Introduction
Every business needs helpdesk software. Especially when helpdesks rarely (if ever) come free and come with a long setup time, sometimes it is not worth the resources that it takes up. But only sometimes. In most cases, a helpdesk will save time, money and save your support agents from frustration. Whether or not it will benefit you solely depends on the way your team serves your customers.
An efficient, fast, smooth, and personalized service is a requirement for online businesses to grow. Ecommerce businesses are always on the lookout to deliver a superior customer experience. They need to excel in all aspects of ecommerce support services to assist customers throughout the purchase cycle while building great relationships with them. It is imperative to transform the customer experience into something better and improve retention rates. So what exactly does an ecommerce helpdesk software do?
What is Ecommerce Helpdesk Software?
When customers shop online, they may have queries about products, orders, shipping charges, exchange items, order returns, and much more. It may even become critical for retailers to provide help so that customers can complete and manage their purchases.
Managing online customers comes with its own set of challenges. It includes many requests, repetitive issues, multiple communication mediums, and quick turnaround time expectations. Organizations seek dynamic and intelligent ecommerce helpdesk software to overcome such challenges.
Ecommerce helpdesk software helps businesses automate and streamline their customer service operations. It helps them centrally manage customer information and interaction history to quickly and effectively resolve queries. Some of the popular features include live chat, integrations, performance reporting, real-time SLA management, and so on. Let’s have a look at the features in detail:
How Does ECommerce Helpdesk Software Work?
Ecommerce customer support software ensures that your customers are satisfied with the quality of your customer support. It allows your support department to carry out the support operations efficiently. ECommerce helpdesk software enhances their productivity by streamlining the support processes for better results. For a better understanding, let’s see the process of how the eCommerce ticketing system works:
Step 1: Your customers faced some sort of issue related to your products and raised a ticket via email.
Step 2: The email gets directly converted into an actionable ticket in the eCommerce help desk software.
Step 3: The support agent gets notified about the email ticket that the customer raises.
Step 4: The agent initiates the ticket by searching for the resolution. The first step is to notify the customer that the ticket has been initiated and will be resolved soon.
Note: If needed, customer support agents can add more support agents to different departments to the ticket in order to fast-forward the resolution process.
Step 5: Once the solution is found, it is sent to the customer. (The resolution will directly reflect in the customer email, even though it is sent through an eCommerce help desk software).
Step 6: The final step is to close the customer ticket by marking it as “resolved.”
This we saw as an example of a customer raising a ticket through email; similarly, any other platforms, such as live chat, web forms, Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, etc., can be used to reach out. However, the process of solving the query will remain the same.
The eCommerce customer support software will provide the best possible assistance to the customers as all their queries will be gathered in one place; it does not matter from which platform they are generated. This way, eCommerce helpdesk software streamlines the support process and makes it a little easier for the support department.
Top Features of an eCommerce Helpdesk Software
Every feature of an eCommerce helpdesk software is designed to help you resolve customer issues faster, from whatever marketplace or channel you sell. It has an exponential effect as your eCommerce business grows. If your sales are increasing, so will your support queries. Let us take a look at some of the specific features that make the eCommerce helpdesk software indispensable.
1. Integrations with Native Tools
Integrations enable your helpdesk software to connect with the popular marketplaces that businesses can sell on. It helps in establishing various channels of communication used to fulfill orders. You can achieve a single, centralized location for your customer service through the integrations feature in an eCommerce helpdesk software.
If you pick a generic helpdesk, you’ll have to pay for separate apps to enable these integrations. However, a helpdesk like DeskXpand gives you the flexibility to integrate all your third-party tools into a single interface. No need to switch to different interfaces; you can operate everything from the same place. Native integrations mean that you do not have to worry about various apps or plugins. Everything you need is already there.
2. Marketplace Integration
Connect Helpdesk with Various Marketplace Integration
Choose a helpdesk that lets you integrate with every significant ecommerce marketplace in the world. For example, you’re selling your products on Amazon, and now you want to also start selling on eBay. You only need to connect eBay to your helpdesk; all communications will be directed to your shared inbox. This is how simple it should be! It also directly refers to the scalability of the ecommerce helpdesk software you choose.
If you want to integrate third-party tools with your helpdesk, you can do it through Zapier. It lets you connect your helpdesk with thousands of the most popular apps. It’ll help you automate your work by bringing everything together and having more time for what matters the most.
3. Email Ticketing: Shared Inbox
Ecommerce helpdesk software centralizes the ticketing process with the help of the shared inbox features and makes it easier for teams to respond faster. It helps businesses in seamlessly processing customer queries, managing tickets and feedback. It will improve your team’s accountability, will improve transparency, and ensure effective communication.
4. Ticket Management Features
Some of the ticket management features are automatic ticket importing, automatic ticket assignment, ticket notifications, etc. We have an ecommerce helpdesk software that lets you perform precisely this and that too as smoothly as possible. It also lets you manage unlimited customers effortlessly. This, in turn, helps you scale your ecommerce customer service. Without further ado, take a free trial of DeskXpand ecommerce helpdesk software.
Start Your Free Trial Now
5. Communication Channel Integration
Every customer does not use the same channel to report their queries. Some might prefer sending emails, some might want to talk to a customer support executive, and some might reach you through social media channels. You could also have customers who let the whole world know about their grievances through their tweets.
Omnichannel Communication: A Must for Ecommerce
An Ecommerce helpdesk software can bring all the online communication, including every channel, into a single inbox. It also ensures that your agents won’t miss any incoming messages or requests on any channel.
6. Snippets
Snippets are a handy way to speed up the personalization process. You can use them to automatically pull in crucial information such as customer care, order details, delivery address, and so on. You can do this by simply typing in a hashtag and choosing which snippet you want. You can create your snippets and include frequently used phrases. It will speed up your processes even more.
7. AI Chatbots
Millenial’s Favorite Customer Support Tool: Chatbots
You can use AI chatbots to create suggestions for common queries. Businesses can use AI-based algorithms to find out which queries were searched or asked for the most times. It can also work if you connect your knowledge base to the chatbot. This way, the chatbot can directly provide links to customers for their queries. You can redirect the customer to a support agent for complex queries, which they can then take over.
8. Templates, Canned Responses, and Auto-Responders
Templates are the magic wand for achieving a lightning-fast response. Readymade email templates or canned responses also maintain a consistent response. Although, your agents will need to personalize the entire message. Perhaps, if you’re receiving lots of similar emails about a particular line of products, your response needs to be very carefully phrased. Saved templates are an excellent option for this scenario.
You have to write out a message and save it in your templates for future use. You’ll be able to generate it with minimum clicks.
Auto Responders: Your agents might not be available all the time to respond to a query. Rather than ignoring the customers and making them wait until your agents come back, you can set an auto-responder to let them know that you received their message and will look into it as soon as possible. This way, customers will feel acknowledged and involved.
9. Dashboard
A unified dashboard is a beneficial resource for online sellers. It lets you access a host of reports specifically designed to give valuable insights to online sellers. The dashboard works as a central hub, containing reports on a variety of different metrics. You’ll be able to view the breakdown of sales by channel in a detailed manner.
DeskXpand Helpdesk Dashboard
You can also monitor everything from your daily ticket numbers, response times, how quickly your support tickets are being answered, what channels you receive the tickets from, and so on. You can break these metrics further to know the performance of individual agents too. Customer service admins or managers can take an in-depth dive into team performance.
DeskXpand ecommerce helpdesk software lets you perform and monitor all the tasks from a single screen. It is utterly beneficial for admins or support managers as it is fledged with advanced analytics features. Take a demo and find it out yourself.
Start Your Free Trial
10. Other Important Features
Ticket Prioritization:
As a support manager, you need to prioritize regular customer queries as well. The closer a task is to the required SLA, the higher they will be on an agent’s to-do list. Your ticketing system must have an SLA timer to ensure that agents attend to issues within the said time.
Collaboration Features:
Ecommerce helpdesk software is designed for the entire customer service team to use. DeskXpand is designed to maximize collaboration, encourage teamwork and increase team accountability. You can set SLA rules which automatically assign tickets to relevant agents.
Auto-translate:
Selling internationally is a part of growing your ecommerce business and reaching as many people as possible. If you’re using an ecommerce helpdesk software, every incoming message can be automatically translated along with your response. Hence, you can start selling overseas without the need to hire multilingual support agents. It is a must-have feature if you’re looking for strategic and substantial growth.
One-click Invoices:
A lot of incoming tickets in the e-commerce industry are for an invoice requests. It may not seem like much, but they’re often annoying and time-consuming to generate. With its one-click invoicing feature, an eCommerce helpdesk software can automatically generate an invoice in seconds.
So, now you know all the required features of an eCommerce helpdesk software. You know why an ecommerce helpdesk software is useful and what are its business benefits. But how do you know if you need these features and the helpdesk (as a whole)?
Why Does Your Ecommerce Brand Need a Helpdesk Software?
Enhances Customer Loyalty and Satisfaction
Businesses that sell their products online are most often overwhelmed with a lot of customer queries. In order to offer quality service, it becomes necessary to have eCommerce helpdesk software that ensures they stay on top of customer queries and provide timely solutions.
Doing so can help the support department ensure that their customers are delighted with the kind of support they provide. This enhances the customer’s loyalty and satisfaction, eventually building a long-lasting relationship between the customer and your eCommerce business.
Increases Support Agent Productivity
If you run a business, there are going to be occasions when your customers will face issues or have queries related to your product/service. But it’s a different scenario for an eCommerce business. It does not get occasional customer queries; instead, it has a flurry of queries blasting in every single day.
To tackle such situations, your eCommerce needs to have quality eCommerce helpdesk software. It has certain features like canned response, automation, analytics, live chat, etc., ensuring that your support team works productively and gets more work done in less time.
Improve Customer Data Collection
For an eCommerce business, when the only way customers interact with your business is online, the data collection of customers becomes very crucial. Only by collecting the data will you know how your customers feel about your products, what issues they face, which product they like the most, etc.
Knowing the customer data also gives you an opportunity to tailor the suggestions for the customers and enhance their experience. This way, you will know your customers better and also can make each customer feel valued and special.
Empower Customers to be Independent
Sometimes what happens is, when there are a lot of queries to manage, customer support agents might miss out on a few of them. This might create a bad experience for a customer. But it can be tackled relatively easily with just a simple strategic adjustment. Start offering your customers the option to solve their queries independently with the help of self-service options.
Self-service has multiple mediums, such as knowledge base articles, FAQs, video tutorials, community forums, etc. These self-service mediums can also be accessed from anywhere at any time, which is more convenient when compared to reaching out to a support agent.
Offers Detailed Analytics on Support Performance
It is not like eCommerce businesses can take customer support for granted. Unlike any other business, eCommerce businesses have to always be on their A-game when it comes to offering customer support. That is why knowing the support teams/department’s performance becomes crucial. But the question is: how to analyze it? The answer is very simple: using the eCommerce helpdesk software analytics feature.
Analytics provides valuable insights into the average response/resolution time, support agents’ everyday workload, overall agent productivity, customer churn rate, etc. These factors can help you analyze the bottlenecks that exist in your support process so that you can make the necessary changes before it does any damage.
Simplify Support Across All Channels
In the era of social media, you cannot afford to offer your support via email and calls. You have to cover a lot of other platforms, including email and calls. Platforms include live chat, web forms, Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, etc. As an eCommerce business, you must meet your customers at their preferred platforms to offer them quality support. Offering your customers omnichannel support can also be an opportunity to have quality interactions with them. This way, with eCommerce helpdesk software, your support agents can offer 360-degree support to your customers.
Reduce the Number of Repetitive Customer Queries
When hundreds of customer queries are generated daily, a few of them might be repetitive. But replying to them all once a time does not make any sense. First, it consumes a lot of time, which can be used to solve more complex queries. And the second thing is that it is quite frustrating to type the same thing repeatedly.
Such situations can be avoided simply by pre-defining these queries. All you need to do is analyze the most frequently asked queries and create a predefined response. Once done, you must select the response and send it to the customer. This saves a lot of time, and quicker solutions are provided.
Best Helpdesk Software for Ecommerce Businesses in 2023
DeskXpand
DeskXpand eCommerce helpdesk software helps businesses scale up their support and operations. The top features are a one-page ticketing interface, a clean and user-friendly interface, task management, and self-service options. It enables managing all the queries in one place with its one-page ticketing interface so your support team can work on it effectively without missing out on a single query.
DeskXpand helpdesk software system enhances internal collaboration for your support teams. It can reduce the unnecessary time & effort of the agents that is spent on customer tickets by offering them high-quality features. These features can also help the agents enhance their efficiency and productivity as the query-solving process becomes easy to handle. With DeskXpand eCommerce software, your support team can do more in less time.
Gorgias
Gorgias offers a unified platform for managing customer inquiries from diverse channels, such as email, chat, and social media, streamlining communication. With AI-powered automation, Gorgias efficiently handles routine tasks, routing tickets to appropriate agents and enhancing response times. It provides rich customer data insights, fostering personalized interactions. Additionally, its customizable templates improve efficiency, making it a valuable asset for eCommerce businesses seeking enhanced customer support and streamlined operations.
Zendesk
Zendesk support software helps your support agents do their best work. It is also a robust tool that is easy to set up and easy to use as well. Zendesk support software offers a shared inbox to handle queries effectively. You can expand Zendesk’s functionality by integrating it with other third-party apps and ticketing tools. Its mobile ticketing feature offers quick access from anywhere so that you can easily offer support. Zendesk Support is one of the most detail-oriented helpdesk ticketing systems.
Freshdesk
Freshdesk is a cloud-based customer support software that provides the features of chatbots, self-service, automation, etc. It offers two support offerings: one is a help desk solution, and the other is an omnichannel solution. Omnichannel solutions mainly offer services on channels like email and all social media platforms. Businesses looking to offer omnichannel support can select this Freshdesk support tier. Freshdesk can be a great software to streamline the customer support process and collaborate seamlessly with other team members.
Front
Front empowers support teams with powerful ticketing management features. It facilitates seamless collaboration on customer messages by providing shared inbox and personal email address capabilities, streamlining team efforts. With Front’s user-friendly interface, businesses can easily create custom workflows, assigning and escalating tickets without coding knowledge. The front also accommodates interactions through personal email addresses, making it versatile.
Kayako
Kayako is among a few top-tier eCommerce helpdesk software due to its versatile features. It excels in managing customer inquiries across multiple channels, offering customization options, and fostering self-service through knowledge bases. Kayako’s integration capabilities ensured seamless compatibility with various eCommerce platforms and applications. Its user-friendly interface ensures easy navigation for both support teams and customers.
HappyFox
If we speak about eCommerce support software, Happyfox can be considered one of the most competitive options out there. Due to its superior reporting features, it stands out from the other helpdesk support software. It allows the support managers to analyze the NPS and CSAT and get insights into how well the agents perform. Happyfox can help your business to streamline its support process for a better customer experience.
Things to Consider When Choosing a Quality Helpdesk Software
Ease of Use
Checking the user-friendliness of an eCommerce helpdesk software before selecting one is crucial for several reasons. Firstly, an intuitive and user-friendly interface enhances the overall user experience for both the customer service teams and end-users. It reduces the learning curve and minimizes the time spent on training. A user-friendly eCommerce helpdesk ensures teams can quickly navigate different features, access necessary information, and perform tasks efficiently, resulting in improved productivity.
Features You Need
By carefully examining the features, businesses can ensure that the eCommerce helpdesk software aligns with their specific needs and requirements. Understanding the functionalities offered by the software allows organizations to assess whether it can streamline their support processes effectively and address their unique challenges.
Analytics and Reporting Options
Reporting and analytics provide valuable insights into the performance and effectiveness of the support team, enabling organizations to make data-driven decisions. By evaluating the reporting capabilities, businesses can assess whether the software provides comprehensive and customizable reports on key metrics such as ticket volumes, response times, resolution rates, and customer satisfaction.
Integrations Capabilities
Integration streamlines workflows and enhances the effectiveness of the helpdesk software. By checking out the integration capabilities, your business can ensure that the eCommerce helpdesk software seamlessly integrates with other essential tools and systems already in use, such as CRM platforms, communication channels, or project management software.
Take the Free-trial
Taking a free trial/demo can be a fantastic opportunity to explore email support software and analyze whether it suits your business needs. It also helps you to check its learning curve and how easy it is to adapt for your agents. While using the trial or a demo makes your life easy if everything goes smoothly.
DeskXpand: An Ideal Choice for Ecommerce Businesses
Nearly 80% of American consumers demand timely and informed customer service. They believe it is the most critical aspect of good customer service.
PwC Survey
The phrase “time is money” is very fitting in the ever-growing ecommerce industry. Despite the statistics mentioned above, most ecommerce businesses fail to deliver a satisfactory experience to meet customers’ demands. Sellers cannot compromise on providing a good service. They’ll face negative reviews and an eventual drop in sales if they do. So, how do you maintain a high standard of customer support, meet every expectation of your customer while growing your sales?
The best option is to use an ecommerce helpdesk software that streamlines your processes and helps you solve support queries faster. It would help if you had an omnichannel helpdesk with easy-to-navigate self-service, automated ticketing features, and robust collaborative features. Make life easier for your agents and help them solve a greater volume of tickets quickly and effectively.
We are an ISO27001-certified helpdesk solutions development company with 16+ years of development experience and hundreds of clients across the globe. We can help you build customized products for your present and future needs. Start building your ecommerce helpdesk software with us today!
Start Your Free Trial
