Gorgias: Driving Sales Through AI powered CX

by Andrew Cox

In many companies, departments are split into two groups - cost centres and profit centres. Traditionally, customer service is viewed as a cost centre, offering little in the way of profitability.

But there's much more to customer support than answering phone calls and taking care of complaints and returns. In fact, with the right strategy, and the right technology, you can transform your customer support centre into a powerful asset that drives sales, profits, and growth.

Our partner, Gorgias, specialises in this area. Read on to discover how this platform offers ecommerce businesses precisely what they need to grow through better customer service.

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What Is Gorgias, And What Do They Do?

Gorgias is a leading customer helpdesk built for ecommerce stores, which partners with merchants across multiple major platforms, including Shopify, BigCommerce, and Magento. As of 2020, Gorgias works with over 5,000 brands, like Steve Madden, White Fox, Bared Footwear, Honey Birdette, KOOKAI, and many more.

Independent ecommerce brands can partner with Gorgias to turn their customer support centre into a viable sales channel that drives leads and profits.

Gorgias uses automation technology to save time and money for ecommerce teams, freeing human support agents from mundane, repetitive tasks. In doing so, companies have more resources on hand to invest in building stronger customer relationships and focus on strategy and meaningful customer interactions that will drive a higher return on investment (ROI).

Why Customer Support Matters In Ecommerce

Every ecommerce store owner wants to generate more sales. Scaling operations to achieve sustainable growth is always a top priority in any industry. While many store owners use live chat to deal with customer queries and complaints, relatively few actually consider how they can use the same channel to increase sales.

In real-time, you have an excellent opportunity to convince people to purchase, especially if you have just satisfied their previous queries. According to a Forbes round-up, 84% of businesses that made improvements to their customer experience reported an increase in revenue.

How Customer Support Can Become A Sales Strategy

With better customer support, you can improve retention rates and increase revenue. Therefore, it's clear that great customer service is the foundation of sales growth.

Here are seven steps to help you enhance customer support and satisfaction:

1. Run periodic customer support audits to assess your service levels, evaluate customer feedback, and identify areas that need improvement. With this analysis, you should be able to determine how to continually improve the customer experience.

2. Make it easy for shoppers to get in touch by providing clear contact details on your website, social media pages, emails, and Google My Business listing.

3. Personalise your customer support interactions to make people feel valued. Live chatbots can humanise conversations through personalisation and humour, providing a memorable experience for each customer while also resolving their issues.

4. Use data insights to set up automations, which will optimise the support system, and give your team more time to focus on strategy and analysis.

5. Maintain rich customer profiles that include full details on customer's onsite behaviours, purchases, and past live chat conversations. The more you know your audience, the better you can serve them.

6. Provide little wins by encouraging your support agents to create coupons, refund and cancel orders, and offer exclusive discounts. These kickbacks engender trust with customers, encouraging them to come back for more.

7. Track progress on all channels to determine how different service approaches work with your customer base.

Dr. Graeme McLean from the University of Strathclyde, explains that "empathy and assurance conveyed by a live chat assistant during a consumer's decision-making process significantly influences consumers to make a purchase, including high-value purchases such as booking a holiday on a travel provider's website."

Put simply: When you establish a well-optimised customer support system, sales organically increase as a direct result of customer satisfaction.

Why Gorgias Excel at Customer Support

Gorgias is ideal for fast-growing online stores that need a scalable ecommerce platform. Brands on Shopify, BigCommerce or Magento 2 need easy integrations with a range of ecommerce apps and can benefit from automating many tasks based on consumer data.

Here are some of the best benefits of Gorgias for ecommerce store owners:

An all-in-one customer support platform that brings all your customer communication channels into a centralised dashboard. This holistic view displays customer data – from customer communication history and order history – from multiple sources, including email, live chat, phone, Facebook Messenger, Instagram, and SMS, making it easy to create orders, edit orders, modify subscriptions, and refund payments.

Native social media functions to automate repetitive actions, such as likes and hides, which saves time and effort.

Drive sales through comments. The dashboard makes it easy to provide quick responses to organic post comments and Messenger conversations. In doing so, this can potentially increase sales and advertising ROI Including social media segmentation to identify and convert interactions into upsell and cross-sell opportunities.

Tracking sales info over text messages, social media interactions, and live chat conversations to unlock more sales opportunities and new leads. In effect, you empower and turn your support agents into salespeople.

Integrations with Shopify, BigCommerce, and Magento, as well as other eCommerce apps like Klaviyo, Okendo, Reviews.io, Yotpo, Smile, Swell, Attentive, ChannelReply, Aircall, and Postscript.

Artificial intelligence (AI) technology that runs customer support bots and automated responses for about 30% of common support tickets.

Case Study: Streamline and grow

Since its inception in 2015, the Gorgias team has helped thousands of companies reach their growth goals over the years. One of the most impressive projects was their partnership with Death Wish Coffee Co.

The Challenge

Coffee is not an especially innovative product, so it can be a tough market to crack for any newcomer.

The founder of Death Wish Coffee Co. Mike Brown believes great coffee is strong coffee. As such, his company dares to go beyond the normal caffeine kick by combining a unique blend of beans and roasting technique that creates an ultra-strong morning brew.

Strong but Small

Not content with being just another coffee shop in Saratoga Springs, Brown and his team set ambitious goals of doubling in size. If they were going to take their products global, they knew they needed the right partner.

Growing by 200% sounds good in theory. In reality, Death Wish Coffee Co. faced an influx of new support tickets, putting their small team under pressure. Their previous customer helpdesk provider was good, but as the company began to scale, problems arose.

The provider's clunky API made it hard to integrate with Shopify apps, and the level of support just wasn't enough. Soon, the Death Wish team realised change was needed.

"We're all about the relentless pursuit of being the best that we can be as a business," explains Caiden Tuller, Customer Relations Manager. "Gorgias was the only solution that was actually going to allow us to take it to that level."

Solution

While they may be mighty, the Death Wish team is limited in numbers. Therefore, they couldn't afford to get bogged down in complicated drill-down reports and complex data.

As their range expanded, the team needed a streamlined, easy-to-understand system to oversee their store and the customer onsite behaviours and conversations around each product.

Seamless Integrations For Smarter Decision-making

Gorgias integrates seamlessly with all the apps Death Wish was using, including Klaviyo, Smile.io, and ReCharge. Forming the new partnership allowed Death Wish to develop a customised backend that unified their support system, bringing all channels and apps together.

The central dashboard and timeline format of the customer response stream allowed the Death Wish team to glean quick insights, and make smarter, informed decisions in real-time.

With this clean and clear user interface, the Death Wish team no longer waste time digging around in multiple tools and windows to draw insights or understand how best to serve their customers. Through the Gorgias dashboard, Brown and his team can view customer support metrics and statistics within seconds.

Built-in bot

For this transformation to truly be a success, Gorgias needed to find ways to free up time for the Death Wish team. With machine learning technology and automation, there was scope to save team members even 15 or 20 minutes a day to turn their attention to strategy and grow the business.

Gorgias developed a powerful built-in bot that can quickly cancel duplicate orders and merge customer features. With the bot taking charge of replying to customers, customer satisfaction is on the rise, and the Death Wish team has more time on their hands.

Results

"Every time I have the opportunity to use the feature, it makes me excited because it's so helpful," claims Tuller. "The tool is able to make those smart decisions for us and make those replies for us, and that saves so much time. It's been incredible."

Since switching to Gorgias, the customer support team at Death Wish Coffee Co. has reclaimed valuable lost time through the seamless backend and centralised, intuitive dashboard. With machine learning at the heart of operations, the team has hit its 200% growth goal and continues to scale.

Wrap Up: Gorgias is Made for Ecommerce Growth

We live in a customer-centric age. By putting your customers first and focusing on delivering a better online shopping experience, your store can nurture trust, build stronger relationships, and encourage brand loyalty. Over time, this approach translates to more customers, more referrals, and sustainable growth.

Gorgias is the ideal platform for improving customer support, giving ecommerce store owners a potent new sales channel and a system they can scale with for years to come.