The last thing you need is your customer getting lost on your business’ retail page, unable to find the product they want to buy. As much as you can make your website easy to use, there are always going to be customers who need some added assistance.
And being that they’re online and not in a retail store, you can’t personally approach them and ask what they’re looking for.
There are, however, some nifty apps that can lend a helping hand. You might have seen these before: Your customer is browsing your website and a little bubble pops up in the corner of the screen, showing a real-person’s profile, asking if they need help. The customer can then type some questions and receive an instant response.
Here are a few apps to help make your online retail shop a bit more personal.
ClickDesk has it all: Live chats, Voice-over-IP and Video chats, a help desk, offline chats and a social media toolbar to easier connect with customers on Twitter and Facebook. There’s a reason why it’s used by more than 100,000 businesses across the globe.
A little technical background on ClickDesk: It’s built on Google’s app engine and hosted by Amazon Web Services. Being that it’s hosted in the cloud and is built using Google’s platform, live chats are available on every device, from smartphones to tablets.
What might set apart ClickDesk from the rest is its ability to integrate with accounting software like Xero to create invoices and view crucial information that relates to visitor details, based on the conversations from the live chats.
In addition to retail shoppers, clients of your small business can use ClickDesk to interact with you and go over invoices step-by-step. And being that Xero is cloud-based, that can be done from anywhere with an Internet connection.
The pro version, which includes all of the above features, is only $22 per month.
A competitor to ClickDesk is FreshDesk, which offers many of the same great features, including ticketing, live support and reporting capabilities, in addition to some nice bonuses, like productivity tracking and self-support, which allows you to write answers for questions that you think your clients might have.
The user-experience is really enjoyable and easy to use. Customer complaints or issues, otherwise known as tickets in FreshDesk, show a comprehensive breakdown from start to finish, including who’s working on the issue. From the ticket dashboard, the business owner can see a customer’s current status, check out contextual customer information and obviously, manage and update those tickets.
FreshDesk is also really big on collaboration, keeping all the important people on your team in the loop. This is important because if a customer were to stop in or call, no matter who picks up the phone, there’s a strong chance that they’re either familiar with the problem, or can easily access it to know how to help.
