Which Apps do we recomend to improve your Customer Service?
“Over 1,000,000 merchants in 175 countries choose Shopify for their online store”
From Aquire and Convert Website – Shopify Stats
This means there is a lot of competition out there no matter how niche your industry. With everyone using the same platform how can you make your website stand out from the crowd and increase sales? We believe improving your customer service is a simple way to do this and have come up with a list of our favourite Shopify Apps to help you improve the way you talk to your customers.
This list is not gleaned from a quick search of the internet for similar looking blogs, this is a list compiled from our own experience. Not only are we a Shopify Partner Agency, we also own and run our own online operations to enable us to find out what works best for our customers. When we share our opinion on an app it is only after we have tested it thoroughly and ruled out at least 5 competitor apps as unsuitable. We can safely say we know these apps inside and out and can teach you how to get the most out of them, as opposed to just saying it is a useful Shopify App.
Live Chat – Tidio
First on our list is our preferred live chat option, Tidio. Live chat is a fast and efficient way to communicate with your customers while they are looking at your website. Usually accessible for customers from an icon that hovers in the bottom corner of their screen. The problems with traditional comms methods are multiple and include a typical delay of 24 hours when responding to an email or using a phone whilst looking at the website on the same device and the customer service agent only being able to handle one enquiry at a time on the phone.
With Live Chat you can talk to multiple customers at the same time, respond in real time without having to wait for them to open an email and keep a record of the whole conversation. The added bonus is the ability to save time and energy by setting up Live Chat Bots to answer common questions while you sleep. Set up correctly and live chat can be a 24/7 sales person without you having to lift a finger.
We have gone through rigorous testing with multiple options including:
For us Tidio has been the most successful and easiest to use as a small business. Most small business owners are incredible busy people and want to be able to handle things on the go, especially dealing with customers who are the life blood of any eCommerce outfit. Tidio has enabled us to talk to customers from our laptops and phone seamlessly and has led to an increase in sales of 300% over the time we have been using it.
Setting up the bots is easy once you get used to the type of question that keeps being asked. For us it is to do with reducing returns and therefore getting the size of a product correct. As a dog product business, we know that a typical Labrador of a certain weight will fit into a medium soft dog bed. If the customer has a question about Labradors and the size of their bed, we can tell Tidio to send them a pdf or link to the relevant size guide. Rather than answer the same question over and over again, the Bot takes care of this for us. Other typical requests include opening times and location requests.
Marketing Automation – Klaviyo
Staying on the theme of looking after your customers using automation like bots and A1, let us introduce you to Klaviyo. For us Mailchimp used to be the go to player for your email marketing, it has been around for a long time and had a good free offering for small business. As time has gone by the market has become more congested and in our opinion, Mailchimp has gone backwards both in terms of usage and user interface. In a attempt to be all things to all people, we feel that the system became too confusing and too expensive when you moved into the payable bracket. Regular changes in the layout of the dashboard and confusing titles for simple categories made it harder and harder to use efficiently.
As usual we decided to have a look around and test out some of the other apps in a live environment on one of our websites.
The first thing to say is that Shopify and Mailchimp fell out last year. In a way that only the global corporations can fall out, like small children. Shopify, developed their own email marketing software that comes free with the platform. As a way of encouraging users not to use Mailchimp they came up with an excuse about infringement of GDPR and cancelled integration with Shopify. There are ways around this and we currently use ShopSync to connect one of our sites to Mailchimp.
What we discovered was Klaviyo. Klaviyo in their own words:
“Lets you deliver amazing experiences across email and other owned channels”.
If you want to build an automated system of communications between you and your customers without breaking the bank and having to create new emails every time a new user signs up then this is for you. As every good marketer knows, email is still a key part of the customer journey and can be farm more engaging than social media and other advertising mediums. Klaviyo lets you build up systems of automation for different customers, subscribers and followers.
There are three clear winners when looking after your customers that Klaviyo gives you the tools for, they are:
- New subscribers
- New Customers
- Past Customers.
Klaviyo lets you look after each of these segments by allowing you to build each one its own journey. New subscribers receive an automated series of emails welcoming them to the family, followed up by a bit of social proof, latest offers and news concerning the company. This can be delivered over a period of days or stretched longer. Depending on their behaviour the system can deliver different messages.
Abandoned Checkout is a particularly important part of the customer journey. How can you keep your customers interested when they leave the website without buying anything?
Since we switched to Klaviyo our abandoned cart emails have double in effectiveness. Twice as many abandoned carts are now converted into new customers. That is an astounding success rate.
We must not forget of course our past customers, who need to be nurtured and Klaviyo enables us to do this easily with a series of automated emails that keep customers informed of new products and special offers. If you are looking for a way of automating your marketing then look no further than Klaviyo.
Reviews on Shopify – Loox
One of our more recent finds and probably the most useful with the biggest impact. Another crowded marketplace dominated by traditional household names like:
- Google Reviews
- Feefo
- Trustpilot
Getting reviews for your products and then using them to promote your brand is a key element in the quest for social proof to persuade people why they should buy from you. The best salesperson in any business is most likely to be your customer. Adding Loox to your Shopify website can help you make a huge leap forward in many areas. It is the best app we have found for gathering customer reviews, especially reviews that come with a photograph. We are at a slight advantage in that people love to photograph their dogs so sharing photos is not a problem. But when we started using the app two weeks ago we obtained 180 new reviews within the first 24 hours. The majority of which came with photographs of their pets in our products.
Loox also comes with added tools that let you offer reviewers discount codes, referrals bonuses and the chance to share reviews on social media. If you are looking for the best review app then Loox costs less than Feefo and works seamlessly with Shopify and gets the thumbs up from us.
