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:
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 start selling on eBay as well. You only need to connect eBay to your helpdesk, and 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.
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.
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.
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 ecommerce industry are for an invoice request. 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)?
Do Your Business Need an Ecommerce Helpdesk Software?
Using a helpdesk means learning and adopting a new system. It takes time and effort, which your team may be unenthusiastic about investing. You may not need all the features included as well. Here are five questions that will help you gain clarity. The more often you seem to answer yes, the more likely an ecommerce helpdesk software will pay off for your business.
1. Do You Need to Make Your Support Easier Across Multiple Channels?
Suppose you’re using multiple support channels and dealing with multiple customers on these different channels. Almost every e-commerce business provides multichannel support. Besides, it isn’t easy to manage support on all these channels from different interfaces.
The horrors of managing everything, including messages, queries, tools, and passwords, are legitimate for the admin to manage all these without a proper system in place. Inconsistency in support across different channels can drive off a large number of customers. You may face difficulty in prioritizing requests and maintain a redundant system.
An ecommerce helpdesk software puts everything in one place and eliminates all the above issues. An ideal helpdesk automatically streamlines all the incoming queries from various channels through a single interface. For example, with DeskXpand, you can streamline multiple channels like email, feedback form, self-service, social media channels, and so on. You’ll see the difference yourself when you can go from flipping through browser tabs all day to answering everything on a single screen. It works like magic.
2. Would a Helpdesk Save You Time?
More than 40% of customers expect their emails answered within six hours. Most companies cannot meet this basic expectation. The average response time is about as long as twelve hours. You need to take a look at the support tools you use right now! Do you think you can meet the response time expectations with your current tools? If not, do you have strategies to make better use of them?
An Ideal helpdesk would have multiple features like email templates, automatic responses, AI chatbots, canned responses, self-service, etc., to save the agents’ time. Through email templates and canned responses, you can save answers to common questions and access them with just one or two clicks. Are you benefitting from these tools, or are they getting ignored?
3. Do You Want to Reduce Your Repetitive Customer Queries?
Implementing self-service solutions becomes relevant when customer service departments face numerous requests at once, to the point where it becomes impossible to tackle them manually. Some other benefits from the companies’ perspective are:
Support Cost Reduction
Boosts Social Engagement
Increases Customer Satisfaction & Customer Success
Self-service features empower customers to solve common product issues on their own. You can include the most common problem and solutions to your knowledge base. It can also include documentation of your product detail for post-sales queries. The primary purpose of these articles should be to provide customers with information that can help them troubleshoot their problems.
If you and your team provide detailed troubleshooting steps for common problems and common roadblocks customers face and share them with every user, your queries will likely decrease.
4. Want to Make Navigation Easy for Your Customers?
Providing self-service is not the only solution. You need to ensure that your customers find what they’re looking for. You must ensure that your website is navigation-friendly. Your customers must be able to find what they’re looking for.
DeskXpand uses advanced search algorithms in its knowledge base interface to make navigation easy for the end-users. You can also use ecommerce helpdesk software to categorize your KB articles into various categories and sub-categories.
DeskXpand Knowledge Base
The primary objective of the knowledge base is its site-wide visibility and 24*7 support availability. You can place an easy-to-use widget to redirect your customers to your online library. This way, they can access it easily regardless of whatever page they’re on. Check if all the links work fine and customers reach relevant solutions.
5. Don’t Know What To Do With All The Data?
Make Use of Search Behavior!
Despite being so obvious, eCommerce businesses lack a proper data management system. Even with all the data, they fail to analyze it correctly to determine the trends and roadblocks of their support. Are you too unable to make crucial decisions due to lack of data?
Collecting basic information and data is just the first step. I am sure you don’t want to spend numerous hours with messy spreadsheets. Hence, the solution: helpdesk software! Analyzing data to bring out the best use for ecommerce helpdesk software is what you need, to grow.
DeskXpand Helpdesk Analytics
Helpdesk reporting tools can gather information and crunch numbers fast and automatically. For example, DeskXpand’s analytics window can show details like your average ticket number per day (per agent,) busiest days, busiest time, average first response times, customer feedback, customer satisfaction statistics, and so on.
Actionable data always powers intelligent decisions. So, if you’re tired of making decisions in the dark or spending hours in spreadsheets, a help desk will, … well, .. help. As a manager, you will know when your customers need you the most, the time when you need to improve, the changes you need to make, and whether your new strategies are working or not.
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.
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 14+ years of development experience and hundreds of clients across the globe. We can help you build customized products according to your present and future needs. Start building your ecommerce helpdesk software with us today!
