OLIPOP Sees 4x Growth in Just One Year

Written in collaboration with Gorgias

For those who don’t already know, OLIPOP is a sparkling digestive tonics brand that contains eight to nine grams of fiber, less than three grams of sugar per can, and is dedicated to bringing the benefits of digestive health to consumers in a delicious, convenient, and accessible beverage. 

Earlier in May, we got to hear from the Co-Founder and CEO, Ben Goodwin, about his entrepreneurial journey to founding OLIPOP. In episode 104, Lee sat down with Ben to chat about his experience starting a kombucha company at 20 years old, building and exiting his first probiotic beverage brand, and launching OLIPOP.

OLIPOP was originally launched in 2018, and in the last four years, they have seen tremendous growth in DTC, growing from it being 5% of their business to 35%. One of the tools that helped support this enormous growth in DTC and keep up with their exceptional customer service is Gorgias. Gorgias is a leading helpdesk for Shopify, Magento, and BigCommerce merchants where retailers can manage all of their customer communication and tickets in one platform. 

Challenge

One of OLIPOP’s biggest challenges was to be able to maintain the same exceptional customer service they could provide to 4 customers to over 400,000 customers, across all channels.

OLIPOP had used Zendesk, Freshdesk, and Front before, but they knew they needed something different. Their mission was to find something that has a similar backend to the legacy helpdesks, but that has a front end that feels like you're getting an email from a person. They were also looking for a helpdesk that would integrate well with Shopify Plus and their tech stack and would let them do everything in one place, which is how they came across Gorgias.

“I've used various tools for CX, Gorgias has the best handle on what delivering a stellar experience takes. From ensuring each and every customer is viewed as a person instead of a ticket, to using technology to help create automations and macros and having the best integrations in the game, Gorgias has helped us constantly deliver fantastic experiences.” - Eli Weiss, Director of CX, OLIPOP

The Gorgias team also had a big vision for SMS. Instead of abusing the channel and flooding someone's inbox, the goal was to use SMS to create highly personalized relationships with customers. Postscript was the clear choice to work with to make that happen, as it clearly understands the medium is the message.

Solution

Today, OLIPOP works closely with both Gorgias and Postscript and takes full advantage of their integration to build effective SMS marketing campaigns and grow their exceptional customer support experiences. They also work closely with Lunar Solar Group to scale their marketing across all channels.

Overall, OLIPOP’s goal is for every customer to feel valued, and like they're building a personal 1:1 relationship with the brand in every conversation. That experience can be ruined if your customers feel like a support ticket to be resolved.

Since OLIPOP’s strategy for SMS is to utilize it as a highly personal channel, they focus on content that encourages two-way conversations and builds relationships. That's why it's so important for their team to be able to respond quickly and with a human voice. The Gorgias and Postscript integration makes that easy by creating a ticket in Gorgias every time someone responds to an SMS. When support agents respond to the ticket, the responses will be sent out via the same SMS number that the initial message came through, so it all flows like a back-and-forth text conversation that you'd have with a friend.

"Working with Postscript and Gorgias gave us the leverage to keep customers close to delivering the best possible customer experience. It is super helpful to have a full view of the customer, all in one spot." - Eli Weiss, Director of CX, OLIPOP

Strategy

Getting both apps up and running has been a"smooth sailing" experience for OLIPOP. When they started with Postscript, they were supported and ready to go immediately with the lowest lift and highest impact strategies. With Gorgias, they've been able to onboard new people on the team really quickly, as it's a quick walkthrough of one app and they're all caught up, instead of training on multiple channels.

For example, OLIPOP sent an SMS to their customers in March of 2020 that featured their team drinking OLIPOP and skateboarding. The message asked what people were up to during quarantine, and there were no links to products in the message. They had a good portion of their audience respond in a two-way conversation, which helps build community and brand awareness. As a bonus, they also saw a spike in sales from that message. This strategy of creating conversations and engaging your audience has short-term and long-term benefits, with immediate sales and customer retention.

Results

OLIPOP has seen some phenomenal results using Gorgias and Postscript. They've had an 88% decrease in first response time in their first 60 days using Gorgias compared to the last 60 days, from 8 hours 42 minutes to 1 hour and 1 minute. They've also had a 91% decrease in resolution time, from 1 day and 3 hours to 2.5 hours total. Their revenue driven from customer service as a whole has grown over 1200%. All while their number of tickets has more than doubled across email, SMS, and social media.

They also have a 25x ROI on Postscript. There's been a 71% decrease in their response and resolution time with the Gorgias and Postscript integration specifically, as well as bonus revenue-driven.

"You can have the best tools in the business, but not empower your team to use them. With both Postscript and Gorgias we’ve done things differently that paid off for us." - Eli Weiss, Director of CX, OLIPOP

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Written in collaboration with Gorgias, a leading helpdesk for Shopify, Magento and BigCommerce merchants where retailers can manage all of their customer communication and tickets in one platform (including email, social media, SMS, live chat, phone). It’s powered with machine learning to automate up to 25% of commonly asked questions, and seamlessly integrates into your existing tech stack to deliver better customer support.