Social Media DMs: The Future of Customer Service

Kristina Muntean is the Manager of Strategic Partnerships at Gorgias, an integrated helpdesk for e-commerce brands. Gorgias is on a mission to help brands deliver personalized support and exceptional customer experiences across multiple channels. Before joining Gorgias, Kristina was the eCommerce Manager of Kion, the Owner of Thrive Rolfing, and the Executive Assistant of Muntean Leadership Group. She attended the University of Colorado Boulder and received her degree in psychology and neuroscience, with a certificate in entrepreneurship. 

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

• [05:03] Kristina Muntean explains how Gorgias delivers exceptional customer service through relationship building
• [11:12] How Gorgias’ integrations and automations can speed up your response time and boost your business
• [17:20] Why listening to consumer feedback can help you expand to new channels 
• [19:19] How a make-up brand dramatically increased conversion rates and boosted sales using Gorgias  
• [23:57] Kristina discusses Gorgias’ typical client base and how long it takes to implement the software
• [28:24] What is the #1 predictor of consumer satisfaction? 
• [34:19] Kristina talks about the value of engaging with consumers using SMS

In this episode…

It’s no secret that today’s consumers expect an instantaneous and personalized response from e-commerce brands. So, how can your brand effectively meet these demands? What is the key to reducing points of friction between your brand and the consumer?

When it comes to increasing consumer satisfaction, the secret to success is to have a quick response time. Kristina Muntean knows the importance of delivering exceptional and immediate service to reduce friction points in the consumer experience. She, along with the team at Gorgias, helped one brand increase its revenue for a single product by seven figures. So, how can you boost your response times and, in turn, your business?

In this episode of the Quiet Light Podcast, Joe Valley sits down with Kristina Muntean, the Manager of Strategic Partnerships at Gorgias, to talk about the future of customer service for e-commerce brands. Kristina discusses how Gorgias’ automation tools can speed up your response times, her tips for building valuable relationships with customers, and why increasing your touchpoints correlates to higher consumer satisfaction. 

Resources Mentioned in this episode

• Kristina Muntean on LinkedIn
• Kristina Muntean’s email: [email protected] 
• Gorgias  
• Quiet Light
• Quiet Light on YouTube
• Joe Valley
• Mark Daoust
• Quiet Light Podcast email: [email protected]
• The EXITpreneur’s Playbook: How to Sell Your Online Business for Top Dollar by Reverse Engineering Your Pathway to Success by Joe Valley
• Ezra Firestone on LinkedIn 
• Blue Ribbon Mastermind 
• Anthony Mink on LinkedIn 
• Live Bearded 
• ILIA Beauty 
• Ogee 
• OLIPOP

Sponsor for this episode

This episode is brought to you by Quiet Light, a brokerage firm that wants to help you successfully sell your online business.  

There is no wrong reason for selling your business. However, there is a right time and a right way. The team of leading entrepreneurs at Quiet Light wants to help you discover the right time and strategy for selling your business. By providing trustworthy advice, effective strategies, and honest valuations, your Quiet Light advisor isn’t your every-day broker—they’re your partner and friend through every phase of the exit planning process.

If you’re new to the prospect of buying and selling, Quiet Light is here to support you. Their plethora of top-notch resources will provide everything you need to know about when and how to buy or sell an online business. Quiet Light offers high-quality videos, articles, podcasts, and guides to help you make the best decision for your online business.

Not sure what your business is really worth? No worries. Quiet Light offers a free valuation and marketplace-ready assessment on their website. That’s right—this quick, easy, and free valuation has no strings attached. Knowing the true value of your business has never been easier!

What are you waiting for? Quiet Light is offering the best experience, strategies, and advice to make your exit successful. To learn more, go to quietlight.com, email [email protected], or call 800.746.5034 today. 

Episode Transcript

Intro  0:07  

Hi, folks, it’s the Quiet Light Podcast where we share relentlessly honest insights, actionable tips, and entrepreneurial stories that will help founders identify and reach their goals.

Joe Valley  0:29  

Hey, folks, Joe Valley here, welcome to another episode of the Quiet Light Podcast. Today we’re going to talk to Kristina Muntean from a company called gorgias.com. And talk about the future of customer service and communicating with your customers where they live. Instead of forcing them to communicate with you where you live, meaning you live on email, you leave the live on phone calls, which is the most expensive form of communication with your customer. Or maybe even now you’ve gotten really creative and innovative and you do text messaging. Gorgias, can allow you to communicate with them on all of the social media platforms where you advertise as well. So the customer can direct message you, from Instagram, from Twitter, from Facebook, wherever they might live, and allow them to do it in the mobile fashion that they do, instead of doing the pop up chat feature on the computer or sending an email waiting for replies. But it’s not just a reactive thing, that she talks about being reactive to customers requests, where’s my shipping, where’s my product, that kind of stuff. It’s being proactive, and increasing your conversion rate by being there for them, again, where they live on social media or wherever they might be, and communicating with them pre order, meaning, you know, they’re gonna ask you, you know about sizes or colors or shipping times or something like that, that will help them have more confidence. And then we talk about specifically about, we call it speed to lead here at Quiet Light this is more speed to response. So what are what are customers looking for in terms of how quickly somebody responds to their inquiry, and the benchmark is less than 10 minutes. I think if you’re doing DMS and things of that nature, you know, the sooner the better, right a text message SMS, they can do it on WhatsApp now as well they’re implementing that right now. You know, within within seconds or minutes is the key. That is the future of e-commerce and customer service in e-commerce, being able to communicate with your customer a where they live, be pretty instantly pre sale to help them make a decision to get the right product in the first place, reduce turn, reduce returns increase customer satisfaction, and the whole ripple effect that comes from there in terms of reviews, more customers, more referrals, less overhead, all of those different things. Great conversation. It’s about, again, Gorgias.com. It’s Kristina Muntean. Let’s go ahead and see what she’s got to say. Here we go. Kristina, welcome to the Quiet Light Podcast. How are you?

Kristina Muntean  3:15  

Thank you, Joe. It’s so good to be here. I’m great. How

Joe Valley  3:17  

are you? Doing fantastic. Before we get into who you are and what, how we know each other and what Gorgias is all about? I want to give a shout out to a couple of our friends. One is Ezra Firestone at Blue Ribbon mastermind. That’s how we connected folks. If you’re an E commerce entrepreneur and you want to learn from the best, I would strongly suggest you look at Blue Ribbon Mastermind and consider becoming a member there. seconds. Anthony Mink, Mink, as he’s known by his friends from Live Bearded. We know Anthony from Live Bearded. And if you’ve got a beard or a man that has a beard in your life, and you want them to be smooth, soft, sexy beards, check out livebearded.com My beard doesn’t count. It’s terrible. I don’t do that. But Anthony, you know, I’m straight. I’ve got a wife of 25 years. I just want to run my fingers through Anthony’s beard. Tell me Kristina, you do too, don’t you?

Kristina Muntean  4:15  

So good beards. Got a damn good beard, that’s for sure.

Joe Valley  4:19  

And the branding folks, the branding and the way that they build a culture around having a beard is just amazing. You can learn a lot just by checking out what they do. So two things check out Blue Ribbon Mastermind, and livebearded.com. Alright, enough about that.

Kristina Muntean  4:35  

Yeah, he’s watching a new brand to make it so check out that one too. And what is it? Hey, y’all don’t have to go find out the opinion to learn more. Yeah.

Joe Valley  4:45  

I’m sure they’ll announce it through live bearded as well. So exactly. Christina Muntean from Gorgias.com. Who are you? What the heck do you do over there?

Kristina Muntean  4:56  

Yeah, Joe. So as you said, I’m Kristina. I work in strategic partnerships that are Gorgias. And our whole mission is just helping e-commerce brands deliver exceptional customer experiences. So it’s literally our founders sought out they saw the problem, which was, honestly most of the employees that Gorgias, a lot of them were EComm brand founders are worked at econ brands and really saw, hey, there’s nothing that’s supporting us exactly how we need in terms of a customer support software, just for econ. So literally, that’s what we’ve set out to do over the last few years is just build a product that’s actually specific to ecommerce merchants and the ecosphere, all the tech stack and you know, the opportunities, you know, and kind of issues challenges, if you will, that e-commerce brands come up specifically, when dealing with customer support. One of those mainly being that when you’re an E commerce brand, you know, your customers are finding you, you know, everywhere, so maybe they’re reaching out to you via an Instagram ad, they see you, you know, you have a community in Facebook, they’re messaging you on Facebook, maybe you’re doing SMS marketing, and they’re trying to engage with you there. Live Chat. So it’s just how can we support nowadays where, you know, so many customers want to engage with you and research brands and all these different mediums? And how can we form relationships, and help essentially, basically, drive those customers back to the website and help them help them get into your product.

Joe Valley  6:27  

So to dumb it down? It’s not just a chat feature on a website, it’s also allowing you to communicate with your customers on all the platforms that you market them to whether it’s Instagram, can you just name all those platforms? For me again, I don’t want to put words in your mouth.

Kristina Muntean  6:42  

Yeah, absolutely. So customer support, like the old school customer support used to just be email and phone. But nowadays, you know, honestly, customers are expecting to be able to have touch points with you and all these different channels. So what that means for Gorgias, we do our own phone, we do email, we do live chat, but we also do Instagram, DMS, Instagram ad comments, Facebook, Twitter, soon to be WhatsApp. Basically, we pull all of those communication channels, even SMS into one platform in place for the team to manage and kind of build those relationships.

Joe Valley  7:17  

Okay, beautiful. So, yeah, like you said, people connect with you in all sorts of different ways with your brands, and the old school email, phone call or, or let’s just say, pop up chats, right, like I chat with people, and I’m trying to figure something out. Because I’m old with gray hair, and I do it through the website. But if they’re on DMing, via Instagram, or whatever it might be your platform, your service, your software allows them to communicate with customers, wherever they are, whatever platforms you promote your products on.

Kristina Muntean  7:50  

Exactly, Joe. And what we’re seeing nowadays, too, is that, you know, people are expecting even more instantaneous response times for things, it’s like, we see, I feel like we have that expectation across our entire culture. It’s like you text someone and you expect that they’ll get back to you right away. And brands are feeling that too. So honestly, people have been going to areas like the DMS almost as if it’s like, hey, even more personal and expecting that really quick touchpoint. And they’re asking customer support related questions, like where’s my order, but they’re almost trying to get their needs met as quickly as possible. And therefore going to some of these other channels, SMS and DMS are two that are really starting to grow email is definitely still the most popular. But yeah, so how can we kind of meet that demand and need for the customers and make that possible for brands to actually manage this bulk of different channels in a really effective way?

Joe Valley  8:50  

Cool. So I’ve got the Gorgias website up here on my screen. So I’m gonna look to the right a little bit folks that are actually watching us on YouTube or on the Quiet Light site. But it’s the history is amazing. And of course, now that I want to scroll through it, I don’t see where it is. But we’re, here we are, the company founded way back in 2016. So ahead of the game in terms of thinking forward and communicating with customers on all the platforms where they are, you know, instead of forcing customers to communicate where you communicate, whether that’s email or phone call or a chat feature on your website, you’re allowing the customer to communicate wherever the heck they are, and more and more and more if we look out to the future. It’s going to be less email and less phone call and more DMS on all the different social media platforms. But the numbers are staggering. As I look at this, you guys have over 9000 customers. Now the growth is pretty incredible to 6800 customers in 2020 and projected 9000 Plus customers and in 2022 But you’re still relatively us mall operation. Just in 2018, you grew from just five employees to 15. And now you’ve got locations. All Over the Map, right? I’m looking at San Francisco, Toronto, New York, Charlotte, Charlotte. Hey, that’s right. Yeah. Paris, Belgrade and Sydney. I think that you mentioned that sometimes you’re going to be in Charlotte. So we’re gonna grab some lunch or something. Sydney, Australia. All right. So yeah, it sounds great to be able to communicate with the customers, wherever the customers are. Yeah. What’s it take from like, you know, if we’re talking to somebody or somebody in the audience is, you know, just keeping the wheels on the bus, right, doing a couple of million in revenue, and just trying to get customers to respond to them, and they don’t have enough bodies to do this. What’s it? What’s it really take to be able to do this? Can you give me a case study in terms of size of companies? And do they have to put new customer service people in place? Or can they just still take that on? Depends on volume, of course, but lay out some of that

Kristina Muntean  11:06  

for me. Yeah, great question, Joe. And when we get asked often, and honestly, like, the power and beauty of Gorgias is, again, that we want to make it so much more efficient with the different integrations that we have. And because again, Joe, it’s ecommerce, all that we do. So it’s not like we’re trying to be the best for every industry. It’s just like, how can we be the best for E commerce? So knowing that our customers and potential new customers are in all these different channels? It’s been really important to Gorgias to say, okay, how can we help brands, automate pieces of this process, you know, things that are repeatable, more admin related, so that and organize them, so that then we can spend more time on okay, what are actually the communications that are happening pre sale that actually bring us more converted buyers, or that build relationships that makes someone such an advocate for your brand. So, for example, Joe, one of the things that I always tell brands to do and look at is, you know, go through, and if you, you know, import your tickets into Gorgias, or, you know, if you’re not on board just yet, put them in an Excel if you want, but basically, you can see all of the different categories, if you filter those all through Gorgias, of all the different inquiries Gorgias, has basically an AI system that kind of senses, hey, what’s the content of this message, and then filters them into tags. So maybe we see shipping delays, maybe we see out of stock, you know, wrong product sent, or whatever the different inquiries are coming in. And we can say, Okay, wow, we can really see from this organization that I am getting, the bulk of my messages are, where’s my order? Or maybe we had a stock issue. So there are these two things, and assess, okay, what are repeatable are kind of admin related questions? How can I automate those to then be able to take some of the time my team doesn’t have to worry about those, take some of that give them more bandwidth to focus on. Okay, if Where is my order, we’re kind of automating those through either a self service chat feature through basically like, you can even set it up Joe where Gorgias says, okay, Joe’s asking me, where’s my order, I’m synced up to his Shopify or whatever other econ platform he uses, all send out this macro with his specific information in it, we don’t even see it come in. So then it’s like, okay, that’s deflected from my team, that frees up all this extra time for me to be on the live chat with someone who’s buying a gift for their friend and needs help, or that gives me bandwidth to go into the Instagram, add comments and see someone tagged to their friend, and to be able to respond and maybe share, you know, a front end customer acquisition offer, and try to Again, drag those eyeballs out, you’re paying so much for back to the site. So it’s this combination of, I’d say firstly is the tool is incredibly efficient, and that it pulls in all those channels integrates directly with your econ platform. So you don’t have to, you can basically like take action on orders, edit, shipping everything right from Gorgias, and then using automation, where it makes sense for these admin related areas to free up more bandwidth that you wouldn’t have if you didn’t have kind of the setup and structure.

Joe Valley  14:30  

Right. So once you get through that initial setup, it actually frees up time and allows you to provide better customer service. Let me back up just a sec. The what are the statistics generally I mean, you see 9000 customers that you have, what what percentage of tickets as you call them, right? This is me learning the language. I’ve heard it before but don’t use it often. What what percentage of tickets come through via email versus phone versus text dress? SMS versus direct messages or DMS, from social media at this point?

Kristina Muntean  15:06  

Yeah. So, Joe, you the one thing which you kind of, basically demographics matter. So, you know, like ezard speaks about boom, often. And, you know, he said things that based on his demo,

Joe Valley  15:19  

he’s makeup for women over 40 years old or? Exactly,

Kristina Muntean  15:23  

exactly, yeah, amazing. makeup and skincare line. And so he’s always said things like, hey, if your demo skews in a, you know, an age range, maybe it’s, you know, 50 and above or something that they might have more of a preference for phone calls than then say, the DMS. So it definitely is, you know, age specific based on your demographic. But still to this day, Joe, overall email is by far the most high volume channel, but chat, SMS and DMS are absolutely the fastest growing. So though, they make up a much smaller percentage and chunk, we’re seeing them jump leaps and bounds to the point where that’s why we launched our own SMS for support, so that instead of a brand, saying, Hey, if you need us call one 800, whatever the number is, you can actually direct people to say, Hey, if you need us, text us. So we’re seeing that shift for sure. But the demo of the brand is definitely like first questions to have, especially if I’m talking to a brand and trying to help them assess, you know, what channels to focus on first.

Joe Valley  16:28  

Okay, so text and MSR s, I’m sorry, direct messages are growing the fastest. And eventually, you know, that email and phone will slow down. I would imagine, though, it varies dramatically, depending upon where people communicate with their customers. Right. So if boom, by Cindy Joseph is doing a ton of Facebook ads, which is an older generation product and an older generation platform. A lot of those folks are not, they’re not communicating with them on Facebook, or maybe they are because that’s where they live, because that’s a platform that Gorgias works on is communicating with people where they live on Facebook. Yes.

Kristina Muntean  17:11  

Yeah. So we can definitely help with Facebook Messenger. Or if there’s Yes, we can basically. And there’s honestly, there’s a lot of sophisticated things that we can do, depending on as you said, where the brand chooses to kind of form community and build relationships with customers, I will say that we have heard a lot of brands say, Hey, I haven’t prioritized SMS as a channel, I’ve just done some marketing messages, I don’t really ask people to engage back, but that they found if they do so instead of saying like, hey, 10% off this weekend, if they ask for feedback, listen to their customers there have a conversation that doesn’t feel automated, that it feels like me and you Joe going back and forth really listening, that brands do find that can open up almost like new business opportunities, or like, like, almost like new customer channels, or even areas where customers want to engage more feel almost like it’s more special or personalized. So I will say don’t be afraid to test different channels and see if you know, there’s you know, you never know where people will prefer to reach out.

Joe Valley  18:25  

Alright, so So everything’s about return on investment in this world that we live in, if somebody’s going to, you know, invest their time, energy and money in the SAS product like Gorgias, to help improve customer experience and drive more revenues. There. You gotta have some examples of case studies of people that use your service and one from x conversion rate to y conversion rate. Can you address or talk about any anything like that?

Kristina Muntean  18:55  

Yeah, I definitely can. And I’m, I’m so happy to share specific cases if there’s an industry that you know, someone’s really interested in. I one that comes up often. And I think Joe, I love this one because I think it’s it’s a use case of Gorgias that people say wow, I didn’t even know you could do that. So it almost unlocked ideas and potential but I’m not sure if there’s a women’s clean skincare brand called Ilya. I don’t know if you’re familiar with them, Joe, but fantastic products. And their best selling product is a Skin Tint almost a moisturizer and it kind of like evens your skin tone a bit. And they have so many shades Joe, if you go to their site, you get there and it’s fantastic because you know, you’ll be able to find one that looks good on you. But at the same time, all those concerns come up of Wow, how do I know this is the right one for me if I order it, and it’s not can I return it? That’s a pain, all of that. So, um, we worked with our team and work really intimately with them. Um, around kind of this friction on conversion for their best seller and actually instituted, basically on the product page, it says right above like above Add to Cart, find my shade, you click that and it actually invites the customer to take a photo of themselves, go ahead and submit it in and they have a whole team, that form goes straight into Gorgias assigned to a specific team that prioritizes responding to those really quickly because again, these are buyers that have raised their hand for this specific product. And basically what they’ve seen, like I can’t share exact revenue figures, but for q4 of last year, there was over 35,000 inquiries that came into that one specific form with photos. And they saw like over a 25% conversion rate on all of those inquiries that came in, and it was well into the seven figures in terms of what sales that one specific campaign generated.

Joe Valley  20:55  

So 25% conversion rate or increase in conversion rate because of that change, and what they’re able to do because of Gorgias

Kristina Muntean  21:03  

25% of those 35,000 ticket increase bought,

Joe Valley  21:09  

what happened, what was the, you know, conversion rate before that, you know, of the 35,000 that would have just gone to the website and try to an Add to Cart? And you know, is obviously it’s yes, what? I’m curious,

Kristina Muntean  21:23  

totally what’s, what’s left, and they weren’t so and that’s that’s like a that’s a great question, because they weren’t this, they were measuring it on, hey, we didn’t have this campaign. And we know, you know, I could ask you to actually ask them Joe. And then we can we can get back to people if they’re curious, because they were just sharing that, hey, it was this lift of seven figures almost have a kind of additional to this one this one SKU but let me I’ll I’ll ask them to see if they’re if I can share kind of the ranges there. What the conversion rate on the page was before they asked for find my shade. I think the big thing to what we’re seeing here, Joe, which is what they shared, besides the fact that it brought in seven figures in three months, was that their decrease in return returns, therefore increased in satisfaction that they saw, and people saying, Hey, I had such a good experience with alien versus I got this skincare product, it wasn’t the best fit. So let me just go to Sephora, and go in person. And pick a shade. It was like this was amazing. If you were afraid to buy online, don’t worry, go use this and then find the right shade and had almost brand advocates and to get rid of the friction in terms of like, you know, can I buy a skin product online?

Joe Valley  22:41  

Yes. So folks go to Ilia beauty ILIAbeauty.com. And there’s a button there that says Find my shade. And that’s what we’re looking at. Pretty interesting because not only does it sound like it increases customer satisfaction right away, increases revenue right away. But the the ripple effect of decreasing returns, increasing positive reviews, having people stay on the site, come back to the site and decreasing. You know, I would think just the customer service requirements on the backend and people power that you need to serve these customers because there’s returns in questions that you’re able to now answer by by the fact that you have the Gorgias tool to implement this. And work with you guys to set up this find my shade. Thanks. So pretty cool stuff. Pretty cool stuff. Yeah, so is it you’re talking about e commerce? So let’s define that. Are we talking about selling physical products? Or are we talking about selling stuff online? Meaning services and content as well? Any is it or is it any place where customers interact with? The founders of the business?

Kristina Muntean  23:57  

Yeah, so So I would say Joe, like most of our customers are actually selling physical goods online. That’s the the majority of our customers primarily 90% of our customers are Shopify or Shopify Plus stores. The rest are Bigcommerce and Magento. But those are really the three platforms you support. So I feel like kind of the nature of that means a lot of them are selling physical products. Most of them have majority of the presence on their DTC channel with some Amazon we can actually pull in some of those Amazon and craze as well. And then of course, there’s some use cases where people maybe are are selling like a digital, you know, something that’s not actually a physical product, but I feel like the total power of Gorgias and everything we’re talking about in terms of like deflecting some of those inquiries post purchase, such as where’s my order or so that the team can kind of have more bandwidth to focus on actually building relationship and driving sales on the front end and has the most impact when it is kind of a physical goods type of book business.

Joe Valley  25:06  

Yep. Makes total sense makes total sense. How difficult is it to implement something like this? Let’s just say that I’m, yeah. A three man show meaning it’s me and a couple of vas. Yeah, I’m doing a couple of 3 million in revenue, and I’ve got 10 skews? Is it? Is it a long, laborious process? Or is it pretty simple?

Kristina Muntean  25:28  

No. So it is so and Joe,

Joe Valley  25:31  

it’s no, it’s not simple? Or no, it’s not long, laborious. No, it

Kristina Muntean  25:35  

is not laborious. So sorry, their job. But yeah, for full context and background to I have not been like in SAS for that long. Prior to this, I was overseeing e comm for a supplement brand and actually met Gorgias at Blue Ribbon. And we were on another platform. And my the customer service manager, the time I introduced them to Gorgias and was like, Hey, do you need help? Like, are you good, and he got it implemented himself within just a couple of days. So honestly, it’s depending on how big the store is how much ticket history, we’re migrating over how many existing rules or an existing FAQ or whatever else that is, like two weeks is kind of long onboarding for us. Because really, you can integrate your Shopify, all of your, your clay vos recharges, postscripts, all of those kind of tech platforms, just with clicks of buttons. And then it’s just the ticket importing the substitute weeks is like very long and few days is really common.

Joe Valley  26:41  

Okay. Any other examples of case studies that people have just seen an improvement in conversion rate, you know, the Find My find my color is interesting, but it’s it not? It wasn’t just an implementation of Gorgias, it was an implementation of it and a new page and a website and new sort of methods? What if I’m selling grilling aprons in the how do i Yeah, you know, how does how score just kind of helped me in that sense?

Kristina Muntean  27:08  

Well, even and I mean, Joe, this is another awesome brand from Blue. Remember OG skincare? You know, we were chatting with them. And they instituted some chat campaigns that were just supporting people in the buying process to simple campaign. You can put campaigns on different product pages, or purchase a website that are all unique. Simply just engaging with the customer saying, Hey, can I help you find the right shade? And simply asking that question, opens up communication for customers to share their friction points for you to understand those work, maybe you can make improvements to your product page or website or customer journey in the long run. But in the short term, help them get into the right product quickly. And stories like that, like that is so simple, you and I could set that up in in two minutes. But it’s really what we’re seeing brands have success when they actually actively engage presale with customers. So don’t just think about this engagement, customer support as I’m gonna put out your fires after you’ve ordered. It’s how can I help you get into the product on the front end? So I think OG that one is just it’s just really simple. The other thing I would say, Joe is what time and time again, is the number one predictor of our customers saying, Wow, this was an amazing experience. First Response time, it continues to be like, the pillar that we come back and look to where people say, Wow, someone got back to me right away, even if it’s a hey, like, thank you so much, we got your message, you know, we’re out of the office until, if it’s late at night, like tomorrow at 9am, we’ll get right back to you, or just those touch points are incredibly important. So I’m

Joe Valley  28:56  

just gonna say response time is I agree 1,000%. And that’s something we battle at Quiet Light. It’s we call it speed to lead, right? Somebody inquires, wants a valuation of the business. Historically, we’ve said you know, okay, somebody will be with you. And within 24 hours, we try to get to them as quickly as possible. But being having some message get to them somehow, some way. Imagine, in the first 10 or 15 minutes when someone fills out the lead form, and they get a text message or a calendar link to an advisor that’s going to, you know, connect with them. We don’t do that. We’re working on it, folks. So if anybody has any solutions, other than or in addition to Gorgias, we’re not an ecommerce business. So it’s a different different issue altogether, but speed the lead, you know, immediate communication with the customer. And that’s, that’s everything right there. You care if you can do that and improve that and just convert at, you know, 10%, higher meaning you know, 3% to 3.3% it pays for itself all day long, and then some He’s not just on the front end, like you said on the customer service issue on the back end on the review side of it, on the word of mouth side of it and all that. I think it’s really smart.

Kristina Muntean  30:09  

And totally Joe Yeah, and people these days, like, first time has been important. But again, it’s it’s getting shorter. It’s like people’s expectations are that window is smaller. So I know you kind of mentioned 10 to 15 minutes, it’s, you know, the bulk of people view an immediate response as 10 minutes or less.

Joe Valley  30:28  

Yeah, it’s funny, you know, when they fill out the Quiet Light evaluation form, we’re we’re working on the form now, because people rush through it. And when they rush through it, and they skip over things, at the end, we know it’s not a complete valuation, and people didn’t fill out the form correctly to begin with. So we’re actually be curious to see if anybody listening wants to send me a message about this with their thoughts. We’re actually going to ask for phone numbers, mobile phone numbers, we’re not gonna require it. But I think those that, that put their mobile number in historically, we’ve never, we’ve never asked for people to give us their mobile numbers when looking for a valuation, which is stupid, to put it bluntly, in my view, because if they want, if they really do want evaluation, they’re going to communicate with us. And in order to communicate properly, it’d be great if we had their contact information beyond just an email address. And so those that put in their phone number as well, we know they’re more serious, but would love to be able to get that information and then text them within 10 minutes, right? They say that’s the timeframe. Is it 10 minutes,

Kristina Muntean  31:40  

hey, that is like what the majority of people view as Hey, and immediate response, if it’s 10 minutes or less, I can say that feels immediate to me,

Joe Valley  31:47  

I would love to be able to make that happen. And then just automatically give them a calendar link if they want to set up a time with an advisor. That’s the challenge. That’s part of the challenge. And so many people that are selling physical products have, I mean, different challenges, because you can you can communicate most of the time online, you don’t have to have actual conversations, right? But conversations take longer.

Kristina Muntean  32:10  

Hey, they do and that’s the honestly, spoke to it. Phone is the most expensive channel. So for me to have teams to actually be on calls and spend all that much time it cost the brand, that much more money chat is the least expensive, you know, these SMS as well. So again, it’s how can we deflect some of those phone calls? So instead of someone calling me to track their order, how can I give them opportunities to get the information and other ways themselves, and then save the phone for, you know, really important, maybe you have an a higher up product or something that’s a big purchase for people and maybe like that phone touch point is really important to get people over the final sale, let’s save the phone calls for those kinds of dynamics instead of just, Hey, you said it’d be her Sunday, and it’s and it’s Monday, Monday, and it’s Tuesday kind of thing.

Joe Valley  33:04  

So speed to response, critically important, Gorgias, can help with that. Do it within 10 minutes, be able to communicate with your customers, wherever they are and wherever you advertise. So if you’re advertising on Twitter, on Facebook, on Instagram on what about what about? No, it’s not tick tock? Yeah, I have tick tock is it tick tock? Can you can you communicate on Twitter on tick tock yet with customers?

Kristina Muntean  33:28  

Not yet. I believe that’s a limitation with like TikToks API not being open and available for us to build into or anyone to

Joe Valley  33:36  

build it. Yeah. will be eventually. Yeah, well, we

Kristina Muntean  33:39  

WhatsApp is exciting. People have been really gearing up for that, like, especially internationally as that’s a huge channel to communicate with

Joe Valley  33:47  

all Stop messaging each other, you know, with I messages or SMS messages on our Android phones, and just to all US WhatsApp, I mean, that’s the only way to truly communicate with anybody in the world without issues. At least at least on our team. We’ve got people International and and WhatsApp works best. When you’ve got people that are mixed up on different phones and you know, group messages, Androids and iPhones, it just doesn’t work. I love that, that you’re gonna expand on WhatsApp, that’s going to be able to break down international barriers pretty quickly.

Kristina Muntean  34:17  

Definitely. And SMS in general Joe, we’re really excited and brands are excited about the channel because even with chat, you can lose a customer like they have to be on their computer and what happens, you know, someone comes to your door, they’ve got to go grab their kiddo or whatever it is, they leave, you know, there’s things that we can do actually, where you capture their email and you can almost like flow them into Klaviyo for example, and send them almost an abandoned chat reminder. So definitely some things we can do to try to keep up with abandoned chats. But if you have an SMS conversation with someone, they can go, you know, pick up their kid or do something for an hour and then respond back to you and You can keep that touchpoint going in a way that sometimes you don’t lose them. So that’s, you know, important and exciting. And also we know people open their text messages. So it’s incredible open rates. It’s

Joe Valley  35:17  

so much more than email, like my personal email, like, hardly ever check it. It’s mostly junk and spam.

Kristina Muntean  35:24  

Totally. And again, Joe, the brands that we’ve seen, like, Ali pop does this so well, like they speak to their customers via SMS, like it’s their friend it is it is not an automated scripted thing. And to the point where I was talking to a brand this weekend. And he said, the customers feel like it’s so personal for SMS that they’ll just be like, Hey, Bob Lutz, like just talk to they’ll reach out, you know, later if you’re SMS, like they’re texting their friend, which is, that’s what you want those personal touch points.

Joe Valley  35:54  

Yeah, so check that out as well, folks, so you can go to it’s the first one was ILIA beauty iliabeauty.com. and experience the interaction as a customer, because they use Gorgias, and drinkollipop.com. It’s a classic soda company. Do the same thing there. Check it out, see how it feels. See if it makes sense and communicate with them in different ways. And maybe try it out by you know, finding them on Instagram, and sending a DM and see how it feels, how it works for you and take your dog for a walk while you’re doing it or pick up the kid at school while you’re doing it. Because it gives you that freedom and flexibility. Fantastic. Well, listen, Kristina, we’re running out of time you and I could talk for days. I know that. How do how do people learn more about? Gorgias where do they go? How do they find you? Should they connect directly with you? How do people get Yeah,

Kristina Muntean  36:52  

yeah, Joe? Absolutely. They can email me that’s, that’s probably the fastest and I know we’ll probably

Joe Valley  36:57  

email this you want an email?

Kristina Muntean  37:01  

I mean, I could give them all my I’m sorry,

Joe Valley  37:03  

everybody listening to call you out?

Kristina Muntean  37:09  

Should I give them my personal phone number Joe and me and let’s, uh, yeah, well, I will start email address. Yeah, so it’s just my first name Kristina with a k.my last name [email protected]

Joe Valley  37:24  

and Muntean Muntean folks. [email protected]. I’ll put it in the show notes as well. And of course they could just go to gorgias.com and take a look there’s I believe there’s a free trial period as well.

Kristina Muntean  37:39  

Right. There is an honestly Joe, if anyone emails me I can give give them two months off to as well. So if you email me not through the website, but yeah, feel free I can put your

Joe Valley  37:51  

website is a seven day free trial. But yeah. Let me let me get one more here. Kristina.Muntean [email protected]. You’ll get two months off so you get two months to test it and work it out. Brilliant. Brilliant. Exactly. Well, it’s been good to see you. It’s been good to chat with you. I’m glad you’re well glad we got to call on our friends Ezra at Blue Ribbon and make the bearded live bearded.com. Folks, check it out another great brand. If you want to see how people build an incredible community. Go to All right, we’re shouting out to all of our friends enough. Not only thanks for coming on, Kristina. Joe, good to see you.

Kristina Muntean  38:33  

Thank you everyone.

Outro  38:36  

Today’s podcast was produced by Rise25 and the Quiet Light content team. If you have a suggestion for a future podcast, subject or guest, email us at podcast at quietlightbrokerage.com Be sure to follow us on YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Instagram and subscribe to the show wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next week.