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Shopify is one of the most widely used e-commerce solutions in the world, and has become the cornerstone of many online businesses. No matter what kind of business you’re in, keeping your customers happy and satisfied is a top priority — which is why you should always have a help desk solution for assisting customers with issues.
While Shopify does not itself provide a help desk solution, it does allow users to integrate third-party help desk applications. This means it’s on store owners to choose and manage their own help desk solution.
Companies that use help desk software see an improvement in response time by 42%, leading to higher customer satisfaction.
We’ll take a deep dive into why your online business needs a help desk, how to set one up and how you can make the most of the experience for both yourself and your customers.
Why Your Shopify Store Needs a Help Desk?
Do you really need a help desk solution for your online store? The answer is a big YES. As previously mentioned, customer satisfaction is key when it comes to your business — it impacts customer loyalty, brand reputation and nothing less than the long-term success of your business.
One of the best ways to keep your customers happy is to have a place where they can report difficulties, issues and suggestions and get their problems handled in a quick and organised manner. If customers find they can’t easily or quickly find a solution to their issues, they may decide to go with your competitors instead.
A dedicated help desk will not only help with these issues, but also centralize your support operations, so you can keep response times fast and let your support team prioritize effectively. There are some other features that can be useful to your business in different ways, too — we’ll get to those at the end.
Key Features of a Help Desk
Now let’s talk about some of the most important features of a help desk.
- A ticketing system. A help desk ticketing system allows customers to create “tickets” for their issues, which can then be prioritized, routed to the correct service personnel and updated or closed when the situation is resolved. This keeps customer queries from “slipping through the cracks.”
- Centralized communication. Ideally, your help desk should aggregate input from a variety of sources — email, live chat, social media and route it into the ticketing software interface. This is also known as “omnichannel support.”
- Self-service options. Features such as chatbots and knowledge bases allow customers to resolve some issues on their own, which reduces workload for your support team and brings resolution times down.
- Analytics and reporting. Having analytics lets you track performance, identify common problems, measure the effectiveness of your support processes, and more. Meaningful metrics can make all the difference in the success of your help desk.
How To Set up a Help Desk with Shopify: A Step-by-Step Guide
Step 1: Choose Your Software
When it comes to help desk platforms, you’ll have several options that integrate fully with Shopify — but Zendesk is one of the most popular choices, particularly for its ticketing, live chat, and analytics features. Plus, Zendesk’s integration with Spotify makes it a breeze to set up.
Step 2: Install via Shopify App Store
You might be relieved to learn that you don’t have to go through an arduous coding process to install your help desk software. Shopify makes it relatively simple and you can do it right from the app store. For purposes of this example, we’ll use Zendesk:
- Go to the Shopify App Store and search for “Zendesk.”
- Install the Zendesk app to your Shopify store. The app will walk you through the initial setup.
- Once the app is installed, sign in to your Zendesk account (or create a new one).
- Link your Shopify store and Zendesk account by following the prompts that come up. It’s just that easy!
Step 3: Configure Your Settings
Once you have the app successfully installed, you’ll have to do some basic configuration to optimize Zendesk. For example, you might want to set up ticket routing rules to assign inquiries or issues to specific team members; configure automatic responses for some of the most common queries, and/or personalize the Zendesk chat widget with your own brand livery, colors, and tone of voice.
Step 4: Conduct Testing
It goes without saying that testing any system before you go live with it is essential. Make sure to run your new help desk through some test scenarios, such as submitting a ticket, responding to a query, and trying out the self-service features. Make certain everything links up properly and appears as it should, and you’ll preemptively avoid any customer frustration.
Step 5: Train Your Team
The next thing to do before you go live is to make sure your support team understands how to use the software. They’ll need to know how to use the ticketing system, manage multiple support channels, and use the analytics feature to track performance. Help desk software is only as good as the people using it, so don’t skimp on the training portion!
Step 6: Review and Upgrade
While this step isn’t relevant right after you complete installation, it’s nonetheless important: make sure you periodically evaluate and update your help desk system to keep up with technology and customer expectations, as well as make improvements based on customer feedback and insights from your performance analytics. By staying ahead of the curve, you can ensure that small problems don’t turn into big ones.
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Should You Outsource Your Integration?
Most help desk software is designed to make it easy to set up and run yourself. But there are any number of reasons why you might not want to do that. Maybe you’re uncomfortable doing it yourself, or don’t have the time or resources to do so. In this case, you might consider using a company that specializes in Shopify website development, such as Rankvse. They can handle the setup and configuration of the help desk system for you, and even help design your store for the best possible user experience.
Other Benefits of a Help Desk for E-commerce
Now let’s talk briefly about some of the other ways a help desk can help your Shopify store:
First, by using customer analytics, you can collect and examine data from all your customer interactions and find things like common pain points, which products get the most support requests, how quickly issues get resolved, and other useful data. This can help you to not only identify trouble spots, but also to find out what works best for your support team.
This can even extend to your marketing efforts, as you can use customer feedback as a sales driver. Reviews and testimonials make terrific marketing tools, and can be added to your outgoing email marketing or social media campaigns. Constructive feedback can also help you improve your products and services themselves.
It’s also worth mentioning again that self-service features can be a win-win situation when it comes to your help desk. Younger customers in particular tend to be more savvy when it comes to solving problems themselves, and using a chatbot or knowledge base can not only solve the problem quickly, but also reduce workload for your support team.
In fact, a properly implemented help desk can improve agent productivity across the board. Ticket automation, routing and prioritization can reduce wasted time and help your team focus on the complex, high-priority issues.
Finally, it’s worth remembering all these elements combined will do a lot to help your customer retention. By keeping response times low, knowledge bases updated, and self-service options relevant and up-to-date, you’ll keep your customers happy — and keep them coming back to your business.
Tips for Making the Most of Your Helpdesk
So now that you have your help desk up and running, what can you do to ensure it keeps working for you? Here are a few tips:
- Update your knowledge base. If you have a self-service portal and a product or service that changes over time, make sure you update your knowledge base so your customers always have the latest and most relevant information. Otherwise, you may defeat the purpose of having a knowledge base at all.
- Track your response times. Customers love having their issues resolved in a timely fashion, and analytics can help you find ways to improve those numbers whenever possible.
- Encourage customer feedback. Implementing surveys, questionnaires, or feedback forms for customers can reveal insights into customer desires and opportunities to improve the customer experience.
- Think ahead. E-commerce trends can shift rapidly and without warning, so do your best to stay agile and keep ahead of the curve when it comes to customer demands, new technologies, and new channels.
While Shopify doesn’t yet offer a built-in help desk solution — and may not ever offer one — they’ve made it relatively easy to integrate third-party solutions into your Shopify ecommerce store. Whether you choose to set it up yourself or work with a third party to install and set it up, having a help desk is a critical part of your long-term business success.
