The automation add-on automates simple, repetitive inquiries to give customers instant answers and free your agents to focus on higher-value interactions.
Keeping pace with customer support tickets is a challenge for many ecommerce brands. Too often, support teams are constantly flooded with very simple, repetitive questions that customers instantly want answered (like WISMO, or “Where is my order?).
The sheer volume of these repetitive tickets leads to a few major problems:
- Customers need to wait for busy agents to get answers to simple questions — for these questions, instant information is much more valuable than a human conversation
- Agents are too overwhelmed with tickets tot prioritize complex tickets that need human attention (like escalated tickets, VIP customers, or complicated product/policy questions)
- Brands lose sales because they can’t surface and respond to urgent pre-sales questions (like “I want to buy this, but will it arrive by Christmas?”)
To help brands manage repetitive tickets (and provide an even better experience to customers), we created the automation add-on. The goal behind the add-on is to deflect your most repetitive questions, provide order information, and turn pre-sales questions into enthusiastic purchases — all while making your shopping experience more convenient for your customers.
What is Gorgias’s automation add-on?
The Gorgias automation add-on provides answers to common questions via self-service via your email, Help Center, and chat widget. Your customers can get a quick response (and resolution) around the clock, even when a live agent isn’t available.
The automation add-on is available for Shopify stores and provides your online store with the tools for speedy resolution without human interaction. With automation, you’re conveniently answering questions that don’t require a conversation. Your agents can focus on more important conversations instead of copying and pasting order statuses all day long.
Benefits of the automation add-on
But don’t customers prefer human interaction? Not in all cases. According to Statista, 88% of consumers expect brands to have a self-service support portal. This is especially true when customers are looking for information that shouldn’t need agent interaction.
By using automation, you can give customers the instant information they need while also freeing up agents to focus on conversations that need a personal touch.
Ticket deflection
The automation add-on typically deflects up 20% of tickets (up to 50% for power users). By deflects, we mean that the customer’s issue is resolved without any human interaction.
Reducing repetitive tickets enables agents to answer and spend more time on high-impact tickets that automation can’t handle.
24/7 support
While customers shop online around the clock, your agents aren’t always available to answer questions. The Automation Add-On’s features can handle questions like “Where is my order?” at any time. You can provide 24/7 service for a large chunk of your incoming inquiries without the overhead cost of hiring additional agents.
“Knowing they can reach us 24/7 is a huge thing for our customers, especially international customers. Because they want to get answers no matter what time it is.”
— Caela Castillo, Director of Customer Experience, Jaxxon
Additional revenue
When customers ask pre-sales questions, they’re sending a strong indicator that they’re more likely to make a purchase. And these customers are even more likely to purchase if their pre-sales questions are answered instantly: questions about product sizing, return policies, international shipping, and so on. If they have to wait, they may lose interest.
FAQs and product information in a chat can provide answers and promote your brand — leading to additional revenue. With the automation add-on, this information is front-and-center, leading to more chat engagement — a type of engagement that doesn’t require any waiting.
For example, Gorgias customer RevAir saw a 120% increase in chat engagement since adopting the add-on — all while simultaneously lowering response and resolution times. (More on that below.)
📚 Recommended reading: Learn how Jaxxon boosted revenue by a whopping 46% with help from the Automation Add-on.
Features included in the automation add-on
Any automation should build customer trust in the same way agent interactions would. Whether the customer contacts your company via chat, email, or your help center, the Gorgias automation add-on is designed to manage the replies.
Self-service order management
Since the main questions filling up most brands’ support inboxes are about order status, the automation add-on features a self-service solution. With self-service order management, customers can track, return, and cancel orders within the chat widget or help center themselves.
Order management in the chat widget
A self-service portal in the chat lets customers log in and manage their orders without waiting for an agent. By opening the chat widget that’s already on your website, customers can::
- Track the status of an order
- Return an order, based on the conditions (order created vs. order delivered)
- Report issue with customizable options
- Cancel an order, based on eligibility (unfulfilled, processing, or pending delivery)
Your customers can also see order details, such as shipping, billing, and payment information.
Order management in the Help Center
Your Help Center doesn’t just provide articles to answer questions about your products, shipping, and brand. You can embed self-service order management at the top of your Help Center to let customer manage their orders, just like in the live chat widget described above.
Customized Report Issue Flows
By using customized Report Issue flows, a customer can notify your support team that something is wrong with their order. You can provide different options based on the order, fulfillment, or shipment statuses.
For example:
- I forgot to apply my discount code
- I’d like to change my shipping address
- I’d like to change the delivery date
- My order has been stuck in transit
- I’m past my expected delivery date
You can even personalize the options each customer sees based on the status of their order in Shopify. This way, they’ll only see relevant options — a customer wouldn’t need “My item is damaged” if we know it hasn’t arrived yet.
Once the customer answers the questions prompted by your Report Issue flows, a ticket will be opened for your agents in the Gorgias helpdesk. The flow collects the information needed for your agents to handle the issue.
Quick response flows in chat
The automation add-on doesn’t just provide self-service answers to questions about customers’ orders. With quick response flows, you can provide answers to common questions, like “What is your shipping policy?” This doesn’t just protect your agents from repetitive tickets, it gives customers answers they need to make a confident purchase while they’re actively shopping.
In your automation configuration, you’ll set up a Quick Answers section along with the automated responses.
When the customer clicks on the button in Quick Answers, the chat will provide a response.
Once the automated response is provided, the chat will ask if the answer was helpful. If the customer clicks “No, I need more help” a ticket will be opened in Gorgias. A live agent can then answer the customer’s question.
Autoresponders for common queries
Email has the highest volume for customer support, around 70% of total volume. Reducing email volume by even 5% can have a huge impact on support teams.
Autoresponders can automatically answer routine questions — again, we’ll use “WISMO?” as an example.
The autoresponders use Intent Detection, powered by natural language processing, to detect if incoming emails are related to common topics like tracking or order status.
If Gorgias receives a ticket with a relevant Intent, the Rule will trigger and send the customer the appropriate reply. In the case of “where is my order?” the autoresponder will provide shoppers with a tracking link, resolving the conversation before a ticket was ever created.
If you have the automation add-on, you don’t need to set up the autoresponders! Just click Create Rule in your Grogias account and select from the options under the ✨ Autoresponse section.
Autoreponders in the add-on are owned and updated by Gorgias. While you can create your own Rules from scratch, you also get automatic access to this library of automatic responses that Gorgias monitors and provides.
Self-service statistics
You can measure the impact of the automation add-on’s self-service features by using the Self-Service Statistics Page. The report shows data such as the total number of self-service interactions via chat. You can also see this as a percentage of total interactions.
You can further break this down and look at your quick replies, issues reported, returns, and other interactions. You’ll also be able to see how many tickets were handled by agents after self-service interactions.
From the Self-Service Statistics Page you can gain valuable insights. For example, you can see if a particular product generates a lot of reported issues or return requests. You can also see how your self-service usage changes over time, especially if you add additional quick response flows
How Loop Earplugs used the automation add-on to increase revenue by 43%
Loop Earplugs understands the importance of quick responses for its customers. “Self-service allows our customers to solve their own issues at the click of a button,” said Milan Vanmarcke, Customer Service Manager at Loop Earplugs. “These frequent simple questions are solved instantly.”
Loop Earplugs cleverly used Google Analytics on its FAQs to determine which questions had the highest volume as a starting point, and answered those questions in Quick Response Flows. Loop Earplugs turned ¼ of all chat interactions into pre-sales flows, building customer trust along the way.
“When customers get a quick and honest answer, they often end up buying more than one product in a short span of time,” Vernmarcke noted. As a result of the pre-sales flows, the company has seen a 43% increase in revenue from customer support.
Read more about the impact of the automation add-on on Loop Earplugs.
Swap low-impact interactions for high-impact results
Beyond meeting a customer’s expectations for instant answers, automation can boost your revenue, as Loop Earplugs found.
You have opportunities to promote your merchandise, capture email addresses by offering a discount, or set rules to follow up with new customers. Plus, your human agents will be more free to answer pre-sales questions coming in on chat, or complex, VIP, and escalated tickets that were once buried under a mountain of WISMO requests.
Already a Gorgias customer? Sign up for an automation workshop to learn more about the add-on. Or, if want the add-on today log into Gorgias and go to Settings > Self-service (under Automation) > Your store > ✨Get Automation Features.
Not on Gorgias yet? Book a demo to learn more about the customer service platform built exclusively for ecommerce.
