Say Goodbye Boomer SaaS - Zendesk
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I started my career in eCommerce building Magento connections and migrating brands on Magento/WooCommerce to Shopify. One of those brands was LuMee (the maker of Kim Kardashian’s favorite Selfie Case).
I went on to run eCom at LuMee during their meteoric Retail rise, when the brand expanded into Apple, Target, Verizon, Sprint, Best Buy, and Nordstrom. While running eCom, I managed the tech stack and played IT support for our CS team—we used Zendesk.
Zendesk got the job done, but it was painful to use and expensive. LuMee was a mobile- and social media-led company, and social/SMS support wasn’t integrated well into Zendesk’s core Helpdesk experience. AI was an expensive add-on, and I had to use countless hours of dev resources integrating Zendesk into the rest of our best-of-breed Shopify tech stack.
It felt like that last piece of Boomer-SaaS we were using. It was slow, expensive, and didn’t make our team more productive. The experience was so bad that after I left LuMee and went to work for the SaaS side of eCom, I joined Gorgias.
I saw firsthand how the 15k+ brands leveraging the platform are more efficient, with happier teams and customers. They’ve turned that productivity into free time dedicated to driving Revenue through their support team.
In other words, they’ve turned a cost center into a profit center.
As an investor/advisor of multiple eCommerce brands, it’s never been harder to run a profitably growing eCommerce business. With how important CS is in building a brand, crafting the right program has never been more important.
Now, I’m on a mission to migrate as many Shopify brands off Zendesk as possible. Here's why your brand needs to make the switch. Also if you sign up before the end of the year, you'll get 2 months free.
Chap 1: The Speed vs. Quality Trap.
Davie Fogarty, founder of the 9-figure brand The Oodie, perfectly explains customers’ CS expectations:
“Customers expect a personalized response in a robotic time frame.”
I’ve seen thousands of brands over the last decade fall into the same trap.
- Ramp up the team size with low-cost overseas talent to answer tickets faster. (Result: Sacrifice response quality.)
- Keep a small, onshore, highly trained section of the team. (Result: Suffer through churn and Exec pressure to reduce costs while maintaining quality.)
What’s always missed in this exercise is that all the data required to solve customers’ requests sits somewhere in your tech stack. Today, you’re reliant on a human to find that information and share it with a customer, but that is because your CS platform isn’t smoothly integrated with your other CS tools.
Macros, Rules, Automations, AI. The real purpose of all these tools is to move data from one area that has the information (Fulfillment, Returns, Marketing channels) into your Helpdesk. The better data quality your Helpdesk has access to, the quicker the information will be populated into these tools to use and train them to better answer customer requests.
If we believe that to be true, then there are 3 key principles to solve the speed vs. quality trap:
- The depth of your Helpdesk’s access to your tech stack determines how quickly you can deliver quality answers.
- The more data you can pre-populate into Macros and templates, the faster your team can respond. If simple enough, they can be directly shared with the customer.
- The more work done by the Helpdesk, the more team member time is freed up to work on more complicated tasks or, ideally, Revenue tasks.
The key to winning with modern consumer expectations is to build a robust system to route customers’ data back to them with as team time as possible.
Result: Customers are happier + the business saves money = Winning CX team.
Chap 2: The Power of eCom-ocused Platforms.
The most important data integration for a Helpdesk is where it all starts: the eCommerce platform.
The biggest difference between Zendesk and Gorgias is their focus. Who their ideal customers are determines what they build, their support, and their value.
The simple answer is that Zendesk cares about eCommerce, but it isn’t their most valuable segment. They work with much more profitable industries, such as SaaS, Finance, Insurance, and B2B companies. The logos that Zendesk has on its site are Siemens, Uber, Ticketmaster, and Wine.com—not startup or midmarket eCommerce brands.
On the other hand, Gorgias’s only customer base is eCommerce brands, and they have a strong focus on Shopify brands.
Why does this matter?
SaaS’s most valuable customers determine how:
- Features are built
- Pricing models are structured
- The level of support you receive
From a feature perspective, the speed and depth of features (like editing orders directly in the Helpdesk and pushing updates into Shopify) will be faster on Gorgias because they don’t need to support features for other industries.
This also applies to other apps in your stack. Most likely, you are using a combination of the following apps: Klaviyo, Yotpo, Recharge, Rebuy, Attentive, Loop. The depth of integrations (e.g., being able to pull data into the Helpdesk + trigger actions to occur in those platforms) is the key to automating personalized customer experiences.
Triggering a flow in Klaviyo/Attentive. Automatically answering Yotpo Reviews. Processing a return from within a ticket. These are the seamless experiences customers expect. And the deeper the integration, the more seamless their experience is.
All of this becomes more important when we introduce AI.
Large Language Models (LLMs) need to train on specific data sets with predefined outcomes. As anyone who has played with ChatGPT has seen, using too broad of a data set or use case can lead to hallucinations. Answering customer tickets is the last place we want to see hallucinations.
The ideal situation for a brand like yours is to have your own LLM trained on only your store’s data, but the problem is most eCommerce stores don’t have enough data to properly train an LLM at scale.
So, here’s the question: do you want an AI model trained only on eCommerce data for eCommerce outcomes? Or, do you want AI trained against different data sets and different verticals’ use cases?
Chap 3: True Cost of Ownership
How much support does your support need?
The one cost that I constantly see brands gloss over when looking at their customer support platform is how much they spend on it. This ranges from integration costs to ongoing dev support for customizations or maintenance.
But one of the greatest cost savings brands in the Shopify ecosystem have is offloading the ongoing management and support of their tech stack onto the tools themselves. Integrations, native features, and customizations are more and more being handled by the technologies themselves.
Most brands I know that have hit meaningful scale on Zendesk are dumping 10s of thousands of dollars into customizations and maintenance of those customizations.
Yet when brands switch to Gorgias, they can remove these dev costs entirely, and simultaneously reduce their team costs (e.g., productivity and reducing the numbers of agents needed to support the same ticket volume).
For example, Gorgias supports Social channels, WhatsApp, and major 3PL integrations out of the box. Brands on Gorgias not only skip additional monthly fees to be able to use them but also don’t need to pay dev costs to properly integrate them into core workflows and automations.
Chap 4: Great Support Platforms Should Have Great Support.
A core tenant of mine is that whatever a platform sells, it should also embody. So, a customer support platform should have great customer support.
Zendesk fails here.
For a company that sells to you the value of great CS, they have been repeatedly called out for how poor their own CS is—especially since they were taken private by a PE firm in 2022.
Shopify App Store Reviews:
To me, the most telling data point in researching this is I wasn’t able to find a positive Shopify App Store review (4 stars+) for Zendesk since 2022. I also noticed there was a stark increase in 1 star reviews then. And this isn’t just within the Shopify app ecosystem. If you look at G2 and Trustpilot, there are similar trends.
Trustpilot:
Now, I take all of these platforms with a grain of salt, Gorgias has negative reviews that are related to their support as well. But, at the same time, where there’s smoke there's fire, and the trends here are pretty clear.
One of the Shopify reviews stood out to me just from the mindset of the reviewer:
“I was hesitant to write this review in case it led to worse support/service than I’m already getting; however, upon reflection, I realized that if I can save anyone else the headache of diving into Zendesk then it will be worthwhile.”
At the end of the day, picking a platform to build your CS program around (though that extends to any program) comes down to your belief in them as a great partner that will be there for you when you need them.
Support is an integral part of that belief, and partnering with a platform that believes in Customer Support will also place the additional investment in building a community of people who also value Customer Support.
If you are still on Zendesk and looking to bring personalized responses to customers in a “robotic time frame” (and not bring on 30-40% more team members), Gorgias is offering a white-glove migration package.
Chap 5: It’s Time to Make the Switch
If you are still considering which CS platform to use Gorgias is making it easier than ever to switch over. If you sign up for Gorgias by 10/31/24 they will:
- Buy out your remaining contract
- Migrate your data, macros, rules and configure them in Gorgias
- Train your team on how to use the platform.
- Get Gorgias live for your team in < 2 weeks from kickoff.
Click this link and sign up today to get 2 months free. And let me know how it goes. How much time did you save? How else were you able to improve your business by making your team more productive?