At the 2024 eTail West conference, Crystal Romero, leading the charge in Customer Storytelling at Gladly, presents a captivating vision for revolutionizing ecommerce support experiences. As trailblazers in Customer Experience (CX), Gladly remains unwavering in their commitment to prioritizing their clients. This dedication isn’t merely a fundamental aspect of Gladly’s identity and drive; it serves as the impetus behind the continuous refinement and adaptation of their adept platform’s ever-evolving capabilities.
Humanizing Customer Support: Recognizing Individuals, Not Numbers
Romero begins with a fundamental shift in customer understanding: “At Gladly, customers are viewed as individuals, not mere ticket numbers or case numbers.” This belief underscores Gladly’s approach, empowering agents to craft interactions tailored to each customer’s unique profile and purchase history.
Beyond transactional exchanges, Gladly emphasizes the importance of forging genuine connections with customers, transcending the old legacy way of putting customers in a workflow by actually treating them as people and building lasting relationships that form the bedrock of exceptional customer experiences, keeping them coming back for more.
The Lifelong Conversation Model: A Unified Approach to Support
Central to Gladly’s philosophy is the lifelong conversation model, which serves as the cornerstone of seamless support experiences. Romero elucidates, “Every interaction contributes to one ongoing conversation.” By consolidating interactions across channels, Gladly eliminates redundancy and enhances the efficiency of support operations.
This unified approach stresses the importance of empowering businesses to deliver personalized support consistently, fostering trust and loyalty among customers at every touchpoint along their buying and loyalty journey. This allows the agent to get a clear view into the customer’s history with the brand in one unified place. Such further enables them to reach out to the customer through the channel they prefer, versus having three separate tickets from three different channels for one person.
Founding Philosophy: Innovation Born from Frustration
“The genesis of Gladly is rooted in a deep frustration with fragmented online support. Joseph Ansanelli, CEO of Gladly, envisioned a resolution to the ticket-after-ticket ordeal,” Romero explains. Gladly emerged as a trailblazer of innovation, bridging the gap between businesses and their patrons with a vision to revolutionize customer support. In fact, Gladly is the only company differentiated in this way with a platform built from the ground up centered around people, not tickets.
This is the keystone of Gladly’s mission, driving the continuous evolution of support experiences in the ever-increasing competitive reality of the ecommerce landscape.
Deciphering Customer Lifetime Value (CLV): Maximizing Insights, Efficiency, & Cost Savings
With its tech, Gladly empowers businesses to unlock valuable insights by centralizing customer data. Romero emphasizes, “We centralize all customer information and conversations from every touchpoint into one place.” This view presents a crucial advantage to businesses in tailoring comprehensive engagement strategies that maximize Customer Lifetime Value (CLV).
By harnessing the top-down view of these valuable CLV insights, businesses gain the ability to refine marketing strategies, curate personalized product offerings, and prioritize retention initiatives, fostering sustainable growth and profitability in the dynamic marketplace that the digital realm persists to be.
Romero goes on to highlight the very tangible benefits of Gladly, that deliver measurable results for businesses to take meaningful actions from. From cost savings through support team time consolidation to operational efficiency gained by eliminating duplicate tickets, Gladly’s impact is transformative.
Investing in customer support platforms like Gladly yields significant savings and operational efficiencies, enabling businesses to reallocate resources strategically and focus on core objectives with renewed vigor. Arming them with data and informed connections that can stand the test of any shifts that, within our chaotic digital realm, has become a mainstay.
The Role of AI: Enhancing Support Efficiency
How do they do it all and continue to innovate? To that question, Romero introduces Gladly’s AI-powered automation tool, Sidekick, designed to handle lower-value inquiries efficiently. “Sidekick resolves conversations through A.I. at a fraction of the cost of traditional support channels,” Romero explains. “If, on average, every support ticket resolution costs $6, A.I. can take care of the lower-hanging fruit and preserve resources efficiently.”
By integrating AI-powered automation into support workflows, ecommerce businesses can simultaneously enhance efficiency, reduce response times, and lower support costs, scaling operations effectively while maintaining personalized interactions prioritized in a way that continues to resonate with new and returning customers alike.
When it comes to a service like Gladly, Crystal Romero’s insights offer a comprehensive roadmap for ecommerce professionals to reimagine customer support experiences. By embracing a human-centric approach, leveraging customer data insights holistically, and integrating innovative technologies, businesses can forge meaningful connections with customers and thrive in the ever-evolving ecommerce landscape.
