Out of 6000+ Shopify apps, Monk probably has the best customer support. Here’s why.
Updated: Dec 9, 2021
Our team of 3 humans & 5 cats has been building Monk (a full suite upsell app for Shopify merchants) for nearly 6 months now. It's not an understatement when I say that we're a team of absolute feedback ho*s & one thing we realized soon after the launch of our v1 was the vital role customer support plays in the Shopify app ecosystem. Almost all of our product feedback came via users who interacted with us via chat or email support.
Therefore, in the months leading up to BFCM 2021 we made customer support one of our top priorities & we'd like to think we did a pretty good job at it:
We were able to achieve an average response time of ~75 seconds with 0 queries left unhandled (n~150 over a span of 2 months).
Here's how we do it:
1. Prioritize chat over email support
E-mail support is convenient to manage but has response times of several hours (in the best case). A Shopify merchant has 10s of things they're managing at once and emailing back & forth with an app developer clearly won't show up high on that list. This is why we integrated Help Scout to allow users to reach us via live chat from within the app dashboard itself.
Our aim is try & resolve the query & fix any issues live on chat itself but in cases where it isn't possible, we email the user with regular progress updates every few hours.
2. 20 hour availability, daily.
Within the 3 of us, we altered our sleep cycles in such a way that at least one of us is awake and available to respond for 20 out of the 24 hrs, all 7 days of the week. It's only in a short 4 hour window when neither of us are available & this window coincides with mostly non-work/office timings in USA/Canada.
3. Help Scout x Slack integration
Every time a user starts a chat, we get it as a notification on a dedicated slack channel. This enables us to immediately pick up the conversation and work towards solving the user's queries.
4. User chat = All hands-on-deck
Irrespective of what either of the 3 of us is doing, if a user is on chat - it's all hands on deck. One of us picks up the conversation while the rest start looking for solutions to the problems a user might be facing. This was especially profound from late Oct to mid Nov when we spent nearly 60% of our time only on support & support related issues.
5. Custom solutions
We also spend a decent amount of our time building custom solutions & adding custom logics and restrictions just to cater to a specific merchant's needs so that they get an upsell exactly as they want.
While all of the above works quite well to optimize our response times - we also make it a point to ensure that the quality of support & resolutions are also top notch. Some of our reviews are a testament to this quality -
(Read full reviews here)
As Shopify app devs, we believe we play a small but significant role in the growth of our merchant's stores and they deserve nothing but the absolute best service possible so that they can get on with building the business of their dreams :)