In case your ecommerce store’s assist setup is beginning to get unwieldy, it may be time to improve to a assist desk that integrates with Shopify. A assist desk brings your whole communications — e-mail, social, chat, telephone, and many others. — right into a central location, whereas an integration with Shopify ensures you will have the data you want in regards to the clients who’re writing in for assist.
We’ve put collectively this listing of 5 Shopify customer support apps that will help you discover the suitable one to your wants. Learn our detailed critiques under to be taught which use circumstances every app is greatest fitted to, what distinctive options they provide, and the way every works alongside your Shopify retailer.
1. Assist Scout – Greatest for affordability and ease of use
Assist Scout is a straightforward to make use of and reasonably priced assist desk that means that you can handle your whole buyer conversations throughout e-mail, reside chat, and social (Fb Messenger and Instagram) in a single place. It is constructed for SaaS and ecommerce groups, has a robust Shopify integration, and provides tons of options that assist your workforce ship higher, sooner assist.
Shopify integration
Assist Scout’s Shopify integration offers you all the things it’s worthwhile to assist your clients proper within the dialog sidebar. The mixing shows particulars like the patron’s order particulars, success standing, and monitoring quantity. Moreover, you’ll be able to course of refunds and cancellations, duplicate and edit orders, and evaluation order historical past with out ever leaving Assist Scout.
Shared inbox
Assist Scout’s inbox homes your whole e-mail and reside chat requests. Your workforce can handle these requests utilizing a number of options that make it straightforward to trace, resolve, and collaborate on something that comes your approach:
Dialog assignments: Assign incoming buyer messages to assist reps or particular groups to offer accountability and transparency.
Saved replies: Standardize solutions to widespread buyer questions by creating templated responses that may be added to any reply in simply a few clicks.
Inside notes: Present context or drop vital data right into a dialog with notes which can be solely seen to your workforce.
Tags and customized fields: Preserve observe of various kinds of conversations (e.g., billing, stock, returns, and many others.) by organizing them with tags and customized fields.
Views: Concentrate on particular emails utilizing inbox views. Phase conversations based mostly on standards like channel, assignee, date created, or tags.
Workflows: Enhance productiveness by automating easy duties like routing emails to a selected division, sending auto-replies, or including tags.
Data base
Having a assist middle with simply accessible solutions to questions on matters like returns, exchanges, and refunds permits clients to self-serve, decreasing the quantity of e-mail or chats in your queue.
Assist Scout’s data base device is known as Docs, and with it you’ll be able to simply arrange a assist middle the place you’ll be able to publish return insurance policies, solutions to FAQs, and the rest that you just suppose is vital to your clients to know. As soon as your content material is reside, your assist workforce also can add hyperlinks to useful articles into any assist dialog with a few clicks.
Proactive messaging and microsurveys
Whereas many assist desk options deal with methods to resolve buyer points as soon as the issue has already occurred, the most effective buyer expertise really comes from being proactive.
Beacon, Assist Scout’s embeddable widget, could be personalized and put in on any web site (together with your Shopify website). Beacon can be utilized to advocate articles out of your Docs website, let clients ship an e-mail to your assist workforce, and permit people to succeed in out through reside chat.
Moreover, Beacon can be utilized to proactively have interaction along with your clients. You are able to do issues like:
Advocate a assist middle article that is associated to the web page a customer is viewing.
Announce gross sales or particular occasions utilizing a banner or modal message.
Ask for suggestions or ship an NPS survey to learn how clients really feel about your model.
Proactive messaging and microsurveys may help you ship personalised experiences, enhance your store’s merchandise and repair, and assist shut the suggestions loop so that you could higher perceive the wants of your clients.
AI options
You can even use Beacon to offer web site guests and clients with immediate, conversational solutions to their questions.
Assist Scout’s AI chatbot, AI Solutions, makes use of data out of your data base and web site to reply incoming questions instantly with none intervention out of your assist workforce. The solutions use your model’s personal voice and solely collect information from sources you have offered, and so they’re notably useful in auto-resolving these FAQs that bathroom down your queue.
Different AI options you may discover in Assist Scout that can save your workforce tons of time embody:
AI Summarize: Flip lengthy, back-and-forth conversations into bulleted summaries to assist workforce members rise up to hurry shortly.
AI Help: Examine your spelling and grammar, increase your textual content’s size or tone, or translate your replies into different languages.
AI Drafts: Create draft replies with a click on of a button. AI Drafts create responses based mostly on historic replies your workforce has despatched and the data in your Docs website or in your web site. Create a draft, shortly evaluation, and hit ship.
Reporting
Assist Scout’s studies allow you to monitor dialog and channel quantity, time to decision, trending points, data base stats, agent efficiency, and different worthwhile assist metrics. You can even create your personal dashboards and filtering information based mostly in your account’s tags and customized fields, and you may acquire and hold observe of buyer suggestions.
Free plan
Should you’re working a small ecommerce store and are not but incomes sufficient revenue to put money into assist desk software program, you should use Assist Scout’s free plan to get entry to quite a lot of the options above at no cost. On the free plan, you’ll be able to add as much as 5 customers, ship e-mail assist, construct a data base, create tags and saved replies, and combine with Shopify for free of charge.
Pricing
Free plan and trial out there. View Assist Scout’s present pricing.
Study extra about Assist Scout:
2. Shopify Inbox – Greatest for solopreneurs
Shopify Inbox is the ecommerce platform’s built-in assist device. It’s out there throughout all plan tiers and is a superb beginning place for smaller outlets or solopreneurs.
Electronic mail and chat assist
Shopify Inbox permits you to add a chat widget to your storefront, making assist extra accessible to your clients. Folks can attain out through reside chat, or in case you or your workforce members are unavailable, they will ship an e-mail by the identical widget.
You may handle each chat and e-mail from a shared inbox that has options like chat assignments, fast replies for quick solutions, dialog tagging, and the power to seamlessly add issues like low cost codes or product suggestions to your responses.
Self-service options
Arrange immediate solutions to be displayed in your widget to offer fast solutions to a few of your store’s commonest questions. You may even arrange an order monitoring immediate reply that clients can click on to get a right away replace on the standing of their order.
Shopify Magic, the corporate’s AI device suite, also can counsel replies to questions — which you’ll be able to evaluation and edit earlier than sending — based mostly in your retailer’s insurance policies and dialog historical past. Shopify Magic also can use AI to mechanically reply to reside chat conversations so your workforce would not need to become involved in any respect.
Pricing
Free for Shopify clients.
3. Gorgias – Greatest for rising gross sales
Gorgias is a assist desk that’s constructed particularly for ecommerce corporations. It has all the options it’s worthwhile to deal with buyer communications: a shared inbox, omnichannel assist, collaboration and organizational instruments, workflow automations, a data base builder, and reporting capabilities.
Shopify integration
Gorgias has a deep integration with Shopify, permitting you to view order historical past and buyer information proper from the client’s ticket. You can even handle (create, edit, duplicate, cancel) orders, create reductions, and share product suggestions with out ever having to modify tabs.
Whereas the performance above could be discovered throughout all the instruments on our listing, Gorgias goes additional by permitting you to mechanically add order information — delivery addresses, order numbers, and many others. — into macros and auto-responders, offering personalised assist and saving brokers the time wanted to customise every message.
Help automation
Gorgias comes with two varieties of AI brokers: a assist agent and a purchasing assistant (which we’ll cowl within the subsequent part).
The assist agent can reply to clients’ questions mechanically. When a request is acquired, the assist agent identifies the intent and sentiment of the question, determines if it has the data and permissions to assist, after which both mechanically sends a reply or escalates it to your assist workforce to deal with manually.
For these wanting a bit extra management, Gorgias additionally has a device referred to as Flows, which can be utilized to design rule-based self-service experiences. Use Flows for issues like order or monitoring updates, returns, and different routine duties.
Gross sales automation
Gorgias’ purchasing assistant is designed to extend your store’s gross sales by proactively partaking with website guests. It could:
Reply questions buyers have about your merchandise.
Supply personalised product suggestions.
Advocate associated merchandise to extend cart values.
Present buyers with low cost codes when it deems doing so would enhance the probability of the patron making a purchase order.
Pricing
Free trial out there. View Gorgias’ present pricing.
DelightChat is a customer support app that makes a speciality of reside chat, however you may also use it to handle e-mail and social channels from its workspace and create a data base for FAQs. You can even create templated quick replies, arrange auto-responders, and design automations to care for busy work.
Shopify integration
The Shopify integration with DelightChat is stable, permitting brokers to view buyer and order particulars. You may edit, view, duplicate, or cancel orders and share monitoring data. Moreover, when clients write in asking about merchandise, you’ll be able to change to DelightChat’s purchasing tab to browse your product catalog and ship clients detailed data and checkout hyperlinks.
Meta apps integrations
Probably the most notable factor about DelightChat is that its Fb, Instagram, and WhatsApp integrations are actually robust. It’s pretty widespread for assist desks to assist social channels, but it surely’s often only for personal messaging. With DelightChat, you’ll be able to reply to Fb Messenger and Instagram DMs and reply to and reasonable submit feedback.
If your organization is lively on WhatsApp, you’ll be able to handle assist requests by the channel — each with reside brokers or rules-based chatbots. There are additionally a number of WhatsApp advertising and marketing options. You may ship deserted cart reminders and order-related notifications, broadcast messages to your contact lists, handle opt-outs, and acquire product critiques.
Pricing
Free trial out there. View DelightChat’s present pricing.
Zendesk is the market chief in customer support platforms. It helps each channel you may want — e-mail, chat, social, voice, and textual content messaging — all from a centralized agent workspace. Its options are strong and embody highly effective performance resembling AI add-ons that may resolve buyer points, construct workers schedules, and QA all responses your workforce sends.
It is a improbable selection in case you’re a bigger ecommerce operation that has actually particular wants that an out-of-the-box resolution simply can’t meet. With the assistance of a Zendesk associate (or an in-house workforce), you’ll be able to craft precisely the suitable buyer (and agent) expertise throughout any channel.
Integrations, together with Shopify
Zendesk has a market of practically 2,000 apps that may enable you simply join your online business’s total tech stack to the platform. As well as, Suite Skilled and Suite Enterprise plan customers can construct their very own customized apps if they will’t discover what they want within the market.
The Zendesk Shopify app is a part of {the marketplace}, and very similar to the integrations seen with the opposite instruments on this listing, it permits store house owners to simply add chat to their Shopify retailer in addition to view buyer and order particulars and handle orders with out leaving Zendesk.
Neighborhood boards
One Zendesk characteristic you received’t discover within the different instruments on this listing is the power to create neighborhood boards. Making a neighborhood to your clients could possibly be an attention-grabbing transfer, particularly in case you’re promoting tech merchandise.
Ecommerce corporations sometimes depend on social media for neighborhood constructing, however troubleshooting — a process that’s fairly widespread when promoting electronics — inside Fb or Instagram feedback can get messy. A neighborhood discussion board could be a good spot to determine model advocates and for purchasers to crowdsource ideas, self-serve, and join with different customers.
Zendesk’s discussion board characteristic has moderation capabilities to make sure conversations keep productive and spam-free, and it additionally makes it straightforward to your neighborhood moderators to transition conversations to a assist ticket if one-on-one assist is required out of your assist workforce.
Pricing
Free trial out there. View Zendesk’s present pricing.
Choosing the proper Shopify customer support app to your retailer
Whether or not you are deciding between the apps we advocate or some others you’ve found by yourself, you may have to do some extra analysis and decision-making to seek out the proper assist desk to your Shopify retailer. Switching apps down the road requires quite a lot of effort, so spend additional time upfront to be sure to’re signing up for the one which greatest meets your wants.
Listed below are some recommendations on methods to slim down your choices and discover the most effective Shopify customer support app to your on-line retailer.
Be certain that it has the options you want
The beauty of a assist desk is that it consolidates all the instruments it’s worthwhile to ship assist right into a single platform. In fact, that solely works if the assistance desk you select provides all the options you want.
Begin your analysis by creating an inventory of must-have and nice-to-have options, then evaluation the instruments you are contemplating, and take any off your listing that do not have your whole must-haves.
Key options to search for in a Shopify customer support app embody:
A Shopify integration: Having the ability to course of refunds and cancellations, duplicate and edit orders, and evaluation order histories with out leaving your assist desk saves your workforce quite a lot of time, and having buyer and order particulars displayed alongside requests permits them to ship extra personalised assist.
A approach to handle assist on the channels you employ: Some platforms are e-mail or chat solely; others allow you to ship assist throughout e-mail, chat, telephone, social, and SMS. Some solely combine with Fb Messenger; others combine with all social platforms. Discover one which covers all the channels your clients use to contact your workforce.
Self-service options: Ecommerce assist groups obtain quite a lot of repetitive requests. A data base with solutions to these FAQs lets clients discover what they want on their very own, and an AI assist chatbot can reply clients’ questions for you and, in some circumstances, present order standing updates mechanically.
Automation: Whether or not it is one thing so simple as mechanically sending replies to clients to allow them to know their requests are acquired or as complicated as an AI copilot that interprets requests into totally different languages and writes draft replies for you, automation helps your workforce transfer extra shortly and retains your clients within the loop.
Studies: As your organization grows, so will your want for detailed analytics in your assist volumes, buyer satisfaction, and workforce efficiency. Studies are essential for scheduling your workforce correctly, figuring out when it is time to rent, figuring out points which can be negatively impacting buyer satisfaction, and rather more.
Get the actual scoop from the app’s present clients
A assist desk’s web site will solely let you know the data the supplier desires you to listen to. If you need much less curated details about how every platform works, you may need to hear from its present clients. You may examine with others in your community to see if anybody makes use of the assistance desks you are contemplating, or you’ll be able to learn buyer critiques of the platforms.
For Shopify shops, we advocate testing the critiques on the Shopify app retailer. Because it’s solely for apps that combine with Shopify, you may get much more particular data on how every app’s integration works than you’ll from extra common evaluation websites like G2 and Capterra.
Think about pricing
Like most companies, you most likely do not have an infinite finances to spend on assist software program, so the following step is to dive deep into the pricing for the apps that made it by the 2 steps above and are nonetheless in your listing.
Spend additional time right here trying on the extra detailed pricing comparability tables on every app’s web site to be sure to’re getting the options you want on the value you anticipate to pay. The shortened variations of pricing you see on the prime of the web page can typically make it sound such as you’ll be getting greater than you really will, so ensure to learn the effective print.
In case you have an extended listing of apps to think about, you’ll be able to slim it down additional by returning to your listing of nice-to-have options. Eradicate some choices by narrowing your listing down to those who have the most important variety of your nice-to-have options for the value you’ll be able to afford to pay.
Check drive your ultimate contenders
With an inventory of apps which have your whole must-have options and can be found for a value you’ll be able to afford, it is best to have a brief listing of instruments to check drive.
Begin a free trial of the ultimate contenders in your listing, herald just a few teammates that will help you take a look at, and use the instruments such as you would day-to-day when offering assist for every week or two to ensure they’re straightforward to make use of and do all the things you want them to do.
You may additionally need to take into account reaching out to the assist groups of the instruments you are contemplating (if that does not simply occur naturally) to get a way of the assist you may obtain whenever you need assistance. If all different issues are equal (pricing, options, and many others.), with the ability to get fast and environment friendly assist whenever you run into points could be your tiebreaker.
By the tip of this train, it is best to have a superb sense of which app is your best option to your workforce, however in case you want extra assist making a choice, you’ll be able to take a look at our Purchaser’s Information to Selecting the Proper Buyer Help Instrument.
