Use gorgias multi-channel help hotline to support inquiries.

Gorgias is a multi-channel service desk software, which can help e-commerce merchants to make inquiries with sales support. By managing all support tickets from one place and automatically responding to frequent requests, gorgias provides support agents with a unified view of customers, so they can provide better and faster services. In this interview, GorgiasBD and the head of partner PhilippeRoireau discussed the advantages of a unified support platform and explained how to balance automation and real-time customer support.

Please describe the story behind the company: what inspired this idea and how it developed to this day? I am the head of Gore Ghias's business development and partners. We are an e-commerce service desk, serving more than 4,500 e-commerce brands. We help them manage all their communications in a place closely connected to their CMS platforms (such as Shopify, BigCommerce or Magento). We help customer service agents to become super agents, so that they can handle queries faster and more effectively.

About 90% of our customers are Shopify stores, ranging from direct selling brands that want to save a little time every day to consumer brands or solopreneur, to organizations with hundreds of customer service agents. We provide them with an interface to help them manage communication with large-scale customers. It can go through different channels, such as Facebook, email, chat or SMS, all of which will gather in the workplace.

What is the typical use case of gorgias? An example of gorgias's use case is that someone contacted your company to return the goods they bought. The customer service agent will receive the request in Gorgia format. They don't have to log on to different platforms to handle returns, just click a button linked to the return platform. So, even if we don't return the goods, we can achieve it through our partner's solution, which is embedded in our software.

Another use case is that the client replies to the automatically generated SMS. The current SMS platform performs well in sending outbound marketing information, but it does not perform well in managing communication with customers. With gorgias, all SMS communications can be further processed through the customer service help desk.

The following is a brief introduction of gorgias:

Some common mistakes in customer support automation and how to avoid it. When people try to realize customer support automation, one of the most common mistakes is bill transfer. Instead of asking customers to consult the customer service team, they try to divert their attention infinitely through FAQ articles and other types of inaccurate robots. Therefore, we are working hard to eliminate common problems that are irrelevant or inaccurate to the customer's inquiry in order to deal with this situation. We need to create more flexible and accurate automation for our customers. There is a correct way to realize automation. We see today that leading brands have successfully automated about 20% of customer service inquiries. 20% is the best level you can achieve without sacrificing the quality of interaction.

What kind of data do you collect and what do you hope to get from it? Our mission is to provide enterprises with tools to achieve excellent customer service. We collect data on the number of orders and customers. In fact, we have something that others don't have, which is more related to the performance of the customer service team. If sales are promoted after communication with customer support department, we can assign it to agents and give them credit. The background here is that we can prove to enterprises and customer service leaders that they are creating sales. We want to empower these people and prove that even with automation, they are still relevant to the business, because customer service is the key to online sales. How does the 20 19 coronavirus disease affect your business and customers?

We noticed that in the weeks before the COVID-19 outbreak, the income dropped. At that time, people will certainly worry and be more cautious about consumption. But now, many of our customers see the great attraction of their products, which leads to the same number of customer inquiries. Almost overnight, the number of our customers increased by 40%. As all enterprises are closed, the number of sales and customer service inquiries they handle online has brought great pressure to their enterprises. Because we are a leading platform and ecosystem, our customer base has more than doubled in a few months.

What advice do you have for companies undergoing digital transformation in COVID-19? They should have been online six months ago. Whether you are an e-commerce company or an ordinary retailer, you need to display the most modern tools online, and now, Shopify and BigCommerce are leading these tools. Once you enter this ecosystem, you don't need to develop all these tools internally, so you can focus on having an excellent product and logistics.

Speaking of technology, there are some ready-made technologies that can be deployed quickly. If your technology is not the latest, it will hinder you, but compared with five or ten years ago, it is relatively easy to make the transition now. Five or ten years ago, you still needed to develop some of these technologies yourself. Now everything is plug and play, anyone can do it, without too much technical knowledge. They just need to know what is the best tool to meet their needs. So my advice is not to wait! Join Shopify or BigCommerce as soon as possible.

What recent trends or technologies have you found particularly interesting? As we discussed before, an interesting thing we found is the chat robot. A few years ago, the robot they developed didn't seem as promising as we thought, but now the robot they developed is not as promising as we thought. On the contrary, our method gives the customer service agent super capabilities by connecting all technologies together.

Many companies are committed to different customer experiences. What we need to do is to aggregate all the functions into one interface for the customer service staff to use, so that they don't have to move on multiple platforms, because they combine all these technologies to work together.

Having a powerful API that partners can build and ensuring that all these solutions can communicate with each other, even if they are developed by different companies, is one of the key factors to promote innovation and improve efficiency. Shopify is a good example, because it enables hundreds of small entrepreneurs to successfully develop based on their API.

The future is the integration and solution I just mentioned. The more conversations between solutions and intertwined functions, the more seamless the user experience will be. No enterprise can solve all the problems of front-end or post-purchase customer experience, but having the technology of mutual communication will make the possibilities unlimited.

For example, recharge is subscription software, and Klaviyo is email marketing software. If one of your customers cancels the recharge subscription, you can automatically register in the Klaviyo email campaign to win it back. Achieving these integrations is crucial for developing online platforms and competing with industry giants such as Google and Amazon.