Tools To Enhance Your eCommerce Store, Part 2 – Help Desks

Sara Jones Author

Another critically important part of managing your eCommerce store is being able to manage communications from your customers and potential customers.

Just getting them to send an email to your inbox isn’t going to cut it – it’s not professional, and it doesn’t allow you to track those communications or integrate it with your CRM. Think of this as your ‘customer service central’.

Let’s look at the aspects we want in a help desk software.

Email Ticketing

Each and every communication gets its own unique ticket and all replies and follow-ups are tracked within that ticket.  There’s a full thread showing every interaction you’ve had with the customer, vital where you have multiple people dealing with enquiries.

Templated Replies

Most questions keep cropping up again and again, and writing out the same response over and over is time consuming and tedious.  Having a help desk platform that lets you build a library of ‘FAQ’ replies is a must.  All you do is pull the appropriate template into the conversation, edit as necessary and send.

Notifications

You’ll want the ability to be able to get an email when certain things happen inside your help desk eg when a customer submits a new ticket, or responds to an existing one.  This helps keep your replies timely and your customers happy.

Tagging & Sorting

The ability to tag your help desk tickets has big benefits.  For example, you might tag refund requests or emails about a particular product.  The beauty of this is that later you can sort emails by a particular tag so you can collate important information about them.  This can be used to improve your products, service, or even your website, for example, if people are always asking for help with a certain task.

Internal Notes

This lets you make additional comments on the ticket that your customer cannot see.  Particularly useful if tickets are passing from one agent to another so each knows what the other has done.

Integrated Phone Support

Allows you to integrate a phone number so that when someone calls your support number a ticket it automatically created for the event.  Keeping all your communications in one place make it much easier to keep track of conversations.

Analytics & Reporting

Lets you track things like how often people contact you and how quickly you respond so you can measure the effectiveness of your customer service.

Satisfaction Surveys

Don’t only rely on the data from your reports to check how well you’re doing, ask your customers!  There’s no better way to improve what you do than to ask your customers what you can do better.

Event Automation

Set up actions for certain events. eg if automated emails come in regularly from payment processors you don’t what those to be bunched in with customer communications.  Event automations let you sort this kind of email and remove it from your inbox.

Social Integration & Apps

When someone sends you a Facebook message, tweets you a direct message or live chats you (to name a few) all of these can be handled directly inside your help desk.  Third party apps can also help streamline by integrating with other platforms or tools.  In this way, ALL your inbound communications can be dealt with in one place, making everyone’s lives easier.

Phone Tech Support

As always, access to a real human on the phone is essential should things go wrong and you need a quick reply.

The Options

There are plenty of choices when it comes to help desk software but here are a few to start you off:

• Zendesk
• Help Scout
• Fresh Desk
• Desk.com
• Kayak
• iSupport
• Click Desk
• Live Help Now

Our Recommendation

F​irst Choice – Zendesk (https://www.zendesk.co.uk/)

Zendesk have been around a long time and have an excellent array of features that’s hard to beat. They really are great at what they do!  Starting at £5 per month.

Second Choice – Help Scout (https://www.helpscout.net/)

An excellent platform, easy to use, lacking some of the integrations in Zendesk but if you don’t need those it’s a worthy opponent.  Starting at $8 per month.

Read Part 1 on Email Platforms here

Read Part 2 on Live Chat, Video & Others here

Categories: eCommerce