Jason Anderson: [00:00:00] Hello and welcome to the Andzen approach, a new podcast from Andzen. My name is Jason Anderson and I’m the director at Andzen. I’m joined by Brenden Rawson, our founder. And. With the ends and approach, we’ll be releasing monthly episodes where we chat to modern software platforms, savvy agencies, and ambitious merchants.

Brenden Rawson: This is actually a revival of a video series we did about seven years ago. So yeah. It looks like we’re jumping on the podcast bandwagon. And we probably are a bit, but we’ve actually been doing this before. So we’re going to be having a drink, having a laugh and trying to get some of the backstories and insights from e commerce and digital marketing legends.

Jason Anderson: So for episode one, we’re in Sydney at the annual online retailer conference. We’re Where we share a good Aussie beer Hawks pale ale with our mate, Hugh Russell- Parsons, the strategic partner manager [00:01:00] for Gorgias in APAC. We chat a little bit about Gorgias AI, smart integrations with Klaviyo and how important it is to get your discount codes right.

Brenden Rawson: Jason, I just realized something that has changed in seven 4k. And I can see all of the blemishes and lines that have appeared over the years.

Jason Anderson: Several grey hairs compared to our original series.

Brenden Rawson: Yeah. Definitely need some makeup artist. So we’ll see if the budget can stretch. So yeah, make sure you jump on sign up at: https://andzen.co/podcast , hear about all the upcoming episodes. Also great offers. From us and some of our partners along the way. And as usual, like subscribe, follow us on YouTube, Spotify and Apple podcasts. Enjoy the episode.

Jason Anderson: Hello and welcome to the Andzen approach first episode. Thanks for joining us. We’re here today with Hugh from Gorgias. My name’s Jason. We’ve got Brendan as [00:02:00] well. Hello from Andzen.

Hugh Russell-Parsons: Hello. Hello.

Jason Anderson: I’m really excited today. It’s first episode, our maiden episode. We’ve obviously done quite a bit of work together.

It totally made sense. AI is massively popular at the moment. Everyone keeps talking about it. Everyone makes sure it bumps their stock prices. And including us. Yeah. Yeah. And customer support is maybe not the first thing that people think about when they think AI, but I think you guys encapsulate a perfect example.

Within e commerce of how AI can help. In areas for merchants to scale, whether that’s locally, whether that’s when they’re scaling globally, merchants of all sizes effectively use AI to give a better customer experience, right? So, let’s hear a little bit about how you guys are tackling it.

Hugh Russell-Parsons: Oh, you want the elevator pitch? Yeah, absolutely. So yes, Gorgias. I’m sure there might be a few listeners who’ve come across us before, but we are the number one help desk and automation platform on Shopify. So what we do is we empower brands to grow through AI powered customer [00:03:00] experience. What that really means is absolutely.

You’ve got multiple channels of conversation. You’ve got so many different needs from the customer, particularly this year that are only getting larger before they actually feel confident to make a sale. And what Gorgias does is really enable brands to automate a significant workload so that you can focus on the more complex tasks for your customers.

Business and customers, but really give time back to focus on those areas and take out the menial, repetitive nature of customer experience sometimes, which is that refund piece. I need to make an edit on my order, all of that. Our AI agent looks after all of that for you, upsells for you, and gives you the best opportunity to keep driving some sales.

And Andzen does that pretty well as well from your end, so might return the ball.

Brenden Rawson: Yeah that sounds That sounds incredible. Very formal, but what we really want to get is this Gorgias AI. Yeah. I’m talking about it for a while. It came out what, a couple of weeks ago now [00:04:00] July 1st.

How much better is this going to be than the previous version of Gorgias? Like what is the percentage increase on the efficiencies that merchants going to get it going to get and. Maybe we can get into like how fewer resources you might need, or how more effective they might be if they’re not spending all their time answering tickets.

Hugh Russell-Parsons: Spot on. Yeah, look, we can casualize things. Absolutely. I’m too used to being at the online retailer summit with a few formal. We’re going to start

Brenden Rawson: with the form and then we can break you down. Yeah, you’ll break me down. You’ll break me down. It’ll be

Hugh Russell-Parsons: alright. But yeah, it’s a great question. And in answer, I think it’s significantly better than the original Gorgias.

Everyone knows what Gorgias is, that help desk platform. Obviously pulls together all your different channels. You answer it through a few macros, everything like that. It works great. But AI Agent, the reason why obviously we’re all driving it so hard is because it really does change the game when it comes to answering questions, answering really difficult circumstances [00:05:00] sometimes from your customers and yeah, reducing the workload that’s included.

I think that’s probably the main bit I want to focus on is, we’ve had examples of brands we’re working with, whether they be, small to mid market, but even up to some of the biggest brands in the world that are using us, they’re removing up to three, five, eight agents who are on their team because AI agent has Allowed them to reappropriate their role within the business, whether they still work at the business.

I think that’s another thing that we’re not really going to cover today.

Brenden Rawson: We can joke about it, right? Like it’s pretty funny. I was going to take our jobs. And It’s not more obvious than with a customer service representative, right? Like that is the talking point, but in reality, you’d be crazy to downsize those stuff when you can make them more effective, you can redeploy them, you can start excelling in customer service rather than just doing the labor as part of it.

You can have them doing all sorts of creative customer service elements that the AI agent [00:06:00] isn’t doing. And it’s taking the heavy lifting, right? That’s what we talk about. If you do nothing, AI will take your job, but if you embrace it then you’re going to be ahead of everybody else and you’re going to excel at your job and grab with both hands,

Hugh Russell-Parsons: grab with both hands indeed.

Yeah, you’re right. And it’s why we’re not saying, automate a hundred percent of your customer experience. Yeah. It is actually. Exactly as you say, you’re re appropriating the workload so that all the repetitive tasks are looked after by AI and redeploying your staff because they have so much expertise.

Now you’d think about CS agent, they probably know the business sometimes better than the founder does themselves because they know the customer better than they do. So how can you really put it across and make them work in different areas? Maybe it’s marketing, maybe it’s an understanding of new campaigns that you might be able to put out.

You can use that expertise and again, just give them time back in their day to actually, it probably makes them enjoy the role a lot more as well. No [00:07:00] one’s, really. Getting too frisky and excited about answering the 1800th customer for the day, asking for a return or refund. So yeah, AI, you’re right.

I think probably the main part of it and I’d love to get your thoughts on this as well is everyone’s talking about it. Obviously pretty hot topic, lots of funding going on, but when it comes to it. What’s a digestible version of AI that companies are actually going to use. It’s all well and good being like, yeah, we’re, utilizing AI and our processes highlight exactly what it’s doing.

And I feel that’s why I’m really happy with what Gorgias is able to do with it being a segmentation of workloads that it’s taking over and giving time back to businesses to continue thriving and growing sales.

Jason Anderson: Yeah, absolutely. It’s an interesting one for us that we’re a customer journey agency, right?

And what does that actually mean? But the majority of our day is about helping merchants set up email and SMS campaigns. So it’s not always logical when we’re talking to a merchant about what help desk tool [00:08:00] do you use? Yeah, exactly. But at the end of the day, we gen, the zoom out from the email and SMS piece, it comes down to customer experience, right?

And where, yeah, we operate in one channel, but once we land them on the website, A lot of what we do centers around good quality personalization, really understanding the customer, making sure that email has personalized content, not just, Hey, first name, but actually is the product feed products that they’ve viewed recently, to the links, take them to the right collection pages filtered for the women’s product.

If it’s a woman or the men’s product, if it’s men’s are we really thinking as deeply as we can about the journey that we put in place? And we talk to a lot of people now about, Oh, tools like quizzes, great way to gather data and be able to effectively do that personalization more. But what very few people talk about is how is that chat assistant that is on the homepage is essentially the, your, the online version.

When you walk into a retail store of someone following you around being like, Hey, do you want me to put that into changing room for you? What size do you [00:09:00] want to see what pairs with that? I

Hugh Russell-Parsons: love that color on you.

Jason Anderson: Yeah. And very few. Brands are really doing that on their websites effectively, right? Maybe you see the pop up.

Hey, I’m here to help and people just close it out but to your point about ai like on the one hand, it’s a great chat tool that’s available in there But when you talk about redeploying those staff that know the brand really They can effectively better fulfill that sales, almost like an outbound sales role Whether they’re the traffic comes in once the chat is initiated And if you really think well about some of the tools in Gorgias around How can you actually make that chat experience look appealing to engage with?

What are you writing in that message? How are you grabbing someone’s attention and making it appealing to say hey, don’t just click around in collections until you find something you want. There’s an actual shop assistant here that you can say, Hey, I regularly wear a size eight. I’m looking for a shirt that like, is this fit or a dress that has that color and have them be able to come back to you and be like, here’s an option below a hundred.

Here’s a below. option below 200 and here’s the nicest dress that I personally love on the site and our best seller, let [00:10:00] me know if you’re new to the site. Do you want to discount code or something like that? You can massively streamline that experience, but all of that data as well can then, that chat data can be used.

Hugh Russell-Parsons: It’s the data at the end of the day. And I think my question immediately back on top of that is you both are experts in the customer journey. So when you talk about customer experience. I think, I’m not sure. Yeah. We’ve certainly been doing it for long

Brenden Rawson: enough. Yeah. We do say that we’re the best.

Yeah, there we

Hugh Russell-Parsons: go. You are the best, you are the best. But, when it comes to customer experience then, where in the customer journey does that really fit within the processes that you’re trying to instill for your clients, for the businesses that you work with? What’s your, Perspective of all right, how can I implement that those kind of processes that kind of foresight and thought that goes into the journey of a purchase within what I’m trying to tell our clients to do.

Jason Anderson: Yeah. So I think,

Brenden Rawson: I’ll jump in because I think from a top level and then Jason is much better on the specifics We want to replicate the [00:11:00] best customer experience, the customer journey that you would have in a regular shopping experience, a regular retail experience online in a more automated way.

And that starts from how do you convert onto the website? What does the purchase look like? What is the the post purchase? What is the welcome onboarding? And then bringing in all of those. Third party ecosystem platforms help desk returns, reviews, and how can we enrich that experience and make it as true to life as possible from a very specific implementation?

Jason Anderson: Yeah. So I think what it comes down to, particularly say things like AI assistant, right? Scale is a very challenging thing. Most, one of the best things about e com is that you’re selling 24 7. Yeah. But to your point, what happens when there’s a product return? What happens when a bad review gets left?

And it’s someone in the U. S. and you’re an Australian merchant, comes through at 11 p. m. And there is an opportunity to deal with that problem in the moment and convert a negative experience into a positive one. Or it can slip through the cracks and you get back to them the next day [00:12:00] and then they don’t get back to you the next night.

And then it maybe takes three days to resolve an issue. And that person is thinking to themselves, I’m never shopping for my overseas brand again. Yeah. This being able to automate those things provide that really positive experience, but also reliably be able to put them back into funnels. Yeah.

Things like product returns, right? You can very easily have automation set up in your Klaviyo account, let’s say, afterwards to be sending them an email, sending them SMS, post a return, where you have some segmentation on the value of the return, and, if it was over 150, you’d be sending them a coupon to come back and shop again.

There we go. And, Try and salvage some of that revenue back from the sale, right? But you’re only going to be able to provide that really nice experience. So you’re only going to have someone who’s receptive to that nice experience. If you’re able to have these efficient tools working automatically for you at the time of impact and then provide a positive experience out of the gate.

Hugh Russell-Parsons: Now, you’re absolutely spot on and I’m going to go back to the formal side for just a hot second, I swear. But it’s literally [00:13:00] your point of recreating the experience that a customer has in a retail store is exactly the MO that our CEO gave us this year. To quote him exactly, that is what we’re trying to replicate.

And it’s so

Brenden Rawson: aligned with customer service. Exactly. Those two things. And

Hugh Russell-Parsons: obviously it’s branching out. Like it’s not just looking at how do you answer customers? It’s how do you create that unique journey that feels personalized, feels tailored, makes them feel happy. And even if it’s a negative experience at first, you’re able to turn that around and generate some positivity around it.

And that’s something only. CX can do, and it’s very hard to get it right, but we’re just trying to create some tools that might make it a little bit easier. So I think when it comes to what you’re really focusing on, what are some of the big issues then? Like when you’re talking with your clients, let’s say a new client, what is just a key fundamental that they’re really often missing?

Jason Anderson: I would say right now it’s maybe a little bit more varied. Traditionally though, their margin has been a big. [00:14:00] a very grey area for a merchant. And I don’t think it’s necessarily even merchant’s fault. We were talking about this last night. We were at a dinner with a fair few of Australia’s, probably Australia’s biggest fashion brands.

Certainly one of the biggest brand, a furniture brand in the country. And They were talking about, how difficult is it, honestly, to get down to a collection level, what was the margin, we bought this much product, we sold this much in revenue, but realistically, how many of those orders had a coupon code, how many of them were returned, what profit did we really make on all of this, and then, not even including when you factor in marketing and everything on top.

And really the best tool that merchants have is just be aware and, cross check things, figure out your minimums, your maximums, and just know work within a certain set of rules. But a lot of the times we still now, while I’d say over the last two years, while the economy has tightened up, a lot of people Have gotten a lot savvier around it and people I think probably did go through most merchants listening to this are probably remembering [00:15:00] themselves One day just going through all their coupons and being like, why do we have all these coupons?

But it’s still fairly common for us to come across a merchant who maybe has a really good abandon cart sequence That’s three or four emails long, but there’s a coupon code at the end And everyone just gets that coupon code and you know that person that shops with you Every month or every couple of months Might be getting five or ten percent off or free shipping on every single order because they can just game the system, right?

So I think looking at that the that is a outcome of a bigger problem, which is that people aren’t or don’t have the time to add the level of segmentation that they could to their automation. And because of that, these binary experiences that people have, it’s really open to abuse. That’s the negative the customer negative though Is that they’re also just getting the same experience every time and these customers might be coming advocates [00:16:00] champions You know for orders ten orders and they still get the exact same.

Thank you for placing your order email The whole experience that they get isn’t evolving with them as they

So bringing all that together

Brenden Rawson: how you know, let’s not name names But you and I were chatting only yesterday about you know No good deed goes undone. Why don’t we talk about the coupon incident with one of our past clients with Ospargan.

Jason Anderson: Oh, yeah. Yeah. Not to name names. Yeah.

Brenden Rawson: And while we do that for all of our international listeners, Yeah.

We are drinking Hawke’s Patio Pale today. Very patriotic. This is our Beloved ex prime minister And if you’re American, this is probably like what an Abe Lincoln IPA or something like that yeah, maybe not that far back But

Jason Anderson: yeah famous for chugging beers at the [00:17:00] cricket, which is basically how you get voted prime minister in Yeah, we can avoid politics

Brenden Rawson: Stereotypes, We put our leaders on our beers.

And a damn good

Jason Anderson: taste of beer as well. But yeah, Foreign International, this is Oz Bargains. It’s a website that you can go to. That’s run by, very savvy Australian shoppers that share bargains on a daily basis. It’s effectively a forum and a bargain is Australian for a good deal. Yeah. I love that you have to

Hugh Russell-Parsons: translate that.

Yeah. I think it’s normal language, but It’s also

Jason Anderson: probably the way that we say it is very, isn’t it, our accents as well. But yeah, this website is very popular. And we had a client who was trying to do a good thing, right? They were just running a survey to their existing customers and they only sent it I think to around a couple of hundred of their top customers And it was quite a long survey Probably take three or four minutes to complete and it had some really deep Detailed personal questions.

They’d [00:18:00] anonymized it. So you didn’t have to put any of your details in, but they were asking things like, what kind of salary do you make? What demographic are you? They’re very much trying to build these demographic profiles to understand their customers. And at the end of it, they were giving away a 15 straight cash, no minimum use coupon to say, we really appreciate what you’ve done.

Anyhow, one of these really great customers whacked the survey link on OzBargain and said, If you guys ever wanted to try a product from this company, you could just do this survey and get a 15 discount at the end of it. And within about, I think it was about three hours, they had quote unquote sold thousands of a coconut based product.

Bowl, basically. A bowl made of coconut husk that was on their website that was 13. And so people were doing the survey and getting the 15 credit and then going and buying this bowl for free. And these are people who aren’t customers and the survey very explicitly said this is for [00:19:00] customers and this is why you’ve been sent it.

But basically it just got out right and they got inundated with these orders. And they had to send out an email to all these people to say, hey this wasn’t our intention. We didn’t, this shouldn’t have really gotten leaked. We’re going to cancel these orders. There was a terms and conditions that said like you had to be this.

And these people on those bargain website were furious and they were, people were threatening to report them. Speaking

Hugh Russell-Parsons: of demographic data, an Oz bargain store, you’re going to get someone who’s going to complain. Yeah, exactly. They’re smart, but they’re also willing to put their money where their mouth is as well.

Yeah,

Jason Anderson: and there are people on this forum saying, guys, this is a small Australian business that was just trying to learn about their customers. And we’ve just attempted to. Cripple them by, basically holding them for ransom to give us this stupid bowl that most of us almost certainly don’t need.

But to your point, so you have to be careful, right? Like you have to

Brenden Rawson: really think about like, how can this be abused? [00:20:00] How can this be circulated? And I guess Rise, you need coupon code, right? Yeah. Rise of the Minimum Purchase in order to get discount. It’s just lessons that really need to be considered.

Jason Anderson: Yep.

Yeah, exactly. So I would say the at the moment really, like it’s July, right? So Black Friday’s begun basically, which is crazy that’s probably see some brands. Yeah, exactly. Yeah

Hugh Russell-Parsons: 20 percent off.

Jason Anderson: Yeah, exactly So I think the next few months really are gonna be some solid discussions around what can we actually afford to do on Black Friday?

What is something that’s going to get cut through but is also, realistic for the business? And I think as part of that We’re talking to a lot of merchants, let’s, about, let’s not just think about Black Friday. How are you going to make sales in the 30 days before Black Friday? What are you going to do to keep people engaged?

Not just hanging out for the sale, but actually get them shopping ahead of time. And there’s a lot of things that we can [00:21:00] be doing to gather attention. A really good example is, what are we doing to build, if we’re worried about Black Friday coming up and a drop in sales. What else can we be gathering?

How could we be doing something or promoting the Black Friday sale? That’s gonna say to email subscribers This is why you should opt in for SMS. You’re gonna get early access or if you have a loyalty program How are we telling people that if you shop now and you move up? These tiers, you’re going to get these benefits during the black Friday sale for being in this higher tier.

So don’t just wait to shop until the sales start shopping now. Yeah, no, it’s

Hugh Russell-Parsons: a really good point. I was at a dinner as well, not with, the largest fashion retailer, furniture retailer in Australia, but last night I was at a dinner as well. And I was actually chatting with another really popular active web brands about this.

And I said, okay, look, you guys discount, you don’t discount as heavily as others, but what do you do to keep sales ticking along between, that, August, September, October period. And she was really smart about it and said, we do limited releases, when it comes to it, we obviously don’t want to [00:22:00] sacrifice our margin because we know we’re going to get increased sales, but we’re going to lose out with that margin piece when it comes to black Friday.

So what we do is we actually, with some of our VIP customers we offer them a limited release that feels exclusive, feels very personalized. And then to our general customers, we also have limited releases of certain products. So these might be products that are either brand new. Obviously not a huge investment piece up front if you’re timing it for this part of the year, but it at least keeps people really actively engaged and almost then creates that sell off point where let’s say you haven’t been able to get one of these limited releases.

You’re still pretty ingrained into then wanting something from that brand. So then suddenly black Friday seems like a great time to buy. It’s just like, all right, I missed out on this, but I’ve got 20 percent off on this product that actually looks pretty good anyway.

Jason Anderson: Yeah, absolutely. I think Anything where you can create a sense of urgency.

A

Hugh Russell-Parsons: hundred percent

Jason Anderson: is really going to work in limited stock is one of the perfect ways to do that.

Brenden Rawson: I think it’s probably time for a word from our sponsor. Klaviyo powers smarter digital relationships, making it [00:23:00] easier for businesses to capture, store, analyze, and predictively use their own data to drive measurable high value outcomes.

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Jason Anderson: Wonderful. That was perfect. I felt pumped. Yeah. I also, I think the placement of who gives a crap in there really does seem like a plan that, maybe are you actually paying attention? Because one of the people that we just said is, Who gives a crap? Which is a real brand.

If you’re interested, it’s a great brand, great [00:24:00] brands.

Brenden Rawson: And what Anzan are doing is we have built our tried and tested, absolutely high converting add to cart flow. And if you go to anzan. co forward slash podcast and register your details we will send you a copy of that flow. We’ll be able to clone it into your Klaviyo account.

But more than That’s how you’ll hear about future episodes. We’ll be sending out a newsletter because that’s what we do. And frankly, if you don’t want any of those things we still want to hear from you. Register interest. This is how we keep our sponsorships going. This is how we make more episodes.

Help a brother out.

Jason Anderson: Yeah, absolutely. Jump on and check it out. And like Brendan said, we’re giving away that free flow and added to CartFlow. This is a flow that’s very often missing, even from some of the biggest brands that we speak to, this flow sits between your browser banterman flow and your added, your abandoned checkout flow.

So essentially, someone puts something on their, in their cart, and they don’t make it to checkout. Right now, for most brands, if you don’t have this flow, you’re not going to be sending them an email, or you might be sending them the browser banterman email, but not the [00:25:00] real added to cart one, which is that extra step in the journey.

It’s a very high converting flow, a very valuable flow. It’s built, we will clone it into your account. You’ll basically just be able to slap your logo on it, add a couple of assets, put your colors in, and the whole thing is ready to go. I think we’re

Brenden Rawson: also throwing in the strategy doc as well. Correct,

Jason Anderson: yeah, so there’ll be a strategy document that comes with it that walks you through how to set it up, how to get it going.

Essentially, free flow that might be making you 1, 000, 5, 000, 10, 000 a month. Get onto it, please fill the form, let us know that you’re keen on more of these podcasts and we’ll keep adding them to our list of things to do. Keep smashing ’em out. Yeah.

Brenden Rawson: Speaking about flows an example that we often talk about when we talk about Gorgias is how we build that into our flows and how that impacts reviews as well.

Yeah. Did you want to talk a bit more about that?

Jason Anderson: Yeah, absolutely. And I don’t know if you’ve seen any interesting examples of how people are factoring in. active Gorgias experiences. Specifically

Brenden Rawson: how Gorgias and Klaviyo integrate, right? Yeah.

Jason Anderson: A [00:26:00] few interesting bits from the agency side I would say is that a lot of people might not know that there’s a few different layers to the Gorgias integration with Klaviyo, right?

On the front end, Gorgias can be asking people questions and recording the answers, like what is your mobile number, what is your email address, information about them and syncing that data to Klaviyo, so you can have a really great active, that sales assistant there asking those questions and syncing that data back, which is fantastic.

But the other thing that a lot of people don’t realize is that, Gorgias will send Klaviyo, or update someone’s records in Klaviyo when they have, I think it’s like an active ticket. And that’s something for us that is, the easiest way to avoid. getting bad reviews, right? Is just adding an exclusion for anyone with an active ticket to your review request flow.

But I would love to know if you’ve seen some cool, interesting applications of it.

Hugh Russell-Parsons: Yeah, look it’s a really interesting one. And we recently updated and improved that integration with Klaviyo too. So yeah, at face value, obviously it’s very simple. You’re looping that information from one platform to the other.

[00:27:00] You’re able to view it, understand it, but then you can really go and action some of those items. I think probably the best one you’re talking about is the fact that historically that was a pretty big issue. If you were pushing people into a Klaviyo flow, they were having a negative experience and they ended up fucking hating the brand.

So when it comes to it and thinking strategically about how you can avoid those bad experiences, Really just having that loop, that constant loop feed of data driving back in, I’d say in terms of examples of how people have operated that really efficiently. They’ve actually been using KBO SMS as well and Gorgias SMS is of course on that support piece, making sure that you can access and communicate with the customer effectively.

But you can easily turn that tangent. And what people have done is they’ve left a personalized note on Gorgias, which then of course is showing up in Klaviyo to go from a potential support issue immediately then into an SMS bump or flow. So Klaviyo can then immediately be actioned. You can start turning or a customer might have [00:28:00] asked, Hey I’m looking to make an adjustment on my order or I’m looking to add this.

You can then upsell it’s providing an upset opportunity. You can set up some flows that immediately come off the back of it. And I know some incredible success stories with a few Aussie brands who just have really simple flows set up, but they’ve been able to attribute the data from Gorgias immediately.

Then go, all right, we’ve applied to the customer on SMS.

Jason Anderson: Yeah.

Hugh Russell-Parsons: Now let’s make that a business opportunity, basically, and they’ve immediately pushed into maybe a two or three text flow and then they’ve pushed it straight across using the likes of, instant or one of those others to really make sure they’ve got that data down.

Jason Anderson: Yeah, nice. I would say an example that I saw it was in the US. We didn’t do it, but I did see it and I really liked it was a pet brand that sold harnesses. They sent. SMS campaign out to all their customers saying, Hey, we would love to see, I think it was like a Saturday morning or something like that, a day that you’re likely to be at the dog park with your dog, or maybe out on a walk.

And they said, we’d love to see a photo [00:29:00] of your dog in their harness today, send it through. So that, we can just get some great snaps and people would obviously everyone loves. I’ve got two dogs. I would have immediately sent 40 photos, so they collected all these photos, but they had it connected to Gorgias.

And so they were then able to look at some of those photos and then have agents be able to reply back and say, Hey, we love this photo. Do you mind if we use it on social media? Do you mind if we feature it in an email? Do you mind if we do this or that? How about that for experience and loyalty and yeah, in terms of improving

Hugh Russell-Parsons: those different areas.

It’s so seamless. It’s so smart. Yeah.

Jason Anderson: Yeah. And I think they ended up, if I’m remembering correctly, I think they then just, posted to Instagram a huge amount of these photos just to their stories. Which I thought was great, you think you take it a step further, right? Let’s say people are doing that.

You’re the helpdesk agent can reply and go, Hey, we want to feature this on our Instagram story. What’s your Instagram handle so we can tag you and does your dog have an Instagram handle? Suddenly you’re putting that up there and sharing that tagging the customer. The customer is going to be [00:30:00] stoked.

They’re probably going to reshare it on their stories. What an awesome word of mouth campaign that you just created. And it’s

Hugh Russell-Parsons: not like you’re paying significant amounts through the tools that are there. It’s literally just that organic piece of just using. The toolkit you have and just being smart and yeah there’s definitely examples like that, which come to mind and we work with some.

Amazing brands like July is of course a great example. I love what they’re doing right now with the Olympics, but the way that they’re repurposing that within their social media as well, and then utilizing Gorgias to really try and gauge the intents of how people are engaging with that. Could it be that there’s a certain athletes that they’re then focusing on that they can then dedicate time towards or any of their marketing campaigns be driven towards that.

Or, we’ve got some larger active web brands, like at SKD Who then are really finding those unique pieces and then turning that into a revenue generating opportunity through just highlighting social media, intense figuring out what customers want to be hearing [00:31:00] and then pushing that natively into the likes of Klaviyo to double down on those opportunities.

Jason Anderson: Yeah, absolutely. And it’s, It really does. I think you do some of the, one of the things you touched on there. That’s really important is that these are low cost activities, right? These are relatively efficient things as part of monthly fees that you’re probably already paying that can have a real impact and a sustained impact to setting up these rules or setting up these automation might take a little bit of time in the first instance, but for the most part, spend half an hour a month just checking in, is it still working properly?

Is it still, have you had an idea of where you can improve it? Maybe a bit of customer feedback. But they could be generating serious revenue.

Hugh Russell-Parsons: But I’m about to go full sales on you. Because at the beginning of the talk, we were discussing AI agent taking away significant portions of workload with the repetitive tasks.

Oh my God. Imagine if your team Had time to then think of these low cost, really effective, high attribution activities and allowing all of the data to be [00:32:00] pulled in by that AI toolkit and then pushing it out through the likes of Klaviyo through the likes of the rest of your tech stack. Suddenly it seems to make a lot more sense.

So I’m not just going to drop the mic there, but I think that’s probably a good bit to bring it around to as well.

Brenden Rawson: Yeah, it really does. So we are in beautiful, sunny Sydney for online retailer. We just spent the morning day one out on the conference floor. floor. We missed your fantastic talk. I hear you had a full crowd.

What’s the vibe? What, what’s going on? It feels like there are a lot of partners in town. There are a lot of merchants walking around. There, there feels like a bit of energy certainly compared to some previous years.

Hugh Russell-Parsons: I’d say you’re right. Look, in terms of from what I’ve seen of online retailer, and I’ll get to the talk in a second, but there’s a lot of merchants who have come not just to see what’s there.

They’ve come for a reason. And I think that’s a really exciting expo to be a part of because people are looking for answers and they’re not asking generic, simplistic answers, questions. They’re actually trying to figure out, okay, I need to go and figure out how I can do [00:33:00] X, Y, Z and who is going to be able to provide support for that.

And. One of the main areas I was talking about, or the title of my talk was the intricacies of KYC and why it matters. Obviously leveraging that AI piece. But right now it’s a conversational economy that we’re living in. People are requiring so much more before they feel comfortable to make a purchase.

Obviously you can talk about the economy, the market condition right now, people being a little bit more savvy about how they spend. But when it comes to it. Really understanding your customer is what so many merchants seem to be focusing on. All right. CAC is at an all time high with increased LTV being a primary, as well as trying to figure out how to keep our customers with us and not just be undercut in a race to the bottom with our competitors.

How are we finding unique ways to really keep them engaged, keep them on top of loving us, loving what we stand for and trying to push that to the next level. So have you heard anything so far today that. Makes you think right here. These are [00:34:00] what merchants are trying to do. And this is how they’re going about.

Really setting themselves up for success for black Friday, cyber Monday in the busy Q4 period.

Brenden Rawson: When you said KYC, I was like, no, your customers, this is like a money laundering prevention. So I should probably give

Hugh Russell-Parsons: context on that as well. I used to definitely does not stand for that. No. So KYC, I tried to, be a little bit smart about it.

I was previously at way flyer who provided that funding piece to e commerce through working capital. KYC was a big portion of that to make sure that people weren’t. Going and buying Bitcoin with the 10 million plus that we might have given them. So when it came to that, I was really trying to find a way to.

engage with e commerce businesses and say, okay, if you have this strong financial structure that allows people to be comfortable funding businesses, how can you be really comfortable getting to know your customer to a level of depth that you feel like you truly understand what they want and why they’re buying from your business?

So yeah, I probably should have added that context, but it was yeah, it’s a [00:35:00] really interesting perspective to try and hold and be like, okay, I know my customer might be predominantly between 25 and 35 for a fashion brand. Maybe it’s a woman, but can I go deeper and how can I go deeper and figure out, all right, who are my most profitable customers?

Who are those that are going to be with me for a 12, 24 month period? Not just that quick purchase at it’s discounted. You’ll never hear from me again.

Brenden Rawson: And this is gold for us, right? Like we, when we’re building out these customer journeys, the more information we can get what are your interests? What are your buying habits?

What are your returns? What, how many tickets do you have? What’s the sentiment analysis? How can we send you the right message at the right

Jason Anderson: time? Yeah, it’s interesting one this year. I think. I definitely think, Brenden, to your point about the energy, it’s the middle of winter in Australia.

For

Hugh Russell-Parsons: those watching on [00:36:00] YouTube, it’s a pretty damn nice day though. If you wanted,

Jason Anderson: If you’re in another country where it actually gets cold feel free to jump on YouTube and watch the the recording of this. You can look out the window middle of winter, there’s no, not a single cloud in the sky and it’s about 20 degrees which is 70 Fahrenheit yeah.

So it’s essentially utopia right now. And yeah, people at this conference, I think, like you said, A lot of people have a preparing for end of year and they’ve probably had a lot of brands seem to have had a much better first half of this year. Confidence is coming back in. Energy is coming back in.

People are really interested in what they’re going to do that’s different. Some of the things that I’ve been surprised to hear from merchants is that apps have been working really well. And I’m not sure if that’s maybe a difference in customer mentality or maybe ease of use. But a lot of merchants have started talking about either they’ve launched an app and it’s doing really well, or they’ve heard about someone launching an app and they’re wanting to have a look at [00:37:00] it.

And then the other area sorry, you’ve totally fucked me up. But between that

Brenden Rawson: Just given Jason a little wind up. Yeah. Come on, mate.

Jason Anderson: Yeah, I’d say the other area that people have been really keen to talk about particularly in the lead up to sales and all of that has just been how can they be looking at their automation and their integration, the tech stack in its entirety and are there missing pieces, something that Klaviyo I was speaking to someone from their product team recently, and they mentioned that they are averaging currently 40 new features a month.

Hugh Russell-Parsons: What Slack channel is going to keep you up to date with that?

Jason Anderson: Exactly. But there’s there’s so many new things in there that merchants are really able to leverage and probably the easiest one that I think has flown under the radar a little bit, but every time I talk to someone about it, they get really hyped is Klaviyo’s own AI features.

Oh, here we go. They’ve released an AI optimization tool for your data capture forms. So you can go into your [00:38:00] data capture forms. Now, basically click a couple of buttons to set up a split test, but Klaviyo will decide how to run that split test. I think it creates six split tests where it will change the timing, the layout, how many fields are in the form, a bunch of different things.

I’m fairly sure you can have a read about it on their website. I’m sure. But effectively it will choose six variations, it’ll run it over a certain amount of time, and it will come back to you and tell you which one had the highest conversion rate. And if you’re a merchant, particularly time poor, if you’ve got a small team and you really want to boost your subscriber numbers, You can now do that with three or four clicks within the platform and then just walk away.

Exactly. It’s, there really are some really great AI tools coming in too. And

Brenden Rawson: It’s good to see same as Gorgias AI, like practical AI uses, not just like the digestible, the bullshit, let’s put AI on this and then people will buy it. I think we’re past that point now, right? Like now it’s AI is ubiquitous.

Everybody’s at GPTN. What are the real actual practical uses of AI now?

Hugh Russell-Parsons: Yeah. Yep. A hundred percent.

Brenden Rawson: I think on that, we’re [00:39:00] going to wrap it up. Hugh, thanks for joining us. It’s been great. Everyone should go to https://andzen.co/podcast. Make sure you register, get our free add to cart. Let us know your thoughts.

We’re going to send out some regular newsletters and reminders. Hugh, final plug. Gorgias. Yeah. Thanks for being

Jason Anderson: on this inaugural episode. Please plug away. No worries. Happy

Hugh Russell-Parsons: to plug. Actually it’s I’m happy to. Expand a new offer that we’re putting out there. We want offers. Offers indeed.

They’re always pretty helpful. Exclusive. Exclusive to Andzen. If you have to mention Andzen on any of the calls we take with you, of course. But AI is trained. You get

Brenden Rawson: premium senior services. Customer support when it detects the word, you actually have me knocking on your door,

Hugh Russell-Parsons: but no customers will actually receive two months free of AI agent with automates.

If they actually do mention Andzen on any calls incoming. So for those listening on the podcast, you want to find out more. The whole idea of this is to make sure you’re in the best place possible for your [00:40:00] CX for the time black Friday, cyber Monday hits. It gives you the time to structure exactly how you want AI agent can be trained.

And enacted exactly in your brand tone of voice, the level of sophistication you want, and you can train it every day. It’s got a fun little playground. I normally am just there with a cup of coffee and just messing around with it. It’ll learn and be iterative to anything you plug into it as well. So two months free in order to get you in the best position possible to take advantage of.

Upselling and opportunities through your customer support and experience for Black Friday, Cyber Monday.

Brenden Rawson: A N D Z E N for the Americans. co forward slash podcast https://andzen.co/podcast . Fill your details in. We’ll hook you up with Hugh and Gorgias. We’ll also hook you up with the Add to Cart flow and tons of information. Thanks for listening.

Thanks for joining us, Hugh.

Hugh Russell-Parsons: Gents, thanks so much for having me. Loving it.

Jason Anderson: Awesome. Thanks everybody.

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