Aaron Conant 0:18

Happy Tuesday everybody. My name is Aaron Conant. I'm the co-founder, Managing Director of BWG Connect where networking and our cheering group with 1000s of brands who do exactly that, we network and now and share together to stay on top of news trends, strategies, pain points, whatever it is that shaping the digital landscape. That's everything from Amazon to direct consumer to international expansion, you know, performance, marketing, SEO, drop shipping, whatever it might be, we just worked together, I talked with about 30 brands a week to stay on top of those trends. More than happy to spend some time with anybody on the line today, we don't sell anything here. We're just a giant networking group. But it's through those conversations that we get the topics for our events. And so this one's coming up over and over again, a couple of housekeeping items, before we get started. know we're kicking this off at, you know, four to five minutes after the hour, just so you know, we give you plenty of time on the back end, where to wrap this up with at least four to five minutes to go on it as well give you plenty of time to get on to your next meeting without being late. And you know, maybe grab a cup of coffee along the way. The other thing is we want this to be as educational and informational as possible. All of our events are shaped this way, whether it's a virtual event, it's in person we do a lot of small format dinners will do close to 100 next year, if you're in a tier one city, let us know more than happy to put you on the invite list for one of those are in person events, which hopefully we get back to next year, which are closer to like 250 300 grands in a room. You know, any of those are all educational, informational. And so the thing about that is we want you to be able to ask as many questions as you want in real time. So any point in time you have a question, drop it in the chat, you can drop into the question section there. Or you can always just email me Aaron Aaron@bwgconnect.com And that includes you know, an hour after the call, if you forgot to ask something. tomorrow, next week, whatever it is, feel free to reach out, you know, like to stay on top news digital trends and more than happy to knowledge share across everything that's happening. So you know, something that is we kind of jumped into this topic for today. overall trend that I'm hearing that kind of led us here is a lot of brands that are on Amazon, are now over indexed on Amazon. And there's this new strategic shift that brands are going after right now, which is No, I don't want to shut Amazon off. But I don't necessarily want to pour more gasoline on that fire. I want to I want to emphasize more my direct to consumer site, I want to own you know, the traffic the customer, I want to be able to market to them and know who they are. And then you layer on top of that a bunch of stuff that happened with iOS 14.5 and 15. You know, high end emails asking to have not to track all of a sudden, you know, it's gotten a lot harder to get people to your website. And so now there's a huge focus on maximizing the potential of any customer you get there. And so we got some great friends, great partners, over at Gorgias, doing a lot of things in the help desk space as a whole, just come highly recommended over and over again. And Rachel and I finally got connected at retail X and was like, hey, there's something really cool going on here. You know, it'd be great to get jump on and kind of answer some questions, get an overview of what's going on in this space as a whole. And so, you know, Rachel, kind of kick it over, you want to do a brief intro on yourself and Gorgias, that would be awesome, you know, and then we can kind of jump into the content

Rachel Fefer  3:33

as a whole. So I'm good. Yeah, sounds great.

Rachel Fefer 3:36

Thanks for having me on air. Appreciate it.

Rachel Fefer  3:38

Yeah, for sure. Yeah. So

Rachel Fefer 3:39

you know, echoing on what you said, right? The the experience now that that merchants have to live up to to be able to compete with Amazon is high, the bar is high. And in order to do that, they have to create an exceptional customer experience. And a big piece of that is customer support. And how can you make customer support exceptional to wider customers so that they do come back to you and buy directly to you from you. It's never been more important, and especially exacerbated by the pandemic. The need for you know, incredible experiences have never been more important. So, yeah, I'm Rachel Fefer. I'm the director of enterprise partnerships here at Gorgias, excited to talk to you all today about how we can make a customer support the new normal. I'm going to show you some some tips in order to deliver that exceptional experience.

Aaron Conant 4:35

Awesome. So just a quick reminder if you have questions drop into the chat the q&a section there to go to webinar panel or just email them to me Aaron Aaron@bwgconnect.com we'll get them answered. Awesome. Rachel kind of jumped into the the content here.

Rachel Fefer  4:48

Yeah, absolutely. So Gorgias is just just to set the stage. We are the number one helped us for eCommerce merchants and we deliver ultra fast personalized customer conversations for about 8000 merchants globally, including Steve Madden, ego, Netflix, Timbuktu, cravat, and others. And as I said, I'm going to take you today take you through a story of how to deliver exceptional support. And before I do just a little bit of an introduction about me. So I spent seven years actually at a live chat point solution company. And then I spent five years at Magento, Adobe, where I lead the commercial partner sales organization. And back in the mid back in November, in the middle of the pandemic, I came across Gorgias, and I had this realization that wow, it has never been more important for traditional customer support to be so much more than that. And, and how it had to play a more integral role in the brand experience, and allow and how merchants had to create more meaningful connections with their customers. And so and so I joined this company in March, and here I am to tell you about how we can do that. So, about seven years ago, our founders interviewed about 100 eCommerce merchants when creating this company, and they discovered a few major buyer pain points. And they realized that most legacy helps us to not meet the needs of these main buyer pain points, and those were threefold. So one was that the average first contact time from a merchant to the buyer is about 12 hours, and a 17 hour resolution time. And in the age of Amazon, right in the age of instant gratification, this kind of response time just didn't cut it anymore. Second, there was a lack of personalization. So buyers prefer to self serve, but when they can't, they want to actually interact with a human and not be treated as if their ticket. And they don't want to interact with a chatbot or an endless loop voice systems, they want to have a conversation with their brands. And the third kind of modern experience is that they feel like nobody is listening. So they have a conversation in one channel. And they want to end it in another and every time they have a conversation in multiple channels, they're feel like they are repeating themselves. They want the same experience across channels. So not having those, those buyer challenges met, has led to merchants paying the price.

Rachel Fefer 7:24

So the slow response time, and has led to

Rachel Fefer 7:28

high service costs. And the reason why they're slow response time is that merchants were not optimizing use of modern digital channels like live chat and SMS. And that actually leads right to to higher costs, because chat is a fairly cheap way to engage with the customer. On average, just to give you an example of voice conversation is about $8. And the chat is actually an average about $3 $3. And actually most people under 50 years old prefer live chat.

Rachel Fefer 7:56

And

Aaron Conant 7:59

the live chat, right, I think we've all experienced where we go on and kind of that that 17 hour thing because you go and you click chat, and you expect somebody there, you don't want to pick up the phone. Right? And you expect somebody to be there to answer it. And it just waits and it just waits and it just waits. Yeah, the question then you move. Right. I mean, that's lost money. Yes. Ra lost revenue. Right.

Rachel Fefer  8:24

Right. That's exactly right. And and so there's there's, there's that there's also this lack of proactive campaigns, proactive chat outreach that can help it move that customer more quickly through their their buying cycle. Another poor experience is when they get into a chat, and they don't think they're gonna talk to a human and they want to talk to the machine. And they're not getting their answer. And so they repeatedly tried to ask the machine multiple questions until finally they're routed to a to a human. And that leads to a kind of a frustrating experience.

Rachel Fefer 9:00

And kind of his lack of personalization has lost has led to lost sales opportunities. And when I say personalization, there's an ability for brands to harness all of this rich data that they already know about their buyer from the technologies that they are already implementing on their eCommerce sites. By not using that data, they're missing an opportunity to create more conversions and to create repeat purchase opportunities. And this silo data that I mentioned earlier is Liza is leading to lost efficiency, right? So a decade ago, the main channels were email and voice and chat emerged right five to 10 years ago and b2c Chat is pretty much commoditized. But again, more on the reactive side. b2b companies also don't have any kind of chat for the most part, it's completely underutilized. But then over the last five years, SMS, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, all of these channels are important and if you As a merchant, keep these channels siloed. It's a loss of efficiency. And so there's a need to aggregate all of this data together. So we can improve customer satisfaction scores and improve efficiency. For further evidence of why delivering exceptional support is crucial 79% of buyers actually said they would take their business to a competitor within a week for experiencing poor customer service. So in order to deliver it to deliver exceptional support, and to make it the new normal, the most important thing is that it can't be looked at as an afterthought. It has to be critical to your commerce experience. It has to be throughout the entire customer lifecycle. At every point in your customer interaction, you need to be where those customers are, from the point that they're browsing your products on social media, or browsing your brand on social media, through to their engagement on the site and trying to select a product. And maybe that's via live chat, all the way through post purchase, help via phone support, chat, and so on. Customer engagement has to be there throughout that entire lifecycle. So we have Gorgias look

Rachel Fefer  11:17

at customer engagement with a metric, we look at something called support performance. And this is an aggregation of a few metrics, first response time resolution time revenue from support and customer satisfaction. And when you look at this metric, you can actually help move from what we call Level One support which is poor, all the way to a level five support, which is exceptional that level one support is that 12 hour response time. But a level five support is less than 10 minutes response time, and driving revenue from support and really turning your call center into a profit center. And we found that there's three main drivers to deliver on this exceptional support. One is personalization, which is, which is made up of number of channels that you actually engage your customer app and number of integrations. And that's your eCommerce stack integrations to is your automations, especially the percentage of tickets that are automated. And three is monetization, and a real focus on delivering monetization from your customer support. So I'm going to talk about each of those three,

Aaron Conant 12:23

you see that we're kind of at even I think is probably on this personalization piece that we're now at like Digital 2.0. Right, where it's not just enough to have the right imagery, but to test and learn on it. It's not just enough to, you know, have the right products, but have the right product mix. It's not, you know, in this case, it's not just enough to have, you know, chat, or, you know, just a standard customer service, it is integration into all the data that you have on a person to personalize it and make them feel good. And then it's beyond just helping them in a support role. Right of hey, would you like to Hey, do you have a question, but then nursing them through the process is the hole where you can actually upsell, right? It's kind of where I see this, this this next level is it's not just enough, right have helped us it's so much more it is so much more complicated than it was even a year ago, or you guys seem like the same

Rachel Fefer 13:21

trend. love that analogy or like the personalization piece, especially like you mentioned around like it used to be that okay, personalizing that is the right content at the right time in place. Right. And that's exactly it. It's not just that anymore. It's it's it's a it's a full program of looking at your your customer engagement operations, and how does it play into everything you do from an engagement standpoint, right. And every time you have a touch point with your customer, are you providing the same consistent experience? And it's not? Like I said, not just like you said not just content anymore. It's about customer engagement

Rachel Fefer 13:52

strategy. Yeah, it's really

Aaron Conant 13:55

unique, because now it's at the point now where I think within six to eight months, this next level will be table stakes are so like the front runners right now are realizing it and seeing it. It's the it's the game changer right now. But you fast forward, you know, six months to a year, it's just going to be this level of interaction. It's going to be table stakes. It's just it's going to be and people are going to expect it. I mean, you mentioned the age of Amazon, everybody wants, you know what they want, and they want it now.

Rachel Fefer  14:25

Yeah, absolutely. And that's why speed is a critical, critical metric to follow. Because the truth is that people want to self serve they right they don't want to take time to have to find an answer. Right. But if they don't have an answer that then getting an answer quickly is is the most important thing to them. And, and that's why you know, first response time resolution time is super

Aaron Conant 14:51

important. Right? No, love it.

Aaron Conant 14:54

Yeah, sorry, interject there. Just a quick reminder, those who joined you know, drop some questions in the chat or the question Action section, we'll get them answered. Awesome.

Rachel Fefer  15:02

Cool. Yeah. So there's three step process, right? As I mentioned before they feel the impact drivers, they're going to deliver you to exceptional support, personalization, automation and monetization. So talking about personalization, what does that actually mean? First of all, it is important to aggregate the customer profile. Right? So Aaron, if you're having a conversation via Facebook yesterday, today, you're having a live chat tomorrow via SMS, it doesn't matter. You want to engage the brand and one sequential, you want to have the you want the brand to have a sequential view of your history, right? And whether it's today or two years from now, that history should be there. And you don't want to be viewed as a ticket, you want to be viewed as a human who's just having a conversation. And so aggregating your profile across all those channels, channels is critical.

Aaron Conant 15:54

So you just go question, are you integrating across all these different channels, then into a standard platform?

Rachel Fefer  16:00

That's right. And so we're aggregating voice chat, email, SMS, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter into one customer profile. And we can automatically detect you from your eCommerce platform, who you are. And if we recognize you from your social channels, it'll aggregate and if we don't, we'll ask if you want to merge your profile history. So we might say, Okay, well, we recognize the name Aaron, right. And your ad is this the same person coming from, you know, again, your social channel, that as your eCommerce channel, we'll merge them together. Awesome. So a customer that has succeeded in aggregating their channels and seeing a lot of success was a company called Super ATV, which, during the pandemic really took off. And they didn't have the capability to hire more agents quickly, but they had to become much more efficient. And so what they did was when they, when they started using Gorgias, of course, they aggregated their customer profile across email, voice and chat. And they immediately saw an impact to their first response time and resolution time, they decreased it by 84%, for first response time, and by 82%, for resolution time, so huge impact to their efficiency. And so they didn't have to hire us quickly.

Aaron Conant 17:27

And what drives that?

Aaron Conant 17:29

What drives a decrease? People are taking notes today, what are the key things that you guys are looking at the back end, you know, to question to drive, a lower response time, a better response time, which actually decrease response time?

Rachel Fefer 17:44

Yeah, so it's about having to fish for data in multiple systems, it's really the removal of the siloed data. Having all of that customer history in one system, gave them ability to not have to go in go source for that information in multiple places, there was also an ability to bring in their commerce data immediately based on email address from the Magento platform directly into the system, so they don't have to toggle between screens. And I'm going to talk about that in a second. So that brings me to this slide here, which is really about taking all of your rich data. So you're an eCommerce merchant, you are collecting data from your shipping platform, from your return platform, from your product, reviews platform, it might be Trustpilot gyalpo. Maybe it's from clay, VO Klaviyo are your email marketing platform, right? You have data in all of these systems, especially your eCommerce platform, and your order history, what you want to do is make sure all of that data is living inside your agent console, so that your agents don't have to shuffle between tabs. They don't have to go between one system and another. All of that rich data is there in the agent console. So you can your agents can respond very quickly, but also personalize those answers as well. Now, you can also use this data to populate your macros, or your canned responses. And also, you should be using this data in automations. And we're going to talk about automations in just a second.

Aaron Conant 19:20

I also want to talk a little bit about just a question that came in over email was around you know, are you pulling in the actual data to see how valuable of a customer they are? Great. Is this the first time? Is this the second time we had six issues? Or is this the 25th time and they're amazing? Are you able to pull that in?

Rachel Fefer 19:40

Absolutely. Yeah. So um, what what you can do with automations is that roles so you can detect who customers are and group them accordingly. So you might want to group your important customers, your VIPs or high value clients based on the number of orders they've had or The total dollar amount that they've spent within X period of time. So let's say, you know, a customer that has spent $2,000, in the last two months is a is a VIP. And so you can queue them up by tagging them as a VIP, and having a certain pool of agents handle those kinds of customers directly. But you can also identify customers and other kinds of groups to based on, you know, whatever third party data point

Aaron Conant 20:26

you want that into your questionnaire. Yeah, yeah, perfect. Yep. Great.

Rachel Fefer 20:34

So as I mentioned, you want to be able to personalize at scale. So using this macros at you can pull in data from your commerce platform, and a question like, where's my order? You could have the answer responded to very quickly, using those third party variables, have the human respond or have a machine respond directly. So that gets into automation.

Rachel Fefer 20:57

What you want to do is detect the intent of what your customers are asking. Now, in eCommerce, we all know, there's a lot of common questions that come up repeatedly. And for those kinds of kinds of questions that come up all the time, really, you don't want to have a machine, a human respond, you want to try to let the machine take over so that you could put those resources to those high value customers instead, or put them towards converting new customers. So we see, I'm just going to jump ahead here for a second. There's certain kinds of customers certain kind of inquiries that come up all the time. I Gorgias, over 30% of all of our customers, their tickets, start of all tickets across all 1000 customers, the number one question that comes up is border status, where is my order. And so you want to let the machine set a rule for this kind of inquiry. Other kinds of inquiries that come up all the time, product availability, product feedback, return requests, order cancellations, these are all inquiries, that you want to have the machine takeover. And if you can do that, you're going to save about 30% in efficiency.

Rachel Fefer 22:12

And just to kind of accentuate this point here is that with a global supply chain issues, we're seeing a huge increase in this kinds of question coming up all the time, where's my order? And I think during the holiday season, we're going to see it even more. So if you don't yet have a rule set up for where's my order and machine taking over this kind of inquiry, it is absolutely essential that you do because that's just wasted time responding to that question, your your your valuable high cost agents are important, and you want to put that time where it most matters. Another thing you can do is identify on your social channels, who is a social lead, who is responding negatively to your ads, who might be asking social questions, and use your help desk to respond to them. So it doesn't just have to live in the marketing department anymore, right where the marketing department only has access to a social monitoring tool. Now you can actually identify who is a browser that you want to convert into a buyer, you can also hide negative comments directly from the platform. And you can do it manually, or you can do it with an automation as well. So that's why if there is an out of control, you know, person who really just likes your brand, you can put a stop to any kind of conversation that might be happening publicly. I don't highly recommend that because Facebook will ding you if you do it too much, but it is an option. So let's talk a little bit about monetization kind of the third prong here to delivering exceptional customer support. So one of the things that is underutilized is proactive chat. Proactive chat is a fantastic way to drive conversions and increase average order value. We recommend using proactive chat campaigns to to bust an objection before it comes up. So if we know that a question is always about something run small, you might want to say go out go a half size up, for example. You want to make the chat bot very, very focused on the content on that page. Right so page specific chatbots. You might also use a chat to talk about positive reviews of a product and offer product specific discounts. One client who is using a product chat very effectively is OG they are helping their customers selecting lip colors. And of course, when you're online selecting lip colors, that's a little bit of a challenge because you don't get to try it on. And so chat agents are often there to help you figure out what lip shade goes with your skin tone, and so on. And we know that again with OG customers that are, that are used utilizing the product of chat are not only converting at higher rate, but they're adding more items to their cart. So,

Rachel Fefer  25:19

as I mentioned before, you want to focus on your important customers, you can do that automatically by creating a rule around your VIPs. And so if we detect who your customers are based on their email address and their order history, because of the integrations into the eCommerce platforms, then you can know automatically who are your who are your high value clients. And so using if then logic, you can determine you can label your high value customers as such, you can add a tag saying their VIP and have a queue set up directly for them. And you can base this on the number of and this is what I was saying before it number of interactions they've had per month or order volume or even take data from your loyalty platform and and classify them based on that data. So if they you smile, for example, and you have a tear called Gold, you can identify them that way.

Rachel Fefer  26:19

One of the best ways that you can drive revenue from from support is to train your agents to upsell. Customers absolutely trust your expert advice. And the data shows that customers trust sales associates who have product knowledge. 50% of customers are looking for expert advice on what to buy when they enter a store. And 73% of customers say product knowledge is what they need most from a sales associate sales people who engage with targeted product education to up to 123% more than those with no training. So train your agents.

Rachel Fefer  26:56

They just have to develop trust and rapport. And then they could offer recommendations and a now non salesy way to drive engagement.

You can use macros to create upsells

Rachel Fefer 27:14

ESPs do this a lot. Email marketing platform says a lot. They do a lot of post purchase sales flows. But you can also use your help desk to automatically send email upsells on any post purchase. If someone is asking about their order, use it automation to drive that upsell. We had a customer that sold silicone rings and they sometimes had damaged products, they would turn a damaged good into an upsell opportunity using macros, they would write Hey, I'm sorry, your product is damaged. Here's the details and how to return it. But if you want for only $20, we can send you a picture send us a picture of your damaged items. And we'll send you an upgraded version of the product. Finally, it's a

Rachel Fefer  27:55

terrific way to monetize is through SMS. So SMS has gotten a lot of buzz lately and for good reason. So companies like Klaviyo and iapo and attentive postscript, they're all rolling out SMS. And the reason is that many brands are seeing a SMS is 20% of their revenue, or even driving again to five times higher conversion than email. They're using SMS for both marketing but also for personalized customer support. SMS is by default personal as it lands directly in the hands of your buyer. So ollie pop is one company that leverage SMS in a highly effective way to create a conversation with their customer. They are a healthy soda brand. And it did a VIP pre launch of a new flavor Orange Crush only via SMS. And within 24 hours, they generated $64,000 of sales just via SMS. And they did this by creating a connection with their client, offering them a coupon and creating a buzz with their client that they were getting that they were getting something new, exclusive and exciting. So there you have it. That's how you deliver exceptional support. And that's how you can move from level one or level two all the way to level five. It's the focus on personalization, automation and monetization, automation, personalization and monetization.

Aaron Conant 29:21

Through quick a question that comes in is around the staffing requirements the rollout time, like what do you see there? I mean, it's time effort money. It's another platform. You know, people have questions in that space as a whole. But is this hiring somebody new internal to run this? Is this something that people run on their own? Is it see best in class companies doing it?

Rachel Fefer 29:43

Yeah, so we have, we have like 1000 customers and they run the gamut. Smaller customers use use the product. They have internal customer customer support agents, but larger ones often have outsourced call center BPO We have a lot of partners that we work with that can that can help them. But it's pretty easy to get started. So if you already have a help desk, Gorgias actually offers a basically a no risk move. So we'll actually buy out your current Help Desk contract. For free, all we ask you to do is pay the first month, and then you can try it out. And you know, again, if your contract is a year long, we'll cover your contract for a year until your contract expires. And we also offer month to month plans. So it's really no risk to try it out. And if you don't like it can always leave. But the migration is pretty simple. Most clients move over within a day or two, we have migration tools that bring the data from your legacy helped us to Gorgias, and yeah, from a resourcing standpoint,

Rachel Fefer 30:52

we often see that they need less labor to use this platform, then historically, because, you know, a lot of legacy helped us charge on a per agent basis. Unlike, unlike that Gorgias charges on a billable ticket. So we actually benefit from sorry, Legacy helped us benefit from having more labor, right. The more agents you have, the more they're paid. We see this as not the fair solution, because we can do more with your current labor pool. We can become we can drive more efficiency. And so we often see customers saving a lot on their, their labor costs.

Aaron Conant 31:31

Yeah, and that's a that's a that's a huge thing right there. What is the training level look like? But you so you work even large companies where they have external customer service, or they've outsourced it? But also if you're a smaller company, then you're seeing them right. It's just somebody's internal the current customer service team?

Rachel Fefer 31:49

Absolutely, yeah. And the platform is super easy to learn and use. The training is really straightforward. There's a lot of documentation online. So even our smallest customers, though, they'll you know, learn pretty quickly, within a day or two, some of the larger customers have more complex setup, so they have more complicated rules and macros. But even then, you know, the agent training is is two days tops and learning. And then we have customer support. Sorry, Customer Success folks, internally that can help with setup,

Aaron Conant 32:30

initially is a couple questions around platforms as a whole that you integrate with, you know, this is everything from Magento to, you know, SAP. And then how long does that integration? Take?

Rachel Fefer 32:44

Yeah, so out of the box, we have Magento, Bigcommerce, and Shopify. So the integration is there. It doesn't take any time it's turnkey. With and we are building Salesforce integration, and that should be ready by q1. We don't you have a plan for hydrous. SAP.

Aaron Conant 33:03

Cool.

Aaron Conant 33:06

And then otherwise, how long does that integration take as a whole, as you say, just a couple days? Or if you go back to the standard platforms?

Rachel Fefer 33:15

Yeah, so SMBs are up and running within a day to two days and larger customers? Maximum one to two weeks.

Aaron Conant 33:24

Okay. Yeah. So this specific one around SAP Hybris. That's not one that you're integrating with right now?

Rachel Fefer  33:29

No, but honestly, like, if there, if there is significant interest from a customer that might be patient with us, I'd be happy to talk, talk to you and and learn a little bit about your business. And, you know, who knows, maybe we can we've been known to accelerate our timelines.

Aaron Conant 33:45

Yeah. No, absolutely. Yeah. You know, Magda, I'll connect you with Rachel after the call. And you guys can do a deep dive on that as well. You know, how easy is it to build and modify, you know, those chatbot conversations in the flow? That's the another thing that people want to be able to test and learn on as quickly as possible.

Rachel Fefer  34:03

Yeah, the chat was made, the entire system was made. So you don't have to be like, have a degree in engineering to launch it and customize it and gain value from it. So everything from from the Chatbot you know, customizing chatbots it's literally like, my brother can do it, you know. And the setup is so easy configuring the rules engine for those automations. Whether it's tagging a ticket assigning an agent, or creating an automation reply, it's actually the rules are they come out of the box in the platform? So all you have to do is tweak them to your business and there

Aaron Conant 34:40

and you're up and running. What are the

Aaron Conant 34:44

necessary what are the KPIs that people should be looking for upon implementation? Right, and people right now are being asked to justify more than ever. Any new thing that comes on board? That's a new paid media partner, you know, it's new drop shipping this Do performance marketing, that's a new Amazon agency? What do they what KPIs should people be be looking at?

Rachel Fefer 35:07

Yeah, so apart from the ones on the screen around driving support performance, I think the one of the most immediate things you'll see in moving to a Gorgias is the increase in efficiency or decrease in costs. So it's two sides of the same coin, being able to reduce your your labor costs, or if you have to increase very quickly, your your efficiency, because you're scaling so fast, and not add more bodies. That is something that you can look at. So I would say cost of your, your total cost of your technology plus your labor together

Aaron Conant 35:49

must have the necessary the importance of like you have AI in the background, that's then you know, cuz I would love to hear a little bit more about that.

Rachel Fefer  35:57

Yeah, so we have machine learning and AI built into the platform. And there's a number of ways in which the AI is is used. So it's identity we're using, we're looking at content of every inquiry. So we run, we run that across all of our 8000 customers so that we're really, really intelligent about the common and repetitive inquiries that come up in eCommerce, so that we can create automations based on intent. So rather than looking at the keyword shipping, right, we know that anything that has remotely close to somebody trying to find out where the order, right, we'll be able to use the machine learning to create that automation. We're also using automation to tag every ticket, rather than have to manually tag those tickets, which can take up a lot of time. And also you want to tag tickets, you can report on the types of inquiries that come up later on. So you can you know, fix various aspects of your business, are using machine learning to determine what the most appropriate macro will be and an answer so that when the agent responding to a question, we're actually going to show you a few answers that are probably the right response to that question, even in the macro section, not in the automation section.

Aaron Conant 37:08

Awesome. The next question, what are the plans for the future? Where do you see taking the tool next, what channel will become the channel in the next years to come?

Rachel Fefer  37:17

Good questions. Yeah, I think a

Rachel Fefer 37:22

PA WhatsApp is definitely one that we are eager to get live. I'm hoping that it will be q1. Because for us to conquer more areas of the world, WhatsApp is critical. We see WhatsApp very popular in Latin America and in Asia as well. So definitely WhatsApp. And we actually just launched knowledge base to our Help Center, which was important and it was to us we're excited about that. And what was the other part of your question? Or what else is coming?

Aaron Conant 37:56

It channel in the next years to come?

Rachel Fefer 37:58

Yeah, so the chat all the years to come? You know, the there's a lot of what's the what's the one of my son uses the the video chat tic tock, of course, is big, although I don't know, I'm not sure like if TikTok will be big for support, but it definitely already Is it a hot channel? So that's one discord, right? It's where the kids are. Um, and in terms of the product focus overall, and you're definitely looking at monetization, and more product features that that look at how we can drive more value per customer. And really hone in on on how to drive a better experience before the like kind of VIP customers.

Aaron Conant 38:48

Yeah, be interesting, like, we get to the metaverse here, right, if it's in Roblox or, you know, Minecraft or Facebook universe or whatever, whatever it might be.

Aaron Conant 39:02

Yeah, it's,

Rachel Fefer  39:03

I look to where my kids are chatting today. Like, Okay, the next one, you know, they they're on it

Aaron Conant 39:07

before I am. Yeah, for sure.

Aaron Conant 39:10

Though, did you mentioned like social media listening? Are you are you supplementing as a social media listing tool?

Rachel Fefer 39:17

You know, yeah, so a lot of our customers may have used a social media tool in the past and they they actually just fully bring that toward us. They don't they don't necessarily need another tool. That's, that's not our that's exactly we do all of that. We do social media listening so we can look at to 10 intent. Our goal though, is really to drive you know, customer engagement

Rachel Fefer 39:45

from from our social media tool. There are other tools out there that a large enterprises use like sprinkler and others that you know, you can use them side by side so they might use Gorgias for having their customer support agents and handling support type inquiries. Gorgias. And then using their social media monitoring tool for more maybe marketing oriented type, interactions and social. But you could absolutely use Gorgias for the purpose of social monitoring. Yeah.

Aaron Conant 40:12

Yeah. Love it. Others have questions keep dropping to the chat, the q&a or just keep emailing them to me Aaron Aaron@bwgconnect.com Are there any other things that are like that you get asked routinely that come up all the time with brands, questions you guys are answering he thought might come up today that didn't come up today?

Rachel Fefer 40:34

Um, no, I

Rachel Fefer  40:35

mean, you covered quite a lot. You know, I guess about integrating Gorgias into existing systems. So we have a full set of API's. So anything that you would want to port, you know, your, your Gorgias data back into, if there was an ERP or CRM? Absolutely, you can do that with our with our APIs. So that was one thing. Um, pricing comes up quite a bit. So we started $50 a month, and for 350 tickets, and we just we go up from there. And as I mentioned, I think before, we're on a month to month contract, so you're not obligated to go into like an annual contract. Gorgias. It's kind of easy and easy out.

Aaron Conant 41:16

Yeah. I mean, I think that's key right now, for a lot of people, right? It's, you know, as we all talk about, you know, the advertising side of test and learn and the imagery side and content side of test and learn. It's ever even on the service provider side testing, learning how to those that are making it as easy as possible, you know, will win will win in the end. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know, if you have additional thoughts there.

Rachel Fefer  41:39

It's, um, it's funny, I, you know, when I, I come from, like, enterprise software, you know, landscape where I was the first time I've ever worked for a company that was a month long contract. And at first I was like, Is that for real? You know, do we want to lock customers. And the response was like, no, like, our CEO, they're like, very much like the Netflix mentality, like, right, like, you want to see a movie, you want to pay for the monthly fee, great, like, go ahead, come in, but you want to leave, we don't want to hold your hands to fire. And the other thing about that I thought was so interesting. And so true, was when you lock customers in, and they are having issues for whatever reason, you are blind to them, or it doesn't become as important to you to solve them, because you know that they're going to be with you another year, year and a half, two years, right. So having this model, you really feel any pain immediately to what you're building. And so you are able to rectify extremely quickly, because otherwise you can lose that customer in a week. Right? So I think that I think that is such an interesting new way to look at like a SaaS, software product, etc.

Aaron Conant 42:47

are there any places where people usually under utilize, you know, what you guys are doing? Yeah, I hear this a lot. Like, you know, even maybe it's like a salsify or something like that they get it, they plug it in, and then people don't use it to the full extent. I don't know, if I'm getting what I paid for. But, you know, a lot of it is not, you know, fully utilizing it. Is there something where, you know, you know, I see people under utilize the platform on a routine basis, whether it's the, you know, setting up the AI, the backend side of the automatic responses, or, you know, engaging across, you know, plugging into all the social channels are there, are there common ways where, you know, people don't utilize at all? Sure, there's

Rachel Fefer 43:26

always gonna be customers that don't utilize, but I love that you asked that question, Aaron, because we're actually really looking at how do we drive utilization, of course, like, I got a good software company should be right. But we're, we found some really great ways to increase utilization in the product, right. So for example, we know from built with and other online tools, if one of our merchants has yacht po or clay VO, for example. And it's not integrated into Gorgias and it should be right because then you get all this rich data from your ESP and from your product review platform directly into Gorgias, so we can automatically now trigger to them in the product saying, hey, like, I think you've got yacht Po, why don't you just click here to download it into Gorgias, right, so that they grab more value on the platform immediately. That's just one way.

Rachel Fefer 44:15

We're trying to make sure that that is utilized. Another thing we've done is that we used to come with a blank slate when it came to rules. Now all of our customers will have, you know, over a couple dozen rules already in their rules, part of the platform, everything from you know, where's my order rule to social engagement to, you know, all kinds of VIP setup, and then they just have to go in and configure it. And so it really becomes easy for them to activate that value versus you know,

Aaron Conant 44:49

not having it. Yeah, awesome. Love it.

Aaron Conant 44:52

I mean, I don't have any other questions coming in over email or over the q&a here. And I think it's been an awesome conversation. You know, there are key like takeaways things you have for people that that are on the line today, we can kind of recap things that are, you know, just no key takeaways as a whole. Um, yeah, I

Rachel Fefer 45:13

think I think a couple things. One, if you have a chat platform, you know, and you're not using chat campaigns today, I absolutely recommend it. We know that chat as is the channel of choice for most people. So implementing chat campaigns should really drive conversions. Don't be afraid to use it. If you're not looking at SMS today, I absolutely recommend making sure that the SMS is part of your strategy, we've seen really, really great results with SMS today. And of course, the main thing is the aggregation of the customer profile is critical to providing a seamless customer experience. So those are kind of the big the big, big takeaways. Awesome. We'll

Aaron Conant 45:55

love it. Well, Rachel, thanks to you Gorgias for being such great friends, partner, supporters of the network. Thanks to everybody who dialed in today, look for a follow up email from us when I connect with Rachel and see Oh,

Rachel Fefer 46:05

yeah. Yeah, that's one more thing to those on the line. I just wanted to share an offer today. So if you're interested in Gorgias, you want to reach out to me my email address is there on the screen, Rachel@gorgias.com and we're offering two months free for any of you today as part of this this partnership of BWG and and yeah, thanks for having me on.

Aaron Conant 46:25

Yeah, absolutely. It's been a blast. And you guys are great friends, partners, supporters. Thanks for all you do for the network. You know anybody you want a connection more than happy to do it. Look for a follow up email from us. I'd love to have a conversation with you as well. Find out what your biggest pain points are and kind of plan the next topics and let you know what what the newest developments are across the eCommerce landscape. With that, we're gonna wrap it up. Hope everybody has a fantastic Tuesday everybody stay safe, take care and look forward to having you in the future. Thanks again, everybody. Already we'll be in touch.