The State of Ecommerce Customer Service Industry Report 2019
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Key Takeaways: Data aggregated from 131 survey responses: - 60% of Ecommerce stores are currently offering on-site chat. - 55% of Ecommerce stores currently not offering on-site chat are going to start in 2019. - 24% of Ecommerce stores are looking to add SMS in 2019. - 29% of Ecommerce stores are looking to add phone support in 2019. - Only 30% of Ecommerce stores care about Twitter. - [Warning: Customer Service Managers] Your CEO thinks you’re doing 205% worse than you do. - [Warning: Customer Service Managers] Marketing thinks you’re doing 300% worse than you do. - You’re 550% more likely to feel creative if you’re a macro and automation master. - Less automation leads to 200% less satisfaction with response time. - 85% of companies doing 5,000+ orders a month still don’t have 24/7 support. - 52% of Ecommerce Customer Service Teams Operate Mon - Fri, 9AM - 5PM, with reduced support during holidays, despite their Ecommerce store being open 24/7. - 79% of Ecommerce stores do not know the cost of a support ticket - Preventative customer service is the #1 issue facing most Ecommerce teams, with 18.5% of teams being focused on it right now. We also dove into our data, from over 780 Ecommerce stores, to uncover truth’s unique to Ecommerce stores that we believe will help you baseline your own store: - First Response Time increases by 210% after Black Friday / Cyber Monday.Average. - 1.76 responses to close a ticket for an Ecommerce store. - Support rep benchmark: 821 tickets / agent / month.Ecommerce stores get 36% more efficient at customer service as they grow. - Ticket volume breakdown: Email (54%) is likely to shrink as the "leading" channel, but will remain the leading channel. Gorgias is an Ecommerce helpdesk that connects your ticket sources - email, chat, social, phone, etc. - with your order data in Shopify, so that support agents have the answers they need to resolve customer tickets in a matter of seconds. Switch to Gorgias and cut your first response time by up to 35% today. Visit Gorgias.io for more details. Be sure to check out our blog for articles on how to streamline your support: https://gorgias.io/blog Subscribe on YouTube. Follow us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/gorgiasio/ Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/gorgiasio
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The State of Ecommerce Customer Service Industry Report 2019
- 1. The State of Ecommerce Customer Service Industry Report, 2019 #1 Rated Helpdesk for Shopify
- 2. 780+ Ecommerce Stores 131 Survey Responses #LoveCX19
- 3. Goals Challenges and Opportunities Unique to Ecommerce Give You Benchmarks for Success How is Ecommerce Doing vs Other Industries #LoveCX19
- 5. #LoveCX19
- 7. Warning Customer Service Managers: Your CEO thinks you’re doing 205% worse than you do. #LoveCX19
- 8. Warning Customer Service Managers: Marketing thinks you’re doing 300% worse than you do. #LoveCX19
- 10. #LoveCX19
- 11. You’re 550% more likely to feel creative if you’re a macro and automation master. #LoveCX19
- 12. 79% of Ecommerce stores do not know the cost of a support ticket. #LoveCX19
- 13. 52% of Ecommerce Customer Service Teams Operate Mon - Fri, 9AM - 5PM, with reduced support during holidays, despite their Ecommerce store being open 24/7. DAYS HOURS HOLIDAYS #LoveCX19
- 15. Gorgias: Tickets by Channel #LoveCX19
- 16. 821 tickets / agent / month #LoveCX19
- 17. 1.76 responses to close a ticket #LoveCX19
- 18. Ecommerce stores get 36% more efficient at customer service as they grow. Small Stores: ● 88 support tickets / 100 orders (including social comments) ● 1.1 support ticket / $100 Revenue Large Stores ($500k/month+): ● 56 support tickets / 100 orders (including social comments) ● .4 support tickets / $100 Revenue #LoveCX19
- 19. Preventative customer service is the #1 issue facing most Ecommerce teams, with 18.5% of teams being focused on it right now. #LoveCX19
- 20. First response time increases by 210% after Black Friday / Cyber Monday. #LoveCX19
- 21. #1 Rated Helpdesk for Shopify 1. Shopify Stores: Start a Free Trial at Gorgias.io 2. Ping our chat with “#LoveCX19” 3. Get extra entry into giveaway for $14k in Ecommerce prizes + second month free of Gorgias. https://gorgias.io/state-of-ecommerce-2019
Editor's Notes
- On-site chat will be the fastest growing channel of 2019. On-site chat provides a competitive advantage that helps you close sales and resolve post-purchase issues before orders get pushed to fulfilment. As we witness the fall of dropshipping as a business model, millions of consumers are left feeling untrustworthy of lesser known Ecommerce brands. To prove your brand has real people behind it, you can add chat. That simple act of being available to talk can build the trust needed to get a customer to complete a transaction. What are the risks? You need someone available to respond quickly. This means a real-time agent, who can answer a range of diverse inquiries, and knows a lot about the products you sell. That agent needs reasonable volume in order to be worth the time, but give them too much volume and you'll have poor response time (and need a second rep). This is your cost of chat. What are the opportunities? On-site chat allows you to answer sales objections and close more customers, thus increasing your conversion rate and lowering your cost per acquisition. Providing, and staffing for, on-site chat should lower your first response time. A key component to increasing customer satisfaction and retention. On-site chat teaches you about what information is missing from your product detail page. It’s your best tool for customer development, which leads to updating the page with new information, improving macros, and understanding the reasons the customer is buying. It may also lead you into new product development opportunities. On-site chat allows you to take action on cancelled orders, refunds, shipping errors, and duplicate orders faster than it takes your fulfilment center to fulfil. This can save you big money in shipping costs and returns. Key Takeaway: If you don’t install on-site chat as a sales and support channel in 2019, you will be behind the market trend and behind your competition. 24% of Ecommerce stores are looking to add SMS in 2019. Next on the fastest growing channel of 2019, we have SMS, which we believe is another crucial channel for communicating, especially with existing customers. Sending text order updates is the new norm (thanks in large part to Amazon), and by using SMS as a communication channel, you can expect a significant reduction in common ticket questions, like “where is my order” and “what’s my tracking info?” The problem: When you SMS someone, they sometimes respond, which means you need a support agent to engage on that channel. Gorgias handles this through integrations with partners like IMPower, where the SMS is brought directly into the helpdesk, tied to the customer data, and can be responded to without a hassle. Key Takeaway: SMS will be a crucial channel for cutting-edge brands in 2019, and the investment can easily pay for itself by reducing customer support inquiries. 29% of Ecommerce stores are looking to add phone support in 2019. With 60% of Ecommerce stores currently offering phone support, we’re looking at phone being a (nearly) universally adopted channel in 2019. Phone support is even faster and more personal than on-site chat, but it’s significantly less prefered, especially by millenial and younger audiences. We’ve seen some brands offer a phone number that only goes to voicemail, then turn that voicemail into a support ticket. This is not phone support. If you’re a brand passionate about having a positive customer experience, then you need to have a well-trained live representative on the other side of the phone, ready to handle the customers needs. Key Takeaway: Phone support will be nearly as prevalent as social media support by the end of 2019. Only 30% of brands support Twitter. We’ve known for a while that Twitter is an underserved channel for Ecommerce, with most responses being routed through Facebook and Instagram. But I’m worried about the 70% of brands not monitoring the channel at all. For larger brands, like airlines, Twitter is a major customer service channel. While it isn’t as important in Ecommerce, it’s important to respond to your customers on every channel. Key Takeaway: Don’t forget to look for customer service inquiries on Twitter native and DM. Sidenote: Unfortunately, Instagram still does not allow API access to their Direct Messages, which means 69% of brands are continuing to suffer by having to do native response, often on iPads or their own cell phones. It’s painful. We look forward to integrating with Instagram Direct Messages as soon as the API becomes available.
- 35% of CEOs gave their customer service performance score a 3 out of 5 or lower, whereas only 17% of heads of customer service managers did.
- CEOs tended to give a more average response of the performance of their customer service department, whereas 61% of Heads of Customer Service gave themselves 4 stars, presumably saying “We’re doing good, but can always improve.” Key Takeways: Agree on the performance metrics and limitation/budget of the department and present concise reports to your manager on a regular basis. If you’re the manager (CEO, COO, or Head of Ecommerce typically), it’s your job to set this up and agree on it with your head of customer service. Agreeing on KPIs, budget, and monthly reports are the boring little secret to success in Customer Service. 51% of marketers gave their customer service department a 3 or lower, which is 300% higher than customer service managers. This leads me to believe there needs to be stronger communication between departments. Coming from experience, marketing’s job tends to be to run campaigns, which brings confusion to your audience and leads to increased customer service inquiries. Marketing gets frustrated when Customer Service doesn’t resolve those issues quickly. Customer Service gets frustrated that marketing flooded them with tickets and didn’t give them a clear way to respond. Key Takeaways: The head of marketing and head of customer service need to meet weekly. Create a templated form for each marketing campaign/initiative that explains all details of the campaign to Customer Service and be sure to give that to them before each campaign launches, discuss fringe cases in your 1-1’s.
- Do you feel like your team is always doing the same thing, it’s not moving forward and your CS inbox 0 seems impossible to reach?
- 65% of those that are 5 / 5 stars for automation are also 5 out of 5 stars for creativity. A 550% increase over those that rated themselves a 4, 3, or 2. Why? Because when you’re automating more, you actually have the time to spend creating the macro responses. It doesn’t matter that it is the same response to each customer, because its a creative response to that specific issue. Interestingly enough, those that rated themselves a 1 on automation were more likely to give themself a 5 on creativity. Apparently these are the companies that prefer a custom message every time, and pride themselves on unique responses. I’m all for having a human touch, but a custom response every time will cause more problems than it solves. Key Takeaway: Automation is not taking away from creativity. Invest the upfront time in better macros and better customer service automation. Need help? Gorgias customers can schedule a quick 15 minute call with our in-house automation expert. Just send us a chat the next time you login.
- I get that it can be tough to calculate, but Ecommerce stores care so much about AOV - Average Order Value - and CAC - Cost of Acquiring a Customer... So it’s a bit surprising to think that most brands aren’t tracking their cost per ticket, or cost per order. This is a metric that needs to be well understood and baked into your margin, so that you can properly calculate a profitable price point, and predict the revenue and growth of your store.
- 85% of companies doing 5,000+ orders a month still don’t have 24/7 support. There are many different ways to differentiate your brand, but with increased competition, and Amazon on everyone’s heals, there is one thing you can do, for any company doing over 5mil/year, fairly easily: invest today in 24/7 customer service. Your store is open 24/7, why isn’t your customer service. This will keep first response time down, and become a talking point for your customers as they share about your product with their friends. Train your support agents to answer on-site chat questions, and take proactive and preventative measures for customer service, so that even if you’re “overinvesting” today, they have ancillary work to do that will help you scale your business.
- Our data. It’s bias because of the nature of our tool. We can expect to see phone and chat rise significantly over the next year, the addition of Instagram Messages and Whatsapp, SMS will join the pie, and email will continue to shrink as a percentage of all tickets, as customers look to contact Ecommerce stores on the channel of their preference.
- Over 780 accounts queried, we see an average of 821 tickets handled by an account rep per month. Which is 27 tickets a day. This is also likely a lowball estimate because we do have many accounts where the agent is not anywhere near “maxed out” on tickets. (Ex. accounts with under 30 tickets a day, or accounts that don’t have 1 dedicated rep, for example). We saw larger customers with 2k-3k tickets per month being closed per agent. Consistently Automation is only going to get stronger in the coming years. It’s our mission at Gorgias to see this 821 tickets/month/rep rise to 1821, 10,000 and even higher. Takeaway: Hold your level 1 support agent accountable for closing 821 tickets a month. Naturally, this number will change from business to business and role to role. As tickets get more complicated, they can take longer to respond. As your ticket count grows, consider breaking out “level 2” tickets, which are complex inquiries that need to be escalated to managers or discussed interdepartmentally. This helps with accountability at scale.
- Over 921 accounts, we found an average number of touches required to close a ticket to be 1.76 responses. This is significantly different than other industries, which average about 8 touches to close. Yet, another reason we need a report specific to our industry, because Ecommerce has significantly different problems. Most of our inquiries are relatively simple, and fairly repetitive. While this varies from store to store, especially when you may need to request additional information, such as a shoe size, or alternative product replacement, the goal should always be to 1-touch close an Ecommerce customer support ticket. I’ve seen stores that make the refund process long and laborious, asking for pictures of the damaged item, pictures of the box the product came in, etc. This is a bad practice that slows down resolution time and leaves customers unhappy. Key Takeaway: Figure out how to streamline the return or exchange process so that the customer knows everything they have to do ahead of time, and they are coming to you with all the information you need to resolve their ticket in one touch. And this isn’t to say that multiple touches are inherently bad, but a good customer support manager needs to build the processes to avoid repetitive multiple touch problems.
- Being a larger company comes with many perks, especially when it comes to support. Smaller stores tend to: Not understand their product problems/solutions as well. Have more sourcing issues (still trying to find the right supplier). Not have invested fully in FAQs, enhanced product detail pages, activation sequences, and other ticket mitigation strategies. Knowing this benchmark will help you understand how you are doing from a ticket mitigation standpoint. Don’t feel alone. Preventative customer service is the #1 issue facing most Ecommerce teams, with 18.5% of teams being focused on it right now. If you’re getting more support tickets per month, it may be time to invest in some ticket mitigation strategies, such as improving your FAQ page, sending out more information via an onboarding email sequence, or producing a video for customers to walk themselves through using your product for the first time.
- We’ve followed this statistic since the start of Gorgias, and without fail we see a rush of tickets during and right after Black Friday/Cyber Monday. Ecommerce brands are not staffing appropriately for this time of year, and it’s costing them real money. Key Takeaway: Prepare better for the holiday rush. Consider hiring temporary workers or outsourcing just for December, to cover the volume. Keeping customers happy is worth the extra investment.