes much more sense to hire support reps as though they are sales associates. Because, in many ways, they are.
Once you hire an all-star team, choosing a customer support platform that includes built-in product training (like Gorgias Academy) can improve your onboarding process. Base your training on real data about your support team’s performance to help you focus your training on the areas that matter most.
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Check out this ultimate guide to customer service hiring for a step-by-step process that attracts strategic, empathetic, and business-minded agents.
3) Too many service tickets for your team to handle (especially during busy seasons)
For all the excitement of shopping events like Black Friday and Cyber Monday, there’s also a bit of pre-holiday scaries. Record sales also mean record tickets and record returns. It’s a great season, but an incredibly busy one.
The challenge is keeping up with a high degree of tickets without losing the fast responses and helpful, customer-centric approach.
Solution: Deflect low-impact tickets (without sacrificing support quality) using self-service
The best way to keep up with tickets (and preserve enough energy to nail the most challenging tickets) is to lean on self-service in your chat widget.
Self-service is a bit like a chatbot, but set up for customer success (rather than customer irritation). While chatbots try and imitate people, self-service provides simple functionality and workflows to answer common questions, track orders, request returns, and more.
Watch this video to understand a bit more about what self-service from Gorgias’ Automate can do for your brand:
If you still struggle to meet demand during busy seasons, even with the help of automation, think about how you can engage your larger team, beyond even CX, to help.
I always talk about how everyone at Chomps is trained on Gorgias (whether they work in CX or not) so that if we have a temporary increase of tickets, we can ask anyone in the company to step in and help out. We love the feature that Gorgias allows unlimited seats that allows this to be possible unlike other helpdesk platforms.
Another option to consider are services such as Simplr which provide remote support agents on demand.
4) Managing stress and avoiding burnout from high-pressure situations
Customer service teams are deeply empathetic, wanting to create the best experience possible for every customer. Unfortunately, this can be a double-edged sword. Even if 99% of customers are patient and understanding, it's hard not to dwell on the 1% who are rude or impatient. The frustrated customer messages and the social media callouts take an emotional toll over time, leading to burnout and turnover.
When good reps leave due to unrelenting pressure, it creates gaps in knowledge and relationships that weaken customer service overall. The long-term effects can ripple through an organization, affecting morale, team cohesion, and the reputation of your customer service department.
Solution: Provide your team with the resources they need — before they need them
The key is being proactive in supporting your team, not reactive. If a rep tells you they need help, it's often too late — the stress has already set in. Instead, provide a range of resources ahead of time.
- Add additional team members. Empower your team to request extra hands based on early warning signs. Bring in temporary contractors to handle seasonal spikes before things get unmanageable. Or, train employees in multiple departments across your company in CX so they can jump in to help.
- Develop go-to templates and scripts. Respond to emails with existing templates (called Macros in Gorgias) — whether that’s replies to shoppers with shipping and delivery problems, customers who got the wrong product, or folks who want to provide positive feedback.
- Wellness resources. Implement wellness initiatives like reset breaks and mental health days before burnout sets in.
Being proactive with resources shows your team you care, prevents disengagement, and ultimately provides better customer experiences. Supporting your team’s well-being strengthens service quality across the board.
Technology and customer service tools
New technologies can improve how your customer service teams operate, giving customers a better overall experience. But there’s always the whole "how the heck do we use this?" phase. offering innovative solutions to better processes and elevate customer experiences.
Balancing the excitement of modernization with the hurdles of integration is a common challenge that teams grapple with.
5) Choosing the right tools (and applying them correctly)
Many companies fall into the trap of investing in customer service tools that promise to do it all — from automated chatbots to crowded helpdesks. But trying to be everything for everyone often leads these generalized tools to frustrate customers more than help them.
A general chatbot, programmed to answer a broad range of queries, can misinterpret nuanced or specific questions, leading to inaccurate responses. Instead of guiding the customer towards a solution, it becomes an obstacle, prolonging the resolution process and frustrating customers more. Without customization, the promise of convenience is overshadowed by the bot's lack of specialized knowledge and inability to provide personalized customer service.
Solution: Select tools built for your business goals
Rather than investing in generic tools that promise to do it all, carefully evaluate solutions purpose-built for your business’s specific needs. For ecommerce, this means identifying where automation can step in to handle high-volume repetitive inquiries like order tracking and refunds. Investing in tools designed to deflect these common questions frees your team to focus on more complex issues that need a human touch.
My team uses Gorgias Order Management Flows for self-service order tracking and automated return/refund requests. Customers can quickly check their status, report issues, or start a cancellation without agent assistance. Not only does this resolve the most frequent customer questions instantly, but it also reduces ticket volume so our customer service reps can spend time building relationships through personalized service.
With the right tools to handle common inquiries in the background, your team is empowered to deliver exceptional human-centric experiences.
6) Creating a unified and seamless customer experience across various platforms
Customers jump between email, social, chat, and self-serve, expecting seamless support. A 2019 report from Salesforce found that 69% of customers want connected experiences, anticipating that the customer service representative they interact with across various channels to have the same information.
Yet, delivering omnichannel customer service across all platforms isn’t easy. Siloed experiences across channels frustrate customers and complicate agent workflows.
Solution: Use an omnichannel helpdesk for a seamless customer experience
An omnichannel helpdesk, like Gorgias, unifies customer service delivery across platforms. Instead of toggling between disconnected inboxes, agents handle all queries from one tool. Customers receive quick, consistent assistance whether they email, chat, SMS, or reach out on social media.
Making use of omnichannel communication comes with a slew of benefits:
- Consistent experiences across all platforms build trust
- Seamless hand-offs between channels reduce repetition
- Unified context gives agents the entire history to personalize interactions
- Meeting customers on preferred channels boosts satisfaction
- Omnichannel analytics uncover service gaps to improve
With a unified helpdesk, interactions build loyalty rather than frustration. The simplicity of managing all touchpoints from a single window creates seamless customer and agent experiences.
Knowledge and training in customer service
Well-informed, knowledgeable agents provide better service. From inconsistent rep expertise to keeping docs updated, knowledge-related challenges impact customer satisfaction.
7) Customer service representatives don’t have the answer to customers' questions
If a customer calls your company and doesn't get the answer to their question, they won’t leave the interaction feeling good about your brand.
Of course, customer service reps can't know the answer to every question off the top of their head. If your team doesn’t have the correct answers, often it’s a leadership issue. This makes it essential to provide your reps with all the resources they need to address each customer’s needs — fast.
Solution: Create a knowledge base, use templates, and thorough onboarding with product and process information
Lean on a knowledge base videos, and other resources that your customer support staff can use to find answers to common questions. It’s different from an external help center or customer-facing knowledge base and more extensive than an FAQ page. Your knowledge base can be an easy reference tool for agents whenever they need to double-check a customer service policy or product.
You can also program that knowledge directly into your helpdesk. Gorgias allows brands to create templated Macros that are easy to use and customize as needed. You can create templates for common questions and issues, building an internal knowledge base for your agents to pull directly into customer tickets.
Here’s an example from our Macros at Chomps, for a technical question that agents might not know off the top of their heads:
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This way, customers get consistent, accurate information, and agents don’t have to guess or dig for an answer.
That said, when it comes to instilling product and policy knowledge, nothing replaces your onboarding and training process. I recommend spending these sessions to educate your reps on the following:
- Product and service knowledge
- Policy and process knowledge
- Customer service tools
- Technical skills
- Good vs. bad tickets
- Brand voice and tone
- Soft skills (like how to empathize with customers)
- Helpful customer service phrases
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8) No crisis management or escalation policies
Sometimes support tickets need a higher-up to step in and sort them out. If your company doesn't have clear steps for bumping these tickets up, some might slip through the cracks.
This leads to angry customers who feel your company isn’t interested in fixing their problem.
Solution: Automate the ticket escalation process
Creating policies for escalating support tickets is the obvious place to start in addressing this challenge, but it's also helpful to automate ticket escalation to ensure that no ticket (or customer) gets left behind.
With Gorgias’ Rules, support agents can automatically transfer a ticket to another agent or team without having to manually collect customer information and reassign the ticket.
Gorgias also allows you to create rules for escalating tickets automatically, such as a rule for automatically escalating tickets when the platform's Sentiment Detection feature detects that a customer is angry.
Here’s an example of a Rule that uses Sentiment Detection to flag tickets where someone may leave a bad review:
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Customer interaction management
Every chat with a customer matters for keeping them happy and loyal to your brand. The tough part? Calming down heated chats, juggling multiple questions at once, and giving that personal touch even when you're swamped. The way agents handle each chat really shapes how the customer feels.
9) Dealing with a frustrated or angry customer
Dealing with angry customers is a part of the job that very few support agents enjoy.
However, empathizing and working with customers, no matter how upset they are, is just part of good customer service.
Angry customers who eventually calm down are potential customers who might return to your company — they are also less likely to leave negative reviews that could damage your brand image.
Solution: Improve your CX proactively with clear product and policy descriptions (plus self-service)
Most blog posts claim the best way to deal with an angry customer is to practice patience and empathy, maybe with a pre-written script. And if you want that kind of advice, check out this blog post with an example script for how to deal with an angry customer.
But let's look closer at the root of most customers' anger: The shopping experience didn't happen like they thought it would. The best way to mitigate that anger is to lean into proactive customer support:
- Create incredibly clear product descriptions (to avoid a customer feeling duped)
- Display detailed policies (for things like shipping and returns) prominently on your website
- Use pop-ups, banners, and mass emails to proactively warn customers about delays and outages before they get frustrated
- Build detailed FAQ pages and Help Centers to help customers find answers fast, before they get angry about having to reach out and wait
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For example, develop a great post-purchase experience to avoid customer anger. Send customers a detailed order confirmation, clear step-by-step information about when their product will be shipped, and how to track their order.
If you’re not sure where to start, listen to your customers. This guide to collecting customer feedback explains how to take insights from customer support tickets.
10) Providing customer service to multiple customers at a time
If you want any hope of achieving industry standards for metrics like first response time and resolution time, your customer support reps need to be able to work with multiple customers in real-time, across communication channels (like live chat and social media).
This is one of the more challenging aspects of the job for small teams. Thankfully, it is also something that the right customer service software can go a long way toward helping your customer service agents achieve.
Solution: Use a centralized helpdesk
If you aren’t already, consider using a helpdesk to manage customer conversations across all channels. A helpdesk pulls these conversations into one centralized inbox so your team can offer omnichannel service — a fancy way of saying offering support to customers on all channels without having to switch between tabs.
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Once your helpdesk is up and running, direct your customers away from calling your support line and towards your Contact Us page.
I recommend funneling as much traffic to a Contact Us page as possible because we have Rules set up based on the drop downs that the customer chooses. Those Rules organize the tickets into different views so that we can work based on urgency.
If they want to talk to an agent quickly, use channels like SMS or live chat.
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Service quality and efficiency
Delivering excellent service quickly is crucial, yet difficult. Customers expect fast, personalized responses and consistent experiences. Challenges include managing wait times, meeting service-level agreements (SLAs), and upholding quality across a growing customer base.
11) Maintaining a singular brand voice across different customer service agents
Customers want the same feel every time they chat with your brand, no matter which agent they get. But since each rep is different, you might find a mix of tones and messages. It's a bit of a balancing act to keep the brand voice consistent while letting agents be themselves.
Solution: Integrate your brand style guide directly into customer service workflows
Having a solid brand style guide keeps things consistent whenever you chat with customers. To create one, define your brand personality, voice, tone, and writing style. Provide guidelines and verbatim examples for everyday interactions like greetings, apologies, confirmations, and closings. Make sure the language aligns with your values.
Here’s how to put your brand style guide into action:
- Incorporate your brand voice directly into canned Macros and automated workflows. Customers will get on-brand, personalized responses.
- Ensure all agents can easily reference the guide as they craft customer conversations.
- In team reviews, collaborate to improve examples and optimize messaging.
- Allow reasonable personalization; agents should represent themselves within the guardrails of your brand voice. The goal is consistency with customer expectations, not rigid uniformity.
12) Slow resolution times
While most customer service teams need to start thinking beyond resolution times, they’re still a tentpole of your team’s performance — and one of the biggest customer service challenges.
Customers expect an immediate response to their questions. This is especially true of younger customers, with 71% of customers between 16 and 24 years old stating that a quick response to questions and issues can drastically improve their customer service experience.
When your team already has more tickets than it can handle, meeting these customer expectations can be a real challenge.
Solution: Give customers instant help with self-service (and prioritize the rest)
Yet again, the answer isn’t to work harder — it’s to work smarter. Rather than trying to answer every question as quickly as possible, set up self-service resources to deflect simple questions and build systems to prioritize the rest of your requests.
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I talked about self-service above, but to recap, here are a few easy-to-implement solutions worth considering:
- A robust help center with articles and videos to explain your policies and products
- A public forum where customers can post and answer questions, which becomes a self-service resource for future customers with similar problems
- A customer self-service menu in your chat widget, which customers can click for instant information about their order status or shipping progress
Once you’ve deflected, it’s time to prioritize. While you could prioritize each ticket by hand (sometimes called manual ticket routing), a helpdesk like Gorgias can help you do this automatically. Here’s an example of automation in Gorgias, called a Rule, that will put any customer requests to cancel a recent order (before it ships) into a priority queue:
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That’s just one example. Read this full guide to customer service prioritization for more guidance.
Conquer customer support challenges with Gorgias
The common customer service challenges we've explored aren't just annoying — they directly impact revenue and customer loyalty.
Companies need to take CX seriously (and invest accordingly) to boost retention. We all know I’m a Gorgias girlie. My team at Chomps uses Gorgias for support, and it helps us be fast, helpful, and strategic with our support
If you’re an ecommerce company that hasn’t checked out Gorgias, I really recommend giving it a shot. Most of the challenges are going to be extremely difficult to solve without the right tools. And for my money, Gorgias is the best tool for ecommerce support teams.
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Customer Service Automation: 14 Types of Automation + the Risks, Rewards, and Best Practices
A recent McKinsey survey asked customer service leaders about their top priorities in 2023. The most common answers were retaining top talent, driving efficiency to cut costs, and investing in artificial intelligence (AI) solutions. In other words, two of the top three priorities involve customer service automation.
In support, automation can be a scary word: Isn’t automated customer service a bad customer experience? Frustrating chatbots are indeed something to be wary of, customer support automation can actually greatly improve your customer experience while saving your team hours per week on tedious, repetitive tasks.
This is your one-stop-shop guide to customer service automation. We’ll start by sharing some examples of customer support automations that automatically answer customer queries. Then, we’ll move on to some customer support automations to help your support reps skip repetitive tasks and become more productive.
What is customer service automation?
Customer service automation refers to using technology and software to handle customer interactions and other tasks without human effort. It's like having a virtual assistant that can quickly respond to common questions, process orders, solve simple customer issues, and anything else to make things easier and faster for both customers and businesses.
Customer service automation could include automated answers, ticket triage, ticket tagging, and so much more.
7 types of customer service automations to answer customer questions
This first set of support automations gives customers an answer without any agent interaction.
1) Automatic responses
Automatic responses (also called canned responses or Macros) are pre-written responses that get sent to the customer when certain conditions are met. You can send automatic responses for a variety of scenarios, including:
- Letting customers know you received their message and will respond soon
- Sharing your business hours and telling customers when you’ll be back
- Answering basic inquiries (like “Where is my order?”)
With the right customer service software, you can send these automated responses on every channel (email, live chat, SMS, WhatsApp, and social media).
How to set up automatic responses
In your customer service software, you can set up Rules (or automated workflows that fire when certain conditions are met). Tools like Gorgias use AI to scan each incoming ticket and — when the ticket meets the pre-determined conditions — execute the Rule.
Here’s an example from Berkey Filters of an automatic response to let customers know an agent is on their way:
And here’s an example of an automatic response for customers inquiring about the status of their order.
2) AI chatbot
An AI chatbot responds to questions that customers ask in your live chat. Unlike automatic responses, which are pre-written by humans and fire when certain conditions are met, chatbots respond to every message.
The benefit is that AI chatbots can try to respond to any type of question. The drawback is that AI chatbots don’t always have helpful or relevant answers. This can lead to a confusing and frustrating experience for customers.
How to use an AI chatbot
AI chatbots don’t require any setup; you just have to buy and install them. Some automated helpdesks come with a chatbot, while other helpdesks integrate with standalone chatbots. For example, Gorgias integrates with Siena AI.
Check out our list of the best customer service software to find the right solution for you.
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3) Knowledge base (or FAQ page)
Knowledge bases and FAQ pages are libraries of pre-written questions and answers that customers can use for self-service.
Technically, knowledge bases and FAQ pages aren’t automated. They offer static content and don’t use any sort of advanced technology to help you skip tasks. However, they help you skip answering tickets by proactively giving customers information that would have otherwise become a customer support ticket.
How to set up a knowledge base
To get started, you can simply create a page on your website with frequently-asked questions. Most likely, your website platform includes an FAQ page template — but here’s an FAQ page template, if you need one.
When you want to upgrade to a full-blown knowledge base, you can find plenty of standalone customer knowledge bases or use a customer support software with a built-in knowledge base.
For instance, Gorgias’s Help Center lets you host a searchable, categorized library of help content — plus, other self-service resources like Flows and self-service order management (both of which we’ll cover below).
📚 Want some examples of FAQ pages? Check out our list of examples of FAQ pages.
4) Article recommendations
With a robust knowledge base, you want to make sure the most helpful gets discovered when shoppers need it most. One way to do this is to use AI to automatically send articles to customers who ask a questions that's covered by one in your knowledge base.
This is a great way to instantly answer customer questions with detailed answers — including images, videos, and other rich elements that you can add to your Help Center.
How to set up AI-powered Article Recommendations
Gorgias's AI scans every incoming message. When it detects that an incoming live chat or email message could be answered by an article in your Help Center, it send the message to the customer. It also gives the customer a prompt — "Was this helpful?" — that lets customers get in touch with a human agent if they still have questions.
Here's an example of Gorgias's Article Recommendations on Parade's website:
Note: You can activate Gorgias Article Recommendations without making your Help Center public. You just need to create articles in the Gorgias Help Center (but not share them externally) and activate Article Recommendations. Gorgias will treat your un-published Help Cetner like a hidden library to send to customers when appropriate.
5) Self-service FAQs
Self-service FAQs are buttons customers click to get instant, pre-written answers. Whereas, automatic responses require input from customers, self-service FAQs don’t require customers to type anything out — they just click a button for an answer.
Here’s an example of self-service FAQs from ALOHAS:
How to set up self-service FAQs
The easiest way to set up self-service FAQs is to use a helpdesk or live chat software.
In Gorgias, self-service FAQs are handled by a feature called Flows. Flows can even be interactive, prompting customers to share information (like their preferences or location) to give a more helpful, personalized answer. Here’s an example of Flows from VESSEL:
Flows give customers an easy, automatic answer to a lot of questions they would normally have. If we just had one response, we would link our FAQ page, but they don't always read that. Flows allow them to interact and get specific answers.
—Alisa Ogden, Sales Manager at VESSEL
6) Self-service order tracking
For the average brand, “Where is my order?” (WISMO) is the most common question, accounting for 18% of incoming requests. And based on math from 12k Gorgias merchants, the cost of answering those tickets manually is $12/ticket.
You can offer self-service order tracking to empower customers to track their own orders. This is more convenient for customers, who don’t have to type out a message or wait for an answer. It’s also more streamlined for your support team, who now has to deal with 18% fewer tickets, and can focus on higher-value interactions.
How to offer self-service order tracking
Some chatbots can track the status of your order, but most have a hard time handling those kinds of requests accurately and with real-time data.
If you use Gorgias, you can use Order Management Flows (part of Automate) to let customers see the status of their order in real-time, in your site’s chat widget and Help Center:
📚 Want to learn more? Check out our complete guide to providing order tracking.
7) Self-service returns and cancellations
After questions about order status, the most common support questions are “Can I cancel my order?” and “Can I get a return?” Automating these return and cancellation requests can be a major time-saver for customer service teams.
Even if you don’t completely automate the returns process — some brands like to have a human approval process — you can automate the return request process. It’s much easier than getting an email that says “I need to return something,” and having to go back and forth to get all the details.
How to offer self-service returns and cancellations
The best way to automate the returns process is to set up a self-service return portal with a tool like Loop Returns. Loop makes it easy for customers to log in, select a recent order, and return or exchange it — completely on their own.
Loop even gently urges customers toward a return, to protect your company’s revenue from expensive returns.
To automate the request process for returns and exchanges, you can use a tool like Gorgias. Gorgias Order Management Flows let customers request a return, request a cancellation, or report an issue with their order in an easy, structured way. They don’t have to type out a message — just log in and make a few clicks.
Here’s an example of Order Management Flows in Loop Earplug’s chat widget (they’re also available in the Help Center):
You can even integrate Loop and Gorgias to send customers to your return portal from your chat widget:
📚 Interested in improving your returns? Read our guide to reducing returns in ecommerce.
7 types of customer service automations to make agents more efficient
This second set of support automations doesn’t give automated answers; instead, it helps agents work faster, improving the efficiency and productivity of your team (giving them time to focus on human tasks).
1) Personalizing messages
Even if you send responses manually, you can use automation to help personalize the messages. Specifically, you can use variables that automatically pull customer information (like order numbers, addresses, and more) into the message.
This helps your customer service agents offer the most relevant, accurate information possible without forcing them to switch tabs and copy/paste the customer’s information.
📚 Read more: Get more tips to offer more helpful, personalized customer service.
How to automatically personalize messages
Every customer support platform offers some version of variables to help you personalize support messages — even Gmail, if that’s what you’re using. However, the best solutions can pull from your other apps to broaden the scope of possible variables.
For example, Gorgias has 100+ ecommerce integrations so you can pull customer information from Shopify, marketing software, subscription software, shipping software, and more. This makes Gorgias a CRM of sorts: It gathers and stores customer data that you can use to personalize the interactions.
With Gorgias, these variables can even be used in automated responses (on top of responses your human agents send):
2) Assigning tickets
If each of your tickets need to be manually reviewed, you’re adding to your set of customer service challenges, and eating up tons of time. If a generalist agent receives every ticket and manually passes technical or escalated tickets to the right person, you’re delaying the resolution times for those key tickets.
Instead, you can set up automation that scans incoming tickets and automatically assigns tickets to specialized teams, like Level 2 team for complex issues or a team of Support Engineers for technical questions.
How to automatically assign tickets
Most helpdesks include features to automatically assign tickets. To get started, you’ll need to set up assignment conditions. Helpdesks like Gorgias scan every incoming ticket to understand the tone and contents. Then, it can automatically assign tickets based on what it finds based on your set conditions.
You can get creative with these assignments. For example, you can assign:
- Repeat customers to a VIP support team
- Subscription questions to a subscription team
- Wholesale questions to a specialized team
Here’s an example of a Gorgias Rule that automatically assigns incoming live chat tickets to a dedicated team:
3) Prioritizing tickets
Just like assignments, ticket prioritization is another valuable automation. It can remove a manual step if you currently have someone triaging all incoming tickets. Plus, it can make your team more strategic and effective by ensuring you answer time-sensitive or high-value tickets before it’s too late.
For example, you can automatically prioritize pre-sales questions that come in on live chat — these kinds of questions often block sales for someone who’s actively shopping on your site.
How to automatically prioritize tickets
You can prioritize incoming tickets in your helpdesk with Rules, or configurable automations. Just like ticket assignments, Rules fire off automations when a ticket meets certain criteria — including support channel, ticket intent, sentiment and tone, and hundreds of other factors.
Here’s an example of a Rule that prioritizes tickets about orders that were placed in the last two days:
The logic here is that you want to see tickets about recent orders in case someone needs to cancel or change their address — you can catch it before the order ships, saving on unnecessary shipping costs.
Want to get strategic with ticket prioritization? Read our Director of Support’s guide to prioritizing customer support requests.
4) IVR (Interactive Voice Response)
If you offer voice support, interactive voice response (IVR) is an easy way to automatically route customers to the right agent and even answer some basic questions without talking to an agent at all.
Have you ever called a business and been told to press 1 for hours, 2 for electronics, and 3 for all other questions? That’s IVR. It saves agents and customers alike tons of time transferring calls and answering repetitive questions.
How to use IVR to automate voice support
Most phone support systems include IVR — you just have to decide how you’ll map out your IVR automated system and set it up. Remember, IVR can automate two things:
- Answers: Customers can press a number to get a pre-recorded message, answering common questions without speaking to an agent.
- Ticket routing: Customers can press a number to get directed to the right team, department, or location’s phone line.
If you use Gorgias support, you can set up IVR with voice recordings or text-to-speech:
5) Ticket tagging
When agents process tickets, giving a helpful answer is only part of the job. Another key element of support is tagging tickets. Tags help you:
- Organize your helpdesk
- Improve ticket analysis and understand common contact reasons
- Forecast future customer service volumes
- Identify areas for improvement
- So much more
If agents have to manually tag each ticket, you’re adding a time-consuming step to the process. More importantly, you’re opening yourself up to human error. If an agent rushes through their work and misses a few tags, this could skew your data and reporting and cause bigger issues down the line.
Luckily, automation never has an off day.
How to automatically tag tickets
The right helpdesk tool scans incoming tickets and can tag them based on the ticket’s channel, contents, tone, and more. In Gorgias, this automated ticket tagging happens through Rules.
Here’s a Rule that automatically tags tickets as Urgent when they contain key words that indicate the customer accidentally made an error while ordering and needs to update the order before it ships.
You could use a similar approach to automatically tag tickets with customer feedback, shipping issues, product malfunctions, and so on.
6) Closing spam tickets
Another helpful automation helps agents identify which messages don’t need attention.
If your email is publicly available, it’s only a matter of time before you’re added to spam marketing lists. For instance, if your email address is connected to Shopify, you’ll get automated emails for every payment notification. Agents don’t need to deal with these, and you can save time by using automation to clear them from the queue.
How to automatically close spam tickets
You can set up Rules in your helpdesk to automatically detect and close tickets that don’t need an agent’s attention.
Here’s an example of a Rule that targets payment notifications by identifying messages that contain words like “Payment received” or “You received a payment,” as well as messages from emails starting with “noreply@” or “donotreply@.”
Gorgias’s Automate also automatically closes all no-reply tickets. Thanks to Gorgias’s always-improving machine learning, you don’t have to set up a Rule.
7) Proactive chat campaigns
Most customer service is reactive; answering incoming questions and resolving incoming issues. However, top brands know to offer robust proactive customer service. One way to do that is by reaching out to shoppers actively browsing your website.
With the right automation tools, you can automatically reach out to shoppers, targeting certain browsing behaviors and customer attributes (to ensure you reach the right person at the right time). These are called chat campaigns.
How to automate chat campaigns
With Gorgias, you can easily set up chat campaigns to target visitors based on a wide variety of factors:
- Total value of the shopping cart
- Goods added to the cart (based on product tags)
- Visiting particular page
- Time spent on a particular page
- Time spent on the website
- # of visits (new vs returning user or x# of times)
- Intent to exit the page
- Type of device
- Time of purchase
- Time of visit (during or outside business hours)
Once you set up the automation, you can write a message that lets the customer know you’re available to answer questions, reminds them of a promotion, offers a special incentive, and so much more.
If the customer replies, they’re connected with a live chat support agent and can get any additional information.
Biggest benefits and risks of automating customer service
Benefits of automating customer service
Why invest in automation? The main reason is to achieve more efficient customer service processes. But let’s drill down into some of the specific benefits.
Faster responses
Automated customer support has a 0-second response time — even the fastest agents could never respond to customer requests that quickly. While automation answers simple inquiries, your team is free to jump on complex issues.
While some brands think that automation ruins the customer journey, response and resolution times are one of the most important customer service metrics to boost customer satisfaction (CSAT).
No human errors
For some issues — like complex or sensitive ones — a human touch goes a long way. But for repetitive, rote interactions, the “human touch” might mean forgetting a step or explaining something poorly. When automation is set up correctly, it never makes an error.
Low costs
Research from McKinsey found that companies save 20-40% on customer service costs with an effective rollout of automation technology. While automation shouldn’t take jobs away from human agents, it can help businesses grow without burning out their agents or falling behind on tickets.
Your tool’s pricing may vary, but Gorgias’s Automate handles an average of 30% of all tickets, for 1/5 the cost of a customer service agent.
Frees human agents for more complex tasks
Your agents have better things to do than copy/paste order statuses. As automation handles more menial customer service tasks, your team can ensure they’re providing the best experience to higher-value customers and more complex issues.
24/7 support
Your business might not have the resources to staff a 24/7 support team, but by automating customer service — even the most basic functions — you can offer a layer of 24/7 support.
Accurate answers and consistent brand voice
People have different communication styles and personalities. They can also make mistakes and cut corners. Onboarding reps may even give the wrong answer while trying to keep up.
Automation is an avenue for ensuring answers are on-brand and accurate. This helps give customers a consistent experience and also helps prevent newer staff members from making unnecessary mistakes.
Works across channels
Customers expect to reach you through a variety of channels, including email, social media, phone, SMS, and more. As your team explores an omnichannel support strategy, customer service tools with automation features can streamline your progress.
Potential risks of automating customer service
Frustrating customers
When automation is used in the wrong ways, it creates a terribly frustrating experience for customers.
AI chatbots are a great example: While they can answer some basic questions, they might also attempt to answer complex questions but return with inaccurate answers. If customers can’t easily get in touch with a human, they’ll leave your site.
The best course of action is to use automation that consistently improves specific parts of the customer experience. Avoid supposedly catch-all solutions. And always give people an easy way to contact a real person.
Robotic answers
Automation — especially generative AI, which writes messages from scratch — can be stiff. Rather than rely on automation to draft messages to customers, consider using automation that triggers a pre-written message from humans (adding customer data where appropriate).
This grants you the benefits of automation while still ensuring the customer gets an on-brand, accurate, and human-sounding message.
Missed opportunities for upsells
If AI automation is responsible for managing too many customer interactions, it might not notice or take advantage of clear opportunities to upsell or cross-sell customers.
For example, if a customer claims their device dies too quickly, your chatbot might generate tips for them to make their battery last longer. A human agent might do that plus send a link to an upgraded device that lasts longer.
The best course of action, again, is to avoid over-relying on automation. Choose automation that’s really great at automating specific tasks, so human agents are still integrated into the process and can capitalize on these particular situations.
Technical glitches
Automation, like any technology, is subject to the occasional glitch or downtime. While this shouldn’t scare you away from using automation, it’s a good reason to avoid over-relying on automation to complete all your customer service duties.
Best practices of customer support automation
Automation is only helpful if it’s strategic and set up correctly. Here are some automation best practices to keep in mind:
Always offer a clear path to humans
Never trap your customers in automation (or chatbot) hell. Always offer a clear path to human support.
The most common example is in the chat widget. Even if a human isn’t immediately available, at least give customers a way to submit a message that your agents answer via email once they’re available.
If you use Gorgias, every automated interaction offers customers a clear path to talk to an agent. Here’s an example of this in action from Steve Madden:
Don’t try and trick customers
Customers generally appreciate the speed and convenience of automation. But they get grumpy when they think they’re chatting with a human, and get an inaccurate, robotic response.
When you’re sending automated messages, consider labeling the message as Automated to be transparent with customers. In Gorgias, automated messages are labeled as automated, and you can choose an avatar that sends automated messages.
Here’s an example of this in action from Loop Earplugs:
Use automation to personalize more, not less
One fear of automation is the robotic, inhuman tone of messages. But automation can actually help you personalize conversations more. The trick? Use on-brand, pre-written messages and introduce variables that automation fills in with customer data.
In Gorgias, you can use a wide variety of variables to populate the automated message with the customer’s name, shipping address, order status, estimated delivery date, and much more.
Choose software built for specific purposes
There’s no such thing as one-size-fits-all automation software. If you’re selling software or a subscription-based SaaS platform, you’ll likely need a different toolset than a vendor selling clothing or tea via an ecommerce website.
Daily interaction types are going to vary considerably. For instance, customer support at a clothing company will deal with sizing and out-of-stock issues or returns and exchanges. None of those needs apply to a B2B software company.
Rather than choosing automation that claims to work for each of these different use cases, choose automation custom-built for your unique needs.
Always maintain the software
Automation isn’t set-it-and-forget-it software. You should consistently review automated interactions and be prepared to tweak your automation software to ensure:
- It works as expected and without (frequent) errors
- Customers are successfully reaching resolutions with automated answers
- You’re adding new applications to maximize the value of automations
Empower humans, don’t replace them
The best automation replaces tasks that don’t need human input, like repetitive tasks that humans find tedious.
Instead of turning to automation as a replacement for a human team, look for ways automation can speed up the work of humans or let humans focus on complex problem-solving and conversations that require empathy and human interaction.
Choose low-code tools
Be sure you’re choosing a tool that aligns with the technical abilities of your team — especially if you don’t have any highly technical staff. Most customer service software companies now design their products with non-technical users in mind, as a result.
Mind data security and privacy
Automation introduces a small amount of risk when it comes to data security and privacy. When shopping for customer service automation software, be sure to check the vendor’s security. At a minimum, look for software that has single-sign-on (SS), SOC 2 Type II certification, and HIPAA compliance.
Discover Gorgias, the automated support software built for ecommerce
Gorgias is the customer service platform built exclusively for ecommerce companies, and powered by a suite of AI and automation features. Your agents will save hours per week by cutting out tab-switching, copy-pasting, and manually assigning and tagging tickets.
Gorgias also features the Automation Add-on, which includes a variety of self-service features to help your customers get instant answers to basic questions. Automate users can automate 30% of all customer interactions — up to 45%, for top users!
To learn more about Gorgias and Automate, book your demo today.
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How to Manage and Reduce BFCM Returns (& Protect Your Revenue)
Black Friday — Cyber Monday (BFCM) is the most lucrative opportunity for online stores around the holiday season.
In 2022, nearly 10% of all revenue generated between October 1st and December 31st occurred during the BFCM weekend, according to Adobe.
But just like BFCM sales skyrocket, product returns also surge after the weekend, so much of that extra revenue gets erased.
You can combat Black Friday returns issues in two ways:
- Reduce the number of returns. This requires accurate product descriptions, timely pre-sales support, and a clear return policy.
- Streamline the return process. Automations, self-service flows, and other similar tactics can make the return process efficient in terms of costs, time, and man-hours.
In this guide, you’ll learn proven tactics for achieving both of these goals and retaining your BFCM revenue.
Common reasons why customers return BFCM purchases
ZigZag Global’s proprietary metrics showed a 60% increase in return rates after the Black Friday weekend last year, compared to 2021. Loop Returns puts that number at 31%.
Regardless of the specific numbers, most ecommerce stores face inflated return rates post-BFCM. There are a few common reasons:
- Shipping delays. Shipping companies are overloaded during the holiday sales rush around Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s Eve. This leads to delays, disappointed customers, and returned items.
- Damaged products. With so much on their plate, shipping companies often don’t handle items with enough care. If the product packaging doesn’t account for that, items can easily get damaged along the way.
- Products that don’t match their description. Returns happen when there’s a discrepancy between what customers expect based on your site and marketing campaigns and what they get.
- Gifts getting returned. Many people do their holiday shopping for Christmas, Hannukkah, and other year-end holidays during BFCM. Plenty of reasons can lead to returns in that context, like wrong sizes, incorrect products, or the recipient not liking the gift in general.
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Throughout the following sections, you’ll learn ways to avoid (or at least mitigate) these problems.
How to reduce post-BFCM returns and protect your revenue
While you can’t evade all BFCM returns, you can limit them significantly by following the best practices below.
Plan your BFCM inventory months in advance
A successful BFCM starts way before November. You want to estimate how much inventory you’ll need and order everything at least a few months in advance, depending on how long the shipping process takes for your suppliers.
If you wait too long, you can end up scrambling to secure inventory at times when supply chains are at maximum capability. This can easily lead to shipping delays and returned items.
The best way to estimate how much inventory you’ll need is to use historical data.
For example, if you use Shopify, you can use your Shopify order history data (or the equivalent in your platform) to filter BFCM orders and compare them to the rest of the year. This will give you a good baseline of how much sales typically jump, so you don’t waste money on inventory you won’t sell and don’t miss out on revenue because of understocking.
Here’s a great guide to BFCM inventory planning, if you need more help.
Use pre-sales support to educate shoppers
Providing timely pre-sales support is a powerful way to reduce returns because it lets you:
- Point customers to the right products for their needs. That way, there’s less of a chance they return an item because it didn’t meet their expectations.
- Answer common questions about product shipping times, returns, and exchanges in advance. Besides increasing customer satisfaction and reducing returns, this has the added benefit of slashing repetitive customer support tickets down the line.
Gorgias — our ecommerce helpdesk software — has various features that can help you implement this strategy.
For example, Flows are self-service Q&As that live in your chat widget and Help Center. Customers can use Flows to get personalized product recommendations, ask about promotions, and learn about your shipping and returns policies — all of which are great ways to instill buying confidence and nudge shoppers toward a purchase.
Here’s an example of Flows from Princess Polly, where customers can find the most accurate returns policy for their location without having to talk to an agent.
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For a real-life example of the impact of pre-sales support, check out our case study with skincare brand Topicals.
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They were able to increase sales by 79% and deflect 69% of incoming tickets by educating customers pre-sale thanks to Gorgias’ chat automations.
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Update product descriptions and images
If product descriptions and product photography don’t match what customers receive, high return rates are imminent.
That’s why it’s a good idea to audit your website a week or two before Black Friday and check if each item’s image and description are accurate. Or, if you don’t have the bandwidth, at least audit the best-selling products and ones that are about to be discounted.
One company that does a great job in this regard is Marine Layer. They offer tons of relevant details under their products, including their exact dimensions, the size of the model wearing the clothes, and more.
Here’s an example from one of their product pages:
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This in-depth information helps shoppers make the right choice and helps the brand avoid unnecessary returns down the line.
Test products and packaging before shipping
As I said, broken items are among the most common reasons for returns. You want to ensure all shipments (especially ones containing fragile items) are packaged in a way that can handle more wear and tear than usual.
If you have access to specialized machines like ECT or Mullen testers, you’re probably doing this anyway. But even if you aren't, the process doesn’t have to be complicated. Just package one or two products and throw them around the warehouse a few times to see how they hold up — we did this at a previous company of mine, and it was educational and entertaining.
Ensure a helpful post-purchase experience
The post-purchase experience begins after a customer completes your checkout process. Making this experience useful for your shoppers will reduce the number of returns and help you create long-term, loyal customers.
Here are four essential post-purchase best practices to follow:
Send clear order confirmation emails
Good order confirmation emails are a must in terms of lowering shoppers’ post-purchase anxiety and reducing unnecessary tickets to your support team.
Make sure to automate them, so that they’re sent immediately after a customer completes your checkout flow. The email itself should include:
- A verification that the order was received and that your team is working on it
- A description of the products included in the order
- The order’s number and expected delivery date
- What customers should expect next (e.g., a follow-up email when their order is shipped or a phone call to confirm the order)
Make it easy for shoppers to track their orders
Giving customers a way to track their orders is a great way to improve their experience and reduce the load on your support team.
For example, you can use Gorgias’ Order Management Flows to let customers check their order status, package tracking number, and shipping details. This is a great way to keep shoppers informed while deflecting WISMO (“Where is my order?”) requests from becoming support tickets.
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Let customers know about shipping delays in advance
Whenever shipping delays can’t be avoided, you want to be upfront about the issue with your customers.
Tell them when they can expect the delivery and apologize for the inconvenience. You can also throw in a shipping discount or another incentive if you feel it’s necessary to prevent potential returns.
Show new customers how to set up and use your products
These might be instructions on how to apply a skincare product, wash a piece of clothing, or configure a Bluetooth speaker.
Regardless of the specifics, you want to make sure shoppers have easy access to the necessary information. This will prevent them from returning products just because they couldn’t figure out how to use them.
Note: For even more details and examples, check out our 10 ways to reduce ecommerce product returns.
3 proven ways to streamline the return process
In some cases, it’s not possible to avoid returns altogether. When that happens, you want to ensure the return process is as cost-efficient as possible, so you can avoid wasting customers’ effort, as well as your team’s time and resources.
Here are three ways to do that.
1) Encourage exchanges instead of returns
This option lets you keep at least part of the revenue and profit margins that would’ve otherwise been lost. Plus, it can help you delight customers with products that they might not know about, so it’s a win-win for both sides.
There are two ways to implement this strategy:
Have your customer service agents suggest exchanges
You can instruct your team to approach return requests as opportunities for an exchange.
If you use Gorgias, your agents can have access to all customer data in one place, so it should be easy for them to suggest relevant products based on each shopper’s previous interactions and purchase history. Plus, with live chat support, your team will be available to customers at every step in the process.
Using a returns tool like Loop Returns
Loop is a returns management app that lets ecommerce businesses embed a self-service return portal on their site.
Besides saving you time (since it’s self-service), the portal can nudge shoppers to exchange their products instead of returning them. This can be done via bonus credits, for example, which give customers more in-store credit than they would get as a refund in the original form of payment.
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Jaxxon is one of the ecommerce brands that employ this tactic on their site. They’ve embedded Loop’s return portal, which helps their agents save time and encourages customers to exchange instead of return.
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They also provide live chat support (via Gorgias) within the portal to answer questions and potentially steer customers away from a return. For instance, their agents can:
- Prompt users to exchange their item with a better option of returning it
- Explain how the customer can troubleshoot and resolve whatever issue causes them to seek a return
- Help the customer through the returns process, so they have a pleasant experience at the very least
Note: Gorgias and Loop Returns can be integrated. This integration allows customers to talk to a support agent while navigating the returns portal. That way, agents have a chance to troubleshoot any issues that may be causing the return (or steer customers toward an exchange).
2) Make your returns policy easily accessible
Another challenging aspect of BFCM is the influx of questions to your support team, many of which have to do with returns, like:
- Is there an extended return window for items bought during BFCM?
- How long will it take for the product to arrive?
- Do you offer free shipping?
- And so on
That’s why you should have your returns policy linked in highly visible places on your website. For example, you could place links to the policy in your site’s navigation or even have a small pop-up that encourages shoppers to read it.
With Gorgias, you can reduce the volume and impact of these repetitive tickets even more by:
- Using Article Recommendations. With this feature, shoppers can automatically receive an article from your Help Center that answers their question. For example, if they ask about returns or exchanges in your live chat window, they’ll get a succinct answer pulled from your content.
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- Setting up Macros. These are pre-made responses (or templates) that dynamically pull in customer information like name or order number. You can include links to your return policy in relevant Macros or even create dedicated Macros for answering specific questions about returns and exchanges — like questions about order status, for example.
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Bonus tip: Adjust your return policy if necessary
As mentioned, shoppers often buy Christmas gifts during BFCM. If your return window is 14 or even 30 days, most of the people who receive a gift won’t be able to return it in time.
This can lead to bad reviews, angry shoppers, and poor customer retention (especially for first-time customers). That’s why it’s a good idea to extend your return window after Christmas and New Year to ensure a good customer experience.
3) Enable self-service returns
With self-service returns, online shoppers don’t have to wait for an agent to get to their request, while agents can focus on more complex tickets (or on generating revenue via proactive customer service).
To implement this tactic, you first need to provide shoppers with clear, detailed instructions on how to return their items. These instructions should be included on your site (e.g., on FAQ pages or in helpdesk articles) and can even be printed and shipped alongside the product.
As I said earlier, you can also use Loop Returns to provide shoppers with a self-service return portal on your site. Loop’s portal is easy-to-use, so shoppers can go through it without any unnecessary hassle.
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From a revenue protection perspective, you can also have Loop nudge customers toward exchanging items instead of returning them. According to their data, companies that use Loop turn 57% of returns into exchanges.
Use Gorgias to maximize your BFCM revenue
Increases in post-BFCM returns are extremely common and in some cases — inevitable.
However, with the tactics outlined in this article, you can minimize their number and impact on your revenue. You can also streamline the return process, so you’re not spending unnecessary time, effort, and money on returning items.
Here’s how Gorgias can help you in both regards:
Streamline the return process
Gorgias offers a plethora of features that can reduce the load on your agents during this year’s shopping season rush — from automated responses to self-service flows, and much more.
Plus, our integration with Loop Returns lets you create a seamless return experience. Shoppers can use the Loop portal for self-service, while also contacting your team if they get stuck (which is a great opportunity to nudge them toward an exchange).
Keep up with multichannel return requests
Gorgias centralizes all customer service tickets in one place. This means your agents don’t have to waste time switching between tabs to handle return requests from your website, email, SMS, and social media profiles, for example.
Provide pre-sales support and generate more conversions
Your agents can use Gorgias chat campaigns to communicate with customers and help them find the right products for their needs (which helps reduce returns down the line).
They can even create proactive chat campaigns aimed at specific visitors to promote BFCM discounts, cross-sell or upsell specific items, reduce cart abandonment rates, and much more.
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Lastly, you can also check out our Black Friday Marketing Guide for 18 ideas and strategies that can help you drive more Black Friday sales this year.
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5 Steps to Get Your Customer Support Ready for BFCM
Let’s cut to the chase: Black Friday and Cyber Monday customer support is intense. For ecommerce customer support teams, the flood of tickets is the online store version of shoppers mobbing through brick-and-mortar stores.
It’s easy to focus on just getting through the flood of tickets. But If you’re proactive, your support team could actually reduce the number of incoming tickets with automation. And with all that time saved, the support team can have a huge impact on the cumulative success of the weekend by unblocking sales, reducing return rates, and more.
Customer support teams are not just there to answer tickets during BFCM — they are key at every stage along the customer journey:
An unprepared or understaffed support team is the quickest way to kill your BFCM success. And with $209.7 billion in forecasted online spending at stake, that’s not something you can take for granted. Here are 5 steps to make your support team the hero of Black Friday 2023.
1. Update your customer service policies and SLAs
Ecommerce sales depend on clear policies around shipping, returns, lost packages, and more. When customers don’t know your policies, they’ll either write to your support team (if you’re lucky) or abandon their cart entirely and head over to Amazon (more likely).
In the first case, your support team is stuck answering repetitive questions like, "What's your shipping policy?" when customers should really have easy access to that information on their own. In the second, you’re directly losing online sales because of a lack of clear customer self-service options. Either way, we’re here to help you solve it.
“Make sure all of your policies are up-to-date before Black Friday-Cyber Monday, and communicate them to both agents (through your SLA) and customers (on key pages of your website). This will reduce the number of tickets you have to field and ensure customers have the information they need to make a confident purchase decision.” —Bri Christiano, Director of Support at Gorgias
Policies for shipping and fulfillment during Black Friday-Cyber Monday
Most customers use BFCM weekend to lock in holiday gifts, so their number one concern on BFCM (after what deal they can score) is often around delivery dates. They want to know if their order will make it on time for the holidays.
How to estimate shipping times to inform your shipping policy
Before communicating shipping dates to customers, work backward with your fulfillment team to determine the absolute last day orders can ship and still arrive in time (factoring in holiday shipping delays).
Once that “drop dead” order date has been determined, it needs to be clearly communicated to holiday shoppers, along with any opportunities to speed up shipping for an additional fee.
Here are some common customer expectations around fulfillment you may want to consider (thanks, Amazon!).
Where to put your BFCM shipping policy
Make your shipping policies (and the “drop dead” date) clear in your:
- Checkout flow (during the shipping method step and order preview step)
- Order confirmation emails
- FAQ page and/or Help Center
- Macros (where relevant)
- Website banner
- Product pages
If you feel uncertain about what those shipping policies should be exactly, check out our guide for ecommerce shipping and fulfillment best practices. Better safe than sorry with an inbox full of angry customer emails.
How to address lost packages during Black Friday-Cyber MondayLost or damaged packages are common during BFCM. The first step for addressing the issue is to understand why they go missing in the first place.
Common reasons packages are lost are:
- The package was never shipped in the first place
- The packing slip fell off or wasn’t properly scanned by the carrier
- The package was delivered to the wrong address
- The package was damaged (usually by fire or water)
- The package was stolen after delivery
Stuff happens. Being upfront about what customers can expect if the worst-case scenario happens is key to recovering and retaining that customer relationship.
Your customer-facing lost package policy should include:
- Any limits in coverage for damages
- How customers should inform of lost packages
- What is required to submit a claim (i.e. pictures, shipping confirmation email, etc.)
- How long a package needs to go undelivered before it’s considered lost
And, don’t forget to set your support agents up for success by providing them with a process that explains:
- What steps they should take to troubleshoot a missing package
- Available macros the team can use in these cases
- Clear guidelines for escalating a case to the fraud team (i.e. number of repeated claims, etc.)
This will help your agents handle the process quickly and consistently, and give your customers the peace of mind that they will be made whole if something goes wrong.
If you’re creating this policy from scratch or want to make sure your policy is covering all your bases, check out our guide on how to handle lost ecommerce packages.
Policy for returns and exchanges during Black Friday — Cyber Monday
If you’ve ever bought a gift for “ the person who has everything” or received tighty-whities from Great Aunt Margret for Christmas, you know how important a return policy is. More than ever during the holiday sales season, your customers are going to want to know your return policy. And, while you can’t eliminate the BFCM returns, you can at least reduce the number of them if you understand where they’re coming from.
In addition to gift returns, the top reasons online shoppers choose to return a product include:
- Item didn't match its product description and/or customer expectations
- Item arrived late and the customer no longer needs it
- "Wardrobing," when serial returners buy and return items without any intention of ever keeping products
- Merchant shipped the wrong product
- Item was damaged or defective
To reduce ecommerce returns, during BFCM or any other time, the more information you give upfront, the less likely people are to return the items later on. Your return policy should be crystal clear to both support agents and customers about the conditions under which you will accept a return for either a refund or exchange. Not sure where to start? Check out our return policy template generator to get started.
Where to put your BFCM returns and exchanges policy
Similar to the shipping policy locations, you want to make your returns and exchanges policy (or at least a link to the full policy) as visible as possible to avoid unnecessary support tickets.
Make your returns and exchanges policies clear in your:
- Checkout flow (during the shipping method step and order preview step)
- Order confirmation emails
- FAQ page
- Help center resource pages
- Macro templates (where relevant)
- Website banner
- Product pages
Set customer expectations with your SLAs
A service-level agreement (SLA) is a document that describes what the client or customer can expect from the provider. A strong SLA is foundational to cultivating understanding and maintaining high satisfaction with your existing customers. Making sure your SLA is up-to-date is more crucial than ever when entering into the busiest times of the year when customer expectations are at their height.
Here are some things you should add to (or update) in your SLA for BFCM:
- Use plain English and simplify as much as possible. Talk to your target audience in language they’ll understand, to avoid confusion
- Design your SLA based on data. Benchmark your SLA expectations against historic data and then adapt to the forecast you calculated above, so you can make the metrics you aim for challenging, but realistic
- Set expectations specific to each customer service channel. Different customer service channels will require different policies. For example, social media response times may be longer than in-app chat responses. (Pro Tip: Use Gorgias Statistics to understand your existing response times per channel to help you craft these SLAs).
- Build in procedures for worst-case scenarios. Your website might crash, you might have more customers than expected, or there could be other unexpected issues — plan ahead to make sure you aren’t caught off-guard.
- Proactively communicate the SLA to your agents and customers. The value of your SLA depends on both of these stakeholder groups understanding the terms, so make sure you communicate it to your agents, to your customers through your helpdesk, and key places on your website (contact us page, live chat widget, etc.).
Berkey Filters, an online retailer that sells water purification systems, does a great job of sharing its SLA for live messaging channels with customers. Their Help page acts as a sort of customer support landing page, setting expectations with customers about the fastest way to reach the team — 2 minutes, for SMS and live chat support.
2. Leverage automation for self-serve support
Your agents have more important things to do than answering the same basic questions over and over (and over and over). The trick? Setting up self-service resources to help customers help themselves.
This includes making information easily accessible by leveraging automation to answer simple or repetitive questions (e.g. “What size am I?”) and making sure your FAQ pages are up-to-date.
With tools like Gorgias, you can even use AI to automatically suggest articles when customers ask last-minute questions in the chat.
Some examples of ecommerce brands taking help centers to the next level are:
- Loop Earplug’s Help Center has easy-to-identify FAQ categories with illustrated buttons. Customers can quickly find the answers they need rather than making them sort through a massive drop-down menu of questions and solutions.
- Steve Madden's Order Management Flows help customers quickly view the status of their orders, request refunds, or report an order issue.
- BrüMate's Flows help their customers easily find the perfect product through their self-service center.
- Topical’s Quick Response Flows answer common customer questions in the chat widget, deflecting 69% of tickets that would have otherwise required agent attention and wait time for customers.
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3. Forecast your ticket volume
Gorgias merchant data shows that the average ecommerce business will see a 20% spike in ticket volume during BFCM. That increase in volume can cripple a support team if you don’t take the time to forecast your ticket volume and staff accordingly. You’ll want to make sure your team has the capacity to answer revenue-driving questions in a timely way so your customers don’t abandon carts due to wait times.
Proactive and data-driven forecasting is the key to reducing wait times and increasing revenue on BFCM. Relying on guesswork or reactive staffing measures will likely leave you with burned-out agents and unhappy customers (not to mention tanking CSAT and NPS).
Or, you may find yourself overstaffed and wasting valuable resources on excess headcount, offsetting any bfcm sales you make. Balancing these two extremes can only be done with a strong forecasting strategy.
If you’re unsure of where to start with your strategy, check out the battle-tested, three-step framework for customer service forecasting, the CEO of HelpFlow, Jon Tucker developed. He manages a 24/7 live chat and customer service team for over 100 brands with this strategy, so you know it’s good stuff! Here’s the Cliffnotes version:
- Calculate your contact rate (i.e. transaction-to-ticket ratio)
To calculate your contact ratio, simply:
- Pull your transaction count for a given period (in Shopify’s UI you can find it under Analytics > Reports)
- Pull your ticket volume for the same time period from Gorgias or a similar customer service platform (pictured in the red frame below)
- Divide ticket volume by transaction volume to calculate your ratio (e.g. 400 tickets divided by 1,000 transactions would yield a contact rate of 40%)
As a benchmark, HelpFlow usually sees a contact rate of 30-50% for stores that haven’t yet streamlined their customer service experience, and 20% for those with more optimized, automated processes.
Use your contact rate to project ticket volume
Once you have your overall contact rate, the next step is to estimate how many orders you'll experience over BFCM. Your estimated order volume and your average contact rate are the two ingredients you need to calculate the estimated ticket volume.
To build a projection of order volume, look at your historical data for:
- Order volume from BFCM the previous year
- Business growth over the last year
- Market trends surrounding BFCM for the current year
Once you forecast ticket volume, the next step is to determine how many team members you need to handle the volume.
Estimate the number of agents needed for the holiday season, based on past capacity
Start by assessing the number of tickets each agent has the capacity for and then divide the number of forecasted ticket volumes by that number to determine how many agents you need for the holidays.
To calculate agent capacity per full-time agent:
- Run a report for the total number of tickets resolved per full-time agent over a specific period using the agent statistics in your helpdesk (in Gorgias, it’s under Statistics > Agents)
- Use the average number to set a benchmark for agent capacity (this number will vary by agent, but an average will give you a good working estimate)
- Next, divide the forecasted ticket volume total by the average agent capacity to find how many agents you will need.
Your agent capacity will vary significantly based on your business, agents, and customer service operation. For example, HelpFlow typically sees anywhere from 40 to 60 tickets per day per agent as a healthy benchmark. And, across Gorgias customers, we see an average of ~60 tickets per day per agent in healthy support organizations.
As a general rule, building in a buffer is a good idea, especially if this is your first year creating your forecasting strategy and there may be some variance in the numbers.
4. Find ways to get more customer service help
While hiring additional customer service agents might seem like an easy solution to the BFCM madness, the unfortunate reality is it’s hardly the time to ramp up new employees.
It’s better to first take a hard look at your existing processes and see where you can optimize for the team you already have, and/or outsource to seasoned pros. This will not only help you run your customer service more effectively but will also help you avoid excess headcount after the holidays.
Offer your existing agents overtime
After you’ve optimized your existing process, consider offering your current agents overtime pay rather than hiring unseasoned agents that would be in excess come January.
For example, if you typically have five agents working eight-hour days, offer an additional 90 minutes each day during the holidays at a holiday-exclusive overtime pay rate. By doing this you can add the equivalent of another full-time agent (i.e. 90 mins per day x 5 agents = 7.5h of workload per day).
Here are some tips from Tucker, to maximize the impact of team overtime:
- Don’t surprise your team with overtime: Keep them informed of upcoming volume so they’re not blindsided and resentful for being asked to extend their shifts.
- Cultivate a sense of comradery: Keep your team informed of forecasts and potential issues — and brainstorm solutions together. This not only creates a sense of teamwork that makes overtime easier to implement but you also may uncover solutions you haven’t thought of.
- Show your appreciation: Offering time-and-a-half pay for overtime hours is a great incentive for agents, and will most likely be more cost-effective than letting sales and customer satisfaction slip.
Agent burnout is a real problem, especially since the pandemic, so be careful asking for too much overtime from your current agents. However, it can be a great short-term solution, especially if you have a healthy team culture. Just make sure you’re following any relevant HR rules and regulations — the penalties can be severe if you aren’t careful.
Bring in an outsourcing agency or BPO
If the amount of overtime your team can work won’t bridge the gap in headcount needed during the holidays, it’s time to look externally for resources. But be forewarned, not all Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) or customer service outsourcing agencies are created equal.
Choosing the right partner agency
“A great outsourcing agency or BPO should be providing advice to make your team more efficient, not just providing temporary agents,” says Tucker. “The net result of finding the right partner is not only the additional tickets from their agents but also the increased output from your existing team.”
Tucker said some of the best ways to find a great customer service vendor is to:
- Ask your helpdesk provider for recommendations: At Gorgias, we have an entire partner program with talented teams that can help you scale (here’s HelpFlow’s partner page).
- Vet your potential agencies’ training processes: This training should be extremely methodical, robust, and agency-driven — it’s a red flag if you’re expected to train their temporary agents.
- Look for an agent turnover rate of less than 10%: It’s common for customer service agencies to have turnover rates of 30% or higher, which means you will be constantly onboarding new hires. (HelpFlow’s turnover rate is only 1% per year, so you’ll get experienced, fully-ramped agents who can hit the ground running during BFCM)
- Seek an agency that asks questions: If they seem desperate for business and fail to dig into the mechanics of your business to know if they can help, it’s a sign they won’t go deep on training either.
5. Double down on chat for BFCM support
Imagine a customer is rushing to get a deal on that one item their kid really wanted for Christmas. They only get as far as the product page when they realize they’re not sure which model is compatible with their kid’s current tech setup though. So, they call your customer support line, but agents are slammed because it’s BFCM and the estimated wait time is over 20 minutes.
The customer, wanting to make sure they get this special gift while it’s still in stock, quickly searches Google for the specs. They land on the site of another retailer that has the product in stock at a comparable price. Better yet, before they even have a chance to try and find the information themselves, a friendly chat assistant welcomes them and asks if they need help finding anything.
The chat conversation quickly helps them determine what model they need and even sends them a direct link to the product page for it after just a brief dialogue. The customer, rather than shuffling through all their tabs to find the other retailer’s site, decide they might as well just purchase the item on the second site since they’re already on the exact product page they need.
This is what chat does best; they help customers while they’re in the flow of shopping. Wherever your customers are on the site, chat keeps all of the information right at their fingertips so they stay on-site and in the online shopping flow. According to recent studies, chat can boost conversion rates by as much as 12%!
With a tool like Gorgias, you can set up chat campaigns that target customers and automatically pop-up based on browsing behavior, pages visited, dwell time, and more. You can use these chat campaigns to offer real-time support, deal notifications, offer unique incentives, and more.
Learn more about how chat campaigns can help you improve the pre-sales customer experience and drive more sales during BFCM (and beyond).
How Gorgias helps support teams drive revenue on Black Friday and Cyber Monday
If your BFCM strategy over-relies on expensive marketing ideas to win new customers, you’re missing out. Of course, acquiring customers is important — but their value is only truly realized if you can keep them around.
According to Gorgias data, repeat customers make up only 21% of the average brand’s customer base but generate 44% of that brand’s revenue because they shop more often and place higher-value orders.
The easiest way to cultivate customer retention beyond the holiday season is through great customer support. And, the best way to provide great customer support is by giving your customer service teams the tools they need to streamline operations.
Gorgias helps empowers your support teams to retain customers by:
- Centralizing interactions across all ecommerce channels through powerful integrations to reduce tedious tab switching
- Automating answers to common requests to skip mind-numbing questions and reduce overall ticket volume to manageable levels
- Empowering agents to engage in meaningful customer interactions by automating repetitive tasks like ticket triage and tagging and updating orders
- Boosting sales with pre-sales support, proactive chat campaigns, product quizzes, and more features that power upsells and cross-sells
- Providing the data needed to continually optimize for the best agent and customer experience
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85+ Helpful Customer Service Statistics for 2023
Looking for some customer support statistics to develop your business strategy for 2023? You’re in the right place.
Understanding customer expectations and their impacts on your business is a great way to improve your company’s customer service. For example, it can help you:
- Make your request for more support resources more compelling and data-backed
- Inform your strategy, including deciding where to invest
- Benchmark your performance against similar companies
In this post, we’ve gathered tons of customer support statistics all in one place so you can understand the objective numbers behind the state of customer service as it stands now.
Customer service stats takeaways
Technology has driven the evolution of ecommerce in many ways, and the same trend rings true when it comes to customer service. Some of the biggest takeaways from this data include:
- Customer expectations are growing. 79% of businesses believe that customers are smarter and more informed now than in the past. They expect A+ service from every brand. Bad customer service experiences will even cause shoppers to look for alternative options.
- Seamless cross-channel journeys are challenging, but essential. 53% of consumers say customer support interactions feel “fragmented.” This is a critical challenge, as customers expect the same experience regardless of when and how they’re interacting with brands and service teams.
- Artificial intelligence (AI) is here. 64% of service professionals who use AI believe it allows them to personalize and improve the service they provide. AI technology is a cost-effective way for brands to keep up. And modern consumers are warming up to the idea, easing concerns about AI leading to bad experiences and issues with privacy, trust, and ethics.
Recommended reading: 8 Customer Service Trends for 2023
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The state of customer service in 2023
Excellent customer service is becoming both more challenging and a bigger competitive advantage than ever before. To deliver on that, brands have to overcome the challenge of high-effort, disconnected experiences.
- 88% of customers say the experience a brand provides is equally as important as the product or services it sells. This is up from 80% in 2020. Consider a good customer service experience one of the most important things you can sell. (Source: State of the Connect Customer report, Salesforce)
- 53% of consumers say customer support interactions feel “fragmented.” This is often due to hold times, handoffs to other customer service representatives, and ill-equipped customer service reps. (Source: State of the Connect Customer report, Salesforce)
- 13% of shoppers believe it takes minimal effort to get their issues resolved. (Source: State of the Connect Customer report, Salesforce)
- 29% of consumers feel like it takes “a lot” of effort to find solutions to their service issues. (Source: State of the Connect Customer report, Salesforce)
- Simplifying the customer journey while simultaneously reducing call volumes and costs is one of the top three customer service priorities for businesses in 2022. (Source: The State of Customer Care Survey 2022, McKinsey & Company)
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- 79% of businesses believe that customers are smarter and more informed now than in the past. (Source: HubSpot Annual State of Service in 2022)
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- 85% of businesses believe that customers are more likely to share both positive and negative experiences in 2022 than in the past. This could have a huge impact on your company’s word of mouth — a big concern if you’re offering poor customer service experiences. (Source: HubSpot Annual State of Service in 2022)
- 27% of customers who place an order reach out to support at some point in the buying journey, based on data from 12k ecommerce brands. (Source: Gorgias data)
- Brands receive an average of 882 monthly tickets, based on data from 12k ecommerce brands. (Source: Gorgias data)
- 61% of customer care leaders have experienced an increase in total calls in 2022. They cite “increased contacts per customer” and a growing customer base as the leading causes. (Source: The State of Customer Care Survey 2022, McKinsey & Company)
- Brands’ top four customer service priorities in 2022 are creating a great customer experience (45%), customer success (37%), customer retention (35%), and customer engagement(33%). (Source: HubSpot Annual State of Service in 2022)
- 88% of customer service leaders say customer expectations have soared to an “alltime high” in 2022. (Source: HubSpot Annual State of Service in 2022)
- 83% of customers expect to be able to resolve their complex issues with just a single customer support representative. (Source: The State of Customer Care Survey 2022, McKinsey & Company)
The top 10 reasons customers reach out to (ecommerce) support teams (based on a Gorgias survey of 12,000 ecommerce sites) are:
- Order status
- Returns
- Pre-sale product questions
- Shipping questions when deliveries aren’t received
- Order change
- Order cancellation
- Missing an item from an order
- Marketing
- Negative customer feedback
- Warranty questions
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Customer service benchmarks
Customer service is increasingly important, and average response times are decreasing. Benchmarks are helpful to keep in mind to ensure you’re competitive, but it’s equally important to set your own benchmarks and compete against yourself.
- Ecommerce businesses have an average Net Promoter Score (NPS) of 50. (Source: Retently)
- The customer satisfaction rating (CSAT) on Gorgias is 4.55. (Source: Gorgias data)
- Customer support agents handle an average of 1 ticket per hour. (Source Gorgias data)
- Brands have an average of 3 active agents at any given time. (Source: Gorgias data)
- The average resolution time is 18.1 hours. (Source: Gorgias data)
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- The average first response time is 11.4 hours. (Source: Gorgias data)
- The average first response time on Facebook is 10 hours. (Source: Gorgias data)
- The average first response time on email is 7 hours and 34 minutes. (Source: Gorgias data)
- The average first response time via contact form is 11 hours and 25 minutes. (Source: Gorgias data)
- The average first response time on live chat is 42 minutes. (Source: Gorgias data)
- The average first response time on SMS is 35 minutes hours. (Source: Gorgias data)
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- The recommended average resolution time is same-day for email. (Source: Gorgias)
- The recommended average resolution time for SMS tickets is 10 minutes. (Source: Gorgias). (Source: Gorgias)
- Live online chat support queries are typically resolved in under 10 minutes. (Source: Gorgias)
- Customer support interactions over the phone are best resolved in 1 call. (Source: Gorgias)
- Social media queries should ideally have a same-day resolution for comments and a 10-minute resolution for DMs. (Source: Gorgias)
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Want to get better at measuring your service? Check out our guide to customer service metrics.
The importance of great customer service (and danger of poor customer service)
Customer service impacts the bottom line, and customers are willing to share their experiences — good or bad. It also builds trust with shoppers, making them more eager to make a purchase and build a lasting relationship with your brand.
- 94% of customer respondents say the “treatment of customers” is the top influence on their purchase decisions. (Source: State of the Connect Customer report, Salesforce)
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- Improving the customer experience can increase sales revenues by 2%–7% and profitability by 1%–2%. (Source: Prediction: The future of Customer Experience, McKinsey & Company)
- Improvements to customer service also boost overall shareholder return by 7%–10%. (Source: Prediction: The future of Customer Experience, McKinsey & Company)
- 48% of customers will seek out competing brands for better customer service. (Source: State of the Connect Customer report, Salesforce)
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- 74% of customers say it’s more important now than before the pandemic for brands to communicate honestly and transparently. (Source: State of the Connect Customer report, Salesforce)
- 62% of customers feel an emotional connection to the brands they buy from most, which is amazing for customer loyalty. Impersonal interactions, including irrelevant offers or waiting on hold, damage those relationships. (Source: State of the Connect Customer report, Salesforce)
- Repeat customers account for only 21% of customers, but generate 44% of revenue and 46% of orders. (Source: Gorgias)
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- 94% of shoppers say they’re likely to make a repeat purchase after a positive customer service experience. (Source: State of the Connect Customer report, Salesforce)
- 82% of customers have recommended a company because they had a positive customer service experience. (Source: State of the Connect Customer report, Salesforce)
- 80% of consumers will even forgive brands after they made a mistake, so long as it’s followed up with good customer service. (Source: State of the Connect Customer report, Salesforce)
- 78% of consumers have made purchase decisions based on their customer service experiences. (Source: State of the Connect Customer report, Salesforce)
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- 68% of customers trust businesses are telling the truth in 2022, compared to 59% in 2020. (Source: State of the Connect Customer report, Salesforce)
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- 96% of customers say excellent customer service builds trust. (Source: State of the Connect Customer report, Salesforce)
- Repeat customers drive 300% more revenue than new customers. (Source: Gorgias)
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Customer service teams and employees
Challenges with employee retention have led to reduced quality in terms of service standards. Brands with strong customer service training and strong, loyal service teams stand to gain a competitive advantage.
- In 2021, nearly half of customer care managers faced increased employee attrition. (This was largely because up to 85% of the workforce shifted to working from home in 2020–2021). (Source: The State of Customer Care Survey 2022, McKinsey & Company)
- The top-cited reason for employees leaving is poaching by competitors—58%—followed by employee dissatisfaction (39%), lack of advancement opportunities (31%), and lack of work–life balance (30%). (Source: The State of Customer Care Survey 2022, McKinsey & Company)
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- 41% of service business leaders say it takes three to six months to train a new employee. 20% say it takes more than six months. (Source: The State of Customer Care Survey 2022, McKinsey & Company)
- “Retaining and developing the best people” was one of the top three customer service priorities for businesses in 2022. (Source: The State of Customer Care Survey 2022, McKinsey & Company)
- According to service leaders, the most effective ways to retain top customer service talent is through focusing on motivating and building trust with employees (34%), encouraging leaders to act on employee feedback (24%), offering new career opportunities (11%), and aligning their work to the overall company’s goals and values (11%). (Source: The State of Customer Care Survey 2022, McKinsey & Company)
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- According to 54% of customer service professionals, peer relationships are the best way to learn. 50% learn by attending conferences and 39% from formal mentors. (Source: HubSpot Annual State of Service in 2022)
- Service professionals actively learn new skills for their roles “a few times a month or more often” (32%), “about once a month” (30%), or “a few times a year” (28%). (Source: HubSpot Annual State of Service in 2022)
Personalization in customer service statistics
Customers continue to expect more relevant messaging and promotion from brands, including personalized customer support. And their hesitations around data privacy and related technologies are waning, making them more open to sharing information to receive improved customer service interactions.
- 73% of customers expect brands to understand their personal customer needs. (Source: State of the Connect Customer report, Salesforce)
- 62% of shoppers expect brands to anticipate their needs. (Source: State of the Connect Customer report, Salesforce)
- 56% of shoppers expect all offers to be personalized to them. (Source: State of the Connect Customer report, Salesforce)
- 56% of customers feel like brands just treat them as a number, not as a person to build a relationship with. (Source: State of the Connect Customer report, Salesforce)
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- 46% of consumers would share their style preferences if it meant they would receive personalized offers and rewards. (Source: State of the Connect Customer report, Salesforce)
- 61% of consumers feel comfortable with brands using their personal information transparently and beneficially. This is an increase from 52% in 2020. (Source: State of the Connect Customer report, Salesforce)
- Almost 80% of consumers say that when brands are transparent about how they use their data to provide personalized experiences, it makes them trust the brand more. (Source: State of the Connect Customer report, Salesforce)
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Customer service tools and platforms
Technology is key to delivering exceptional customer service experiences. The right tools, from helpdesks to live chat support apps, are essential to meeting today’s customer expectations.
- Only 12% of digital platforms are “highly integrated.” (Source: The State of Customer Care Survey 2022, McKinsey & Company)
- There are 94 help desk solutions currently available in the market. Gorgias has the top spot. (Source: Datanyze)
- Gorgias customers improve ticket resolution by 34% by adding phone support. (Source: Gorgias)
- 86% of live chat tickets end with a satisfied customer. (Source: Gorgias)
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- 77% of businesses use some form of digital means to provide customer service and assistance, yet only 10% of new digital platforms are fully taken advantage of by customers. (Source: The State of Customer Care Survey 2022, McKinsey & Company)
- 95% of customer service leaders believe a customer relationship management (CRM) platform can help boost productivity. (Source: HubSpot Annual State of Service in 2022)
- 36% of brands track NPS scores as a way to listen to customers. (Source: HubSpot Annual State of Service in 2022)
Multichannel customer service statistics
The number of communication channels customers can use to interact with brands (and vice a versa) is constantly increasing. This number is only going to grow, so brands need to understand not only how to leverage each customer service channel but also how to integrate all the touchpoints into a single synonymous customer experience.
Synergy across an omnichannel support experience is the new baseline for good service.
- 43% of shoppers prefer to use non-digital channels for customer service, preferring in-person or phone support. (Source: State of the Connect Customer report, Salesforce)
- 83% of shoppers say they have more brand loyalty when customer service is consistent across departments. (Source: State of the Connect Customer report, Salesforce)
- 86% of live chat tickets end with a satisfied customer—more specifically, a 4- or 5-star CSAT rating. (Source: Gorgias)
- Businesses plan to increase digital customer interactions by 1.5 times by 2024. (Source: The State of Customer Care Survey 2022, McKinsey & Company)
AI and automation in customer service
Artificial intelligence (AI) enables more self-service options, as well as automations. Effective use of support automation technology can boost efficiency and reduce resolution and response times.
- Nearly 80% of businesses have experienced an increase in customer adoption of self-service customer support channels, including chatbots. (Source: State of the Connect Customer report, Salesforce)
- Only 20% of online support interactions are completely self-serviced and unassisted. (Source: The State of Customer Care Survey 2022, McKinsey & Company)
- Nearly two-thirds of customer care leaders say that higher-quality self-service options have contributed significantly to reduced call volumes. (Source: The State of Customer Care Survey 2022, McKinsey & Company)
- 14% of Gorgias tickets are automated. (Source: Gorgias data)
- The top 5% of Gorgias Automate users automate 45% of all interactions (source: Gorgias).
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- 79% of customer service professionals believe AI is “somewhat to very important” to their jobs. (Source: HubSpot)
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- 64% of service professionals who use AI believe it allows them to personalize and improve the service they provide. (Source: HubSpot)
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- 65% of customer service tasks are automated. (Source: The State of Customer Care Survey 2022, McKinsey & Company)
- 57% of consumers trust companies to use AI ethically. (Source: The State of Customer Care Survey 2022, McKinsey & Company)
- 72% of shoppers have concerns about the ethics behind companies’ use of AI. (Source: The State of Customer Care Survey 2022, McKinsey & Company)
- 69% of customers are open to the use of AI if it can improve their experiences. (Source: The State of Customer Care Survey 2022, McKinsey & Company)
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- Only 20% of online support interactions are completely self-serviced and unassisted. (Source: The State of Customer Care Survey 2022, McKinsey & Company)
- Nearly two-thirds of customer care leaders say that higher-quality self-service options have contributed significantly to reduced call volumes. (Source: The State of Customer Care Survey 2022, McKinsey & Company)
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- 88% of consumers expect brands to have self-service support tools. (Source: Statista)
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- In 2022, 58% of customers have used chatbots for simple customer service. (Source: State of the Connect Customer report, Salesforce)
- In 2022, 65% of customers reported having used self-service account portals for service. (Source: State of the Connect Customer report, Salesforce)
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- 66% of Millennials prefer self-service for simple support cases, compared to 61% of Gen Zers, 59% of Gen Xers, and 49% of Baby Boomers. (Source: State of the Connect Customer report, Salesforce)
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The future of customer service
Anticipating future trends and advancements can help you stay ahead of the curve. Customer expectations will continue to rise, touchpoints will become increasingly complex, and AI will play a growing role in delivering top-notch service.
- 58% of service leaders believe call center volumes will continue to increase over the next 18 months. (Source: The State of Customer Care Survey 2022, McKinsey & Company)
- Digital channels will become increasingly important. Millennials and Gen Zers are the most digitally savvy. Each of these generations, for example, is 1.6x more likely than Baby Boomers to prefer digital channels. (Source: State of the Connect Customer report, Salesforce)
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- AI-powered self-service options are also going to grow. Nearly 80% of businesses have experienced an increase in customer adoption of self-service customer support channels, including chatbots. (Source: State of the Connect Customer report, Salesforce)
Are you ready to improve your customer service in 2023?
Now that you know the latest customer experience statistics in 2023, check out our list of customer service best practices to put this knowledge into action and become a more customer-centric company to attract and retain loyal customers.
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