Receiving questions from visitors is common, particularly when you’re attracting significant traffic to your store and employing tools such as live chat to interact with numerous potential customers. However, this can result in a high volume of email queries for your store help desk to manage.

Having a simple Help Desk will enable you to keep track of questions, process them efficiently, and of course make sure your visitors are well taken care of

But a Help Desk doesn't need to feel clunky to you, your visitors (i.e. "here's your ticket # from donotrespond@yourwebsite.com", etc.

Here's what we've seen work well for our customers...

Store Help Desk: Help Scout (no affiliation with us at all)

We appreciate Help Scout for its straightforward and practical features. Our recommendation is unbiased as we have no affiliation with Help Scout and receive no compensation for directing you to them. We simply believe in the value it adds and suggest it to enhance your store help desk operations ; )

Most help desk systems are pretty clunky, in that they generate automated "ticket notification" emails to customers, come from "donotreply@website.com" style email addresses, and others feel like a ticket system to customers. They also usually have a pretty steep learning curve to use in your business.

But Help Scout is different. Here's what we love about it... 

Customers Receive Emails - Not "Tickets"

When replying to customers, the communication appears as a personal email from you. There’s no “ticket #” data, no dontreply@website.com addresses, or similar impersonal elements. It creates a personalized experience, as if you directly emailed them, which is the ideal approach for a store help desk.

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Image source: helpscout.net/email-management-software/[/caption] 

Easy Collaboration with Your Team

You can collaborate with your team easily by adding notes to tickets, tagging tickets, and assigning tickets to different team members. This can all be done within the Helpscout interface, but can also be done via email without ever logging in (more on "email commands" below).

Image source: helpscout.net/email-management-software/[/caption]

Saved Replies Can Save a Ton of Time

You can use saved replies to answer common questions, while also integrating personal information. When creating saved replies, consider including instructions for your support team too if more in depth customization of the message is needed before sending it out.

Manage Most Activity from Your Inbox (not Help Scout)

If you're hesitant about using a Help Desk because you don't want to have to login to yet another online tool to manage communication, then Help Scout's "email commands" feature will excite you (if you're nerdy like us).

1. You can get notified of new tickets, replies to tickets, and much more directly within your inbox.
2. Then, simply reply to the ticket from your inbox and that will send the reply to your customer.
3. If you want to assign the ticket to someone, add a note, tag the ticket, etc., you can do that too - all from within your inbox!

Workflows and Automation

If you want to get a bit more advanced, you can configure automation steps within Help Scout for various situations.

Here's a few examples:

1. If the ticket contains "refund", assign it to the owner with active status and tag "Refund" in case it's a sensitive customer service issue you want to handle yourself.
2. If a ticket is assigned to a junior team member, but not responded to / updated in 3 days, assign it back to a Senior team member with a note about the inactivity on the ticket.
3. (and much more).

Integrate Your Shopping Cart Data

If a customer asks, "When is my order shipping?", it'd nice to have that info right in front of you, right? With Help Scout, you can.

... Nerd Mode [On] - It Integrates with Zapier.com

If you use Zapier.com, then you'll know how powerful this is. If you don't, check out Zapier.com (we'll update this post in the future if we do a post on Zapier).

With the Zapier integration, you can trigger things to happen in all types of other tools if something happens in Help Scout, and visa versa.

1. If someone fills out a specific form on your website, create  Help Scout ticket with that info
2. If a failed payment happens in your merchant account, create a Help Scout ticket
3. If a ticket is tagged as #awesome by you, notify your team in Slack
4. (and much more)

Try Help Scout For Free (Forever)

HelpScout's pricing is really simple, and the free version honestly has enough of the core features you'll need to move away from processing email tickets in a single email inbox like you're probably doing right now. You can see the pricing at http://www.helpscout.net/pricing/, and signup for a free trial without any credit card.

Have any questions? Let us know by commenting below!