4 eCommerce Best Practices for Maximizing Help Scout
Through research and customer conversations, we see a few different ways eCommerce customers use various portions of Help Scout. Since every business is different this doesn’t get into specifics, but can be used as a guide to point you in the right direction and spark ideas on what might work the best for your specific needs.
Tags
These can be added automatically to emails via workflows, or manually on individual emails. If you need emails to stand out in the inbox, or need to categorize certain kinds of emails, tags are a great resource.
Examples:
- Sales
- Amazon Sales
- Out of Stock
- Refund/Return/Exchange
- [Product name(s)]
- Tracking
- Payment
- Quotes
Further reading: Create and manage tags / Categorize incoming email
Workflows
In Help Scout we call automations workflows, and they can be set up to either run automatically when certain conditions are met in Help Scout, or manually on individual emails. Manual workflows are especially helpful to use after reading an individual email, they can take many actions for you (e.g. add a tag, add a note, reply to the customer, change the status) all with one click.
Examples:
- Move mailbox based on subject line for different products or issues
- Highlight certain emails to catch attention in the queue - IF subject is equal to [Return & Exchanges] THEN tag
- Instead of using mailbox auto reply, set up workflow to look for keywords in the subject/body to then send email to customer for specific issues
- If you have certain teammates who handle specific requests/products - IF subject contains X, THEN assign to Y.
- If a custom field is set, that can trigger an assignment to a specific user or Team.
Further reading: Get started with workflows / Automate your inbox
Custom Fields
Custom Fields and Tags are both great email tracking tools, but they have some nuances. Custom Fields are better for tracking things on every single conversation, like if you wanted to track and report on conversations by product type, region, or order number.
Examples (you would set these on most/every single email you reply to):
- Order number
- Product type
- Follow up date
- Return reason
Further reading: Work with Custom Fields / Report on Custom Fields
Reporting
Using either tags or custom fields, you can set up reporting views that allow you to get an accurate view of the kinds of issues you are seeing weekly/monthly/quarterly. We see eCommerce customers setting up these kinds of reporting views:
- Refunds
- Replacements/Damage
- Cancellations
- Fulfillment
- Shipping
Further reading: Understanding reports / Use views to filter reports