What Is Help Desk Software & Why It's Important For eCommerce
Let’s be honest; managing customer support for an eCommerce business is no mean feat. It takes time, patience, and constant empathy to serve your customers. And to top that, when it comes to eCommerce, you need to answer queries coming from more than one channel, viz., email, Facebook, Instagram, live chat, etc. So, add multitasking to it as well.
The bottom line? It’s an arduous task to manage support for an online store. This is precisely why you should equip yourself with an eCommerce help desk software that lets you manage support seamlessly.
What is eCommerce help desk software?
A help desk is nothing but a customer support center that enables you to support your customers with delightful customer service. When it comes to eCommerce, it includes a bunch of different things:
- Deep integration with the eCommerce platform (e.g., Shopify) to fetch customer data, order data, modify orders, and a few other things.
- You should be able to respond to customers across various channels. Some of them being email, Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, live chat, marketplace messages, phone calls, etc.
- You should be able to collaborate with your team from on a single screen.
There are other features that arms you to deliver a better customer experience than your competitors. For example, you could create canned responses (pre-made replies) to common questions and reply with the same in two clicks. This saves time and helps you be more productive.
Let’s take a more in-depth look at why you need a help desk for your store.
The 6 reasons why all eCommerce stores should use help desk software
Now that you have a fair idea of what an eCommerce help desk is and why you should be thinking about it, let’s solidify that idea with these six reasons why you must get help desk software.
1. Support multiple channels: Your customers can message you from anywhere. It can be an email, a DM on Messenger, a comment on Instagram, or a query through the live chat widget on your website. And if you’re catering to all of them, you’re providing multichannel support. Managing multiple channels simultaneously is tedious, especially when you don’t have five support reps on your team.
In these cases, an omnichannel help desk can come in handy. All of your support channels are integrated into one place. This makes it easier for you to respond to customers across various channels in record time.
2. Save time with instant replies: Almost every customer we talked to told us that around 60-70% of their customer queries are repetitive questions. Questions like, “Where’s my order?”, “Can I get a discount?”, “What’s the shipping cost for X products?” and they go on.
But here’s the thing. There’s a way to reply to these messages in two clicks with canned responses within a help desk software. Canned responses are pre-made templates that you can save with a boilerplate answer catering to a repetitive question. This way, you can answer a question in seconds.
3. Assign tickets to the right person: If more than one person manages the same set of support channels, there might be awkward situations where two of you reply to the same customer. Or, you don’t reply altogether, thinking the other person will take care of it.
In these scenarios, assigning tickets to a person plays a pivotal role in delivering a stellar customer experience. You can easily do this within a help desk software - assign, open or close tickets whenever you need them.
4. Collaborate with the team: Do you share screenshots of customer chats with your teammates? Is it inconvenient to do that since you have to change tabs continually? Well, collaboration is one of the pillars to delivering excellent customer service.
This is where help desk software shines. Within the dashboard, you can tag your teammates, leave them private notes, set reminders, assign/unassign conversations, and a host of other useful actions.
5. Easily modify orders: There are many queries where customers ask you to modify orders (edit, change, or cancel), and every single time you need to navigate to the Shopify dashboard. That’s very inefficient and hampers your productivity.
Instead, you can just equip yourself with a help desk software that comes with deep integration with Shopify (or other platforms) so that you can modify orders directly from the help desk dashboard itself. This will save you from endless tab hopping and errors in changing the correct order.
6. Manage customer reviews seamlessly: Customer reviews are crucial to the success of your eCommerce business. People trust other people to guide them to make an informed purchase decision.
To make the process of review management simpler, you could opt for a help desk that integrates with tools like Stamped.io. With Stamped integrated into your Help desk, you can provide timely responses to submitted reviews and customer questions. It also contributes to additional information based on review history, which can help support staff better handle customer inquiries. We’re hoping that you’re clear on why you must get yourself help desk software. Now, let’s look at some of the key features you need to consider before opting for one.
The 7 must-have features for help desk software
There are a handful of features setting apart the best eCommerce help desk software from the rest. We’ll illustrate the top ones that we think are non-negotiable.
1. Multichannel support: A help desk software should ideally support multiple channels since customers can message your brand anywhere, and you should be able to respond to it instantly. Ideally, the following channels must be available:
- Facebook & Instagram Comments
- Facebook Messenger
- Live Chat
- Phone (in-built or third-party app integration)
- SMS (in-built or third-party app integration)
2. Deep integration with Shopify (or other platforms): If you’re using Shopify for your eCommerce business, make sure the help desk deeply integrates with it. The best Shopify apps always integrate deeply with the platform; why should your help desk software be any different. This enables you to modify orders without having to leave the dashboard.
3. Fast replies: Fast replies are nothing but canned responses to save answers to repetitive questions that customers ask regularly. Just within two clicks, you can respond to questions like, “What’s the shipping rate?”, “What’s the price of X?”
4. Team collaboration: Customer support is a team effort, and you need to collaborate with your teammates frequently. Some of the features that can help you collaborate better:
- Private comments: With private comments within customer chats, you can ask your teammate a question, provide information/feedback and collaborate to resolve the issue.
- Assign: If a customer issue is beyond your knowledge scope, you can assign the right person from your team to take over that issue.
- Tags: If you want to prioritize a customer query over others, you can simply mark the conversation as CRITICAL (or whatever fits your requirement).
5. On-demand customer details: With deep Shopify integration, the help desk software should show customer details like their name, email, phone number, last order id, later conversation date, etc. This gives you additional context while responding to a customer.
6. Live chat: An eCommerce website isn’t complete without a live chat. Customers want to know more about a product before purchasing, and they want to talk to a real human. That’s why your help desk software should come with an in-built live chat, or it should integrate with a third-party app that allows you to control the widget’s functionality from your dashboard.
7. Mobile app: Last but not least, you need a mobile app to manage your store’s customer support on the go. You might not have access to your laptop every time, but customers never sleep, and they can shoot a query/issue any time of the day. And that’s where the mobile app comes in handy.
Convinced you to opt for help desk software?
There you have it - the ultimate reasons why you should manage your customer support through help desk software and deliver a delightful customer experience. Customer service is what differentiates you from the thousands of options available on the market.
This is Guest post written by Deb Mukherjee. He is a SaaS marketer with 5+ years of working with companies worldwide. He has consulted over 40 companies to date and is now heading the marketing function at DelightChat, a customer support software for eCommerce & DTC companies. When he's not working, you can find him watching the latest Anime or writing about SaaS & DTC marketing on debgotwired.com.
