eCommerce Helpdesk: How Does It Work & Why Is It So Crucial?

The Value of an eCommerce Helpdesk 

In 2021, customer relationship management is all the rage, and for eCommerce sellers, implementing a comprehensive solution for customer support is especially vital for success. Why? Simply put, customer expectations are on the rise in an industry that just experienced record-breaking growth. Providing a quality customer experience is quickly becoming the top priority for eCommerce businesses in order to stand out from the heightened global competition. In fact, customer experience will soon be even more important than price and products.   

So where does an eCommerce helpdesk fit into all of this? You may be thinking that a helpdesk simply serves to help troubleshoot product or service related issues for customers. However, with tools to organize communications, enhance productivity, integrate marketplace order data, coordinate with team members and drastically improve response rates, an eCommerce helpdesk actually provides you with a powerful and direct method to increase customer satisfaction across-the-board — not to mention make your support team’s job infinitely easier!

It should come as no surprise that greater customer satisfaction and a positive customer experience leads to increased sales, more repeat business and more loyal customers — an eCommerce helpdesk can help you get there. Let’s take a look at the core features of eCommerce support software and how it can improve the customer service experience for both you and your customers.

Managing Messages With an eCommerce Helpdesk

A Multi-Channel Approach

According to HubSpot, “87% of customers expect a response to an email within one day” and 44% expect a reply in 4 hours or less. That might sound manageable at first, but as a multi-channel eCommerce seller, you’re receiving customer inquiries across different time zones from every marketplace you sell on, in addition to your incoming emails, social media and website messages. 

Take into consideration the specific information needs of each and every customer, as well as the various marketplaces and inboxes you will need to access in order to retrieve that data and respond in a timely fashion. It quickly becomes apparent that managing your multi-channel customer support while also meeting the rising demands for faster response times isn’t as easy as it first appeared. 

That’s where an eCommerce helpdesk enters the equation. By integrating with major eCommerce platforms and marketplaces, a helpdesk solution such as Replyco seamlessly integrates all of your customer and order data into one convenient and easily navigable inbox. This functionality alone saves huge amounts of time, as you no longer need to open several tabs and share passwords with support team members just to access a customer’s order information. Instead, when you receive a message, all relevant data such as customer ID, order number, product ID and shipping address is presented to you alongside the customer inquiry. 

Customized Email Templates & Tags

The utility of an eCommerce helpdesk goes far beyond the convenience factor. By analyzing your customers’ inquiries, you gain a pretty clear picture of what types of questions you receive the most. You can leverage this knowledge using pre-formatted templates to drastically reduce the amount of time it takes to respond to a message. This function eliminates the repetitive process of individually answering every message regarding common topics like delivery status, package tracking, returns, refund requests, address changes and exchanges. 

With templates, an eCommerce helpdesk like Replyco allows you to respond to these messages in just a few clicks. And by making the most of integrated marketplace data, tags will automatically insert all of the relevant information needed (customer name, delivery address, order number, etc.) for a personalized response every time. 

Auto-Responders

As response-time expectations are ever-increasing, auto-responders have become an essential tool for eCommerce businesses. Naturally, you cannot be in the office 24/7, and factors like time zone differences, holidays, and unexpected events necessitate a method for handling customer inquiries when you’re not around. Auto-responders are designed for just this purpose and are a key feature of eCommerce helpdesk software.

Ensure your customers don’t feel neglected by expressing your commitment to meeting their expectations, even when you’re not around to personally address their questions. After creating email templates, you can set up rules to trigger relevant auto-responses based on a number of factors, including keywords, date/time, marketplace and email address. Pairing thoughtful out-of-office messages with a user-friendly eCommerce helpdesk that features easy-to-use auto-response rule creation allows you to keep your customers top-of-mind, 24/7. 

Tools for Better Team Coordination & Performance

While an eCommerce helpdesk offers tremendous assistance for individual sellers overwhelmed by customer messages, it’s equally advantageous for customer support teams. As I touched on earlier, a helpdesk eliminates the need to share marketplace passwords to gain access to customer data, but teams will also enjoy a wide variety of other benefits.

Task Assignment 

Communication, coordination and collaboration are the foundations of a successful customer service team operation. An eCommerce helpdesk such as Replyco supports these foundations with easy user task assignment functionality. Assign responsibilities for your customer support agents by marketplace, customer, query type (returns, product questions etc.) or any parameter you see fit. 

Label & Prioritize 

Which customer tickets are of immediate importance? With features like SLA prioritization, and a labelling system to organize all customer messages into clearly identifiable categories, your support team can see exactly what needs to be taken care of and when. 

Internal Notes

An eCommerce helpdesk allows team members to collaborate better to resolve customer issues quickly and efficiently. The Replyco approach to team collaboration includes internal notes that allow users to leave comments on support tickets so that fellow team members are easily informed of previous dialogues and vital customer information. 

Monitoring Performance

eCommerce helpdesks often include reports that will help you assess the productivity of your team as well as the activity on your marketplaces to help you make informed decisions to optimize your business. Replyco does just this through data-driven visual reports on customer support team performance, top selling products, total revenue and more. 

Expanding Your Reach & Connecting to More Customers

Social Media Messaging

Connecting with your audience where they spend most of their time online is a key ingredient for growing your business and brand visibility. It’s no secret that more companies than ever before are taking to social media in order to build awareness and offer customer support. In fact, according to BigCommerce, one third of all social media users actually prefer social messaging for customer service over phone or email support.

But, remember how I mentioned that 87% of consumers expect a reply to their emails within 24 hours? When it comes to instant messaging, that timeframe gets considerably smaller. In fact, 60% of consumers actually expect answers to questions within 10 minutes. Yet, on Facebook, the average response time for customer inquiries takes over 24 hours. 

A good eCommerce helpdesk doesn’t just integrate with eCommerce marketplaces, but also seamlessly integrates with social media platforms. With our software, all of your Facebook and Telegram messages can be received and replied to directly within Replyco, and eventually Twitter and Instagram direct messages as well. 

Live Chat

Instant messaging capabilities shouldn’t be limited to just social media. Amid rising consumer expectations and increased competition, a study by Forrester reveals that 53% of customers are more likely to abandon their online purchase if they are unable to quickly find answers to their questions.

A live chat widget is yet another extraordinarily helpful component of an eCommerce helpdesk. 

Installing a live chat widget on your website allows customers to reach you instantly, which can actually translate to making more sales.  With Replyco, your Live Chat widget can be set up in minutes, installed anywhere on the web, and customized with different color schemes and auto-response messages. And as always, your live chat messages will be easily accessible from within the Replyco interface.

Conclusion

We hope that you now have a better understanding of what an eCommerce helpdesk actually does. Replyco was created with a keen awareness of the particular needs of eCommerce sellers. For online businesses, every single customer interaction represents a major opportunity to make a sale, improve brand reputation and differentiate oneself from the competition. 

The need to sell in more places than one has become essential for survival and growth in the eCommerce industry. With that need, we identified the most central challenge of managing customer communications while continuing to expand one’s eCommerce business. Replyco aims to rise to this challenge and continually grow to offer the best eCommerce helpdesk on the market. Sign up for a free trial to experience the Replyco difference.