The 10 Best Shopify Customer Service Apps (Compared)
Successful ecommerce is built on more than just selling high-quality products or services. It's also about providing top-notch customer service. By leveraging the right customer service app for Shopify, you can streamline your support operations, ensuring that every customer query is handled professionally and in a timely manner.
Managing customer service isn't always easy. With an array of customer inquiries flooding in from different channels, it's imperative to have a robust solution to handle all support requests efficiently. And there's a multitude of customer service apps available to choose from, each with its own unique features and benefits.
In this guide, we'll provide a comparative analysis of the best Shopify customer support apps to help you make an informed decision that meets the precise needs of your store.
What is the best customer support tool for Shopify?
Choosing the best customer service app for your Shopify store can make a big difference in your business's operational efficiency, customer satisfaction levels, and overall growth. The ideal set of features may vary depending on the size of your business, what you sell, who you sell to, and your business needs. However, some common elements are universally beneficial for most Shopify stores.
Integration with Shopify
As you can imagine, ease of integration with the Shopify platform is a paramount feature. A fully integrated app will streamline your business workflows, saving time and reducing redundant tasks.
Multi-channel support
In today's digital age, customers reach out via various channels: email, social media, phone, or live chat. A robust app should offer multi-channel support, ensuring consistent, high-quality customer service across all platforms.
Ticketing system
An organized ticketing system keeps track of all customer support requests, helps prioritize them based on urgency and other factors, and ensures that no request goes unanswered.
Automated responses
Automated responses can be a real time saver, providing instant answers to common customer inquiries. It's not a one-size-fits-all solution, but it's a great feature that supports teams in maintaining responsiveness and efficiency.
User-friendly interface
An intuitive and user-friendly interface makes navigating the app an easy task, which is vital for fast-paced customer service environments.
Customizability
Maintaining a consistent look and feel across all customer touchpoints, including customer service, enhances your brand's professionalism and can put your customers' minds at ease. Customizability in the app can help you achieve this consistency.
Reporting and analytics
Detailed reporting and analytics provide insights into various aspects of your customer interactions, like common complaints, resolution times, and other metrics. These insights are invaluable in understanding and improving your customer service over time.
Knowledge base integration
Having an integrated FAQ or knowledge base on your app allows customers to find solutions themselves and reduces the burden on your support team.
CRM capabilities or integrations
Features related to customer relationship management (CRM), such as maintaining customer profiles or interaction history, can significantly elevate the quality of your customer interactions.
Chatbots
A good chatbot can take over answering FAQs, guiding users, or escalating urgent requests to your team, substantially optimizing customer service efficiency.
Scalability
The app you choose should conveniently scale with your business as it grows without introducing additional complexities or requiring extensive reconfiguration.
Pricing
Naturally, the cost of the application should fit your budget, but remember to weigh it against the value the app provides.
Customer support
Lastly, dependable customer support from the app vendor can potentially save you a lot of hassle. You don't want to sit around waiting for support during a peak sales period.
Top 10 Shopify customer service apps
These customer service apps offer a range of features that can help you choose the best help desk for Shopify customer service. They can help you streamline your support efforts, enhancing both efficiency and customer satisfaction.
1. Help Scout
Best Shopify customer service app for human-centered customer interactions.
Help Scout helps growing ecommerce businesses manage all their customer conversations in one powerful platform that feels just like an email inbox.
Quick to set up and easy to use with your Shopify store, Help Scout enables customer-facing teams to focus on what really matters: growing customer relationships. Whether customers prefer to engage through email, live chat, or help centers, ecommerce customer service teams using Help Scout are ready with advanced features for collaboration, organization, and automation.
One key aspect that makes Help Scout a standout option is its Shopify integration. It allows you to view customer lifetime value, order details, and shipping status right from your Help Scout dashboard, providing you with context to craft personalized responses and enhance your customer service by providing a seamless support experience.
Help Scout’s Beacon feature also plays a significant role in positively affecting Shopify stores' customer service. Beacon lets you provide a live chat option on your Shopify store's page, enabling real-time conversations with customers. It helps your team answer queries promptly, ultimately ensuring improved customer satisfaction and potentially higher conversion rates.
Additionally, Help Scout's integration with Facebook Messenger extends your customer service to social media platforms. Since Facebook is used by a significant portion of online shoppers, this integration lets you meet customers where they're comfortable. You can address their inquiries and provide Facebook Messenger support without leaving your Help Scout inbox.
Price: Free trial available. Plans start at $20/user per month.
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2. Gorgias
Best Shopify customer service app for AI-driven automation.
Gorgias is a help desk platform using AI to consolidate all your customer communications into a single view. Serving as a comprehensive solution for Shopify merchants, Gorgias is designed to help your team manage and respond to customer service inquiries directly and efficiently.
The platform and its features are geared toward enabling an optimized customer service environment for Shopify stores. It centralizes customer interactions across all channels, from email to social media, into one dashboard, keeping all customer inquiries manageable and organized. Further, it integrates with your Shopify store so your team can view and edit Shopify orders without leaving the Gorgias interface.
Gorgias leverages automation to streamline common tasks. By employing machine learning, Gorgias enables you to set up automated responses to common questions or requests. It also assigns incoming requests to the most appropriate team member.
Price: Free trial available. Plans start at $10 per month (includes 50 tickets).
3. Zendesk
Best Shopify customer service app for creating a cohesive customer journey.
Zendesk is a customer service tool that aids businesses in improving customer engagement and understanding their customers better. Its platform consolidates various customer interactions and houses them in one place, enabling a transparent customer journey.
Its Shopify app integrates your customer service workflow with your ecommerce site, allowing you to access and respond to support queries, manage orders and refunds, and track customer engagements directly from the Zendesk interface.
Zendesk can analyze data from your Shopify store to create detailed reports on customer satisfaction, agent performance, and much more. Also, the ability to automatically turn emails, chats, and social media interactions into support tickets means that no customer help request gets lost or ignored.
Price: Free trial available. Plans start at $19/agent per month.
4. Re:amaze
Best Shopify customer service app for consolidated support.
Re:amaze is an integrated customer service platform designed to combine various customer support channels into one accessible interface. Its goal is to help businesses streamline customer service processes while improving response times and overall customer satisfaction.
For Shopify merchants, Re:amaze offers a range of features to help improve customer service. Its live chat function can be implemented directly on your Shopify storefront, allowing immediate and convenient communication with your customers while they're browsing. The platform also integrates well with Shopify, pulling customer and order data directly into the chat for a personalized customer service experience.
Re:amaze also shines with its ability to manage customer conversations across email, Instagram, Facebook, and SMS, all in one place. This multi-channel approach ensures you're able to cater to customer inquiries wherever they choose to engage and helps prevent any conversations from falling through the cracks. The Re:amaze dashboard is designed to give you an overview of all your ongoing conversations, facilitating focused and effective customer service.
Price: Free trial available. Plans start at $29/team member per month.
5. Tidio
Best Shopify customer service app for chatbot functionalities.
Tidio is primarily a Shopify chat support app designed to provide quick and effective real-time support to customers through its live chat and chatbots. Aimed at enhancing customer communication online, Tidio offers features that cater to retailers needing to address inquiries and demands promptly.
Tidio's live chat feature can be integrated into any Shopify store, allowing customers to send queries in real time and get immediate responses. The Tidio chatbot can be programmed to answer common customer queries automatically. It can also gather customer data and provide personalized product recommendations.
Another notable feature of Tidio is its customizability. You can personalize the live chat window, chatbot messages, and the overall look of your customer interaction panel, making the customer service experience more cohesive with your brand image.
Price: Free trial available. Plans including Shopify support start at $29/seat per month.
6. HelpCrunch
Best Shopify customer service app for customer engagement.
HelpCrunch is a customer communication platform that combines live chat, chatbots, knowledge base capability, pop-ups, and email marketing tools. It aims to streamline communication and engagement to increase customer satisfaction and drive sales.
One of HelpCrunch's main selling points for Shopify stores is its multichannel chat widget, which can be fully customized to match your brand style. This chat widget brings live chat, email, messengers, and social media channels like Facebook and Instagram together in a single dashboard, allowing your customer support team to provide assistance no matter where customers reach out from.
In addition to the chat widget, HelpCrunch offers a knowledge base tool that can be integrated into the chat widget for added context. It also comes with a WYSIWYG editor to create helpful content and optimize it for SEO. HelpCrunch's chatbots and auto messages help engage visitors and pre-qualify leads automatically.
HelpCrunch is not available in the Shopify app marketplace and needs to be installed directly on your Shopify store.
Price: Free trial available. Plans start at $12/team member per month.
7. Gladly
Best Shopify customer service app for omnichannel communication.
Gladly is a customer service platform that enables businesses to create a unified profile for each customer, capturing all interactions and personal preferences across multiple channels.
Gladly’s integration with Shopify enables businesses to unify order and shipping information with customer communication data. This integration allows customer service representatives to have instant access to customer purchase details within the same platform that houses all customer interactions.
Another prominent feature of Gladly is its omnichannel capability. Customer conversations from email, messaging, voice calls, and social media platforms can be streamlined into one place. Also, by enabling proactive outreach, Gladly aids businesses in providing an active support presence, anticipating and addressing customer needs.
Price: Plans start at $150/support hero per month (ten seat minimum).
8. SuperLemon
Best Shopify customer service app for WhatsApp support and sales.
SuperLemon is a customer service app designed to integrate with your Shopify store, leveraging the power of WhatsApp as an efficient communication channel for support and sales. The app helps streamline customer interactions and strengthens brand-customer connections through a widely used and familiar messaging platform.
By implementing SuperLemon's WhatsApp features, Shopify store owners can enhance customer support with effective communication in real time. The app allows customers to reach your support team easily through WhatsApp to seek assistance, ask questions, or place orders.
SuperLemon enables Shopify stores to send automated notifications to customers via WhatsApp, including order confirmations, shipping updates, and abandoned cart reminders. The app can also be customized with your store's branding, ensuring that each message aligns with your store's look and feel.
Price: Free trial and plan available. Paid plans start at $15 per month plus usage.
9. Richpanel
Best Shopify customer service app for automating routine tasks.
Richpanel is a customer service and help desk platform specifically designed for ecommerce businesses, including Shopify stores. It empowers businesses to enhance their customer support by streamlining communication, automating tasks, and centralizing order management.
One of Richpanel's notable features for Shopify stores is its unified inbox. It gathers customer interactions from multiple channels, including email, social media, and live chat, allowing support agents to respond quickly and efficiently in one place. This integration also covers real-time access to Shopify order information, ensuring that the support team has all the necessary data without leaving the Richpanel dashboard.
Richpanel also offers self-service options to reduce the workload on customer support teams. The platform allows for the creation of customizable help centers that cater to frequently asked questions, enabling customers to find solutions quickly without contacting support. Additionally, Richpanel automates routine tasks such as order cancellations and returns, freeing up time for support agents to focus on more complex issues.
Price: Free trial available. Plans start at $29/user per month.
10. Kustomer
Best Shopify customer service app for workflow automation.
Kustomer is a customer service platform designed to provide a complete and unified view of customer interactions across various channels. It aims to help businesses deliver personalized and efficient support and enhance their overall customer experience.
Kustomer integrates with Shopify, enabling businesses to streamline their customer service by centralizing all communication channels, including social media, chat, email, and phone conversations. The platform gives support agents real-time access to customer information and order history directly from the Shopify store.
The platform also offers workflow automation capabilities, allowing you to create custom rules and triggers to streamline common tasks and improve support team efficiency for your Shopify store. Kustomer's reporting and analytics features provide valuable insights that help you identify areas for improvement and measure the impact of your customer service initiatives.
Price: Plans start at $89/user per month (eight seat minimum).
How do I improve customer service on Shopify?
Good customer service not only resolves issues but also helps you build lasting relationships with your customers. Here are some ways you can provide better customer service on your Shopify store.
Use a comprehensive customer service app
Implement a customer service app that consolidates all customer interactions into one platform and integrates well with Shopify. This ensures that all customer data and history are readily accessible, making it easier for your staff to assist customers quickly and effectively.
Leverage live chat
Live chat provides an avenue for immediate interaction and engagement with your customers, allowing you to address any issues or inquiries in real time.
Automate routine tasks
A good Shopify customer service platform will allow for automation of routine tasks such as order tracking, refunds, and simple FAQ inquiries. This saves your team time and resources, allowing them to focus on more complex customer issues.
Provide self-service options
Self-service tools like knowledge bases and FAQ sections help reduce the load on your customer service team and allow customers to find answers to common questions at their convenience.
Balancing features with human connection
Customer support serves as the framework for customer satisfaction, retention, and promoting ongoing business growth. As a central component of your business strategy, it warrants careful attention and optimization.
Choosing the right app to facilitate customer service is about finding the right mix of features while never losing sight of the ever-important human connection you foster with your customers. This involves considering factors ranging from communication unification to the automation of routine tasks and effective live chat support.
While the right choice will always depend on your specific needs, Help Scout stands as a comprehensive support solution and a great option for your Shopify store. Sign up for a free trial of Help Scout today and experience everything the platform has to offer.
Jacinda Santora
The Supportive Weekly: A newsletter for people who want to deliver exceptional customer service.