Let’s face it. Customer service for eCommerce businesses is a lot expensive and puzzling. It plays a very important role in the success of the ecommerce business. The number of inquiries and its varied nature make it even more challenging to streamline or standardize a process. A poor customer service response time or unsatisfactory solution is more likely to turn your competitors off your brand. There’s a lot at stake.
The smallest of the customer inconveniences can work against your ecommerce business. Besides, nowadays, customers expect personalized treatment when they contact support. And they are more likely to take customer support interactions personally, just like they would if buying from a street shop. So, how can you (as an ecommerce brand) come on top and make sure your customers are well taken care of? Here are a few ideas:
- Try preventing customer service inquiries before they even occur.
- Make multiple channels available to your customers.
- Do not let even a single issue on social media go unnoticed.
- Treat customers like the most important entity (which they are) of your business.
The natural next question would be: How?! How can you do all this? How can you streamline support in such a way that benefits your customers, business, and support team altogether? Helpdesks are the end-all-be-all of your support problems! An ecommerce ticketing system or an ecommerce helpdesk can empower your venture in multiple ways. In this blog, we’ll take a closer look at the reasons ecommerce businesses need a ticketing system. But, before that, let me introduce the ecommerce help desk ticketing system.
ECommerce Ticketing System
An ecommerce ticketing system is a customer service software intended to improve the experience for both customers and support representatives by centralizing everything in a single location. Ecommerce businesses face issues like longer response times, missed queries, misplaced customer data, and maintaining support requests at high volumes.
An Ecommerce helpdesk can change this drastically. It can help you scale your business while keeping up with the same level of personalized relationships with your customers. Let’s find out how.
4 Reasons Why Your E-Commerce Business Needs A Help Desk Ticketing System
An Ecommerce ticketing system can help you:
- Manage queries from multiple channels
- Streamline queries through a single dedicated inbox
- Save support costs and resources
- Monitor and organize all queries from a single place
- Serve personalized experience
- Align service requests with customer expectations
Let’s look at some important reasons in detail.
1. Helpdesks Eases Personalization
Customers value personalization, and they see it as an indicator of how much the brand values them. Personalized service experiences skyrocket your brand’s reputation. 80% of customers admit that companies that offer such experiences are more likely to win their attention. And, personalizing customer support requests manually without a helpdesk ticketing system is as painful and impractical as it sounds. It is nearly impossible.
Helpdesks come equipped with different functionalities that make it easier to organize and filter customers’ requests. This can be:
- Supporting customers through multiple channels
- The possibility to address a customer by their first name
- Access to previous communication and purchase data.
- Custom templates
- Automatic responses through auto-responders
- Agent’s personalized signatures
- Customized categories, etc.
All these factors, in one way or another, help build a personal relationship with the customer and ease their issues. This, when combined with a prompt communication experience, becomes like a cherry on top of the cake.
2. Helpdesks Improve Team Collaboration
Transparency brings a huge (and positive) impact on the customer experience. If things are sorted at the support end, then they’re more likely to get sorted at the customer’s end too. Not to brag, but helpdesk software provides customer support reps with everything they need to keep the support standards high.
3. Adapt an Omnichannel Support
How many support channels do you use? You’d be using email definitely, right? How about social media? Do you have chatbots? What else?
Every ecommerce business provides multichannel and omnichannel support. Since different channels have different interfaces, passwords, tools, archives, etc., they tend to get isolated from the rest of the business. Siloing each channel like this can cause major problems like:
- Inconsistent support across different channels
- Difficult to prioritize requests
- Increases system loopholes
- Trouble collecting and analyzing customer data
- Longer training times for employees
- Slow responses as agents switch from one interface to another.
An omnichannel helpdesk will help you put everything in one place. It eliminates all the issues mentioned above. It’ll give you the autonomy of handling everything from a single place.
4. Data Consolidation
Collecting support data can feel like chasing marbles down the hill. Each time you pick one up, others roll away as more requests come bowling in. You can keep using a spreadsheet until a time. But as your queries increase, this manual system becomes unsustainable. If you’re dealing with multiple channels, it gets even worse as queries might bounce down side roads and skitter into the bushes.
Here are some signs you’re chasing too many marbles:
- You’re not able to locate specific queries and have to ask your customers the same details again and again.
- Team members keep asking each other for details they can’t find on their own.
- Large-scale problems go unrecognized, and patterns go unidentified.
You might not face trouble while providing support from one email. But, if you have messages coming from all channels in a dozen systems, you’ll be rolling down that hill like Princess Buttercup.
An ecommerce ticketing system puts all your marbles in a leveled box so they can’t roll away from you. With all aspects of your customer service in one place, things tend to get sorted themselves. Most helpdesks will even sort your data points with deep search options. They make it easy to find every little detail pertaining to anything and everything you need.
I’d suggest doing whatever it takes to avoid losing your marbles.
Time-Saving Features of eCommerce Ticketing System
Here are some important features to look for in an eCommerce ticketing system that will make your support efficient. Depending on what software you pick, the features vary from ticket tracking, shared inbox, messaging within the thread, custom signatures, and omnichannel interface to automation. You can also track the individual progress of each customer support agent.
I. Collaborative Inbox
One of the crucial features of any ticketing system is the one that allows you to see the progress of the whole team. This means agents assigned to different tickets can see who’s working on what.
II. Ticket Automation
Many tasks are repetitive and act as time-theft. This brings down the overall efficiency of the support teams. This also delays the resolution journey of your customers. Helpdesks can automate many such repetitive tasks. This way, support reps can focus on important and unique queries that need attention.
III. Ticket Tags
Ticket tags are necessary for keeping everything organized. They can help your team spot common issues that customers deal with every day.
IV. Customizable Templates
Customizable templates make the resolution process faster. Multiple customers always face common queries, so you can prepare answers in advance by creating a template.
V. Internal Comments (Comments within the thread)
Internal comments or notes can provide specific information about each inquiry. The more customer support agents know about the customers, the better they’ll be able to address their issues.
VI. Advanced Search
Search fields improve the navigation through tickets and boost overall efficiency.
VII. Dashboard
Dashboards are an incredibly useful resource for retailers. It helps you access a host of reports specifically designed to give valuable insights. The dashboard is a central hub for every piece of information, from customer data to daily reports. It even shows a detailed breakdown of support, with a heatmap to demonstrate your peak times and most popular issues.
Final Thoughts
When it comes to ecommerce, customer support is at the forefront of the shopping experience. It is one of the most important factors that make a business stand out from its competitors. In order to meet these increasing customer expectations, businesses should implement reliable solutions.
Meet your customers with fast, reliable, and attentive support. An eCommerce ticketing system is a priceless tool when it comes to managing customer support requests. Not only does it help customer support agents browse through tickets faster, but it also provides customers with a better overall experience. It is also a great way to keep up with the rising expectations. Meet your customers with fast, reliable, and attentive support.
DeskXpand is an ecommerce ticketing system that allows you to implement all the ticket handling best practices mentioned above. The great thing about DesKXpand is that it is flexible, not prescriptive. It gives e-commerce organizations full power to determine what works best for their businesses. So, are you ready to meet the demands of today’s digitally-driven world? Take your customer support to the next level with DeskXpand.
