Last Updated on June 9, 2023 by Tony Fowler
Are you a busy parent that is homeschooling your child? Have you ever struggled to teach history and make learning a fun experience for your kid? If so, you’re not alone!
As a former homeschool student, John Notgrass and his parents, Ray and Charlene, have had their fair share of bad homeschool curriculums. Whether they came across books that were difficult to read and understand, or content that was not at all engaging for the student, the Notgrass family had seen it all. These poor homeschooling experiences, as well as their love for history, encouraged the Notgrasses to start a homeschool curriculum publishing company of their own. Notgrass History provides flexible tools that you can adjust to the needs and abilities of each student including:
- easy-to-read narrative lessons
- primary source documents
- historical novels and biographies
- hands-on activities and projects
- and more!
In this case study, we talk with John Notgrass, Co-founder and eCommerce manager of Notgrass History, to discuss how he and his team use Re:amaze’s native BigCommerce integration and multi-channel inbox to reduce response times and provide exceptional customer support to their homeschool clients.
About Notgrass History
After graduating from homeschooling, John and parents, Ray and Charlene, decided to start a homeschool curriculum publishing business. They created their first website for Notgrass History in 1998, and have been taking the homeschooling industry by storm ever since.
Notgrass has thousands of satisfied customers across all fifty United States, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom. If this doesn’t impress you, just check out their 450+ 5-star reviews!
Notgrass History is very popular with homeschool families and have also received several awards from Teach Them Diligently (Homeschool Family Favorites Guide: Best of 2019) and Practical Homeschooling (Reader Award: Top Ranked By Homeschoolers).
Notgrass History’s primary goal is to encourage and support parents who are teaching the heart, soul, and mind of their child. They aim to make learning at home easy for parents and engaging for students.
Creating high-quality curriculum for homeschoolers is an honor and a joy for the Notgrasses. The values they share with their customers help to build connections with them that go beyond a book purchase.
Notgrass History Moves to BigCommerce
As Notgrass History had continued to grow, their needs had changed. Notgrass had used several eCommerce platforms and various tools for customer communications, but none of them had fully satisfied their requirements.
In 2017, Notgrass History had found an eCommerce platform that suited their needs and had decided to make their move onto BigCommerce. BigCommerce had provided the tools to host and manage a great storefront, but Notgrass still needed a tool to streamline their customer service process. The next step they needed to take was to find a great customer messaging platform that integrates with BigCommerce: Re:amaze.
Notgrass History has a remote customer support team, so it can be difficult to collaborate with one another and distribute customer support conversations. With Re:amaze’s shared inbox, ability to reassign conversations, and leave internal staff notes, Notgrass’ customer support team can manage customer inquiries efficiently and easily assign them to the correct person. Re:amaze’s native integration with BigCommerce also enables the Notgrass History’s customer service team to easily view customer order details, tracking information, and even process refunds within a conversation. With all of this information on hand, Notgrass’ customer support team is equipped with all the tools to provide the best support for their homeschool clients.
“We get positive feedback on the customer service we provide, and Re:amaze is a key part of that process. In our second year of using Re:amaze, customer appreciations were up 49% over the first year.” -John Notgrass, Co-founder and eCommerce Manager of Notgrass History
Notgrass History Puts Their Customers First
A major part of Notgrass History’s mission is to provide support and assistance to overwhelmed homeschool parents. With many responsibilities and duties, it’s common for parents to feel like homeschooling their child is becoming a burden. John understands that Notgrass History has a customer base that consists of busy parents who are often taking care of their home or tending to other family matters. Due to their overloaded schedule, many of these parents may not be able to contact Notgrass History’s customer support team during normal business hours.
Notgrass History needed to come up with a solution to make it easy for these busy homeschool parents to contact Notgrass’ customer support team. Notgrass History’s fix to this problem is to offer a variety of communication channels for customers to use. Customers can find a communication channel that works for them and then can easily contact a customer support representative when needed.
However, this brought about a new problem. Going back and forth between emails, social media, phones and SMS was not only extremely time consuming, but it also made it easy for conversations to fall between the cracks. Managing customer support conversations became extremely tedious, and Notgrass needed a better solution.
Re:amaze’s multi-channel inbox brings live chat, email, social media, SMS, and voice all into one dashboard. John’s team uses Re:amaze’s multi-channel inbox to easily manage all incoming customer inquiries. Instead of going back and forth between emails, social media, phones, and SMS, the Notgrass customer support team is able to view and respond to all customer inquiries within one shared, multi-channel inbox. Notgrass History has been able to reduce their average response times and are able to respond to more customers within a day.
“Re:amaze helps us respond to 34% of contacts within one hour and 83% within one day.” -John Notgrass, Co-founder and eCommerce Manager of Notgrass History
John’s Final Thoughts
“Before moving to Re:amaze, we did not track response times or have a clear view of how our customer service team was performing. Re:amaze lets us track response times, average thread size, and now how often our bot can take care of routine customer inquiries. Re:amaze lets us serve our customers without getting in our way.” -John Notgrass, Co-founder and eCommerce Manager of Notgrass History