Customer service has always been the underdog that significantly affects a business’s performance but is always overlooked due to a lack of time and resources. While businesses focused on generating more revenue, they missed an important contributor to that revenue- a positive customer experience.

Using the customer’s perspective to stay aligned with the evolving customer needs is essential for your business to foster a customer-centric culture. There are many customer success metrics that can help you track your customer satisfaction and tools that enable you to improve those metrics.

Before getting into customer success tools, let us talk about customer success in e-commerce.

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What Constitutes Customer Success in E-commerce?

Customer Success is a collective term given to a set of practices that result in customers achieving the desired results when purchasing a product or service. Large organizations generally employ a customer success manager to handle customer success tasks.

In the e-commerce industry, customer success management (CSM) includes the planning and project management of workflows that contribute to the satisfaction of online customers. An e-commerce business can attain customer success in a variety of ways, some of which include:

  • Help desks for customer support

  • Surveys that depict customer satisfaction levels

  • Content personalization

  • Analytics for tracking customer health scores

There are many customer success tools in the market that offer multiple ways of enabling online businesses to adopt a customer-centric approach. We will discuss some of these customer success softwares here that you can integrate with using Integrate.io to drive meaningful user experiences:

1. Delighted

Delighted is a real-time survey feedback tool for collecting and organizing actionable user feedback. The surveys in Delighted can be used to collect feedback from your organization’s customers, products, or employees.

Following are some of Delighted’s key features:

  • 8 Survey Templates: The platform offers 8 ready-to-use survey templates (NPS, CSAT, etc.) for creating engaging and personalized surveys to ‘delight’ the users.

  • Omnichannel feedback: Delighted allows users to submit their feedback on their choice of application or device. 

  • 5 Survey Delivery Methods: The customer feedback is delivered back to your business through one of Delighted’s 5 survey delivery methods:

  • Customization: Businesses can customize their surveys to the look and feel of their brands with their logo and colors. They can also send email surveys from their domains.

  • Personalization: The surveys can be tailored to ask questions tailored to a customer’s unique situation.

  • Automation: Delighted’s autopilot features allow businesses to schedule survey deliveries. The platform also sends follow-up surveys in a way that does not bother the customers.

  • Analysis: Delighted offers real-time dashboards, survey metrics, and automated feedback reports for businesses to analyze their feedback and make relevant improvements.

Personalization is the key for your e-commerce business to stay ahead of your competitors. Delighted claims to enhance your customer experience with its best practice surveys that can increase your business’s survey response rate. Delighted’s intuitive surveys provide e-commerce businesses with actionable feedback that can help them gain and retain happy customers.

2. Clearbit

Clearbit is a data activation platform that provides a bird’s eye view of your entire customer base, market, and prospects. The platform’s complete picture allows businesses to identify target audiences and track customer engagement. In this way, businesses can focus their resources and workflows on valuable prospects and turn them into customers.

Following are some of Clearbit’s key features:

  • Hyper-Personalization: Businesses can create their demand with Clearbit’s hyper-personalized approach using targeted ads and campaigns to connect to customers. 

  • Data-Driven Prospecting: Clearbit uses customer data from a business’s existing integrations to create Customer Profiles. Thereby allowing businesses to build a list of valuable prospects with the highest intent using these profiles.

  • Instant Sales Alerts: Clearbit helps businesses keep an eye on their customer engagement with notifications and alerts, so they can take required actions in real-time.

  • Smart Chat: Businesses can use Clearbit’s smart chat feature to engage the best prospects in real-time.

  • Enhanced Revenue Analytics: Clearbit offers enhanced revenue analytics for businesses to focus on what's driving revenue at their organization.

  • Enriched Accounts & Contacts: Clearbit makes sure your business has access to the most up-to-date information.

  • Integrations: Clearbit offers integrations to popular CRM platforms like Hubspot, Segment, and more, to help businesses push and sync data across all systems they are connected with.

Ecommerce businesses know the struggles of discovering, retaining, and engaging customers. Clearbit claims to be a revenue-driven platform that helps such businesses satisfy their most valuable customers for driving more revenue.

3. Tidio

Tidio is an all-round customer communication software created for automating customer service and improving customer experience. Tidio can help businesses get high-quality leads, increase conversions, improve efficiency, and automate customer service up to 70% while offering fast and efficient support. 

Here are some key features of Tidio:

  • Conversational AI: The chatbot Lyro can help automate up to 70% of customer requests. 

  • Live chat: Manage customer support in real-time for better customer experience.

  • Chatbot flows: Lets you create chatbots without coding and comes with dozens of predesigned templates.

  • Helpdesk: Handle messages from all channels in one tool.

  • Email marketing automation: Helps create personalized marketing campaigns in minutes.

  • Tidio+: A tailored customer experience ecosystem with custom limits for agents seats and chatbots.

Tidio is a great choice for businesses aiming at providing stellar customer experience without installing dozens of different disconnected tools. With everything in one place, multiple integrations, and AI-driven tools, Tidio can help supercharge your business.

4. Recurly

Recurly is a subscription management and recurring billing platform that offers accelerated subscriber growth to businesses. An optimized subscription strategy can help eliminate customer churn using intelligent customer retention.

Following are some of Recurly’s key features:

  • Subscription Plan Management: Whether the business is new or growing, Recurly offers agile plan management to meet the subscription requirements of innovative businesses.

  • Automated Recurring Billing: Recurly offers a variety of billing options for automated invoicing that eliminate the risk of manual accounting errors. 

  • Flexible Payments:  Recurly provides a flexible payment system that can accept a variety of payment options using cards or digital wallets like Amazon Pay. Global payment gateways allow businesses to reach subscribers worldwide.

  • Intelligent Customer Retention: Recurly is built with the capabilities to increase the customer lifetime value of a business. By reducing failed payments and increasing business revenue, Recurly fights off customer churn in the background.

Recurly is engineered to satisfy specific subscription growth needs that are different for every business. E-commerce is a competitive business with evolving subscription needs. Recurly claims to simplify billing and payments for these businesses so they can focus on selling their products.

5. QuickBooks

QuickBooks is an accounting software that offers simplified accounting services for small businesses. It is a platform where businesses can track their expenses, run reports, customize their invoices, and more, all in one software.

Following are some of the key features offered by QuickBooks:

  • Invoicing: QuickBooks offers professional-looking invoice templates that can be used to automatically create innovative invoices in seconds. QuickBooks makes getting paid simpler and more creative with custom invoices and quotes. 

  • Expenses: QuickBooks maintains a photo record of all receipts so there are no gaps in tracking expenses for taxes.

  • Reports: Businesses can analyze their progress using Quickbooks’ reporting feature which offers a variety of reports for performance analysis. QuickBooks reports can also be customized to add details specific to a business.

  • Connections to the bank: QuickBooks offers connections to a business’s bank to keep a consistent record of income and expenses.

  • Budget Management: QuickBooks offers budget management for running and growing businesses in its Essentials and Plus pricing plan.

Accounting is a daunting task and there is so much that can go wrong when these tasks are performed manually. E-commerce businesses require their resources to focus on increasing their revenue. A platform like QuickBooks is a great tool for online businesses to manage their expenses without having to spend time manually tracking receipts and creating invoices.

6. Salesforce

Salesforce is a customer relationship management (CRM) software that is ranked as the world’s #1 CRM tool. It is a collaborative platform that brings all business teams together to focus on finding new customers and retaining existing ones.

Following are some of the key features offered by Salesforce:

  • Ease-of-use:  Salesforce offers a Visual Workflow for businesses to easily design and automate their processes.

  • Custom 360: Salesforce provides a complete view of the customer to all teams of a business in a way that all teams have access to the same data. Salesforce becomes a platform of single truth for all business teams.

  • Reports & Dashboards: Salesforce provides real-time dashboards of a business’s progress that can be accessed from anywhere at any time.

  • Portable CRM: With Salesforce, mobiles can be used to log calls, check dashboards, and respond to leads from anywhere in the world.

  • Contact Management: Salesforce enhances the customer experience using customer data from their communications, account interactions, key contacts, product usage, and more. It allows businesses to drive insights from social media applications, directly from within the Salesforce platform.

Salesforce claims to provide a customer-centric approach to e-commerce businesses. A business built around the different phases of its customer’s journey grows faster and is relatively more agile than its competitors.

Related Reading: 5 Ways to Integrate Salesforce With Other Platforms

7. SendGrid

SendGrid is an email delivery, API, and marketing platform that leverages the email service for reliable inbox delivery. The platform offers smart email marketing for building meaningful connections with customers.

Following are some of the key features of SendGrid:

  • Email API: SendGrid’s email API allows businesses to integrate with the platform in minutes. The email API ensures trusted email delivery to users’ inboxes.

  • Scalability: SendGrid offers seamless scalability to the growing email requirements of businesses that do not have the time or resources to focus on an email program. SendGrid sends over 100 billion emails a month.

  • Automation: SendGrid leverages AI to empower its deliverability with features like email automation, multichannel advertising, email marketing, and more.

  • Infrastructure setup: SendGrid optimizes a business’s IP address setup based on the volume of emails they send monthly.

  • Delivery Rate Optimization: SendGrid improves the rate at which a business’s emails reach the target inboxes. 

  • Security: SendGrid keeps emails secure with authentications and permissions.

SendGrid can be great for e-commerce businesses to generate targeted emails based on customers’ behaviors and interests. Personalization at this level is a great way to develop important connections with customers.

8. Zendesk

Zendesk is a customer service software that offers multichannel, conversational experiences to satisfy customers. The platform makes customer service better by keeping businesses in sync with their customer’s needs.

Following are some of the key features offered by Zendesk:

  • Customer Support:  Zendesk offers real-time customer support at any place and time. The platform’s Zendesk Suite provides exceptional support that is seamlessly consistent across all support channels.

  • Effective Sales:  Zendesk drives sales using the Zendesk Sell feature that delivers meaningful conversations to win over prospects. 

  • Reporting & Analytics:  Businesses can use Zendesk’s reports to analyze their customer health throughout the customer lifecycle and make relevant improvements using conversational experiences.

  • AI-driven Service: Zendesk has an Answer Bot that works alongside a business’s support team to provide additional brainpower to the team and automate repetitive tasks. Unlike the teams, the Answer Bot is always available for support.

An e-commerce business is driven by the needs and demands of the customer. If there is a communication gap between your business and customers, you are not very likely to succeed in the industry. Zendesk can help build meaningful connections between you and your customers.

Related Reading: 5 Tips for Pushing Data From Your Warehouse to Zendesk

9. Xero

Xero is a cloud-based accounting software that caters to the accounting needs of small to medium-sized businesses. The software allows businesses to integrate with their banks, accountants, bookkeepers, and other business applications.

Following are some of the key features provided by Xero:

  • Bill Payment: Xero allows businesses to track their bills and pay them on time. Xero provides a complete picture of a business’s accounts payable and cash flow so no bills are missed. 

  • Bank Connections: Xero provides connections to a business’s bank so their transactions can flow directly into the Xero platform, each business day. 

  • Accepting Payments: Xero offers quick online payment acceptance with integrations to Stripe, GoCardless, and more. 

  • Contact Management: Xero brings together all of a customer’s sales details, e.g. invoices, payments, etc., in one place.

  • Capturing data: Xero automates data capturing using Hubdoc. 

  • Reporting & Dashboards:  Xero provides detailed accounting reports for businesses to track their finances. An accounting dashboard provides a real-time picture of the day-to-day finances of a business.

Xero is an appropriate solution for an e-commerce business to focus better on buying and selling goods instead of worrying about their payments. With a simplified approach to accounting, Xero claims to handle all accounting tasks for a business in a single platform.

10. Slack

Slack is a digital communication software designed specifically for business teams to collaborate and communicate for business use. It serves as a digital headquarter for businesses to enhance their teamwork in a flexible manner. 

Following are some of the key features supported by Slack:

  • Channels: Slack offers centralized conversation spaces, called Channels, for bringing the right teams and the right information together. 

  • Workflow Builder: Slack supports a workflow builder that automates routine tasks in a business’s workflow, so teams can focus on tasks that cannot be automated.

  • Integrations: Slack offers integrations to over 2200 services, like Google Drive, to streamline the workflow in a single platform.

  • Enterprise Key Management: Slack keeps business communications secure with encryption keys that control the access and visibility of the discussions.

For any business to succeed, it is important for all teams of the business to be on the same page. By bringing all work communications to one place, Slack allows business teams to collaborate and make decisions faster.

Integrate Customer Success Tools in your Ecommerce Data Stack

The bottom line of our discussion around customer success tools is the relative relationship between customer success and your business’s growth. To stay competitive in the market, it is absolutely essential for your e-commerce business to incorporate customer success into your corporate strategy.

Integrating the right customer success tools in your e-commerce data stack is a step in the right direction for your company to embrace customer success practices. A customer-focused data stack can significantly improve your brand’s customer experience and boost your sales. 

If you want to add customer success to your data stack but are still unsure where to start, check out Integrate.io for customer success tools that can optimize your e-commerce data stack. Get in touch with us today and let us help you out.