One of the most costly areas of running a consumer brand is your customer service team. They are the front lines for any customers, whether they have questions about a product, they have issues placing an order or they want to remedy a problem they had with their order.
The best brands use a combination of technology and human resources to get through their customer service tickets as fast as possible — and even when we launch new brands at Sharma Brands, we use technology to solve tickets before they require a human agent.
Technology-wise, we use Gorgias for our customer service ticket management, and we use Certainly.io on the website to answer any and all questions someone might have.
Most recently, we used Certainly on the Feastables website, Mr. Beast’s new snacks brand, and saw that we were able to deflect 95% of the tickets by using their AI chat bot. It was so sizable we staffed down the human resources we had put in place for the launch!
On top of being able to solve customer inquiries right away, we saw that customers who chatted through the Certainly bot (aka “Feasty”) had a 20% higher AOV and their conversion rate was 3x higher than normal site visitors. People just want confirmation before placing an order!
Ok, I’m getting too excited. Here are 3 things we implement in brands we launch to prevent an abundance of customer service inquiries:
1. Extensive Testing
Before any brand goes live, we test EVERYTHING. Shipping into every state, placing orders from different email services to ensure emails come through properly, navigating the site on laptops, large screen desktops, iPhones and Androids (for the 3 people in the world who use an Android), and so much more.
There are so many issues that can be mitigated simply by putting yourself in a customer’s shoes. If you feel like you aren’t finding anything, ask a parent, or an older relative to do the same — I’m sure you’ll find a few bugs that can still be fixed.
2. A Solid Tech Stack
When we launch a new brand, we put technology in place to prevent customer issues, and also to show us where we might be falling short. Here are some of my favorites:
Certainly — A simple AI-driven chat bot to answer customer questions before they become customer service tickets. On average, customers who interact with a Certainly bot have a higher conversion rate and AOV. Click here to get a demo of Certainly.
Gorgias — The easiest plug-and-play solution for managing customer service tickets across email, social media,
Microsoft Clarity — Clarity is an easily-installable snippet of code that allows you to see on-site heatmaps, scroll-depth maps, and user session recordings.
Okendo — Okendo reviews are a great place to not only build social proof on your website, but also actively solicit feedback from customers. Their answers will either validate what you’re promoting or flag potential issues.
3. Consistently Audit the CX
Once you’ve launched your brand, you must consistently audit your consumer journeys to ensure the messaging coming from your brand’s SMS, emails, post-purchase order tracking apps, subscription emails and more stay consistent.
When you don’t have consistent messaging, you open yourself to become an easy target of customer confusion. Audit every quarter and save yourself the trouble.
Don’t put yourself into a customer service pickle, use the right technology to prevent it!
If you're doing over $300K/month in revenue, I highly recommend getting a demo of the product. They can put together a demo of how it would work with your site fairly quickly.
With Feastables, we're averaging around 120,000 conversions per month and have a Net Promoter Score (NPS) of 100 — which is wild, but it's true.
