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Shopify Customer Service – Best Practices to Implement in Your Business

7 min read
Mar 13, 2023
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Setting up your customer service strategy is worth learning from the best-in-class. It means it's good to sometimes sneak a peek at the best practices of big brands and implement them within your organization.

To make your life easier, we’ve looked into Shopify customer service to learn how its team handles customer queries. Let’s look into how Shopify handles customer support.

How to contact the Shopify support team

Before focusing on what you'd like to say to your customers, you should decide how to communicate with them. There are numerous channels you could use for good customer service, such as:

Shopify provides customer service to 1.75+ million merchants worldwide. Let's look at how you can contact Shopify support to get the help you need.

Shopify Help Center

Shopify Help Center support

Shopify provides a vast and easily searchable knowledge base, offering help documents related to topics from various areas, including orders, products, deliveries, or migrating an already created store to Shopify.

Shopify Help Center also provides valuable materials related to growing an ecommerce business and additional apps you could use to grow sales in your store.

Shopify live chat support

Shopify live chat support

Shopify offers an option to contact the customer service team using a live chat service. This makes the customer's life much easier as long as support is provided instantly. After all, what’s the benefit of having live chat software on your website if visitors need to wait for a response via email? That’s exactly why Shopify provides instant customer service and builds a personal connection with customers right on their own website.

What’s interesting about Shopify’s live chat is that it provides 24/7 live chat support both for customers as well as for its Shopify partners (with LiveChat as one of the partners with its software designed for Shopify users).

Call Shopify support

Shopify callback

For many years Shopify provided a direct phone number for its major markets. However, last year, they transitioned over to a callback system to ensure that their customers spend less time on hold and more time growing their business. To schedule a callback, merchants can:

Phone callbacks are available depending on their current contact volume. If the “schedule a callback” option isn't visible, customers should get in touch with the customer service team via another support channel.

Shopify support Email

Shopify email support

Shopify still offers standard email support as a traditional channel for answering customer questions. This is likely not the most preferred channel by Shopify’s customers, but still, leaving an email might be more effective if you don’t have time for instant communication.

Shopify Community

Shopify Community

You can also get help via the Community. It gives you access to over 900,000 Shopify Merchants and Partners. You can ask questions, join conversations around popular topics, and find solutions to common issues. There are popular topics around store feedback, Shopify design, Shopify apps, ecommerce marketing, and more. It's a place where you can connect and collaborate with other Shopify businesses near you or at any stage of your growth. 

Before contacting Shopify support directly, it's worth checking the Community. There's a good chance you'll find a topic about your issue, resolved by Shopify staff or Shopify Partners.

Twitter support

Shopify twitter support

The last way to connect with Shopify Customer Service is through direct contact via Twitter. You won’t find many big brands with a direct Twitter message channel, which makes Shopify especially unique. After starting a Twitter support session, you’re brought to a direct message at Shopify’s Twitter, which is quite similar to the live chat conversation.

Now that we’ve learned how Shopify provides customer service, let’s look into the way Shopify provides support via live chat.

Delivering the best possible live chat experience

We’ve heard a lot of good words about Shopify’s live chat service, and as partners, we've used it as well, but we decided to give it a try as a customer.

My favorite experience was helping a merchant through the entire process of setting up his new store. He was totally new to everything ecommerce, but he gave us a shot. I had the pleasure of answering his first email and partnering with him through the process.

Christina, Shopify Support Guru, Moncton, Canada

So, we contacted Shopify support with a potential issue related to our online store. After logging in, we clicked the “Help Center” tab in the website’s top right corner. We landed on a well-crafted landing page full of topics divided into categories related to running a store: Start, Sell, Manage, Market, and Expand.

In our case, we wanted to check what support we’ll get in case of an issue with installing an additional app at our Shopify store. 

Shopify Help Center

Based on the problem, we got a special recommendation from Shopify's knowledge base, with the best possible material to solve our issue.

Shopify knowledge base recommendation

If you don’t find what you're looking for, you can scroll down to the bottom to find "Contact Shopify Support". After you choose to contact the Support team, you’re presented with a few possible options, including chat, email, call, or community. The main one is a live chat service which shows that it's a preferred way of providing support by Shopify.

Shopify support contact

So, let’s look into how Shopify provides customer support via live chat.

We’ve started a random chat with a customer service representative to check if they’d be able to help us. An issue with installing an app from a Shopify App Store doesn’t seem to be standard. Most often, the apps are added seamlessly, so we considered it an additional challenge for the support team.

After starting a chat, we were instantly greeted by Ardo, a “Shopify Guru”. That's Shopify's name for the support team member. For instance, we have Support Heroes at LiveChat. 

Shopify live chat start

After explaining the issue about installing the app, we were guided to provide the store’s name, which enabled him to view the details of our store. Ardo confirmed the application we wanted to install in our store and proceeded with the remote installation of the chosen app. The app is now magically installed at our store.

Shopify live chat conversation

Kudos Shopify Support Team! Going an extra mile is the type of service we aim to deliver over here at LiveChat as well!

Kudos, Shopify Support Team! Going the extra mile is the type of service we aim to deliver at LiveChat as well!

Immediately after the conversation, we were provided with an email from the Support Guru with a chat transcript, which comes in handy if you unexpectedly disconnect or leave a chat window by mistake. You can still continue the conversation via email after ending the chat.

Do you also want to leverage the LiveChat benefits? Start our 30-day trial and learn the best practices from Shopify!

Shopify customer service in numbers

During our test, we also took a look at the numbers related to the response times from each communication channel. Let’s look at the time it took us to reach a customer service representative for each of Shopify’s support channels:

ChannelResponse time
Email10 hours
Twitter7 minutes
Live Chat30 seconds

Shopify is the third-largest ecommerce platform in the United States and has more than 2.1 million daily active users. Over 4.4 million websites use Shopify to run their online store. There are over 7000 applications available in the Shopify app store to assist businesses in customizing their stores. And the average merchant has six apps installed.

As you can see, the Shopify support team could be flooded with technical questions, and customers waiting for answers. However, with the right customer service strategy, including self-service support filled with current documentation, an active community as a valid source of knowledge, smooth social media support, and instant live chat support, it's doable to rock the ecommerce market and score 90% customer satisfaction.

Good customer service team

Even though the Shopify team consists of hundreds of Customer Support Gurus worldwide, it’s still possible to implement effective and high-quality customer service in your business on a much lower scale.

Consider adding LiveChat to your Shopify store and connect with customers while they're browsing your store. Identify customer buying motives, offer personalized help, and improve the buying experience for visitors. Stop switching between admin panels to answer customer queries.

Offer support across different channels, such as Facebook Messenger, Twitter, Instagram, and WhatsApp, and handle every query inside one live chat app. Let your customers enjoy an amazing experience in your Shopify store!

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