Meet the product: eDesk helpdesk solution

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1 Mar 2021

Vincent McCarthy, Product Manager, eDesk helpdesk

eDesk is an ecommerce helpdesk solution which is designed not only to allow you to collaborate to answer customer messages but does so much more besides to help you streamline your business.

We asked Vincent McCarthy, Product Manager at eDesk helpdesk to reveal all and tell us how eDesk can help to grow your business

What is eDesk?

eDesk is essentially the smarter way to do ecommerce support. eDesk is a helpdesk which allows growing ecommerce retailers to quickly receive and respond to messages from potential and existing customers around their products.

We’re also entirely ecommerce focused, so we integrate with over 35 channels across various marketplaces, webstores and integrations. We also combine rich order data with AI-powered automations which help remote teams respond faster and deliver that five-star customer service experience.

What is a helpdesk solution?

In its simplest terms, a helpdesk solution is a centralised team that solves problems or answers questions for customers, making management a lot easier. What happens behind a helpdesk can be very different, especially in the ecommerce space; it can mean the difference between a growing business and one that’s struggling with bad reviews.

A half decent ecommerce helpdesk consists of good people, a good issue tracker, a good ticket management system, analytics and various plugins.

But a brilliant ecommerce helpdesk will help you grow your orders, grow your business, and let you integrate seamlessly with multiple channels as you continue to grow. It should be easy and intuitive for any agent to use while providing time-saving features such as automation and templates and then providing actionable insights around your business, so being able to identify when your business is busy based on tickets, identify how help teams and agents are performing and be able to act on them accordingly.

Which pain points can eDesk address in my business and how can you help me grow?

When people are selling online, they’re usually selling on eBay, Amazon and Shopify. In order for them to respond to messages they need to log into each of those platforms. What eDesk does is to integrate with those platforms and bring all messages into a centralised inbox which has a consistent look and feel, so that any ticket that arrives looks the same and an agent can respond to it in the same way. You’re instantly saving time and the ticket has the order information so that you can quickly identify and relate queries to orders.

Everything we do is around productivity and collaboration so we want the agents to be as effective as possible and we do this in a number of ways with some really cool features such as message rules; AI; our templates; and then also with snippets.

In terms of collaboration, sometimes an agent might not be able to respond to a ticket and may need assistance from someone else in the team. Within the ticket they can mention another agent who will then be notified that their assistance is required.

In terms of growing the business, we directly integrate with marketplaces, webstores, and other integrations and that removes the need for integrating with any third-party clunky app. Everything is within the product so that you get that consistent look and feel as your business grows and you add more channels.

Another key feature of eDesk is management reporting: we’ve got a comprehensive suite of reports around how agents are performing, how the team is performing, and also how the business is performing. With these actionable insights, management and team leaders can identify where the problems are, where the pain points are, and quickly resolve them, while also being able to set realistic targets which can then help with any coaching programmes and assist the team.

eDesk is an entire ecommerce ecosystem. Although we have eDesk as a product for responding to tickets and visualising performance, we also have a feedback product – as we know reviews are critical to the success of online retailers – so we can integrate our feedback addon with eDesk so that you can automatically request reviews once a product has been received by the customer. We know a lot of customers are selling on their own webstores, so we have developed a live chat feature that integrates with the webstore and will send messages to eDesk in the same way that they would for any channels, meaning agents can respond to live chat messages in real time. We also have a knowledge base which allows larger customers to create their own libraries of Frequently Asked Questions allowing their customers to self-serve information, making agents even more efficient.

Take a tour

Click the image below to take a virtual tour of what eDesk has to offer:

What sets you aside from your competitors?

In addition to all of the above, we’re purpose built to support ecommerce, so everything that we do is ecommerce focussed. We consolidate order information from webstores, marketplaces, inventory and fulfilment solutions, email, chat, social media into an end-to-end view of the customer’s transaction journey.

With the sheer number of integrations that we have we’re the biggest in the market and we’re also releasing some really cool features soon so watch this space.

Which platforms do you support?

We have over 35 integrations altogether, some examples of which are:

Marketplaces

Amazon, eBay, Walmart, Etsy,

Webstores

Shopify, BigCommerce, Magento, Woocommerce

Social

FB, Twitter, Instagram

Integrations

ChannelEngine, ShipStation

Case Study

Previously known as US Autoparts, carparts.com are an American auto parts supplier and their customer support is based in Manilla in the Philippines. So as you can imagine, as we moved into the pandemic it affected a lot of our customers but the Carparts team have been working remotely since the very start.

Their problem was that they had several million customers online generating a large volume of tickets which proved difficult to manage and lead to a bit of an operational mess. Dealing with 10 million customers a month across marketplaces and emails, as you can imagine, is complex.

They got onboard with eDesk and their business has grown significantly since. The solution that we provided to them was having that single location for customer support which made their workflows a lot more efficient as well as making their agents more efficient. We enabled teamwork and collaboration through that centralised inbox and enabling them to have the ability to communicate within the product to get assistance when needed. This allowed them to quickly resolve tickets.

The data and reporting (and they’re really keen on data!) allowed them to focus on areas that are performing well and aren’t performing well and quickly rectify them, either through changes in process or with training and education for staff, which ultimately led to time-saving across the board.

Since using eDesk, carparts.com have experienced a 10% reduction in ticket handling time so their agents are 10% more efficient, despite a 12% increase in the number of tickets that they handle every day.

What’s coming in the future?

Everything we do is primarily customer focused so we build what our customers want. They speak, we listen! We’ve got an active research community who we constantly look to for feedback and recommendations on how to improve and we are constantly investigating new ways to make improvement for our customers.

This led to some of our recent development releases:

An improved mailbox where we’ve enhanced the user experience and the UI which allows agents to quickly identify high-priority issues but also to quickly respond to tickets.
Our recent Etsy marketplace integration, so another marketplace which we’ve added to our portfolio.
Our Amazon VAT calculation service that helps with automating the VAT process with Amazon.
And then a recently released integration with Channel Engine: an aggregator of marketplaces which we can then pull into eDesk

We do have some big product news coming on the 16th of March so watch this space, or join us for the launch event and we can tell you more about it.