Your corporate gifting customers are as unique and varied as the rest of your store’s shoppers — they have different needs, timelines, and budgets all begging to be met by your brand.
And while many B2B gifters are happy cruising through your self-service storefront for their holiday gifting, some corporate clients want help from you, a real person, to place this high-stakes order for the holidays.
Now’s the time to prepare your gifting team for these high-touch projects. If you wait too long to familiarize the squad with best practices and possibilities, you’ll be bogged down by bottlenecks before you know it.
This playbook was made to help prepare your team and minimize holdups with Zest’s efficiency-driving features, Concierge and the AI Assistant. Scroll on to learn:
Why a little prep now is priceless later
When to use Concierge (and when to send clients to your storefront)
Ready to grab some prepared peace of mind? Let’s go.
Don’t Let Preparation Be This Year’s Pitfall
Your brand may offer the highest-quality gifts or the best curated bundles, but if your team bobbles the ball when it comes to speed and execution, B2B gifters won’t hesitate to take their order (and company credit card) somewhere else.
After all, these customers have been charged with finding the perfect gifts for a bunch of their peers (or *gulp* verrry high-value clients), and making a positive impression that fits their exact needs is a must. To add to the pressure, these shoppers are almost always working with tight budgets and tighter deadlines, all of which makes these big corporate orders that much more critical.
TL;DR There’s a lot riding on these gifts, and your goal is to help your gifters knock this project outta the park so they make everyone happy (and come back to your brand for all their gifting needs year after year).
Getting Comfortable With Concierge
While your self-service storefront hums along on its own this season, your team can pour its energy into making white-glove gifting as efficient and accurate as possible — all of which is easy to do with a little bit of prep. Here are a few boxes to check on your journey to Q4 preparednesss:
✅ Familiarize yourself with Concierge and the Assistant
Go ahead and take a tour around Concierge in your Zest account. This step seems almost too easy, but it’s a great way to get a lay of the land, take note of the capabilities, and mentally prepare to help customers.
We recommend cruising through this product walk-through for anyone who’s bound to touch a concierge project this season.
✅ Create mock orders in Concierge
Consider this an extension of the step above. It never hurts to have a dry run and create a mock project or two in Concierge. Try making one manually, then make another using the AI Assistant. Doing this demystifies the process and gives you the confidence to go forth and scale white-glove gifting this season.
Pssst! If you haven’t created a project in a while, you may notice a few new features. You can now:
duplicate previous projects and orders easily using the "Duplicate" shortcuts in Concierge, Orders, and the Assistant.
bulk select Concierge orders to submit for processing.
send email notifications for Concierge direct ship recipients.
✅ Train your team (or at least one other person)
We always recommend having more than one person understand the concierge gifting flow at your company. Teams of one risk being overwhelmed (and burnt out by the new year), which could lead to delayed communication, order processing, and more — especially if they get sick or simply have to step away for a while during Q4.
Good resources to share with others include:
• Share the “why” behind Concierge with this post from our founders.
• The Getting Started With Concierge help center collection.
• This article detailing the ins and outs of Using the Zest AI Assistant.
• A live demo of the AI Assistant by our own head of customer success.
When to Use Self-service vs. Concierge
Many Zest partners have a dedicated corporate gifting landing page that funnels gifters toward the best gifting path for them: self-service or concierge.
Jamagansett's gifting landing page clearly funnels shoppers toward
self-service or concierge gift services.
However, even the most thoughtful landing pages can go ignored and shoppers scroll straight to the concierge contact form regardless, even if self-service is the best fit for their needs.
So, when should you start a concierge project and when should you guide shoppers to your storefront? Here’s how we decide:
Send gifters to your self-service storefront when:
No human touch is needed, e.g., no curation is required.
Orders require no or limited customization, like printed gift notes with a logo.
Buyers have a tight timeline and ready-to-ship gifts are the only option.
Remember: Storefronts were made to automate a large portion of your corporate gifting program. They’re your team’s go-to tool for clearing your plate of time-consuming repeat, standard, or smaller orders. These orders don’t need any intervention from your team, and they give you more time to dedicate to high-tough custom gift projects.
If the shopper filling out your contact form could get exactly what they want on your storefront, guide them there.
Fire up a new project in Concierge when:
If the gift request you’re fielding is large, bespoke, or attached to a high-value relationship — think a client who wants a curated gift build, custom product mix, special pricing, handwritten gift notes, or white-glove handling — then it’s worth dedicating someone on your team to it.
With Concierge, you uphold that white-glove feel (things like shareable upload links, real-time address validation, a branded tracking dashboard, flexible invoicing) while automating the backend busy work.
Our Rule of Thumb:
Route standard, off-the-shelf, ready-to-ship smaller orders to your self-service storefront. Reserve Concierge for your VIP gifters, like key accounts, and large one-off orders or anything requiring real customization. Knowing when to re-route is key to a smooth (and relatively stress-free) gifting season that ensures you have enough time to serve every gifter and even scale this channel.
Four Tasks to Tap in the AI Assistant
The holiday rush is no joke. With Zest powering your self-service gifting and concierge project management, you’ve already streamlined the most historically stressful parts of any gifting program.
When you start folding in Zest’s AI Assistant to your workflow, you take another giant leap toward eradicating bottlenecks, ramping up efficiency, and scaling your gift channel as a whole.
Note: The AI Assistant is not a customer-facing tool. It’s your very own internal AI agent that lives in your Zest Partners portal. Think of the Assistant like having Claude baked into your portal but with all the knowledge and context of your Zest orders.
Since the Assistant is powered by AI, the list of things you can ask it to do is bottomless. From simple tasks, like adding a few more recipients to an existing order, to more complex asks like generating complicated invoices and drafting emails in your voice, the Assistant is ready to help.
When it comes to the Q4 holidays, these are three tasks you can instantly streamline when you loop in the Assistant.
Remember! Keep a human in the loop. The Assistant does the heavy lifting, but your team owns the final call. Always verify data in the UI before actions that cannot be reversed, like submitting orders for processing.
Task #1: Intake New Concierge Projects
It’s not unusual for the information you receive from clients to be…messy. Recipient information, individualized gift messages, sporadic customization, different gifts for different people — in short, there is a lot of room for error when trying to manually add and validate every detail in a massive order.
The Assistant makes quick work of making sense of it all. The worst parts of setting up new Concierge projects now take just minutes. You can:
Clean up spreadsheets
Take all the info a prospect sends you — no matter if it’s by way of CSV or even handwritten note — and feed it to the Assistant. In return, the Assistant will deliver a new project with every detail cleanly organized.
If your input has multiple sheets, each sheet becomes its own order grouping named after the sheet tab. Clean column headers help (name, address, city, state, ZIP), but the Assistant handles renamed columns, odd formatting, and typos, too.
👉 Example prompts:
"Here's a spreadsheet of holiday gift recipients for Acme Corp. Set up a project and organize them into orders."
"Each tab in this file is a different office. Create an order per tab and load the recipients."
"Add these 400 recipients to the Acme project as a new order called 'West Coast Team'."
Validate recipient addresses
Plus, The Assistant runs address validation automatically as part of the process, and it will show you how many addresses are valid, how many have errors, and how many are still being checked. From there, you can accept the corrections suggested by the Assistant, dismiss warnings when you know the original input is right, or dig into any list to see who needs fixing.
👉 Example prompts:
"How do the addresses look on order 1234-C1?"
"Show me the recipients with address errors."
"Accept the suggested corrections for everyone who has them."
"These addresses are fine, dismiss the warnings."
Task #2: Place Repeat Gift Orders
For repeat clients who order the same thing every year, you can duplicate a past project in one prompt. The Assistant clones the original with the same recipients, lets you add new ones, and swaps in updated products. It's the fastest way to handle reorders without rebuilding from scratch.
👉 Example prompts:
"Duplicate last year's Acme holiday project and swap in this year's gift box."
"Clone project 1234, add these 50 new recipients, and keep everything else the same."
Task #3: Customize Products or Deals
When using the Assistant, customization easily happens through plain chat rather than a settings menu. Open the Assistant on a Concierge project (new or existing), describe the add-on or pricing rule you want in your own words, and it builds it into the order or into a standing rule.
The Assistant can handle two distinct types of customization:
Product customization: logos, branded gift notes, custom wrapping, or any other add-on your brand offers can be applied to a single project or to a whole batch of orders just by asking. Not sure if you’re asking correctly? Don’t sweat it! The Assistant works conversationally, so you just give it the instruction, it may ask clarifying questions (like which logo file, which SKUs, which recipients), and you iterate live until it looks right before submitting.
Deals and pricing rules: rather than applying a discount order-by-order, you tell the Assistant the business rule once (who it applies to, what triggers it, what the discount or special pricing is), and it deploys that rule automatically going forward whenever the matching scenario comes up — a repeat client, an order over a certain size, a specific product line…you get the gist.
👉 Example prompts:
"Add our logo to the mug and the notebook on the Acme Corp order, and include a printed gift note that says 'Happy Holidays from the Acme team.'"
"Apply our standard deluxe gift-wrap add-on to every order in this batch of 50 recipients."
"Set up a rule: any client ordering more than 100 units of the holiday gift set gets 15% off automatically, starting now."
"Give repeat clients from last holiday season a standing 10% discount on their reorders going forward."
"Apply Standard US shipping to all orders in this project."
"One recipient is in Canada. Waive the shipping rule and charge $25 flat."
Pssst! You can search your catalog by product name, SKU, or ID and the Assistant helps you pick the right variant. It can soft-match product names even when you use slightly different wording (or include the occasional typo). If something exists in your Shopify store but hasn't been imported into Zest yet, the Assistant can find it and pull it in on your approval.
Task #4: Draft Emails in Your Voice
During the holiday rush, communicating with clients can take up more time than you can imagine. Gathering all the nitty-gritty details to include in even short responses can eat up hours, so this is a prime use case for your handy dandy Assistant.
The Assistant can write email drafts (subject line and body copy) that you can then copy and paste into Gmail, Outlook, or whatever ESP you use. The Assistant pulls in any project’s context, including portal links and tracking URLs, so you don't have to hunt those down yourself. If you've set up tone-of-voice rules, the Assistant matches your style with ease.
If you want more time to foster relationships or ideate gift projects instead of writing emails, this is the best way to make quick work.
👉 Example prompts:
"Draft an email to Acme Co. listing the 3 invalid addresses and asking them to fix them."
"Write a friendly follow-up to last year's client suggesting a reorder."
"Draft an email letting the customer know their order shipped, with the tracking link."
"Write an email telling Acme Co. a summary of this project for their approval."