Hi guys, I’m looking to put together a new solution around customer service as my existing CS rep is going on maternity leave at the end of the month. Does anybody have any thoughts around AI in customer support to handle this? Or does anybody have any solutions to hire an A player customer service team member fast?
I tend to stay pretty far away from AI at the moment as the tech just isn’t there yet. We use Gorgias as a helpdesk and TalentPop.co to handle our customer service, and it works well while still being quite affordable ($8/hour) Gorgias has easy automation you can use to build out and automate the answering of specific questions, but we find that a lot of “False Positives” tend to arise. Ex. “Where is my order” vs. “Where is my order, it’s been 2 weeks, I want a refund” would need too very different responses. So what we do on our end is use Gorgias to auto tag tickets, which populate the tickets in customized views. From there our Customer Service team at TalentPop handles all of the support requests out of those views making for a really streamlined solution to support. From my experience, AI Chat bots and things like that just don’t provide a great experience…
Totally get the situation. AI can definitely help bridge the gap while your CS rep is on leave, but the real value right now isn’t “AI instead of a person” — it’s AI as a copilot that makes a small team feel bigger.
Here’s where stores see the biggest efficiency boost without losing quality:
Drafted replies you can approve instead of writing from scratch
Quick summaries of long messages or multi-thread conversations
Auto-surfaced Shopify info (last order, tracking, cart) so you’re not digging for context
Auto-tagging and routing to keep the queue organized
On-site proactive messages/campaigns that prevent common questions before they become tickets
This setup gives your team a bit of a “superpower”: less time on repetitive work, more time acting as product experts or improving workflows - which is ideal when you’re temporarily understaffed.
For context, this is the approach we use at Text with LiveChat: AI assists, humans stay in control. Happy to share what a lightweight workflow could look like for your situation.