If you’re running an e-commerce business, chances are you’ve got a lot on your plate. Between managing inventory and sourcing new suppliers, keeping tabs on stock, and launching marketing initiatives, there are countless demands on your time and attention as a business owner.
There are a number of problems that an e-commerce business may encounter as it expands its operations. Wider distribution means more third parties, from delivery services to logistics providers and suppliers. Each one of these poses its own set of challenges for customers that need to be addressed quickly and efficiently. Whether you have just launched your business or simply want to improve efficiency all around, here are four reasons why you should use Zendesk for e-commerce:
Managing customer service requests can be a daunting task—especially when your business is experiencing rapid growth and customer support requests are coming in at an exponential rate. Brands can now reach millions of customers directly via social channels and email, making customer service representatives’ jobs increasingly challenging. To keep up with the increased demand and respond in real-time to customer needs, businesses often have to hire additional support staff. But that’s a short-term fix that can wreak havoc on your business’s bottom line. Hiring a new employee can take several months, during which time your business is left scrambling to catch up with customer service requests.
Using Zendesk for e-commerce allows you to respond to more customer service requests without hiring additional employees and view customer service tickets from any device, so you can respond to customers from any location.
Customer service teams are often looked at as the gatekeepers to your business. While the focus is often on how to optimize the flow of customer service tickets, this can sometimes come at the expense of agility. Zendesk also allows you to create a new ticket and route it to the appropriate agent in seconds, and also reroute tickets quickly and easily, so that if an agent becomes unavailable, you can have another take over the ticket with a single click. This means you can respond to customer service issues quicker and more efficiently, leading to happier customers.
Understanding the needs and desires of your customers is crucial to the success of any ecommerce business. When customers reach out to your business, they are providing an invaluable gift: They are giving you a window into their concerns and needs. However, as a business scales, it can become more difficult to understand your customers’ needs. Particularly when you’re receiving requests across multiple social channels and email inboxes, it can be challenging to aggregate data and draw insights. Zendesk for e-commerce businesses allows them to centralize all customer data and draw insights from that data in real-time. You can measure trends in the systems, such as repeated issues with certain products, to understand customer needs in more detail.
When you first set up Zendesk for your e-commerce business, you will likely spend most of your time evaluating tickets, assigning them to agents, and routing tickets to the right inbox. One of the best ways to save time and improve efficiency once your team starts using the system regularly is to automate certain Zendesk processes. For example, once you have a good understanding of your customers’ needs and the most common types of requests, you can automate the routing and assignment of tickets to agents, by using Zendesk’s routing mechanism and also platforms like Lang.AI. This allows you to spend more time on strategic initiatives and less on simply keeping the lights on.
Zendesk for e-commerce allows you to manage an ever-growing number of customer service requests more efficiently. You can view and respond to customer service tickets from any device, so you can respond to customers from any location. Zendesk also allows you to search for keywords, such as product names or location information, to quickly draw insights from customer service requests. You can also automate certain processes to improve operational efficiency. And by using Zendesk for e-commerce, you can view and respond to customer service requests in real-time without hiring additional employees.
