As soon as your sales hit $1M, you need to start hiring a customer support person, and later on, a customer support team. The thing is, support is a black box.
As soon as your sales hit $1M, you need to start hiring a customer support person, and later on, a customer support team. The thing is, support is a black box: you spend some money on it because you know customer satisfaction is essential for your business, but you have no idea if this is profitable or not.
Here are some pointers about the impact that the money you spend on customer support can have on customer satisfaction and revenue. This study uses the data from 20 Shopify Plus merchants among Gorgias customers, who make on average $10M per year.
Half of your most loyal customers contact support: make sure to treat them well when they do
Say you rely on a small pool of brand promoters who order from you regularly. Regardless of how well you treat them with your marketing, they are going to interact with your support team as well.
What does this mean? If you want to increase your ambassadors’ engagement, make sure that they have a great experience when they ask something to your support team. You can do this by linking Shopify to your helpdesk. Then, you’ll be able to setup a rule to treat requests from your most loyal customers in priority.
Repeat orders at 4x more likely if the customer engages with support: it should be easy to contact your company
If a customer who already bought something from your company reaches out to your support team, their likelihood to purchase again increases by 4.3x.
And this is true for all the merchants we surveyed, even those who don’t invest a lot in customer support. The more touch points your support team has, the better it is for your business. For instance, you’ll have a chance to convert hesitant buyers with a product questions. Or to convert a customer unpleased because of a shipping problem into your best brand ambassador!
Have at least 1 agent per $4M of revenue. Otherwise, first response time will suffer
There’s a direct correlation between the number of support staff you have per million dollars of revenue and the first response time. First response time is the primary driver for customer satisfaction. As a result, you want to make sure to keep first response time under 5 hours.
Otherwise, you’re spending too little on customer support and your business will suffer.
At the end of the day, your investment on customer support will pay off by increasing sales. This post is a first attempt at measuring the impact support can have. If you're interested in this topic, let us know and we'll keep sharing insights about it!
Do you want to get these stats for your store? Create a Gorgias account here, connect Shopify, Facebook and email, send “I want my stats” to support@gorgias.io and we’ll provide those stats to you after one month.
