Handling large volumes of support requests?

Customer relationship is at the epicenter of your e-commerce business, which can build or break your business, necessitating a customer support software.

With growing customer demands and expectations in 2024, it is critical that you deliver fast and efficient omnichannel communication to ensure your customers receive the best customer support. Making it critical to the success of your retail business.

In fact, a good customer service experience heavily impacts recommendations with 38% of consumers who rate a company’s service as “good” more likely to recommend that company.  

These figures suffice to highlight the urgent need to deliver quality customer support for your e-commerce business to succeed.

Running a small business and looking for the best customer support software? Check out my previous review of the best customer support software for small businesses for robust and affordable solutions in 2024.

In this article, we discuss the best customer support software to help your retail and e-commerce business deliver unparalleled customer support services by streamlining operations. 

Quick summary 

1. Glassix - Best customer support software for Omni channel communication

2. Zendesk - Best user-friendly software for empowering sales teams

3.DoneDone - Best comprehensive software for small e-commerce businesses

4. Richpanel - Best customer support software with native integrations

5. Hiver - Best collaboration software with shared inboxes

How to Choose a Customer Support Software 

a) Prioritize User-friendliness

Simplicity is key when choosing a customer support software to ensure it does the job without much effort while maximizing customer support efficiency.

Ensure that the software you pick has easy and intuitive dashboards, menus, and buttons to ensure both customers and agents can navigate the software easily.

b) Consider the Software’s Features

Features can vary between different customer support software, but standard basic features you should look out for include communication and automation features, ticket management, and analytics.

Additionally, ensure you consider non-negotiable features and those that you can compromise. There is no need to pay a premium for additional features you may never use. 

c) Keep in Mind Integration Capabilities

A great customer support software should be able to integrate well with other tools you use in your business. This ensures seamless sharing of data and communication.

Integrations with tools such as customer relationship management software, communication platforms, and help desk software can streamline agent productivity and enhance customer support efficiency.

d) Identify Your Business Requirements

Different customer support software are designed for different use cases. Your business requirements are unique and can differ from those of other businesses.

Identify your business’s pain points and challenges to help you choose the right customer support software for your ecommerce store. For instance, if you have challenges managing tickets, find a solution with a good ticket management feature.

e) Check for Customization Abilities

Most software are one-size-fits-all, which I wouldn’t recommend as your business is unique and should have a solution that caters to that.

Customization capabilities enable you to make changes, such as adding essential widgets and tweaking dashboards to fit your ecommerce brand and unique needs.

1. Glassix

Glassix is the ultimate software to help transform your ecommerce customer support.

Your customers likely want to communicate with you through different communication channels such as WhatsApp, calls, and emails. 

Imagine having software that consolidates all communications into one platform.

Well, Glassix does that and even more to help increase your sales.

The software’s omni channel communication feature offers seamless support and sales across multiple platforms–with the help of AI, to ensure continuity and customer support designed particularly for e-commerce businesses.

Glassix understands the importance of providing instant and 24/7 support to your customers, and therefore, Glassix's Generative AI chatbot helps you provide assistance to customers through automated human responses. 

This also saves you money on labor costs as you don’t have to hire a huge team.

Additionally, Glassix offers integration abilities allowing you to connect your software to CRMs and other ecommerce platforms for seamless and cohesive workflows to enhance marketing efforts.

Although Glassix is priced higher compared to other software, it delivers enterprise-level features designed specifically for e-commerce businesses. 

Key features:

• Glassix’s omni channel communication enables you to maintain continuous communication with customers and keep track of support requests.
• The software offers AI chatbots that not only provide instant assistance to your customers, but also provide responses perfectly tailored for them.
• Glassix allows you to connect your online store with all your favorite tools to ensure cohesive and smooth workflows that enhance customer experience. 

Pricing:

Starting plan: $49 per agent/ month

2. Zendesk

Zendesk can help your retail business boost workforce efficiency.

The software hosts features that help you build relationships with your customers, providing them with what they need and retaining them.

Zendesk’s customer relationship management platform, Sunshine, enables you to consolidate all your customer data from different sources, including shopping history, billing, and inventory, to arm your agents with the necessary tools to deliver a premium customer support experience. 

Additionally, the software provides one of the best tools built on thousands of customer interactions, meaning it understands customer support. The AI enables you to deliver personalized customer support on every channel your customers are, not just in your emails. 

On top of that, the AI-powered tools offer a hand to your agents, providing them with customer information such as customer intent for them to offer better service. 

AI chatbots are completely automated, providing instant responses to support requests and routing requests to the right agents without human intervention.

Zendesk is a robust software that provides more than just a typical customer support software, making it ideal for ecommerce businesses. However, it has no vertical specialization, especially for an ecommerce business, so you are better off with a niche-specific customer support software like Glassix.

Key features:

• Zendesk’s integrated ticketing system streamlines support by consolidating all communications into one inbox, giving agents a complete view of each customer and their interaction history.
• The software has built-in business rules that enable you to set up workflows that eliminate repetitive and time-consuming tasks.
• Customer profiles and interaction history provide the necessary tools for your agents to deliver top-tier customer support to enhance customer satisfaction.

Pricing:

Starting plan: $19 per agent/ month

3. DoneDone

DoneDone provides the easiest way to manage customer support.

Say goodbye to confusion and wondering which request tickets have been resolved and which have not, thanks to DonDone’s robust mobile application with task-tracking features, workflows, and shared inbox.

You can use the software’s pre-configured workflows or design yours to help you log and assign tasks to your ecommerce team.

Additionally, to improve collaborative measures, the shared inbox allows agents to access customers’ support requests and conversations, enabling them to deliver a great customer experience without asking a customer the same question several times, which can be annoying.

DoneDone is a straightforward software with no complex menus to ensure you do not have difficulty looking for things. With a few clicks, you can track tickets, product returns, and site changes.

As an ecommerce business owner in 2024, you can benefit from DonDone’s integration capabilities that enable you to get your whole marketing team working together. 

Although affordable, DoneDone lacks several essential features like omni-channel communication offered by Glassix that can help you easily organize communications.

Key features:

• DoneDone can integrate with several platforms, such as Slack, Google Drive, and Zapier, to help boost your support team and increase efficiency.
• The software has a simple workflow management feature with built-in workflows to help you track request tickets, store updates, and product returns.
• To eliminate the challenge of managing support requests on emails, you can auto-forward all emails to DoneDone shared inbox and manage tickets easily.

Pricing:

Starting plan: $4 per user/ month

4. Richpanel

How can Richpanel improve customer support?

If you are looking for the best customer support software designed for ecommerce businesses to help resolve tickets faster and enhance customer satisfaction, look no further than Richpanel.

With a help desk and self-service platforms, the software hosts all the features you would want in an ecommerce customer support software, such as integration capabilities, automation, multichannel communication, etc.

Managing redundant tasks can be annoying and take away from productive time. 

What’s more, Richpanel has robust automation features that eliminate manual and repetitive work, such as clearing spam and transactional emails. 

The software offers chatbot automation abilities that auto-clean your inbox, surface all queries that need responses from your social media pages, and auto-tag requests to ensure an organized system.

Additionally, Richpanel’s multichannel communication feature is incredible, consolidating communications from all channels into one inbox. 

Richpanel is one of the best customer support software with a powerful help desk and self-service features that accelerate customer support. However, the two are provided in separate pricing plans, meaning for you to have both you will have to spend a little bit more. 

Key features:

• Richpanel provides real-time insights that help you understand your customers and show how customer experience impacts your business.
• The software’s spam filtering bots help you organize your inbox and easily get rid of clutter, such as promotional emails, to save time.
• Richpanel integrates with several ecommerce tools and platforms to provide a more centralized and efficient communication channel.

Pricing:

Starting plan: $29 per user/ month

5. Hiver

Hiver enables your team to collaborate and deliver world-class support.

It takes teamwork to provide an efficient, top-tier customer experience. 

This software boasts features that will enhance collaborative features across departments and teams, such as shared inboxes essential for redefining customer support.

Hiver’s multichannel support can help streamline customer support by allowing you to manage email, live chat, and voice channel support from Gmail's left panel.

The good thing about this is that it requires little to no training, as Gmail’s interface is familiar, ultimately saving you time and training costs.

When it comes to ticket management, Hiver enables you to easily—with a few clicks— assign customer queries to qualified agents and have a clear view of who is working on what to ensure accountability.

Like most great customer support software, Hiver also provides automation features such as auto-assigning tasks based on keywords like ‘urgent’ to help expedite resolution and allow your agents to focus on what matters.

Furthermore, to help you improve the quality of customer support you deliver, you can leverage Hiver’s robust analytics features to track key metrics such as response time and average resolution time. 

Although the platform is relatively affordable compared to other software, its starting plan lacks essential features such as automation capabilities that your ecommerce business needs.

Key features:

• Hiver integrates seamlessly with Google emails to enable you to manage multi-channel communication from the same platform for enhanced efficiency.
• The software provides real-time insights, such as response time and resolution time, to help enhance productivity and improve customer support.
• Hiver’s automation features help achieve more efficiency and eliminate repetitive and time-consuming tasks like email routing.

Pricing:

Starting plan: $15 user/ month

Conclusion

Customer support software is indispensable for ecommerce businesses.

Customers value excellent customer service, which explains why retail businesses with great customer support retain customers and boost profits.

In fact, according to Microsoft, nearly two-thirds of consumers will immediately stop doing business with a brand once they receive poor customer service, highlighting more reasons why you need to invest in customer support software.

The best customer support software will offer a plethora of benefits to ecommerce businesses in 2024, such as self-service abilities, 24/7 support, and actionable insights to elevate your customer service.

If you are unsure where to start in your search for the best retail customer support software, Zendesk, Hiver, DoneDone, and Richpanel offer great options for retail businesses. Still, Glassix hosts all the necessary tools to transform your customer support into a simple, easy-to-use platform.

Sign up for Glassix’s 30-day free trial to explore its incredible features, including Generative AI chatbots, AI-powered inbox, and powerful integrations that can help supercharge support operations for your ecommerce business.

FAQs

1. What is ecommerce customer support software?

Ecommerce customer support software refers to platforms that equip support teams with the right tools, such as shared inboxes, to streamline communication and provide better customer support for your ecommerce business.

Customer support software enables your ecommerce businesses to automate processes and streamline the channels customers use to reach out to you.

2. Which is the best customer support software for retail businesses?

There are several vendors offering great software for ecommerce support teams, such as Glassix, Zendesk, Hiver, DoneDone, and Richpanel. They host all essential tools to empower your support team to deliver unparalleled customer support.

Glassix stands out with robust features that will eliminate chaotic communication systems by bringing everything your team may need into a single platform.

3. How much does ecommerce customer support software cost?

Different vendors have varying product prices, so providing an exact price point for customer support software is hard. However, most software offer a free plan with limited features.

Glassix provides a 30-day free trial for customers to interact with its features and have a feel of what they will be getting. Our starting plan is priced at $49 per user per month. 

4. What key considerations should I make when choosing an ecommerce customer support software?

There are several factors to consider when choosing a customer support software, but first, ensure you research and find out what options are available and what features they offer.

You can make other considerations from there, such as your business requirements, integration capabilities, and budget, that will help elevate team performance.

5. What features should I look for in an ecommerce customer support software?

An ecommerce customer support solution should provide essential tools such as omnichannel communication to deliver a strong customer service strategy to help you easily manage customer queries from different communication platforms.

Other features you should look for include ticket management, automation, integration capabilities, and reporting tools.