Replying to buyers during the holidays, the new year, and the seasonal hustle is not an easy job for busy sellers, even (and especially) with a team of support agents.
If you are using CJdropshipping to sell on multiple channels (e.g., Amazon, Shopify, eBay, Etsy, etc.), during a holiday rush, this part of dropshipping can cause some delays and longer working hours.
If you’ve found yourself spending too much of your day on customer support, this article will quickly review the following critical points of how a helpdesk can help during the busiest days of the year:
- What fast-paced business problems a helpdesk solves
- A helpdesk’s impact on busy multichannel dropshipping
- What to look for in a Helpdesk for seasonal dropshipping
Pro Tip: You can test-drive all the features found in this article for free with 3Dsellers Multichannel Helpdesk.
What is an eCommerce Helpdesk?
An eCommerce helpdesk is Customer Relationship Management software (a CRM) designed to organize incoming messages into a structured, ticket-based system. It also displays message threads as conversations (like an SMS app or messenger).
The purpose of a helpdesk is to simplify customer support workflows and shorten the time needed to respond to buyers.
How can a helpdesk improve multichannel dropshipping during the busiest days of the year?
Multichannel dropshippers have many opportunities to grow; however, more growth requires more responsibility.
When the busy days arrive, you will have more incoming pre-sales questions and order-processing inquiries from multiple different websites, leaving you with a lot more ground to cover.
Instead of taking the entire workload on your shoulders, you may consider an eCommerce helpdesk to manage most of the responsibility for you.
Centralization of all of your messages
A good helpdesk application should centralize (consolidate) many parts of customer service from different selling channels.
In other words, by keeping all the data for customer support for every channel in one place, you will reply faster and keep organized.
Consolidating messages: a solution for a busy multichannel dropshipper
It’s a clear hurdle that marketplaces like eBay require another inbox for you to check, another website messaging system to learn, and one more password you’ll need to share with your team.
But managing customer support across multiple stores without a helpdesk can be especially tough for teams during the busy seasons. Some common issues may include:
- Different settings and buttons across inboxes can cause mental multitasking delays under pressure.
- For a 5-star service, you’ll need to prevent cross-over replies by organizing who on your team will reply—on which selling platform—and when.
- Without organization across busy channels, missed messages and cases are bound to happen.
- This workflow can often lead to enough open browser tabs to shorten the lifespan of your laptop. Too many browser tabs and active extensions can be very destructive to computers.
As you can see, keeping up with all of your support when flooded with buyer messages can become chaotic; quickly. And sadly, there are prices to pay for late replies.
However, the right helpdesk for your business can solve and prevent every one of these scenarios by combining all of your customer messages, emails, and order details into one place.
Easy Buyer—you—supplier Communication
There are many reasons why dropshipping is easier and more accessible than managing a warehouse—but customer support during busy order processing is probably not one of those reasons.
Your inquiries and item returns are the priority if you own the warehouse. But in the world of dropshipping, typically, you’ll need to follow the same inquiry and return process as the buyer did for you—but with the supplier.
Playing middle man can be rough, but centralizing emails with an eCommerce Helpdesk gives you fast access to supplier conversations so you can quickly report certain information to the buyer.
Every second saved adds up fast, and you can conserve a lot of energy with fewer small decisions and searches.
Maintain a Professional Dropshipper Reputation
Sometimes dropshippers get an unfair shake from buyers when dealing with a holiday-delayed supplier. So to keep your brand image healthy, a good helpdesk can make your support appear as “grassroots” or “enterprise” as you need by allowing you to:
- End automated replies (with rules),
- Be precise by having all the order details (and take actions) when replying, and
- Use auto-personalized email templates & message snippets.
These features automate many repetitive tasks, bring consistency to your team’s responses, and let you focus on maintaining professional service to boost feedback and most importantly, repeat buyers.
Instant Order Insights
Another caveat for dropshippers is that suppliers control shipping and order processing instead of us.
Orders dispatched on non-holidays, and especially with good suppliers, will usually process without incident, but even then, some buyers will frequently inquire about shipping or order status.
A helpdesk saves time with these buyers by providing the order and item data on the same screen as your conversation with the buyer.
Team-Based Workflows + Automation
If you have or will hire help for the holiday rush, you will need to manage labor costs and limit the time it takes your team to assist with eCommerce customer support.
The first step to cutting customer support costs is to automate as much of the workflow as possible.
The right eCommerce helpdesk software should allow you to automate two things:
- Automatically assign new tickets to specific teammates
- Create custom, natural autoresponders that send based on the buyer’s message and order.
These two automation features act as a “virtual secretary” for your customer support team, and autoresponders can resolve some inquiries without needing your reply.
Once you’ve created your automated system, you will have countless hours cleared from your overall tasks this season.
More Features for Dropshippers to Look for In a Helpdesk
The features above are tremendous for any dropshipping business’ customer service; but here are a few of the top extra time-savers and customer satisfaction boosting features you may consider:
- Automatically translate messages.
- Display from which channel the buyer is contacting you.
- Add notes inside conversations.
- Mention teammates to send the teammate a notification of the ticket.
- Reply to buyers with custom message templates/snippets that automatically personalize with the buyer’s order and shipping details.
- SLA and business hours settings for “time-to-respond” and autoresponder features
- Exportable teammate statistics for the number of tickets handled
- Customizable inbox filters for better organization
The list of various helpdesk features can go on for a while, but the list above contains some of the most important features that make the most of a difference in multichannel eCommerce customer service workflows.
Reminder: you can test-drive all the features found in this article for free with 3Dsellers Multichannel Helpdesk.
Thousands of online sellers from all niches and levels use 3Dsellers every day to expand and manage their businesses. 3Dsellers’ tools have provided countless sellers with time-saving, sales-boosting features to grow their eBay business from a blooming account into an enterprise.
Whether you’re up to your head in customer support emails right now, expect to be, or want to set the foundation for the smooth growth of your dropshipping business during next season’s rush, a multichannel eCommerce customer service helpdesk can be one of your solutions.
This article originally appears in 3Dsellers
