Make Money With Customer Service

The TL;DR:

• Let’s Chat D2C: Customer Service as a Profit Center with Gorgias.

• What I’m Thinking about this Week: Take the Time to Delegate.

• The D2Z Podcast: The new podcast setup is up and running! New camera, mic, lighting, and recording platform, making it easier for us to repurpose this content into bite-sized pieces for social media. This week, I sat down with Jay Sethi, Mid-Market Account Executive at Shopify Plus and someone who we work very closely with on migration projects.

• App Highlight - Shopify Updates, Malomo + Status Integration, and Rebuy + Yotpo Integration

• Upcoming Events: DTCxRetain is June 14-15, where I’ll host a retention marketing breakout session. If you’re a brand, use the code ELECTRIQBRAND for a free pass! I’ve got three other upcoming events with more details below.
  

  Random tip: Do NOT open your email first thing in the morning. It’s so easy to get sidetracked from your priorities for the day.

Let’s Chat D2C - Customer Service as a Profit Center with Gorgias

For too long, brands have looked at customer service as a cost center, focusing on reducing their overhead as much as possible, typically at the expense of a positive customer experience. That’s why I’ve teamed up with Gorgias to highlight how you can turn your customer service into a revenue-driving channel.

Mindset Shift

Typically, agents are instructed to respond to customers as fast as possible. While an important metric to track, it doesn’t empower them to think about how they can better guide the customer journey to increase revenue. 

Gorgias Revenue Statistics

Gorgias revenue statistics allow you to measure how much money your support team is generating. Here’s how it works:

• Converted tickets: Tickets that were followed by a sale within five days

• Conversion rate: Ratio between created and converted tickets

• Total sales from support: Sum of the amount paid by customers for orders associated with tickets (converted tickets). Refunds and order adjustments are taken into account.

You can view statistics by the relevant integration, ticket channel, ticket tags, or by the period of time that you want to check and also create new support KPI goals for your CS agents with the ‘sales per agent’ breakdown.

Over time you’ll be able to identify which types of tickets convert and which don’t so you can optimize your upsell strategy.

Proactive Chat

Gorgias Chat Campaigns are one of the best ways to engage customers on your website and drive additional conversions and revenue with your CS team.

You can specify what URL(s), how much time must be spent on the page before the chat campaign pops up, and the message you want to show.

I like to leverage chat campaigns to cross-sell and increase AOV during the customer journey. With Gorgias’ product picker, your CS team can easily send links to your Shopify product pages in the chat.

SMS

I continue to strongly advocate for brands staffing their SMS line with customer service agents versus forcing customers to email in to get help, and the numbers support this stance. Over BFCM, Klaviyo processed 1.92M incoming text messages.

This is a massive opportunity for brands to engage with their customers in a 1:1 manner, improve their experience, and help nurture them to conversion. With Gorgias’ Klaviyo and Attentive integration, adding it to your customer service channel mix is simple and a no-brainer for driving additional revenue. 

Gorgias’ Shopify Discount Code Generator

Empower your CS team to get shoppers over the hump. Now you can create and send one-time-only discount codes to your shoppers directly from the ticket message view in Gorgias. The codes can be custom or generated based on a percentage, fixed amount, or free shipping, and the code can be marked as ‘one-time use’ or for use multiple times.

Give your CS Team Superpowers with AI

Gorgias AI uses machine learning to study your past tickets and suggest brand-friendly responses for each ticket to give agents a head start.

What I’m Thinking About This Week: Take the Time to Delegate

We can’t do everything, and we shouldn’t try.

I mean, I get it. Entrepreneurs like to do everything. It’s sort of what we’re wired to do. We have millions of hats, and we like to wear them all and do so as a badge of honor. And in the beginning, we really do need to do everything. But if we’re being honest, even if we don’t like doing it, we probably feel like we have to do everything even as the business grows. It is ingrained into our social fabric that the intrepid young business owner must bleed to create their dream. The more we bleed and sweat, the more effective we are.

That approach to entrepreneurship is from another era.

It doesn’t work now, and I would argue that it never really did. It’s an unnecessary self-sacrificial point of view that is tied into ideals far older than we are and working on assumptions that are simply false.

I fell into this trap hard.

The first real challenge I encountered when building my business was the elusive “back office.” Going into this, I didn’t think it was a big deal. It was just a matter of keeping up on Quickbooks, processing invoices, and handling receivables. Paying taxes. It just didn’t feel like much of a burden at any one moment.

But that’s a red flag. That’s the trap.

I’m sitting there thinking, “Oh, it’s no big deal, it doesn’t take me a lot of time,” forgetting that every little thing adds up. And after a while, all of these little tasks pile up until their ship sinks from a thousand leaks.

If I had it to do over again, I would have detailed my process and given it to a different team member far sooner. Looking back, it seems so wrong to me. The CEO of a thriving and growing business should not be handling back-office work. They should be building their business.

My mentors told me this, and I suppose I didn’t think their delegation advice applied to smaller tasks or a bootstrapped, cash-conscious small business. Often, I fell into the trap of, “I’m too busy to train someone else to do this properly, so I am just going to keep doing it myself.” It might take 3 hours to offload a 1-hour per week task, but it’s important to find those 3 hours to save those 1-hours from adding up over time. But I kept it on my plate for too long.

There are countless tasks like that, and those deliverables could be sourced by someone else who would do it better. I guarantee there is at least one thing you are doing right now at your company that would be better handled by someone else.

That struggle doesn’t go away. I’m still dealing with it. But, delegation is not optional in creating a thriving and sustainable business.

This Week’s The D2Z Podcast

#60 – Shopify Plus, Ecommerce Trends, and Simplifying the Tech Stack

🎧 Listen Now 🎧

In this week’s episode, I sat down with Jay Sethi, Mid-Market Account Executive at Shopify Plus, to chat about the new environment merchants are navigating regarding their commerce platform choices. Specifically, we explored the following: 

💰 Customer acquisition crisis and how your ecommerce platform can help (i.e., Shopify Audiences)

📲 Merchants desire to simplify the tech stack and get away from bespoke custom solutions

😎 B2B is getting modernized with DTC best practices

🚀 Shopify’s expansion into new verticals, such as alcohol

App Highlight - Shopify Updates, Malomo + Status Integration, and Rebuy + Yotpo Integration

Shopify Checkout

No updates here, but Shopify’s checkout is the best in the world, converting up to 36% better based on a study completed in partnership with a Big Three global management consulting company. The mere presence of Shop Pay, according to the study, can increase lower funnel conversion by 5%.

And it’s only getting better. When a prospective customer with a Shop Pay account hits a storefront, Shopify can recognize them with one click, pre-filling all customer information and giving a 4x faster experience than a guest checkout. There are also over 100 million customers on Shop Pay! The network effects here are crazy.

Shopify Audiences

Shopify recently released a new Audiences algorithm that is 63% better at driving conversions at a lower cost than last year. Just another demonstration of how powerful Shopify’s network effects are.

Shop Pay + Shopify Markets Pro

Merchants selling with Market Pro can now accept orders from customers using Shop Pay.

Shopify Unified Media Library Pools

File management has never been great on Shopify, so I’m excited to see some investment in this. They’ve now unified files across content/files and products, so product media is available within the content admin. You can now filter media based on where it is “used_in” to identify areas of the site it’s being shown. 

Shopify Benchmark Reports

You can now compare your data to other similar Shopify stores' data (similar to how you can compare your data in Klaviyo to other similar Klaviyo stores). Follow these steps to access Benchmarks in a report:

1. Open a report with a benchmark.

2. Click the Compare menu.

3. Select Benchmarks.

Shopify B2B Payment Updates

Vaulted credit cards are now supported with Shopify B2B, and Paypal has been added as a supported payment processor.

Shopify GA4 Migration Guide from Google

Google put together this helpful guide on how to migrate to GA4 for your Shopify store.

Shopify Email + Shopify Magic

Merchants leveraging Shopify Email can now use Shopify Magic (Shopify’s AI product) to optimize email send times and autogenerate subject lines.

Malomo + Status

Status is a new partner for Electriq (I’ll highlight them in an upcoming newsletter), and I’m excited to start testing this new integration with Malomo! This integration:

• Automatically signs customers into their accounts during the order tracking experience

• Eliminates sign-in friction with passwordless accounts

• Offers an on-brand tracking experience from within the customer account

• Increases first-time customers with accounts 

Rebuy + Yotpo

Merchants using Yotpo for reviews can now showcase their product reviews in Rebuy products, such as the Smart Cart, to drive more engagement and conversions.

Upcoming Events

Had a blast on ShipBob’s webinar last week, and I still have four exciting upcoming events!

• Leveraging Rebuy Across the Customer Journey Master Class. I’m hosting an hour-long master class on June 8th, demonstrating how I leverage Rebuy across every aspect of the customer journey. From pre-purchase AOV increasing tactics to retention strategies deploying Rebuy’s AI recommendations tool, I’ll cover it all in this jam-packed session!

• Private Dodger Stadium Suite with Recharge on June 13 in LA. There is extremely limited space for merchants, so RSVP ASAP if you’d like to attend, but no guarantees that we’ll be able to accommodate you.

• DTCxRetain June 14-15, where I’ll host a retention marketing breakout session. If you’re a brand, use the code ELECTRIQBRAND for a free pass!

• Transactional Email & SMS Master Class on June 21st with Malomo, where I’ll dive into how Electriq creates personalized transactional journeys that improve retention and increase LTV.

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