Ecommerce Customer Service Software That Grows With Your Business (7 Tools)

For a long while, customer support was seen as a “value add” of sorts.

Sure, it was nice to have. But, it wasn’t pivotal to business success the way sales and operations might be.

We’re happy to say that viewpoint has shifted. Smart, contemporary businesses recognize that customer service is critical for understanding customer journeys, acting on shopper data, and making experience and product improvements that have a real impact on sales and retention.

Unfortunately, though, this new era has left many Shopify founders in the lurch.

How are small- and medium-sized brands with limited staff, budget, and time meant to handle all the responsibilities that come with providing great customer service?

Say hello to ecommerce customer service software.

With the right tech, any retailer large or small can save time and money, tap into the power of personalization and data, and overall create an experience that consumers crave.

Read on to learn how to identify that tech, as well as our top platform recommendations for 2025 and beyond.

What’s ecommerce customer service software do?

Customer service is something we’re passionate about here at OpenDesk. And a huge part of that world today is the software that makes it accessible for ecommerce founders using Shopify.

We think of the category of ecommerce customer service software as encompassing all the various tools and applications retailers can use to optimize the customer experience via support.

Customer service software in all its forms should enable ecommerce businesses to provide proactive, personalized assistance to shoppers, when and where they need it. To get more specific, this type of tooling typically allows customer service teams to manage and track customer inquiries, deliver support as close to real-time as possible, and turn consumer behavior into insights to improve future interactions.

Sound like a good investment for your brand? It very likely is. So let’s get right into the actual platforms that can deliver on this functionality for you.

7 modern options for customer service tools

Ready to ensure streamlined, effective, and always customer-focused support operations? Here, we’ve compiled some of today’s top solutions for a variety of ecommerce business types and budgets.

1. OpenDesk: Affordable, smart support boosts retention for SMBs

OpenDesk is an AI-powered customer support solution we designed specifically for ecommerce businesses — based on our own experience managing some of the best Shopify brands. Our smart blend of modern features, combined with reasonable and transparent pricing, helps us stand out as one of the best platforms for small- to medium-sized Shopify founders.

Our favorite OpenDesk features:

• Prioritized, omnichannel inbox: OpenDesk centralizes all messages, automatically supplemented with sentiment scoring, Shopify data, and customer value, so urgent issues and key customers get timely attention.
• Customizable AI-powered resolution automation: Auto-draft responses in seconds, and enhance them with easy-to-find customer data like order history. Train our AI with your own content to make sure responses are always on brand.
• Detailed CSAT scoring: Compare customer satisfaction scores for automated and manual responses to fine-tune automation and maintain quality.
• Modern analytics: Our unique Tickets per Order metric helps identify recurring pain points, so you can get ahead of issues to reduce ticket volume, optimize the supply chain, and grow shopper retention.

Pricing: OpenDesk is just $49 per month. No metered tickets, no user limits, no out-of-reach features. We strive to keep our pricing affordable and simple for SMBs that want to save time as well as money. If that pricing speaks to you, start your 30-day free trial now and start taking advantage of our revolutionarily simple yet powerful solution.

2. Zendesk: Service solution for bigger teams and budgets

Chances are you’ve heard of Zendesk — one of the most widely used customer service platforms. As such, it provides quite a comprehensive suite of tools not only for customer support but for sales and employee management as well. Its scale, which coincides with its pricing, caters to businesses with large customer bases with high query volume and complex support needs.

Key features:

• Support that connects with customers via various channels (including voice).
• Advanced ticketing system with AI-powered automation and workflow customization to streamline repetitive tasks.
• AI bots for those who want to provide around-the-clock service.
• Extensive reporting and analytics to monitor key performance indicators and drive data-backed improvements.
• Integrations with many of the apps agents need.

Pricing: The service plan begins at $55/agent/month when billed annually. Many automation and AI features are only available at a higher tier or for an additional fee.

3. HappyFox: Complex service suite for DIY-ers with deep pockets

HappyFox has all kinds of products under its umbrella that businesses can string together, from a help desk to a service desk, chatbot functionality, various AI offerings, and beyond. This makes it a good fit for Shopify brands that demand customization to handle unique support requirements — and have the technical expertise and bigger budget to pull it off.

Notable features:

• The help desk platform calms the chaos with omnichannel, unified ticketing as well as self-service features.
• Various AI capabilities support conversational and generative AI to resolve issues faster.
• Chatbot integration helps wipe out repetitive tasks.
• Build community forums that foster customer collaboration and knowledge sharing.
• Support for multiple brands within a single platform.

Pricing: Different features have different payment plans. The help desk starts at $9/agent/month annually. AI, chat, workflow, and other capabilities are all available for additional fees.

4. Hiver: Help desk tooling with a multi-channel focus

With the help desk side of its platform, Hiver is all about streamlining customer support by consolidating conversations from tons of channels — email, chat, calls, WhatsApp, etc. — into a singular inbox. For small to medium-sized brands that tend to engage with consumers across various platforms, Hiver offers a solution that’s simple enough to set up and use.

Top features:

• Shared inboxes allow team members to collaborate on tickets without duplicating efforts.
• Detailed tracking means no ticket gets missed and ensures timely responses.
• A knowledge base reroutes customers with FAQs.
• Voice-based queries you can manage through the Hiver + Aircall integration.
• Light AI features with summarization and template recommendations.

Pricing: Hiver has a free tier with limited features, then ramps up to $19/user/month yearly. Keep in mind that with this plan, some of the automation and analytics features and all of the AI ones are unavailable.

5. Foundever: Customer experience with unique outsourcing option

Foundever is foremost a provider of customer experience outsourcing. In addition, their customer support tool features omnichannel ticket management, self-service options, and a phone-based contact center component. Foundever’s powerful services and solutions are best for bigger businesses that either have large in-house customer support teams or are busy enough to outsource that task.

Features to know about:

• The unified desk concept integrates with customer relationship management (CRM) platforms and more to create a holistic support environment.
• Conversational AI tools help provide self-service capabilities and reduce agent workload.
• Customer care outsourcing services are easily tailored to your industry.
• Interactive self-service content makes for a more satisfying customer experience.
• Custom rules and automations let you design smart ticket routing workflows, saving time and resources.

Pricing: You’ll have to get in touch with the Foundever team for pricing, but based on the size of the company and breadth of features — costs are likely set with enterprise buyers in mind.

6. Front: Customer service software for the integration-obsessed

Front focuses on providing AI-powered solutions to manage customer inquiries across multiple channels. With lots of integrations and an API, it’s particularly well-suited for teams that want to plug into various other business tools. Businesses of various sizes with robust tech stacks can benefit from working with Front for their support needs.

Best features:

• AI that pulls from your knowledge base to solve queries wisely.
• Seamless integration with over 100 apps and services, including CRMs and project management tools.
• Automations save time by streamlining ticket routing and response workflows.
• Built-in workload balancing helps reduce burnout.

Pricing: Annually, Front users can pay $19/seat/month for up to 10 seats. AI and analytics not available at the lowest tier.

7. Acquire: build support workflows with this spendy, robust platform

Acquire is an entire customer engagement platform designed to provide real-time support through advanced tools like live chat, video calling, and even something called co-browsing. Its extensive capabilities and matching pricing make it a good choice for businesses with big support needs that are ready to invest in a substantial tool.

Features of note:

• Powerful, customizable workflows seamlessly integrate customer information to enhance ticket queue management, improve self-service, and provide agents with valuable context.
• Cool co-browsing functionality makes it even easier for support agents to assist customers by making it possible to look at the same page at the same time.
• Video and voice calling offer additional support solutions.
• Unified customer profiles and CRM integration create a single source of truth from which to provide more personalized support.

Pricing: Acquire’s full, integrated solution runs $2,000 per month, billed annually, and the self-service option is $500 — both priced before the cost of adding agents.

Why customer support software should be part of your stack

What makes customer support software a cornerstone of success for growing ecommerce brands?

It’s critical to helping businesses with limited resources still provide delightfully scalable, data-backed, and personalized consumer experiences.

Save time through automation and consolidation

In today’s omnichannel world, there’s a very real chance customers are contacting you through all kinds of channels — email, social media, and on and on. A robust customer service tool centralizes all of these inquiries on one, easy-to-use platform. This makes it possible to apply smart automation to prioritize tickets and create AI-enriched responses that save agents time.

Provide more personalized, context-rich support

Relying on multiple tools and platforms (or just good ol’ email) to communicate with online shoppers can lead to a disjointed view of conversations and customers’ unique needs.

This lack of context can leave customers frustrated when they don’t feel agents are clued into their issue. Effective help desk software becomes the single source of truth providing a comprehensive view of each customer’s interactions — empowering support to always serve up personalized answers and experiences.

Get real data on support performance and impact

As that single source of truth we just mentioned, customer service tooling for the retail space can serve up a wealth of data that helps support leaders and staff better understand performance. Just the thing to make sure you're accurately tracking important metrics like open ticket times, resolution rates, CSAT, etc., and making targeted improvements as needed.

Create support experiences that close and retain shoppers

Especially for smaller ecommerce brands, retention is a key driver of growth and profitability.

Usually, acquiring new customers is a good bit more expensive than retaining existing ones. And often, customers who are already familiar with your brand are more likely to make more future purchases. In other words, the value of a happy customer can hardly be overstated.

And what makes a customer happier than thoughtful customer support interactions?

This is why customer support feeds directly into retention for retailers. In 2024, a poor customer service experience was the reason 43% of people stopped shopping with a brand.

When you use highly-effective tooling that enables the modern, delightful support experience consumers desire, you’re well on your way to creating the trust, personalization, and positive impressions that reduce churn.

Features to look for in customer service software solutions

Whether or not you select an option from the above list, choosing the right customer service software will make a significant impact on how effective your support operations can be. We’ll help you make the best choice by narrowing down which essential features to shop for.

Accessible (and trustworthy) AI-enabled automation

AI-powered automation has pretty much revolutionized customer support today.

With this level of smart automation, agents can get away from the simpler, repetitive to-dos and enhance their response times on higher-value tasks.

Look for software that integrates AI to help automatically…

• Categorize and prioritize tickets/tasks
• Generate accurate, helpful responses for common inquiries

It’s critical that whatever AI your platform uses is trustworthy and capable of learning from your specific business needs, so it improves over time.

At OpenDesk, we ensure this improvement by making it easy for our users to enrich our AI model with their own content. That means, the more you use our smart automation feature to answer customer queries, the more it sounds just like you. But you don’t have to take our word for it — we separate out CSAT scores for tickets that used automation and those that didn't. This provides crystal clarity into how well your audience is connecting with your automatic messaging.

Smart ticket prioritization

Not all customer issues are created equal.

Software that features smart ticket prioritization ensures your team can focus on the most important queries first.

What makes for a critical ticket? Here’s how we sort them (using the aforementioned AI + automation) at OpenDesk:

• Based on LTV: You want to make sure your most valuable shoppers never feel ignored.
• Based on sentiment: Customers having a bad experience rise closer to the top of the queue so your team can get to them faster and get ahead of a potential bounce, return, or bad review.
• Based on wait time: The above factors have to be balanced with timing to make sure no customer, regardless of spending history, waits too long for a resolution.

With ticket prioritization, your support team can reduce response times for your most pressing customer needs.

Unified consumer channels

A unified support platform that consolidates all communication channels into a single, easy-to-use interface ensures no messages slip through the cracks.

But it’s not just that.

Great omnichannel support makes for informed personalization and decision-making, consistent customer experiences, improved workflow efficiency, and overall more balanced and happy agents.

Insights that help guide operational and experience upgrades

What’s the use of having all that data flowing through your ecommerce support platform if your technology can’t even help you take action on it?

When you’re selecting the best app for your business, shop for a solution that provides deep insights into:

• Support ticket trends, such as the most common product complaints, questions, return requests, etc. We closely track this metric, which we call Tickets per Order, in the OpenDesk platform.
• Team performance metrics, to identify strengths and areas for improvement.
• Customer feedback, so you can get ahead of complaints and work to refine your service offerings.

These insights act as a roadmap, guiding you toward proactive, continuous enhancements that boost retention.

Reasonable and understandable pricing

Last but never least, we need to talk about money.

Pricing that’s transparent and easy to understand is just about as important as pricing that aligns with your budget. Unfortunately, much of the pricing for customer support tech is convoluted. Many platforms charge different rates based on your number of agents, how many tickets you process in a month, and whether or not you want their fancier features — often those in the AI and automation space. Needless to say, it can all add up quickly.

This lack of accessibility is exactly why we decided to price OpenDesk the way we did, with a monthly price and no per-anything charge. It’s reasonable, it’s easy to understand, and it includes every awesome feature we’re ever going to build.

Take your ecommerce business to the next level with OpenDesk

Choosing the right ecommerce customer service software can be transformative to small and growing Shopify brands.

Only one solution on our list was built from the ground up by and for customer support professionals to decrease operating expenses and boost customer satisfaction scores, all with a focus on slashing agent headcount.

That’s OpenDesk.

With powerful automations, a personalizable AI model, and a unique take on analytics and insights — OpenDesk is positioned to bring your Shopify business along on our ride to the moon.

Get your 30-day free trial today! No credit cards required.