When many brands launch their online stores on Shopify, they mainly focus on their product, marketing, and having a user-friendly design or functionality.
Because of that, they can often forget one of the most important pieces of running a successful direct-to-consumer e-commerce store: customer support.
Having a customer support team to answer customers’ questions—from purchase to checkout, shipping & handling, to even returns—can often mean the difference between a one-time buyer and a loyal customer.
People can spend as much as 60% more on a brand when they interact with support teams, which can easily bolster customer retention.
Given the size of Shopify’s app ecosystem, choosing the right companies to pad out your customer support operation can be daunting. But there are a customer-facing apps—which garner glowing product reviews—that e-commerce businesses should keep in mind:
Gorgias is a customer service dashboard that pulls in customer inquiries from a variety of places—email, phone, chat, Facebook Messenger, SMS, even your Instagram feed—into a single location.
It’s a sophisticated ticketing system that integrates with Shopify, BigCommerce, and WooCommerce. Gorgias paid plans start at $30 a month, and cost as much as $750 a month to unlock the most advanced features.
Founding year: 2015
Examples of clients: Suitshop, Milligram, TruWood
Zendesk offers one of the best apps for a sophisticated ticketing system. After it pulls in customer inquiries from social media, email, and more, it reminds your customer service teams to take actions or follow-up on each inquiry.
Zendesk also offers analytics, a virtual assistant, and a chatbot-enabled live chat that can segment and address low-level customer inquiries instantly—which can streamline the customer experience and lower abandoned carts for your store.
Founding year: 2007
Examples of clients: Tile, Instacart, Homebridge
Once you get your help desk solution set up, you may quickly find it difficult to respond to all the inquiries coming in. With a 5-star rating on the Shopify store, brands turn to Chatdesk to help them quickly scale up their customer support at a super affordable price (starting at $99/month). We recruit and train Experts to answer every customer inquiry on-brand.
We also integrate easily with all the companies on this list so you can get started quickly. Our dashboard pulls in customer comments not just from emails and chats, but also from all social platforms.
Chatdesk is one of the only companies to pull in customer comments from TikTok. That means, if you want to provide customer service on an important and new sales channel or marketing platform for many e-commerce brands, Chatdesk might be the way to go.
To get started, schedule a free demo with us to learn more or start your 2-week free trial.
Founding year: 2016
Examples of clients: Thinx, Andie, Prose Hair
Like many customer service companies, eDesk supports a live chat and a shared inbox feature, which helps aggregate all of your customer messages into one place.
But eDesk does more than just build a help desk. It also has a customer reviews and feedback tool that sends automated review requests to your most satisfied patrons.
Plus, a handy marketing automation like its repricing option adjusts your prices on Shopify and on other e-commerce platforms based on market trends, in order to draw more customers and boost sales.
Founding year: 2016
Examples of clients: Neo Chair, Superdry, MyBoatStore
Re:amaze, which is now owned by the web hosting company GoDaddy, helps you build FAQs pages, a live chat, a shared inbox, and more.
But one unique benefit of Re:amaze is its live customer monitoring program, called Re:amaze Live, that allows customer support agents to see how existing and new customers are navigating your website.
Through it, your agents can intervene and help your customer. They can also make product recommendations, even upsell or cross-sell. This can then drive sales, lower cart abandonment, and boost your conversion rates.
Founding year: 2012; acquired by GoDaddy in April 2021
Examples of clients: GoodDollar, Printful, and FitTea
Freshdesk offers a lightweight and affordable help desk solution, with a low-level free plan for Shopify store owners that are still trying to work out what exactly their customer service needs might be.
Freshdesk lets customer service agents chat with buyers on WhatsApp, Messenger, Apple Business Chat, LINE, and more, and it also gives brands tools to privately communicate with one another within the Freshdesk dashboard in order to swiftly resolve issues.
Founding year: 2010
Examples of clients: Groupon, BrewDog, Bridgestone
Customer service isn’t just about answering customer questions or DMs once they pop up. It’s also about supplying your buyers with information before they think to ask for it.
Through Shipway, customers can get real-time order updates sent directly to them via SMS, WhatsApp, or email, so they won’t need to ask you where an order is if it’s running late.
Shipway also provides insights about which of your carriers have the best on-time performance and the best customer satisfaction numbers.
Found year: 2015
Examples of clients: Bluestone, Birkenstock, MensXP
One of the key parts of ensuring a positive customer service journey is to build in a system for easy product returns.
ReturnLogic creates a dashboard from which you can approve or deny a customer refund request, track the product’s shipping status, see what returned items still need to be inspected, and more.
ReturnLogic also analyzes patterns in customer returns and provides insights about what products are being returned, how much it is costing your brand, among other things.
ReturnLogic has partnerships with 3PLs like Quiet Logistics and shipping companies like Shippo.
Founding year: 2015
Examples of clients: Jofit, Jolyn, Ecru
