Turn Customer Reviews into Conversations with Zendesk

Sometimes your customers just need a little help

Customer service has never been a more important part of running a successful business. When it comes to asking questions, everyone has a personal preference: would you rather make a call, send an email or chat online? The most successful businesses are prepared with multi-channel customer support, providing a variety of methods to suit every customer.

Maximise conversions

Customer support services are having a strong effect on conversion rates too, which makes sense if a customer is seeking answers about certain product details, shipping times and return policies. Providing customers with the answers they need only further fuels the desire to complete a transaction. Now more than ever, customers value exceptional customer service and appreciate an easy and direct communication channel to enable a dialogue.

We’ve seen an increase in communication channels too

If a customer wants to get in touch with you, they’ll turn to live chat, social media platforms and customer support emails to get in touch. Primarily, these channels aim to improve the communication line between consumer and business, but there are other benefits to having these channels.

Businesses are increasingly using live chat widgets to welcome customers or hype up promotions when customers land on their site. Support assistants have a small window to convert potential customers who are interested in a product, and more and more customers want to be connected in real time. In fact, research demonstrates that consumers are up to three times more likely to commit to a purchase if they have received chat support in real time. Live chat options allow you to communicate directly with leads and act as a finishing touch. For more information on setting up live chat for your ecommerce store, click here.

If only we could curate all that information in one place...

Whilst organisations take pride in the flexibility of their customer service teams, ecommerce vendors should also be aware of the time this is costing their business. Customer support assistants need to appear reachable, but this is often difficult when trying to juggle customers on so many different platforms. As a result, customer service is often deemed ineffective and disjointed.

Zendesk

Zendesk provides a platform that allows you to put everything in one place. Zendesk is a cloud-based software designed to dramatically improve customer service for businesses. Having access to all the information you’re receiving, customer support assistants are notified of each communication strand, enabling them to address all queries with appropriate urgency. Instead of the dense, complex strands of information that customer support must often tackle, they’re instead notified if a case demands closer attention, and given suggestions for the next steps (delving outside of Zendesk itself to do so.) Messages are integrated from all active platforms including email and web, so agents will no longer need to constantly switch between websites.

9 useful Zendesk features

1. Data

Zendesk Insights tracks all the interactions that occur throughout the app, compiling useful data reports to track how your business is performing. This feature is useful to marketers looking to access some advanced analysis of KPIs. Want to know your average response times? Zendesk provides you with data to ensure that you are tracking your service and can make necessary improvements. It also pools together useful information if you’re looking to analyse a certain customer group including specific demographic groups, or how your performance sits within your industry. This in-depth analysis helps business owners to leverage data and respond to it, thus nurturing long term relationships with your consumers.

2. Scale

Unlike a manual, multi-channel customer support service, Zendesk is scalable, supporting your business’ demands as you grow. Integrating this support app will ensure you’re not having to play catch-up when you have countless customers with questions that need answers. Implementing this end-to-end solution will add structure to your entire customer service department.

3. Collect feedback

Once a customer has spoken with a member of your customer service team, Zendesk delivers automated questionnaires to customers asking them to rate you post-service. Collecting feedback like this is invaluable when improving your customer satisfaction rate.

4. Delegate


The app is designed to make it much easier to highlight certain cases to other team members. Maybe it’s time to handover your query to a member of the team who is specialised in this subject, or you’d like to demonstrate a recurring problem to a member of your website team so that they can improve its coherence for customers.

5. Bonjour, Hola, Ciao!

Wherever you’re running your business, Zendesk is integrated with admin interfaces in over 40 languages.

6. Content

As an AI-powered bot, Zendesk can generate automated responses that are relevant to your customer’s query, saving you a large chunk of time. Using an archive of content that you’ve used previously, Zendesk helps to recycle replies where necessary, and free up time to focus on high-value leads.

7. Customise

Companies dedicate a lot of time setting themselves apart in the highly competitive ecommerce landscape. The most effective customer support services convey a carefully crafted brand tone of voice in the same way their social media platforms and website do. It’s a demonstration of who you are as a business, so it’s important that this remains consistent. Zendesk offers extensive customisation options in order to maintain branded customer-facing support. You can create themes and layouts for every function in order to communicate with customers.

8. Handover to self service

It’s super important that your customers can access basic information without getting in touch with you, so an up to date FAQ page is a must. Zendesk takes this concept a step further, allowing you to build a portal for customer self-service. This portal uses the AI-powered bot (mentioned in feature 6).

This self service feature eliminates a lot of the really repetitive work that customer support assistants tire of. The self service tool comprises of information from your existing knowledge bases, but can be enriched when manually adding resolved cases or assigning specific tags to them. There’s even an option to set up community portals for customers to participate in. These are a designated pot of user-generated information relating to frequently asked questions. Customers are more satisfied when they are able to resolve a problem themselves as opposed to waiting for an assistant to respond.

9. Easy to set up, and there’s so much more…

This trusty app is much more than a help desk. Branching into a CRM system, salesforce automation and affiliated with 600 apps in the sector, Zendesk allows organisations to prepare workflows and track customer engagement.

A short note on messaging apps

Whilst Zendesk live chat is the perfect channel to respond to queries, the app is formatted so that near-to-convert leads approach you. Supplementing Zendesk with messaging tools equally allows your business to reach out to prospects via messaging apps. Messaging tools are a great way for your business to engage with leads who are talking about you on social media, and carry out any necessary damage control for negative comments when they arise. It’s the perfect supplement for Zendesk to ensure that you’ve got all areas covered.

How to integrate Zendesk into your Shopify store

To get your Zendesk Support Web Widget integrated you’ll need to:

• Have a Shopify account
• Be on the Zendesk Team, Professional or Enterprise plan.

Ready to get started with Zendesk? Click here to find out how to integrate Zendesk into your Shopify store.

So, what’s the cost?

Zendesk offers four different services:

• Support
• Chat
• Talk
• Guide

Each of these services have varying levels of plans according to the features that you require. You can bundle any plans from either of these services to create your unique Zendesk setup! However, your monthly platform fees can get fairly high if you have multiple services bundled into your setup.

If you'd like to view more information about pricing, click here.

We're suckers for good customer service

Ready to get started? For more information on providing stellar customer service on your e-commerce store, get in touch! Contact Elkfox for more information on using Shopify to offer an exemplary multi-channel customer support service and increase your conversion rates!