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You might never understand what a customer support agent goes through if you’ve never had a chance to experience it for yourself. However, if customer service is something you deal with daily, there’s no need to tell you how time and energy-consuming it can actually be. But that’s not the only point.
Good customer service is one of the key factors of excellent customer experience and might cause some serious damage if gone wrong, especially in e-commerce. It also plays an important role in customer satisfaction and retention. Customer service influences how shoppers perceive your brand, which can either make or break your business.
Customer service apps for Shopify help online store owners handle all communications efficiently and are an inseparable part of any customer support team. If it's something you've been considering for a while or just looking for a switch from your old provider, we've picked the 5 best customer service apps based on ratings, reviews, and our own expertise to help you make a more informed decision.
1. HelpCenter
HelpCenter is an intuitive, user-friendly customer service app aimed at lightening the burden for customer support agents, thus enabling customers to receive fast and attentive support.
It helps customer support teams to shift the attention from mechanically answering tons of emails all day to actually creating some value to the customer. What’s truly great about HelpCenter is that it combines several essential customer service solutions in one app.
FAQ builder
Customers always have questions, and some of them often fall under the same category. HelpCenter comes with an FAQ builder that you can use to create a comprehensive, easy-to-navigate FAQ page in around 10 minutes to prevent recurring inquiries, thus saving time.
HelpDesk ticketing system
Using a help desk ticketing system, you can manage all requests from emails, live chat, and Facebook messenger in a single location, meaning that switching back and forth between different channels becomes a thing of the past.
You can add as many agents and inboxes as you need, see customer purchase and communication history, use internal tools for work efficiency, which will pave the way to better customer support.
Live chat
HelpCenter's live chat can help to keep businesses closer to their customers, no matter when they decide to get in touch. You can either use it to communicate with visitors in real-time or set an auto-response for out of office hours, leaving them a contact form that they can fill to be contacted later.
Product description tabs
With tabs, you can easily organize your product descriptions into different sections and provide visitors with the most important information without harming user experience.
HelpCenter pricing
Free; paid plans start from $8.00 (annual subscription, billed at $80.00/year).
2. Gorgias
Gorgias is one of the most popular customer service platforms aimed at making the whole process more efficient for customer support teams while also boosting customer satisfaction.
By automating most of the interactions and some specific tasks, it still allows businesses to “sound human” when communicating with their customers but without the need to put so much time and effort into it.
Integrations
As a Shopify store owner, one of the first things you might probably want to do is to connect your store with the platform.
This can be done with Gorgias integrations, which is something that should definitely be mentioned – the app allows over 20 of them, also including email, Facebook Messenger, Instagram, Slack, Amazon, etc.
Rules and automation
Rules feature provides automated or semi-automated options for specific actions, such as tagging, closing notifications, notifying agents, or responding to customers.
Gorgias makes customer support process easier by notifying agents of assigned tickets, automatically sending customers to order status pages, sending auto-responses, or tagging urgent edits.
Tags
Talking about tags, there are many already premade ones that might help to navigate through inquiries and keep track of the topics customers are contacting you about (e.g. billing and payments issues, orders/shipping status, refunds, returns, etc.).
You can also add a new tag that is unique for your business – and that's actually a really nice feature that would be appreciated not only by those who simply enjoy organization.
Gorgias pricing
From $10 to $900 per month on annuals plans. Custom pricing available.
3. Richpanel Customer Service CRM
Richpanel's Customer Service CRM can collect the data from multiple channels and resources (e.g. sales, marketing, and CRM's) to keep it all accessible from one place, help to manage tons of information, and allow fast communication.
Richpanel also focuses on the same approach of providing an agent with all the necessary information to improve every possible interaction with a customer, for both sides.
Self-service portal
Richpanel’s self-service portal is kind of a live chat but with the possibility to see orders, request edits, track packages, and browse frequently asked questions.
With the self-service portal, you can create scenarios that allow customers to find answers to their own questions without the need for reaching out to the customer support team, thus reducing the number of inquiries.
Help desk and live chat
Help desk unifies all the channels, such as email, live chat, Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, and allows agents to access all messages in one place.
Meanwhile, Richpanel’s intelligent live chat basically plays the role of a separate agent. It can act as a guide to customers’ favorite products, help to recover abandoned carts, allow using task bots, and, once again, is able to “keep” a personalized conversation and even distinguish customers from visitors.
Richpanel pricing
Free; paid plans start from $200/month (annual subscription).
4. Re:amaze
Re:amaze is another help desk ticketing system and communication tool that comes with the most important features for an app of such kind, and actually leaves a pretty good impression.
It's known for its robust integration possibilities, advanced live chat software, built-in FAQ generator, and serving the primary goal of any help desk ticketing – unified experience, no matter the channel.
Intuitive FAQ page
Re:amaze offers an easy-to-use FAQ building platform which gives a full control not only of the content of the FAQ page but also of how it's going to be displayed. Besides, its search bar can find the necessary results using root words, not to mention basic keywords.
Chat widget
Re:amaze’s chat widget provides information about the average response time and comes with social media icons. It’s something that might seem small and is not provided within the live chats from other Shopify support apps yet might result in higher conversion rates, for instance, so definitely something to keep in mind.
Live chat
One of the functionalities Re:amaze’s live chat offers is automated messaging that helps to engage customers using rules and predefined conditions that can be triggered by different criteria (e.g. time on the store, Shopify parameters, items in cart, etc.).
Chatbots can also answer order-related questions and address the most common issues.
Integrated order tracking
Re:amaze comes with an order status box to ease the burden of “Where is my order?" inquiries. Every time a customer wonders about their order status, s/he can simply enter an email address and order number to get this information without even contacting a customer support agent.
Re:amaze pricing
From $29/month (+ an extra $29 per additional staff user) to $899/month.
5. Kustomer
Just by the name of it, you can clearly see what this Shopify app is aimed at. Kustomer is an omnichannel customer service platform that helps to overcome daily challenges of customer support by keeping the process well-organized.
Put simply, Kustomer provides you with internal tools for quality service and enables you to interact with your store visitors using the channel they’re most comfortable with.
So if anyone decides to contact you via live chat, on social media, using email, SMS, or all at once, this platform will help to keep everything under control.
Unified agent dashboards
Kustomer automatically collects all customer data and displays it as one single view, making the most important information easily accessible at all times.
Kustomer supports many different channels, including email, live chat, SMS, Facebook messenger, Twitter, WhatsApp, and voice. Therefore, it eliminates the need of managing them all separately, thus improving the speed of customer support and making it more convenient for both agents and visitors.
Artificial intelligence (AI)
Kustomer’s AI isn’t meant to replace human support – it was developed to help streamline the processes for support agents and boost the experience for customers.
Some of the features worth mentioning in this area are:
- Routing conversations to the most appropriate agents
- End-to-end resolutions across chat, social, messaging apps
- Prioritizing unsatisfied customers
- Auto responses and tags triggered by Shopify data
Performance tracking
For even better results, Kustomer allows you to measure the team’s effectiveness in real-time, across channels, by tracking activity and capacity. Analyzing the reports, you can identify what works and what doesn’t, therefore, start working on improvements if needed.
Kustomer pricing
Free to install, yet plans start from $89/month. Platform’s capabilities can be also extended with extra add-ons.
Conclusion
Choosing the right tool for your business requires a lot of comprehensive research so being confused over all the possibilities sounds totally normal. Hopefully, this list of the highest-rated customer support apps for Shopify will help to make the right decision and nudge you in the right direction towards choosing the option that meets your business and customers’ needs, resulting in a seamless customer experience and overall business growth.
