4 Govalo features that can help your customer support team

When shopping around for apps to add to your Shopify store, you might install many of them with one or two purposes in mind. It’s always a welcome surprise when you can then find additional uses for them. Or when you can see how they’ll add to another area of your store you didn’t originally consider.

Govalo is all about reinventing the gifting experience on Shopify. So it’s easy to think of the app as just adding to your gift strategy. However, customers will get in touch with your support team about a variety of issues…including gifts.

Here are four of Govalo’s features that will help your support team when it comes to gifting and delivering that top notch service your customers expect.

#1 - Gift card event timeline 

When a customer gets in touch with your support team, they prioritize speedy resolutions. 71% of consumers aged 16-24 say that a quick response from customer support can drastically improve their experience. Part of being able to provide that speedy service is having all the information your team needs at hand. The longer they spend digging through data and investigating, that longer resolution takes. 

When it comes to gift cards, Govalo has a clear and easy-to-understand event timeline feature. 

This timeline provides your support team with the visibility they need on individual orders to provide that better, faster level of service. They can see exactly what actions have been taken with a gift card complete with dates. For example, you’ll be able to see when a gift card was sent, when it was opened, and if it was redeemed. That redemption event will include how much was spent, along with the order number associated with it. 

#2 - Resend gift cards

Sometimes, gift cards get lost - even digital ones. Govalo allows customers to add the details of their recipients so the gift card can go straight to their inbox. While this is a very useful feature for the customer experience, things can also go wrong. The original customer might have made a typo in their recipient’s email address, or used the wrong email address altogether. Or say for example they’ve sent a gift card to a loved one who’s not so great with technology. 

Well, to make things a little easier, it’s easy to resend gift cards through Govalo. These can be issued to the original recipient, or to a completely different email address. And the good news is that if you’re using Govalo to power subscriptions and store credit, these can also be easily resent.

#3 - Gift subscriptions

Improving certain aspects of your customer experience often has a positive impact on your customer support also. The better and more robust the experience, the fewer enquiries you’ll see coming through about the same topic again and again. If you want to sell subscriptions as gifts, this can often be a bit of a point of frustration for both customers and your support team. It’s often easy enough for a customer to buy a subscription for themselves…but less so when it comes to buying one as a gift.

The usual gift subscription experience involves the customer buying a subscription, then their details being attached to it as well as their payment details. In many cases, they have to pause the subscription until it has been given as a gift. And to add even more complexity, the customer may also reach out to your support team to pass the account over to the gift recipient. 

Govalo integrates with both Recharge and Bold Subscriptions, providing a customer-focused approach to gift subscriptions.

Customers can send a subscription as a gift, and their recipient and activate it and manage it like any other subscriber. This will improve the experience of buying a gift subscription for your customers, putting more power back in their hands to manage the transaction and spend less time reaching out to your support team.

In cases where a customer does need help with their gift subscription, you can access their order information quickly through Govalo’s dashboard.

#4 - Store credit

Looking for more ways to improve your support resolution strategy? Have you considered adding in store credit? Store credit is a handy and valuable feature that you can add to your support team’s toolkit for dealing with customer queries and issues. And you can add store credit functionality using Govalo. 

Store credit can help your support team in a couple of ways. The first is in providing another alternative solution to resolve returns. Customers typically only have the option to get a refund or an exchange. In some cases, they may prefer instead to opt for store credit - especially if the order was a gift for someone else. Store credit can act essentially as a gift card for that recipient to choose something better suited to their needs or wants. 

The second way store credit can be of use is in boosting customer perception of your support experience. If a customer is unhappy with how an issue is resolved, that doesn’t mean that they’re a lost cause. In fact, if you can do something to demonstrate further care, you might just retain them. 89% of customers are likely to make another purchase if they have a positive support interaction, so it’s in your best interest to try and turn things around. When your support team wants to try to smooth things over a little, they can offer and issue store credit to the customer in question. This doesn’t have to be exclusive to negative customer interactions, however, your team could also issue credit to high value customers if they have a problem and need to contact support. A small gesture like store credit could help to boost the relationship and keep up their loyalty. 

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