Twitter Facebook LinkedIn Flipboard 0 WHO YOU ARE: A Retailer As a retailer, you built your product to fulfill a distinct need, or your business was born from a dream. And it’s that bigger thing your employees are rallying behind—the creativity, beauty, value, or quality your brand offers. You know that happy customers become repeat customers, which leads to increased revenue. You also know that building good customer relationships, rewarding loyalty, and continuing to innovate is the way forward. Still, it’s no easy task to give customers what they want, when they want it, at the best price, and to deliver it all with a smile. WHAT KEEPS YOU UP AT NIGHT Your success depends on your products as well as your brand reputation. The brand side is influenced by both your marketing and customer service teams. The product side involves a lot of moving parts, as well as dependence on third parties—manufacturers, distributors, and shipping services. If ecommerce wasn’t tricky enough, add dozens or even thousands of retail outposts, and you’ve got a multi-channel sales and support conundrum. You’ve invested in a complex web of systems that automate and track every part of your business, but it remains hard to connect them and to keep pace with customer expectations. Increasingly, customers expect the staff in your contact center as well as on your sales floors to have the exact same, up-to-the-minute information, and to respond consistently. KILLER APP COMBO Zendesk can be the cornerstone of the customer journey, connecting customer service with your other major systems, helping to streamline all messaging, and allowing you to see all customer interactions across all support channels in a single view. After all, the data support collects is valuable to the rest of the business, helping to identify what’s returned, and why. Zendesk integrates with more than 100 systems, and the apps below are perfect for the retail space. Magento, Shopify, Cartloom, Bigcommerce, Infusionsoft Your ecommerce system is your heavyweight on the back-end, collecting the bulk of all customer and order data. Many retailers use their ecommerce system as their CRM, but customer service agents don’t always have access to this data. Zendesk integrates with many ecommerce systems, including Magento, Shopify, Cartloom, Bigcommerce, and Infusionsoft. When integrated, agents gain insight into the customer’s support history, as well as their order history, subscriptions, billing cycle, and more. Kevy, Zapier Kevy enables Zendesk users to automatically share data between their cloud apps. By tying your customer service platform to your ecommerce and marketing automation systems, like Bronto, you can create better alignment between sales, marketing, and support. Zapier is another great connector app, allowing you to connect and sync with other tools you might use. Zopim Zopim is the answer to the proactive chat piece of the retail puzzle, helping to stem shopping cart abandonment and letting you answer customer questions before the customer reaches the point of frustration. Plus, the insight into where on your website your customers are the spending the most (or least) time is pretty valuable too. Yotpo How do you make your customer service team work harder for you? Show them off. Yotpo is a tool that helps to generate and collect reviews of the products you sell and to display them on your website or social media profiles. Mapply Mapply is a full featured store locator app that, when integrated into Zendesk, allows agents to look up store locations nearest to a customer and add them to a ticket. Glance Glance is a great tool to help agents navigate technical issues customers may be having on your ecommerce site. Agents can launch co-browsing and screen sharing sessions right from the Zendesk ticket, decreasing resolution time, as well as customer frustration. Tango Card, Ifeelgood Gifting While you can’t buy customer loyalty, it doesn’t mean that agents shouldn’t be empowered to reward customers at opportune times, perhaps on their birthday, or when they’ve been patient on a slow-to-resolve issue. Tango Card and Ifeelgoods Gifting are both easy ways for agents to send personalized gift certificates to a customer right from the Zendesk ticket. (We can’t think of anyone who doesn’t like a free gift sometimes.) Learn more about Zendesk for retail This is part of a series focused on extending Zendesk to meet your company’s most fundamental needs. Check back next month to see what apps or integrations we recommend for the enterprise. In previous installments we covered: The Contact Center The Midsize Business The SaaS Company The Small Business Twitter Tweet Facebook Share Email This article originally appeared on Zendesk and has been republished with permission.Find out how to syndicate your content with B2C Join our Telegram channel to stay up to date on breaking news coverage Author: Alan Draper Based in the United Kingdom, Business 2 Community editor Alan is part of the team that’s responsible for ensuring all the content on our site is accurate, relevant and up-to-date. In addition to editing, he is also a writer and an expert on the stock market. Alan has previously written … View full profile ›More by this author:Get Free Bitcoin and Earn Interest on Crypto with ZenGo5 Best Cryptos to Buy on the Dip in the May Crypto CrashEuroswap EDEX: Last TokenSale phase before listing – team announces the list of exchanges