Many brands that have had this customer service retention focus say that in fact they wouldn't go back at all and that on the contrary they should be doing even more. Hello, you're listening to the podcast about e-commerce. Once a month, I host an inspirational figure from the French e-commerce ecosystem for a friendly, unpretentious discussion on the subjects that fascinate them. The aim is to decipher e-commerce trends and share practical tips for making your e-shop a success. I'm Joseph Aubry, co-founder of Loyoly, the loyalty and sponsorship platform that lets you engage your customers through over fifty different mechanisms. User account sharing to customers and much more to increase your LTV and decrease your cac. If you like Loyoly talks, subscribe and feel free to leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts or Spotify to support us. Good listening. Well, it's a pleasure to have you here. Yeah, thanks, it's a pleasure. Listen, yes, we've been wanting to do this for so long, it's so cool. Plus, we've only just joined, so yeah, it's free. Yes, it's free. We've been waiting for this one for a long time, and now it's here, and the customers too, I think quite a few of them are in the process of installing it, and they're pretty happy, so it's great to have you on the podcast. So, you know the principle, the idea is simply to give as much actionable value as possible to all the brands that can listen to us, whatever their size. Brand or no brand, it's true. Do you have other, customers who aren't necessarily brands? No, not necessarily, but just any audience interested in e-commerce to have value in its, but yes mainly on the brand side of course. And I'm the first, by the way, that's why I like doing this exercise, because it's a great way to learn a lot of things. So, basically, it's a pretty selfish idea, but if it can benefit others, that's always good. So, listen, let's talk customer support. We've worked out the plot before. There are a lot of tips, I think they'll be delivered. So frankly, it's going to be very, very cool, I think. And then, of course, we're going to talk about customer retention, but also a little bit about artificial intelligence and trends. Sounds like a good program I'm pretty familiar with it since it's my daily routine at Gorgias, so it'll be a pleasure. And yeah, the aim is for it to be interesting, with concrete use cases and things to put in place for the people listening. So it's clear from my point of view. My name is Johann, and I'm in charge of European partnerships at Gorgias, which is a customer service management solution for e-commerce. So I'm based in Amsterdam, but basically I'm from the south of France, from the Alpes-Maritimes, and I'm really passionate about technology and e-commerce, which is what has shaped my studies and my whole career, it's really always been this interest in new technologies and also the customer experience, customer service, customer relations, which is what I was doing for five years as a customer success manager, now at Gorgias too. So everything to do with technology and the customer experience are subjects that, beyond my job at Gorgias, really interest me personally, and so it's always a pleasure to discuss these subjects, which are often a little underestimated and not sufficiently understood, I think in Europe and in France compared to the US in particular, like many other things. So it's always a pleasure to be able to talk about it together. Yeah, and you see, a few days ago, I was with Jérémy from Just, who was also on the podcast. And as a result, the three of us, and others too, have come to the same conclusion, the same conclusion in the end, the same conclusion, i.e. that brands have invested a lot in acquisition in recent years. And what we're seeing more and more is that they're actually starting to realize that the bottom of the funnel has perhaps been a little neglected. It used to be very easy to go out and find new customers, but now it's much harder to take care of the customers you have today. So I'm very happy to be able to talk about this aspect, which I think is the direction of history, as this expression makes me laugh, but it's true, I think it's really the direction of history today. We're heading more and more in that direction, so that's great. It's true that acquisition costs are constantly rising, it's more expensive and more complicated to convert new customers these days, and as you said, whether they like it or not, brands are increasingly asking themselves the question of retention, the customer experience, but not only the pre-sales experience on the site, but also the post-sales experience and customer service, because the reality is that this has a big impact on the bottom line, on revenues. People often say that acquiring a new customer costs five to six times more than getting an existing customer to buy again. And it's true. And despite the fact that people often repeat it, very few brands actually ask themselves how to improve retention. And beyond the retention of sending well-segmented emails, which many brands do very well, there's also the customer service part, and asking the question of how customer service can really help us generate more revenue as a brand. And it's true that more and more brands are asking themselves this question and implementing it, not necessarily by choice, but because, with acquisition costs and the current e-commerce situation, they're a little obliged to ask themselves these questions. Yeah, two hundred percent, and what's more, we've published a study on loyalty, and we asked ourselves what makes a customer buy from a brand for the first time, but also, of course, what makes them come back to buy from the brand. And in fact, customer support, customer service, was really one of the first factors that made the user come back, make a first purchase, but also make a second purchase. So, as you said today, it's really essential to have a customer service that's well honed and on the ball. Yeah, and also, we'll need to fact-check the information, the veracity of the data. But it seems to me that, on average, a customer who repurchases spends fifty-six percent more than a first-time customer. Logically, I don't know if you sell cosmetics, for example, and maybe you buy a cream the first time to test it out. If you actually like it, maybe you'll buy another one for yourself and another one for a friend or whatever, so these customers are more likely to buy again. Eighty-six percent of consumers are prepared to pay more for a better customer experience, so this is something where you actually have real leverage as a brand if you have a good customer experience, and you don't really have the right to make a mistake with customer service, so we'll check that out too, but it seems that thirty-two percent of consumers are prepared to abandon a brand after just one bad experience with that brand. I'm not surprised. And that rises to ninety-two percent for two or more bad experiences. So as a brand, of course you have to pay attention to customer service, but you don't really have the right to make a mistake at first because consumers have a lot of options and they're ready to switch from one brand to another pretty easily after a bad experience, whether it's related to customer service or the experience with the brand in general. Yeah, totally, and you see, last week we were with Pierre from 1 Pilot, of course. Which you have to recognize, of course. So we ran a workshop at Plug Day together on how to turn your customer base into a profit center. And so, right at the start, he asked a question to the people who were with us at the workshop. And I think you'll get the answer, but the first thing that came up was speed. I'd have been surprised if you'd said anything else, and there are plenty of studies that have shown that, in fact, among the most important factors for a good customer experience in terms of customer service, number one is response time. And number two is omnichannelity. In other words, people increasingly expect a response not only by e-mail, but also on the social networks WhatsApp and so on. But the number one criterion is still response time, and this should be the main objective for brands: to be able to respond more quickly, bearing in mind that not all customer requests need to be answered quickly. But there's a big part where it can help you convert more or people who are unhappy, who need to make changes to an order, and so on. If you respond quickly, you'll avoid a lot of customer frustration too. So clearly, response time is the most important criterion for a good customer service experience. And in the end, it's very simple. If you want to improve your customer service, try to respond faster to your customers. And you published a benchmark on this subject at the end of two thousand and twenty-three. I thought you were going to tell me the figures, but it seems to me that it's what I'm going to say, but hold on. I think it's seven point 6 hours of response time, well first response time, so it takes a brand an average of seven point 6 hours to respond to these customer requests and I think in the seventeen hours of resolution time something like that and yeah so that's a study we did with our customers. It sounds huge, doesn't it. It sounds huge. If you have an answer and you have time to do a lot of stuff in seven hours. You have time to go to the competitor's site. Completely, I can also tell you that there are many brands in France that take several days to respond too. So that's an average that takes into account not only our customers in the US, UK and so on, who are a little more mature on the subject of customer experience and customer service, and who put more resources into it, but I think it's also a little hard to learn, because it doesn't take into account business hours, so in fact in most customer services in France it's typically nine to five from Monday to Friday, and there's nobody available in the evenings and at weekends, just to qualify things a little. But in any case, I agree with you that it's too much. It should be less than that, especially as there's a big gap between consumer expectations and what brands are actually able to deliver in terms of response time. For example, I believe a HubSpot study showed that for ninety percent of consumers, it's important or very important to get an immediate response from customer service when they really need it. Immediate response meaning a response in less than ten minutes. But the reality is that very few brands are able to deliver on this. So there's a gap between consumers' expectations and what brands are able to deliver, and from what I see personally, it's mainly due to the fact that customer service is still something relatively secondary for e-tailers. So they don't necessarily put in the appropriate resources, whether technological, financial, human or other, to give themselves the means to really get to a stage where someone with an important question, or someone who's really unhappy, can be identified and responded to super-quickly. It's a figure that's too high, but it doesn't surprise me that much either, especially in Europe and France, where I can tell you that there are very few brands that are able to respond even within a few hours for the Shopify e-commerce ecosystem in any case. Yes, that's clear. Okay, so yeah, it does seem like seven hours to get a response. That seems like a long time. Well, I'd like to take this opportunity to say that we're pretty proud of Loyoly's customer support, which responds in less than three minutes. Incredible. You beat us, we're at four minutes on chat anyway. Ah, that's it, that's really stylish. So, we're a bit manic on this subject. That's a good thing. Because we know how frustrating it is not to get respect right away. It's hyper hyper frustrating, you've got things to do, you're there, your thing doesn't work, it's a tool that costs you money, at least for us. For us, it's not necessarily like an e-commerce brand, but yes, of course. I think it's really important, and this hour seems to me, it seems huge. So, I'm wondering if you have any tips on how to reduce this typical response time. Yeah, there are lots of ways to reduce response time. It depends on the brand's situation, but first of all you need to be able to centralize all your communication channels in one place. So, typically, a customer service tool like Gordjas, for example, can be used to do this and prioritize requests according to who is asking for what on which channel. In other words, centralizing the channels means that if someone sends you an e-mail and you don't reply a day later, that person may send a DM on Instagram and if you don't reply, because many brands don't check their DMs on Instagram for example, they'll go and see that there's a chat on the site and contact you on the three channels. In the end, just by having the three channels centralized, you'll be able to identify these types of requests and you won't need to reply three times, you'll reply once and you'll have visibility on what people are asking you. Secondly, you need to prioritize requests, because they're just as urgent as someone saying “I'd like to change my order” when they've just placed an order and it hasn't been picked up yet, or someone who's very unhappy or is asking a pre-sales question, who may be ready to buy. So first of all, you need to know how to identify the types of requests that are going to come in, so you can prioritize them. Then, for the most common questions, make sure you can answer them super-fast, so have macros or templates already pre-recorded for questions like where's my order, return requests, and so on, so that the customer service team doesn't have to type everything in manually every time. Ideally, to be able to use variables from different sources that will be used for these answers. If you're using Shopify and you have tracking data in Shopify, you'll have a template that tells you your order number so many was sent on such and such a date, to such and such an address, and so on. So you have pre-recorded answers to the most common questions, and I think this also involves I don't know how you say it in French, but difflecting as many requests as possible. So using the sales service to ensure that customers don't have to ask certain questions on their own. Typically in e-commerce, the question “Where is my order? There may be exceptions. But it's mainly what everyone has as their most recurring question, so maybe you can have a page on your site where customers can go and track down even their orders. FAQ or even stuff about stuff. Depending on the tracking tool you use, this could be a landing page. For example with Gorgias, we also have something called order management where you can track and manage your order directly from the Cordias chat, from the help center or even from a contact form. So you can very well have an automatic email response saying that as soon as someone asks where my order is, we'll send them to the chat or to the help center, and in fact it's self service, there's very little chance that they'll end up contacting the brand about these questions, and so you'll reduce the volume of tickets to be processed, and so inevitably you'll improve your response time. And also, in fact, response time should be as low as possible, especially for important conversations that will either generate sales for the brand, pre-sales questions, chat questions or questions from customers who are really frustrated or unhappy, it's really in your interest to focus on these if you want to reduce your response time. Yeah, okay, okay, really interesting, and you were giving quite a few examples of good customer service practices. I've got a few examples of brands after all, I can't necessarily say exactly what they're doing, but from what I can see, having spent three and a half years at Gorgias as customer success manager for our biggest customers in Europe, I can see what some brands are doing. Well, when you have a customer service tool like Gorgias or other channel centralization, that's the basis of the basis. Knowing how to identify and prioritize requests. So, for example, a request from a VIP customer who has already placed an order for a long time should be given relative priority, because it's someone who's more likely to place another order, who's already loyal to the brand, who'll be able to recommend it. But you can also prioritize someone who asks you a pre-sales question and you know they're not yet a customer, and identify this request as a priority. So you really have to be able to identify and prioritize the requests that are most important to the brand, and that depends from one brand to another. And then I think it's really about thinking that customer service can be a revenue center, and it can be a revenue center by having a good, personalized customer experience, which means answering pre-sales questions quickly, which should be the number one priority, for example, to have a good customer experience, you need to have a chat on your site, but you also need to be able to respond relatively quickly if there are requests coming in from the chat, but it's the channel that converts the most, so for me, good customer service means customer service that's going to generate revenue, and that means chat, and that means perhaps saving as much time as possible on other channels like e-mail, to spend a little time on chat and be a little more proactive in that respect. And I'd also add having a concrete help center that responds to most of the requests customers might have, so that they can do a search, have a help center search bar, for example, and use the help center to recommend items according to what customers want or request, for example outside business hours, and have automations in place that really enable us to respond automatically to certain types of request, to free up the time of the customer service team, who become a bit like advisors to help potential customers place their orders. For me, truly optimal customer service means that we spend as little time as possible answering requests, because we prioritize them, we have pre-recorded answers, we can use tools, well, data from different tools directly from Gorgias, we don't have to switch between different super-efficient tools, and we take the time to answer pre-sales questions, questions from customers who are a little unhappy, and we really take the time to create this human relationship and take the time because that's what's going to help us generate more revenue from customer service. And do you think we can go and see some, we can go and try to place orders on shops that do this well Do you have any ideas for merchants in mind I know we can go and test the limits of customer support a little. Yeah, you don't even have to order from them. You can just send an email to an ordinary brand. I've done it myself several times. For example, I wanted to buy a mechanical keyboard for my computers. And that's mostly about existing keyboards. It's very complicated to find an azerty keyboard if you make your own custom keyboard. So I contacted four or five sites by email, I said to myself, I'm going to count the number of emails, and in the end, only one got back to me in two or three hours, I think not bad, I said to myself, bravo, and then I realized that they were overloaded with customers at the time. six hours later and two others I simply didn't get a response from, so just sending an e-mail will allow you to see how long it takes to react, especially if you show you're a little interested, or if there's a brand you've already ordered from, you can try it out, but if not, there are brands that do this well in the US, like glamnetti, which is a brand that sells everything from nail polish to fake Ileshies and false eyelashes. They do that very well. We've got Doctor Squash too, so it's SQUATCH, which in any case with Gorgias, and in terms of customer service conversion rates, revenue generated per customer service, they're doing a very good job. Then there's Jackson, which sells all jewelry, JAXX0N. There's also Hello Toshi, the brand that inspired a lot of people in France, who make TUSHY Japanese toilets. So if someone looks at the Toshi site, it's Hello Toshi, because if you just search for Toshi, you're going to come across stuff you don't necessarily want to find, so it's Hello Toshi. You can try it out later if you like. They used to have I don't know how many people managing customer service, and now they manage it with one and a half people, even though they have tens of thousands of tickets a month, because they've really automated everything, but of course they have a human for questions that make sense, but it's really a lot of dirty service at that level. Okay. Then in Europe, there's Looper Plug who do a very good job in this area. Halo Has Sandel too and YATM Lewin in England, I name drop like that but in any case they do a really good job and that deserves to be highlighted because there are really very few there, for example I'm thinking about France, There's Franklin Petfood, which is doing something we're working on with Gorjas. I discovered this two weeks ago when we did a presentation with them, and they've really got some great statistics and usage, there are very, very few brands that really have a super-optimized customer service, well oiled as it should be, it's still something that's not at all common, but it's also super interesting because as a result there's a real competitive advantage in looking for them right now whereas in the US, some of the brands I told you about, all channels combined, even email, in tens of thousands of customer service tickets per month, they respond in less than ten minutes. Something I've never seen in France until now. So there's something to be said for that. It's clear, no, but absolutely. And then, even if we leave the e-commerce world for a moment, it's true that for those who have their own personal businesses, what I was quite positively surprised about was the support for Alan or PayFit, for example. Yeah, I've also found that a lot of B-to-B customer services are pretty responsive. I use Breaks for the card for all my expenses with Gorgias. Okay. Same answer in a few minutes. We also use Breaks for everything to do with planning hotels, events, bookings, etc. Likewise, we respond in a few minutes, and it's great to see that it's becoming the norm in B2B, But what's really interesting is that there's a real opportunity here, because if we go back to the subject of response time, there's a direct correlation between response time and customer satisfaction. We have data on this, and we might even be able to put a screenshot on the video, a direct correlation between response time and customer satisfaction. The lower the response time, the higher the customer satisfaction. Yeah. And do you have any stats to go on to the next step, i.e. between customer satisfaction and average basket? That's what I was just getting at, so perfect. The higher the customer satisfaction, the higher the repeat buyer rate. So in fact we realize that if you manage to increase your customer satisfaction, you're going to increase your repeat buyer rate, and we base this on people who reorder within one hundred and fourty-two days of their previous order. As we mentioned earlier, a repeat customer spends on average fifty-six percent more than a new customer, so there's also a direct correlation between the repeat buyer rate and the revenue generated by the brand, and we've got statistics on this on Gorgias, we can put the screenshots up and so the correlation between response time and customer satisfaction between customer satisfaction and repeat buyer rate, spend on average more and their custom live time value is greater than that of first-time customers. And you also know that repeat customers are more likely to test new products, to recommend your company, to join the loyalty program, to perform actions in the loyalty program. So it's all quite intertwined. It's not just a matter of responding quickly to your customers, it's that it makes sense and is ultimately justified by an increase in revenue. Yeah, a hundred percent. No, you can see it's totally cause and effect, even more than a correlation, so I'm really looking forward to seeing the screenshots. We've got a playbook on how to generate more revenue with customer experience and customer service with very concrete use cases including data like this. Too good. And we've got a playbook on customer service automation. Why Premièrement, well, why it's of interest because you say yes it's all very well to want to automate AI but why shouldn't we respond manually as we always have It's because in fact, there's also a direct correlation between the rate of customer service automation and the revenue generated by customer service, and so it's going to be in the playbook we've got on automation, and so yeah, it's super interesting stuff where if you're not confronted with factual data and concrete use cases, you're not necessarily going to make the connection yourself, and even if you do see this data, these use cases, you still need to see two or three times that you've heard it from another brand before you really start thinking, okay, I've got to ask myself some real questions in terms of customer service retention and how this can help me generate revenue. Yeah, definitely. Do you have any examples of automation? We've talked a lot about that in the last two or three questions. Is it when you always have the same question, instead of asking your question, you click on the question in question and you get the answer, is it some kind of link? It's something that's mainly done on the chat where you go to the chat and in fact you'll get the most common questions and it works very well - well, I didn't give exact figures, but in any case the accounts that I look at from time to time on Gorgias or with whom I chat I'd say that easily eighty-five percent of requests or in fact the person clicks on that button, it doesn't create a customer service ticket behind it, it goes from stuff like how do I choose my product, what's your return policy. In fact, these are pre-sales questions that people often ask, and there isn't necessarily any added value for brands in answering them, apart of course from the fact that it can convert customers, but it's in their interest to allow customers to get the answer themselves directly on the chat while they're on the site. So it works very well, we call it quick with pense, but it's basically, I click and I get my answer. And then you've even got the you've got some intermediate steps sometimes. You can create things that are more or less complex, I'm an existing customer, I'm a new customer, and you can go pretty far with that. There are few brands that go far enough in the complexity of these options, but you can go, you can go very far, you can even make call APIs to check that this person has subscribed to which subscription, and depending on the subscription, they'll have this option or that option. For me, you can go really far, and this is something that's really under-used, because at the end of the day, consumers don't necessarily want to contact a brand for anything. First of all, you always have to prioritize dirty services options, but it has to be easy to find the information and get the information. But then, to come back to your question about automation, there's the quote-unquote sales services part of enabling people to find the answer to their questions themselves with what you were saying about chat, quick with pense. It can also mean tracking and managing orders directly from chat or the hell center, as we were saying earlier. Otherwise, in Gorgias as a tool, you're going to have automations that aren't necessarily an automatic response. It could be automating things to make customer service life easier. Yes. It could be macros, services. It can be macros with variables or even that perforate actions. So, for example, you'll have a macro for editing the delivery address, so in fact you'll say here we've updated your delivery address and when it's time to send it you'll edit the delivery address directly in Shopify from Gorgias, for example. So macros are really going to be a big aspect of automation in the sense that you're going to save an enormous amount of time with macros and then there's automation via rules, so basically it's going to be a bit like triggers where you say when someone asks me this, I'm going to tag the ticket in such and such a way. A question in French for the French team, a question in English for the English team. A question in French for the French team, a question in English for the English team. A question from a VIP customer, I'll send it to such and such a team, or a pre-sales question, I'll send it to the team of advisers who know the product really well. So there are all these types of automation that will help prioritize and better manage customer service more quickly. Okay. It can also be automatic responses. I was talking earlier about business hours, where you have a lot of customer service teams, working Monday to Friday from 9am to 5pm. You can have an automatic response saying that outside business hours, if someone asks a question about a return, we'll send them to the help center on the return part and tell them that if they have a question, they can contact us again, and there are quite a few other things like that, and now in fact there's conversational AI too, so I'm not going to say conversational too much, because the aim isn't for you to have an AI that goes back and forth with a customer ten times, either. I'm not going to say conversational, because the goal isn't for you to have an AI that goes back and forth with a customer ten times, but rather for it to be able to answer the right question at the right time, without necessarily having to converse as if it were a human being. But the reality is that this is going to become the norm very soon. We're launching AI Agent on July 1, well, I don't know when the podcast will come out, maybe it'll already be live, but we're coming out soon. We've already got four hundred customers using our AIGENT, some of whom are already able to automate twenty percent of customer service requests with something that's still in beta, so in fact, more and more brands could be able to automate a good part of their customer service thanks to AI, and this is still in its infancy, but it's really going to be something open to everyone. There will no longer be any excuse for not being able to respond except quickly, in a personalized and optimal way, whatever the size of the brand. It's no longer limited to brands with large, high-volume teams, who are obliged to optimize this. Now, anyone, even a solo finder, will have access to tools that enable a great customer experience. Yeah, and speaking of which, in fact, it's going to greatly reduce the barriers to entry. So mechanically, as I was saying, the level of customer service is going to go way up. Can you tell us about the key features of your AIG Agent? Yeah, after all, it's always a matter of taking lia with a grain of salt, in the sense that it really is an incredible opportunity, but for me you have to do it right, and that's not always easy. The first thing I do every time is speak to human. I mean, I need to speak to a person, because they say things that are completely beside the point. It's generally hellish. It's all very well to have an AI that can answer customer service requests, but for me what's much more important is to make sure that it's going to answer something relevant and that behind it there's always someone human who's available quickly. But the opportunity is to make sure that the questions that don't bring too much value, like where's my order, can be handled by an AI, and that this frees up time for humans to really manage the more human conversations that make more sense. And how does it work? Is there something that's really autonomous and connected to all the tools and that's really going to respond autonomously, or is it more of an aid for the support agent to kind of prefer questions to her, and you've got the support agent who's just going to validate what Léa has come up with as a pre-answer or whatever. For us, what we're developing at the moment is a concrete response to customer requests, so it's going to be based on the history of customer service conversations in Gorgias. Ok. On Shopify data, i.e. order and customer data available in Gorgias, on the help center. This will be the main source of information for a young AY to work well, and that means having a concrete help center. Not necessarily the help center that's customer facing on the site, you can very well have I don't know, twenty-five help articles on your site, but on the other hand having a help center with two hundred and fifty articles for your AI with all the internal processes and all the information. So that's going to be really key, it's having articles in quotation marks on which the AI can base itself to answer the most common questions. And basically, the aim is to be able to answer certain questions, or even transfer them to a human, but having first gathered some information, and then it's a matter of deciding whether I'm going to automate a large part of the customer service. Is the product in good condition? Does the person need to take it to a relay point or send it straight back to us, whatever the case may be? transferred to a human, it depends. In the beta version, we're responding to requests, but very quickly, over the next week, we'll also be able to perform actions. So on Shopify in particular, editing an order, cancelling an order, refunding an order, it can be performing actions, I know we're going to start with loop return so on return requests. Very quickly, it's going to be actions via the API. So what I'm imagining is, for example, AI interacting with someone and then asking them if they'd like to be kept informed of new product launches, bim an action to add the person to a Klavio list, for example. So for me, the real potential is also to perform actions, so always with a view to doing something that the brand wants and so that there's no action that shouldn't have been taken or whatever, but in terms of possibilities, it's really going to make it possible to automate a lot of things so that humans can spend their time on things that make a lot of sense, and also a big advantage is that it makes it possible to manage things with all the customer's context, so all the conversation history, all the information. No human error of having forgotten something, forgotten the context of something twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, so in relation to that we were talking about response time earlier, even if it's not the ideal response, if you set it up in such a way that it responds to something that's still relevant, at least it's super fast and you're assured as a customer that it's transferred to the team and so on, they'll get back to you as soon as possible. You can even ask the AI to tag it as urgent based on certain requests and so on. So it's really made this job easier, and also multilingual. Tomorrow, if you're a French e-tailer, and you want to launch in Germany or Spain, you don't necessarily need to recruit a team that speaks those languages, and a young team that can handle the first requests as they come in, and you can test things at that level too. It's really going to be a game changer for organizations. It's also going to mean less need for human resources to manage large peaks in demand. Typically, there are always lots of brands telling me they're in a tizzy after Black Friday, which requires q-four. So in fact, it's going to enable us to manage the influx of requests much more effectively, and as we were saying earlier, it's accessible to anyone, so in fact now anyone can use these technologies, which until a few years ago, were only available to large multinationals with mega-budgets who had developed their own in-house LLM model. Yeah, yeah. So now it's over for anyone. It's crazy, no it's really I think revolutionizing the way we interact with our customers. And in a few months or years, when we contact a brand, we'll be expecting an AI to answer, but we'll be thinking, okay, if things are well done, it's going to answer me something relevant, even if it's not too relevant, at least I'll get a very quick answer and I know the AI will take the context, share the right information and so on, but on the other hand I'll also expect that since there's an AI that responds to requests, if I need to talk to a human, I'll be put in touch much more quickly than is currently possible. So there will be both this expectation, this expectation that maybe it's an AI that's going to answer me, but secondly that I can very quickly be in contact with a human if I need to. Yeah, in terms of response time and resolution time, that can normally increase it quite drastically. While balancing this out so as to have a good experience and so that it's not an AI answering nonsense, not very relevant stuff. I'm convinced of the positive impact it can have, but I'm also convinced of the risks involved in setting up this type of tool, just as I've seen plenty of people who've set up chatbots where, in the end, it was an ultra-frustrating experience, which wasn't at all the aim in the first place. So yes, but you have to do it very carefully and test the different scenarios and how it works beforehand. Yeah, I can't wait to test it out, it's going to be pretty cool, I think. And then, listen, maybe we can finish with the question at the end in general, it's the same one, i.e. do you have any advice In fact, there are two categories of brands that can listen. You've got the ones that are just starting out, and then you've got the ones that are scaling up the next stage. When it comes to customer service, you see that for a small brand that's just starting out, perhaps it's going to be rather secondary at first, and maybe it's after a while, once they've cracked their acquisition a little. At least, that's what she might think, you know. Once I've cracked the acquisition, I'm going to focus more on the follow-up, on retention, and so I'm going to implement tactics to take better care of my customers than I did before, even if we can also do it in the pre-sales phase concerning support. And then there are those who don't want to move on to the next stage, and who have to manage tens of thousands of tickets from one day to the next. What would be your advice for these two categories of brands? Yeah, I think it's super important, especially for a brand just starting out, because it's where you're going to get the first feedback from your customers, you're going to see the questions they're asking you, You're going to see why they buy, why they don't buy, you're going to get feedback that's not necessarily positive about the product, about the experience, which will really enable you to get information directly from your customers to improve your various processes, and so on. So for me, it's really crucial at the beginning, and I think that in relation to what you were saying, maybe at the beginning, it's not a priority. Personally, I think it's a priority because, at the beginning, it's very often the finders themselves who answer to customer service. This may have been the case for you in the beginning with Loyoly. But where it becomes secondary is when you actually end up spending an hour or two dealing with customer service, which isn't necessarily a very cool task. Still, as a founder, when it's your brand, it can be cool, you can see the positive aspects, but you'll quickly detach yourself from that and move on to more sales-oriented conversion issues. And as soon as you start to have people managing it for you, that's perhaps when it becomes a little more secondary, and not ready for more mature brands, that would be to say that customer service can and should be a source of revenue. It's possible, we have plenty of customers who do it, it's just a question of mindset. You can see in Gorgets, for example, the revenue influenced by the solution. That's exactly it, but yes, we're the only customer service solution to my knowledge that allows you to track customer service conversations that have resulted in sales in Shopify. So basically we say if there's been a conversation and a sale within five days, we count that in Gordjas and of course that's to be taken with a pinch of salt, you can have a subscription model with someone contacting you and the subscription is renewed but behind that you can actually go and filter all that, you can filter them according to the agent, you can set them and filter them according to tags, so you can tag certain types of tickets and see the figures behind them, and yes, when you look at this statistic in a more granular way, we have customers who generate much more with customer service than what Gorgias costs them, but also than what their customer service team or a good part of their customer service team costs them. But you don't get something for nothing, in other words, you have to think in terms of improving and optimizing customer service, looking at KPIs, maybe looking at which agent converts the most, what this agent is doing that the others aren't doing, setting up an incentive for agents who upsell, and so on. So it's a revenue channel like any other, but yes, yes, and that's also why I'm convinced of the impact of customer service on revenues, because I see what some of our customers are doing, and I see the improvements compared to when they started with it, for example. And clearly, there's something that works when you try to optimize, ask yourself the questions of how to offer a better customer experience and better customer service to our customers and so on. Too good. Listen, we've done, we've done a good tour, I think of the conversation, it was really interesting. As expected, I learned a lot of stuff, so I'm very, very happy, and I can't wait to see what developments in AI will bring in the next few, next week in fact, typically. Yeah, yeah, in a couple of weeks, in any case, it'll be, it'll be available, but yeah, well, it's really interesting to see how people are going to use it, because I think there are lots of use cases where we don't yet know how- how people are going to use it, but it's really interesting to see how people are going to use it, because it's really interesting to see how people are going to use it. I think there are lots of use cases where we don't yet know how people are going to use it, but typically for me, the fact of performing actions via the API opens up a multitude of use cases where it really allows us to put ourselves in a position of generating revenue towards customer service and spending it on people who manage customer service with tools and things that will enable us to generate more revenue at this level. so it's very interesting to see where it's going and it's the kind of thing where it's all breaking down there are some who are going to adopt it very well, who are going to use it in a way that's really going to benefit them, just as there are others who are perhaps going to say okay, let's make a customer service agent. be thinking “ok, we've made an agent, but they're not using it very well, and maybe it won't be ideal afterwards”, so in any case, it's really interesting to see what's going to happen at this level. and in general, customer service is really becoming central and in fact, many brands that have had this focus on customer service retention say that they wouldn't go back at all and that, on the contrary, they should be doing even more, and even among the many brands that are saying, let's take a tool like Gordjas, there are very few that are using it well and very few that are proactively trying to optimize it too, so this is really something that's relatively new, but that's going to develop very quickly in Europe and in France in the United States, They're much more mature than we are in this respect, and it's really interesting to see what happens, because things are moving very fast in this area too. Too good. Thanks again for sharing all this on the podcast, it's a pleasure. Yeah, it's a pleasure everywhere. And then we can find you on LinkedIn. Yeah mainly on LinkedIn so Johan rent, I think he must have my name somewhere on the podcast otherwise Johan Y0HAN corjas and then yeah as I said I'm passionate about technology, e-commerce, customer service so even independently of de Gorgias, it's always a pleasure to talk to people on these subjects, so LinkedIn is the best way to get in touch with me, or Johan at Gorgias dot com, and if people want to get in touch with me, it won't be too much of a problem to find my contact via people in the ecosystem. Don't hesitate to ask me if. If need be, that's it. Thank you very much. Thank you for the opportunity. Thank you for listening to this episode of Loyally Talks all the way through. I hope you've enjoyed it and found lots of tips to try out for your brand. If so, subscribe so you don't miss the next one. Spread the word and leave us a five-star rating on the Apple podcast, it helps us a lot. Finally, if you need to increase your LTV, don't hesitate to contact me on LinkedIn or on our website loyoly point I o. See you soon.
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