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Shopify is used by over 600,000 merchants worldwide to manage their businesses online. Shopify focuses on making commerce better for everyone so that businesses can focus on what they do best: building and selling their products.

Shopify’s mission is centered around helping merchants sell more – their customers’ success is their success. The publicly-traded commerce giant is on track to cross 1 billion in revenue this year, and a big part of that success is linked to how Shopify supports its customers. To deliver the best possible experiences to online merchants, Shopify employs a unique strategy when it comes to their support team: Support is viewed not as a cost center, but as a revenue generator and a competitive differentiator.

Support as a revenue generator

Shopify’s support team is over 1,000 strong. The customer support team are experts in all things commerce, and help merchants with everything from SEO to online marketing, business advice, and positioning their product against competitors. Shopify coaches its customer support to have conversations with merchants that aim to improve the success of their businesses. They take a consultative approach to every support interaction: customer support solves the immediate need, then opens a discussion about the merchant’s business goals to figure out how else they can help them succeed. The net result? Happier, more successful merchants who drive more revenue for Shopify.

"I really enjoy taking time with my customers. We uncover different ways they can improve their sales.Let’s say a customer asks about selling their t-shirts just on Instagram. I can actually bring up a GuruCard and look at some blogs that may be relevant for them, or some apps that are going to actually boost sales.”

Ethan Brown
Support

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‍Shopify reinforces the importance of driving merchant success by tying the support team’s performance to revenue outcomes, like whether or not a merchant’s store generates more revenue after seeking help from customer support.

In order to equip customer support with the knowledge they need to help merchants drive real business results, Shopify implemented Guru.

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How Shopify customer support uses Guru to drive business results

Shopify’s support team is 90% remote, which raised the need for an integrated knowledge solution that could support the team in every application they use.

“In 2014, Shopify started hiring mostly remote support reps. The product was growing tremendously, and we realized that we didn’t have a single source of truth for our processes, procedures, or best practices. We expect a lot from our merchant support folks, and without having a knowledge team or a knowledge base that could be relied upon, it was really difficult for us to give people the tools and resources they needed to do their jobs effectively.”‍

Dana Tessier
Director of Knowledge Management
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Dana Tessier, Director of Knowledge Management at Shopify, knew that they needed a solution that lived within the support team’s existing workflows so they could find the answers they need efficiently. The remote workforce communicated primarily through Slack, so Guru’s Slack bot, in addition to the browser extension, sealed the deal. “What sold it for me was how embedded into a rep’s workflow Guru is,” said Dana, “When I see how our reps work, it makes complete sense. They don’t have to switch tabs or go somewhere else to find information. They can continue working their ticket and just pop up knowledge using the browser extension in the context of their job.”

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Today, over 1,000 Shopify customer support reps use Guru and they leverage it in over 60% of all support interactions. On-the-fly access to verified knowledge via Guru helps customer support have better conversations with their merchants and ultimately drives real business results.

“One of the things that can really impact how somebody is able to maintain control and confidence within their conversations is having the resources available to continue on with that momentum. Guru is a phenomenal example of surfacing that knowledge in the right form, at the right time, so reps can worry about having that human conversation. Guru is the engine behind them, empowering them to have better conversations with the information they need to keep going.”‍

Marcie Murray
Director of Support
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Knowing that the knowledge in Guru is up-to-date and accurate empowers Shopify’s customer support team to speak with confidence. The team is dedicated to keeping their knowledge verified and accurate, maintaining an impressively high Guru Trust Score that hovers at 93%.

Finding success

For Shopify, success for their merchants is success for the entire organization. By empowering reps with the knowledge they need to have better conversations, Guru
helps Shopify’s support team provide value to merchants that increases sales and
drives revenue.

“Guru is a big part of our knowledge management strategy. We spend a lot of money on facilitating human conversations, so we want to ensure that those conversations are as powerful as possible. If we can make those conversations better, more knowledge-filled, and shorter, then we save a lot of money and we create a lot more value. Guru is a big part of that process.”‍

Toby Shannan
Senior VP of Support