eCommerce Help Desk: What Is It and Do You Need One?

Delivering excellent customer service as your business expands can seem like a daunting task. There are more communication channels between you and your customers today than ever before, and today’s customers demand a quick response. 

As customer experience standards become higher, you can’t afford to miss a step. Failing to respond on time or dropping a ticket can mean losing a sale. 

How can a fast-moving, rapidly growing company make sense of it all? That’s where an eCommerce help desk can be your secret weapon for delivering excellent eCommerce customer service and making it all look seamless. 

An eCommerce help desk can not only help you optimize your approach to customer support but can help you uplevel your overall customer experience, both key factors in helping your business scale. 

Generally speaking, a customer support help desk takes customer details such as queries, order numbers, and contact information and coordinates them all centrally in one platform. More specifically, an eCommerce help desk can help your business centralize the following:

• Customer messages from marketplaces like Amazon and eBay
• Customer messages from social media, such as Twitter and Instagram
• Emails from your online store
• Feedback and review requests
• Live chat transcripts
• Ticketing system for customer queries

It will integrate all the above customer and order data into one inbox. Important and relevant information such as customer ID, order number, product ID, and shipping address is displayed all in one place, along with the customer inquiry. 

This not only saves time but means that customer service teams have access to each customer’s relevant information all in one place so that they can respond to customer inquiries more efficiently. 

Essentially an eCommerce help desk provides your customer service reps with everything they need to do their job effectively.

Multiple Channels: One Help Desk to Unite Them All 

Today’s eCommerce sellers are operating within an incredibly dynamic landscape. Selling across multiple online platforms and channels is now the norm. This means that many sellers are navigating several marketplaces simultaneously, along with direct web sales in addition to sales through social media. 

All of this is a lot to keep track of and can overwhelm even the most organized and dedicated customer service team. When customer queries come from many channels and sources, you run the risk of dropping the ball somewhere if you don’t have a centralized system to deal with them all in one place. 

That’s why having an eCommerce help desk solution is one of the most important investments you can make as an eCommerce seller. It brings everything together in one streamlined, easy-to-use platform. 

Because it simplifies and streamlines information, an eCommerce help desk will not only make it easier for your team to manage customer queries but will also make response times faster and easier to track, meaning your response rate can go up, which is key to providing good customer service. 

Features of an Ecommerce Help Desk

Customer experience is one of the most important parts of a modern business. Research has found that over half of all companies surveyed in 2021 stated that customer experience is their top priority for business for the next five years.

As mentioned, one of the key uses of an eCommerce help desk is its ability to bring everything together in one easy-to-view space. This offers many benefits to your overall customer service proposition. 

Let’s dig into some of the features that eCommerce help desk solutions can offer to improve your company’s customer experience. 

● A library of saved replies makes answering common customer questions easier and quicker, so you’re not repeatedly typing out the same answer. 

● Similarly, templates allow you to create automated responses for your most common queries, so you can respond to them quickly and minimize repetition.

● Automatic reminders and notifications ensure you never miss or drop another query.

● Workflow automation software can help automate repetitive tasks and create a better working pattern for your customer service team. 

● Logs show which customer service representative has handled which customer interaction, so you have a chain of continuity in your replies.

● Tags can personalize messages by automatically populating customer details, such as name and order details, so your customer always feels that each message is tailored to their needs. 

These are just a sample of some of the features that an eCommerce help desk offers, which can transform your business from struggling with customer experience consistency to getting it right every time. 

Additional Read: Turbocharge Your Business with Amazon FBA Automation.

Help Desk Data Can Help Your Business

Streamlining and organization are often the key reasons an eCommerce business brings on board a help desk solution. Yet, it’s important not to lose sight of another great benefit that the help desk offers beyond customer support, and that is data and analytics. 

The data reporting offered by most help desk platforms can help you with your entire approach to customer support. For example, you can use your help desk to create reports showing your busiest times and days of the week, average reply times, and customer service feedback ratings. 

Armed with this information, you can make informed decisions about how to structure your customer support program. Perhaps you realize you need to hire more support during peak seasons, days, or even by the time of day. Or maybe you notice that reply times lag behind the standard 6-hour response time that research has shown 40% of customers expect. If this is the case, then you can adjust processes to ensure you improve your response times. 

Looking at your data as a whole can help you make the little tweaks that all add up to providing a comprehensive, top-notch customer experience support experience. 

How an eCommerce Help Desk Can Help your Business Scale

Many small e-commerce business companies start by trying to manage their various customer channels independently. While never easy, this can only work to a certain point. Once a business begins to gain momentum and grow, most business owners simply find it unsustainable to function in this way. 

That’s where bringing on an eCommerce help desk is valuable. Not only will it help you organize customer support and provide helpful analytics, as mentioned above, it’ll also help your company scale faster and more efficiently by delivering processes that can handle large volumes of customers. 

Learn more about eCommerce Analytics Software here.

Final Thoughts 

The decision to bring on an eCommerce help desk is an important decision, one that has the power to transform your entire business. With the right help desk solution, your eCommerce business may well find itself nailing customer experience, opening the door to new and repeat business as a result.  

If your company is growing, and you’re ready to take that growth to the next level, investing in an eCommerce help desk solution like eDesk could be one of the best decisions you’ll make. Try eDesk free for 14 days, no credit card needed.

Additional read:

Everything you need to know about eCommerce Demand Forecasting.

SellerApp Recognized to Deliver Great User Experience for eCommerce Software

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