How to drive conversions and loyalty for Black Friday.

Customer service can drive both revenue and customer loyalty and in his session Chris Lavoie, Senior Technology Partner Manager at Gorgias, explained how to make the most of the opportunity.

The company is a customer service helpdesk platform for ecommerce brands. “We power all things related to customer service and the customer experience,” said Lavoie.

He said customer engagement is the critical layer of an ecommerce company’s growth stack, but said that the market was changing fast.

Lavoie ran through a number of predictions. The first of these was the increasing trend for brands to give the customers the ability to get their own answers. This frees up retailer time to work on other areas of the business rather than wasting time on repeated questions such as order status or refund requests.

“You should not be answering these questions manually,” he said. With Gorgias’ self-service portal he claimed customers could deflect between 30 to 40% of support volume.

Secondly Lavoie said he believed brands will also begin to adopt automation earlier in their growth cycle to survive and scale faster, especially since reducing response times can radically increase conversion rates. Brands will also consolidate communication channels with customers to deliver a more seamless customer experience, he said.